Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  If I had to guess, the front boxwoods were dying, yet the leaves were still green, the inside of the stems appeared healthy when I broke one, and when I dug into the soil, there was no indication of deeper root problems. It seemed important, but I couldn’t say why, and I was, admittedly, a plant person, not an experienced agent. I was likely to think inside a plant box when none existed.

  When I couldn’t verbalize why the black mold was important, the other techs wandered away, uninterested in my discovery. And they had a point, summed up by Riley. “What could mold have to do with three families going whacky?”

  Molds did a lot of bad stuff, including causing hallucinations, but three families? All at the same time? In exactly the same way? When it wasn’t affecting the rest of us? It wasn’t likely. I made a note in my tablet—not the easiest thing to do wearing the uni’s gloves—took a photo, and, just to be on the safe side, I scraped off some mold into an evidence bag and sealed it. Then I went to get Occam. I wanted to see the other houses.

  I wasn’t lead agent. I had to check in. I felt tethered. And stubbornly resistant to being tethered. But I remembered something my mama had often said when I was young. “I may not always like it, but I can work in the system.” For her, “the system” had been church and an extended family and sister-wives and many, many children to help raise. For me, the system was law enforcement.

  Occam caught my eye at the back door of the house, changing out of his uni, and putting on a new one. His face was set into hard lines, cool and unemotional, and the sight of his expression made me even happier that I had stayed outside. “You okay?” I asked.

  “No. This sucks. The kids were beaten in a circular pattern. He used a crowbar. Started at their heads and worked his way around the beds in clock patterns, twelve blows ending back at their heads.”

  “Clockwise or widdershins?”

  “Bloodstains suggest clockwise.” Clockwise was a direction used in witch workings. He cursed softly and rubbed his forehead. “I’m glad Rick made Tandy sit this one out at the office. Even the fish in the aquarium are swimming in a circle.”

  Silent after the terse words, Occam led the way to the next house, both of us wearing clean antimagic unis. The next house was Point B, Alisha Henri’s two-story home, with an open, empty double garage and three family cars parked in the drive, two of them from out of state. Occam paused at the driveway and said, “The FBI SAC just spoke with the hospitalist at UTMC. Two people from this house are currently asymptomatic. They don’t have a theory yet why only the two from this one house seem to be fully recovered, when the rest of the people from all three houses are still exhibiting psychosis.”

  The SAC was the special agent in charge, a deliberate reminder that we didn’t have true lead on this site. The FBI did. I stuck out my tongue at him and he laughed, the shadows in his eyes vanishing for a moment, the dimple popping into place. “Thanks. I needed that.” He lifted a hand in a half wave and went inside Alisha’s house. I walked around the yard, taking readings, this time alone and without a tent. The area where the family had been walking in a circle was taped off with crime scene tape and was still redlining. Before I could get more than that accomplished, Occam shouted, “Ingram! In here.”

  Ingram. Not “Nell, sugar.” Good. I jogged to the porch and when I entered, found Alisha’s place to be much more empty than I expected. Only two middle-aged feds, wearing wrinkled suits, unis zipped open, half off and hanging on their hips, suitcoats sweat-stained, ties pulled loose at their necks, were in the house.

  “I want some P 2.0 measurements inside too,” Occam said to me. To the two others, he said, “Ingram. Probie. A whiz with the new tech.”

  The feds grunted without looking up. Occam placed a hand-sketched floor plan into my free fingers. “Read each room and record the results,” he instructed, his face less grim than earlier, his eyes holding something I couldn’t place.

  “Probie work,” I muttered, as if it bothered me. Occam snapped his fingers three times, fast, as if telling me to hurry up. “And when you get through, we can chat.”

  I didn’t know what he thought I might find, but I started the readings at the front door, working around the two agents, who were both human. The first floor took less than half an hour, and I ended on the second floor, in what looked like a man cave, with a minikitchen, wide-screen TV, chips in bowls, two colas open on side tables. A cat sat in the corner on a cat climber stand that went to the ceiling, the carpeted leap shelves crossing in front of the window where the cat could stare out at birds by day. As I did the readings, I began to get a feeling that Occam wanted me to pick up on something. And I did. I rechecked the levels on both floors before I found him in the kitchen with the feds, looking over the evidence footage—because without a crime being committed here, they couldn’t be called forensic photography or crime scene photos—collected by the first responders. The shots were of Alisha; Kirsten Harrell; her partner, Sally Clements; and Sharon Sayegh, and her husband, Adam Sayegh.

  I pushed my way between Occam and a cop and studied the video too. The family all wore nightclothes and were barefoot, walking in a circle. All five had their eyes open, shoulders rounded, stumbling as if sleep-walking. In the vid, police and paramedics approached slowly. The five kept walking. Until a city police officer touched one of the men on the shoulder as if to pull him around. The cop stopped, his back rigid. The man kept walking. Seconds passed. The cop stepped toward the group and tried to join the walkers. Another cop yanked him back, across the yard, and the rest of the officers pulled them both away.

  That was interesting. “Is the cop who touched one of them, without a uni, okay?”

  “He’s okay,” the bald guy said. “He’ll get a reprimand for being a dumb-ass, but he’s okay.”

  “Ingram,” Occam said. “Readings and analysis?”

  “Question first. I’ve seen two houses. Is this the only two-story?”

  The bald cop swiveled until he faced me and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah. Why?”

  “I won’t know until I take readings of the other houses, but I have a theory based on the second story and the cat.”

  “Based on the cat?” The cop laughed as if he thought I was a silly female. He probably thought all females were silly.

  I narrowed my eyes at him and went on. “We have redline readings all over the first floor. Upstairs reads in the low normal range on three psysitope levels and only redlines in psysitope level three. Because I know you guys are unschooled and ignorant about paranormal events, I’ll explain.”

  Occam’s mouth quivered with a suppressed smile at my tone. Too bad. I didn’t like being talked down to because of my gender.

  “Each of the four levels read by the P 2.0 is specific for each creature species. Witches read high in psysitope one. Weres read high in psysitope three, midrange in psysitopes one and two, and psysitope four nearly zero. The upstairs reads like a were-creature. The difference in readings seems significant. The fish at Point A were swimming in circles, but the cat on the second level here is sitting easy.

  “Of the five people who were hospitalized from this house, two victims have already gotten better. Upstairs, two colas were open, two recliners were stretched out, two bowls of chips, and the TV was on, though someone had muted it at some point. Having talked to a visitor who was here last night, I confirmed that three blood-related females were in the kitchen drinking wine and two unrelated people were upstairs watching the game.

  “I’d say that the contamination, whatever it is, is low to the ground. It’s also possible that it’s bloodline specific.”

  The bald-headed cop kept his eyes on me but spoke to Occam. “This the little girl who brought down Benton?”

  I felt my cheeks heat at the little-girl comment. Thomas Benton the fourth had been the head of the Knoxville FBI. He had not been human. “Yes, I am,” I said, silently adding, you creepy misogyn
ist. I smiled sweetly instead, but looked him up and down, head to foot. “He was a Welsh gwyllgi. A devil dog. Something you boys missed entirely.” With that, this little girl got out of there. Before I said something that could get me fired.

  As I walked out the door, the bald cop asked Occam, “What the hell was that about?”

  “You called her ‘little girl.’”

  “She is little. And young enough to be my daughter.”

  I had a feeling that the bald cop had ongoing gender and age sensitivity issues. Stuff I had learned in a half-day seminar on diversity at Spook School. Behind me, Occam answered, and I slowed to hear.

  “You meet her at a church social, you can attempt to address her any way you want, hoss,” Occam said, a thread of something I couldn’t identify in his tone. “On the job? She’s a competent field agent. Learn some professional manners or go home.

  “And before you try to make this your assessment, I’ve already documented that Special Agent Ingram offered her professional expertise and conclusions. And I’ll be sending that up the line to your boss, the ADIC, Penny Francoeur. And, hey. You call her ‘little girl’ too? How’s she like that?”

  No one answered. I heard Occam leave the house behind me and I hurried to put some space between me and my bad temper. And my hero. I had seldom been protected in my life; it was nice having someone stand up for me, and I couldn’t hide the smile on my face.

  The third house, Point C, was easy to find. It was on a triangle from the first two, and it was full of cops. Because here, like at the other single-story house, there were dead inside.

  A middle-aged man and two elderly people, a man and woman, had died violently, and the bodies were still on scene while CSI and PsyCSI worked up the site. The specialized team from outside Washington, DC, had sent enough techs to cover multiple sites, the pond, the other houses, and here. Thankfully I wouldn’t have to work up this site with the P 2.0. That had already been done, by the DC team with their own 2.0 device, but it didn’t stop me from having to see the house and the killing scene.

  Occam said, “You need the experience, Nell. If you’re gonna remain a PsyLED special agent, you’ll see plenty of these scenes.”

  “Yeah?” I challenged my former (like two minutes past) hero. “How many have you seen?”

  “Before today? Four. Four scenes with dead bodies. One of them children. After today that brings my total to seven.”

  I screwed my face up into something worse than a frown, but when Occam stripped out of his dirty uni, I changed out of mine. At the door, we put on fresh 3PEs. I was not looking forward to this. Every time I blinked my eyes, I saw the dead bodies floating in the pond. I never had nightmares, and I wondered if that was about to change.

  The house was an open floor plan, tastefully furnished in greens with white cabinetwork, trim, and woodwork. The place smelled of fresh paint and the stink of new furniture. The neutral-toned carpet was brand-new clean, and the furniture was upholstered in a pleasing mix of fabrics. It wasn’t a house where young children lived, but looked like the house of empty nesters who had only recently finished redecorating. Maybe just in time for children and parents to come for Thanksgiving. There were three bedrooms in the main part of the house, all showing signs of having been used the night before, and a separate suite in the back that appeared to have been added on. The suite was where the bodies had been found, a bloody track of bare footprints on the new carpet, leading from it.

  At the end of the footprint track, a body lay. The middle-aged man had been shot with a handgun about a dozen times. I didn’t try to count. In the back suite, an elderly couple had been beaten to death, but unlike the young men in the other one-story house, these two hadn’t gone down without a fight. It was clear that the elderly woman had shot her attacker, emptying her weapon into him, but he hadn’t died fast enough, not until after he had struck both of the elders in the heads with a baseball bat.

  I had seen plenty of killings in my life—hogs, cattle, chickens, sheep, goats. I had been on-site when deer and wild boar were processed. I had studied crime scene photos in Spook School. I might have thought that the blood of those deaths would have inured me to most anything. It hadn’t begun to harden me to violent murder scenes. The smells were the unexpected part. At the pond, the air had carried the stench of death away. Here, it was contained and rank. The sickly sweet scent of old blood, the stink of bowels and bladders released in death were all stronger than the fresh-paint smell. The sight of blood in sprays up the soft green walls and soaked into the pale bedding was still fresh—bright and vivid. I feared for a moment that I’d be attacked by bloodlust again, but it didn’t happen. I wasn’t on Soulwood and the bodies weren’t on soil, but on floors, so maybe that was the reason.

  I stood in the doorway, doing what I was supposed to do. Getting used to the awfulness of what people did to people. The horror of violence. The utter helplessness of being too late to help, too little to save. I studied each body, teaching my insides not to react, not to feel. Not to throw up.

  When I had all I could stand, I left the house, peeling off the uni, throwing everything into the evidence bag at the back door. I went straight to my truck. It hadn’t been towed, but a media person had parked herself at my vehicle, and I nearly plowed her down to get past. She was sleek and polished, with long dark hair and enough makeup to make a good Halloween mask. She finally got out of my way and then out of the way of my truck, as I pulled off. If I made the evening news as an uncooperative law enforcement officer, that would be a good way to end my day.

  The tears started on the way home. I had to slow down and then pull over so I could cry, snotting and wailing. I don’t cry pretty. Never have. But when the misery was cried out, I pulled back into traffic and continued home, with a promise to myself to put some handkerchiefs in the car for next time.

  EIGHT

  Back at my house, I felt empty and raw, as if my heart and soul were abraded and bleeding. I went directly to the garden, where I picked some spinach that had survived the cold, some late squash, and two pumpkins that were in a protected place and were still good, and dug up a batch of turnips and greens. I carried them inside with me, where I kicked off my boots and washed and cut up veggies, walking the floors in my wool socks, feeling the land through the wood flooring that had once grown here, on Soulwood. I was shaky and mad for reasons I wasn’t quite sure of, and the Calhoun’s BBQ had worn off long ago. I was sick to the stomach and yet also hungry, which made no sense at all, except as an indication that I was confused and mad and distressed.

  Though I hadn’t had time to buy groceries since I got back, I had plenty of home-canned goods that I could whip up in a hurry. I should put something together. But my brain wasn’t clear enough to know what I wanted to eat.

  Moving on instinct and habit, I added wood to the stove and put the greens in a pot to simmer with salt and fatback from the freezer and a few red peppers. I added a couple of whole, unshelled pecans to keep the stink down. The sliced pumpkin went into the oven to roast. I doubted the unit would like turnip greens or roasted pumpkin. Lots of city people didn’t, and cats hated the greens. Still antsy and hungry, I stood in front of the pantry and finally chose a Ball jar of spicy field peas. I made some instant rice, and mixed it together with a can of tuna that made the cats come running. It was dinner, tasteless except for the spices in the peas. And I didn’t particularly love tuna. But I forced myself to eat, and to not think, not think about anything.

  Not about the deaths. Not about the bodies in the pond and on the shore. Not about the bodies in the back suite at the last house. Not. But again I couldn’t stop the tears. No matter the classes in paranormal crimes and the crime scene photos, this was not what I had expected my job with PsyLED to be about. I didn’t know what I had expected, but . . . not this.

  Shoveling food in, I kept turning my thoughts away, but it was like herding cats. They kept returnin
g to the blood and the death, just as I kept shooing cats off the long table and away from my tuna, an endless loop of failure. But eventually my belly got full and my shakes decreased. I began to calm and stabilize. Mostly the tuna was gone and the cats wandered away in a snit.

  But my eyes were still leaking and my heart felt funny, so I took off my socks and carried a clean, folded quilt made by Leah years ago out to the edge of my woods, to the married trees, put the quilt, still folded, on the ground, and sat down on the pad it made. The weather had turned cold. My bare toes were already frozen. They would be even colder soon.

  I rearranged my legs and placed my bare feet onto the earth and my palms flat on the ground beside me, and sank my thoughts into the land. In an instant, Soulwood recognized me and enfolded me. Warmth flooded me, the way a mother hugs a child, reaching all inside me, embracing me. I closed my eyes and breathed out the worry, the fear, and the anger that I had been carrying. The grief. I sank into the dimness and the deep of the land, into the broken stone of the mountain’s heart, stone canted up in some massive, ancient earthquake. And I simply breathed. Felt the land fill me, felt it hold me.

  Let it tell me that death and life were an endless loop. That life and death were nature’s way. That all things, no matter how cruel seeming, were part of living. That I was loved now when I was alive, and I would be loved when I was dust and ashes and my soul was set free.

  I relaxed. Let my shoulders droop. Stretched out my legs. I breathed. And breathed. My heart beat. Time passed. When my spirit was soothed and quiet, I remembered Rick’s orders, issued so much earlier in the day. I curled my legs up into a modified guru position, icy toes inserted into my inner knees, between my thighs and calves, and thought about what I wanted to do. I reached out and around, reading the land.