Shaman's Blood (26 page)

That event had shocked him and, he had to admit, frightened him on several levels; he’d been alarmed for her safety, but he’d also been unable to rationally construct how the scene of destruction could have come about. Margaret seemed to have no trouble accepting what she claimed was obvious: the Dreamtime Wandjinas had come to rescue her mother, or her rescue had been a by-product of the retribution visited on the phantom preacher Alice believed she’d called from some other dimension into this one.

Try as he might, Nik simply could not accept the notion of anyone being haunted by creatures that manifested from somewhere outside the here and now. He could almost accommodate the notion of consciousness existing beyond the physical plane, but to have it deliberately haunt one’s dreams and invoke visions of terror that could cause bodily harm was to admit a universe he’d stolidly denied most of his life. The closest he could get to it was the ongoing scientific discussion of extra dimensions that might resemble membranes or strings or some other construct du jour. He could discuss in speculative terms a model whereby planes of these unknown universes might bump up against each other and somehow bleed into one another, but outright belief in the supernatural he held at arm’s length.

Alice had said, when she’d recovered enough to try to describe what had happened on that afternoon of rain and shrieking wind, that an Aboriginal god, an Ancestor called Namarrkun, had come down and taken away the vile thing named Cadjer Harrow, a character whom she admitted to having largely invented from a few scraps of nineteenth-century newspaper reporting. She also believed that her own consciousness had been scooped up along with Harrow’s and transported out into the cosmos. To the Milky Way. Sky Home in Aboriginal terms, she’d said. These were things he didn’t like to think about, which was why he kept up his jogging routine, even on the hottest days of summer: running cleared his mind.

Nik toweled his hair dry and went out into the hallway. He heard Dawg barking outside in a barrage of yipping and yelping punctuated by growls that escalated into alarm barking. Nik wrapped the towel around his waist and looked out the bedroom window to see if anyone had driven up in the yard. Seeing nothing, he went out onto the deck and tried to course the direction of Dawg’s incessant yelping. It seemed to be coming from the trees behind the clearing at the back of the house.

He knew that he needed to get dressed and go check on Dawg, but his thoughts kept returning to Alice and the events of last year. As much as they had all tried to settle back into a pattern of normalcy, tacitly agreeing to carry on as if nothing had happened, he still thought about those fear-filled months all the time and assumed both Alice and Margaret did as well. How could they not?

So, it bothered him that Alice had gotten involved with the history of the church down the road again, because it seemed clear to him that had been the origin of her problems. For whatever reason, she’d begun to imagine seeing characters from an aborted novel she’d been researching and hallucinating spectral visitations. These delusions had temporarily driven them apart, and it was mainly his concern over her physical safety, and Margaret’s, that had brought him back. But once he’d come back, he made a commitment to stay, because for that brief time when they’d been separated, he’d found himself surprisingly lonely.

He firmly believed that for a couple to make it together, they should support each other through whatever crises might occur in their lives. But in this case, the problem was that although he felt competent to physically protect the property and make sure Alice got proper medical attention when she’d been mauled by the feral dog, he’d been unprepared to help her in the way she’d obviously needed most: confirmation of the unreal.

The dog attack, however, had been real enough … at least, her injuries from it were real. She had a torn coat and a dislocated shoulder to prove it. And his own chase of the beast and confrontation down by the pond in the woods had certainly been real. Remembering that encounter brought his focus back to the edge of the trees where Dawg continued to yelp. Nik could just make out the movement of his tail and rear end near a fallen beech just off the beginning of the footpath.

“Hej, Dawg!” Nik whistled sharply and the barking ceased. Dawg came trotting into the yard, his head up and tail beating his hindquarters. Even without his glasses, Nik could see that Dawg’s fur wasn’t bristled, so whatever had excited him didn’t appear to be threatening.

“Wait, Mutt-butt,” he called, using Margaret’s favorite nickname. “I’m coming there in a minute.” Dawg danced around the yard, seeing his master leaning over the rail, and then he bounded off into the woods again. Soon Nik heard his yipping resume with renewed excitement.

Nik went to the bedroom and found a clean T-shirt and jeans. Normally, with the weather so hot, he would have opted for gym shorts, but if he was going to have to go into the woods he wanted his legs protected from briars and biting insects. He found a clean pair of socks after much rummaging in the bottom dresser drawer that Alice had allocated for his use, put his running shoes back on, and tossed his sweaty jogging shorts and socks on top of the towering mound in the corner hamper. Between Alice and himself the pile grew at an alarming rate; one of them would have to break down and do the laundry soon.

Putting his glasses on and tying his wet hair back with a shoelace, Nik headed out the front door and bounded down the steps. He was thinking of the ways in which he and Alice complemented each other when she was happy and things were going well, which only contributed to the glum feeling that a lot of what he enjoyed about their being together had been quietly eroding. Things weren’t right, but he was at a loss as to how to fix whatever it was.

He knew that Alice fit most of the things his parents would wish for him: she was attractive, intelligent, educated, professional. But maybe not young enough; they would want grandchildren that were Nik's own blood, not adopted from a former marriage. Of course, they would never say that to his face, but the thought would be there.

Some of this was bound to come to a head when he graduated, which wasn’t that far away now. He had already started sending out employment query letters both in the U.S. and abroad, with the help of Stuart Eisner, his major professor, and if he got a good offer in Sweden, chances were that he would take it. He had his own fantasies of how he wanted that to play out, but without Alice’s cooperation, making it happen was questionable. If she chose to stay here because of job or friends or whatever reason, it wouldn’t deter him from taking an offer if it seemed good enough. That would likely mean seasonal visits to keep their relationship going.

He walked around the corner of the house to the back yard. Dawg burst out of the woods, ran circles around his master, and made a few perfunctory leaps in the air in front of Nik to be sure he had his human’s full attention.

“Lägg av, cut it out already!” Dawg sat down, but it was clear he could barely contain himself.

Nik surveyed the perimeter of the clearing and the opening into the trees where the path began. “So, what’s this thing you want so much to show me, eh?”

He reached down and scratched Dawg around the ears and under the chin. A small round object fell off into his hand: it was a tick, bloated with blood. In late summer, that was to be expected; they were everywhere.

“Time to get you a new flea and tick collar, I see,” he said to Dawg. “Another reason I can’t let you in the house, old pal.”

Nik held his palm open, dispassionately observing the unwieldy creature trundling slowly across his hand, its body so swollen that the head was all but invisible. He fully intended to kill it because he didn’t want more of them proliferating in the grass around the house, but it was interesting to him from a purely biological standpoint to identify what type of tick it was and observe how it moved.

Finally, Dawg could restrain himself no longer and leaped up, dashing down the trail. Nik crushed the tick between his shoe and a rock at the edge of Alice’s butterfly garden and followed. He could see Dawg crouched down in the leaf litter just off the path, clearly pointing at something in a hole under the fallen beech. The massive trunk had been there for several seasons and its gray skin was peeling up, making a home for beetles and other things on the raccoon menu, like the row of Pluteus cervinus, the deer mushroom, marching in a neat row along the eastern-facing side of the tree. The sizeable excavation underneath the trunk suggested armadillos.

“What do we have here?” Nik said aloud. He whistled and called Dawg to him, holding him in check, and squatted down, not too close, to see if he could glimpse what was under there. If a rattler or a moccasin, he certainly didn’t want to be within its strike range.

Balanced on his haunches, Nik waited, perfectly still, for some minutes just watching and listening. And then whatever was under the log made a distinctly animal sound.

“Not a snake,” he said. It was probably some hapless raccoon or opossum that had sought a place safe from Dawg’s chasing instincts.

He stood up, pulling Dawg away from the tree. “Follow with me. Let’s just leave the poor creature in peace.” But then, it made a distinctly feline sound, a sort of mewing that sounded quite pitiful. Nik stopped in his tracks.

Going back to the hole, he got down on his hands and knees and tried to get a better look. It was impossible—the creature was wedged in too far to see.

Nik stood up and went quickly back down the path to the house. Opening his truck, he retrieved a flashlight and shut Dawg in the laundry room. Dawg protested, whimpering and scratching at the door, but Nik was unmoved. “Back in a minute, old pal. I just need to see what you’ve got cornered.”

He ran up the steps and went to the kitchen. In the refrigerator, he found the leftover grilled grouper from last night’s supper wrapped in plastic. Breaking off a small piece, he hurried back downstairs.

Crouching in front of the hole, he put the fish on the ground and waited. Before long, he saw movement and heard a scrabbling as the creature maneuvered itself out of its hiding place and into the daylight. It was a cat, so thin as to be skeletal, with long matted gray-white fur. It began to gnaw the piece of fish with a fury, by which Nik could tell it was starving. Then he observed that one of its front legs dangled limp from the shoulder as it hunkered over the food.

Looking more closely, he also saw that part of an ear was missing and there were other healed scars on its body. A dog had probably mauled it. And then, when he finally realized what he was looking at, he could not believe his eyes.

“Satan och helvete,” he whispered, “Holy Hell.”

Alice pulled up under the house just after sundown and was surprised to find Nik’s truck gone. Usually he was home every evening unless there was some university function he needed to attend. His dissertation deadline was looming, and she’d pretty much let him take over the spare bedroom, turning it into his study. He often worked late into the night, sorting through slides for his field guide and writing up the ones selected. He still taught a few classes as a graduate assistant to keep his university stipend, but he was in writing mode now and rarely had time for anything else. Since this was Thursday, she knew his classes were over at noon and that he should have been home this late in the day. 

Then she heard Dawg barking and whining, but didn’t see him anywhere. It took her a moment to realize he was shut up in the laundry room.

“Dawg! Who put you in here? Did Nik go off and leave you? Bad man!” she exclaimed as Dawg embraced his liberator with a wet sloppy kiss.

“Yuckkk! Stop that!” Alice wiped dog drool off her cheek. “But really, where’s your sorry master, eh?” Dawg bounded away to the edge of the woods, nose to the ground, but then came trotting back, apparently not finding what he was after.

Alice was shaking her head. “I don’t get it,” she said as Dawg galloped up the steps ahead of her.

Reaching the landing, she was surprised to find the front door unlocked and a note written in haste taped above the doorknob: GONE TO VET. RAINE’S CAT IS FOUND!

How was that possible? She couldn’t even begin to imagine. Late last year, on Christmas Day to be exact, Nik had discovered the grisly remains of Raine’s other cat, Tux, mauled by a wild dog, the same one, it was assumed, that had attacked Alice on the stairs of her house one dark night a few weeks later. When Sesshomaru, Raine’s white Persian, disappeared, they assumed he’d met the same end, and although they’d all searched the surrounding woods for months, the body never turned up.

“Well, I guess that explains that,” she said to Dawg.

Alice was about to give Raine a call to see what she could find out when Dawg’s head went up and his tail went into action. Then she heard Nik’s old truck chugging down the drive. She went out onto the landing and waited for him.

“Hey, I found your note,” she said, as he came up the stairs. “Sesshomaru’s still alive? That’s amazing!”

“Ja, I thought so too. When I first saw him, I wasn’t so sure it was a cat, even, he was so emaciated. I called Raine and went straight to the vet. She met me there.”

Alice followed Nik inside. “What did the vet say?”

“She thinks they can save him. He had a lot of old wounds on him, and one leg had been dislocated and broken. He’s been dragging it around useless. It’s anybody’s guess how he’s been able to catch or find enough food to stay alive. One would think he would have gone home when they were looking for him all that time.”

“I’ve heard about that kind of thing,” Alice said. “Cats aren’t like dogs, y’know. Injured or highly frightened cats will hide out and not come to anybody, not even their owners. They can get in such a state that they actually forget where they once lived. Cats that have been missing for months are often found not far from their owner’s home.”

Alice pulled a bowl of tuna salad out of the fridge and set about making sandwiches. “Are you hungry?”

“Ravenous.”

“Me, too. This won’t take a second.”