by C. E. Murphy
Distantly, I heard Judy’s drum falter when I laughed, but my own heartbeat was strong, and the spirit animals rumbling to see who got to help Gary made me feel tremendously better. I took a breath, about to speak to them, when I felt a bump against my foot. It wasn’t the same physical ponderousness that had made me open my eyes when the snake appeared. It felt more like the arrival of these spirit animals, a shower of sparks that lit different parts of my body. I looked down to discover a tortoise waiting patiently at my toes. I crouched, smiling as the other animals continued their playful war. The tortoise blinked slowly at me, and it was everything I could do to keep from picking it up and hugging it. I had the idea tortoises weren’t big on hugs. “Thank you,” I whispered to it. It bobbed its head and put one of its front feet on mine, which I took as an invitation to pick it up, carefully.
My hand touched the shining patterns on its shell, and light slammed into me so hard I lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 15
The first thing I noticed was my head hurt so badly it felt like the top was coming off. Blood pounded in my temples hard enough to make me put stacked odds on being upside-down, but I was afraid to open my eyes and find out. Light seared into me from all sides. I was pretty sure if I opened my eyes, I’d discover that my bones would be dark shapes in my lit-up flesh. The air I breathed was hot, much hotter than the Lower World air, and tasted of dryness. Sand, I thought, and my eyes opened without consulting me on the matter.
At first there was nothing to see, just whiteness so intense it made my eyes try to turn around and crawl into my head. Tears streamed down my forehead and into my hair. I was almost certain I heard sizzling as they beaded and hit the ground somewhere below me. Crushing my eyes closed didn’t help any: the light smashed right through my eyelids as if they weren’t even there, prying out all the imagined places of shadow where my vision was trying to hide. I peeled my lashes open in the tiniest squint I could manage.
The light didn’t recede, but after a dozen head-pounding heartbeats my vision adjusted very slightly. It took a long time to get my eyes all the way open. By the time I had, I could feel sunburn setting into my skin, so deep it felt like my bones were burning.
The sky was white with heat, cloudless and stretching to approximately forever, where it ran into a horizon as blindingly white as the ground below me. The sun was too close and much too hot. If it hadn’t been for the fact my hands were tied behind my back, I’d have thought I could touch it.
I was trussed up like a chicken for Sunday dinner. My ankles were bound together and I hung upside-down from what appeared to be the only tree in Creation. It was about twelve feet tall and so extremely dead that I was astounded its bleached branches could hold my weight. The ground, crystals of sand too tired from the weight of the sun to even glisten, lay about six inches above my head. There were tiny indentations directly below me where my tears had hit and evaporated.
“Help?” My throat was already dry and parched. I swallowed nervously, squinting to eye the sun and the horizon. If it was anything like at home, the distance between the two suggested I’d be dead long before night came. I wriggled around in my ropes, earning myself burns on my ankles and wrists, and a slight swing to change the monotony of just hanging there.
SeattleCop Found Dead In Apartment—Suffered From Sun, Rope Burns. I could see the headline. I wondered what Morrison would think. I wondered where the hell I was. I wondered if I could possibly get myself out of it. I wasn’t panicked; the heat had smashed panic right out of me and pushed me well into numb. But there had to be something I could do before the sun cooked my brain for good. It’d be embarrassing to die here in the white desert without even trying to get out of it.
Start with what I knew. I closed my eyes, not that it did any good against the light, to help myself focus.
I knew I was hanging upside-down on the verge of horrible death by dehydration, according to the backs of my eyelids. “Goddamn it,” I croaked, and opened my eyes again to stare at the expanses of white. One baked crystal gleamed at me. I wondered briefly if it was salt, not sand. Because that made it all better somehow.Shut up and concentrate, Joanne.
My vision started doing interesting things, swimming in and out as it tried to make depth out of featureless grains of sand. I listened for my heartbeat; last time I’d been in a desert of the mind, I’d been dying and my heartbeat was a painfully slow drum. But no: it was bumping along steadily, pounding in my ears and now making me notice the headache all over again. That was probably a good sign.
Choice. The word whispered itself to me. I had a worried moment of wondering whether I was hearing voices or if my own tiny mind had come up with that direction all by itself. After another moment I decided it didn’t matter, as long as I got out of here. If I continued to hear voices, I’d thank them nicely for pointing me in the right direction, and then get medication.
One of the fundamental concepts of shamanism was choice: choosing to believe, choosing to heal, choosing to accept. Once, choosing to accept something that someone else had forced on me had allowed me the power to change it and escape. I let my eyes close again and began the task of acceptance.
It turned out hanging upside-down from a bleached tree in the desert wasn’t the best place to start on the whole acceptance thing. Time wore on and the sun kept burning me. I swallowed on a dry throat more times than I could count, trying to work up a little moisture. Whether I managed to accept my position or if the part of me that held on to disbelief simply dried up and blew away, eventually I started to feel as if I belonged there, the Hanged Joanne in the desert. There was a Tarot card like that. The Hanged Man, not the Hanged Joanne. I remembered Billy enthusiastically telling me about Tarot in general a couple years earlier, while I rolled my eyes and generally behaved like a jerk. I reminded myself to apologize to him—again—if I got out of this. Then I spent a while wondering what it was that the Hanged Man signified, anyway.
Once in a while I tried to will the tree to fall over, or the rope to stretch and put me on the ground. I was starting to feel very at home there, like a nineteenth-century outlaw waiting for the coyotes to come nibble his eyeballs out.
Coyotes!
My eyes popped open. “Coyote! Hello? Help? Look, I know I never call, I never write, but I’ve been kind of busy the last few days.” I wasn’t in daily contact with my spirit guide anyway, but since last time I’d ended up in a desert—one completely unlike this one—he’d been the one to get me out, I figured it was probably my best shot. “I got a teacher!” I yelled. “That’s a good sign, right?” The desert swallowed the shouts up without effort. “Hello? Coyote?”
There was no answer whatsoever, and I started to wonder if doing a spirit quest would wake my spirit guide up to my predicament. While I wasn’t exactly in a sweat lodge, the out-of-body surreality surrounded me in spades, which seemed like a good place to start. For a few seconds I got distracted by how many levels removed from my body I actually was, then decided down that path lay madness. Assuming I wasn’t already totally nuts. Either way, I certainly wasn’t going to get back to myself by hanging around in a desert wondering when the hero was going to show up and rescue me.
After another ten seconds, I realized I was holding my breath and waiting for Morrison to interrupt my trance, as if my thoughts could conjure him.
Another ten seconds after that I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or horribly disappointed that they hadn’t. I sighed and closed my eyes, trying out a crooked half smile at myself. I could afford that here, somewhere so deep and private that nobody but me was ever going to see it. My shoulders relaxed and I sighed, drifting past caring whether or not my skin was burned to the bone or my wrists were numb from the ropes around them. My mouth was too dry to make any saliva at all. When I swallowed it felt like double-sided tape closing together and trying to pull apart again. My shoulders relaxed again, falling another centimeter toward my ears. If I could just take a little nap, it’d turn out all right, whethe
r Morrison rode in to save the day or not.
If my inner self had any sense of dignity at all, it would allow my brain to cook to a crisp rather than let me wake up, go to work, and face Morrison with the knowledge that he’d featured heavily as the White Hat in my damsel-in-distress fantasies.
Someone sucked all the air out of the desert. I inhaled and began coughing, the air suddenly so much hotter that it was like sticking my head in a furnace. Tears rolled down my forehead again as I pried my eyes open. The whiteness of the sun and earth was no longer what I had to struggle against. Now the heat itself stuck my eyelids together and pressed my eyeballs farther back into my head. I whimpered, a genuinely pathetic sound, and the heat added thunder.
It was a physical presence, pushing into my body with a rumble I couldn’t even hear, only feel. I couldn’t breathe. Spots swam through my vision, black and red boxes with sharp edges like pain. The air itself had malicious intent, squeezing down on me. Lightning split the empty white sky, a bolt of brightness against the already impossibly bright world. My eyes ached, but the heat had seared away the last of my tears. I tried to think of last words, sure that the thunder and air and lightning would crush me into lasting oblivion.
“Well, fuck this,” I croaked. A final show of defiance would have to do. Go, Joanne.
A coyote trotted out of the desert.
It wasn’t my coyote.
This one took up more space than my coyote, although he wasn’t, at an upside-down glance, any bigger. When he breathed, the air seemed to expand around him, shimmering like a heat mirage. Every piece of fur on his body gleamed and bristled, like they’d each been individually dipped in gold and bronze and copper. The play of muscle under the gold-dipped fur was incredibly precise, as if every bunch and release was calculated and thought-out ahead of time. Coyotes, with their long legs and skinny bodies, weren’t animals I thought of as beautiful.
This one was.
The air he brought with him was cooler, just within the upper ranges of tolerable. He sat down six inches from my head and I gasped in a grateful breath, never once thinking he was there to rescue me. It was probably a little late to judge somebody who’s already been hanged, but the coyote was jury, judge and executioner. His eyes were gold-flecked, stars in blackness. He felt a little like Cernunnos, and more like the thunderbird. I could only see the surface, but if I relied on the knots in my belly instead of my eyes, I could feel that he tapped into something much larger, part of the raw primal force that made up the universe.
“Oh, for sweet pity’s sake,” I said in a normal enough voice that the shock of it sent racking coughs through my body. When I finally undoubled—and doubling up to cough while suspended by your feet is not something to be recommended—the coyote was watching me with his head cocked very slightly to the side. Exactly like my coyote, only much, much bigger, metaphysically speaking. “I honor you,” I grated. My throat tasted like I’d swallowed a cup full of iron filaments. It was a flavor I associated with running, and it made bile splash in my stomach.
Coyote tilted his head the other way, looking amused. I wrinkled my eyes shut, trying to think of what I’d said, and if it had been wrong. “You honor me?” I tried. “How can I honor you?” I opened one eye. Coyote still looked amused. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, what do you want? Nobody ever gave me lessons in talking to archetypes, but honestly, I respect the shit out of you and I’d really like to go home now, please.”
Coyote barked and snapped his teeth, which looked very large and very white and very much like Little Red Riding Jo should stay far away from them. I swore I could hear the dried earth crackling and breaking apart when he snapped his teeth together. “I’ve already been eaten once recently. You don’t have to do it again. Really.” I cranked my head up, wondering if the thunderbird might fall out of the sky and rescue me.
It didn’t. I let my head drop back down and sighed. At least with Coyote for company I’d regained some equilibrium. “What do you want from me?” I asked again, more subdued.
Coyote—I was going to have to find something else to call my coyote; after this, calling him Coyote would be like calling a mountain lion “kitty”—Coyote leaned forward until my eyes crossed, and put the slope of his forehead against mine.
Fragments of memory shot through my brain, sharp as shrapnel.
Sara Buchanan’s angry eyes, blaming me for a decision that already terrified me.
A desolate garden coming to life.
A dark-haired woman with a silver choker and a ready laugh.
Dusty highway roads stretching in front and in back of us as far as I could see. My father, slender-shouldered, quiet and thoughtful, tapping out a tune against the steering wheel. I didn’t know where we were going, didn’t recognize where we might’ve been. The story of my childhood, never belonging, in a more literal sense than most lonely kids feel. A bitterness old enough to feel tired filled my throat. I turned my head away from Coyote, dry spitting the taste of resentment from my mouth.
The images blasted on, undeterred by breaking contact with Coyote.
A baby boy, his sister too small to live.
Getting off a plane in Dublin, searching for features that might be at all like mine. Not finding them, even when the mother I didn’t know touched my arm and asked, “Siobhàn?”
SIOBHÀN
I flinched so hard my whole body cramped up. My name thundered through the recesses of my mind again, echoing and slamming against the inside of my head. I doubled again, trying to twist my arms around somehow to protect myself from the huge sound. My ownname tore at me, pulling images from beneath my skin, faster, like tenterhooks with no regard for pain.
—a tunnel of darkness leading into somewhere I was afraid of, astral lights bluing the path—
—a beautiful man, high-cheek boned and grim-mouthed standing with a gun to my head—
—a horned god standing over me, sword lifted for a killing blow—
—Morrison, white with pain, shouting at me—
—Gary grinning over his shoulder at me, pulling away from the airport in his cab, apparently driving by use of the Force—
—a thin scar on my right cheek, running from my eye to just below the corner of my mouth—
—tearing across flat earth in Petite, the speedometer clocking over a hundred and forty—
—a banshee’s head held in my hand, dangling from its hair—
—bone-wearying exhaustion, like sleep had come to weigh on me with all its strength—
—a baby boy, his sister too small to live—
—a diploma, the name I’d abandoned written on it: Joanne Walkingstick—
WALKINGSTICK.
I began to scream.
—a race against the Wild Hunt—a snake’s bright black eyes, staring at me—a kiss I’d waited years to taste—a graveyard with a new marker, and me on my knees beside it—another grave—another—a bewildered child wailed and flung herself at coffin-bearing men—me, squalling and waving angry red fists in the air, a man’s brogue saying, “And there she is, our wee Siobhàn, welcome, alanna, welcome,” as he lifted me into the air—and another voice, one I knew somewhere in my bones, saying, “Already?” before my own voice, cracked with age or pain, replied, “It had to happen sometime,” and coldness settled over me—a dark-haired teenage boy, expression neutral and calm—a cauldron bubbling with the stench of death—a raven with a woman’s eyes—a mantis, preying—a baby boy, his sister too small to live!
“STOP IT!” My eyes flew open and I thrust Coyote away with everything I had, all my heart put into the rejection. He exploded in a burst of white that seared my eyeballs, pain so intense I thought I could feel the nerves sizzling and spitting into decay. I flew backward from the force of the blast, driven farther by the strength of my own pain and fury, and slammed back into the Lower World so hard I jolted over backward. The snake that encircled me lifted its head and spat with annoyance, then slithered out from under me to coil itself tall beside Judy.
My eyes burned as I sat up again, holding my head and squinting at them. The light still dazzled my eyes, and the two of them were inversed, their black eyes glowing white. Judy’s skin was black and almost featureless, like shadows had come to live on it, and the snake’s scaled hide spun between purples and dark greens. I swallowed down nausea and turned my head away, looking for something that was a normal color.
The sky provided; it was deep cerulean, almost too dark for nature, but less disturbing than Judy’s shadowy skin. Only when my gaze went to the sun did I realize that it was black, too, and that in the Lower World the sky should be crimson, not blue. I pressed the heels of my hands over my eyes and shuddered. “I have to go back.” My voice still sounded parched to my own ears, and I didn’t want to look at Judy to see if her expression said I sounded odd to her, too. “…snake, will you come with me?” I didn’t know how to address it, and I didn’t want to look at its swimming patterns, either. It hissed with ill-concealed annoyance, but slithered forward and climbed up my body to wrap around my shoulders. “Thank you,” I whispered, grateful to not have to look at it. My hands pressed against my eyes were making sparks that reminded me: “Where’s—”
I didn’t finish the question before I felt the presence I was looking for. The tortoise appeared behind my eyelids again, its colors bright and proper, unlike everything around me. “There you are,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
