Spiritwalk

by Charles de Lint

  Waves crashed against the shore, rising high, but not high enough to wash them off. Esmeralda’s winds blew them back. They lay on the hard stone like a pair of bedraggled cats, gasping for breath. The mists thickened around them, making an impenetrable wall of haze.

  “Where... where are we?” Esmeralda asked as she finally caught her breath.

  She had lost her shoes in the water, but worse, she’d lost her shoulder bag with its fetishes and charms. She sat up and peeled off her socks, sticking them in the pockets of her borrowed jacket.

  “We haven’t left the inner realms,” Emma said.

  “The drumming?”

  “I can still hear it—but it’s faint.”

  Esmeralda looked out at the mists. Waves continued to crash against the rocks, spraying them. What little they could see of the river beyond the rock was a storm of spinning waters.

  “We’ll have to go back in the river,” she said. “We have to cross it to get out.”

  Emma nodded dully. Her head ached from the strain of bringing them this far on the threads of the drumming. But the longer they sat here, the fainter the drumming grew.

  “I’m not giving up,” she said.

  Esmeralda smiled at her. “That’s the Emma I remember—welcome back.”

  Emma wrung the water from her hair, but a new wave rose up and the spray that wasn’t driven back by Esmeralda’s winds soaked her again.

  “Time to go,” she said.

  They helped each other stand and stood with their arms around each other’s waists to keep their balance. The thread of drumming sounded suddenly louder, but then Emma realized that it was coming out of the mist. A new drumming. Not the thread that had been leading them home.

  “Esmeralda...” she began, but she didn’t need to speak.

  The heads of two enormous serpents rose out of the water. They had huge eyes, round as moons. One was black, the roof of its head capped with antlers. The other was white, its brow smooth. The new sound of the spirit drums that accompanied the creatures joined the rhythm of the drumming that they had been following.

  “Mishiginebek,” Emma breathed. The drumming whispered the name of the serpents to her. Mishiginebek lived to punish those who mocked the manitou, who used their medicine for evil, by devouring their souls after death.

  I’ve mocked the spirits, Emma thought. I refused to believe in them, refused to accept their reality.

  The great beasts watched them with unblinking gazes, unmoved by the storm of waters from which they rose. Emma shuddered at the forked tongues that flickered from their mouths. She could already feel the convulsive motion of their throats, drawing Esmeralda and her down into their bellies....

  Esmeralda stepped forward, drawing Emma with her.

  “No,” Emma protested.

  “They’re here to help us,” Esmeralda said. “Don’t you see? The shaman sent them.”

  And then Emma saw an image of the old medicine man in each of their eyes. She couldn’t read the sign language his hands were shaping, but the drumming told her what Esmeralda could read. The serpents were his patrons, as the Black Duck was his totem. They had come, summoned by his water drum to help them.

  Emma turned away to look at her companion; then the two of them held hands and jumped into the roaring waters.

  6

  When the creature spat at Blue’s face, Judy thought her heart would stop. But Blue turned his head just enough so that the gob of saliva went by his ear. His cheek and hair smoked from its accompanying spray. The pain was enough to lend him the strength to wrench himself free. Judy brought up the shotgun, now that she had a clear shot, but suddenly Ernie was there, his tire iron upraised, then flashing down.

  It bit into the creature’s head with a wet popping sound, breaking through the bone of the creature’s skull. Blood sprayed and the creature dropped to its knees. Before it could rise, Hacker was there as well and the two men each hit the creature again. When they stood back, it lay still on the ground between them. Judy stepped forward and fired a shot into its chest for good measure.

  “Jesus, Jesus,” Ernie was saying, staring down at the thing. “What the fuck is it?”

  Blue wiped the side of his head with a sleeve of his jacket and stepped slowly forward. His cheek was pocked with red burns.

  “It’s dead,” he said flatly. “That’s all it is.”

  “Are there more of them?” Hacker asked.

  “There were the last time.”

  “Great.”

  But Blue wasn’t listening anymore. He turned his back on the dead creature and went on down the hollow to where Emma lay on the gray stone. Judy fed another shell into the shotgun and trailed along behind him. When she reached the stone, Blue was trying to wipe the glowing symbols from Emma’s face. Whatever they had been painted on with wouldn’t come off.

  “God, she’s so still,” Judy said.

  “Is she dead?” Hacker asked, coming up behind her.

  Blue shook his head numbly. “Jesus, man. I just don’t know.”

  He put his head to her chest and heard the faint sound of a heartbeat.

  “She’s alive!”

  He started to gather her up in his arms.

  “Should you be moving her like that?” Ernie asked.

  Blue just looked at him like he was crazy. “We’ve got to get her to a hospital,” he said.

  He hoisted her up, but then Judy touched his arm.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to just beyond the stone.

  A pair of pale shapes stood there, ill-defined so that their features couldn’t be made out, but human shapes all the same.

  7

  The serpents bore them out of the river, up into the sky to where the mists were deepest. The spirit drums spoke like thunder all around them. As their bodies were borne by the twin beasts, they lost all sense of physical awareness and seemed to be drifting in a gray place. For their spirits, motion had ceased. The trees of a ghostly forest rose all around them. Seated directly before them was the old shaman. He, too, seemed to be made of mist. He looked up at them, ghostly hands leaving the skin of his water drum.

  Welcome, manitou, he signed to them.

  As she took in their surroundings, Esmeralda’s thoughts turned to the Weirdin that she’d read in Jamie’s study. Three old bones, drawn from their bag. A future told in their carved faces. That moment seemed like a hundred years ago now. But she could still see them as though they lay in her palm.

  The Forest. A place of testing an unknown peril.

  She and Emma had been tested and known peril tonight.

  The Acorn, or Hazelnut. For hidden wisdom and friendship.

  They’d both found wisdom and deepened their friendship.

  And the last bone? She looked at the old shaman.

  Among certain tribes a man did not speak his own name, so she couldn’t ask their benefactor his, and there was no third party present to speak it for him. But there was still one Weirdin unaccounted for, and she thought she knew now both its meaning and their benefactor’s name.

  She let go of Emma’s hand and faced the shaman. Extending her arms, she waved her hands in imitation of the beating of wings, palms down, fingers outstretched. Then she brought her right hand near her nose, curving it slightly to suggest a bird’s beak.

  Eagle, she signed.

  The Eagle. Release from bondage.

  The old shaman smiled as his name came from her hands.

  You must go, manitou, he signed. Your own world calls you.

  Esmeralda nodded. But she wanted to show her respect for him. I have a friend, she signed quickly, in need of his true name. Will you help him find it?

  Migizi’s smile broadened. I would be honored.

  His palms returned to the skin of his water drum and the sound of its voice rumbled through the ghostly glade. As Esmeralda took Emma’s hand once more, a great rushing sound filled her ears, hard on the heels of Migizi’s drumming. The place of mist tattered like smoke. There was a mome
nt of vertigo, and then they were standing in a wooded clearing in the Outer World, drawn to the place where Emma’s body awaited the return of her spirit.

  They saw Blue holding Emma’s body, Judy Kitt with a shotgun in her hands, and two strangers. For one long moment they held to their spirit forms; then Esmeralda’s flesh returned to cloak her spirit while Emma’s fled into her body. She stirred in Blue’s arms, the symbols on her skin fading, evaporating away, into the late-night air, until they were gone.

  “Jesus on a Harley!” Ernie Collins said softly. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

  8

  It was just after dawn when Esmeralda returned to the knoll in the center of Tamson House’s gardens. The bird chorus was in full song all around her, the sun’s light just rising over the gables of the east side of the house.

  “Gaoth an lar,” a voice said softly. Wind of the West. “You’ve returned from your journey.”

  Esmeralda smiled at the crippled bard. “Journeys never end,” she said. “You must know that.”

  “Yet your feet are still.”

  Winds rose to tousle her hair and his. She touched a hand to her chest.

  “Only when the heart is still is the journey over,” she said. “And even then...”

  “There are rivers to cross.”

  Esmeralda smiled. The old Celts also believed that one crossed a great river when they died. So much seemed different in the world only to be proved that it was the same thing, merely wearing an unfamiliar shape.

  “I met a man last night,” she said, “who knows your true name. Will you come with me to hear it from his lips?”

  “And then?”

  Esmeralda looked beyond the garden to where she could see the roofline of the House through the garden’s trees. “Then we’ll return to this place.” She smiled. “It can be as much an inspiration as a refuge, you know.”

  She could already hear the music that his one hand would call forth from the synthesizer that Blue was going to pick up this morning. But the bard would need his true name to make that music. And when she had eased the winter of his heart? There would be others for her to help. She and Emma. There would always be others.

  Rising, she offered him her hand. By the time the young playwright Tim Gavin had made his way to the garden’s knoll, to call them in for a celebratory breakfast, there was only a stirring of leaves to show where they’d been.

  GHOSTWOOD

  There was a child went forth every day,

  And the first object be looked upon,

  That object he became....

  —Walt Whitman

  There are wildflowers in the woods,

  there are owls who wake and guard the forest paths.

  —Susan Musgrave, The Charcoal Burners

  Lead Into Gold

  The Cave—entrance to the Otherworld

  —Weirdin disc; Secondary: Second Rank, 36.a

  To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

  —Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

  It was time to die.

  Albert Watkins looked out the window of the house that he and his wife Eleanor were renting on Clemow Avenue. Across the street, stretching either way to the end of the block, was the enormous bulk of Tamson House. The facade it presented to the world of being a long row of town houses meant no more to him than it did to any long-term resident of the neighborhood. Everyone knew that it was all just one building; for them, the secret its facade hid was merely the odd turn of mind of the man who’d originally commissioned the building and had then overseen its curious construction. But Watkins knew the true secret its facade hid:

  Tamson House was a place of power. It was a door to Otherworlds and magic breathed in its walls, mystery slept restlessly in its enclosed garden. In a world where the ancient mystery traditions had been mostly relegated to bad plot devices in Hollywood films or New Age fantasies in equally painful novels, Tamson House presented irrefutable proof that more lay beyond the scope of the shallow world than most men and women could perceive with their sleeping senses.

  To comprehend the power that lay in the House’s walls—the potent forces of energy matriced in the ley lines that collected under its foundations as though the building were some ancient stonework, rather than a curious, overly large structure—required a mind that demanded more of itself and its body than the autopilot thought processes and reactions with which most of humanity confronted the world. There was no one in this neighborhood awake enough to appreciate its potency. There were even people living in its maze of hallways and rooms who hadn’t the first inkling of what lay underfoot, of what hummed within its walls and was stored in its perfect puzzle of stonework, glass and wood.

  But Watkins knew. Reading the works of a namesake, Alfred Watkins—the name was close enough to his own to make no difference, to Watkins’s way of thinking—he’d first begun to understand the complexity of the earth lines that gave the sacred sites of the world their potency. From ley lines and their mystic crossroads he’d delved into the lore that accompanied them.

  Common knowledge and quaint folktales had led him into a study of ever more arcane texts and finally, through perseverance—“The superior man heaps up small things in order to achieve something high and great,” the I Ching said—through studies and interviews with various spiritual teachers—Native American shaman, Eastern swami, cabbalists, Western mystics—but mostly through the sheer audacity of his own wit, he learned how the world worked. He learned of the otherworldly powers that lay waiting in this world’s hidden places. He learned how to tap into their potency and so quicken his own resources. And ultimately, he learned how he could have it all.

  It required one’s own death, but repaid that death a hundredfold with eternity—but not in some nebulous afterworld. What use was that? No, the dividend that sacrifice repaid was a return to this world and the promise that one could be whatever one wanted, have whatever one wanted.

  Forever.

  Watkins was nearing the end of his natural life. The past years of his searching had taken on a fine edge of desperation. He knew the power was here in this world, waiting for the man or woman brave—or foolhardy—enough to take it up, and he had found its hiding places. A stonework in the Hebrides, another in Brittany. A mountaintop shrine in Tibet, another in the Andes. A jungle pool in Sumatra, a river in Oregon. But they were all too well protected. Their guardians were fierce and dangerous beyond compare for they swallowed not the bodies, but the souls of those who came with plunder in their heart, rather than respect.

  And then Watkins found Tamson House. It, too, had a guardian, but his guardianship was eroding. He was new to his task—a novice, and an untutored one as well. His mind was still too enwrapped in the human concerns of the life he had led before he’d acquired his responsibility. The guardian of Tamson House had yet to learn how to focus on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else.

  Watkins had no such difficulty. He had but one thing on his mind. When he looked at the night-silhouetted skyline of the building, he saw neither its darkened gables nor the shadowed outline of its roof, but the sparking glow of its power, a shimmering aura of power just waiting to be harvested that glimmered and spun webs of fairy-gold light from roof ridge to chimney, cornice to gutter.

  Tonight it would all be his.

  It was growing late. Dawn would soon be washing the eastern sky with its soft pastel light. But he knew that before the first pale ghosts of the sun’s light could streak the sky, he would be dead, his spirit embracing the mystery that was Tamson House.

  He had been monitoring the guardian’s increasing distress with heightened eagerness. The whys of that distress were immaterial to Watkins’s concerns. What interested him was that the guardian was attempting to reach out from the confines of his guardianship—reaching, stretching
himself thin, thinner—until tonight his hold on the House was so vague that Watkins knew that any moment now the guardian would lose his grip on the House and be gone.

  Where he would go was also irrelevant to Watkins. All that was important was that for a time—perhaps it would only be a moment—the House would be unprotected. A moment was all that Watkins would need to slip in and take control.

  He turned from the window and went to sit on the edge of the bed, lifting a glass of clear liquid from the nightstand.

  “You don’t have the courage to fulfill your potential,” a so-called wise man had told him once. “The art of what we pursue is not to gain power, but to become more complete, to fully understand the complex simplicity that makes us what we are and by doing so, understand the mysteries of the world of which we are an integral part. Acquiring power is child’s play—any half-wit can accomplish that; it takes courage to forgo the concept of self and take one’s rightful place in the natural scheme of things.”

  Watkins held his glass up to the light.

  “This takes more courage,” he said softly.

  The liquid was a distillation from the fruit and roots of the hemlock.

  “And offers greater return,” he added.

  He wasn’t frightened. There was no room in the tight focus of his mind for fear or doubt. He closed his eyes, his mind monitoring the spirit of the House’s guardian across the street as it tugged and stretched itself away from its responsibilities. The guardian was pulled taut now, every point of his being concentrating on his effort, just as Watkins was entirely focused on his own task.

  The guardian pulled free from one tower.

  Watkins smiled.

  There was a momentary hesitation on the part of the guardian; then he strained again and suddenly he was free.

  Gone.

  The House unprotected.

  Watkins lifted the glass to his lips. It would be like a kind of alchemy, he thought, his passage from life, into the mystery held by the House, and then back again. Transformed.