Jirra killed the last of his beer and tossed the bottle into the brush. It shattered against a pile of a hundred other shattered bottles. Then he motioned inside. “This is a beer story.”
“They’re all beer stories with you.”
“You only ever ask for the beer stories.” Jirra walked inside, leaving the door propped open behind him. Colby followed reluctantly into the dark house.
Inside the two sat once again at the cheap kitchen table with the mismatched chairs, each with a beer. Colby stared across the table impatiently, fingering the sweat on his bottle, but Jirra only smiled, taking his time. “The old fella really knew you well, eh?” he asked. “Had you pegged.”
“How did he die?”
“Well, you killed him.”
“I what? I didn’t murder him.”
“You didn’t murder him. You killed him. When you were a kid. You just didn’t know it yet.”
Colby sat back in his chair, his brow furrowed. He took a swig of his beer, trying to read Jirra. For all his warmth and their shared history, Jirra was still a Clever Man, and Clever Men played games. He wasn’t sure what Mandu’s protégé was up to, but he needed to figure it out before he walked into some sort of trap. “Is this a lesson?” he asked. “Or are you just fucking with me?”
“Bru, let me tell you something. Mandu comes to me at the end of his life and says, ‘Jirra, Colby will be back one day. You’ll know it’s him because he will be brought on the back of a powerful spirit.’”
“Right. The demon.”
“Yeah. Then he says, ‘He’ll be back a few weeks later. You’ll know it is time for him to arrive when you’ve returned victorious from a long, frustrating journey. Then and only then can you tell him the full story. Until that time, only tell him that I was ready, eh.’ So I say to him, ‘Ready for what?’ And he smiles. Bastard just smiles. A week later he was gone.”
“You’re not answering the question.”
“Bru, this morning I opened the fridge and there wasn’t a beer in it. Not one. It’s blasted hot out there and I got me no beer. So I had to go into town, only the truck broke down halfway there. Had to walk the rest just to get someone to come get the truck. But then the fella at the store says, ‘Sorry, fella, I’m all outta beer. Just sold me last sixer,’ and I’m like, ‘What do you mean, you sold your last sixer?’ and he’s like, ‘Bru, did you see how hot it is out there?’ So I got to wait around for my truck to get patched up. Then I gotta—”
“Skip to the end. Did you get the beer?” asked Colby.
Jirra pointed at the beers. “I just got home not ten minutes ago, eh, bru. So yeah, I got the beer. And yeah, I’m gonna drink my beer. And yeah, I’m gonna deal with the fact that that mean old bastard was laughing because he knew about all the bullshit I was gonna have to go through today and didn’t have the fucking courtesy to give me a heads-up about the goddamned fan belt. Victorious from a long, frustrating journey.” He looked off out the window into the brush, as if yelling at Mandu himself. “It was a beer run, you old asshole!”
Colby smiled. “Okay, okay. So how did I kill him?”
Jirra peered from across the table. “Do you remember the first time you died?”
Colby stared darkly at Jirra, the color slowly draining from his skin. Memories more than a decade old began flooding back to the forefront of his thoughts. He sipped his beer. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
2
Then
Every boy needed to learn how to hunt from his father. And every boy needed to make his first kill on his own. Not just any kill—a close kill. The feel of the blade in your hand, the warmth of the blood as it courses over your fingers, the steam wafting from an open wound, the smell of the sweat, and the smell of the fear. Every boy needed to watch the life drain from the eyes of his prey up close; needed death to see him staring back, unafraid. Warra had followed his father hunting for years, watched him stalk his prey in the outback, learned the fine art of a quick kill, and tonight, on this black, moonless abyss of a night, his father was going to let him take the lead.
Nine-year-old Warra Gaari was finally going to kill.
Together they hid in the dark, crouching between the branches of a prickly bush, ignoring the thorns cutting into their bare brown, scarred flesh. Warra, thin and gangly, knelt close beside his father, Koorong, trying to keep his breath silent and still. In his hand, Warra clutched a bone wand, his father’s pointing stick, crafted from the leg bone of his first kill. If tonight went well, Warra would be carving his own pointing stick by morning.
Firelight flickered in the distance, painting long shadows across the barren desert, the occasional patch of scrub clinging for dear life to the dirt, but otherwise the tiny campsite was alone in the wide-open expanse. There would be nowhere to hide. But the night was dark—a deep, terrifying kind of dark, the stars blazing pinpricks, the Milky Way a glimmering cloud—and the campfire was only large enough to cook a decent meal and chase away the night’s chill. They would be able to sneak up unseen until the last moment.
Not two hundred feet away from them sat a portly man in a tattered T-shirt, cross-legged, enjoying a beer by the fire. Neither Warra nor Koorong knew his name. They’d tracked him by fire’s light, having chosen him because he was alone. Warra’s first kill needed to be easy and clean. There would be time to teach him more elaborate methods of assassination when he was older.
Warra looked up at his father. Koorong looked tired, weaker than normal. His skin had paled, the whites of his eyes were a jaundiced yellow, and wrinkles were slowly spider-webbing across his face. And yet he looked as determined and dangerous as ever, the ravages of time doing little to rob the spring from his step.
Koorong quietly uncoiled a rope, tying a lasso at the end. He motioned down to it with a glance, Warra nodding in return, memorizing every detail. They stood up, each creeping silently in the sand through inky black night. They stayed behind the man, out of his line of sight, worried he might at any point turn around. But the night was dark and the man had drunk his fair share and then some, and the two were upon their prey in no time.
The lasso landed squarely around the man’s shoulders, Koorong quickly yanking the rope back to tighten it around his neck. The man jerked backward, Koorong’s strong, bear-like arms winding the rope back, dragging the man through the dirt, his screams muffled by the noose choking him to death.
Then Koorong jumped astride the man, pulling out a black flint dagger and plunging it into his victim’s chest. The man gurgled, struggling weakly against the giant atop him, Koorong slicing a clean semicircle beneath his heart. Blood spurted, drenching Koorong, who then squeezed the wound just so as to cause blood to stream into a small basket that hung from a cord around his wrist.
Koorong waited, the life draining from the man’s fight.
Then the heart stopped.
With the skill of a surgeon, Koorong pinched the rent flesh together and whispered an incantation as he massaged the torn flesh. And within seconds, the wound was healed, the skin smooth. The man’s eyes opened, his breath restarting with a deathly shriek.
Koorong hopped off, once again crouching in the dark as the man staggered to his feet, walking drunkenly back toward the fire. Taking the pointing stick from Warra’s hand, Koorong leapt at the man once more. He clubbed him over the back of the head with one hand, then sliced his back twice with the knife in the other.
The man exploded, his soul bursting like a pile of leaves blown apart by a stiff wind, his scream like a strangled animal set on fire. For a moment the man was gone.
Then the leaves set themselves aright and the man re-formed, a leaf at a time, once more staggering toward the fire as if nothing had happened.
Koorong snatched the man’s soul out of the air with a single hand and stuffed it into the small basket in which he’d caught the blood. Then he motioned to his son, tossing him the pointing stick with a knowing nod.
It was time.
Warra’s heart raced. His mouth
went dry. His knees quaked with excitement, his left foot tapping uncontrollably in the dirt.
It.
Was.
Time.
He leapt toward the warm light of the fire, knuckles white around the hilt of the stick.
The point went in one side of the man’s throat, coming out the other with a wide spray of crimson.
Warra flicked his wrist and the throat exploded, the voice box dangling from a few remaining tendons, arterial spray pumping spurt by spurt into the night.
The man dropped to his knees in the dirt, mouth agape, gasping silently for breath. His eyes stared up into the starlight, body paralyzed in fear, fingers curled, grasping painfully at nothing at all. Then he fell face forward with a thump, body limp, dead.
Warra smiled, watching the steam rise into the cold night air. For a moment he daydreamed that it was the man’s soul, drifting out into the afterlife. But he knew better than that. The man’s soul was safely in his father’s basket. This was just the leftover meat, a dinner for worms. Even though his father had captured the lifeblood and the soul, he had let Warra make his first kill.
And it was everything Warra had ever hoped it would be.
Warra turned to smile at his dad, who stared back coldly in return. Koorong never smiled. But he nodded approvingly, which meant the world to Warra. It was as warm and loving a nod as ever he gave, as good as if Koorong had picked him up with a fatherly embrace and swung him around, laughing. Warra’s insides tickled with pride. Then Koorong handed his son a machete.
“Hack the leg off at the knee,” he said to his son. “We’ll clean the meat from the bone and you can carve your own stick. But choose wisely. The left leg is better for spirits, the right leg better against men.”
Warra felt the weight of the machete in his hand as he looked down at the man’s legs. He raised the blade above his head with both hands and brought it down in one fell swoop. Koorong’s son had chosen the right leg, and his father nodded in approval.
Then the two disappeared silently into the night, the man’s body still steaming by the fire, his soul safely tucked away in Koorong’s basket.
3
A Man and His Soul
An excerpt by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D., from his book Dreamspeaking, Dreamwalking, and Dreamtime: The World on the Other Side of Down Under
Amongst the many powers of the Clever Men, or men of high degree, is the ability of their sorcerers to steal souls from the living, leaving behind conscious, breathing individuals who appear every bit as they were before the theft. Over the course of the following three days, however, these victims die from any number of terrible ailments, all of which can be attributed to the loss of their soul.
At first this process might seem counterintuitive. After all, dreamwalkers away from their bodies leave behind comatose husks, devoid of any sentience. Soul-stealing, on the other hand, leaves behind the human being as he was, though weakened, easily fatigued, prone to memory loss, and on the road to certain death. How is it that these sorcerers can swipe the souls from the body while the body still walks around as it did before?
The answer, it seems, lies in the parsing of terms. These sorcerers aren’t so much severing the soul from the body as they are scraping the soulstuff out of a man’s system, leaving behind only what is caked into his being like resin. Whereas dreamwalkers use this resin as a sort of “sealant” to hold their soul together, the art of soul-stealing involves puncturing that outer layer, draining the essence, and leaving behind the physical “husk” to buy the time necessary to put distance between the victim and his assassin.
We are, at our core, animals. What separates us from the lower animals is our soul. Without it, we can still function, but only on an instinctive level. Soul-stealing is practiced in many cultures around the world. In some practices, like the voodoo of the Caribbean, soul-stealing is used in zombie creation, leaving mindless yet living servants with no personality or memory. In Australia, the aim is murder, pure and simple. Sorcerers steal the souls of others as a form of cultural warfare, to settle vendettas or as offerings to the spirits.
But in certain cases, people have been known to survive such attacks and live short, hollow lives, eating, sleeping, and otherwise interacting with the world around them thanks to some sort of vestigial memory, but unable to perform any higher level functions. There are tales, however, of sorcerers who have not only survived such attacks but found ways to maintain a certain level of activity through various methods of feeding off dreamstuff.
4
It has been said by many that Koorong Gaari was the only man in all of Arnhem Land to have his soul stolen by another sorcerer and live to tell the tale. His was a heart and countenance so bleak and malicious that there could be no other explanation. His eyes were pools of hate, his lips always curled into a scowl that could wilt trees in full bloom. The air chilled around him, even on the hottest days, and night grew darker when he was around, even the stars dimmed when he was close.
Koorong had been the only Clever Man within a thirty-mile radius of his home since he’d killed the last one ten years earlier. He’d long since wiped out all the sorcerers along the coast, moving from tribe to tribe, dreaming to dreaming, skulking along the songlines until he cornered and siphoned the souls out of each and every last one. And content that he was no longer in danger of being usurped, convinced that his was the strongest eye in Arnhem Land, he had settled down to a peaceful life, killing now only when necessary to obtain the souls he needed to live.
Warra stood beside him at the riverbank, the dawn light tickling the horizon as Koorong hefted a bottle of freshly drawn water from beneath the surface. “It has to be moving,” he said to his son. “Flowing water. Always flowing; never stagnant. Stagnant water will sour the soul. Be like drinking a snakebite, eh. It will burn all the way down and eat you from the inside. Also, take it from the deep, not the surface. The dream is stronger deeper in the water.” He lifted the bottle into the coming light, eyed it for impurities. Clean. Not a bit of silt or fish shit.
He reached into the basket at his wrist, plunging his hand in and drawing the soul out by the scruff of its neck. The black writhing mass tried to wiggle out of his grip, flopping around, snapping at the air, but Koorong held tight, having done this hundreds of times before, jamming it quickly against the mouth of the bottle. The soul, trying to escape, squeezed in through the opening, unaware that it was now trapped. Koorong stoppered the bottle with a slap and shook it violently.
The water darkened, swirling with fluorescent bits of violet and soft pink. The soul struggled but couldn’t break the glass, couldn’t loosen the grip of the rubber stopper. Slowly but surely it faded, softened, until it gave up the fight and became one with the water. And when it was done, Koorong pulled the stopper from the bottle and drank every last drop of the man trapped inside.
Koorong’s color darkened from a pale creamy coffee brown to a rich, sun-scorched black, his eyes losing their jaundice, his skin tightening around his mouth, eyes, and forehead. What a moment before had looked like a man of fifty now looked thirty-five. The plundered soul was doing its work and doing it well.
“Now,” he said, his youthful vigor returned, “let’s get to making you that pointing stick.”
It was night and the campfire had dwindled to a single dim log belching embers. Koorong sat close, watching the last flickers of flame. It was his favorite time of day. Once the fire was gone, the rest of the outback would be asleep and he could relax. His son lay only a few feet away, deep asleep, hugging his freshly carved pointing stick like a teddy bear. The Clever Man didn’t feel much anymore, but when he looked at his son, he felt pride. Warra was the one thing in Koorong’s life that made him feel alive, that really reminded him what it was like to live life with a soul of his own. And to see Warra following in his father’s footsteps, on the road to being a Clever Man all his own, made Koorong’s otherwise hard heart swell.
But as he watched his son dreaming and the log s
puttered as it died, the soft crunch of twigs and gravel drifted in on the night air. Someone was watching them.
Koorong had nerves of steel and knew exactly what to do. He didn’t look, didn’t react at all. He simply stood, taking a large branch from the ground to crush the last remnants of the log. The log came apart like snow, disintegrating into smoke and ash, and Koorong took the opportunity to cast his gaze, as if lazily, out into the dark across the bush. His eyes were sharp, especially at night, and while most people wouldn’t be able to make out the shadow of the man creeping in the bushes fifty-some-odd meters away, he saw him clear as day.
The man crouched low, behind a shrub. Whoever he was, he was bad at this.
Koorong knelt down, then used a bit of Clever magic.
A shadow of Koorong appeared sitting beside him, and instantaneously Koorong wrapped the dark night around him like a blanket until he winked out and the shadow seemed more real than he. Then Koorong ducked out into the dark to surprise the intruder. He stalked quietly, hushing his footsteps with a wave of his hand, coming up closer and closer on the interloper. Slowly, silently, he slipped his pointing stick from his belt. Koorong was going to make this quick and quiet.
The man crouched by the shrub, peering at their campsite, entirely unaware that Koorong was five seconds from killing him.
Koorong leapt, jamming his pointing stick into the neck of the . . .
A shadow. A trick. A phantom.
Just like his.
No mere thief was watching them. There was another Clever Man.
Footsteps crunched a hundred paces away, running. Koorong turned, reacted, darting across the outback at an inhuman speed. He clutched his stick, waved his hand, manipulated the very dream that surrounded him, bending space so that he might gain ground on the man running away from him. His feet stopped touching the earth, and in the span of a breath Koorong was running on the very air, six inches above the ground, carried along by a strong wind at his back.
We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories Page 19
