Soul Catcher

by Bridger, Leigh

  “Oh, yes, old Crow Walker is hard to surprise. He’s been expecting you for over two hundred years.”

  A bead of sweat crept down my face. “What kind of spirit is he? An ordinary man? Sorry, I don’t really know how to ask this question politely.”

  “Old Crow Walker? An ordinary man?” The pog threw back his dollar-bill head and laughed so hard my eardrums vibrated. “No, he’s a memory keeper.”

  “What’s a—”

  “Oh, you’ll see. Sorry, but it’s time for me to get back inside my home.” He stood up slowly, heavily. The air shimmered with his reflective metallic light and his money music. Money, after all, is irresistible. “I feel naked without my treasures around me.”

  He touched a golden fingertip to my head. “Ka-ching.” then gave Ian the same petting touch. “Ka-ching.” A slot-machine blessing.

  He faded away.

  A little shaken, I looked at Ian. “I wish just once a pog would say, ‘Have a nice day,’ and leave it at that.”

  Ian nodded grimly.

  *

  Grotesque masks stared down at us from the deep shadows of log walls blackened by endless campfires. Their eyes were empty, their mouths open in shrieks. They leered, they howled, they laughed obscenely. Some were made from large gourds, others from carved pieces of wood. One wore a turban made from a hornet’s nest.

  “Booger masks,” Crow Walker drawled, gazing at us over the red-orange flames of his fire pit. The flames seemed to run up the crags of his cheeks. “Faces. Our Enemies. Worn in tha dances. Don’t be’ fraid of ’em. We all wear masks. Our bodies er jist that. Jist to wear an’ throw ’way. Only the soul behind the mask is e-ternal.”

  He returned to smoking his pipe. Long silences punctuated what little conversation we had with him. For all I knew, we had stepped back through time the moment we got off the bike and walked up the hill to his log shanty. Or we’d entered a different dimension. Or we were hallucinating from some secret ingredient in the old-school tobacco he’d tamped into our clay pipes.

  His shanty was three-sided; the night outside was so dark it might be part of the moonless sky. We might be floating in an astral plane, or lost in the middle of deepest space.

  Or fuck, just heading down a mystical rabbit hole with a stoned old man. His skin was leathery, his cheekbones high and gaunt; his nose long and hawked. His head was wrapped in a red turban anchored by a long pin made of bone. Not human bone, I hoped. Small gold hoops pierced his ears from the lobes to the tops. He wore buckskin britches, moccasins, and a long red shirt tied with a beaded belt. He wrapped himself in a plaid blanket that seemed vaguely Celtic.

  We wrapped ourselves in our camping blankets.

  I looked at Ian over my long pipe, for a clue to his opinion of the situation. He cupped the bowl of his own pipe in the crook of one forefinger, drew on it expertly, then gestured with a flick of his eyes toward the white smoke that trickled lazily upward. It joined the smoke of the campfire, wafting toward a small hole in the shanty’s roof. The Zen of air currents, or something.

  Be one with the smoke? All right. I’d chill. Relax. Chilax. Sure.

  “Yo’soul keeps even tha mem’ries you try t’forget,” Crow Walker said. He gestured at the flames, and they died down as if turned low on a gas burner. He passed his hand, palm down, over them, and a silver-gray pool of water took their place.

  I looked at my startled reflection and Ian’s worried one. Our faces were lit by invisible firelight.

  “What d’ya wanta re-member?” Crow Walker drawled.

  I said warily, “We want to know what happened to us when we were known as Ian and Mary Thornton. How did we die? Why? What are we supposed to learn from it, so that our new lives won’t always be doomed?”

  Crow Walker looked at Ian. “That what you wanta ’member, you sure?”

  Ian nodded.

  “Then you’ll live yo’ mem’ries ta-gether.”

  The booger masks shimmered, coming to life. My head swelled with the smoke, the narcotic fear. Ian put a hand on mine, and after a stiff moment I wound my fingers through his. He was the alpha and omega, everything I was or had ever been. Just as I was the beginning and end for him too. Ian said quietly, his voice hoarse with arousal, “Mary-Livia, I also wish for you to remember why you loved me.”

  I bowed my head, wanting him, wishing he were free of the body I hated. I couldn’t see beyond that yet. But we had to know who we were. And why we were drawn back to one crucial, turning-point life.

  Crow Walker pointed at the watery mirror.

  We looked into the past.

  11

  Liver Eater. That’s what I named her. That’s what she was, this deadly demon in a woman’s form who called herself Susannah St. John.

  It was she who brought the pox to Wonaneya town.

  I crouched in the shadows beyond the log house and outbuildings of my father’s trading post. Ian slept soundly in our room there. We hadn’t been married long, and we’d just begun building our cabin near the Talking Rock, on the site the uktena and Bird Woman had counseled me to choose. I’d put Ian under a charm, so he wouldn’t notice me going out alone in the night.

  He didn’t understand my work as a soul catcher. He assumed it was just one more part of my Cherokee religion, and he considered religion a whimsy. Any religion, from either his world or mine. It was hard to convince a man that demons existed when he only looked into shadows to search for me.

  It was a moonless night high in the Cherokee lands of the Appalachians, long before the end of the great Cherokee empire that controlled the southern highlands. In the broad creek valley nearby, campfires burned outside dozens of low huts. Shamans chanted to the spirits to save the sick. People mourned the dead. Ghosts, shocked and grieving at their untimely passage, wandered everywhere I turned. I spent many hours gently urging them to let the wind carry them to the middle realms, where souls consider who to become next.

  A tall, blond woman stepped from one of the small cabins my father offered to visiting traders, especially those bringing wives and children with them. She wore fine silk and petticoats, even here in the wilderness.

  She traveled alone, strangely unafraid of men or beasts. Several weeks ago she had arrived at my father’s trading post with a wagon full of goods to trade for the rubies, sapphires and other stones the people of Wonaneya dug from our secret mountain caves. She wanted to see the caves for herself. She wanted to see the Talking Rock. Everyone told her it was a ghost-rock, a hidden being, but she just laughed.

  My father, a burly Celt who had become as much Cherokee by nature as Irish over the decades among my mother’s clan, would not reveal the gemstone’s locations but agreed to barter with her on behalf of the village. This aloof white woman with her high-pitched British voice might be greedy and ingratiating, but she’d brought many useful things the people wanted—fancy knives and metal pots, brass buttons and glass beads.

  I was wary of her from the start but she charmed everyone else, including Ian. He’d traded her some blacksmithing work on her wagons to get me a beautiful silver gorget. That pretty silver pendant had tricked even me.

  Now I realized a bane was attached, and that bane had pulled a mist over my eyes that kept me from seeing the demon behind Susannah St. John’s smile.

  Until it was almost too late.

  Liver Eater headed up a path that led to the high ridges. She walked fast and with sure feet, as if she could see in the dark. Help me track her, I said to Owl and Fox, two of my most helpful boons. Owl glided from a high tree limb without a sound. Fox led my way up the trail, his bushy tail giving off a soft red glow only I could see. Small hands slipped into mine. “We are here,” an old man’s voice said in Cherokee. “You should not track a demon without all of us going along to keep you invisible.”

  I looked down. Dozens of little people surrounded me. Men and women, old and young. Miniature Cherokees in appearance, only knee-high to me. Bird Woman, my guide and teacher, had sent them.

>   I nodded a silent thanks.

  We followed Liver Eater up the mountain.

  *

  Standing atop a craggy granite bald with only the stars above her, she stripped off her white woman’s bodice, her skirt, her petticoats, her chemise, her shoes, even her jewelry. She unfastened her blonde hair. It curled down her body like yellow tongues, stroking her bare breasts and naked back, licking her skin. She arched her spine and raised her arms to the sky. A harsh purple light slowly grew from the massive rock beneath her feet. It swirled around her, illuminating her and everything around her for a dozen strides in all directions.

  She is calling her banes, Fox said. I squatted with my small troop of boons in the forest, watching through the trees. Fox gestured with his head. See their eyes burn red at the edge of the shadows?

  My stomach twisted. Slowly, dozens of ugly and frightening banes crept or slithered or flew from the darkness. Most were so strange I couldn’t compare them to any living animal; not even in parts. Some reminded me of insects, some of lizards, some of birds, and some of grossly misshapen animals with shaggy fur. Most had dangerous claws and fangs or long, agile tails with sharp tips. Some oozed putrid oils from their skin, dripping and drooling as they moved forward. And some had sexual parts similar to human men and women. Those parts were engorged, ready.

  They gathered around her with eager, upturned red eyes. They shivered and wiggled with anticipation. She lowered her arms to a wide embrace, welcoming them all. The banes wrapped themselves around her legs. They crawled up her body. The entire pulsing, wiggling crowd climbed over each other to reach every inch of her. They sucked and kissed her skin, they licked her breasts, they slid the tips of their tails between her legs, front and back. She parted her lips to let their long, flicking tongues slide inside her mouth. Their spines flexed in quick humping motions.

  She smiled. With her eyes shut and her head drooping back, she let the mass of lecherous, orgasmic beings lower her to the rock with them beneath her, around her, on top of her, inside her. They spread her legs as if her inner body was a feast. Two, three, four five banes burrowed between them at the same time, licking and thrusting. Her body flexed and spasmed. She cried out again and again until she went limp and sighed.

  The creatures licked her clean of their filth and her own juices. They dressed her as she slept, exhausted. Then they crept and slithered and flew back into the shadows. I crouched lower as several swooshed by above my head. I knew how to banish the usual banes; I’d been doing so since childhood. But for once I was glad to be invisible and let them go.

  I shook all over.

  Liver Eater was a major demon, commanding a large, loyal troop of banes. She had stolen a human form to work her evil in the human world.

  And she had come to Wonaneya for no good purpose.

  *

  When the terrible, oozing sores began to speckle my younger sister’s skin I knew Liver Eater was behind it. I blamed myself. If only I hadn’t been fooled by the demon for so long. If only I had come up with a plan to fight back before now.

  Now Cera lay dying. Her face and body were covered in festering sores. The breath rattled in her throat. She lay on a sweat-soaked straw mattress in our father’s log house, clutching her favorite flower, a wild pink orchid. Her golden hands shook with fever. Her long hair, which had always had the prettiest hint of Father’s red Irish in its black Cherokee strands, trailed off the mattress in damp ropes.

  “Would I have made a good witch, Mele?” she asked.

  “A very good one,” I whispered, tears streaking my cheeks.

  “Maybe next time,” she moaned.

  When she died, the pink orchid wilted instantly.

  Our father cried alongside me as we wrapped Cera’s body in a blanket. His name was Hagan MacMahon. I was Mary MacMahon Thornton, known as Mele by the people of Wonaneya. My Cherokee mother was long-dead by then. I had a deep instinct that I lost my mother young in nearly every life. Wherever she was, she must have some reason for leaving me each time, I hoped.

  Ian helped Father carry Cera’s body outside and gently laid it under a tree. Ian held my hand as Father and I sat beside her corpse. My Aunt Red Bird and Uncle Turtle sat with us. “Don’t cry too long for her,” Red Bird soothed. “She’ll be with us again in another life.” Uncle Turtle nodded sagely.

  “Maybe sooner than we wish,” Ian said under his breath. I turned to stare at him. His strong, weathered face had a slight pallor that scared me. Cera wasn’t the only person sick with pox in Wonaneya. The fever and the sores were spreading. What if I lost Ian too? “Don’t you believe we come back in new lives?”

  “Mary,” he said sadly, “’tis not for me to say.”

  “You don’t believe.”

  “Love, I’m not much for religion of any kind. I see naught but the here and now.”

  Father shook his head. “Well, Ian, I believe ’tis true that we return. Though God Himself only knows why. He will no’ allow us to remember who we were before, at least not always. I suppose because there are new lessons to be learned each time, and ’tis up to our hearts to recognize the people we have lost before.”

  Ian loved my father and always treated him with respect. So now he hid his own thoughts and just nodded. I knew what Ian’s silent nods meant. I gripped Ian’s hand harder. “If you ever die, you must try to come back to me. Whether you believe this talk or not. Promise.”

  His face softened. He put an arm around me. “Love, you know I’ll come huntin’ for you. I promise. Will you swear you’ll always be waitin’ for me?”

  “I swear it.”

  Such an easy oath to take.

  I turned my tear-streaked face toward Father, Red Bird and Turtle. A strange sensation came over me, a kind of trance, and in that moment I saw them all differently; I glimpsed faces they had worn in other lives or might wear in lives to come. Faces I didn’t recognize; sometimes the faces of children, meaning they had died very young in those lives.

  I pulled down the blanket that covered Cera just enough to let me see her face. It faded into the image of a pale white woman with pink hair, and then again into a young white girl. When I turned my eyes up to Red Bird and Turtle again I saw an aged white man in a gray uniform, and a weeping white woman; a moment later those images were replaced by a white couple carrying Bibles. Their clothes were so odd—the woman’s dress stopped at her knees, and the man’s coat and trousers were dark with fine gray stripes—that I decided they must be from a distant future.

  But it was my father’s face that made me gasp. His raw-boned, red-bearded Celtic self faded and shifted. I looked at him and saw an African smiling kindly at me. Then the African segued into a pale, strong-jawed white man with thinning brown hair, cut very short. He wore a shirt with a strange emblem over the heart. As I looked closer I realized it was the letter N laid over the letter C. And under the emblem were these mysteries words. TAR HEELS.

  The stranger’s kind face faded away, and once again I saw only burly, redheaded Hagan MacMahon, my father. He gently covered Cera’s face with the blanket again, leaving just the crown of her head exposed. He stroked one big, ruddy hand along her dark, burnished hair.

  “Haste ye back,” he whispered in a heavy Scots brogue.

  Fear crawled through me. It took all my courage to look at Ian again. What faces would I see? Who had he been, and who would he be, and what if none of his many faces meant anything to me?

  But when I looked at Ian, nothing changed.

  Nothing. I saw no other face but the raw-boned Irishman’s I loved right now, heart and soul.

  Why couldn’t I see his history or future? Why didn’t I want to remember him as he had been before this particular life, or glimpse who he would become next?

  *

  “Why can’t I see my husband in other lives?” I asked miserably.

  I sat beside the Talking Rock. Bird Woman and the uktena looked down at me from atop it, as always. My pipe lay unsmoked in my hands. “Because your sou
l has chosen to hide him from you, the uktena hissed. Or you from him. We warned you. He’s a soul hunter.”

  “How can that be? He doesn’t know it . . . ”

  “He has rejected the calling. He senses its doom. He wishes it were not so. And so, he has made himself forget during this life. But his soul never forgets. Whatever happens next is his soul’s fate. And yours.”

  “Does this have something to do with Liver Eater?”

  “Yes. You must kill Liver Eater’s human body,” the uktena said.

  “And banish the demon inside her,” Bird Woman added.

  “I’ve never fought a demon this powerful before.”

  “It will take more than you alone, soul catcher,” the uktena said, its tongue flickering in the shadowy forest air. “You will need your husband’s help.”

  “But Ian doesn’t . . . believe. He isn’t drawn to the spirits. He doesn’t see.”

  “He is a soul hunter, nonetheless. You must show him how to help you. Together you can send this demon away forever.”

  I bowed my head. “He has the pox. I’m so afraid he’ll die. I’m trying every charm I know to keep him alive. But he’s getting sicker.”

  “There is a way to save him—this time. And to fight the demon.”

  The light began to change. The air sparkled and turned white. “What is this?” I asked, afraid.

  “It’s the spirit of the Talking Rock,” Bird Woman explained. “It’s very ancient and very loving. It has known you and your soul hunter through many lives.”

  My skin warmed as the light closed around me and its namesake boulder. Symbols began to glow on the rock. It was covered in them, line atop line of some ancient language. “There are secrets in this writing that only the being of light remembers,” Bird Woman said.

  The light tickled my skin, caressed my face, and smiled inside me—that’s how it felt. It spoke inside me. “Soul catcher,” it whispered. “You still have much to learn, and so does your soul hunter. I will show you a trick. Chip off a piece of my stone. Grind it into powder and mix it into a drink. Give it to your soul hunter before you go to fight the demon. He will be able to go with you and help you, even if he is sick.”