Ghostcountry's Wrath (8 page)

Not many people his age had had friends die. And fewer yet had
seen
them die. No!—had been forced to
watch
them die. That was the worst thing Don could imagine: having to stand frozen in his tracks and see the person he loved best in the world, even including his mom and sis, be slowly drained of life and not be able to stop it. It wasn't like he saw Mike at school one day, and then that night somebody called and said he was dead. That would have been a clean break, but without the force of finality because he had not witnessed the transition. But to observe the process, and to
know
…

He'd even missed the funeral—had still been in shock, the doctor said. And his mom had been so traumatized herself by the death of his sister (whom he'd never much liked because she never liked him, and besides she wasn't a boy and didn't
understand
him, as Mike had done instinctively) that she'd never taken time to talk to him about the loss of his best friend until the wall of his sorrow had grown too thick and high for anyone to breach.

And now, very simply, Don wanted to make his peace with Mike. He wanted to see him, and talk to him, and apologize to him, and tell him that he was sorrier than anybody had ever been or could be that he had not been able to save his life.

Not that he hadn't tried to contact him before, of course. Shoot, he'd paid the fortune-teller at the Willacoochee County Fair a month's allowance for a seance.

He'd asked her to call up his friend, but hadn't told her the name 'cause he didn't trust her. And she'd let him down. Oh, she'd got Mike's name right, but everything else was wrong, so Don knew she was either a fraud or that some other Mike than
his
Mike had come calling in her crystal ball.

Since then… Well, one of his buddies had taken him to a witch-woman in the swamp who'd read his tea leaves, but she'd only mumbled about cars and girlfriends, which every guy his age wanted. He'd even bought a deck of tarot cards at a shop in Savannah and by slow degrees puzzled through their intricacies and double-talk. He'd brought them along tonight, too, just in case. But even they had been unable to put him in touch with his bro.

His friends had said he was nuts—but Don knew they were wrong.
He
had witnessed magic, had himself been snared by a paralysis spell and watched a shapechanging ogress devour his best friend's liver. But even more spectacularly, he'd seen his Cherokee friend, Calvin, change into an eagle and assorted other critters! And if the world allowed for spell-songs and shape-shifters, somewhere it surely should admit some art that would let him talk to Michael one last time.

And what better place than here, where Mike had died? And what better time than tonight, when the moon was full and the anniversary of Mike's death but four nights away? He probably should've chosen the day itself, but he didn't think he was up to that, and his mom would be watching him like a hawk anyway. Besides, and much more practically, the forecast called for showers then.

Taking a deep breath, Don swallowed hard, then squared his shoulders and strode into the campsite. He scanned the sliver of open earth atop the riverbank—not much larger than two cars side by side—for a staging area, and finally chose a waist-high stump at the western end. His stomach growled as he plopped down there, reminding him yet again that he hadn't eaten in over a day—doubtless another reason he was tired. That had been some trick, too: fasting without his mom being the wiser. But she was preoccupied with her own sorrows—as usual—and didn't think it odd that he took his meals to his room—and flushed them down the john on the way.

But it was what you were supposed to do, darn it! It was what Calvin had done. And it was what it said to do in the Book.

The Book…a worn old pamphlet on Cherokee magic he'd found in the Hinesville library. He had it now, and the other things he needed. He unslung the backpack and drew them out: four sticks as long as his forearm, each stained a different color, but all made of wood from a lightning-blasted tree, which the Book said were strong medicine. Next he produced a string: a two-foot length of cordage twisted from the inner bark of a North Carolina hickory he'd found on the same autumn leaf viewing trip as he'd got the most important object: the stone. The old man at the rock shop up at Asheville had called it
cairngorm,
but he knew it was simply a perfect, finger-long crystal of smoky quartz.

And if he was lucky, it would help him contact Mike. If not…well, he had one final ace up his sleeve. But since Mike had been killed by a Cherokee monster, Don figured a Cherokee means of reaching him might succeed where others hadn't and ought to be attempted first.

So it was that a minute later Don had shucked his clothes and stood naked in the center of the clearing. He felt a little silly doing that, and it wasn't specifically called for, but he was a white boy, and he wanted whatever powers he invoked to take him as seriously as possible, and the less that branded him as Caucasian, the more likely he figured they'd be to pay him heed. Besides, in a sense he was making a blood sacrifice—to judge by the mosquitoes already homing in, which seemed to have invited the neighborhood gnats as well. He'd be itching like hell tomorrow.

In the meantime, he ignored them as he knelt and inscribed a two-foot circle in the sand with the red stick. That concluded, he used the blue one to divide it into quarters oriented north and south, east, and west. The black stick limned a second circle around the first, and the white stick drew lines parallel to the enclosed cross. That concluded, Don stuck the sticks into the ground at the cardinal points: red to east, blue to north, black to west, and white to south.

Pausing only to wipe his hands on his well-nibbled thighs, Don returned to his pack and pulled out three more sticks. Again the wood was from a lightning-blasted tree, but this time it was from a red cedar, one of the plants of vigilance and also one that grew in graveyards thereabouts. One stick was straight and roughly two feet long, the others Y-shaped and six inches shorter. These last he planted on the north/south axis, then laid the third across them.

Satisfied with his work so far, he fished out two final objects: a lump of charcoal, and a square of denim from a pair of jeans Mike had cut off at Don's house. The former he placed on the cross's western arm, the latter on the east. An instant only it took to loop the cordage around the crystal and suspend it from the cross-stick, and he began. Holding his breath, he knelt at the south side of the circle, then slowly repeated the formula he had memorized from the Book. He did it in Cherokee first—or his version of that tongue, for he had no idea how to pronounce the odd-looking words, but he hoped the powers would understand his intent:

Sge! Ha-nagwa hatunganiga Nunya Watigei, ga-husti tsuts-kadi nigesunna. Ha-nagwa dungihyali. Agiyahusa aginalii, ha-ga tsun-nu iyunta datsi-waktuhi. Tla-ke aya akwatseliga. Donald Larry Scott digwadaita.

And then, just to be sure, he did it again in English.

Listen! Ha! Now you have drawn near to hearken, 0 Brown Rock, you never lie about anything. Ha! Now I am about to seek for it. I have lost a friend and now tell me about where I shall find him. For is he not mine? My name is Donald Larry Scott.

Eight times Don intoned the formula: twice from each prime direction. And when he had finished, he reached over the pattern he had inscribed and began to swing the crystal in a circle.

Round and round it went, faster and faster—a bit faster than he expected, in fact. But inevitably the pace slackened, and as it did, the circle tightened into an ellipse.

And as the crystal slowed, so did Don's breathing—and so, it seemed, did the wind, until not a limb swayed or twig twitched or leaf shivered. Chills raced across Don's ribs. The dark hairs on his forearms and legs and the nape of his neck prickled, and his skin went rough with goosebumps.

Slower and slower, and as Don's breathing and the sighing of the wind fell silent, so did the rest of the night. Tree frogs ceased their chanting, mosquitoes and gnats their insistent buzz. The gator that had been bellowing in the nearby swamp broke off in midnote. And the crickets and cicadas stopped their contentious chatter. The only sound was the slapping of the creek against its banks and the non-noise of distant wings high above.

Slower and slower, and now the stone swung in a line, due east and west. But though Don had carefully knotted the string exactly over the center of the circle, he could not help but note that the arc tended to stretch a little further on its western transit—enough so that he could actually see the twig rock that way in the forks.

Which meant that Mike was dead.

Which he already knew.

What he did not know and, because of his contact with Calvin, had cause to wonder, was
how
dead.

Sighing, Don removed the charcoal and fabric (had Mike been alive the stone should have pointed toward the latter), moved to the south, and repeated the formula he had used before. Once more, too, he spun the crystal.

And again, after a nerve-wrackingly long time, it tended west.

Which only reinforced what it had told him already. For west, so the Book said, lay Tsusginai, the Ghost Country, the Cherokee land of the dead.

Yet that was not the direction in which Mike's grave lay, for his father had had him cremated and the ashes scattered on the Atlantic, thirty miles to the
east.
Which meant that what remained of him as a conscious entity resided where the sun set.

And so, Don Scott faced that way and called out very softly, “Mike? I need to talk to you.”

Silence…

Silence…

Still that unnatural silence, as if all the woods wished and waited with him.

Silence…save for the lapping of the creek…

And then, abruptly, a splash: a crystalline sound, the perfect noise to focus the night. The ground thrummed softly beneath Don's feet, and the wind resumed. But this time it carried a thread of melody.

Don tensed automatically. The last time he'd heard music in this place it had been Spearfinger's terrible chant:
Uwelanitsiku. Su sa sai!

But this time it was the sound of a wooden flute, and the tune one Don recognized. It was Mike's favorite song: Deep Purple's “Smoke On the Water.” But somehow, rendered thusly, as a long slow sigh upon the wind, it acquired a plaintive quality, a thin, reedy eeriness fraught with pain and loss.

Tears started in Don's eyes as he rose. But just as he did, the string gave a twitch and suddenly shifted axes: north—toward the creek.

Don gulped, for part of him knew he ought not to be fooling around with such forces as he was. And another part knew he'd expected no result at all and was crazy to think he'd found one now, and a third part told him he was on the edge of some life-changing event and that he'd be well advised to fling the crystal in the river and run like hell and let the harsh light of day burn away whatever had answered his summons there in the Georgia night.

Instead, he eased toward the bank and looked down.

Iodine Creek glittered like a sky of black glass fractured by reflected lightnings, yet showing, in the calmer places, the shadow-sisters of the summer stars.

But he could see nothing more—yet the song persisted, no louder, but somehow clearer for all that, and coming, he was certain, from the water.

Grunting, Don scrambled down the chest-high bank to pause at the bottom, balanced on a root that curved down from the oak above. He squatted there, a pale naked wraith of a white boy, shimmered into silver by the moon, the only darkness the cap of hair on his head, the sketchy triangle at his groin, and his haunted eyes.

When he looked down he saw his own face mirrored. Clear it was: uncannily so. Grasping the root with one hand, he bent forward for a closer look, and when he did, it seemed the music grew louder and the breeze stirred the stream more vigorously, bending the ripples into patterns he could almost recognize.

And then he saw it! Gradually taking form atop his phantom features was another face: squarer of chin, more stubby of nose, and crowned with unkempt blond hair. The eyes were the color of the creek, and yet he knew they were blue. And then that face, which looked up at him through his own reflection, smiled, and the body that floated beneath it raised a hand.

“Mike!”
Don Scott whispered—and had no choice but to grin back, and extend a hand in turn.

Chapter V: An Hour Almost Struck

(near Sytua, North Carolina—Friday, June 15—midnight)

Calvin was doing something he had vowed never to do: he was wishing, very hard, for rain.

Yeah, if a bank of clouds would just come rolling in from over the Smokys to the west, they could blank out the persistent moonbeams slanting in through the new bedroom skylight of Sandy's hillside cabin like ramps laid in place for day. Then—maybe—he could sleep. As it was, the rays found the knotty pine walls far too easily, and awoke strange images there: here a tree, there an eagle or uktena, yonder a leering booger-face like one of the Davy Arch masks that hung, interspersed with handwoven baskets, from the exposed top plate of the opposite wall. And if he loosed his imagination even a little, the rays would conjure a crooked, grinning hag's face—or, incongruously, a badger. Never mind what happened when they touched the coverlet—undisturbed now, on Sandy's side, courtesy of a seminar on Buckyball over at Chapel Hill, which would claim her until late tomorrow. That was really bad, because the coverlet bore a black-and-white pattern, pirated from M. C. Escher, that depicted fish flying into birds, each shifting to the other where they met. And shapeshifting was the last thing he wanted to be reminded of just now.