Shadow People

by Bevill, C. L.

Tuesday, July 15th

  The willies (slang, origin unknown, probably 1930s American) - a case of extreme nervousness

  “Your mother,” Will said uncertainly. It was the first time Penelope had really noticed that he was unsure. It was as if he truly hadn’t considered the possibility that she was not alone.

  “That’s right, cowboy,” she said. Penelope let the heavy linen curtains fall back into position. “I really do have a mother. I won’t say that it’s not my fault for getting her into this, but I will say you’re not helping.”

  Will’s eyes went to the floor. He was thinking about her words. He glanced at Jeremy’s cell phone. “And Frederick Clark?”

  “Freddy courts my mother,” she said. “He took her away the night I first ran into you at my parking garage. You see, the seatco smelled out my scent and followed it to the one place I’m most at when I’m not at the apartment. I thought it was something else. Something not magical, but I was wrong.”

  “The scent it followed was where your mother lives,” he finished.

  “Yes, that’s right. Freddy took her away, as far away as he could without tying her up and putting her over his shoulder.” Penelope’s tone went a little grim. “She’s a little stubborn.”

  “A family trait,” Will said bleakly. He stared at the four identical scratches down the side of her face and wished that he wasn’t hearing the things that he was hearing. It would have made it much easier. But Penelope was, after all, human, and she wasn’t all a set of open contrasts of black and white. As a matter of fact, she was so much more than that.

  Penelope shrugged. “But your brother,” she said, “seems to be more than stubborn.”

  “What do you mean?” he said slowly.

  “I mean Anthony is determined to get the Tears of the Spirit back into his sick hands,” she said. “I suppose you know that. Isn’t that why you showed me the things you did?”

  “I showed you what you needed to see to convince you,” Will said blackly. “Anthony didn’t start off evil. But by God, he is now, and he intends on taking the rest of us with him. You’re not one of the Enumclaw people, but you had to know what you’re up against.”

  Penelope took the piece of burnt bone out of her pocket and examined it minutely. “And Nahkeeta, is she still around?”

  “The fire that Anthony set all but destroyed her. However, she’s cursed to live forever. Her bones speak infrequently now.” His dark eyes studied the bone in her hand. “That she gave a piece of herself speaks highly of your value.”

  “It looks like bone, but it’s more than that,” she said. “It hurt Anthony in the vision. It hurt him worse than anything else I could have done.”

  “It’s powerful magic.”

  “And I’m the one who’s going to use it,” she stated.

  “Yes.”

  “Not you,” she added.

  “I’m one of the chosen few who protect the gemstone. Once it was stolen from my grandfather’s home, then it was up to me to find it and recover it. It took many years to discover what Anthony was about, but the evidence was there.”

  “Your wife, Merri, was transformed into something,” she said, remembering the events in the vision and the sting on her cheek.

  “She sought more power than I had, than any normal human has,” he said harshly. “It turned against her. The thing that has my former wife’s body is not my wife, and she can never return. She’s dead.” His last statement was ruthlessly unemotional.

  “I think she understood her error at the end,” Penelope said unhappily. “She wasn’t happy with what Anthony did to her. She knew that he was betraying her.” Understanding was grimmer than reality. “He did it because she was yours.”

  Will didn’t respond and she went on. “And Anthony unleashed more shadow people to this world, opening a door from the underworld and making a deal with them. My mother would call that a devil’s deal.”

  “Anthony isn’t concerned for his soul,” Will said.

  “No, I guess not. Then he made another covenant with the seatco, the ones who still remain in your mountains.” She shuddered despite the fact that the room wasn’t cold.

  Will said, “A few remain. Mostly they don’t come in contact with the outside world. Sometimes they get called other things; they’re often mistaken for Sasquatch. They know what will happen if too many outsiders vanish in the forest. They’ve been content to remain in hiding until recently. But Anthony has reminded them of their heritage.”

  “The end of this world,” she said. “The end of the third world. And bringing about the beginning of the fourth one, where he will be a god, I suppose.”

  “Something like that,” Will said. “But Anthony’s a fool if he thinks the things he’s made his bargains with will hold up their sides. After it’s all said and done, he’ll be much the same as the rest of mankind, and it won’t be pretty.”

  They both stood very still in the room. The sound of the nearby interstate traffic punctuated their silence. Finally, she said, “I need to go. I don’t think you can be with me.”

  Will considered that statement. “Anthony has your mother. That’s why he has this Frederick Clark’s phone. That’s why you’re scared.”

  Penelope shut her eyes. “My mother needs my help. She doesn’t need to be a casualty.”

  “If you weren’t a thief…” Will said, and Penelope’s eyes snapped open.

  “If I weren’t a thief, then I wouldn’t be involved in this? If I weren’t a thief, then Anthony would still have the stone and be on his way to what? Bringing in the next world in a whole big whopping way? If I weren’t a thief, then my mother wouldn’t be in the hands of a psychopath and his crew of evil things from beyond the grave?” Penelope spread out her hands in a questioning manner. “Which one of those is right?”

  Will didn’t answer.

  “My father never paid social security in his life. He also didn’t pay taxes. He didn’t pay the government a dime more than he had to. Consequently, my mother was left with a little house, a car with payments, and a headstrong daughter.” Penelope snarled out matter-of-fact statements like a set of vehement curses. “When the worst thing happened that could have happened I could have walked away, but goddammit I love my mother, and I did the only thing I know how to do in order to make it all right for her. I took from the people who deserved to be taken from and who wouldn’t be starving for the theft. Then I gave it to the one person who deserves more…my mother.” When Penelope realized all that she had let out, she rapidly clamped her mouth shut and crossed her arms protectively over her chest.

  “What was the worst thing that could have happened?” Will asked calmly.

  Penelope’s neck twitched suddenly.

  “What…was…the worst…”

  She interrupted his slow demand for information. “Mama lost her eyesight. When she was all of forty-five years old. She had to re-learn everything. How to live. How to exist. How to read and how to write. And money, which had been scarce, got a whole lot more scarcer. Next time, do your homework, Dr. Littlesoldier. You want a heroine to save the world, understand there aren’t any left. I’m not one, and I can’t magically become one.”

  As Will took that last statement in, she went to the closet and retrieved the plastic bag used for dry cleaning by the hotel. Then she went to the pile of dirty clothes and stuck the clothing inside. She deliberately tried to change the direction of their exchange. “Do you know why Anthony’s in Dallas?”

  “Do you remember the story I told in the museum?” he asked as a response.

  “The story of Magic Elk and Nahkeeta,” Penelope said. “How can I forget it? Having seen every pertinent detail of the story up close and personally, it’s kind of burned onto my frontal lobes.” She considered. “Except that I haven’t met Magic Elk, seeing how he’s been dead and gone from this Earth for X amount of years. You don’t always get what you want.”

  “That’s one of them, anyway,” he said wryly. “I specifically mean the l
ong quest that Magic Elk took. He went through the mountains and encountered the seatco.”

  “He kicked their butts, and he didn’t even have a Thunderbird,” she said.

  Will lifted his eyebrows, and she shook her head, adding, “Never mind. Go on.”

  “He went to the great cratered lake,” Will said. “There he met the witch.”

  “Then he traveled a whole lot and met the ghost of his wife who warned him.”

  “By the Great Salt Lake and down into the desert,” Will said carefully, “he came to a vast canyon where the shadow people had taken refuge in the tremendous gloom of the walls.”

  Penelope suddenly nodded. “The Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Crater Lake, that’s in Oregon, too, right? Then there was the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Magic Elk went south into Arizona. The story’s like a travelogue.”

  “And he went further and further. Magic Elk traveled to the spot where a great sky god had fallen from the heavens.”

  “And a chief was there already protecting the pieces because he had been told by the Great Spirit that the pieces could help destroy the third world,” Penelope said. “But from the time he left the Grand Canyon and traveled south, there aren’t any oral clues about his eventual destination.”

  “Magic Elk went south, but he also headed toward the east, where the sun rises every day,” Will reiterated. “If you look at a map, he went toward Texas.”

  “But there’s a great meteorite hole in Arizona,” Penelope said.

  “But Anthony isn’t in Arizona,” Will said. “He’s in Dallas. The house on Durfrene Row is merely a base for his operations.”

  “Why not a house in the ‘burbs? Why not a desolate farmhouse?”

  “That house is sick with death,” Will said cryptically.

  It took Penelope a moment to understand what Will was saying to her. “The people who were murdered there years before,” she said slowly. “Anthony…wants that?”

  Will nodded. “He wants their protection. The evilness that permeates the house aids his endeavors. When I watched the place, pedestrians hurry by the house. And although it’s a through street, I’m betting that once someone drives by, they unconsciously avoid doing it again. The street is almost as dead as the house.”

  “It made me more than uncomfortable,” Penelope admitted. She didn’t want to confess that her inner voice had been screaming at her to leave it alone. She also didn’t want to divulge that she was desperate for the money to pay for Jessica’s latest rounds of treatment and the quarterly costs of Cedars on the Ridge. She clutched the plastic bag tightly in one hand and said brightly, “Well, this really fills in some of the blanks. Anthony is looking for the place where a meteor hit and some more pieces of the sky god. So why does he need the Tears of the Spirit?”

  “The powers that are one with nature, are the spirit world to Native Americans,” Will explained. “The power is manifest in every part of this world and every part of the next. Anthony doesn’t just want to end this world; he wants to destroy each and every remaining bit of it, down to the tiniest microbe of dirt.”

  “And he needs as much of the meteorite as he can get?”

  “Yes and no,” Will said carefully. “The stone is connected to the heavens. It really is a piece of a sky god come to Earth. Anthony won’t just end this world, he’ll crack open the doorway to the next so that it can never be closed. Ghosts will roam, both the good and bad. The evil spirits will descend and tear every living thing apart. It will be a bloodbath of biblical magnitude, an apocalypse in which only the strongest souls will survive.”

  Both of them were silent. Penelope stood by the bed. Will stood by the desk. After a minute she said, “I have to go now. I’m taking the Bronco. You’re not going to stop me.”

  Will smiled grimly. “I’m going with you, and no, not the car, we can take the tribe’s plane. After all, that’s how I got here well in advance of you.”

  *

  They took the Ford Bronco to the local municipal airport where the Enumclaw’s tribal plane was waiting. The tribe’s plane was not a little Cessna but a jet with the tribe’s official logo on the side complete with lightning striking downward in colorful display. “The name actually means Thunder People,” Will said regretfully, “but there’s not many symbols for thunder.”

  A pilot and co-pilot were waiting. The plane was already fueled up and ready to leave. All they had to do was to climb in, and when the door shut, the plane started to move. Penelope looked at Will accusatorily. “You were going to take me to Dallas anyway.”

  Shrugging Will settled into a seat. “Dallas and an approximate circumference around it of about a hundred to two hundred miles.”

  “Because you think that Anthony’s found the crater,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Before you stole the key to his plan, he was already moving out of the Durfrene Row house. It was fairly empty.”

  Penelope had noticed the owners’ and workers’ absences but had chalked it up to not starting renovations yet. The black Chevy Suburbans would leave and then not come back for days. “You didn’t follow him to the site,” she stated.

  “The Tears of the Spirit was at the house,” he said plainly, implying that he didn’t need to find the site where a meteorite had landed hundreds of years before. “Until you took it.”

  “Well, it’s right here,” she said sarcastically. She patted the medicine pouch. “It hasn’t vanished, and Anthony doesn’t have it.”

  There was a folded-up newspaper lying on the seat next to Will. He buckled his seatbelt and nodded his head at her, taking the newspaper into his hand. “Sit down.”

  After Penelope sat down in the seat opposite where Will was sitting, she looked at him expectantly.

  Will handed the paper to her. “Yesterday, something happened. It lends credence to one of the old myths about creation and the end of the world. I might be the expert on Native American mythology and legends, but Anthony knows each one just as well as I do.”

  Unfolding the paper she glanced down at the front page. It was The Salt Lake City Tribune. The headline story was about American troops being killed by a car bomb in the Middle East. The one just below that was the one that Will indicated. Four children had been kidnapped at gunpoint at a day care center in Dallas, Texas. An AMBER alert had been issued. Just after sunset a masked gunman, a very large man who might have been disfigured, had burst into a day care center that specialized in late night pick-ups for working parents and taken four children. All were under the age of eight years old. He had driven a black Chevy Suburban and had a female accomplice. Her description was given as well. It was Merri, just as surely as the masked gunman was the seatco.

  Chilled breath hissed through Penelope’s clenched teeth. The plane continued to taxi its way to the end of the runway. The pilot came on and said, “Dr. Littlesoldier and Miss Quick, we’ll be taking off just as soon as we make it through a short queue. About five minutes.”

  “Why does Anthony need children?” she said wonderingly.

  “Read the story at the bottom,” Will said gently.

  Penelope flipped the newspaper over to see the bottom half of the front page. On the very bottom was a short piece about a total lunar eclipse. It would take place on Friday, July the 18th and would be the last complete eclipse of the moon for another five years. Her eyes came up to his. “What does it mean?”

  “It means Anthony not only has found the site but that he’s preparing for the ceremony. It’s a special ceremony using the souls of the utterly innocent to initiate the black magicks that will bring about the end of the third world. We believe in the six directions of the Earth.”

  “Six directions,” she repeated. “North, south, east, west, and what?”

  “The bottom and the top,” he informed her.

  “But he only took four children,” she said, perplexed.

  “And he’s got your mother and he probably intends on using you as well.”r />
  “I wouldn’t say my soul was innocent,” Penelope tried to joke, but it came out weakly.

  “Innocence is a state of mind,” Will said. “It’s not about white meanings.” Suddenly, he realized what Joseph John had been trying to tell him all along. It wasn’t only that Penelope had to learn how to trust Will, but that Will had to trust Penelope. He had been tainted by the idea that she was a thief. Thievery was wrong and frowned on by the people of the Enumclaw tribe. But they all laughed and cheered the mischievous ways of the legends of Coyote. Coyote was the first to steal and take that which did not belong to him. Coyote, in his errant ways, taught important lessons to the people. Not all of his lessons were on the up and up. Penelope’s words about taking from those who deserved it came back to him. “What did you mean when you said that you took from people who wouldn’t be starving for it?”

  Penelope took a breath. She refolded the newspaper and settled it in her lap. “I stole from drug dealers, crooked individuals, white collar thieves, and anyone who could afford to be nicked.” She hesitated and added, “Never from anyone who couldn’t. Not even once. It was the way my father worked. It was the only way I would.”

  Will wanted to laugh, but he didn’t think that Penelope would understand why he was doing so. She was like Coyote. He wanted to grab her around her shoulders and kiss her. An honorable thief. What better representative could there be for Coyote on this Earth?

  On the opposite side of the aisle, Penelope wondered what her mother was thinking. Jessica Quick was a good woman; she was a woman who abhorred lies and had never truly cottoned to Jacob’s chosen trade. But she had approved of his targets and often had input into the worst of them. It was because of her mother’s value system that Penelope had kept her own nocturnal activities hidden from Jessica. All of this would seem like a horrid nightmare to Jessica, and who knew what Anthony was allowing his supernatural cronies to do to her mother.

  Penelope shuddered and looked out the window just as the pilot increased the engine’s speed in anticipation of takeoff.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine