“The new guide that Corvin picked was pretty strict about the schedule. If we want to get to the Lost Village today, we have to go early.”
“Is he a goblin?”
“No.”
“He’d better not be,” Reg warned.
“Can I turn on the light for you? Are you going to stay awake?”
“Turn on the lamp.”
Damon fumbled around for the switch and eventually got the bedside lamp turned on. It felt like it was going to burn a hole right through Reg’s eyeballs. She covered them up, groaning and swearing at Damon. She should have said no to participating in the search. She should have said no to continuing after she found out how he had lied to her. She should have just gone home and told Damon she would see him the next time she saw him.
“I’m sorry.” Damon’s tone was wheedling. “I brought you coffee. Do you want coffee?”
“I’m going to need more than one.”
“I’ll get you another one. One before you get dressed and one when we reach the boat?”
Reg reached out her hand without opening her eyes, and Damon put a to-go cup of coffee into her grasp. Reg squinted her eyes open just wide enough to see the orientation of the sipping hole and drank down the first few swallows of the hot, bitter coffee.
“So get out,” Reg growled at Damon. “I’m not changing while you’re here.”
Not that changing was going to involve much more than putting on a bra and changing her t-shirt. And she was going to have to splash some water on her face. That and the coffee should be enough to at least get her on her feet. But she wouldn’t be alert and able to carry on a conversation yet. That would have to wait until she was on the boat with her second cup of coffee.
Reg put out her hand as she approached the boat, and Damon put her next cup of coffee in it. Reg had a sip. It wasn’t quite as hot as her first cup had been, so she was able to drink more at a time. Fire in the furnace. Soon she’d be able to talk intelligently. She greeted Corvin, who laughed at her sleepy-eyed demeanor and lack of makeup. She was dressed. What more could they expect before dawn?
Corvin touched her elbow and escorted her onto the boat, making sure she didn’t trip over any steps or go overboard. He sat Reg down near the guide. Reg glanced over at the thin, dark-skinned man. Reg wasn’t sure whether he was that brown from the sun or due to his ethnicity. She closed her eyes, melting into her chair.
“Are you a swamp goblin?” she asked.
“What? Are you talking to me?” the guide asked uncertainly.
“Yeah. Are you a goblin?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Good.”
Reg took another sip of her coffee.
It was some time before the sun was above the tree line and Reg felt like it was actually day. Not the time she would normally be getting up in the morning, but at least it was daylight. She watched the sky change color. It was pretty. She understood why people liked the sunrise. But it wasn’t something she was interested in getting up to see every day. A sunrise was a sunrise. She couldn’t imagine being able to do what Erin did, getting up hours before the sun was up in order to bake bread before her bakery opened every morning.
Every morning.
It was crazy. Anyone who did that had to be crazy. When they had been in foster care together, Reg was the one who was always identified as being unstable and Erin was in pretty good shape. But getting up that early in the morning wasn’t normal.
Now that Reg’s eyes were open and she was looking around, the guide started his usual patter, telling her about the Everglades and the treasures it hid. Except he didn’t mean actual treasures, like the box of gems that Reg had. He talked about natural beauty, species that were near extinction, and the storied history of the place.
You couldn’t take those to the bank.
“Tell me about this Lost Village,” Reg told him. “That’s what I want to hear about.”
The guide obliged, going into a long narrative about the village originally inhabited by the Seminole Indians. Until one day, they had disappeared. But that wasn’t all. Confederate soldiers had hidden or been lost there. Al Capone had hidden out there during prohibition. People had come and gone, but the village was once more deserted.
It was, Reg thought, an excellent place to start. She didn’t know anything about the rifts Corvin had mentioned, but a place with that much history of people disappearing or hiding out was bound to have a pretty big ghostly imprint, and maybe she could learn something there.
Chapter Thirty
There wasn’t much left of the Lost Village in the physical world. But as soon as Reg stepped off the boat, she could feel the ghosts around her. So many ghosts. They all pulled at her, wanting to talk to her or through her. She’d never been in a place with so many spirits before. It was overwhelming. Reg put her hands up, trying to fend them off. Corvin was there beside her and touched her shoulder lightly. Reg drew strength from him, trying to build a shield up around her. She was careful not to draw too much of his energy. She didn’t want to leave him weak, but he had offered. At least, she took his touch as an offer.
She had been learning to build a protective shield around herself, and having been in contact with Harrison the night before helped. He had shielded her before, and she had learned a lot about how to construct a shield just from feeling the one he put around her. She had quickly surpassed Corvin in his ability.
After a few minutes, she was feeling better. She could breathe again. She opened her eyes, opened her mind, and looked around at the remnants of the Seminole village.
“You okay?” Corvin asked.
“Yeah. Better.” She pulled away from him so that she wouldn’t keep drawing on his energy. She could maintain the shield reasonably well. For the time being. “This place is… amazing.”
He looked around, expressionless. “What do you see?”
“All of the ghosts,” Reg said, shaking her head. She couldn’t believe that he couldn’t feel them. Anyone who stepped onto the ground there should be able to feel them. “There are so many.”
“Indians?”
“More than that.” Reg looked around. There were plenty of Seminole ghosts there. But she suspected that most of the village had escaped and hidden, rather than allowing themselves to be decimated. “There are men in uniform too. The soldiers.” Unlike the natives, who were mostly calm and peaceful, the soldiers carried a heavily sad and desperate feeling. They were dark and downcast. Some still attempted to fight each other, even though they no longer had the bodies to do so. They fought like shadows, striking out but never touching each other.
And not just at each other; they seemed intent on killing the Seminoles as well—even women and children.
And there were a few scattered gangsters that must have been members of Capone’s gang who had been killed while they were still hiding out in the swamp.
“Pretty overwhelming?”
“I can manage with the shield.”
She could see Corvin’s nod out of the corner of her eye. He still stayed close to her side, which seemed to be irritating Damon. She supposed it was Damon’s gig, and he had the right to be irritated at Corvin taking over leadership, first dictating where they should go and who their new guide would be, and then staying at Reg’s side instead of waiting for her to ask, crowding out Damon the same way as Weston had crowded Corvin from his seat at the restaurant the night before.
Reg looked around for someone to talk to. She wanted someone safe. Someone who would not try to hijack the conversation to speak through her to someone else, or who would not intrude on how her brain was organized and try to take over to dictate his own ends.
Reg walked around the ruins for a few minutes, just looking around and taking it all in. She could see shadows of the teepees and buildings that had been there at one time, even though they had fallen down and rotted away by that time. She could see how the Seminoles and the others had lived their lives there.
Eventually, sh
e sat down in the middle of the village, in the door of one of the teepees. There a grandmother and little girl had sat, tending a fire, preparing food and hides, making tools with the materials they had at hand. She watched the ghost of the grandmother sewing, fitting garments together for her family, caring for them.
“Grandmother,” Reg whispered. She wished she had done more to prepare. She could have learned a few words in Seminole so that she could at least address them in their language, even though she couldn’t converse in it.
The grandmother’s ghost looked at Reg, smiling patiently. What teeth she had left were worn down to nubs.
“Can you help me, Grandmother? I am looking for a man. I don’t know if he ever came through here.”
The woman continued to gaze at her, not answering.
“If he came here, it was after you died.”
The ghost nodded, understanding.
Reg closed her eyes and formed the picture of the wizard in her mind. She hadn’t kept Damon’s picture with her, but she didn’t need to. She had memorized the face, had tried to imagine what he might look like now. He might still look young, with black hair like he’d had in the picture, or it might all be gray or white fifty years later. And Reg didn’t know when he might have passed through the ghost village. Soon after he had arrived in the park? Much later, after he had escaped whoever had kidnapped him? Or was he there in the village too, attracted to the other ghosts by their magnetic pull?
“Who is he?” the grandmother asked.
Reg tried to think of how to describe him in a way that would make sense to the woman in her culture.
“He was… like a medicine man. Someone who could… do things that others could not.”
Reg didn’t know what kind of wizardry Wilson had performed. Had he had a particular talent or area of interest? Did he dabble? How was a wizard different from a warlock? She might have asked Damon some of those questions before she had started, but she had pretended that she knew what he was talking about and had not asked what she should have.
The old woman nodded slowly as she fed sticks into the fire. “There was a medicine man. More than one.”
More than one. Of course. It couldn’t be that easy.
Reg went back to the picture. He couldn’t have changed that much before he had shown up in the ghost village, could he? She showed the mental image to the grandmother again. “Was one of them this man?”
She considered and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I remember him,” the child piped up.
Reg looked over at the little child. “Do you? That’s wonderful. Do you know… how long ago it was? A long time ago or recently?”
They looked at her blankly.
“Reg,” Corvin spoke, “there is no time for the ghosts. They won’t have any way of marking how long ago anything happened.”
“Crap!”
Reg tried to stay calm. She was close. Much closer than she had been before. Here was someone who had actually seen Wilson. That was important. She went back to the picture, holding it in her mind.
“Did he look like this? Or did he look older?”
She hoped that the wizard had aged during the time he had been in the Everglades. The question wouldn’t be much help if he hadn’t changed in appearance.
“Older than that,” the child said thoughtfully. “But… not an old man.”
Reg tried to make adjustments to the picture she had formed of him. “How did he look? Can you describe him?”
“He did not have hair in the middle,” the little girl gestured over the crown of her own head. “And it was spotty. Not just black.”
Reg imagined black hair flecked with gray and the little girl nodded.
“Yes. And I don’t think he was so tall.”
Reg hadn’t even realized that she had given the wizard a body and height. She considered her mental image and made what adjustments she could.
“Fatter. Not like a warrior.”
Reg felt like a forensic artist working with a witness to a crime. She’d always admired the people that could draw sketches of other people like that.
The little girl turned to the other ghost. “Grandmother? You remember him?”
The older woman nodded gravely. “Yes. He came here in a wind-boat. Made a fire and burned herbs. He did not speak to us as you do.”
“He couldn’t see ghosts?”
The grandmother looked at the little girl. “He did not speak to us. I don’t know whether he had the sight.”
The little girl nodded her agreement.
“Did he say why he came here? Was he looking for something? Was he… by himself or maybe running away from someone?”
“No… there were others. The living come here sometimes to look. Most do not make an offering. He at least showed that respect.”
Reg nodded. She looked at Corvin. She didn’t know if he could hear what the ghosts were saying or if he could understand what was going on by virtue of the connection between them.
“We should burn herbs too,” she suggested. “Do you think… I don’t know much about plants, but could you and Damon look around, see if there’s sage or something?”
Corvin didn’t look particularly pleased with being given this assignment, but he was familiar with herb-lore. He nodded.
“You’ll be okay by yourself for a few minutes?”
“Yes. I’m fine here and I have a shield.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The little girl spoke to her grandmother, but in a language that Reg could not understand. She tried to sense what the ghosts were feeling, since she couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other. It was strange not to be able to understand them when they could have made her understand. But she supposed they didn’t always want to be overheard, just like living people.
The grandmother was nodding slowly to what the little girl said. Her eyes flicked to Reg a few times, but she didn’t say anything immediately. She closed her eyes in meditation and just sat there by the fire. Reg didn’t know how she could sit so still without moving for so long. Maybe it was easier for ghosts because they didn’t have bodies to keep still or muscles that would get sore from sitting in one place in one position for too long. But Reg’s mind wouldn’t let her sit for that long either. She would be too restless. She couldn’t concentrate on one thing for that long.
Reg watched Corvin and Damon when she could see them—moving in and out of the trees, stooping to examine something on the ground, collecting a few leaves here and there. Eventually, they returned with their offerings.
Corvin placed them in front of Reg, telling her what each was. None of it meant anything to Reg. But that was why she was glad to have them with her. She wouldn’t have known on her own which plants were appropriate for sacred offerings and which would mean nothing, or stink, or end up insulting the ghosts so that they put a curse on the whole group.
“And I can burn these?” Reg asked. “That’s the right way to offer them?”
Corvin nodded. “They can be burned… and I suspect that with ghosts, that’s really the only way. It isn’t like they can eat or drink them or use them in a poultice.”
Reg nodded. Taking each kind of plant in turn, she burned a few leaves of each in her hand, and wafted the smoke toward the ghosts. The other spirits who were gathered around, outside of her shield, quieted and calmed. Maybe she should have done that to begin with, but she hadn’t known.
The grandmother bowed with each offering, and sometimes waved her hand through it as if to draw the smoke closer to her, but her movement did not affect the drifting smoke.
She tilted her head. “Ah, sweet bay leaves.” She drew a deep breath. She nodded slowly. “You should not burn all of that one. You should take it with you in case you need it.”
Reg hesitated. “Are you asking me to take it? I don’t want to take anything off of the island, in case…”
“You will not be cursed if you take it with you. It is our gift to you. Yo
u will need it.”
Reg gathered what remained of the sweet bay leaves. She wasn’t sure what to do with them, so she shoved them into her pocket, hoping the ghosts would not think that she was being disrespectful in doing so.
Reg sat after having offered each of the wild herbs. She wasn’t sure what to do next. Her shield was growing weaker. She noticed the gangsters and the soldiers were getting closer to her than they had before.
“We’d better leave soon.”
Corvin nodded. He glanced up at the sky and then looked at his watch. “It’s later than I would like. I didn’t expect it to take so long to get here, or for us to be here for so long.”
Reg looked around. The day seemed to be growing dusky. How long had they been there? She could have sworn it had been no more than an hour. But time in a place like that could be unreliable. As Harrison often pointed out, humans were limited in their understanding of time. While everyone said that time always progressed at an even pace and could be measured by clocks and watches, Reg wasn’t so sure she believed that. Her experiences with time had been… unusual. She wasn’t surprised at how quickly the time had gone, and yet at the same time, it was disconcerting and made her feel a little bit off-balance.
“Yes.” She started to get to her feet, and paused to bow to her ghostly hosts. “Thank you for talking with me.”
“The man had a sickness,” the little girl said.
“A sickness. What kind of sickness?”
The girl looked at her grandmother and again exchanged a few words with her in their native tongue. She looked back at Reg. “I don’t know the English word for it,” she said. “Maybe you do not have a word for it. In our tongue… giant sickness.”
“Giant sickness?” Reg looked at Corvin and Damon, hovering close by. “Have you ever heard of that?”
Both warlocks shook their heads. Reg was disappointed. She had hoped that it would be a clue for them. It would be something they recognized, and it would help them to find him. Maybe he would be in a hospital somewhere as a John Doe. Or perhaps he had died. But either way, it would be a step forward. Instead, it was just one more thing to add to the list of things that they didn’t know or understand about Jeffrey Wilson.
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