Shaman's Blood (6 page)

By the time Cecil knocked on the door of the bathroom to check on him, he’d caught a ride with a farmer hauling bags of manure and was miles down the road, heading west.

Chapter 5

July 9, Tuesday—Present Day

Alice got out of her car and stretched.

“I’m not looking forward to this,” she said. Standing barefoot in the gravel drive in front of her mother’s house, she held her hair up off the back of her neck as a stiff breeze whipped her gauze skirt around her legs. Shielding her eyes, she squinted beyond the house at the windswept dunes fronting the Gulf of Mexico. At one o’clock in the afternoon, heat waves shimmered over the sand. The beach was dotted with people, even in the baking heat.

“I wish we’d brought Dawg,” said Margaret from the back seat.

Nik unfolded his legs from the passenger side and got out, pushing the seat down for Margaret to crawl out. “Me too.”

“Don’t you two start. I’m not in the mood. Dawg smells and he’s not getting in my car.”

She hadn’t been sleeping well and had come close to dozing off at the wheel during the two-hour drive from Citrus Park to Gull Harbor. She caught the look that passed between Margaret and Nik.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m stressed. It’ll pass.”

Alice stood looking at her mother’s Lincoln, still parked in the drive. She hoped Hal would be able to sell it because she certainly didn’t want it. 

She could hear Carlisle inside the house, barking like a demon. Hal opened the door, and Suzanne’s Afghan hound galloped down the porch steps with wide, wagging sweeps of his feathered tail. Hal opened his arms toward Alice and folded them around her.

“I’m glad you’ve come. There are so many things I need to do … you’ll be a huge help.”

Alice pressed her face against his chest, hugging him tightly. “It’s funny,” she said, her voice muffled. “I don’t miss her, not in the normal sense, but I feel … unmoored. I don’t like it.”

Hal gave her a squeeze and turned toward Margaret and Nik. “Thank you both for coming. This probably isn’t how you’d like to be spending your Saturday afternoon.”

Nik stepped forward and offered his hand. “It’s good to see you again, sir,” he said.

Hal nodded, one arm still around Alice’s shoulders. “It’s been a difficult week, forgive me if I’m not very attentive. I was a better host when Alice brought you here for Christmas.”

Carlisle galloped around them, heading for Margaret. She squatted down and grabbed his neck as he landed on top of her.

Hal managed a small laugh. “Poor Carlisle, he’s been quite unhappy. Maybe he’ll be better when we move.”

“Ah, so you’ve decided to sell Dunescape?” Alice linked arms with her uncle as they headed inside. “I wondered if you might think about moving.”

It was mercifully cool inside. “God, this feels good,” Alice said, fanning her neck. “I don’t know how those idiots on the beach can stand it.”

“I like it hot,” Margaret said, taking Carlisle into her lap on the couch. “It doesn’t bother me like it does you.” The old dog lumbered his thin body up and over her knees with a whuffing noise. “Poor old woof,” she said, hugging him. “Misses his person.” Margaret wiped at her eyes. “Me, too.”

Nik scratched the dog behind the ears and settled himself into an armchair beside the couch. “How old is he, then?”

“Nearly twelve,” said Hal. “Suzanne got him when he was a puppy. He’s pedigreed, you know … papers and all. He was her companion.”

Alice watched them, allowing herself a small pang of guilt for not feeling weepy. Well, Margaret could do the proper mourning for both of them. The one she was most concerned for was Hal, who had been Suzanne’s shadow for most of their lives. Hal never married—she’d wondered for a while if he was gay—but he appeared to be perfectly happy living platonically with his widowed sister. It had seemed the perfect arrangement for them both, but now it was over. 

Hal went to the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses on a tray.

“I’m thinking of moving back to Miami,” he said, “if I can get a decent price for the house. I still have friends and business associates there that I wouldn’t mind seeing again. And Suzanne will be there.”

Alice winced. He meant, of course, that her mother’s ashes would be entombed in the Blacksburg family mausoleum. “So, is everything set for the funeral?”

Hal nodded, pulling a pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket and lighting up. Alice did a double take. He’d never smoked in the house before, because Suzanne didn’t and never had. But now she supposed he could smoke wherever he damn well wanted to.

“I’ve booked our flights,” said Hal. “You’ll be leaving fairly early Monday morning, returning on Tuesday. I hope Nik won’t mind being left behind.”

Nik shook his head. “Not a problem.”

Alice sat down on the floor and leaned against his leg. “Nik’s a hermit. He’ll enjoy having the house to himself.”

“And somebody has to take care of Dawg,” Margaret said, holding Carlisle against her chest with both arms. His tail thumped the couch cushions.

Alice turned to Hal. “I assume you’re keeping Carlisle?”

“Oh yes, we’re a pair now. Two old bachelors with nothing more important to do than fetch the morning paper and fall asleep in front of the television. We’ll be all right together.”

Alice poured herself a glass of lemonade and sipped it slowly. This was probably the last, or maybe next to last, time she would be sitting here in this house. Hal was decisive when it came to business, and she knew that once he’d found the right buyer, he’d close the deal and be moved out in the time it took to sign the papers and do the handshake. He’d bought Dunescape with Suzanne on a whim some years ago and, Alice was sure, would move out of it just as quickly.

She thought of Nik, so perfectly content with his own company. After a year of living together, she still sometimes wondered what went on in his head. She had seen him sit still for long stretches of time without moving, just thinking. Margaret had once poked him from behind to see if he was breathing, and they had all laughed.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Hal said.

“Huh? Sorry, I kind of zoned out.” Alice yawned and swallowed another gulp of lemonade. It wouldn’t take much for her to fall asleep on the spot.

“Can I take Carlisle for a walk down the beach? We won’t go far.” Margaret heaved the dog off her lap and headed for the back door.

“Don’t go any further than the boat house,” Alice called. She checked her watch. One thirty-five. She’d give them half an hour, then send Nik to fetch them.

She refilled her glass and got up. “Well, no sense putting it off.”

Hal leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. “If you could bag up all her clothes and such, that would help. Keep anything you want, the rest I’ll take to Goodwill. Her expensive jewelry goes to you and Margaret, listed by item in her will. She’s made a rather nice endowment for Margaret’s education.”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” Alice said, walking back to her mother’s bedroom. “Nik, would you go after Margaret and the dog if they’re not back by two o’clock?’

He nodded and gave her the slightest wink. “Ja, min kärlek.”

That seemed to bring Hal out of his funk. He said to Nik, “How’d you like to sample a little Wild Turkey I keep for special occasions? No reason to save it.”

Nik shrugged. “No reason at all.”

They went to the kitchen, where Alice heard glasses and ice clinking, then the back door slammed as they went out onto the patio. Alone, she turned to the task at hand.

She went to Suzanne’s bedroom and looked around. The room was neat, bed made, no clothes piled on the floor or spilling out of drawers.

Alice sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling morose. No wonder Hal didn’t want to do this job. It was disheartening. She thought about all the things a person accumulated and kept because they held meaning, defined who the person was. And once that person was gone, the objects had no purpose, no value. Alice felt smothered—it made her want to go home and throw away every useless object taking up space on dressers, shelves, tables, and the floors of closets. It was all so pointless. She stared at the floor.

Suddenly, her stomach lurched. The polished hardwood floor appeared to be fading; through it, she could see a field of stars. No, no, no. Alice panicked, breathing sharp, shallow breaths as if her lungs had forgotten how to function properly. Her mind reeled as images of Namarrkun, the Wandjina spirits, the Dreamland Ancestors played a slideshow on her retinas–she was losing it again. The room receded around the edges as her vision tunneled. She looked down at the dark well opening up under her feet and tumbled headlong into the void. A moment of freezing cold, and all went black.

Alice came to sprawled on rough ground, gasping and slightly nauseous as her brain groped to find equilibrium.

Chilled air brushed her ankles and lifted her hair, circling in a raw, bone-shaking dance. Within moments her entire body was shaking uncontrollably in her summer tank top and thin gauze skirt.

“H-holy sh-shit,” she whispered, and then caught her breath. Not far off, a group of young Aboriginal women stood watching her. Their long silver hair swirled around their waists and knees in the frigid air, and their naked bodies glistened with a coating of ice. Long icicles sparkled from their earlobes and fingertips. Several wore tall tasseled headdresses, and others were adorned with bangles of crystal and armbands tufted with sprays of ice needles. They laughed and whispered among themselves in voices like the surface of frozen water cracking or icicles falling from tree limbs. Frost was in their breath. Alice’s hands and feet began to go numb as she listened to their voices, rising and falling like a cicada’s chant, although there was no hint of summer in their frozen song.

Alice tried to stand, but the marrow in her bones was freezing, her breathing slowing to long, shuddering gasps of frost-laden air. She was turning to stone and for a fleeting moment understood what glacier-entombed mammoths must have sensed as they slowly went to sleep.

The frost-maidens were approaching. Where they stepped, the ground became a glistening sheet of ice. Her brain had slowed to a crawl, but she listened to their tinkling, crackling song with an unbearable desire to join them. The song was ancient and primal, creation business of the Ancestors, yet she heard words that were familiar and held meaning. Kungkarangkalpa. The syllables danced in her mind and rolled like pebbles over a watercourse of ancient language and memory. One of the women bent down toward her, reaching out with silvery elongated fingers.

Alice’s face lost all feeling as the woman touched her forehead, then her cheek, with long fingernails of ice. Blinding cold flashed up her sinuses and into her brain as the ice maiden’s thumb and index finger pinched the septum of Alice’s nose, making a tiny hole. Blinded by cold and pain, she barely noticed the small dingo bone sliding through her nose as the woman’s shining hair whipped around her face. But the instant the bone was in place, it became a sounding board through which Alice’s entire body began to resonate with the sirens’ song—it was filling her up like the rising tide in the gorge below. She sank below the surface of consciousness, immersed in the trance woven by the seven sisters.

The Aboriginal maidens surrounded her, touching her hair and shoulders, intoning their song of creation. They sang their name, Kungkarangkalpa, the Dreamtime Seven Sisters whose beauty touched the land from high cliffside to water’s edge at creation’s dawn. Alice felt drunk on their song. She wondered in a loopy sort of way where her essence had skittered off to, but at the same time something about the place felt familiar. And then it all came back, only in much better detail than she’d given the shrink.

She’d been writing a book, a fictional history of the abandoned turn-of-the-century rural church she’d passed so many times on her drive into town. During her research, she’d found a folder of crumbling documents that belonged to the church’s founder, a mysterious foreigner named Cadjer Harrow. Alice had believed–and perhaps some small part of her still did–that her discovery of the documents had triggered something. Her psychiatrist called it a psychotic episode brought on by the stress of curating an international exhibit and a much too vivid imagination. Alice’s neighbor Raine told her she’d had a paranormal experience, maybe even manifesting a thought form of the appalling Rev. Harrow.

In the event that put her breakdown into overdrive, she thought she remembered cowering in the abandoned First Church of the Heavenly Powers, as it had been named, confronting the physical specter of Harrow, just as she’d described him in her manuscript. Black, flat-brimmed hat, mud-stained riding boots, black coat, dark skin like tanned animal hide, soulless eyes. Had the historical Cadjer Harrow looked like that? She had no idea, but this was the image that embedded itself in her mind's eye when she began to write about him. He’d materialized with a great black beast with red eyes that was more mutant dire-wolf than dog. She’d also sensed a dangerous tension between it and the man, as if they could not agree which of them was the master.

Though the specter wore a man’s body and a preacher’s suit, and was corporeal enough to inflict pain, he’d claimed to be from the other side. Exiled there, he’d said, by Namarrkun, a terrifying Dreamtime Ancestor humans called the Lightening Man. In the wake of Namarrkun’s arrival to fetch him back, Alice had been swept with them into the frozen void, where she’d hung, for an hour or an eon, listening to the hum of the stars. When she’d struggled back to consciousness, the black shaman Harrow was gone, and the wreckage around her house and yard had been attributed to a monster thunderstorm that had swept across the county. But she knew. Namarrkun who commanded the rain and thunder and the Wandjina who followed him on the storm had scrambled her molecules.

Months of mood-calming drugs and private sessions with the psychiatrist recommended by her sister-in-law had helped her get a grip enough to return to work, and in the end she’d accepted the explanation that none of it had been real. Nik had taken her to Norway with him for a mycological convention, and life returned to normal, whatever that was. If she were honest, Alice didn’t think she’d ever feel normal again.