He thought she might laugh, but she sat quietly, her eyes focused on nothing for a moment, thinking.
“Maybe so,” she said. “Many cultures believe that the shamans, brujos, or wizards among them can take the shape of an animal. Though I’m not sure why a person of that much magic would choose a one-eyed parrot as its surrogate. It’s not Naheyo. Her animal is the jaguar. Unless she’s taken on a second form.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t this mix of anthropological information and a practical judgment on the merits of a familiar. Pilar confused him—the way she could be a scientist one moment and superstitious the next.
But it had been Jake who’d said he felt the bird was making sure he did its bidding. He couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow both Mawgis and Naheyo were controlling his life and fate. That he, and maybe Pilar, were tokens in some game neither of them could see.
A light drizzle began falling. If the rain turned harsh, they’d lose the fire tonight and spend tomorrow tramping through deeper mud.
“How long until we reach Catalous?” he asked.
“We covered a good few miles today,” she said. “One more like this and we’ll be there.”
He wanted to be there now, to have been there already and phoned to the States and sent out the warning. He wanted Ashne to believe him.
A night moth flitted by, lit by the firelight. A bat winged after it, caught the moth in its mouth, and banked out of view.
“We should get some sleep,” Jake said, and realized how very tired the long walk had left him. His calves and thighs were sore. His neck and shoulders ached from looking down for hours to keep from tripping over roots and branches or stepping on an insect or animal. He stretched his legs out and studied them. His old body never could have covered so much ground in a day.
They set up a makeshift tent with the canvas they’d brought, working as quietly as if they’d done this together a dozen times before. They piled up fallen leaves and made a mattress of sorts, laid the blanket over it, and settled beneath the canvas—Pilar snug in his arms. The leaves they lay on smelled sweet and earthy. Crickets chirped fast in the darkness. A night bird called and was answered. Her hair didn’t smell of lemons the way it had at the compound, when she used the shampoo she’d brought from the States. It smelled of her now, a more natural scent. He breathed it in and wanted to kiss her. And thought maybe she wouldn’t mind. They knew each other now. She was warm to him—lying in his arms as if they were already lovers. And he was Tall Jake now—normal Jake. A man like any other. Who had to take the chance men took with women, fighting past the hesitancy, the fear of being refused—kindly or in disgust. He knew all about disgust, and it held him back now.
Pilar shifted slightly, easy and relaxed in his arms. He told himself she wouldn’t turn him away coldly or angrily. If she said no, she would be kind. He thought he could risk that. Thought she likely already knew what he was feeling—his heart pounding so hard that she could probably feel it against her back. And he did think she felt something for him. She’d risked going against Naheyo to help him.
Still, she might think of him as a friend, nothing more. The looks he thought he’d seen from her, the lingering touch, the word beguiled—desire could make a man imagine things. If she wasn’t interested, it could make the rest of their journey uncomfortable. Jake sighed. He could talk himself in and out of trying all night long. He bent his neck and kissed the top of her head.
She stirred and turned to face him. They kissed, long and deep and feral. Jake held tight to her not only because she was Pilar, but because she was warm and willing, and he had been alone for so long. She held tight to him for her own reasons, needs and desires that had a private genesis and were no business of his. His business was with lips and tongues, with the scent of her skin, and the heat rising from them both.
He broke off the kiss and gently pushed her away. His heart raced. Her eyes were dark canyons, too deep for him to descend into. She tilted her head to the side in unasked question.
How could he tell her he was thirty-three years old and had never been with a woman he hadn’t paid for? That he felt stupid for not having thought of that before he kissed her. That he feared being inept, laughed at—or worse, pitied.
But his guard was down and she must have read something of it in his face. “Trust me,” she said, and kissed him again, easy this time. Drunk on the taste of her, Jake pulled her close. Her arms slipped around his back. The damp sweat on their skin tasted like ocean—their mouths locked together, all tongues and fire—and he wished that she had no bones, that he could fall into her like falling into the sea.
She undressed him, her fingers practiced and skillful, then pulled off her own clothes, a cover she no longer needed. Naked, she astounded him. Not only because she was beautiful, her body snake-thin and muscled, her breasts small and sweet, curls of black hair filling the delta below her belly, but because she was completely present, as though she could have picked anywhere to be and had chosen the place she wanted most. Here. With him.
“Like this,” she said, and showed him how she wanted him to touch her.
And touched him back until he was wild and senseless. Their hands traveled each other as if they had eyes that could see into new worlds. For a moment he hung between the heavens and earth. Then all the worlds fell away.
In the morning he woke alone in the same small room with the scratches he’d dug deep into the wall to mark his growth.
Twelve
The sound of his breath sliding in and out of his lungs was all he heard. The metal cot frame felt hard under his thighs, his forearms, his heels—only parts of him registering: senses, breathing, blood flow.
Thoughts skimming around his brain, sparking and fading. Going downriver to Toshi’s. Hiking through the forest with Pilar. Holding her, making love to her. Her making love to him. Had he made up the stories of her childhood in his own mind—the high school anthro class that had set her on her path? The cocker spaniel called Schooner, named by a younger brother in love with sailing ships he’d seen only in books? Was it crossed brain wires making him seem to remember—it felt like memory, not dream—the one-eyed parrot attacking Pilar? Dried leaves in the fire to keep away mosquitoes—of all things.
Dreams weren’t like that—linear and sensible. Dreams came jumbled and jumpy, moving from scene to scene. His did, anyway. He’d never dreamed up another person’s history. Didn’t think he was even capable of it. It wasn’t the way his imagination worked.
Was he sleeping beside Pilar in the forest now—fear making him dream of being in this room, the mirror image of his dream the night before? A man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man?
He tugged his shirt down, put his hands on the cot’s canvas-wrapped metal edge, and slowly levered himself to his feet. He stood a moment—not thinking, not trying anymore to make sense of it—only feeling the burn in his eyes and in the pit of his stomach. Focusing on the way fear glued his feet to the floor.
“Go,” he said, and forced the first step and the second, and found the rest easier. Barefoot, he padded to the room next to his and pulled back the thin blue blanket hanging in the doorway. Pilar, still in the tank top and shorts she’d worn in the forest, lay asleep on her side, facing the door—one arm flung out, her legs drawn up toward her chest. The pink orchid he’d given her and she’d tucked over one ear lay crushed beside her head on the pillow, its petals bruised and torn, its vanilla scent a fading whisper.
He wanted to wake her, to assure himself that they had walked halfway to Catalous yesterday and fallen asleep in the forest, miles away from the compound. But he didn’t. He knew the truth already. He let the blanket fall back in the doorway and stood listening again to the ragged edge of his breath, the soft beat of his pulse in his ears, the quiet of the compound.
If Naheyo or any of the Helpers were up, he didn’t hear sign of them. They could be in the courtyard, or the fields, or the
forest, but he doubted it. He could feel people were there, knew that if he drew back the blankets in the doorways, he’d find the women asleep, as if under a spell—no one awake and aware but him.
He stood in the gloom of the windowless hallway, numbness spreading by inches, as though soft fingers pulled every thought from his mind, every feeling and sensation from his body except the sense of his weight on his feet and the hard-packed dirt floor beneath them. Why that, he wondered, and then remembered sitting on the flat stone beside the riverbank, rubbing his sore feet through his socks—remembered Mawgis saying, “Feet first,” and how he hadn’t believed it when the older man had said he was growing.
But he had been growing. Had grown. Was that Mawgis’s doing, or had he done it himself? Or was it, like Pilar had said, some kind of magic?
Was it magic that had brought him back from the fish trader’s? Magic that had carried him and Pilar back to the compound while they’d slept?
There was no magic. Magic didn’t exist any more than demons did.
But Mawgis existed. Mawgis was as real as the dirt under his toes. And some sort of trickster, who’d made the green smoke appear during the exorcism and, Jake felt sure, had something to do with him finding himself back in the compound twice after he’d left it. He didn’t know how Mawgis could have done that, but he was positive that was the truth of it.
There was no joy in the knowledge—a mystery solved. It pricked at him, a dull rasp across his skin, a hard ball inflating in his chest. He turned away and strode the short distance to his room, using his forearm to push back the blanket in the doorway.
The light through the rough-cut window was thin and pale, as if the sun itself was weary. It seemed fitting, that pale light—the time between time, no longer night but not yet morning. He sat on the cot and pulled on the sweat-stiffened socks he’d worn yesterday—the only pair he had—and the boots Pilar had given him, the soles sticky with the fresh red mud picked up tramping between trees and through the prickly underbrush. He headed outside, closing the compound door quietly behind him.
The thin light seemed to have swallowed the world. The shadowy trees bordering the swept-dirt courtyard were dark and still. No wind rustled their leaves. No monkeys swung through their branches or woodpeckers knocked on their bark. Jake could barely see the small bench he knew sat at the base of a tall Brazil nut tree. The cane field beyond was little more than a large, dark rectangle except where the creeping sun illuminated a tight corridor to the forest, as clearly defined as a roll of carpet.
He didn’t call for Mawgis or look for the one-eyed parrot. Mawgis would come to him. He felt the certainty in his bones and blood as he picked his way down the narrow, sunlit path across the cane field. The charred stalks that had jutted from the land like spears when he’d first stumbled onto the field were gone. Hard, clotted dirt crunched under his boots. His eyes flitted up and down as he walked, shifting between the ground and the trees edging the forest beyond.
There was nothing but forest to see, until where only trees had been before, there was Mawgis standing in a small, bright break, hands on his hips. No face or body paint this time, no parrot feather necklace. He wore a chambray shirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots much like the ones Jake wore. A gray canvas backpack hung over his shoulder.
“What do you think?” Mawgis stretched out his arms, palms forward, displaying himself, and Jake realized the man always had been a peacock, angling for attention.
He hiked his shoulders in an easy shrug and stopped a few yards in front of the other man, wanting distance. “Change of style for you. But no matter how small or tall I am, we’re always the same height.”
“It’s an illusion, my friend,” Mawgis said. “All of it. Haven’t you reasoned that out yet?”
Jake inwardly cringed at being called “friend,” and at the clear pleasure in Mawgis’s voice, the enjoyment on his face, and the way his eyes shone in the barely-dawn gloom. “All what?”
“Well, not this.” Mawgis swept his arm to indicate the cane field and the compound beyond, where the women were still sleeping or just now rising. “This is real enough, unfortunately. But us, we’re an illusion. Well, not us, we’re real, but how we look.” He snickered. “Did you think you had grown, Jake? How would that be possible? You may have stunted your growth, but nothing, not even I, could suddenly unstunt you—without any growing pains, in a couple of weeks. It was a most ridiculous fantasy on your part.”
A chill nervousness snaked through Jake’s gut. It made sense—more sense than the truth being that he’d grown. Small Jake, foolish Jake, so willing to believe the impossible when it suited him. The nervousness grew, vibrating through his arms and legs, up though his chest and neck, prickling the skin on his scalp and face.
A jewel-colored hummingbird winged by, calling, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.”
Mawgis grinned.
Jake had seen that grin before, in the Tabna camp, whenever Mawgis thought he’d put one over on him. The chill racing through his body stopped, replaced by another coolness, the welcome glacial cold he sometimes felt in negotiations. He was in home territory now, the place of give and take where the only question was whether there would be one winner or two.
“Why is it unfortunate the compound is real?”
“Because,” Mawgis said, “the shadowline is near here and those wretched women were keeping you locked up so you couldn’t get there.”
He tried to remember if Pilar had mentioned a shadowline, and didn’t think she had. Did it have something to do with benesha, or with what Mawgis had told him twice: that the older man had plans, a thing he needed Jake to do? He wondered how to turn Mawgis’s need to his advantage. Something would present itself, he hoped. He knew how to wait. He could wait through days and days—and then pounce.
“Shadowline?”
Mawgis pulled up his shoulders in the merest of shrugs. “The way in and the way out. It’s a long story.”
A troop of monkeys arrived, their chatter so loud and raucous as they swung through the trees that rimmed the cane field that Jake couldn’t have heard a word even if Mawgis had shouted in his ear. He watched the little black-capped blond monkeys appearing and disappearing in the thick green leaves, their chatter rising and falling and rising again, and felt Mawgis watching him—a subtle prickle on the back of his neck. The monkeys moved off. Jake turned back to Mawgis, jumping in before the old man could speak.
“Why are you here? What’s your goal?”
“Fair is fair. You told me your true tale; I’ll tell you mine.” Mawgis looked across the field to the bench set under the Brazil nut tree. “Shall we sit and be comfortable?”
Jake shook his head. “Here is good.”
“You’re very stubborn,” Mawgis said. “I like that about you. It’s good we don’t get too comfortable. They will be up soon, those women, and they’d likely interrupt us anyway.”
The older man walked toward him, leaving the trees but coming only a little way into the cane field.
Distance was good. Even the few steps Mawgis had taken toward him felt like invasion. He had to get past that and keep focused on the game. Had to be fine if Mawgis stood so close they could breathe each other’s breath.
“Why wouldn’t you just freeze them like last time?” Jake asked.
Mawgis dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “Repeat a trick? How dull. I could, of course, but—” He smiled brightly. “Better to do something new each time, don’t you think? The unexpected is more . . . joyous.”
The sun had risen above the trees. Birds began calling and twittering, one here, one there—not yet the chorus full day would bring. Insects stirred in the warming air, the whir of tiny wings heard only when they flew near his head. Jake wanted to look back to the compound, to see if the women were out, but he kept his eyes on Mawgis. If someone were coming, he’d see it on Mawgis’s face plainly enough.
“Let’s hear it then,” he said. “What are you after?”
�
�You know how it is,” Mawgis said, shifting the pack on his shoulder. “Sometimes people know things without knowing they know—or how they know. Take, for instance, the idea of other worlds. Heaven. Hell. Lands of fairies, or places with dragons that fly through the air. These days, we call it parallel worlds, or the multiverse. It’s all the same though, a way for your people to explain what they sense, what they see from the corner of their eye—the shadowline, where worlds meet up.”
Any other time, any other place, any other speaker, and Jake would have laughed. Not here or now. He’d seen too much that couldn’t be explained.
“It’s like this,” Mawgis said, clearly enjoying himself, discoursing on a favorite subject. “Imagine curtains wafting in a breeze. Sometimes the panels bump against each other. Where the fabrics touch, that’s the shadowline. Now imagine an ant on one of the panels. Two curtains touch and the ant walks from one to another.”
“You’re the ant. You walked on over.”
“Fell across, actually.” Mawgis puffed up his cheeks and blew out a breath. “If you’re in the right place at the right time—or the wrong place at the wrong time—well, things happen. Whoosh, and you’ve gone across to who-knows-where. In my case, to here.”
Jake felt the words like a well—something deep and dark but with promise at its bottom. There was no such thing as magic, but maybe there could be this—a being from another world. Not little green men from Mars, but a creature from another dimension, slipped across. He didn’t know why this made sense to him—maybe not sense, but it was an explanation he could accept even as his mind rebelled against the idea of magic and demons. Maybe, he thought, the two were really the same after all.
Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Page 12
