In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  The old man bent around the bowl, like he was trying to envelop it. A small breeze sprang up in the still night just as he began to chant. It was a soft lush sound, as if velvet had taken on a decibel, a note in the soft night air.

  Mick stayed quiet, watching the old man, feeling detached from the scene before him, as he felt from so many things in his life. The rhythm of the words changed, and became something that sounded familiar, a prayer from childhood, something once spoken over folded hands against an altar rail. There was a strange low buzzing in his skull, an irritating sensation like bees had begun to move just a little above the nape of his neck. He resisted the urge to swat at the back of his head, or to just rub his scalp until the feeling dissipated.

  Eddy touched his arm. “The words stir things up, the atmosphere, the shadows. He has to stir them up in order to sweep them away.”

  The old man picked up the bowl and drank several long, lusty swallows and then he gagged, spitting to the side. The chanting resumed then, building like a descant, multiple voices, a single voice, the voice of the night itself and the buzzing building inside Mick’s skull until he thought he might go mad with the sensation.

  Then the old man blew a single breath across the surface of the bowl, the dark liquid not even rippling in response. He said one last prayer.

  “He’s addressing the drug,” Eddy said quietly, “it’s the vine of life and it’s what will bring the visions.”

  The old man looked at Mick and nodded slightly. Mick moved forward on his knees, and took the bowl. The smell was dreadful, but he had come this far, and drinking some foul brew was no great price if it brought even a sliver of clarity to his memory.

  He took the bowl and drank, long swallows so that he might get it over with quickly. He gagged on the taste for it was even worse than the smell. He kept it down, which felt like a feat in itself.

  He felt nothing for a good half hour, just a mellowness and a dying off of the buzzing inside his skull. Then he realized his lips had gone numb, and there was a spreading warmth in his stomach even as his legs turned cold. Vertigo suddenly overwhelmed him, and he shut his eyes. Behind his eyelids bright flowers burst open—crimson blossoms spilling amethysts, stars cascading like water rushing through a narrow aperture tumbling over each other in great silver streams, trees billowing with leaves pulsating with life, as though the universe ran through every vein, every green-sapped inch of them.

  Suddenly he felt like he had been knocked to the ground and someone was hitting him, hard blows that took the air from his lungs. The pain was huge and spreading. It was the color of blood—scarlet and bursting. The ground beneath his hands was wet and the scent of decay rose thickly from it and then he was face down in it and the blows continued, driving his face into the earth.

  And then he was no longer there. Instead he was back in the old man’s yard, sick, violently retching into the dirt behind a tree, so dizzy he couldn’t tell up from down. The nausea passed as quickly as it had swept over him, taking the vertigo with it. He sat up once the spasms stopped and took a long, shaky breath. Eddy was hunkered down in front of him, concern in his face and also a clear determination. The buzzing in his skull was back.

  “He says you must drink more, he says what is in you has a powerful hold and that your body is so strong it fights the smaller dose. He says you must succumb to it and allow it to sweep the darkness from you.”

  And so he drank again, the taste not as bitter this time. He waited thinking the nausea must come, but it did not. What came instead was rage. It rose up, crimson as fire, burning the inside of his skull, killing the bees with a pain that seemingly knew no bounds for it felt as if his skull was splitting, leaking agony and dark thick viscous liquid like blood half-coagulated. He felt the wet of it, running through his hair, down the sides of his face, into and through his fingers. Just when it seemed he would have to die from the pain, that it would overcome him and kill him a voice, soft and soothing, spoke his name.

  It was the dream and yet far more vivid than the dream had ever been. Except he wasn’t in the boat, he was on the land and he was walking with the sea behind him. He could hear it and smell the salt of it, but his gaze was trained only on the land beneath his feet. Soft land, worn land, soil rich and loamy. He bent down to grab a handful and put it to his nose, breathing in its scents—growth and harvest and frost and decay. A small lane wound away over hills that were an impossible green, every shade of green from emerald to acid.

  Without warning he found himself at the top of a drive, looking down into a hollow where a farmhouse sat in late afternoon sunlight. It was white and the doors and shutters were painted a deep and dazzling emerald. It seemed not quite real, as if a painting hung in the air before him, a painting that was peeling back layer upon layer of thick oils and colors—alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, purple lake, sap green, and raw umber. And as each layer peeled back to hang raggedly at the edge of his vision, more of the house and its surroundings emerged. At first it seemed only a blur of figures and color but as the scene moved closer and the clarity increased he saw a wood, old trees, hardwoods—oaks, elms, ash. The ground beneath the trees was covered in a carpet of long grass and bluebells—bluebells thick with butterflies. A woman holding a child by the hand walked in the wood, gathering flowers. A small boy ran ahead of her and she bent down to the child at her side to take something from her. He could see the tiny one was a little girl, for she wore a straw hat with a ribbon on her head, dark curls rioting from beneath its brim. The woman kissed the upturned face of the little girl and when she straightened up, she was holding what appeared to be a clutch of weeds. The boy had swung himself up into the low branches of an oak, and Mick caught a glimpse of his face and drew in a sharp breath that drove needles through his lungs. The child looked so familiar—he looked like he could be his son, he was so like him in appearance and coloring. He followed them, though to his frustration he could not quite step inside the frame of the painting and could only bring its details closer by moving toward it.

  The land seemed familiar to him, and the residue of pain clung to him, as though the land and the hurt were entwined and inseparable. The crimson pain threatened to overtake him again and he pushed it away through force of will. He could not let it cloud his vision of the woman and the children. His children—a boy and a girl.

  And then the woman spoke to someone off the canvas, someone just off the edge beyond the ragged and thick edges of the peeling paint. He strained his vision, his hands clutching at the painting, trying to grasp at the paint to tear it away so that he might see the man to whom she spoke and yet he was afraid if he clutched it too hard it would dissolve. He knew she spoke to a man for there was a light in her face that spoke of love. He felt a surge of possession that was so strong it knocked him back down to his knees. He wanted to hit something or someone more like—the man she was looking at in that way for a start. He longed to touch her, to be touched by her. He longed to get up off this ground, and walk into the painting and join the small family there. Even if it meant spending a lifetime caught fast in a wood filled with bluebells.

  Suddenly she turned her head, as if she sensed him watching and came toward him, the children still playing in the field behind her. It seemed to him that she could see him, but it was as if it was through a mirror tarnished by distance and time.

  She put a hand up as if to touch him and he could smell her—want and need and strawberries and the sea coming forever into a receding shore. She smelled like desire and something more, something that made his guts clench and a silver shot of pain dart up his body. She smelled like home. And then she spoke to him and he strained to hear her, to know what she was saying and if she meant to speak to him. Her voice came to him through a long tunnel of echoes, just the remnants of what she said, whole syllables and half words making it to his ear. He put his own hand up to take hers and abruptly it all stopped. The peeling paint fell away and the picture itself—the woman, the children, the trees and th
e bluebells all swirled together and then vanished leaving only a trace of color and scent upon the air. And he was left with empty hands and an overly full heart.

  He came back to himself to find that his shirt was off, his body clammy with sweat and the breeze prickling against every inch of him. He was lightheaded and light-bodied, like he was floating somewhere above, the ground no longer beneath him. The old man was touching the scars on his back, one finger tracing the pathway of each one and he could smell the woman again, as though it was she who touched him, ran her fingers soft as rain through the channels of his ruined flesh.

  “The woman,” he said, voice hoarse and broken, “where did she go?”

  “What woman?” It was Eddy asking, and it sounded as if he spoke from far away, from another time, another country.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking like a leaf, the sweat still running from his body though he was horribly cold. “There was a woman here, didn’t you see her?” He knew even as he asked that they hadn’t, only he had, she was simply part of his hallucinations. “I just know she was here, she was here,” he said, and then felt the loss of it in his bones, for she was gone and his understanding of her had left with the vision.

  “You called her wife,” the old man said quietly and then walked away.

  “Mick, man, I’m sorry, that was wild—are you okay?”

  He sat up, dirt cascading down his chest, catching in his chest hair, the smell of it, dark and loamy, a comfort to his chilled, terrified self. He felt it on his bruised hands, earth, the thing that had always given him comfort and sustenance. One thing remained from the vision of the woman, one word he had heard through that strange echoing tunnel.

  “My name’s not Mick,” he said, “it’s Casey. My name is Casey.”

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Taking the Dive

  CASEY HAD SPENT the afternoon roaming the Marin Headlands and now was sitting on an outcropping of rock with the view of the bay stretching out below him. It was where he came to sit and think—high in the hills with the dark scent of pine wrapping around his senses and nothing but the wind and the gulls for company. He liked this city and felt as at home here as he expected he could feel at this point in his life. San Francisco was a brash city and always had been. It was the last wild outpost of the American Dream though it was a city that had seen a lot of dark days recently. He’d heard people say that the 70s in San Francisco was the graveyard of the late 60s. It felt all too apt in a city that had seen so much turmoil in just a few years’ time. Patty Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Zebra murders, the death of Janis Joplin, the wave of new and far more deadly drugs that hit the Haight and the people who inhabited its streets. But the lost and the forgotten still found refuge in the city by the bay: veterans and windy-foot children, gay men and women, musicians and vagabonds, gypsies and poets, wayfarers and renegades.

  There were the dark threads that wove around the brighter ones—rumors that the CIA had run a human guinea pig farm in the Haight, testing hard drugs on the youth that filled its streets and rundown houses. Sometimes it was easy enough to believe when he saw the wreckage that roamed the streets, the hollowed out zombies and psychotics, and the boarded up store fronts where, Eddy had told him, a vibrant and colorful madness had existed only a few years before.

  San Francisco was city as theater, city as pageant and spectacle. Even its setting was staged on a grander scale than most cities—the white-capped Pacific rolling into the bay, the beautiful dark hills falling down toward the water and the bridge spanning up like a golden arc of promise. It was the destination, but you didn’t start the journey until you were already here.

  Casey had made his own journey here but he thought he might be nearing the end of the road. Hale had told him to take a dive in his next fight. The odds on him were so high that betting against him and having him lose would result in a gold mine. He had expected this day to come; he just hadn’t expected to feel quite so belligerent about it when it did. There were things to consider, though. Hale had promised him a handsome payout if he took the dive. It would be enough money to go to Ireland and see if he couldn’t find out who he was and who he had once been. He knew he needed to stop fighting soon, because eventually he was going to take one hit too many and he was already dancing with the devil when it came to the odds on that particular issue.

  Since the episode with the ayahuasca he hadn’t felt the same about the fighting. He no longer seemed to need it and the rage which had fueled it was gone. Having his name had changed things for him too. It felt like a worn shirt which had long been lost, abandoned at the bottom of a box and newly come upon while searching for some other item. It fit, and it was comfortable, even if it took some readjustment. Somehow he felt more solid, less like a ghost and more like a man.

  A gull landed on a rock in front of him and squawked, no doubt expecting some sort of food to appear.

  “I don’t have anything for ye, man,” he said and the gull squawked again, seemingly annoyed by his lack of largesse. He had one of those echoes which had become more frequent since the night of the ayahuasca visions—an echo that made it feel that he had been in this moment before. The gull gave him one last beady glare and flew off, wheeling out over the bay until it was only a tiny arc of white against the dazzling blue of the water.

  He held his left hand up in front of his face and looked at the narrow silver band. He twisted it around his finger wishing, not for the first time, that it could tell him its story and like a magic talisman lead him back to its matching partner.

  He thought about the woman and children he’d seen in his drug-induced vision and wondered again if they were real, or if he had somehow wanted them so badly that he’d conjured them up with the assistance of the drug. He felt half-made of longing lately. Longing to know who he really was, longing for a history and a home that was his, rather than a house in which he and the woman who owned it both seemed more ghost than flesh and blood beings. He rose and dusted pine needles off the seat of his pants. Dream or not, he needed to find out for certain.

  One more fight, and then he was done.

  “You’re fighting an Irishman tonight. Seems fitting,” Eddy said, his voice muffled by the tape he was biting off to wrap around Casey’s knuckles. “He’s a Gypsy apparently. Didn’t know the Irish had Gypsies.”

  “Aye, they’re called Travellers,” he said, putting up his hand so Eddy could apply the tape. When Eddy was done Casey jumped around a little to let off the excess energy before they went out to the pit. He was fighting at Molly’s tonight and was glad of it; it was a good way to end his run.

  His opponent was fierce looking. He strode into the lighted ring wearing a worn pair of jeans and a bright blue fedora with a red feather stuck in the brim. He flashed a smile at the crowd and it was blinding white, and winking with several gold caps. He had rings on all his fingers and a rather gaudy cross around his neck which he made a show of kissing before removing it. The rings took him a good two minutes to take off. He removed the hat last, doffing it to the crowd with a flourish and bowing, the lights gleaming off his shaved head. He knew how to put on a show, Casey thought. It was a good tactic; it would endear him to the audience. Casey just wanted to get on with it.

  “You’re a little tight tonight, man. You feeling fear?” Eddy was checking the tape on his right hand to make certain it wasn’t going to slip at all once it got bloody. They were drawing interested stares from the opposite side of the ring. Casey knew people found the combination of a big Irish guy and an Indian interesting. “Balls and bowels, man, that’s where fear always shows up. One’s high and tight and the other is loose and rumbly. That’s when you know you’re afraid.”

  If those were the two indicators then Casey would have to assess himself as afraid. He usually got a huge hit of adrenaline before a fight, but this was the first time he could recall feeling scared. He wondered if it was because he suddenly felt there was something to lose if he was h
urt, even if it was only a name.

  “I’m fine,” he said shortly. He didn’t like to talk before a fight, though he never minded if Eddy talked to him and Eddy understood why his answers were always brief.

  “Use the fear, and remember in through the nose and out through the mouth. Step back when you’re tired and drop your hand to give it a rest whenever you can.”

  “Aye.”

  He met the man in the middle, feeling the rush of blood pumping hard through his fists. The referee was there to give them the rules. His hearing was heightened along with all his other senses and it sounded like the man was almost yelling in his ears.

  “If one of you is down, the other lets you get up. Arms round each other is a foul. No fouling, no dirty punches—when you break, break clean.”

  They both nodded and backed off, assessing each other for strengths and weaknesses. Casey wasn’t sure this man had any; there were no obvious tells in his demeanor or movement.

  He saw the transformation come over the man, who went from smiling showmanship with the crowd to looking like he wanted to eat Casey’s guts for breakfast. He knew the space you slipped into, because he did it himself with each fight. You could feel perfectly cordial about your opponent outside of the ring, but want to hurt him badly in it. It was necessary to winning, a man could not be squeamish about it or he was lost.

  They spent the first few minutes taking short jabs at one another, feinting with one fist, throwing with another. Dancing in and out, eyeing one another up as wolves would confronting each other in a forest. He threw the first real punch just to get things started. Three minutes later he was starting to sweat, five and they’d both drawn blood. The man could fight. It might not be hard to take a dive because it was quite possible he was going to lose this fight without the need to cheat. The man was relentless and yet this was exactly the sort of fight he loved. There was a brilliance at the dark heart of it like nothing else. Something that was like rushing out and flying past the edge of things, touching it all—joy and dread, fear and fury, blood lust and blood exhaustion.