Suddenly the silence of the church was shattered by a woman’s shout. As he whirled around to see what was wrong, a silver-sharp needle of pain lanced through his head. He dropped to one knee, hands going to his skull, as if they could harness the agony somehow, keep it confined and control it.
He froze in terror, quite certain he was losing his mind for he had heard three words shouted at him and yet the church around him was still empty. The voice had come from somewhere else it seemed to him, somewhere distant as if a small portal had opened in the air, or a figure in a painting, static for years had suddenly come to life and cried out loud. The echo was still there, the repercussion moving the air around him.
A woman’s voice. His woman’s voice. He knew it, as he knew the shape of his own hands or the feel of his skin against his bones. She had an American voice. So had he lived here in the US when he had disappeared? He clenched his fists on his knees. So many questions and never any damn answers. It was like trying to hold snowflakes in his hand, a mere touch and they melted away to invisibility. But just the fact that he’d heard her voice and knew it was her voice gave him hope.
That small weed of hope shrank almost immediately. It was the way it often happened for him as the reality of his situation sunk in once again. He didn’t know this woman, he didn’t know if she was real or what she looked like. How long would a woman wait? If there were children they might not remember him, not to mention him remembering them. There would be other concerns and considerations for her and life would and did move on, it was just the nature of it. What if one day he found his way home, only to find there was no longer a place for him and that his empty spot had been filled by another man?
A rush of jealousy so primal that it took his breath away flooded through his body. He stood up and backed away from the candles and sat down on the nearest pew. He put his hands to his head and fought to take in a full breath. It had been a while since he’d had a rush of emotion this strong and it overwhelmed him.
He thought of his memory like a small black box which was bound with a padlock and fine chains and until he found the key to that lock, until he could break those chains he would remain lost. There was the fear, too, that if he ever did find the key and open the box, he might not like what came tumbling out. What if he had been a bad person? It seemed to him that most good men didn’t get shot and beaten.
And yet, right now, in this moment with the woman’s voice still echoing inside him he would have given anything to remember who he was, even if that man wasn’t a good man.
Three words—still thrumming through his blood and making his chest tight—wait for me.
When he came out of the church the Banshee was standing on the stairs like she had been waiting for him. He smiled at her and she fell into step beside him. He was glad to see she wasn’t barefoot. She had the warm wool stockings and boots on that he’d given her during their first meeting.
He offered her his arm and to his great surprise she took it and they walked for a little way until they came upon a bench which had been placed beneath an oak many years ago, for the tree had grown around it and swallowed parts of it. She pointed one of her long, bony fingers at the bench and he nodded. She wanted to sit, and his coat was warm enough to stand the chill of the night for a time.
He realized that the conversation he had begun in the church was still going on in his head. He wished he knew with whom he was conversing. So, to this stranger who seemed to dwell inside those dark spaces where his memory hid he said silently, “I will wait for you. Wait for me too, if you can.”
As they sat snow began to fall, just lightly at first, delicate stars landing on their heads and shoulders and hands. The woman they called the Banshee looked up, the stars landing on her face, touching her lips and catching in her eyelashes.
“Magic,” she said, her voice cracked from such a long time of silence.
“Aye, magic,” he agreed, looking up into the airy pathways between the snow, pathways that ran all the way to the stars. He was startled a moment later when her hand touched his and then he held hers, one lost human being with another, holding hands while stars fell all around them.
Chapter Fifty-one
A Glimpse of the World Before
March 1977
“FIXING HER FLOOR? MAN, I have heard it called a lot of things but fixing the floor ain’t one of them.”
“I really am just fixin’ the floors,” Mick said with some exasperation, though he knew Eddy was unlikely to believe him. Hell, he wouldn’t believe him if he wasn’t the one experiencing it. He lived with Bridget more or less full time at this point. Eddy knew what she looked like and didn’t believe any man had the sort of fortitude required to stay out of her bed when it was so willingly offered. His relationship with Bridget was certainly complicated, but not in the ways that Eddy and any other red-blooded male might think.
He stopped as they came up over a rise and a small valley filled with redwoods revealed itself below them. The tall trees were wreathed in tendrils of the morning’s fog and Mick took a deep breath of the cool air and then abruptly gasped.
“Ribs still bothering you?” Eddy asked, coming up beside him and looking out over the valley with the inscrutable look he wore most often.
“Aye, I expect they will for a bit. They aren’t broken but they are most definitely bruised.”
He’d fought a man out of Oakland three nights back and he had only won by a whisker, or a really lucky punch to the man’s chin that finally took him out. He’d taken a fair beating before that and he was still feeling it.
“Man’s spirit animal must be a wolverine; he was fierce.”
“Aye, I don’t need remindin’ of it,” Mick said. He sat down on a big rock that overlooked the valley. His knee felt like it was on fire and he knew he couldn’t go any further for now. Eddy on the other hand hadn’t even broken a sweat. He looked as cool as a cucumber and like he could climb for another twenty miles if he wanted to.
“You could give it up—the fighting,” Eddy said, his tone casual though the look in his eyes was not. Mick knew what he thought of the fighting. Eddy believed he was either going to kill someone one of these days or get killed himself. He was probably right, but Mick wasn’t ready to give it up just yet.
Eddy settled on the ground across from him, his back up against the trunk of an aspen and his legs stretched out in front of him. Wherever Eddy was he always seemed comfortable, like he could sleep on a tree bough and wake up refreshed the next morning.
“Have ye got a spirit animal?” Mick asked. He was hit with a sudden longing for a cigarette, and wondered if he’d smoked back in that life before. He couldn’t remember ever wanting one prior to this moment.
Eddy sighed. “Yeah, I have a spirit animal. There’s a story to it if you’ve got the patience to hear it.”
“Oh aye, I’ve got the patience.”
“Bastard,” Eddy said, “you don’t need to sound quite so gleeful.”
“Ha, I knew it was a good story. Get to tellin’ it, man.” He moved down to the ground and put his back against the stone, easing his leg out in front of him.
“Throw me a beer, you know a story needs a wet throat.”
Mick reached into the pack he’d brought up the mountainside and took out a bottle of beer and a wax paper-wrapped pile of sandwiches. He tossed the bottle to Eddy who caught it neatly out of the air. He took out a second bottle for himself and passed a sandwich over to Eddy.
Eddy took a bite and then a swallow of his beer as he looked out over the valley. Mick waited patiently, for it was a fine day and there was no hurry to anything.
“I always thought my spirit animal would be a wanderer, you know a lone wolf or a cougar, something that covers a lot of territory, the kind of animal that has itchy feet. Just like me, just four legs that keep on moving, instead of two.”
“I’m guessin’ that’s not the case,” Mick said.
“No, it sure isn’t. I was up in Maine one spring,
visiting an auntie. It was still a little chilly, everything wet after that big spring thaw, everything coming back to life. Maine is huge, but on the eastern side it is all about the water. And I am talking about water, man, the Mother of us all, that water, the water that wants the moon and surges through women’s bodies. The water that birthed us all and keeps us alive still. There’s a pull there that’s hypnotic, especially in the spring. We all move to the tides and the pull of this grand fucking world in the spring. I’m talking about that kind of water, that kind of night—you know what I’m saying?”
“Aye, I think I do,” Mick said, because he did. He knew what it was to feel the earth surge with life beneath his feet, when it caused the blood to move quick and fleet as if it sparked with an interior fire which was fully connected to the outer world and the things that ran beneath that world.
“I could hear frogs everywhere. To me that’s the real sound of spring, peepers singing their song, doing their thing in the ponds and creeks. Some nights it would get so loud a man couldn’t sleep, just that crazy song they sing like they are gonna burst with it. A man can’t sleep on those kind of nights anyway. I went outside, because since Vietnam I can’t breathe inside so well and I need to get out and have the stars over my head and the earth between my toes in order to really get a lungful and calm myself.
“I just thought I’d amble down the road a ways, maybe until I got tired. The moon was high and on its half, like some big slice of peach up there in the sky, an’ I could see my way just fine. I’d gone a fair way along when suddenly I feel this presence behind me, a big presence, not some little fox peeping out of the shrubs at me or anything, but something really big. You can tell the difference when a big apex predator has his eyes on your bag of bones. A bear, a mountain lion, or another man.”
“Aye.” He did know, he didn’t think it was bear or mountain lion that had hunted him, but another man, or maybe men.
“And then I see a shadow crossing over mine, a huge shadow and it’s moving. I feel like the shadow alone could swallow me whole, and man, let me tell you, I saw some bad stuff in ‘Nam, but I have never been as scared as I was with that shadow behind me. I started to run, but it kept pace with me. When I picked up speed so did it. I could hear its feet slapping against the ground, in the way that webbed feet sound. It’s a wet sound and it’s unmistakable. I’m moving faster and faster an’ it is too. I was terrified and exhilarated at the same time; it was kind of an uncomfortable mix.”
“Did ye turn around an’ look at it?” Mick asked, shivering like the shadow loomed over him, too.
“Hell no, brother, I did not turn around. There are some things a man just doesn’t want to see. I knew if I looked it would change my world forever, it would take the struts out from under my life and leave me changed and maybe not in a good way. You know?”
“Aye,” Mick agreed, “I know.”
“I was on the wharf in a river before I realized this thing, this force, whatever the hell it was, was going to chase me straight into the water. I just stopped dead right there, with the old rotten wood of that wharf cold beneath my soles. I was half expecting something to hit me like a cannonball and send me straight out into those rough currents. But it just passed over and through me.” He shuddered and Mick could smell the marshy scent of the night and feel the darkness that had chased Eddy down that country lane.
“And then there I was standing on the wharf and there’s this huge silence, the kind of silence that exists in those hours after midnight and it’s just me and a couple of tiny frogs hopping around on the end of the wharf. I tell you, man, I kinda wish I was doing drugs at the time because at least I could have chalked it up to that. I told my auntie about it in the morning, sort of an abbreviated version because I still wasn’t sure if I’d hallucinated it or half dreamed it or something. She turns around from making flapjacks and says to me, ‘It’s your spirit animal, Edward.’ And I’m thinking, seriously? Because first of all it would have been nice if my spirit animal had shown up a long time ago when it was supposed to and now that it does it’s a damn frog? Then she says, ‘Eddy, a frog’s eyes are such that they can see two worlds at the same time.’”
“Yer spirit animal is a frog?”
“Hey, it was a really big frog—a fucking huge scary frog.”
Eddy took a last swallow of his beer and then tucked the bottle back into the pack. Mick had long ago noticed that Eddy never left any trace of himself behind. He walked lightly in the world. He looked back at Mick, the dark almond eyes suddenly piercing.
“I’m just saying there is more than one world, there’s what we see and that’s one world and there’s what we know in our bones and that’s another world entirely.”
“Aye, I suppose I agree with ye there. There are edge places in the world; ye can feel the intersections when you happen upon them.” He was starting to get an uneasy feeling about just where this conversation was headed.
“If you’re going to walk in that space you gotta be careful, you gotta go in prepared for it. Like a hunter who is after really big game, you have to have the right tools, and a plan. Because where those two worlds intersect, well, it’s not necessarily a benevolent place. You know that, it’s blood knowing. You know that where two worlds intersect the path between them is dark and lonely and populated with weird shit. You gotta have courage to travel that road, and there’s no guarantee that what you find on the other side will be a good thing and won’t scar you or even kill you. Because real belief, man, real knowing it tears you up, it makes you into something else, sometimes something more and sometimes something less. That’s the risk of it.”
Mick sat up straighter and gave Eddy a dark look. “Why is it ye’re tellin’ me this story? Because suddenly this feels like it has a bigger purpose to it.”
“Because that place, that intersection, that’s where your memory is, man, that’s the land you are gonna have to travel if you want to remember who you were.”
“How do I find that place? That’s the problem, isn’t it? Figurin’ out where the ticket is to gain entry.”
“I think I know where you can get a ticket.”
“I’m not going to like this idea, am I?”
Eddy laughed, “Probably not, man, probably not.”
As a witch doctor he didn’t inspire great awe, Mick thought. The old man wore an overly large Hawaiian print shirt that had seen better days, baggy shorts and a pair of sandals made from tire rubber. On a small table beside him he had a bunch of feathers, a fan of leaves, a necklace of beautiful turquoise beads and a large, smooth quartz crystal. Beside these were two jugs of a dark and rather malevolent looking liquid. He hoped to hell that wasn’t what he was expected to drink, though he rather suspected that it was, despite the fact that it looked like no tea he had ever seen.
They were sitting outside the man’s trailer within the shelter of a ring of oaks. Overhead the night was thickly peppered with stars, and a soft breeze soughed through the branches above.
Eddy explained the paraphernalia upon the table. “The feathers are to sweep the shadows away, the beads are the land from which he draws his strength; the land is the source of his magic. The quartz is like a crystal ball, it is how he sees into your soul.”
Mick swallowed. He wasn’t sure what he thought about any of this, and he had a cold trickle of ice water running through his veins which was making his entire body shake.
Eddy had, after his first cryptic statement about an entry route into the deep murky well of his lost memory, explained it to him, and he’d been right—Mick didn’t like the sound of it at all.
“I’m gonna be up front with you because it involves drugs.” He held up a hand, knowing Mick’s opinion on any sort of mind-altering substance. “I know, just wait a minute okay and then you can protest all you like. It’s not anything you’re familiar with—it’s called yage or ayahuasca—it comes from a vine in South America. Well, only part of the recipe is the vine, there’s a combination of things in
it. I have an uncle who knows about this stuff, he’s from Peru originally. I think I could get him to do the ceremony with you—he won’t do it for just anyone, but I think he might when I explain your situation.”
“Ye have an uncle from Peru?” Mick asked, as always confused by the vast and far-flung web of Eddy’s relations. Eddy had drawn out his family tree one night and it had looked like the web of a spider on mushrooms by the time he was done.
“My Auntie Shirley has been married five times. This uncle from Peru is the fifth and it looks like he might stick, he’s been around for fourteen years now.”
“How does it work—this drug?”
“I don’t understand how it works really,” Eddy said, with one of his eloquent shrugs, “I just know that it does. You gotta be real careful what you eat the day before.”
“Ye know how I feel about drugs. My head is messy enough without adding drugs to the mix.”
“I do know that, and I understand why, but this stuff is different. My uncle just calls it ‘the tea’ and it’s like it resets your head. I’m just thinking it might sweep the cobwebs from your brain, maybe allow you to remember something of what your life was, who you were before. If you want to remember.”
Aye, that was the question, wasn’t it? Did he want to remember? Did he want to know who he had been, or was he running from something, something terrible in his past that he would not want brought back to him?
“I’ll do it,” he said, and prayed to a God he wasn’t certain he believed in that he wasn’t about to make a terrible mistake.
This had brought him here, one month later, with sweat trickling down his backbone and ice water running through his intestines.
The old man might have been harmless looking but Mick revised that opinion rather swiftly when he got a whiff of the brew he had concocted for them to drink together. It smelled like someone had scraped a particularly moldy bit of forest floor together and boiled it, and then poured it in a cup without the bother of straining it.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 54
