by Sarah Dreher
“Stoner McTavish?”
Stoner nodded and stepped up into the house, which made her a little taller than the older woman. She heard Gwen start the motor, and turned to give her a quick wave.
When she turned back, the woman was holding out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth,” she said.
Her handshake was warm and firm.
“Diana recommended you,” Stoner said.
“Yes.”
Stoner remembered that Diana had set up the appointment, and felt foolish.
“Come in the kitchen,” Elizabeth said. “We can talk over coffee.”
The cat had taken up residence on the sofa and was doing its best to cover every inch of available space.
“That’s a nice cat,” Stoner said.
Elizabeth picked up the cat, held it in front of her face and nuzzled it.
The cat licked her nose.
“Actually,” she said, “he’s a bully and a beast.” She nuzzled it again. “Aren’t you?”
“What’s his name?”
“This week, it’s Geddown.” The cat leapt from her arms and back onto the sofa. “He doesn’t care what you call him, he either answers or he doesn’t. Mostly he responds to my voice and my intent.”
The kitchen was dark, having few windows but lots of wood. In addition to the conventional appliances, shelves had been built into the walls over old-fashioned free-standing radiators. On one side of the room they were filled with herbs and plates and cups and glasses. On the other side they were filled with books.
Elizabeth motioned her into a chair and placed a plate of sweet rolls on the table. “If you’re not hungry,” she said, “I am. Help yourself.”
“This is a nice kitchen,” Stoner said. Now that she was here, she wasn’t certain how to begin.
“I’ll tell Karen you said so.” She put a cup of coffee in front of Stoner. “Karen’s my ‘significant other,’ as they say. We’re original, Women’s Movement Dinosaurs. That little pot there is sugar. Very hard to find in lesbian households.”
Stoner laughed and reached for the sugar bowl. “That’s the truth.”
Elizabeth brought her coffee to the table and sat. “Thank God I’m old enough to remember condiments.”
“I like you already,” Stoner said.
“Good. I like you, too. Though I find those green eyes unnervingly attractive, especially with the chestnut hair. Did you come that way originally?”
“Yes, I did.”
The woman sighed. “Well, some of us are blessed and some of us are here to learn not to envy.” She stirred sugar into her own coffee. “So. Fill me in on your problem.”
“It’s not really my problem, it’s my Aunt Hermione’s problem. I mean, it’s my problem because I love her and I don’t like to see her like this and I don’t know what to do. And that’s why I’m here, even though I’m not sure I believe... No offense, I hope, but… well, it seems like a lot of mumbo jumbo to me.”
If she’d really tried, planned for weeks, she couldn’t have said it any worse.
“I will never speak again,” she said.
Elizabeth gave her an amused look and took a sweet roll. She tore off a scrap and nibbled on it. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I was thinking of something and completely missed what you were saying. Could you start over?”
Stoner rubbed her face with her hands. “I’m sorry. Really. That was rude.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Elizabeth said. “Although, for sheer incomprehensibility you did pretty well.”
“It’s just… this thing has me all screwed up.” It sounded weak and inadequate and she hated herself for it.
“I understand that. Honestly. And I have heard worse. Shamanism isn’t exactly a household word. And many people associate it with hallucinogenic drugs.Imagine the kinds of remarks that generates in this culture.”She passed Stoner the plate of rolls. “Now, take a deep breath, relax, and blurt out whatever’s on your mind.”
Nobody’d told her to do that in years. It threw her back to her early days with Edith Kesselbaum. Sometimes she missed therapy, though it was certainly an uncomfortable experience at the time. But the luxury of an hour of undivided attention and caring from a person who wanted nothing from you but honesty, and who maybe was a little bit wise on top of it… that was pretty hard to come by in the world of every day.
She took a roll and buttered it and thought about where to begin.
“My Aunt Hermione,” she said at last. “She’s been unwell. I don’t mean sick, but it’s as if she’s wasting away. And she’s losing her memory, and sometimes her personality seems to change.” She ran out of words.
“And?” Elizabeth prompted.
“She’s been to a doctor and there’s nothing wrong with her. Nothing they can find, anyway. She’s over at the med school in Worcester today having a neurological workup.”
“Good. What else?”
Stoner took a bite of the roll and chewed slowly and swallowed. “It started months ago, but I didn’t really notice it then. But lately it’s been getting worse, and fast.” She couldn’t think of anything else.
“That’s it?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m not very helpful, am I?”
Elizabeth broke off another bit of roll. “You’re sure that’s all?”
Stoner nodded. “That’s all.”
“Have you picked up anything on another level? Maybe it strikes you as nonsense, so you don’t mention it or think about it.”
A thought surfaced briefly. She shoved it back. “Nothing.”
Elizabeth smiled at her softly. “I think there is something.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The way your eyes shifted to the left, just for a second.”
She hesitated. Well, what the hell, she didn’t even know this woman and probably wouldn’t see her again after today. Probably she’d say she couldn’t help, or didn’t want to help, or...
“Sometimes I think I can see through her,” she said. “Her body. It’s as if she’s a ghost.”
Elizabeth’s eyes lit up. “Now we have something to go on. Can you tell me any more?”
“I try not to think about it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with seeing that, Stoner. Lots of people do. And, like you, they don’t want to talk about it.”
She liked the way Elizabeth said her name.
The woman was looking at her. “This has been a rough time for you, hasn’t it?” Elizabeth asked.
It touched her on a deep and private level and made her want to cry. She shrugged instead, and gave a little laugh. “Psychics make me crazy,” she said. “They read your mind.”
“I’m not a psychic.”
“You’re not?”
“Any information I get, I get on a Journey. In Ordinary Reality I’m dense as lead.”
“But you understood…”
“That comes from experience. Most people have the same fears you do. And, frankly, if they don’t—if they’re too eager to do this—I worry they’ll enter Non- Ordinary Reality and refuse to come back.”
Well, that was spooky enough. For some reason she found it reassuring. Anyone claiming to work at the terminus between reality and fantasy ought to be a little bit spooky. “My aunt’s a clairvoyant,” she said.
“Good,” Elizabeth said. “I have a few issues I need help with. Maybe we can exchange services. Does your aunt know you’re coming to see me?”
“No, but she won’t mind. In fact, she’ll be ecstatic.” She realized she sounded a little plaintive.
“This doesn’t please you.” Elizabeth passed her another roll. She hadn’t even realized she’d finished the first.
“Sure, it does. For Aunt Hermione. She’s wanted me to get involved with psychic things ever since I came to live with her. She says I have a talent for it. But I’d rather not.”
“How come?” Elizabeth brought over the coffee pot and refilled their cups.
She’d never tried to explain this, ev
en to herself. Her reaction had always been sudden and certain, and that was as far as she’d taken it. “I think,” she said as the words oozed their way into her mind, “it’s always been hard for me to live in… uh… Ordinary Reality.” She glanced at Elizabeth to see if she’d gotten the terminology right.
Elizabeth nodded.
“It was hard, growing up different from other people. And my parents hated it, and me.”
“For being a lesbian.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, adding her part to the story.
“Right. I ran away from home at sixteen. God, that seems so young now.”
“It was.”
“Aunt Hermione took me in. I was pretty messed up. Depressed, confused. Hated myself. She got me a therapist and made me finish high school and then college.”
“You were lucky to have her.”
“I think I’d be dead now if I hadn’t. I know I would be.” She took a swallow of coffee. “Sometimes, when I look back on it all at once, how hard it was to learn how to live in this world without it taking everything from me... I just feel so tired from it all. The idea of trying to learn how to get along in another world is too much.”
Elizabeth drank her coffee and said, “Hmmmm,” thoughtfully.
“And who knows what kind of stuff there is over there? Or up there? Or wherever there?”
“Well, there’s one thing I can say about Non-Ordinary Reality, it’s not homophobic.”
“These people, things, spirits that Diana talked to said they wanted me to do it. Help Aunt Hermione. There was something about it that I had to do.”
“That must be difficult,” Elizabeth said, “feeling the way you do.”
Stoner ran her hand through her hair front to back, an old habit from when she was a kid and had a cowlick and her mother would yell if it stuck up. “I just want to run away. But there’s Aunt Hermione, I can’t run out on her. And if I’m the only one who can help...”
“Sort of like being a child and forced to go to the dentist.”
She felt an enormous rush of fear and sadness. “Yeah, pretty much like that.”
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair. “Okay. If your aunt wants to do this, and if it seems like the right way to go, and if it’s necessary for you to be a part of it… that’s a lot of ‘if ’s… there are things you can do to protect yourself. I’ll show you how. And there will be people with you every inch of the way.”
“Will you be there? Wherever there is?”
“If that’s what you want, of course. But you have guardian spirits, too, Stoner. It’s just a matter of meeting them.”
“Well,” Gwen said. “Elizabeth sounds like a truly wonderful woman. Should I be jealous?”
Stoner shifted onto her side. The sun was hot, and filtering softly through the trees that arched over the park. “Gwen, you should never be jealous. Like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”
“Life is good,” Gwen said. She stretched out beside her.
Stoner fingered a strand of Gwen’s hair, counting the few grays. She had just enough silver to lighten the already light brown. It had been like that when Stoner first met her, and it hadn’t changed in the years since. It probably wouldn’t until one day—maybe when she was about eighty-five or something—she’d wake up one morning completely gray.
The thought that they might still be together then was so overwhelming it scared her. The thought that they might not scared her even more.
She fondled short strands of Gwen’s hair. “Elizabeth says this stuff works whether you believe it or not.”
“Thank God. If it doesn’t, you won’t have to feel guilty for the rest of your life, thinking you ruined it by not believing.”
“Yeah.” She was silent for a while, feeling the sun, feeling the softness of Gwen’s hair.
“What’ll she do for her?” Gwen asked.
“Take a journey into Non-Ordinary Reality.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Not much,” Stoner said.
Gwen smiled. “Not for you, maybe. When she gets into this Non-Ordinary place, what happens?”
“Try to find out what’s wrong. She thinks maybe it’s power loss. Or an intrusion. Or soul loss.”
“I know all about power loss,” Gwen said. “I used to have a car that kept losing power on the Turnpike. It turned out to be the alternator.”
Stoner smiled. “I don’t think it’s that kind of power. See, there are these Power Animals, spirit animals that help us through things, and when they get lost we have power loss.”
“That’s what I said,” Gwen said. “I lost horsepower.”
Stoner swatted her lightly. “Pay attention. And an intrusion is something black and ugly that gets in you and makes you sick.”
“Sort of like your first lover.”
“Yes, sort of. Do you want to hear this, or not?”
“I want to, but my head won’t behave.”
Stoner tilted Gwen’s head up to look her in the eye. “Where did you go while I was talking to Elizabeth?”
Gwen looked guilty. “Nowhere.”
“Come on. I know a chocolate high when I see one.”
“Bart’s,” Gwen mumbled.
“I knew it. I’ll bet it was a brownie sundae with chocolate sauce.”
“I had to. I’m premenstrual.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Honest.” She snuggled closer. “Tell me about intrusions? Please?”
“Okay.” She lay down with Gwen’s head on her arm and looked up at the trees. “Intrusions make you sick. They start as thought forms. Maybe you’re a really negative kind of person. Or sometimes someone wills them into you.”
“Someone like our friend Mogwye?”
“Maybe. People in cities get them a lot.”
“Air pollution?”
“Negativity. People put out negative energy at random, and then you come along and suck it up.”
She stroked Gwen’s shoulder. “Soul loss is caused by trauma. You send a part of your soul away and it gets lost. Or someone takes it.”
“That’s what Cutter said.”
“I know.”
Gwen was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Stoner, are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. What?”
“You’re talking about this stuff as if it’s second nature to you. If I did, it wouldn’t mean much, but when you do it’s cause for deep concern.”
“I know. But when Elizabeth talks about it, it just sounds so… well, so ordinary.”
“Not to me. Not coming from you.”
Stoner didn’t know what to say. Gwen was right, of course. But thinking like this felt almost comfortable—for the moment. Letting herself go with it, not trying to make sense. It was like the feeling she got when she studied a beach stone or a blade of grass. A feeling of amazement at the complexity and perfectness of it.
Not corn, though. Corn was too scary. Corn took one little seed and a little dirt and water and turned itself into a six-foot plant with hundreds of copies of itself all tucked into corn condominiums. One little seed. That was power. If corn ever decided to run amok, they were all done for. It wasn’t a good idea to antagonize corn.
And how about Cutter? Is it a good idea to antagonize Cutter?
The thought popped into her mind and startled her and made her heart race.
But Cutter had warned them. Cutter had been helpful. Cutter seemed to understand.
Cutter showed up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
If she could translate his more cryptic comments correctly, Cutter knew a lot about what was going on.
As much as she did. Maybe more.
How?
Gwen had drifted off to sleep, no doubt dreaming of chocolate. Stoner started to wake her, then held herself back. Gwen hadn’t been pleased with her for questioning Marylou about him. Maybe she should wait a bit and see what she could find out for herself.
And keep an eye on Cutter.
<
br /> But he appeared like mist, and disappeared like mist.
How do you keep an eye on mist?
Chapter 8
Finally, Hermione thought as Elizabeth gave her a hand up from the rug, we’re doing something that makes sense.
It hadn’t been a long session, but neither of them had expected it to be. All they had to do was keep their intent in mind, and before the drums had even started the Power Animals and Spirit Guides—and a few curious on-lookers—were gathering in the Lower World.
Hermione’s Power Animal of the moment, a small brown spider who intended to teach her how to use the wind to travel from place to place, led her down the hole in a hollow tree and into the piercing light of Non-Ordinary Reality. She hadn’t done this kind of Shamanic Journeying before, at least not in this lifetime. But it seemed both natural and right. She supposed she’d gotten her training at another time and place, and Elizabeth’s refresher course had been exact and brief.
She and Elizabeth had greeted one another like kindred souls. There was an instant empathy between them—as that old Hopi woman of Stoner’s would say, they ‘made good medicine’ together. Even though neither had any memory of having met the other before, they found to their delight that their minds ran along the same tracks.
“Well,” Elizabeth said after she had rolled up the rug they’d been lying on and made them each a glass of iced tea and written in her journal while Hermione took a few moments to rest and acclimate herself to Ordinary Reality. “It’s a soul loss problem, all right.”
Hermione wasn’t at all surprised. “But what in the world is it about?”
“They wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell me. My Guide gave me very explicit instructions. Or, rather, she gave them to my Power Animal. Did you find a Power Animal.”
“I did.” Hermione stirred her tea and hesitated. “Is it all right to tell you about it?”
“Of course, if that’s your inclination.”
“I haven’t been in this particular neighborhood before,” she said. “At least as far as I recall. You will let me know if I break any rules?”
“There aren’t many,” Elizabeth said. “Everything you need to know you should get from your Guide and your Power Animal. Pay attention to them. Did you meet a Guide?”
