Shadow Walker

by Tina Proffitt

  Shadow Walker

  TINA PROFFITT

  Prologue

  Thunder rolled in from over the Virginia mountain tops, sounding like explosions of mortar in the valley more than the innocent path of lightning through the heavy rain clouds. In the distance, a red barn sat at the top of the hill in a remote area of campus. No one would stumble upon them there. If they could just reach it before the next lightning strike, the two young women would be safe inside.

  Once there, stepping inside, lights came on overhead as if someone had been expecting them. The pair dripped water across the plank floorboards all the way to the back where they found a nice dry spot to settle down and wait out the rest of the storm. And soon, as they whispered to one another and the thunder continued outside, they found a way to occupy themselves that suited them both. It also managed to keep them warm.

  So caught up in their lovemaking were they that neither one of them heard the footsteps entering the barn. And too late, a horrible, dog-like creature was upon them. The taller of the two girls managed to push the hideous beast away, but just for a moment. And she used that second to turn her back on the creature to check on her new lover. The massive creature rose up again on hind legs, seemingly from the other girl's view over her lover's shoulder, to be twice the size of a normal man. Its back was covered in fur, its face a grotesque mask, half man, half coyote. It knocked her down easily with a sweeping blow to the head, which left her body wholly unmoving on the floor in the fetal position, her face covered in blood that ran freely, stealing the life from her body.

  As she sat upon the floor, unmoving, where she had been when the creature first appeared. The second girl, much smaller in size than her lover could now see directly into her lover's open, lifeless eyes. She sat, frozen there, unable to move, her own eyes full of a terror that foretold her own death. Her lover's eyes, the eyes that had just seen her naked breasts, now stared lifeless at the ceiling. They could have been soul mates but now would never have a chance to discover.

  Seconds ticked by as if they were hours as she sat, hugging her knees to her chest and watching the creature stalk towards her. She knew there would be no chance of her stopping it, and she looked up into its human eyes, the last thing she saw.

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference. -Robert Frost

  Chapter 1

  Bethanie Hutchinson was not given a middle name. Although her name was carefully chosen, being named for Bethany, a village near Jerusalem where Jesus visited Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, her parents had not given her a middle name. When she had turned seven, she had asked her mother why she did not have one like the other girls. Her mother had told her that she would not have any use for a middle name since when she married, she would take her husband's name. Thus, making her forever a Hutchinson. Since then, in her mind, Bethanie had always compared a middle name to a place marker.

  Having been groomed for marriage from their first year, all of the women in her family married by the age of eighteen. But here she was nearing twenty-one years old and still single, with no prospects and no interest in anyone, particularly no one she went to school with.

  Attending Ferra College also signified her as different since no female in her family attended school after the age of sixteen. There was simply no need for it, her mother had said. They were needed at home. So, the kind of life intended for Bethanie existed inside of a vacuum, with no change, no growth, and no dreams.

  It was Saturday morning. Bethanie switched off the small analog television set that had been left on overnight to help her sleep. She tucked inside her backpack her field notes, a baggie of homemade granola and almonds, a refillable water bottle, and her senior year practicum guidebook. As she placed them all inside the green canvas bag, she felt a piece of paper tucked away inside the backpack and pulled it out. It was a note from her roommate, who never came home earlier than midnight and whose favorite method of communication was the kind scribbled on a scrap of paper since Bethanie did not carry a cell phone.

  I know you said you're not scared, but Drew said his roommate saw the skinwalker outside his dorm last night. That freak is gonna hurt somebody one of these days. Be careful, sweetie! -Maggie

  Maggie's boyfriend, Drew, wanted to marry Maggie, and had even proposed to her, but she had turned him down flat. And Bethanie could not imagine why. He was obviously in love with her. She could tell by the way he hung on every word Maggie uttered. If a man ever listened to her the way Drew listened to Maggie, she would know that he really loved her. But then again, what did she know about love? She had never even had a boyfriend. The closest she had come to having one was holding hands in church. And her Daddy had found out about that quick enough.

  Quietly, she closed the dormitory door behind her so as not to wake her roommate of the last three years. She padded silently down the hall and out into the grassy yard. Out the massive iron gates that separated the large stone edifices that made up the girl's dormitories from the quad and farm fields surrounding her, resembling a patchwork quilt that stretched so far into the distance that they met the horizon. The land so beautiful it never failed to take her breath away.

  Ferra College had been a part of Virginia history longer than she had been alive. The school had made quite a name for itself back in 1969, when an injunction by the ACLU forced the college to open its doors to women. And it certainly had not been her first choice, but with a full scholarship to bank on, she could hardly afford to be picky. Sadly, it was more than two hundred miles from her home in West Virginia and her mother. She had wished to be closer to her all five of her siblings who still lived at home. But sadly, she lacked the money for the twelve-hour bus ride home.

  It had been the idea of her court-appointed attorney that she continue her education when he discovered her 4.0 GPA and her affinity for birds. He had insisted she apply for as many scholarships as she could which she finally won. Three years later, and here she was, one semester away from completing her degree in animal science.

  The campus was silent at this early morning hour, except for a whippoorwill, singing its lonesome song in the distance. It was September, and the trees, still full of green leaves, were motionless. The humidity hung in the air like a silent companion to the exposed skin of her arms on this, the remains of the hottest summer on record in twenty years. Not that it had slowed her down any; she had a date with her barn owls everyday.

  Making her way out to the barn owl nesting site, a man-made nesting box set on a pole twelve feet off the ground, she tried to put out of her mind the note from her roommate. She meant well, but Bethanie would not buy into the hysteria. The stories of the skinwalker had become wickeder and wickeder in the weeks since the fall semester had begun. Perhaps it was just urban legend started by homesick freshmen students. Students had always been the main instigators of such fables as they occurred every year since 1950. But that year in particular however, the legend just so happened to be corroborated with actual facts. A student dressed as a skinwalker had terrorized the campus, streaking around dressed as a dog until one night, the campus police, mistaking him for a coyote, shot him. And as legends go, it is said that his ghost still haunts the campus at night. The current skinwalker was believed by students to be his ghost returned set on taking revenge for his untimely death. She shuddered just thinking about it.

  This past week, some small animals had gone missing from dorm rooms. Small things like cats, hamsters, gerbils, and the occasional snake that no one besides their owners would miss. But since none of these pets were allowed in student housing anyway, no one wanted to report them as missing to campus police out of fear of being fined or even worse suspended for breaking the rules. Freshmen, she thought to herself, always taki
ng pranks too far. When will they learn how to act?

  Arriving at the barn owl's nesting box just as the sun rose above the tree-lined horizon, she smiled to herself. Early morning was the best time of day to catch the pair of owls at home, resting after a night of hunting for food. Their box sat on a high pole overlooking the agriculture department's field of fescue grass. As she approached, a nearby crow announced its presence, not in the way one would squawk at an enemy, but in a conversational way, as if to say, “hello, back again?”

  Bethanie was anxious this morning to see if her owl's second clutch of the year had yet hatched. Because of the excellent supply of prey that resided beneath the grassy fields, the adult female had laid an impressive number of eggs, eleven this time. And this, after successfully raising six owlets who, now teenagers, still enjoyed the comforts of living at home with mom and dad but frequently did their own hunting.

  She unpacked her field journal and pen and tucked them inside the waistband of her jeans. Without a shred of self-consciousness, using the deep treads in her boots, she shimmied up the rungs of the pole to the nesting box at the top, twelve feet from the ground below. This was not the first time she had been out at this site, recording the habits and her own observations of her barn owls that technically belonged to Ferra College, it had become like a second home to her. Although, this was her first year to be solely responsible for a nesting box, she had spent the last three years in classrooms, preparing for this practicum. She would spend this last year of study, tracking her owls' diet. And by monitoring what and how much they were eating, she could then determine the health of the ecosystem, whether it was thriving or not, and if not, why.

  Graduation was just a semester away and she could hardly wait. If all went well and she completed her practicum, a job with the Barn Owl Conservatory, the BOC, in Worcestershire, England waited for her, where she would be responsible for teaching everything there was to know about barn owls to small groups of school children and continuing her research.

  “Still not out are they, Carol?” she asked the mother owl whom she had affectionately named after a beloved television character. The female owl peered at her, leaning closer to her and allowing Bethanie to scratch the top of her head above her heart-shaped face. “Well, don't worry, it's only been thirty days. But look who I'm telling.” She chuckled to herself. “They'll hatch any day now. I just know it. And won't you be a proud new momma. Your first clutch. I hate to admit it, Carol,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “but I'm a little jealous. You've got everything a girl could dream of.” Bethanie had always dreamed of having a devoted husband with babies on the way. “Your husband even feeds you. How lucky are you?”

  Bethanie straightened away from the nest box and sniffed the air around her. It was Shadow Walker. She could always tell when he was near, by the scent of his sandalwood soap. The fragrance reminded her of her past, but she could not place it, only knew she liked it. The groundskeeper, as she thought of him, even though she knew he was a well-liked teacher, and one she had taken a class from her first year, was nearby. Always alone, she thought to herself, he’s always by himself just like me. They had that in common, but she disliked him anyway. He always seemed to be lurking around whenever she worked, as if he were a sentinel on some kind of guard duty for his precious fields. He knew she had never stepped foot onto his tracts of land, and she never would. That was her owl's hunting grounds, and she had no need to go near it as long as he kept the grass surrounding the fields at a height of less than eight inches to accommodate her owls' ability to hunt in them. As long as he did that, then she had no need of ever speaking to him. Not that she would even want to, he was not the sort of man with whom she would ever wish to speak. The expression he wore was a permanent scowl. She believed that he was purposefully making himself appear intimidating. Nope, she had no use for that sort.

  Shadow stretched his broad back as he stood up from his crouching position to his full six feet four inches. His long blond hair lay down the middle of his back in two narrow bone braids fastened together with a strip of thin leather. His hair had only been cut short once in his twenty-nine years, and that had been when he was mourning his father's death. When Shadow had turned sixteen years old, his father had died suddenly, leaving him and his mother alone.

  Letting the wind pick up and carry off the handful of rich, black dirt in his hand, he placed both of his hands on his narrow hips and looked out at the field of what remained of the summer crop. Being outside early in the morning was his favorite part about working for Ferra College.

  The owl girl was outside and close by. He turned to look at her. Knowing her routine by heart was easy. She was the predictable sort. That said a lot about what kind of person she was. He admired that about her. Though they had never exchanged more than a polite nod of the head, something about her drew his attention like no one else. For the past three years, since the n'ya, woman, had come to Ferra, he had silently watched her work, admiring her dedication to God's gracious, winged creatures. He could tell she had a natural way with animals, and he respected that in the same way he respected the kind of dedication she had to stewardship.

  When she turned away from him, he suddenly felt as though he had lost something. His eyes began to sting as thoughts of his father drifted in to fill his head. It did not take much to remind him how much he missed his father.

  Before he had died, his Native American Catawba Indian father had been a subsistence farmer. Who, on a fairly small piece of land not more than three acres, had been able to grow all of the food for his then young family which included Shadow and Shadow's mother. Their meat, vegetables, berries, and grain for making their own bread was provided for them on a few acres of land. Icing on the cake, his father used to say whenever he found an animal in one of the humane traps set out for small game, because it meant they would be dining for free that night.

  He heard a cry of a barn owl that took him from his thoughts and in an entirely different direction. He thought about last night, the police, and the two missing students.

  What had started out as a great day, Sunday, his day off, had quickly gone to hell. He had headed out that morning to work for his homebound mother as he always did, caring for her aging house, the same house in which Shadow had been born and raised. Loose floorboards, leaks in the roof, there was always something to occupy him. But Shadow mostly used the time to talk with his mother. Despite the fact that she spent most of her days alone, she was still fascinating to speak to. A retired teacher of a one-room schoolhouse, she was used to being the boss, and she used to doing things on her own. He sympathized with her for that. He knew how hard it was for him to ask for help. He had come by that trait naturally.

  The three acres that had once provided for all of them was now grown up. Where once there were neat, square patches of dark soil and green pushing up through the Earth, saplings and wild grass grew now. This overgrowth also brought with it the problem of pests. Mice had found their way inside the little farmhouse on more than one occasion. And unfortunately for them, they had met with a fate worse than death, his mother's sixteen pound, blind cat, meaning that any mouse it caught died a slow death because of its lack of speed. After disposing of a few carcasses in the basement, clearing weeds from the small kitchen garden, and pushing the mower over the grass surrounding the house, Shadow was almost ready to call it a day.

  He sat at the old wooden desk in the family room and took out his checkbook, paying her bills. When he was done, he tucked a fat envelope of cash into one of the pigeonholes just in case she needed anything before he returned.

  After eating a late dinner of roast chicken, string beans, and mashed potatoes with his mother, he kissed the black knot of hair on top of her head. And he asked her one more time if she would consider moving onto the Catawba lands with her husband's people where she could be cared for as one of the tribe. “Mother, you are as much a part of the tribe as he was. You know that. The moment you married, you became one of th
em.”

  “And so are you,” she said, smiling proudly at her blond-haired, blue-eyed son.

  Shadow took a deep breath, reluctant to have that conversation with her again, and she smiled knowingly.

  “I don't belong with them anymore Shadow. I would feel like a trespasser. They owe me nothing. It would be like taking advantage of my relationship with your father. He was a beautiful man. And I would feel as though I was tainting his memory. I wouldn't do that for anything in the world,” she said, relying on her cane to get her out of her chair. “I won't go back,” she said, looking squarely into his eyes, refusing to move onto Catawba land, despite her right to do so. “It's your father that I miss, not his people.”

  He nodded, saying goodbye and promising to be back the next Saturday. But he had not quite reached the door when his mother called to him.

  “Make your peace with them, Shadow. I already have.”

  Despite what happened when he returned home, the day had been a big improvement on those from his youth, and if he cared to admit it, which he did not, most of his days since. He had been known to spend an entire weekend intoxicated only to wake up on Monday morning in a strange bed with a strange woman lying next to him. He was glad those days were behind him.

  As soon as he had step foot back onto campus, he had been accosted by a group of freshmen, some he recognized from his classes, who looked as scared as if they had just met a ghost.

  The sun had just been about to set. He turned towards the sound of their approach behind him and cursed. That's when he saw her. It was the owl girl, tending to her barn owls. Wimba koda, friend of the owls, turned towards him, looking at him and squinting into the evening sun, her hand poised over her face, shielding her eyes from the glare. He nodded and she turned away.