Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  His ears still rang with all sounds muted. His breathing slowed, his pulse slowed, he straightened from his panting crouch, he turned, scanning for trouble. Forest. Autumn forest surrounded him with mild air and the smell of loam and rotting leaves, the early trees already turned and the later ones just starting. He saw maple and ash and beech and yellow birch and scattered oak. No bugs, the first frosts past.

  Autumn woods in Maine, he thought they made the finest days of the year. Except those trees looked old, the soil seemed deep and fertile, not the cut-over woodlots and shallow rocky acid soil that had sent Maine farmers west for generations. This was some kind of idealized Maine forest, story-book land, the Happy Hunting Ground that romantic whiteskin writers created for Indian Summer Indians to hunt.

  He kept turning, scanning, flexing adrenaline out of his muscles, testing the balance of the club he held. It looked like a Naskeag war-club, all dense fine-grained wood, carved and smoothed grip like a thick baseball bat rubbed with pitch or rosin, round ball head, looked like maybe iron-wood or hawthorn, trunk and root burl, at least a dozen vicious scalloped edges of chipped flint set into resin glue in the business end. That would have put some serious hurt on whatever he’d been hitting. If the whatevers could be hurt.

  Sweat soaked into his shirt, and he found his winter jacket hot in the mild air. He started to open it, take it off, discovered his holster and its belt in the way. The Webley sat heavy in the holster. He didn’t remember that un-thought action in the heat of fighting. He pulled the pistol out, checked the chambers, six empty cartridges, reloaded. He had three more full reloads in his pockets, more useless clips for the M-1 he’d left behind.

  He could pull the bullets and use the powder for tinder when he needed to make fire. He remembered the bow drill Alice had used. Making fire, that was one of the most basic survival skills. A heavy KaBar knife hung on the opposite side of his holster belt, Marine survival knife “liberated” from a jarhead in a poker game in ’Nam. He had the tools. He had the skills.

  Where the hell was he?

  Spirit lands.

  He must have stepped into the circle in the fight. Stepped through the circle. He was somewhere off in Naskeag never-never land.

  Where did that leave Aunt Jean and Alice and Grendel? Still fighting, fighting an endless stream of . . . things . . . without Bear to help them?

  Where did that leave Tranh, Ms. Doctor Susan Tranh, Ms. Sleeping-with-a-girl-puts-you-on-a-first-name-basis Tranh. Oh, God, one time lying sweaty and drained together, she’d admitted that she had this thing about people vanishing from her life. Everyone had left her, starting with her dad . . . .

  And he’d promised that he’d stay.

  Leaves rustled and crunched to his right, off through the forest, his ears recovering from gunfire blasts inside a cave. He heard footsteps, casual, someone walking rather than someone stalking. No attempt to hide. Dennis couldn’t take that at face value. He tensed, heart speeding again, and crouched behind a massive ash tree that could have been Odin’s World-ash. He kept scanning the woods around and behind, kept listening for other feet creeping quiet under the cover of the obvious noise. He’d survived ’Nam . . . .

  A man showed between tree-trunks, tall, tan leggings and bare chest, red skin, not “red” brown like full-blood Naskeag but actual scarlet. Ocher body-paint? Not a man. A bear’s head sat on his shoulders, broad tapering neck, shaggy, red fur. His hands ended in claws, his bare feet ended in claws, feet too broad for a man. Hands too broad for a man.

  The Bear-man walked, calm as a stroll down the sidewalk, straight toward Dennis. No point in trying to hide, Dennis stood and eased out beside the trunk of the ash, centering the sights of his Webley on Bear. On maybe-Bear. Something smelled wrong.

  “I greet you, son of my clan. I welcome you to your home.”

  Smelled wrong, literally. Dennis smelled fox, not bear. He knew the smells of both. He remembered Bear at Spirit Point, he remembered his smell, Dennis remembered the smell of bears and foxes kept in his rehab. Spirit Bear’s fur had been silver, except for the brown muzzle of a Maine black bear.

  Aunt Jean’s voice whispered in his memory. Spirits lie as easily as men lie.

  He kept the Webley’s sights centered on the bear-man’s chest. “I don’t think you are Bear. I don’t think I belong here. Send me back.”

  The maybe-Bear chuckled, a strange growly sound from that throat. “Send you back, my son? I do not have such power. You have left your body. You are dead. Otherwise, you would not be here.”

  Spirits lie as easily as men lie.

  “You think I lie. You think your body is flesh, you think your flesh is here with you. If your body is made of flesh, where is your warrior’s reward, your wounded foot?”

  Dennis flexed his ankle, flexed his toes inside his boot. Phantom nerves again, a phantom itch on his instep and the feel of toenails snagging at his socks? He squatted, right hand still holding the Webley centered on Bear’s chest. His left hand explored his calf. He ran fingers over his boot.

  No straps. No socket, no soft flesh above and hard plastic below.

  Bear, maybe-Bear, nodded. “Your flesh has followed your foot to the Spirit Lands. You died well.” He turned away. “Come to our lodges. We shall feast.”

  XXVIII

  “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum . . . .” Susan caught up on ten years’ arrears of prayers, staring at a single candle flickering in the clammy dark silence, darkness colder than the cellar had any right to be.

  She had worn her down parka and sweaters, she had gloves and a knit ski cap, wool pants, wool long-john underwear top and bottom. There wasn’t any wind down here, the scattered puddles glinted wet in the candlelight on the concrete floor rather than frozen. Why the hell was she shivering? She was dressed for twenty below zero and a high wind. But the stone, the concrete, all that cold hard weight closing in on her . . . .

  “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . . .”

  That locked room held damn near everyone she’d allowed herself to care about. Grendel. Aunt Jean. Alice. Friend, grandmother, sister.

  Carlsson.

  Hate at first sight, not love. Racist bastard lout, swaggering egocentric, big and rich and white and dumb, ruler of all he surveyed. Everything she wasn’t. Well, she’d been right about some of that. The parts that didn’t matter.

  Kind, quiet, gentle. Brilliant mind, just didn’t show it off. He loved animals, loved this land. He tended both with skill and care, guarded this outrageously beautiful sanctuary, this snow-covered tree-covered point of granite poking shelter out into the violence of the Gulf of Maine. Storm-battered, wind-tossed, only the toughest and most tenacious could cling to this thin rocky soil and scratch a living from it. The people had to become like the trees out here. His family had dug in and set their roots and prospered and made riches from it. He fit the land.

  “Pater noster, qui es in caelis . . . .”

  She’d known him a couple of weeks, maybe. She’d have to check the calendar—time had turned screwy on her with all the shit going down. Hated him for maybe half of that. Bit by bit, hate changing to love, fighting the evidence, realizing that what she hated wasn’t there. That subconscious understanding had forced her back here through the storm.

  She’d hated a phantom she’d built herself. He’d feared a ghost with her face. They’d groped past that and touched. She’d had two days of him and found maybe the only man she’d want to spend her life with and now she faced losing him. Now he waited on the far side of steel and concrete, waited for something so dangerous that steel and concrete walled it away from the peace and beauty of the land he guarded.

  “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . . .”

  Whispers came through the wall, words and a drumbeat barely louder than her pulse. Aunt Jean did magic. Alice did magic. Grendel was magic, a creature from a fairy tale.
Now all of them might die.

  Carlsson.

  Shots broke the faint whispers, slamming at her ears even through thick concrete, deep booming of that huge antique revolver mixed with flatter bangs that had to be the automatic that Alice carried, snarls, growls, screams. Susan clenched her eyes shut, clenched her teeth, clenched her fists until tendon and bone screamed, until nails gouged holes in palms. She tried to force prayers through her mind if she couldn’t make her tongue work. Something thumped against the door, soft but heavy, rattling lock and bar.

  Silence.

  Shivers again, the darkness cold beyond cold, the walls closing in on her.

  No, not silence, just quiet. Quiet enough that she could hear the trickle of water. Not drip, trickle. Her candle still cast wavering light across the floor, the walls. It picked up darkness spreading from the door, flowing under the door, water. She hoped it was water.

  Flashlights. She had three flashlights, Aunt Jean had brought them out before starting . . . whatever . . . .

  They worked. The spirits hadn’t ruined them, or turned them into something else.

  The beam showed clear water, not red, not thick opaque red blood oozing from bodies hidden beyond the steel. Susan took a deep breath, held it, let it out. The water flowed strong, driven by pressure beyond the tight door, water trickling down the sides in spite of weather-stripping. The flow rose one foot, two feet on each jamb of that door, she had to open the door or they’d drown in there.

  “Whatever happens, whatever you hear or see, don’t . . . open . . . this . . . door.” Aunt Jean’s last words to her, eyes staring into hers, forcing her, making her promise.

  Silence surrounded her, just the gurgle of water flowing out and across the floor and down a drain she hadn’t noticed. She smelled ocean on it—Maine coast smell, free air, breeze, open sky, replacing the dank stale cellar air of char and dust twenty years old.

  The trickle on each side reached two feet off the floor, held, flowed. Did it fall? She willed it to fall. Her fingers juggled keys, adding that quiet jingle to the gurgle of draining water. No other sound.

  She wanted to scream.

  “Pray for us, my daughter.” Aunt Jean’s voice.

  “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . . .” Smell of incense remembered, Gregorian chant with choirboys and candles, tall thick white candles. Susan crossed herself. “In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spritus Sancti . . . .”

  Three knocks on the door, soft, a fourth harder.

  Words through the steel, quiet, “My daughter, you may open now. S’il te plaît. The danger has left.” It sounded like Aunt Jean.

  Susan’s teeth chattered. She stood, joints aching as if she’d sat for hours, hands twitching so that the keys still jingled. She lifted the bar and set it to one side, the ring of seasoned wood on stone setting off echoes. She fitted the key to the lock and forced it to turn, tumblers and bolt reluctant. It clanged retracting into the door, echoing again, sounded like unlocking the Gates of Hell. She didn’t actually want to open the door. What did it hide? She reached for the handle.

  The door popped open with weight behind it, someone, something working the latch from inside, and water poured out over her boots. Cold water. Salt air. Reek of burned gunpowder and grassfire smoke.

  Susan glanced through the door, point to point to point, scanning, listing, brain skipping places in between—Aunt Jean at the door. Alice behind her. Candles burning, light shimmering on water, flowing water, draining water, granite wet up about two feet on the walls, room looked like Anemone Cave at Acadia, tide falling, stage-set for a witches’ sabbat with candles in niches in the stone. Bones at one side, skeleton or mummy, sodden clothing and white bone, gleaming wet, long dead, not Carlsson.

  No Carlsson.

  No Grendel.

  No Carlsson.

  She stepped through the door, feet moving without her will, probed flashlight beam right and left. Small space, nowhere to hide. Two people. Four people had gone in. Two people. Aunt Jean. Alice.

  The cave turned fuzzy around her.

  “Where the hell is he? That bastard . . . .”

  o0o

  Shivering. Cold. Wet.

  Grendel was supposed to vanish. Go . . . wherever she belonged. Carlsson, Carlsson was supposed to come back. Dammit, that bastard owed her.

  He’d promised.

  She focused on Aunt Jean—Aunt Jean crouched in front of her, old round lined sagging face shadowy, darkness all around and flickering with the candle flames in a faint breeze. Faint breeze? In a cellar?

  “Sorry. Don’t need me fainting on you.”

  “The power of the spirit path touches you. Oui, and you are Eagle. This feels like a trap to you. You need sky over your head, not stone. Eagle cannot be strong in this place. No shame.”

  “Where is he?”

  Aunt Jean shook her head. “The fight pushed him into the circle while the spirit path was open. Vraiment, I do not know where he is.”

  Susan blinked floating white spots out of her eyes and then studied the face in front of her. Blood trickled from Aunt Jean’s lip, dark in the candlelight, and a lump seemed to be spreading from her cheekbone to her eye. Ought to put ice on that . . . .

  Alice leaned against one of the stone walls, holding her left wrist and wiggling one finger after another on that hand as if testing to see if they all still worked. Something had ripped her jacket along her left side, claw or tooth or knife, and bloody bare skin showed through along her ribs. Looked more like a scrape than a cut, though. She seemed to be ignoring it. The kid straightened up, shook her injured hand, and then stooped and started picking up little chunks of glittering yellow brightness. Brass. Empty cartridge cases.

  Carlsson. Carlsson was still gone. Still not here.

  “You don’t know where he is. Can he come back?”

  “Are you sure you want him back, my daughter? He may have found a land where he belongs. You know this is not his true home. This world does not fit Bear. It has not fit that spirit, for many years now.” She paused and shook her head. “And he may be dead. The spirits who came through the path, they were hungry. The walls had held them from our world for a long time.”

  Susan glanced around. No bodies. Just that skeleton, that mummy, looking like he’d lain there for decades. Centuries. Brass cartridge cases, gunsmoke in the air, she’d heard a minor frigging war in here and she knew Alice wouldn’t miss, Carlsson wouldn’t miss, but no bodies. Not even any bullet pocks in the walls.

  “They do not stay, my daughter. Even if you kill them, they do not stay. I would say that if Bear fell dying in the spirit lands, he would have returned to us. René did. But Bear does not belong here, and he may have found a hero’s grave in some other land. Non, I do not understand the way the spirit paths work. I do not want to understand.”

  Who the hell was René? That body?

  “I want him back. I need him back.”

  Aunt Jean nodded, satisfied, and grunted as she rose from her crouch, old and heavy and worn by whatever battle she’d fought in this dark space. “There may be a way. As with René, he should feel a tie to this land among all the spirit lands. He should feel a tie to you, return to you, as René came back to me when dying. Lovers can reach across the spirit paths. For a time. The tie fades quickly, and spirits move into other lands. We must not wait long.”

  Sorrow lined the old face, memories that Susan didn’t want to share. Not with Carlsson off lost in the same unknown.

  Susan forced her way to standing, needing the wall cold and hard and rough under her hands. She did not like this place, whether it was Eagle in her soul or something else. It seemed to suck life out of her, weakening her knees and making her work for every breath. Yes, she wanted sky and wind and sea and a horizon far beyond her reach. She needed them.

  And she needed Carlsson.

  “Damn you, Carlsson, get your sorry ass back here!”

  Half a smile twitched Aunt Jean’s face and then vani
shed back into weary sorrow. “Oui, that most truly will bring him back. And yet, between such fierce spirits, that might work. At least, he will know who calls to him. Vraiment, he will know it is not Coyote or Fox lying to him.”

  The old woman pointed to circles chipped into the rough stone floor. “This way is dangerous. It is most truly dangerous to you, because Eagle will want to fly from this trap. Do you understand this? Understand that the spirit paths lead to places not of your choosing, to things you may not wish to meet? Most who enter these paths never return to tell us where they led. Most things that come through this door are things we do not want in our world. That is why we guard this place.”

  Susan nodded, words not coming. Her chest felt tight.

  “If you must do this, stand by the outer circle. Do not step into the circles. Call to him. If you enter the circles, I do not know if you will go to him or he will come to you. Oui, or neither thing may happen. We may lose you without you finding him. You may find yourself soaring over high mountains or deep under cold water. I think She Who Swims followed that path. I hope it brought her to her home. I only hope this.”

  o0o

  Dennis kept the Webley aimed at Bear, at red-furred ocher-painted maybe-Bear walking away, leading to some kind of warrior feast, at Bear who smelled like Fox. He wiggled the toes of his foot, his maybe-foot, flesh instead of plastic.

  The Spirits lie as easily as men lie.

  He wondered if lead slugs would have any effect on the Spirits in the Spirit Lands. They’d vanished when he shot them, when Alice shot them, back in the cave. He’d seen the wounds, seen blood and bone and brains and bodies falling, and then they’d vanished and new bodies took form in the smoke and shadows. And then he’d vanished, must have vanished, to find himself in this Maine autumn poet’s romance of a Happy Hunting Ground.

  He still smelled the smoke on his clothing, sweetgrass and tobacco and the sweet headachy burned gunpowder heavy in the air. Heavy as if the smoke still hung inside a cave, not under a red-gold October maple with a light breeze cooling his cheek. And he certainly did not feel dead. His muscles trembled, cooling from the rage of battle, and his wool shirt itched on his forearms. He needed to sneeze, dry leaf-mould and moss spores tickling his nose. His ears still throbbed from the gunfire.