Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  The witch holds the key . . . .

  Alice slid her backpack to the floor, opened it, and pulled out a bow drill and palm stone and tinder, fire board, the whole pre-Colombian kit. Susan reached into her pocket and pulled out her Zippo. “Want a bit of high-tech?”

  Aunt Jean touched her wrist. “Non. No matches, no lighters. Those smells attract the wrong spirits. We use the old ways.”

  The drill spun under Alice’s hands, wood boring into wood, raising a wisp of smoke, cedar aroma from the board and a tinge of apple from the drill, then the tinder glowed red and Alice cupped her hands around it and blew it into yellow and then white and then flame. She lit a candle, yellow-brown, beeswax, all natural, and then another and another.

  Aunt Jean lit a cigarette from one of the candles, chanting quietly in Naskeag, and then blew smoke to the four winds. Or the four corners of the world—no wind touched the basement, except that the smoke eddied strangely and didn’t seem to hang in the still air.

  Then, something she’d never done before, she offered the cigarette to him. He took it, not asking questions, took a deep drag and then blew it out. The smoke tasted strange, not harsh, tobacco and yet not. Not marijuana, either, but something else. Tobacco with the essence, the spirit, of Communion wine?

  He blinked and passed the smoke on to Alice. Alice passed it to Susan, and Susan, after a glance at Aunt Jean, passed it to Grendel. None of them coughed. Alice pulled out a cord of braided grass, sweetgrass it had to be, and lit one end of that to smolder and add its tang to the musty air and tobacco smoke.

  Aunt Jean took her cigarette from Grendel. “Now we enter. Susan, you will wait out here. We need you to bar and lock the door behind us. You will not open it unless I ask you to, my voice asking with a knock from inside, three taps and then another tap, like that symphony begins. That Beethoven. If we do not come out, you will find Bouchard and tell him what has happened and give him these keys. No one else. Vraiment, no one else. Whatever happens, whatever you hear or see, don’t . . . open . . . this . . . door. Oui?”

  “Oui.”

  “It is good. Be careful, my daughter, and pray for us. I will try to bring your man back to you.”

  “I’m not much of a Catholic . . . .”

  “Then le bon Dieu may pay more attention to you, if you do not bother him often. Pray.”

  Susan frowned. She turned to Dennis. “You damn well better come back, you sorry bastard. I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

  Aunt Jean slid the bar out of its sockets, a heavy cold wooden sound echoing in the cellar. She unlocked the door, sharp loud clangs, echoes like a jail cell, and pulled it open. Air flowed out of the black beyond—not stale, strange. It smelled vaguely salty, vaguely of rockweed. The candles flickered with the breeze.

  Rockweed. Breeze. Underground.

  His flashlight beam glinted on something beyond the door. White, ivory-white, against faded dusty plaid, and something else that gleamed silver.

  The white looked like bone.

  XXVII

  “May God guard and cherish your soul, René Baptiste LeClaire.”

  Aunt Jean shook her head and walked slowly over to the corpse and knelt next to it, candle in one shaking hand. She made the sign of the Cross over the man’s body with the other. She looked tired, for once showing every year of her age and more.

  Half skeleton, half flaking furry mold from the damp, the man lay on bare granite, no bier. No heaps of trophy weapons, no finery. He wore a ragged stained wool shirt, some kind of plaid, and wool pants that might have once been green before the damp got to them, and boots—gnawed lug-soled logger’s boots with steel toes showing through the leather, on ankle bones. Teeth had chewed at other parts as well, and the marks didn’t look like mice or rats. Black hair still clung to one side of the skull.

  And on the chest, the sunken chest with splayed ribs poking through holes in the shirt, lay that Carlsson Viking axe that Dennis remembered from his childhood. He remembered the black head, the silver dragon inlay twining around itself like some kind of weaving, the keen gleaming double edges. He didn’t see any rust. Skeletal hands still folded over the shaft wrapped in sharkskin for a firm grip. He’d been laid to rest, not left to rot where he fell.

  This must be the man of his vision, the man in that barrow grave surrounded by honor. That was the grave he should have had, the grave he had in the spirit lands.

  “What did your father tell you about this?”

  Dennis shook himself out of his memory. Aunt Jean was looking up at him, sorrow lining her old face.

  “Just that the stories were lies. He didn’t want to talk about the fire, the murders.”

  “Your father still feels shame where there is no shame. He will not talk. Thus the history is broken. He did what duty told him to do, oui.” She forced herself back to her feet, grunting, waving away his offered hand. “I grow old, but not so old I need help rising from the bed of a good man.”

  She turned to Alice. “I sometimes think I would like to lie here when I die, lie next to him. But that would cause questions, questions about this place and about his dying, so I will not ask you to try.” Her gaze swung back to Dennis. “Guard and honor his grave, as you are able, s’il vous plaît.”

  Alice and Dennis nodded, mute.

  The old woman took a deep breath and closed her eyes, the lines on her face saying that she saw pain in her memories. “The army called your father back, your uncle back, both at the same time. Some secret thing, the kind of foolishness that Bouchard does in their place. Maybe Korea, maybe Suez or even Cuba, I don’t remember. So many years ago, so many times a country calls, so little gained for all the deaths. But Bear had to leave, Bear had to follow duty. Duty sometimes calls you in two directions and you can only follow one.”

  She shook her head. “It should not have mattered, non. Not with the door locked and barred, not with the key in safe hands. Even with the door open, without the chants, without the opening of the inner path, it should not have mattered . . . .

  “René was also Bear, not as strong as your family, not a tie deep in the bone and blood that makes you become Bear at need, but I knew him from St. Émile when we were young and wild together. I asked him to take up the guard. Just to be here, just to watch. It should not have mattered.”

  A shudder took her, and she paused. “A fool was curious. A fool died, and others died with her, and the fire started. René died with honor, closing the spirit path. I fought at his side, I comforted his dying, I said the words, I locked the door on his body, I set the bar, I took the key back to where it belonged. Thus it happened.”

  Alice stared at her aunt, eyes wide. “René was the man you mentioned once, the man you loved long ago in Canada?” She pronounced ‘Canada’ in the French manner, as Aunt Jean would.

  “René was the man.”

  Dennis knew that was the other side of the Haskell witches, the side that truly earned them their power in Sunrise County and the Naskeags. They guarded. They gave. They risked themselves and all that they loved and had, to protect their people. Most of those people didn’t know how or where or why, didn’t know about this, but they knew enough to respect their guards.

  He thought of his own family history. “The fool that died, was she a Carlsson?” He couldn’t remember any aunt or cousin who had disappeared, and the cook shouldn’t have known enough to get curious or had access to the key.

  Aunt Jean looked grim, lips tight. “Non. The fool was my cousin. That was why I came here from St. Émile. That was why I became the next witch.” She stopped and focused on Alice. “We are not all wise. Remember this, eh?”

  And that seemed to be the end of Aunt Jean’s story, a few bald paragraphs that could have made an epic poem. Aunt Jean shook herself again, and set to lighting more candles from the backpack Alice carried. She spread light around the room, setting candles into sockets waiting in niches in the rock, and Dennis studied this strange place.

  She’d called it a cave. He stoo
d by the concrete wall, one wall of a room about the size of a decent parlor, on a small section of concrete floor under a small section of concrete ceiling. The rest showed bare stone, rough weathered pink granite hollowed back into a space more alcove than cave. No wonder Aunt Jean had asked him to leave the M-1 behind. High-velocity slugs, small space, hard walls . . . .

  Patterns marked the walls, pictograms chipped into stone with harder stone, mostly concentric circles or rectangles, some waves and zigzags, but he saw one of arrows or spears surrounding a stick-figure man. Except the “man” had one joint too many in his legs, as if he walked on his toes and used his ankle as an extra knee turned backwards.

  Demon. Spirit. Goat-man, dog-man, jackal god. Coyote, up on his hind legs and brewing trouble.

  Dennis stared at that one. Prickles ran down his spine. Ancestral memory? He saw a campfire in the midnight woods, and shaggy forms that walked upright but walked wrong. He realized that he’d unsnapped the strap over the Webley in its holster, after he’d already done it.

  “You feel it too.” Aunt Jean nodded. “Très bien. Bear would not have chosen a fool. I would not come here and do this thing, without the words Bear gave you. It is dangerous. Oui, very dangerous, and I did not know that the Swimmer could find her way through the spirit lands if we open the door. Find her way by following her nose. I hope that was a true vision and not a wish born in your own mind.”

  Dennis shook his head. He couldn’t answer that. Ancient hands had chipped another pictogram on the cave floor, rough concentric circles again, six or seven of them making a pattern four feet, five feet across. They looked too damn much like target rings for his comfort. Water oozed from a crack in the center and spread across the lines of it and collected in the last, deeper line, and seeped away into another crack in the granite that looked like a natural drain of sorts. He couldn’t understand why a spring would flow from one place and drain into another only a few feet away. Odd cracks in the granite?

  Grendel stood in the flickering candlelight, body tense, fur ruffled and a low growl sounding in her throat, sniffing, staring at that circle on the floor as if it threatened her. Her claws flexed in and out of her fingers like a cat stretching.

  Dennis tasted the air again, that salt-coast air fresh inside a cave inside a long-locked cellar under a charred and rotting hulk. He stepped to the side of the circle—he wasn’t about to step on it—squatted, and touched the water. Cold, but not winter-icy. He brought his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Sea, and rockweed, and spruce, and air that didn’t know helicopter turbines burning jet fuel. He tasted the film of water on his fingers. Salt.

  “We’re still well above high tide, aren’t we? Those stairs, at most we’re eight feet below grade . . . .”

  Again the old woman nodded. “Above high tide for this world. Some of the spirit lands, the sea is higher. Some lower. Waves have covered this point in past times. Waves will cover it again. We do not know where that spring starts, only where it ends. This is a place where lands touch. Do not walk on the circle. Mostly, nothing happens. But that one time in a hundred, eh?”

  Dennis looked around again, less and less happy with what he saw, hairs standing up on his arms and the back of his neck. Yeah, that door and lock and bar, all that reinforced concrete, they looked like a great idea.

  “You think the Navy radio signals leaked through a place like this and messed with Grendel’s head? That’s why she swam between her world and ours?”

  “I think that may be why and how. Sometimes worlds touch without any cause we can see. I do not know. I only know one fixed place to open a door, and one way. My aunts and grandmothers did not study this place and others as much as you might wish. We are not scientists. The danger frightens us. Except for some fools who paid the price of folly. Better we should just wall it off and lock the door. We knew the cost of curiosity long before your house burned, oui. Some of us knew.”

  Something that frightened generations of Haskell witches . . . Dennis backed away from the circles pecked into stone. Dad hadn’t told him about this. So much they hadn’t told him. Just said that it would be good if Dennis came to this quiet point of land and learned how to live with his memories. That a Carlsson should live here.

  Quiet point of land . . . .

  The quiet of a grave.

  Dennis shivered.

  Aunt Jean took his flashlight, and Alice’s, and turned to the door. “Better to use the old ways, the old lights, candle or burning fat or torch made from spruce pitch. The spirits, they can do strange things with electricity, eh? We can trust fire.” She looked down at the skeleton a last time, shaking her head. “René was not even sure we could trust gunpowder. That is why he borrowed your Viking axe. He was skilled with an axe.”

  She noticed Dennis fingering the butt of his holstered Webley, wondering. “You may trust it. My pistol worked. My hands did not shake in those days.”

  She stepped through the door, spoke to Susan waiting there, and returned without the flashlights. The door swung shut, the click of the latch and jail-cell clang of the lock, the thump of the bar across it all sounding too damn final to Dennis.

  She turned to him again. “You also might say an ‘Our Father’ or two. Pray, but stand ready.”

  Dennis shook his head. “I haven’t been to church in years, but the church I don’t go to is Lutheran. Not Catholic. I think I’ll concentrate on the ready part.”

  “Oui.” She nodded. “That is an old question between us, between my family and yours. We will let it lie. Luther, he was right about some things. Not all, but some. The Church of his time maybe was not God’s house and God’s will, but something else. Le bon Dieu, he knows your heart. I suspect words do not matter.”

  Alice pulled an old drum out of her backpack, wooden body and skin head and rawhide lacings, about the size of a gallon can of paint. The skin and body showed dark with the grease of centuries of hands. She squatted in one corner of the room, the cave, face to the pictogram circles on the floor, back protected by two walls, concrete and rock. She started drumming, the soft beat practically a heartbeat lub-dub lub-dub.

  Aunt Jean waved him to the other corner on the concrete wall, field of fire clear, aimed into the natural cave and the . . . target. “Better you should stand. Faster. And have your pistol ready in your hand. The spirits move like lightning when they wish. If something comes out of the circle, do not wait, do not ask questions. Shoot. I hope they will smell Bear waiting on this side of the gate and decide to stay where they belong. I hope this. Do not trust my hopes. I tell you again, these things, they are deadly.”

  Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.

  She paused. “If any of the spirits talk to us, to you, remember this—spirits lie as easily as men lie."

  She pointed to Grendel, pointed to the corner next to Alice. Grendel nodded and moved there. Dennis really wondered if she understood what was happening. The Swimmer flexed her claws again and bared her fangs at him in a dangerous smile. Maybe she didn’t understand what was happening, but she smelled trouble. Or maybe prey.

  That rope of sweetgrass still smoked on the floor, next to Alice. The smoke rose and swirled, mixed incense and harsh bitterness, not just grass burning as that tobacco had not been just tobacco. Dennis felt some kind of draft in the cave, for all that the door stood closed and locked and barred. He couldn’t see any pattern in the smoke, any direction to the flow, any obvious vent. Dennis shivered as if the breeze came straight off December ice.

  Aunt Jean touched her cigarette to a candle and sucked it back to life. Again she blew smoke to the four corners of the Naskeag world and again the smoke behaved as if it had a will of its own. She placed her back against the door, out of his line of fire, anything that wanted to pass through that door would have to pass through her first, and began to chant in Naskeag with the drumbeat, lub-dub lub-dub.

  The witch holds the key . . . .

  More than one key, apparently. The chant had to be a way of opening the
spirit gate. Dennis hoped she knew another chant to close it. Dennis hoped she wouldn’t open the way to wherever that seawater oozed from . . . .

  Smoke eddied in the cave, gathering, flowing to the center and those rings chipped into the floor but the smoke didn’t seem to get any denser there, as if it flowed in only to go . . . somewhere. The smell of danger grew, his Bear-sense, the thing that warned him, that took him and made him Warrior . . . .

  His fingers tingled, and he tightened his two-handed grip on the Webley. He cocked the hammer.

  A form squeezed into the air, dark, man-shaped, becoming solid, becoming shaggy with hair, not fur, holding a spear. Eyes focused on Dennis, moving toward Dennis, the spear stabbing and the Webley aimed of itself and boomed and deafened him and the head exploded impossibly like a melon and another shape followed and Dennis fired again, again, again, targets that kept coming and he heard flatter bang-bang, bang-bang double shots from an automatic that had appeared in Alice’s hands to replace the drum. His ears rang with the shots in a tight hard-walled space.

  The Webley clicked, and he’d spent all six shots, and the things kept forming and he couldn’t shoot anyway because Grendel spun among them like a furred dervish, snarling, biting, slashing, bashing. He felt Bear’s strength flowing into him and he scooped up a club that hadn’t been there a minute ago, he didn’t know what he’d done with the Webley and didn’t care and he swung the club and felt the jar and crunch of bone on the other end and spun and swung again.

  And again. And again. And the last time, he hit nothing. The weight of the club carried him around. No targets. Nothing trying to kill him.

  Blood pounded in his head and his hands shook. He gasped and gasped again, bent over like a marathon runner panting at the finish line, fighting to control his breathing because danger still lurked out there and he had to guard.

  Guard what? Guard who? He stood in a forest. No cave, no granite, no pictograms. No witch.