by J. R. Mabry
“At least the dog-people half,” Brian added.
“I don’t think there are going to be very many cat-people sleeping soundly tonight,” Terry countered. Brian nodded his agreement.
“First things first,” Richard said. “Dylan, I know you’re in a lot of pain over Toby right now, but we need you to pull it together and see what you can do for Mikael.”
“I don’t know, dude, I’m pretty scattered—”
Kat hovered over the sofa and put her hand on his shoulder. “Please, Dylan,” she said.
Dylan hung his head, and a long silence passed. “Ah’ll try it,” he said at last.
“Kat, can you monitor the news on the web? We probably know more about what’s actually happening than anyone else in the world, but one of us should be monitoring how the world is responding and what people are saying.”
She straightened up and cocked her head. Richard realized he had just said “one of us” in reference to her. He smiled.
“Oh. Yeah. Okay,” she answered. “I’ll do that. I need to give Randy a sponge bath tonight some time, but I can do that, too. Um, not at the same time, but…yes. Sir.” She apparently realized that she was officially coming across as an idiot, and shut up.
A hint of a smile crossed Richard’s face. “The rest of us—including you, Susan, if you feel up to it—we have some major grief counseling work to do right here in our neighborhood. Let’s pace ourselves, and each of us take a different direction.”
“Ah’ll need someone to drum and watch for mah journey,” Dylan said.
“I can do that,” said Brian.
“Dude, you drum too fast,” Dylan said warily.
“I’ll be careful,” Brian smiled.
Everyone scattered, and Brian and Dylan climbed the stairs. They split up briefly, Brian to fetch a drum from the spare bedroom and Dylan to snag a sprig of sage to cleanse the area.
Once they met in Mikael’s room, Brian closed the windows against the noise in the street. Dylan tried to focus as he lit the sage and began a Lakota chant. He was, in fact, one-sixteenth Lakota, not enough to see in his stocky Melungeon features but enough to claim headrights, he knew, should he ever choose to do so.
Fragrant smoke curled up from the sage and gradually charged the room with Beauty. Using a feather, Dylan blessed himself with the smoke, then the skinny, prone frame of Mikael, and finally, Brian, who sat erect on a stool, cradling a Native-American drum. Laying the unburned sage in an oil-glittery abalone shell half, Dylan also laid aside the feather and stretched out on the twin bed next to Mikael.
Dylan nudged him over a little and eventually got comfortable. Lying faceup, his hands at his sides, he winked at Brian. “Let’s get going.”
“How long?” Brian asked.
“You’re gonna hate me.”
“How long?” Brian scowled.
“Gimme an hour and a half under and a half an hour return.”
“Oh…my hands are going to so hurt.”
“Ah told you, you wuz gonna hate me.”
“Just get going,” Brian said, with mock irritation.
“If Ah can surface early, Ah will.”
“Deal.”
Brian began to pound on the drum with clean, slow, even beats. Dylan allowed the concern about Toby to be there but chose not to focus on it. Instead, he concentrated on the rhythm, and in his mind’s eye he traveled down a wooded path, deeper and deeper into an alternative reality that is the Middle World.
Soon, the imaginal realm had solidified, and he began to experience it not as a phenomenon of consciousness, not as a world viewed through his mind’s eye, but as a world as solid and real as any in waking life.
As he walked toward a clearing, all traces of normal reality were left behind, and the sunlight, so bright he almost had to look away, shimmered in the heat of an afternoon that was definitely not cold, gray Berkeley in winter.
No sooner had he hit the clearing than he became aware of a large, luminous presence padding along beside him. “Hullo, Jaguar,” Dylan said, reaching out to touch the mottled black fur of the great beast at his side. He watched as the sunlight played upon the solid ripples of muscle just below the pelt. His spots, velvet pools of midnight, were separated by highlights of gold—the same color as his brilliant eyes.
Jaguar said nothing but kept pace with him, looking about warily. “Good to see you, dude.” Dylan didn’t expect a reply to this. Jaguar was a fiercely loyal animal guide—emphasis on fierce—but he was not much for small talk or pleasantries. In fact, of all the creatures Dylan had ever met in the Otherworld, Jaguar was hands down the surliest.
Dylan remembered back to the time he had first begun doing shamanic journeys. It must have been his second foray into the Lower World when, near the close of the journey, he had called after Jaguar, “Hey, dude, why are you so surly?” The enormous cat had stopped and faced him and without a hint of irony answered, “Because the world is hard,” and then turned and stalked away. Dylan shook his head, remembering the scene.
“Dude, Mikael’s in a bad way. He got caught in a magickal crossfire, kinda, and his soul has been separated from his body. We gotta get it back, stuff it in him, make it all better.”
Jaguar looked at him, comprehending but silent.
“So, where should we look?” Dylan prompted.
Finally, the great cat spoke. “For what?” Although the sentence was slight, the rumble of his voice was felt in Dylan’s belly.
“For his soul,” Dylan answered, with an implied “of course” in his diction.
“How should I know?” asked the Jaguar.
Dylan stopped and faced the creature. “Uh, I don’t know, dude, because you’re, like, a magickal dude, and you know…everything?”
The Jaguar padded on without him. “You’re an idiot,” he threw over his shoulder.
“Ah’m not an idiot, and Ah’ll remind you to be civil when we’re working together. Ah don’t mind what you say behind mah back to all the other celestial menagerie-folk, but to my face we’re gonna have some respect. Am Ah clear?”
Jaguar stopped. “Of course. I’m sorry. I don’t know where Mikael’s soul is.”
“Can you think of any likely places?” Dylan asked.
The great cat thought, wind playing on his fur as he sniffed at the dry yellow grass of the clearing. “He was not the target of the magickal working, was he?”
“No, it was residual energy from sighting the sigil used in a working.”
“Which means he probably wasn’t intentionally carried anywhere. He probably just got separated, and got lost.”
“So, he’d be…what, wandering around Pier 39?” Dylan grabbed at straws.
“Perhaps hung up in a pocket of the pain body.”
“Yer thinkin’ he would have gravitated naturally toward a locus of primal wounding,” Dylan considered.
“It won’t hurt to look,” Jaguar suggested.
“We can even do some retrieval of those parts of his soul that got split off from that wounding, and integrate them with the larger soul later.”
Jaguar nodded.
“Well, all right then, Jagger, let’s root around in Mikael’s cellar, shall we?”
48
Kat trolled the web for a few minutes but so far wasn’t turning up much. The most mentions of the disappearance of dogs she was able to find weren’t on the web at all but on CNN, where they were—she could hardly believe it—joking about it. They weren’t fooling her, she told herself; the anchorwoman looked pretty fucking rattled.
She began an mp4 capture of CNN and gathered her things for her brother’s bath. She put a large dish tub in the kitchen sink and drew it half-full of warm water, adding just enough dish soap to make a generous supply of suds. “Soap is soap,” she said to herself. “No need to go in search of different kinds.” From the linen cabinet she got a clean washcloth and started up the back steps, holding the tub like an offering in front of her as she went.
She set it down o
n the nightstand in the guest room and shut the door to ensure her brother his privacy. Then she turned down the bedclothes and placed a loving hand on his chest…his very, very cold chest.
Her eyes wide with horror, she drew back, startled and panicked. Catching herself, she struggled to have the presence of mind to proceed logically. She placed two fingers on his neck and felt for his pulse.
None. The skin was already ashen. She could see that now. His mouth, which she had always thought was dorky due to his overbite, drew no air, and his jaw hung slack.
Tears welled up in her and spilled out onto the cold bedding. She had already felt he was lost to her, and was, in a way, already prepared for this. Yet now that it was here, she marveled at the surreality of the moment, the unreality of it. She shook her head and squeaked, “No, no, no…” Then she laid her head on his chest and sobbed.
It was dark when she picked her head up. She turned on the light but couldn’t bring herself to look at the body. Instead, she paused at the mirror and drew the mussed strands of hair back over her ears, fighting hard not to cry again at the sight of her swollen eyes.
Oddly, a faint blue glow obscured her chin in the mirror. She thought it was a trick of the light, but as she moved, she found that it remained where it was. She reached out and touched the glass, but it was set back a couple of inches. If it had been a reflection of something, it would have been hovering about three inches in front of the mirror, but instead it seemed to be hovering behind it. She turned off the light, sure that whatever it was would be extinguished with nothing to reflect. But the blue-violet glow endured.
49
Richard crossed Cedar and headed up windy Arch Street toward the backside of the Pacific School of Religion. He wasn’t sure what drew him, but he followed his instincts, exercising a well-honed professional skill of getting out of the way and letting God work. God seemed to want to wander up Arch Street, and Richard did not argue. A wail went up, piercing the air, and Richard headed toward the sound. He walked toward an open garage, and there, on the floor, beside a steel cage, a familiar figure sat, keening and rocking back and forth.
It was Mr. Kim, the owner of the Gallic Hotel. Richard stopped short, assessing his feelings. Mr. Kim was far from his favorite person in the world. Once he had even tossed Richard out for not having enough money for another cup of coffee, shouting that he had taken up space in his shop long enough. He had also uttered a few choice anti-gay epithets in Richard’s direction on more than one occasion. Mr. Kim was not someone Richard particularly felt like ministering to. But as he took in the scene, his heart softened, and he saw not an intolerant businessman but a man bereft of someone he truly loved.
Richard entered the garage uninvited, and sat down on the floor next to Mr. Kim. The balding man’s face was flushed as he almost choked on his emotion. He continued to rock back and forth, apparently oblivious to the friar’s presence. Richard put a hand out, and laid it gently on Kim’s arm, giving it a light squeeze and then releasing it. The man choked on his words. “I heard…on radio…but I didn’t believe it until…until…she’s gone. My baby is gone…”
Richard looked around for signs of what sort of dog “she” must have been. It was a large cage, so that told him something. The water bowl might have held half a gallon, and there was a femur lying in the cage that might have belonged to a rhino. She had been a good-size dog, he reasoned.
For a brief moment, Richard struggled with what to say. He tried “It’s going to be okay” on for size, as well as “There, there,” but they both seemed so outrageously lame that he bit them back and kept his silence.
And it was silence that was the proper thing. There was nothing to say because, Richard realized, he had nothing to promise. All he had to offer was presence, empathy, and support, and he gave those things without reservation, and without words.
He didn’t know how long he sat on the floor beside Mr. Kim. Until the other had stopped crying and lay on the floor, the cold concrete of the garage cooling the businessman’s fiery cheek. He sat there until the sun was long down, until Mr. Kim finally rose, pulled him to his feet, hugged him briefly, and went inside his house.
On the way back toward the friary, Richard felt as if he were slogging through tar. He thought of Toby and was just beginning to recognize his own grief at the loss of the dog— “their” dog. He multiplied that grief by millions and millions of Mr. Kims, and realized that no evil of this magnitude had been visited upon the planet since the Angel of Death had swooped over the Egyptians.
Wandering down Spruce, he heard a small crowd of men cursing loudly in Spanish. He crossed to the east side of the street and followed the voices. As if in a dream, Richard walked through a gate into someone else’s backyard, where several large, angry Latino men were arguing. Richard didn’t understand the Spanish, but he did understand their confusion and their rage. An empty collar attached to a chain lay on the ground, illuminated by a blue porch light.
An enormous, muscled man with his head shaved bald and tattoos adorning his neck was still yelling. He noticed Richard, and yelled at him for a while. In an almost dissociated state, Richard reached up and touched the man’s cheek. “I’m sorry, miho,” he said. The man’s face went through many rapid changes, from rage to confusion to fear, to remorse. “Who, Padre, who did this evil thing? My Feo! He’s gone! Who took my Feo?”
Richard didn’t think about it. If he had, he never would have done it. It was as if he were watching someone else’s hand pull out a pen and a scrap of paper; someone else scrawling an address to a house in the Lower Haight. “Here,” he said, handing the paper to the man. “The people at this address—they did this.”
The man looked at the paper, back at Richard, and nodded. “¡Vamanos!” he cried, and a small army of Latino men and boys paraded to the front yard, to waiting cars, armed with garden tools and baseball bats.
50
Even though he was walking through a clearing with Jaguar, Dylan knew that his body was lying on Mikael’s bed, and he could make use of that proximity energetically. “Jes’ a minnit, Jag,” he said and closed his eyes, concentrating on the body he knew was only six inches away. He reached toward it with his mind and sought out places of concentrated energy. Oddly, he was drawn to Mikael’s back, and holding on to Jaguar with one hand, he entered into it in his mind. When he opened his eyes, he was in another place altogether: a shabby apartment with a stained orange shag carpet. The television was on, and Bob Barker was telling someone to “Come on down!” Flies buzzed at the windows, and dishes were piled high beyond the rim of the sink. Dylan stepped over plates of wet cat food, scattering more flies, and made his way over to the couch. The room was oppressively hot even though the windows were open and a generous breeze blew through.
On the couch, apparently unconscious, was a woman in her thirties. Dylan hovered over her—he could see a resemblance between herself and Mikael. She was missing several teeth, and the skin of her face was wrinkled beyond her apparent years. A pool of what appeared to be dried vomit had accumulated on the fabric of the couch. Dylan heard a rustling from another room, and then a shrieking voice, “Hold still, you little shit!”
It was an old woman’s voice, and Dylan followed it into the bathroom.
The door was shut. He tried the knob—it was locked. He turned to Jaguar. “I can’t get in,” he said.
“You don’t want to go in,” Jaguar countered. “To go in, all you’ve got to do is walk through the door.”
Dylan steeled himself and walked forward, expecting to smash his nose on the door. But instead, a shimmer passed his peripheral vision, and he passed through the door.
There he stopped, his eyes widening at the sight. Standing in the tub, his fists held out before him defiantly, was a young Mikael, maybe ten years old. He was dressed only in a ratty pair of white briefs, and his face was pocked with scabs and bruises.
He was tiny, as a boy, betraying none of the size he would later accumulate. But the defiant
hook in his nose was already in place, as well as the piercing look in his eye.
Facing him was an enormous woman, three times his size, gnarled and obese. In her right hand she held a steaming saucepan, and the other was waving in the air, making swipes at the young Mikael.
“You gonna mind your nana!” she shouted at him, making another grab at the boy, blocking his escape with her enormous frame.
“I hate you!” he shouted.
“Jesus said to kill boys who don’t respect their elders,” she hissed. “But I’m not gonna kill ya, ’cause I love you, Booby-boy. And it’s only ’cause I love ya that I gotta discipline ya. I wouldn’t be no kinda Christian if I failed you in my duty. Now hold the fuck still!” She made another grab and this time caught a handful of wild black hair. She pulled at it until he cried out, forcing his head down toward the tub. Once his back was exposed to her, she raised the saucepan over it and poured a stream of whitish, viscous fluid down on his back.
As soon as it hit his skin, he screamed. Steam leaped from his back into the air, and white streams flowed slowly down his back until it stopped, clinging to his skin in hardening sheets.
“Ahhhh!” the boy screamed, twisting around to break free of her grip. “You fucking witch! I hate you, hate you, hate you!”
With a jerk, he leaped back and pulled her forward, pulling her off balance. Seizing his opportunity, he leaped out of the tub and ran under the arm holding the saucepan. Not to be undone, she swung the pan down and around, catching him in the back of the head. Without another sound, the young Mikael went down like a dropped rag doll, lying facedown at the threshold to the hall.
“Oh, Booby-Boy, you are such an evil baby.” She dropped the pan, now empty of scorching wax, and, with difficulty, picked the child up in her arms. Tenderly, she brought him to the bedroom, laid him on the bed, and shut the door.
Dylan debated whether to enter the bedroom. What he had seen already was bad enough—did he really want to see more? He looked to Jaguar for help.
