The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  “Well?”

  “I’m looking for a piece of a runestone.”

  “You called me here for a rock?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well get to the point, then.”

  “I need to know where I can find Mama Duvalier.”

  Moki looked surprised.

  “The hell are you looking for her for?”

  “Nothing good,” I said.

  “Obviously. You messing with that lot, you’ve done and moved up into the big leagues, kid, and as much as I hate to say it, you ain’t ready to play on that level,” Moki said.

  “Yeah. I get that. Can you tell me where to find her or not?”

  “Chances are, she already knows you’re nosing around. She’s smart like that and you ain’t exactly what any would call subtle. But to answer your question, yeah, I could tell you where to find her.”

  “Alright, where?”

  “I said could, not would. First things first. What’s in it for me?”

  That’s the problem with spirits. Nothing, absolutely nothing, with them is free. There’s always a price. It’s usually a lot less expensive than what you’d pay one of the Fae for a favor, but there’s always a price nonetheless. Usually, it involves paying some form of tribute to their earthly counterparts.

  Spirits are essentially thoughtforms, mankind’s collective impression of something given form. For instance, a wolf here is just a wolf. A wolf in the spirit world is about eight feet tall at the shoulders, with glowing red eyes, an insatiable hunger, and a really bad attitude. Not because that’s what a wolf is at its core, but because over time that’s what mankind has envisioned them as. It’s the image they’ve created. That much belief gives something form. You start adding religion into the mix, and things can get pretty hinky.

  “What do you want? The usual?” I asked.

  “I want you to go home, get drunk, well, drunker and forget this nonsense.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “And why the hell the not?”

  I explained the whole story, from Lysone on down the list. Moki didn’t say a word, he just listened, tilting his head this way and that as I recounted the events.

  “I s’pose that’s as good a reason as any,” Moki said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So? Tell me?”

  “After we discuss terms,” Moki said.

  I sighed.

  “Alright, what do you want?”

  “Assuming you survive this little suicide mission, order some wrestling on Pay Per View.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  “As a heart attack.”

  “You’re not a physical being,” I said.

  “Yeah, and? Summon me.”

  I shook my head, irritated.

  “Sure, fine. Okay. It’s a deal. If I survive, you get your burly man in spandex fix.”

  “Farm, little ways off Tater Patch Road. Look for the bottle trees. Follow that up a few miles, then hit the dirt road off the side. It’ll take you up a ways.”

  “Tater Patch Road? Seriously?”

  “You are in the South, Jonah.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s, just…wow.”

  “Can I go now? I ain’t in the mood to watch you run off and do something stupid.”

  I nodded and reached out with the tip of my shoe, smudging the circle. Moki started to fade away, slowly becoming transparent before finally vanishing. I stood there for a few minutes after he was gone, listening to the slow buzz of the occasional car on the road behind me. I turned, almost tripped on an empty beer bottle and in a moment of frustration kicked it towards the dumpster, missed, and watched it shatter on the pavement.

  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel a little prophetic.

  Chapter 12

  I didn’t have to drive long to find the bottle trees that Moki had told me about. Bottle trees are a common occurrence in the South, most often connected to hoodoo. The general belief is that the blue bottles catch spirits, trapping them until the sun rises. Mama Duvalier’s property was lined with them, one bottle tree every hundred or so feet, each one standing out in stark contrast to the thick woods behind them.

  I made a few passes up and down the street before I finally worked up the nerve to pull my truck off the road. I found a spot about a quarter mile away from where the road diverged from the paved street and made the transition to dirt. I waited for almost fifteen minutes, and after no other cars passed, I got out and started to hoof it towards Mama Duvalier’s. A steady rain was falling, which, despite soaking me to the bone (again) and making my leg ache like hell (again), was a benefit. The rain offered me a little bit of cover in the sense that it’d be hard as hell to hear me picking my way through the woods and would, I was hoping, drive anyone inside that could potentially see me on my approach.

  I made it maybe three steps over the property line when I heard the first bottle break. More started bursting in rapid succession, filling the air with loud, gunshot-like pops and the high-pitched chatter of glass against glass.

  By the time I managed to put two and two together, I was already in it up to my eyeballs. The bottle trees weren’t made for capturing spirits, at least these weren’t. Every one of the bottles was a fetish, holding a rather restless spirit hostage. I’ll give credit where credit is due, as far as home alarm systems went, this one was, for lack of a better term, effective.

  Wind spirits, dozens of them, came tearing through the trees, each one howling mad and fixated on me. Pine needles, leaves, and pieces of debris, along with the rain, kicked up into my face and eyes in their wake. A burst of wind, gale force at the least, hit me in the side. That, along with the slippery terrain and the fact that I was mostly relying on my cane for balance, sent me into a sideways tumble that ended with me landing in a thicket of briars. Thorns, more annoyance than pain, tore at my hands and cheeks. It took a minute for me to get untangled, but when I managed to get to my knees, another blast of wind hit me in the gut, like a massive fist, hard enough to launch me several feet into the air and then back to the ground.

  I hit hard. Harder than I would’ve expected, given that I was landing on mud-soaked ground. For a moment, the world swam in front of my eyes, colors from the spirit world bleeding over into my field of vision, turning everything into a crazy, mixed-up kaleidoscope of warring realities. I realized I’d pretty much just walked right into Mama Duvalier’s hands just as I lost consciousness.

  • • •

  I’ve had this dream more times than I could count. Every time, it opened the same old wound. It brought to life a hurt so deep and profound that the echo of it carried over into wakefulness and had a tendency to follow me around like some kind of phantom passenger.

  There was something different this time, though, something that wasn’t familiar. It was still the house I’d spent the first part of my life in, the little three-bedroom home in Portland, Oregon. Only it didn’t look lived in, or at least not lived in recently. The furniture was still there, but it was old, waterlogged, heavy with mold. The windows were covered in filth, turning the world outside into little more than a hazed-over blur. I knew this place well enough to find my way through it in the dark. My room was on the right side of the hall. My sister’s directly across. The bathroom, where I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub while she got ready for school, was next to her room. My parents’ room was at the end of the hall. The living room and kitchen were connected with an open doorway, laced over with cobwebs. The storm was still there, whipping the trees back and forth outside, lightning painting the night sky in flashes of blue and white. I could smell the bacon from breakfast that morning mixing with the warm, almost sugary, smell of my father’s pipe tobacco.

  It was here too. The thing that took my sister away from me. I could feel it. I could almost taste it, just underneath the comforting smells of home, like rotting, fetid meat and stagnant water.

  The woman from the
parking lot of the Poor Confederate was standing in the kitchen. For a long moment, I stared at her, trying to wrap my brain around her presence. I’d had this dream hundreds, if not thousands of times, and it never changed. Yet here she was, larger than life and twice as ugly.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” I said.

  She shrugged. She was wearing the same tattered jeans, but she’d replaced the Mötley Crüe shirt with a Skid Row shirt. Her hair hung around her face in matted tangles, which didn’t help to make her look any more sane than she had the first time I came across her.

  “I’m not supposed to be anywhere,” she said, matter of fact. Something caught her attention that I couldn’t hear despite my familiarity with this nightmare landscape and she turned towards the back of the house. She stood there staring out the window over the kitchen sink. She flickered, briefly, like a bad film reel, and then vanished.

  I opened my mouth to say something, though I’m not entirely sure what it was I was actually planning on saying.

  The crazy things about dreams is that even when you know what’s going to happen, sometimes, no matter how good you are at controlling it, you can’t change the outcome.

  Thunder came next, booming from everywhere all at once, a sonic assault so loud that, in my dream, the dust lifted off of shelves, dishes rattled against each other in the cupboards, and cracks started to thread their way through the drywall.

  What came next was the part that hurt the most.

  My sister screamed, a banshee-like wail that carried out over the sound of the thunder. It was the pure and utter terror and pain of it that always got me. Her screaming, with the storm raging outside, when everything should have been peaceful and still, that was something that I just could never shake, even now.

  I tried running to her room, as I always did every time this scenario played itself out. I found myself moving in that slow motion that’s commonplace in dreams, like my legs had been encased in lead.

  It took something like an ice age before I reached her room. I had expected to see my sister sitting up in her bed, her dark hair mussed from sleep. That’s how it happened before. I’d run into her room, she’d stare at me, I’d see that thing in her eyes, she’d bleed from the gunshot wound she’d inflict on herself, and I’d wake up.

  It was different this time.

  My sister was sitting on her bed; that much was the same. She was smiling. A shadow slithered across the floor, sliding over the wall and towards her bed. Everything about its shape, the way it moved, the curves and angles that comprised its form, were all nausea inducing. It was Lovecraftian, a thing that didn’t belong in this world. The shadows coalesced into a vaguely humanoid shape, and for a moment, there was a face present, though only in the most rudimentary of ways. It turned towards me, locking its eyes with mine as it materialized into a solid, human-like form next to my sister, and smiled.

  I tried to scream, to charge towards what, at the time I thought was a monster, but I couldn’t move. My legs, my voice, every part of my body was on lockdown, the signals from my brain refusing to reach out to the parts I needed to work. I learned later what it was that took my sister. A manifestation of millions of people’s faith in something wholly evil. It was a walking, talking, if not wholly physical, incarnation of one of the seven deadly sins.

  A demon.

  It watched me, even though it had no eyes. Instead there were just two spots where there weren’t shadows inside the facsimile of a face. After a few seconds of staring at me, one of those empty spots filled with darkness.

  It took me a second to realize what it was doing, but once I had, my fear only intensified.

  It winked at me.

  The shadows swirled around my sister, enveloping her. She shot back on the bed, her body going rigid. I tried to run towards her, to help, but I couldn’t move. She started to convulse, her tiny body thrashing back and forth, slamming against the mattress.

  When she finally went still, the storm outside had stopped. I could hear her breathing, slow, measured and steady. She sat up, locking her eyes with mine, and spoke in a voice that wasn’t even remotely human.

  “Remember me.”

  Chapter 13

  I woke up with a sudden jerk. It took me a minute to sort through the myriad of visuals that came with waking up and put up the necessary mental walls so that I wasn’t overwhelmed. The echoes of the dream were still rattling around in my skull and the copper taste of adrenaline and fear was still heavy on my tongue. I hurt all over, which I didn’t consider too much of a surprise, but my face was really singing. My hands were behind my back and I could feel the bite of something against my wrists. Zip ties, maybe. I checked my ankles and found them bound as well with, as suspected, zip ties.

  It took a bit of wriggling around, but I managed to sit up and take stock of my surroundings. I was in a root cellar. The floor under me was raw earth. The walls on three sides were lined in shelves, all filled to the brim with canned vegetables. My cane was a few feet away, leaning against a rickety wooden set of stairs. My backpack, unfortunately, was nowhere to be found. The floor overhead was old wooden planks, thin slivers of light shining through the cracks between the boards. I could hear conversation, but I was only able to make out every couple of words, not enough to piece together what was being said. Every so often, someone would walk by overhead, casting shadows down into the basement.

  Not that it would have mattered, really. I was tied up in the basement of Appalachia’s resident wicked witch and I wasn’t exactly feeling like this was going to play out in my favor. Anything I heard wasn’t really going to do me a whole lot of good. My best bet was to focus on what was important: getting the hell out of here.

  I was still trying to figure out exactly how I was going to try and get out of here, when the door at the top of the stairs opened. The light was brighter than I expected, and for a second, all I could see were shadowed forms as a small parade made its way into the basement. When my eyes adjusted to the new light source, I was surrounded by a semicircle of women. Under different circumstances I probably wouldn’t have been bothered to find myself in such a predicament.

  The women all bore similar sharp, angular features. Sisters, maybe, or possibly cousins. They all looked to be roughly within a few years of each other, age wise. They had the same mocha-colored skin, the same dark hair, each one styled differently.

  “Hi?” I said, finally.

  They didn’t say anything.

  “Okay?” I said. “How does this work exactly? I’ve never been held hostage.”

  Still nothing.

  It wasn’t until Mama Duvalier came down the steps a moment later, that some sort of reaction passed between them. It was a mixture of hushed respect and military-like discipline. Postures straightened, heads lowered just a bit, and an air of all around respect filled the little root cellar.

  Mama Duvalier shared the same features as my three captors. On the women, the high cheekbones and sharp chins looked severe. On Mama Duvalier they looked almost regal, cut with a haughty arrogance. She carried herself with the swagger that came with authority, of orders and commands carried out within seconds, with no argument, and hell befall anyone that chose otherwise.

  Mama Duvalier was on the heavy side, though it was the sort of broad-shouldered build that spoke to muscle, not fat. Her hair was cut short, tight to the scalp, and peppered here and there with bits of silver. She wore jeans, hiking boots, and a light-blue flannel shirt. Everything about her read hard work, grit, and pit bull–like tenacity, from the clothes to the way she moved.

  One of the girls standing around me moved to across the cellar and grabbed a chair from under the stairs. She carried it over and set it in front of me, then returned to her previous position of looming over me.

  Mama Duvalier sat down across from me and leveled me with a stare that made me feel like I was two inches tall and in my underwear, all at once.

  “So, you’re him,” she said, leaning back and throwi
ng an arm over the back of the chair. It was frighteningly casual, like I wasn’t even close to being taken seriously, let alone considered a threat. Her voice was a lot warmer than I expected. It was kind, patient sounding, with just a touch of a French accent.

  “I guess that depends on who the him in question is?”

  “C’mon now. You’re Gretchen’s little apprentice and you’re all grown up. I must say, you grew up pretty, Jonah.”

  The hell? Was she flirting with me? For once, I didn’t know what to say.

  “I heard she passed. You have my condolences.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, mostly unsure of how to respond. I’d been expecting a lot of things from the evil queen of the Appalachians, but I was pretty sure this level of civility wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t exactly being kind, as evidenced by the fact that I was zip tied in her basement, but she wasn’t being out and out hostile. At least, not yet.

  “Though, I can’t say she’d be too proud of you,” she said, looking over me one more time. “Given you’ve turned into a pretty piss poor rendition of her example.”

  And, nevermind.

  “Yeah? I try to set the bar low,” I said. “Keeps people from expecting too much out of me.”

  “No need to be wiseass,” Mama Duvalier said, her tone doing more to dissuade me than the goon squad and the bindings put together. “Facts is facts, you’re an alcoholic who cons good, hard-working people out of their money. I ain’t condemning you for it, but I sure don’t abide by it either. Actually, it’s a bit of a shame really.”

  “Yeah, and why’s that?”

  “Because you’ve been doing nothing but drowning any potential you might have underneath a whole lot of booze and even more self-loathing.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me,” I said.

  “Don’t I?” Mama Duvalier asked. She undid the top button on her shirt and reached into it, withdrawing a battered pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She tapped one out, lit it, and replaced the pack. She watched me for a long time, taking the occasional drag from her coffin nail and letting the smoke spiral into a haze that hung just over her head. “I know more than you think. I know why you walk with that cane, for one. I know why you drink. It ain’t because some girl went and got herself dead, either. At least, not the one you convince yourself it is. Honest, I know more about you than you know about yourself, Mister Jonah. More important, I know that how you go through the next few days, it’s gonna set the tone of things for a long time.”