by C. T. Phipps
However, that ran into the fact human beings were also capable of repressing memories until adulthood about past trauma. Those evil things done behind closed doors were far more common than anyone gave them credit for. My uncle Jeffrey, a therapist, had said there was no way to tell the difference without evidence. That wasn’t even getting into how magic could affect the mind. What had I forgotten?
“I helped you,” The kelpie said, moving closer, its backward hooves leaving prints in the muck around the lake. “‘I don’t want to be like my mother,’ you said. Didn’t want to deal with spirits. Didn’t want to see, did you? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten all we did for each other.”
Its voice was hypnotic and made me relaxed rather than terrified. No, that wasn’t right. My body relaxed but my mind was screaming. It was a dichotomy that made my present experience all the worse.
I stepped back. The more it spoke, the more I remembered, the more I wanted it to be lying. But the creature wasn’t lying. I was remembering. But was I remembering right? I couldn’t tell anymore. The worst part of being a shaman was losing your certainty what was true and what was real. The Spirit World made thought reality and that was a source of dreams as well as nightmares.
“I’d come into the woods,” I said, quavering. “The spirits frightened me.”
“But then you met me. And I offered to help.”
“You said I had to bring someone else to swim in the waters.”
“And you did.”
“You didn’t say you were going to kill her!” I said, falling into its spell. Had I given Jill up to this thing?
Yes.
No!
“You never asked. And I fulfilled our bargain and took the spirit sight from you. No more the daughter of a shaman, and I left you the Gift to see the truth of the world in your touch. So that you would learn how much hate and fear define your kind and return when you’d grown cold enough. And here you are.”
“No!” I screamed out loud.
“The sacrifice was well used,” The kelpie continued. “I gave its soul to the old wolf spirit, made the demon strong again. Strong enough to draw those children into his circle. Once he’s free, he’ll pay me back with so many children to drown.”
I couldn’t move anymore. All of this. The coven, Victoria’s death, the deaths of the others… I’d started it.
No. I hadn’t!
All I came here for was swimming! To get away from Mom and Dad! I’d wanted to be a shaman as a child and hadn’t started training until later.
Right?
“I can see it in your eyes that you understand now,” the kelpie said. “You’re one of us. I knew it as soon as we met. Welcome to the dark, Jane Doe. We’re going to have so much fun.”
Yes.
Everything the creature said felt true, completely true. I was evil. I was corrupt. I belonged with this forest and could stay here, becoming something powerful and dark. No more would I have to worry what anyone else thought of me.
No more jobs, no more bowing to social conventions, no more being polite when I just wanted to tell someone what I thought of them to their face. The part of me that wanted to scream no at these thoughts was getting smaller, I knew it, but it was so hard to think of why that was a bad thing with the siren blaring in my ears and… the siren. It had come up quieter this time; the shift of the moon to red had happened more slowly, escaping my attention as the kelpie spoke, trying to make me my worst self. These weren’t my thoughts. Like last time, making me hate, last time, the gun! I’d touched Alex’s gun and the influence had dissolved. I reached for it now, only to find it gone, pulled from me by a vine that was dragging it across the ground. I dove for it, but the kelpie’s speed was fantastic. It was in my way before I even realized it had moved and I grabbed only its wet, rancid fur.
“An unfortunate choice, young Jane,” the creature said, its breath fetid like a swamp. “If you won’t choose to join us in life, you will have to join us in death.”
“You are a liar!” I screamed.
“Maybe,” the kelpie said. “Maybe not. Humans are the ones who invented truth. A tree may make a sound when it falls and no one is there to hear it, but without humans then who cares? Your lies to yourself make your life meaningful. Hope, justice, and love.”
I tried to pull away, but my hand had sunk into its rotten flesh, no, not flesh, but swamp slime. I couldn’t pull it back. The creature reared back with a whinny and then raced toward the Darkwater, dragging me along with it. When it reached the water it kept going, throwing itself in. I screamed one once as I found myself pulled helplessly under the water.
This was my nightmare. Ever since I had watched Jenny drown, ever since I’d seen this monstrosity kill her, this was the dream that kept me up at night. Being held underwater, unable to breathe, unable to even scream.
I flailed more than fought, kicking and punching, but the creature no longer had any real shape. It was made of slime, silt, sticks, and decaying pond plants. Yet, as impotent as my strikes were toward it, its mass held me under the water firmly. This was how Jenny had felt. This was how she had died. Helpless to do anything but watch the daylight through the water as her need for oxygen grew and grew until…wait, that was how she had felt. It was night now; I was seeing her view through my power, pulling her memories from the lake itself.
For some reason, that calmed me. At least I wasn’t going to die alone. I could feel the energies of the memories all around me. And there were others, so many others, who had drowned in the swamp. All that silent pain, gathering around me, glad to finally be heard at long last. My lungs were aching now, as I reached out and shared all those memories with the kelpie.
I had not, before that moment, known I could do that. The kelpie and I were both touching the water, and I could make the memories flow into it as well as myself. Made it listen to the voiceless, agonizing deaths of every person it had drowned. Made it listen to the chorus of despair that it had created.
“No!” the kelpie howled, its voice echoing through the water to my ears. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Tough noogies.
I shoved all of them I could into the creature. And then, lost amidst the seemingly endless march of deaths, was one other memory—the kelpie’s own. Once, it was an undine, a spirit of the lake, pure and unsullied, until the forest grew dark and the spirits within it became corrupted, causing what was once clean to become foul. That memory, more than all the others, caused the kelpie to surge up over the water and release me.
For a second, I got to see the world as the spirits saw it. So much of it being wild, free, and untamed without any reason or rhyme. Humans had brought sentience to the universe with their dreams, though, or perhaps the things that had preceded humans. That had been both a blessing and a curse as they’d become capable of good and evil. Huh, maybe there was something to the Bible after all. Except man had given knowledge of it to everyone and everything. I don’t remember a passage dealing with that.
I heard its voice in the water. More feelings rather than words but still clear to me. I could hear it in my soul thanks to my shaman powers. Power I hadn’t been able to use for years. So much pain. My soiled lake, toxins in my waves, chemicals in my water, carried by the rain and bubbling up from underneath. Rage from the Lord of the Forest and pain. So much pain. So much I want to give it out again.
I erupted from the lake, breathing in huge gulps of air, not even minding that it still stunk of Darkwater Lake’s fetid waters. Once I was no longer desperate for breath, I drug myself out of the water and to the shore. There, several yards away, was the creature.
What it looked like now was hard to describe. It was still the pile of lake sludge and plants it had been in the water, but in the vague shape combining the features of the undine’s female human form and the kelpie’s horse-monster shape. She/it was shaking violently as its tendrils and slime kept trying to shift the whole shape into one or the other.
“Please,” it gurgled. “Don
’t let me go back. The darkness here is too strong. Please, Jane. End this life. Let me start over.”
I kept scraping what seemed like gallons of muck off my clothes as I looked for my gun and picked it up. The runes glowed and warmed me after the cold of the water. I didn’t owe this creature anything. I didn’t. But somehow, it felt right when I fired the gun and the bullet struck the creature’s form. That was when all of the mud around it surged forth, wrapped itself around the kelpie, then glowed orange-red before collapsing into indiscriminate sludge. I didn’t know what sort of spells Alex had wrapped into this thing, but it was packing a serious wallop.
Either way, the lake spirit was dead. It would eventually form a new one, but it would take years, probably, until it had anything resembling a consciousness. Even in these woods.
“Go in peace,” I said, staring at it. I didn’t hate it like I wanted to or feel any sense of triumph. I was just numb. Had I actually made a deal? I’d never be able to tell now that it was dead. Somehow, the fact I couldn’t tell made it worse. At least if I had, I could begin the healing. Now I’d just always wonder if I was capable of something so awful. “I’m sorry, Jill.”
That’s when I heard Jill’s voice in the wind. “It’s all right, Jane, I forgive you.”
I fell to my knees and broke down crying.
Chapter Nineteen
I finished crying about three minutes later. Looking at the kelpie’s remains, I tried to soak in what I’d done. It was not a monster anymore, just a bunch of dead weeds and decomposing rotting animals. There were bones scattered among empty beer cans, plastic rings, and worse. Once it had been a figure from my nightmares and now it was just a big floating pile of trash.
“You don’t think Jill’s bones are there, do you?” I asked, wiping away my tears with my sleeve. It was a somewhat questionable tactic since I was soaked from my dip in the lake. At least most of the sludge had washed off.
“No,” Jacob’s voice spoke. I could hear it but not see him. He’d been there with me, even if he couldn’t physically help. “But even if they were, it’s not her any more than this was the kelpie.”
“So you’re just lying and her bones are probably inside there.”
“I ain’t saying nothing,” Jacob said.
I took a deep breath and put away Alex’s gun. “I’ll call someone back here to pick up her body along with everyone else’s.”
“Good idea,” Jacob said, slowly manifestly beside me as a nimbus of white light that was slightly translucent.
“Before you continue,” I said, staring at him, “you have to tell me to go to the Dagobah system.”
It was easy to slip back into Jane the Jokester. It was a comfortable mask and one that felt good to wear after the horror of facing the kelpie. Besides, when else was I going to get a chance to use that kind of line?
Jacob snorted. “Your mother, Jeremy, and now you are obsessed with those movies. You should watch something educational and uplifting instead…like Dirty Harry or The Outlaw Josie Wales.”
“The Outlaw Josie Wales was Confederate apologia,” I said. “Seriously, the author of the book was a big segregationist too.”
“It was still badass,” Jacob said. “But I laugh at any movie where lots of cowboys get killed.”
I rolled my eyes. “Grandpa, thank you for this. Sort of. I mean, yes, you put me in horrible danger and almost got me killed—”
“Those are the same thing.”
“It’s worth repeating!” I snapped, looking back at the dead monster. “But I feel better now.”
“Liar,” Jacob said.
He was right, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “I confronted some things I needed confronting.”
“You didn’t make a deal,” Jacob said, giving me the reassurance I needed. “Spirits lie and make things up. They have the power to make you believe anything about yourself if you’re afraid.”
“I was,” I said, ready to cry again but pushing those thoughts down. I chose to believe my grandfather’s words even if I didn’t miss the fact he was a spirit too. “But it doesn’t matter. It was feeding on my real fears and regrets. I wanted to be normal and that’s never going to happen. I have to get over that.”
“Normal is overrated,” Jacob said, putting his hand against my cheek as the fingers lightly passed through and left a cold oily residue. “I never wanted to be a weredeer either but I resolved to be the best warrior I could for the people who needed one. Life is a river and you never step in the same one twice. It’s always shifting and changing.”
I sniffed. “Where did you get that?”
“Disney’s Pocahontas,” Jacob said, chuckling. “Not exactly true to life.”
I didn’t want to mention I liked that movie. I had a huge crush on John Smith when I was eight. “Well, whatever the case, I’m not going to stop. I’m going to get back everyone the Big Bad Wolf has taken.”
“A shaman can do that,” Jacob said, pointing out a fact I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’d done a shaman’s duty by cleansing the kelpie’s spirit. Albeit, with a bullet.
“I’m not a shaman,” I said, stubbornly.
“You’re whatever you want to be,” Jacob said, starting to fade away. “But the power is yours if you want it. It always was.”
I took a deep breath. “I guess I’m our last hope then.”
There was no response.
I shouted into the air, “You’re supposed to say there is another!”
But there was no other.
It was all on me.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, so now I just need to go find the eldritch location where my friends, the sheriff, and the FBI agent I think is cute are. Yeah, that shouldn’t be difficult at all. There’s just, what, ten thousand acres to search?”
Which, honestly, sounds like a lot, but most people can’t transform into deer. Still, the clock was ticking and I needed to pick a direction for where to go. Moments later, as if answering my unspoken need, I saw the sight of a white stag standing on top of a path leading from the ruined cabin nearby. It was magnificent and reminded me of illustrations of a similar creature in a book about Arthurian myth. It was larger than any stag I’d ever seen with a huge crown that even my father would have envied. The creature stared at me for a moment then beckoned me with its head before trotting off.
“I really hope this isn’t another monster trying to trap me because, wow, would egg be on my face,” I said, turning into a deer and running after him.
The sense of running through the forest as a deer isn’t something that I can really describe to non-shapeshifters. In human form, I’d have to keep watch on the ground and be careful to avoid tripping. As Emma would say, humans actually evolved pretty badly to walk on two legs. It’s why back pain and other conditions exist.
God, Goddess, and nature had given us four-leggers many advantages over that, though. I felt free and awesome with the wind at my face even as I hoped I was coming to the Lodge. I imagined smashing myself through its front doors and banging Rudy in the face with my head.
That fantasy disappeared as I felt dread creep up the back of my spine again. I was running away from the lake, but whatever I was running to felt even worse. Not born of suppressed memories but something even more intangible. Seeing the stag’s rear legs, I struggled to keep up even as I knew I was getting closer and closer to the Big Bad Wolf.
Would Emma still be alive? Alex? Maria?
Would I at the end of the night?
Forcing those thoughts away, I ran faster in order to catch up with my spirit guide and searched the darkness of the woods for some sign of my friends or the Lodge. I had no idea what it would look like but there were a thousand tiny sights all around me. The moonlight coming through the trees was no longer red, instead a pleasant silver light, but it barely provided the illumination I needed for my search. My vision was limited to being barely able to keep up with the white stag if I ran as fast as I could.
“Come on,” I said, thr
ough labored breaths. “Please be close by, please be alive.”
Following him through a pair of trees, I nearly ran over a pair of sheriff’s deputies and Lucien. All of them jumped out of my way with Deana knocking me over with a ball of water, she conjured in the air and that hit me like a baseball bat.
“Deer!” one of the deputies shouted, aiming a rifle he was carrying.
Lucien grabbed the rifle from him and looked ready to hit him with its butt. “Idiot!”
I fell on the ground and resumed my human form, holding my hands up in the air. “Friend not food!”
It took me a second to recognize the two deputies as Harvey Chang and Dave Warren. Harvey was a goatee-wearing Chinese-American man with a spherical bald head who dressed like a cowboy while Dave was a thin African-American man with short, bushy black hair and a pair of spectacles. Both were human and people I’d had some unfortunate encounters with over the years. Apparently, some of the hunters me and my dad took rock salt shots at were less than pleased with our pranks. Harvey hated shapeshifters, which meant he was in the wrong town, and Dave liked them way too much.
“Great, Jane Doe,” Harvey muttered, his voice like gravel. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“A weredeer, a sign!” Dave said, clapping his hands together. “She’s meant to lead us to the missing federal agent.”
Lucien did a sideways glance at Dave. “You realize magic doesn’t work like that, right?”
“He really doesn’t,” I said, getting up. “Albeit, a white stag was leading me toward the Lodge. Did either of you see it?”
“A white stag!” Dave said, aping his earlier statement. “Magic does work like that!”
Lucien felt his face. “Don’t encourage him.”
