The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  “I caught the first one. He was a little thing, real scrawny, with black and white fur. He kind of looked like he was wearing a tux. So, I had this kitten in a cage, and I needed to figure out how to shut it up, cause when I caught it, it just screamed and screamed. So I got to thinking—”

  “Well that can’t be good.”

  He kept on with his story; I kept trying to cut my tape.

  “My uncle, when he wasn’t kicking the crap out of my cousins, he used to fix lawnmowers and the like for folks. It helped him get beer money. He used to always keep a can of gasoline in the shed out back, mostly just for cleaning parts. So I got that gas can, stole a book of matches out of the house, and took the cat down to the creek. I dumped the gas on him, set a match to him. He howled then, with good reason, I suppose, but in the end, he finally got quiet.”

  “You’re a sick fuck,” I said, finally.

  Cash sighed.

  “Well, I’m about to do the same thing to you.”

  Chapter 22

  Cash paced around to the back of my truck, tapping his lighter against the finish as he went.

  He dropped the tailgate and hopped up into the back with me. With Cash standing over me, I stopped working at the tape and clenched my hands around my homemade blade. He took a step towards me and I squirmed away from him, pressing my back against the back of the truck’s cab. I shot out both feet in a hard kick, aiming at his kneecap. He sidestepped the blow, shaking his head with mild annoyance.

  “Don’t fight,” Cash said.

  When I tried to kick him again he caught my ankles and took a few steps back, dragging me right off the back of the truck and to the dirt. I hit the ground hard enough that my breath got caught somewhere between my stomach and lungs in a hard, leaden ball. The torn can in my hand cut into my palm. The impact dazed me enough that I barely felt it while Cash started to drag me across the ground, finally turning me loose a good twenty feet away from my truck.

  “Wait here,” he said and turned, trudging back towards my truck.

  I sawed furiously at the tape around my wrist with my makeshift shiv. It took a second, but I felt the tension snap and my hands came mostly free. Cash had his back to me, and I took that opportunity to finally free both hands, working the fingers to get the blood flowing. I was laying on my back, in the dirt, my head hurt, my hands hurt. Hell, I hurt all over.

  But I had a plan.

  Well, not a plan.

  More like half a plan.

  Okay, it was an idea at best.

  Fine. Long shot.

  Alright, I admit. What I was about to do, I saw it in a movie once.

  Cash grabbed the gas can out of the back of my truck and walked back towards me, unscrewed the cap, and dumped a trail of gas on the ground as he went. The smell of it, overly sweet and chemical, struck me hard. Now that I could smell the gas, hear it splash over the ground, the threat of death somehow became tangible. It took everything I had to not crawl away.

  Cash walked the trail of gasoline over to me, then splashed it over my legs and feet. The smell of it hit me harder, to the point that I could taste it.

  I threw a handful of dirt and gravel into Cash’s face. It didn’t exactly work like the movies, but it did the job. Cash dropped the gas can, swatting and wiping at his eyes. I tore at the tape around my ankles, freeing them.

  I couldn’t take him in a fistfight, I’d already learned that from experience. My little distraction would buy me a second, maybe three. I got to my feet, and opted out of playing fair all together.

  I kicked him as hard as I could, right in the manbits.

  Cash dropped to his knees, hands over his junk, his face streaked with dirt. I grabbed the gas can and swung it, using the extra weight of the gallon or two of gas for added momentum, and clocked him in the side of the head with it. There was a hollow thud and Cash fell over, onto his side. The weight of the can kept me spinning, throwing me off balance and sending me back into the dirt and dousing the both of us with even more gasoline.

  “That was uncalled for, Jonah,” Cash said. Other than sounding a little winded, he didn’t seem to be suffering too much in the way of ill effects.

  My keys were in his pocket, which made trying to drive away pretty useless since going near Cash seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I got to my feet and ran to my truck, yanking my bag out from the seat and then turned, bolting towards the trees as fast as my one and a half pins would carry me.

  I hit the woods at a stumbling run, low lying branches slapping me in the face, tendrils of underbrush tearing at my legs. I sucked in big, hulking gulps of air as I went, each breath smelling like dirt and pine and forest and the ever-present scent of the gasoline that was soaking my clothes.

  I wasn’t much of a runner, or hell, much of an anything physical, so I started getting winded quick. I figured I had a few minutes’ lead, at best, on Cash. I ducked behind a tree and tried to remain still long enough to catch my breath. Behind me, I heard Cash’s pursuit. He was moving slow and methodical, and I suddenly understood how a rabbit feels with the hounds baying at its heels.

  I needed to make the best of what little time I had before Cash tracked me down. When he’d caught me in my old man’s house, and at my place, I’d been naked. That wasn’t the case this time. This time, I had my bag of tricks with me.

  I opened my bag and start rummaging, as quickly and quietly as I could. I needed to incapacitate him long enough to get my keys out of his pocket and get to my truck. Unfortunately, I didn’t think a dose of Valerian like I’d given Sam would do the trick. I had a few things to work with, nothing fatal or that would cause lasting harm, but enough that an idea was starting to take shape.

  I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood, then spit in the palm of my hand. I took a deep breath, steeled my nerves, and stepped out from behind the tree. Cash’s head snapped towards me, and I could see his outline moving towards me through the trees and underbrush. He stopped a few feet away from where I was standing, and even in the darkness, I could see the tire iron from my truck in his right hand.

  “I wish you hadn’t made me traipse through the woods after you.”

  “So I was supposed to lay there and let you burn me alive?”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “You know what? To hell with you, Cash. To hell with your brother. To hell with your daddy, and your little thug friends and your ugly Cadillac and just your whole incestual backwoods mafia wanna-be family.”

  Cash didn’t say anything. Instead, he started towards me with a stomping urgency, which was exactly what I’d hoped for. I tossed the fetish I’d taken out of my bag, a large hunk of quartz with a spirit bound inside it, from one hand to the other. I felt the spirit inside it stir as soon as the blood staining my palm touched the outside of the fetish.

  Spirits are, essentially, thought forms. In other words, when a person thinks of say, a wolf, they create an image in their mind. In the spirit world, all these images from different people start to take form, shape, and substance. They reflect the beliefs of people in general. So, said wolf for example, would be the sum of man’s take on wolves. They’d be big, beautiful, terrifyingly savage creatures that, compared to modern wolves, would look like something out of the Paleozoic Era. That was because mankind, over millennia, had feared wolves and admired them. Their form would reflect that collected belief.

  Spirits don’t really happen a lot in the material world. They don’t mix well, the two different planes. The vast majority of spirits can’t cross over to the physical plane of existence without some sort of help. Keeping them here, be it via circle or fetish, was a different animal altogether. A circle, as long as it was made right, could hold just about anything. Problem was, circles weren’t portable. Fetishes were. They were a lot harder to construct, a lot more violent when they failed, and a lot more entertaining if you could turn that failure in someone else’s direction. Circles were like putting a muzzle on a friendly dog. Cracking open a fetish was like giving Cujo a sh
ot of crystal meth and a direction.

  It would take the spirit a second or two to break from the fetish now that it was charged it up with my blood. Once free, the spirit would only manifest for a second or two before it dematerialized, vanishing back into the spirit world. Given what I had trapped in the quartz, I was pretty sure a second or two would do the job.

  I threw the quartz at Cash and turned my back to him. There was a loud pop and the woods lit up with brilliant, white light. There was a sound sort of like sizzling grease for a brief second and then everything went dark again, the light spirit vanishing back to its home plane of existence.

  I turned back around and, even though I hadn’t been caught by the spiritual flashbang, it still took a second for my vision to adjust to the dark. Cash hadn’t been so lucky. He’d caught the spirit’s light show full frontal and it had, in turn, effectively blinded him. Cash was on his knees, one hand over his eyes, the other feeling the ground around him, trying to compensate for a lost sense. I grabbed the first thing I could find and came back with a large stick, roughly as thick as my wrist and as long as I was tall. I swung with both hands. There was a dull thud, the makeshift club connecting with Cash’s ribs, just under his arm. I heard him exhale in a massive whoosh and fall over. I hit him again, this time in the hips, then again, and again, over and over again until my makeshift club finally snapped. When it was all said and done, Cash lay on the ground, motionless.

  I took the opportunity, shot over to Cash, fished my keys out of his pockets and ran for my life.

  Chapter 23

  The climb back out of the woods was worse than when I went in, partially due to the fact that my eyes still hadn’t adjusted fully to the darkness. I tripped and stumbled over exposed roots, falling once into a tangle of thorny vines. When I finally made it back to the car, the smell of gasoline assaulted my senses, reminding me of what I’d just escaped. The reality of just how close I had come to being immolated settled in and, rather than fear, I felt the boiling coil of a normally hidden rage somewhere deep in my stomach.

  I threw my bag in the cab, slid in behind the wheel and shut the door, fumbling through the keys. It took a minute, but I found the right one, slammed it into the ignition, and brought the engine to life.

  The window beside my head exploded inward, shards of safety glass peppering my already sliced-up cheek. A hand grabbed my shoulder, pulling me out of my seat. I thrashed on pure reflex, slapping and beating at the hand as it pulled me out through the window and dropped me, rather unceremoniously, to the ground.

  I got a face full of dirt and gravel. On instinct, I started scrambling backwards. Cash stalked me, eyes locking on me in a death stare. He took two steps and kicked me in the side, hard, a whole new nucleus of pain erupting through my ribs, spears of pain shooting through my chest, every attempt at breathing causing me to choke out a gasp of agony. I tried crawling again. He kicked me again. This time he got my other side. The pain met in the middle, and for a moment it felt like my heart was going to stop and my lungs were collapsing.

  I rolled onto my back, and Cash pounced, both hands wrapping around my throat. Instantly, the little air I was able to suck into my lungs was cut off completely. I started thrashing again, slamming my fists into his arms, swinging at his head, bucking my hips, trying everything I possibly could to throw him off of me.

  The harder I fought, the tighter he squeezed. My head felt hot. A high-pitched ringing filled my ears. My vision, already off kilter from the light show, started to shrink down to pin points. I lost control over my ability to differentiate the two worlds, physical and spiritual, and saw threads of vivid colors trace their way through the little bit of sight I had left. My arms felt heavy. My hands went numb, falling into the dirt. I reached out blindly, fingertips feeling at the ground. My hand settled on something, a rough, jagged piece of quartz roughly the size of a softball, and in a last burst of adrenaline and willpower, I swung it upwards as hard as I was able—and connected.

  Air filled my lungs, mouthfuls of glorious, cool, night air. I coughed and sputtered, rolling onto my side. My skin tingled, like my whole body had gone to sleep. My vision returned, equal parts physical and spiritual. I could see the spirits of the forest, the trees thousands of times taller than they should have been. Animal spirits, silhouetted against the dark, watched from the treeline, eyes blazing in shades of yellow, red, and bright, bio-luminescent green. In the distance, howls, loud and undulating, shattered the silence. Beneath it all, the mundane world hung pale and shadowed, like a fading photograph. It took a moment, but my head cleared and I was able to put up the mental blocks I needed to shut out the spirit world. Cash was a few feet away from me, on his hands and knees, the side of his face painted with blood.

  Cash and I both managed to work our way up to our knees. He was wobbly, swaying back and forth like he was drunk. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t the one that was worse for the wear.

  Cash turned his eyes in my direction and just the sight of his face, after everything he’d done to me, to people I know, people I cared about, caused something in my brain to snap. Rage washed over me. This monster had tried to kill me. Not once, but twice. He’d tried to rape Melly. He’d threatened my father.

  It wasn’t going to happen again.

  Everything went red.

  I hit him again and this time, he dropped to his back. I leapt on top of him, swinging the quartz down, hard, against his temple. I felt him trying to push me away, weakly. I brushed his arms to the side and hit him again. The impact sounded like an egg dropping on the floor. It registered somewhere far away, like an echo of an echo. I hit him again and again.

  When I finally stopped, my throat was raw. I had been screaming. Tears were drying on my cheeks. I dropped the rock and stared down at Cash. He was unrecognizable. His face was a mass of blood and swollen flesh. His mouth was open, though his lips were split and torn, teeth all broken. One side of his head was misshapen.

  Then reality came flooding back in.

  “Cash?” I asked, shaking him.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Cash?!” I asked again, my voice pitching upwards, cracking. “Wake up you asshole! You don’t…Cash…”

  The understanding of what I’d done set in hard and sudden, every bit as irrefutable as a universal truth. It was a certainty that held the world down like gravity. I’d killed him. I’d willfully taken another human being’s life. I stood up, took a few staggering steps backwards, horror and revulsion hitting me in waves, and then fell backwards. I had to fight to take my eyes off of Cash’s body. I turned and threw up, over and over again, emptying my stomach on the side of some dirt road in the middle of nowhere. My whole body was shaking, violent, chattering tremors that started somewhere in the center of my body and radiated outwards, towards my fingers.

  My brain started processing the scenario in slow motion, each thought weighed down with abject horror and disgust, tempered with the realization of how this was going to play out. If his brother knew where he was, or what he was doing, and Cash didn’t come back and I did, well, the Carvers would do absolutely everything in their power to kill me. What was left of them, that is. I couldn’t call the cops. Most of them were on the Carvers’ payroll, hated me, or both.

  “Shit!” I yelled. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  I had to get rid of the body. I had to put it somewhere where no one would find it. Then, I had to get away from here. A swell of emotion, more rage, fear, and disgust flooded over me.

  I was already bleeding from the beating Cash had given me. I wiped blood off my face and onto my fingertips and drew the summoning sigil in the dirt.

  Chapter 24

  The earth elemental wasn’t anything dramatic. It didn’t have a face or a shape, or anything even remotely similar to features that would denote a personality. It looked like a pile of different types of rocks in all shapes and sizes, with a few fist-sized gemstones thrown into the mix for good measure. Though I couldn’t tell you ho
w, I was pretty sure it was looking at me.

  Elementals, as it were, are some of the easier spirits to deal with, or summon for that matter. The sigil for an earth spirit is just a straight line with two dots over the top of it. Like any spirit, they have a personality archetype that tends to apply to most any of their ilk. Fire spirits are like hyper children. Air spirits have a memory and attention span like a goldfish. Water spirits are abhorrently moody. Earth spirits, on the other hand, are just lazy.

  I heard the spirit’s voice in my head, a sound comparable to pebbles rattling down a cliff face just before a coming avalanche, that my brain translated into words.

  “What?” It asked.

  “I need a favor.”

  “I’m not really in the mood to be charitable.”

  “What would put you in the mood,” I asked, then added, “To be charitable, I mean.”

  “A nap.”

  “I need your help,” I said, my voice trembling a bit.

  “Yeah? I don’t feel up to it,” the elemental rumbled in the back of my head. “Better things to do.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No, I’m lying. Yes, seriously. Can I go now?”

  A small sliver of the rage I’d felt earlier slipped through.

  “Open a hole, swallow that,” I said, pointing to Cash’s body.

  “No.”

  “Last chance,” I said.

  “And what are you going to do?” it asked in a lazy drawl.

  “I’ll summon you back,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s likely to change my mind.”

  “It won’t. The crystal that I plan on binding you in might,” I said, not mentioning that it would take me a month to purify it.

  “You still won’t get your hole,” it said.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Though I’m pretty sure I’ll get a measure of satisfaction out of it.”

  The elemental fell silent. It suddenly felt weird that I was carrying on a conversation with a big pile of rocks. A moment later, Cash and the ground around him began to sink, the earth beneath him collapsing inwards, like a sinkhole. Within seconds, the hole was filled in. He was gone. It was like he’d never been there to begin with.