His body convulsed and spasmed from the retreat of the invading presence. He’d sensed it dampening its energy field just low enough to wear his human suit for the minutes needed to draw the picture. His arms glowed olive green with a faint golden sheen, and his entire torso itched beyond endurance. Pulling up his T-shirt, he saw with a shock that his shoulders and chest were covered with the scale design. More frightening, however, was the faint glowing umbilicus that emerged from his body just above the navel and stretched out horizontally in a thin shimmering line. It undulated slightly in the patches of sunlight, as if responding to unseen vibrations. Transfixed, Ned saw that it floated over the destroyed house and vanished into the trees beyond.
The pencil and paper fell from his hands as Ned sat slack-jawed, staring with unblinking eyes along the sightline of his spirit cord. Voices murmured in his head, one of them elevating to a loud honking-hiss that made his blood run cold. But at that moment he was beyond moving or seeing; he simply registered the sound in his mind and let it pass through him. The landscape around him was fading.
Ned realized with a jerk that he was no longer sitting, but standing, looking down at his stupefied body as it slumped against the tree trunk. The glowing spirit cord emanating from his solar plexus flowed through his standing body, and when he stepped away toward the trees, the thin glowing line reeled out as if he were a fish on a line.
As he went toward the heaps of charcoal that had once been a structure of pine and oak, he sensed several presences occupying the burned space. Ned passed through them, only peripherally aware of their waves of rage and sorrow momentarily directed toward him. The shining line continued to stretch out from his body as he advanced into the trees where the sunlight faded into black night.
Ned emerged from the grove of oaks into a landscape of red cliffs and wind-sculpted monoliths, their tortured shapes the product of eons of weather chewing and gouging at their sandstone surface. The night sky was lit by an enormous bonfire that flared like an earthbound sunspot, its bright tongues of flame arching and falling in a shower of sparks back into the pyre of brush and the trunks of trees. A ring of dancers, all wiry brown men at least ten feet tall with painted bodies and tasseled headdresses painted in symbols of smoke and clouds, shuffled, leapt, stomped, and twirled with rhythmical precision. Ceremonial smoke bathed the dancers as the bonfire blazed up higher than their heads. Clack-sticks and the low drone of a didjeridu sounded in his head and resonated in the marrow of his bones. He wasn’t simply surrounded by the sound; he had become the subsonic tone that rose and fell and yelped like an animal.
The sound rumbled along the ground and toppled a couple of the sandstone monoliths, but the dancers continued to jump and leap, oblivious of their surroundings. Ned felt the bones of the earth splinter and separate as the tone cleaved the elements that held their shapes together. And then, a monstrous dingo, taller than the dancers and transparent enough for Ned to see the outlines of the bluffs behind it, burst through the ring of dancers. One great leap and it landed in the bonfire, scattering coals. The Dingo Ancestor snapped at the flames with red-stained fangs, allowing itself to be consumed by the fire until there was nothing but a glowing lump of rock where it had crouched.
The dancers stopped as one body. The tallest with the highest conical headdress stepped forward and reached out with both hands, retrieving the object from the coals. He turned to the group and held up the talisman for all to see, proclaiming in a high voice words of wisdom for the witnesses of the miracle that had just taken place. Although Ned could not fathom their language, an understanding of the event flowed into his mind. The Dingo Ancestor had given his clan group a sacred tjuringa to take back to the human world for their safekeeping. And he knew without seeing it what images were engraved on its surface.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp tug at the spirit cord connected to his solar plexus. Without warning, his consciousness began to slide along the line like an electrical impulse and, picking up speed, it landed with a jolt back in his body. Ned toppled over and lay on his back, staring up into the flaming red eyes of the most hideous dog-shaped creature he could ever have imagined. It did not have the majesty of the Dingo Ancestor he had just seen, but was instead a travesty of that one’s beauty, a horrible lower-world mockery of a celestial archetype.
“Die!” it demanded in a guttural voice that was not quite growling and not quite speaking.
“Gahhhhhh!” Ned rolled away from the beast and scrambled to his feet. The dog-creature leapt at him again, crashing against one of the massive oaks as Ned fell to the ground. Propelled by terror, Ned ran headlong into the thicket containing the charred timbers of the old cracker cabin, falling to his knees in a shivering, shaking crouch, waiting for death to strike. Instantly, he was surrounded by shrieks and the sound of timbers falling and fire crackling. The demon-dog turned and lifted its bloody lips over its teeth, questing and tasting the air. Then to Ned’s horror, he watched it stand up on its hind legs and slowly stretch into a blurred humanoid shape. The more it went vertical, the less defined its outline became, much the way Ned might have blended the edges of a charcoal drawing with his fingers.
It was now as tall as the overhanging limbs of the oaks, looking around with a small bulbous head whose only distinguishable features were two white-ringed, lidless eyes. Then it turned in his direction and spoke in a familiar voice.
“Neddy, my boy. Why are you hiding?”
Ned clapped his hands over his ears, but the hateful voice continued.
“Come die like a nice boy. Come, Neddy.”
His chest pounding almost beyond endurance, Ned cowered on his knees, clutching his chest. Was he having a heart attack? The pain was unbearable.
The loathsome man-thing was coming toward him, a black smudge against the tree canopy. But then it began to gibber, losing its voice and lapsing into something more closely resembling an animal’s howl.
“Nonono, not yet, noooooooo!” Then it was gone.
Absolute silence filled the clearing. Lifting his head in spite of the excruciating pain in his midsection, Ned scanned the trees and underbrush for movement or sound, but the forest was as still as when he’d first sat down. Ned confronted the evidence of his watch and realized, stunned, that several hours had passed. His chest hurt so much he thought he might pass out.
“No proper Senior Knowledge-man bin jump back in his body like that.” The reproving voice in his head was the other one, the one that held the terror at bay. “You can follow the spirit cord out like a proper initiated man, but you can’t find your way back in without nearly killing yourself.” The voice cluck-clucked its disapproval.
Ned crawled out of the thicket and collapsed beside his sketchpad, staring at the drawing. “What’s that thing?” he gasped, fighting for breath.
“Dingo clan tjuringa,” said the Taipan Ancestor. She slithered across the clearing toward Ned and rose up in front of him, her smooth olive-golden body gleaming in the afternoon sun.
The constriction in Ned’s chest was easing, and he dragged himself, shaking, to the spot where he’d leaned against the oak. The giant snake looked real, but he was damned if he was going to reach out and touch it to make sure.
“It hasss to go back,” she hissed, swaying much too close to his face. Ned saw bright dots in front of his eyes and felt the ground tilting underneath him. He clutched at the tree roots, thinking if he could just hold on, things might snap back to normal in a minute or two. But the ground continued to ripple like the waves of an earthquake, and the glittering eyes of the taipan held him breathless.
“Back where?” He could barely get the words out.
“Sacred place, Dingo clan cave,” said the Ancestor.
Tears of frustration pricked at the corners of Ned’s eyes. “Why fucking me?”
“Got to be you,” said the taipan, “unless you bin want to father yourself a child and pass the job onto it.”
“W-what?” Ned buried his head in his arms to escape those dreadful slitted eyes.
“Shhhh,” said the snake, flowing in a liquid motion over his leg and up his body to his shoulders, then around until her head came up behind him and rested in the nest of his hair. “Take up your drawing tool,” she said. “Big boss Wandjina says I’m to show you.”
Trembling in bone and sinew, Ned picked up the pad and pencil, and began to draw, slowly at first, and then more rapidly as the familiar channeled energy took over his muscles and tendons. Quickly, he sketched a high bluff with a cleft in its side, partially hidden by windswept crooked trees. A distinctive rock formation marked the base of the split in the cliff, and water flowed past it, although the source of that water was hidden.
Then he folded the page back and began a new drawing. A woman’s face took shape, small-featured and comely with long hair whipping in the wind. Behind her appeared palm trees and the façade of a building with decorative tiles in Moorish, Egyptian, and Italianate design. As before, Ned’s hand then went limp, and the pencil fell to the ground.
The Ancestor retreated, leaving Ned completely alone in the sand and roots of the giant oak, with mosquitoes feasting on his face and arms. The sun was slipping low over the trees, the light fading into gathering gloom under the oak canopy. Ned stared at the woman’s face. He would have to go in search of her, he knew that much. But where she was, and what he would do when he found her, he had absolutely no clue.
Chapter 14
July 24, Sunday—Present Day
Margaret settled into the computer chair and logged onto the Internet, surfing quickly to her favorite forum. She still had a couple of hours before they were supposed to leave for camp, and she wanted to post her gone-for-awhile notice in the Absences thread just in case she ended up being Internet-deprived for over a month.
For the duration of science camp, she would be living with three other girls in a dormitory on the university campus, in a “quad suite” consisting of two bedrooms, a communal bathroom, and a kitchenette. She was friends with two of the girls assigned to her group, but the fourth was from out of town. Margaret hoped she was cool and would fit in. If not, well, they would deal.
She slipped her favorite anime soundtrack into the computer’s CD player, put on her headphones, and typed GOKU into the user-name field and then typed her password, shikigami. Margaret sighed. She wished she had a real shiki of her own to command. It would be the bomb to be a genuine onmyouji, a Japanese sorcerer, who could conjure up the magical dragon servant just by folding a piece of paper and chanting sutras over it.
She looked to see who was online. The usual suspects were logged on: Ryoga, a board moderator, plus Inu-luvver, Hellboy2, Muraki’s Lair, NekoMania, and Kinigar.
Margaret grinned. She’d gotten pretty friendly with most of them and had been a member of the forum long enough now to have posted over five hundred messages, which gave her non-noob status and a couple of stars by her handle. Although she posted in half a dozen Internet forums, she had a comfortable sense of belonging in this particular one. It was hard to say why; it was the typical mix of pop-culture-addicted teens and twenty-somethings, with a smaller sprinkling of older weird-but-cool members, if you were to believe their profiles, which one always took with a grain of salt. But there was a slightly more intellectual, slightly less confrontational tone to this board that Margaret liked. Overfiend, the forum’s founder, enforced the rules with a twisted but supportive vibe, and the members followed his lead.
First, she scanned the threads where she had last posted, checking for responses. There were new posts to a topic called “Have You Ever,” started by Kinigar. It was one of those “what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done” type of thread, and she’d written that she’d once had a Dreamtime monster called a Quinkan living in her closet. Nobody took her seriously, of course, although most of them wanted to know what she’d been sniffing.
Her experience with the creature wasn’t exactly like calling up a shikigami, but it was pretty freaking close. Sometimes when she thought back, it seemed like just an eyelid movie and not something she’d actually seen in real life. Other times it still creeped her out.
She checked her PM box and saw the icon blinking. Kinigar had sent her a message. The subject line simply read “Heya.” She’d gleaned that Kinigar was a male from numerous other posts he’d made—statements like, “I’m the only guy in my class who reads slash fanfics.” He posted a lot (“Postwhore” was the tagline under his avatar) and was fairly popular on the board.
She clicked open the message and read, “Sooo, u met any shapeshifters lately? Seriousleh. Did u really? XD, Kini.”
Margaret chewed her finger, and reread the message. Epic WIN. A guy she sort of admired had taken her post at face value. She read his message again, trying to decide if there was any sarcasm or hidden agenda she wasn’t seeing. It seemed straightforward, and he’d signed it XD, an emoticon for a big grin, so she hit REPLY and typed: “No I have not seen any lately. Once was enough, ya know? *shudders* Have u? heh heh, Goku.”
After hitting SEND, she clicked on Kinigar’s profile, more curious about him now that he’d PM’d her. His profile page opened, displaying his avatar pic, a wildcat’s face in full white-fanged snarl. Reading his stats, she saw that he was sixteen if his birth date could be trusted, and that he was into “skating, swimming, Scandinavian Goth music, manga and anime, sci-fi, horror, cosplay, animals (especially cats), and computers,” which sounded pretty compatible with herself. She smiled and read on. He listed his personal e-mail address and Instant Messenger ID, and his location. Margaret stopped reading. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. His location was listed as Bondi Beach, Australia. Kinigar was an Ozzie.
She immediately hit PM again and typed a new message to him: “Kini, where in Oz is Bondi Beach? How long have u lived there? What do u know about the Dreamtime? Were u hinting about something? Wanna share? *glomps and hugs you* Goku”
Margaret’s chest was thudding. She wondered what he would make of all those questions and if he would be put off. She wasn’t stalking him, after all, it was just that she was so shocked to find somebody from Australia actually responding to her shape-shifter post. She really, really hoped he wouldn’t just blow her off and not answer. With a click she returned to the regular forum thread and looked to see if he was still logged on. Disappointed, she didn’t see his name in the list. Now she really needed a reason to get back on the Internet tomorrow or the next day, to see if he’d answered. Camp could interfere with that because she didn’t have a laptop, and she knew Judy and Lissa didn’t either. Maybe the other girl in the quad would come through.
* * *
“Hey, Margrits!”
Judy and Lissa came through the doorway of one of the bedrooms in their quad suite. Judy gave her a bear hug. “You’re late, so we went ahead and took this room. You and the other girl can have the front one, hope that’s okay.”
Margaret shrugged. “No problem. I’m late ‘cause Mom and Nik are still trying to find a place to park. They let me off at the dorm front door.” She looked around. So this was what college dorm life was like.
During the university’s summer break, Science Camp took over two floors of a co-ed dorm, housing boys on the third floor and girls on the second. The quad suites accommodated two pairs of roommates, who would share a bathroom (shower, no tub) and a tiny kitchenette that held a pantry, half-fridge, sink, and microwave oven. The main access doors for each suite (she’d counted eleven before finding the one assigned to her) opened onto a hallway that ran the length of the dorm.
Margaret went into the front bedroom and took a look around. If you split the small room down the middle, the halves were mirror images except that one wall had the door to the short hallway inside the suite and the opposing wall held a window to the outside world. Otherwise, both sides of the room had a single bed on a heavy wooden frame pushed into a corner, a small student desk with two drawers at the foot of the bed, and bookshelves bolted to the wall over the bed and desk. A computer des
k with Internet hookup took up the space against the wall between the two beds. Two floor-to-ceiling locker-type wardrobes filled in the wall opposite the computer desk. The room was spare and utilitarian, but Margaret had to admit it was a pretty efficient use of a small space intended to accommodate two people and all their belongings.
Nik poked his head in. “Is this your room?” He put Margaret’s suitcase and a cardboard box of books down in the middle of the floor. Alice squeezed past him and put her arm around Margaret’s shoulders.
“Hi girls, how’s everybody? Getting settled in?”
“Yeah, it’s all good.” Margaret allowed herself to be hugged in front of her friends. She was feeling jittery and nervous, but excited. This was different from the other camps she’d attended. It was like being in college for five weeks.
Alice kissed her on the cheek. “Have fun, then. I’ve got the dorm phone number, so I’ll check on you in a few days and see if you want anything. Call us if you need to.”
“Bye, Mom. Thanks, Nik.” She was mentally nudging them out the door.
As soon as they were gone, Margaret joined Judy and Lissa on the floor and pulled out the quad assignment info sheet.
“Wonder where our other quad-mate is,” Judy said, looking the page over.
“What’s her name?” Margaret asked.
“You’re gonna love this: Thomasina Redfern, from Orlando.”
“No way anybody has a name like that. You made it up, right?” They were all laughing.
“Sounds like Thumbelina. I bet she’s some stuck-up rich kid.” Lissa made a face.
“Epic FAIL!” said Judy. They started cracking up.
Margaret was twitching. “I hope not. I gotta live with her for five weeks.”
“She’s the oldest, too,” Judy said, looking at the info page. “She’s fifteen. Me and Lissa are fourteen, and Margrits is the baby.” Sixteen was the age cutoff for Science Camp participants, with the youngest being twelve; most of the college-student counselors were nineteen and older. Margaret noted that the one assigned to their quad was a Biology major named Melissa.
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