Wakeworld (12 page)

M
organ had no trouble finding his way back to the old homestead. It was a wonder to him that his body remembered, by force of habit, the things that his brain had cast aside, that there was no indecision or hesitation about where to turn, even without signposts or recognizable landmarks. For some reason, the county had kept the road open—not maintained, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it was clear of trees and brush. Two rough tracks led through a forest of pine and fir, interspersed with tamaracks, bright gold still but beginning to shed their needles.

There were a few rough dwellings along the way—trailers, cabins, even a yurt. No evidence of telephone or electrical wires, and he saw a homebuilt windmill churning on a hill. These were the homes of people who liked the solitude, who were most likely off the grid entirely. And this was good, because as long as he left them alone they were unlikely to report on his activities to the authorities.

The old homestead lay at the very end of the road, in an overgrown clearing. Forestland had encroached, but someone had taken the trouble to beat back a healthy barrier between house and trees. It made a sort of sense—somebody must own the property. It would have been sold or taken over. Just because they hadn’t chosen to rebuild didn’t mean they weren’t smart enough to maintain a firebreak between a tinder-dry old heap of lumber and acres of forested land.

As he got out of the truck a raven, hoary with age, glided over and landed on a nearby rock. It cronked at him, twice.

“Go away, would you?” Morgan snapped, but the bird cocked its head to peer at him out of one bright black eye and stayed precisely where it was.

Something about the bird was familiar, just as the turnoff and the road had been, and Morgan was pretty sure he had uttered that exact same phrase more than once during his childhood. Of course it couldn’t be the same bird, even though ravens were long lived as birds went. Still, his fingers went of their own accord to the carved pendant he had worn ever since he could remember, a raven in flight, caught in a dream web.

There was no comfort in that pendant. It was a reminder of his guilt more than anything else. Guilt that he was finally going to confront despite the deep dread that weighted every step, restricted every breath.

The house was still standing. He had maintained a secret hope that someone would have demolished it by now. The windows were broken, the shingles green with moss. Apart from that, it didn’t look much different than he remembered. His resolve failed, thinking about what awaited him inside, and he chose to allow himself a small grace and visit the barn first. As he made his way across the yard, the raven hopped and fluttered after him, never more than a few yards away, refusing to shoo even when he threw a pinecone at it.

When he reached the barn door he hesitated, eyeing the structure with some unease. The roof sagged in the middle, giving the whole thing a swaybacked look. The boards were gray and weathered and had warped and dried, forming cracks wide enough to slide fingers between. But it was still standing, and unlikely to come crashing down on his head.

The door scraped across the warped floorboards, creaking on its hinges. Small scurrying and fluttering noises signaled the presence of mice and swallows, hiding themselves from the unaccustomed daylight.

A thick layer of dust coated everything. Several of the floorboards were rotten, and he stepped carefully to avoid holes. Swallow droppings piled thick in places, clay nests above his head a varied sculpture of new, old, and broken.

To the right were the milking stalls where Morgan had sat on a three-legged wooden stool, half awake in the early morning and resting his head against the cow’s warm flank. He hadn’t been alone, though. Three stalls. Three people milking cows. Somebody else tending chickens, throwing hay out for the horses.

A memory flash showed him faces. It faded at once, taking the faces with it and leaving him only the irritation of having almost seen, a brain itch that made him want to peel back his skull and rake his fingernails across his brain. At the same time, his body responded with dread. His heart sped, his insides shook like Jell-O. He took another step into the barn.

At the center of the open space, not far from the feed bins, was a small hump of straw and dust. Again, for no reason he could think of, his entire attention fixated on that hump, with the same watchful respect he might have accorded a rattlesnake coiled next to his feet.

The raven hopped past, pausing once to poke his beak into what was left of an old feed sack, and then moved on to the looming thing. Morgan followed in spite of himself, a quiet horror darkening the edges of his vision. A memory flash assailed him.

He stood with the gun in his hands, his stomach knotted with guilt. Tears threatened and he blinked them back. He did not deserve the release of tears . . .

Dear God, what had he done? He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to look, but that’s what he was here to do and he pushed himself forward. Beneath dust and cobwebs lay what was clearly a skeleton, the size of a small child.

He felt his gorge rise, clamped his jaw tight to keep his teeth from chattering against each other. Bending down, he brushed away the dust and straw that covered the bones.

Something wasn’t right with the skeleton—the jaw was too long, the skull too narrow, the leg and arm bones of equal length. Not a child, then, thank God. Long-denied tears wet his cheeks as he bent and touched a finger to the hole in the side of the skull.

Lady tries to get onto her feet when she sees him, but her hindquarters are flattened and refuse to move. Her tail can still wag and gives three whaps on the barn floor. Run over by the plow, his father says. Got in the way, no time to stop. She’ll have to be put down, and Morgan’s the one that will have to do it. But there’s another option, his father says.

“You don’t have to kill her, son. Just take her on into a Dreamworld and make a shift. She’ll be running free and whole in no time. So easy . . .”

“No! When will you listen? I won’t be the Dreamshifter, I don’t want to. Gracie wants it—why can’t you—”

“You’re it, boy. I’ve already taught you, and rules say I can’t teach two. Time to be a man and do what must be done.”

He won’t do it, though. He won’t give in to his father’s twisted games. He pushes the barrel of the gun against Lady’s head and she wags her tail again, her brown eyes pleading.

Morgan pulled himself back from the memory. Why hadn’t he buried her? She’d been a good dog.

He searched the barn and found what he wanted leaning up against the wall. The spade was rusty and the handle full of slivers, but it served his purpose. No more than fifteen minutes later he stood, head bowed, beside the grave he should have dug eighty-six years ago.

A soft squawk behind him, a rustle and flutter, and the raven landed on his shoulder. This too was familiar. Everywhere he went, the dog at his heels, the bird flying from tree to tree or sometimes alighting on his shoulder, always to be shooed away.

“Get lost, will you?” he said again, but the raven only dug sharp talons into his skin, a determined passenger. Part of his penance, maybe, and he let the bird stay. The business with the dog was bad, but he knew damned well there was worse to come. Images darted through his memory without any connection or explanation. Blood and death, terror and rage, and always the overarching guilt.

Whatever pain awaited in his memories he had most certainly earned, and it was about time he paid. Still, about halfway toward the house, as the first tendrils of memory reached out to pull him in, he hesitated. It was not too late. If he drove away now, if he directed his mind down other paths, if he stopped at the very first liquor store and bought a fifth of McNaughton’s, he might be able to stuff this all back down into the place where he had kept it for so many years. He’d spent his entire life avoiding one thing or another; what was to stop him from continuing?

Memory of Jenn’s desperate face at the last moment he’d seen her alive decided him.
Coward.

Images of his brothers and sisters flicked through his mind, one after the other, Ellie, Jack, Will, Grace. Years since he’d seen those faces or allowed himself to think of them, and yet they belonged to him as surely as his own hands and feet. Bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

Tightening his grip on the shotgun as though it would somehow provide protection from his memories, he crossed the threshold into the house.

He was relieved to find the kitchen empty. No stove, no table, no chairs.

No bodies.

The kitchen window was broken, and glass shards mingled with a debris of dirt and leaves on counter and floor. A dead bird lay in the corner where the stove should have been. The rough plank table with the red checked cloth was gone.

Ellie would be appalled at the state of her kitchen.

Ellie is dead. Long dead.

A breeze flowed in through the broken window, rattling dry leaves into drifts in the corners, leaving bare patches on the dark, rust-colored floor.

Wrong color. It had been a lighter wood, scrubbed by Ellie’s busy hands to an almost golden glow. The whitewashed walls, gray now with age and dirt, carried other, darker marks. A fine spray in places, solid color in others.

Morgan realized he was holding his breath; his blood roared in his ears like surf against stone.

Blood.

The fragile continuum that was time dissolved and he fell on his knees under the weight of blood and guilt, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes to shut it out. But still he saw her, exactly as she had appeared in an endless procession of nightmares over the years. Grace, his little sister, his to protect, eyes wide and expressionless in a face splattered with blood.

Coward.

Morgan stops once to vomit as he walks back to the house. Lady needed to be put down; she was suffering. But guilt nags at him. All he had to do was give in. Take the dog to a Dreamworld and shift the dream.

All the trust in those brown eyes as he’d pulled the trigger. He wipes away tears with a hand that shakes with grief and rage and guilt. He did what he had to do. He will not be the next Dreamshifter. Will not become like his father. Ever.

He’s late. They will all be at supper, waiting for him. So he stops to wipe his eyes again, to pull himself together, clutching the shotgun like an anchor. As expected, the table is set for dinner, everyone in their places. Except for his father, who stands waiting at the head of the table, his chair pushed back, the Winchester in his hands.

“I’m going to ask you one more time, son,” he says.

All of them know that tone of voice and what it means. Every face in the room goes still; all eyes turn on the man about to erupt into violence.

“No,” Morgan says. He’s going to die, he thinks. Right now. Right here.

Instead, the old man swings his gun toward Ellie and shoots her full in the chest. Her chair crashes over backward and she falls to the floor, blood staining the front of her dress. Jack drops to his knees beside her, calling her name, pressing his hands against a red tide that will not be stemmed.

Before Morgan can think to speak or move, the back of Jack’s head is gone and he slumps over his sister.

“No,” Weston shouts, or means to. His voice comes out small and quavering. This can’t have just happened, can’t be happening. “I’ll do it. Whatever you want—”

The old man’s mouth stretches into a grin. “You’re too late, son.”

The gun swings toward Will, who has time to say one word—
please
—before he has no jaw to speak with.

“All I asked of you was for you to do your job,” his father says. “You wanted one of the others to do it. Now there are no others.”

But there is one, still. Grace. Blood in her hair, on her face, her dress drenched in it. She has left the table, is standing beside Morgan.

She lifts the shotgun, still clenched in his hands, aims, pulls the trigger. The kick startles him out of his shock as crimson blooms on their father’s chest. The old man’s jaw goes slack. The hand holding the gun sinks toward the floor. His mouth opens to say something and then he collapses.

“Coward,” Grace says.

Morgan realized he was rocking like a small child or a man insane. He could have saved them all. One shot to take out the old man before he killed anybody. Grace would have done it, if she’d had the gun. She was only a child and she’d been able to think and act.

Or he could have just done as his father demanded and agreed to be the Dreamshifter.

People were dead because of his failure to act. His brothers and sisters. Carpenter and Jenn. It was time for justice, and he knew only one way to make things right.

V
ivian white-knuckled the steering wheel of her old Subaru, partly to stay on the road and partly to keep from bouncing off the seat. Poe, making good use of his flightless wings to keep his balance, made reproachful noises that sounded human. She didn’t blame him.

This couldn’t be called a road; it was little more than two tire tracks through the forest. Tall grasses swished along the bottom of her car. Bushes and tree branches scraped along the sides. Once she drove over something that made a long metallic screech and she held her breath, waiting for the radiator to explode or the smell of gasoline to fill the air.

At least one other vehicle had traveled here, and not long ago. The grass was flattened in the tire tracks and had not yet stood back up again. It worried her at first to think about encountering a stranger in the middle of nowhere, but then she began to notice the trailers and shacks along the way, well off the track and nearly hidden in the trees. Civilization, of a sort.

She hoped to God she’d read the map right, but even if she hadn’t she was going to keep on driving because there was no safe place to turn around and she sure as hell wasn’t backing all the way out of here. At least it was early in the day and she wouldn’t get caught out in the dark. At least she had a full tank of gas.

These were small mercies, but she clung to them.

Time swirled around her ears, sang in her veins, whispered through every cell of her body with an urgency she could not ignore. Not the winged chariot of Donne’s poem, merely drawing near, but right here and now, in your face, like a cat in the morning when you’re trying to sleep.

Something was about to happen. Maybe she could stop it, but she didn’t have much time.

Just as she was beginning to truly doubt her sense of direction and the map, the track widened and she drove into a clearing. As she had feared, she was not alone. There was another vehicle—a battered old pickup truck, dented and scratched, so mud-covered she couldn’t figure out its color. It bore B.C. license plates, which meant someone was a long way from home, and the chances of ending up in this place accidentally seemed slim.

She stayed close to the car, looking around for movement. She had no weapon on her, not even a can of bear spray. No phone. Not that there would be a signal out here anyway. A raven flew across the clearing and settled in a tree not ten feet away, peering down at her. Other than the inquisitive bird, nothing moved. Nobody appeared from out of the bushes or behind any trees, and after a long moment Vivian eased the door closed and walked over to check out the pickup.

It was empty.

She opened the passenger-side door and rifled through the glove box. The truck was registered to a Morgan Weathersby, of Trail, B.C. A litter of receipts from grocery stores and gas stations for coffee and soda covered the passenger-side floor. A coffee mug, an empty chip bag. Nothing else. No wallet. No weapons, although there was a gun rack in the back window. In the bed of the truck a couple of gas cans, strapped down with bungee cords. A backpack, complete with canteen and sleeping bag.

The raven took flight in a burst of feathers. Vivian startled, pressing her hand over her racing heart. Poe stood beside her, his black eyes following the path of the bird toward the house. It lit on the eaves, scolding something out of sight.

A heartbeat later the target of the raven’s attention emerged from around the corner of the house—a man wearing a red flannel shirt and faded jeans. Long gray hair hung in snarls over his shoulders; a grizzled beard cascaded over his breast. Vivian took an unconscious step forward. He was hurt in some way, moving in a shambling, loose-limbed gait as though something were broken and he hadn’t realized it yet.

In his hand he carried a large container, fire-engine red. He bent over at the waist, pouring liquid onto the ground, splashing it up onto the walls of the house.

Vivian’s brain registered slowly, making a delayed connection with the gas cans in the back of the pickup.

She broke into a dead run, but it felt slow-motion, like running in a dream. The man tossed the gas can toward the house, onto the sagging front porch, and stood up straight, both hands pressing into the small of his back as he stretched. He dug into his pocket and pulled something out, a small rectangular object. A motion of his right hand, and a flame burned. Matches.

Vivian found her breath and shouted, “No!”

The raven dove at the man’s head.

“Shoo, damn it!” he yelled at the bird. Shielding his head from the onslaught with his free arm, he tossed the match with the other. Flames erupted up out of the dry grass with a loud whoosh, licking hungrily at the old wood. All around the perimeter of the house the flames shot up. The front porch flared into an instant bonfire, the fire reaching in through the broken glass of a window.

“Are you insane?” Vivian shouted. She stood at a distance, helpless, the heat already reaching out to sting the skin of her face.

The raven still fussed, diving over and over again.

“Tar and damnation, you blasted bird!” Continuing to cover his head with one arm, the man dug in his pockets with his free hand, drew back his arm, and hurled something toward the hottest part of the fire.

Vivian gasped, her heart twisting with helplessness and loss.

A small crystal sphere arced upward, splintering the light into a myriad of rainbows, falling with a soul-shattering chime into the flames. A dreamsphere. It would have taken her into Dreamworld, locked doors or no, and he had just destroyed it. Still the man wasn’t done. He reached up and lifted something over his head, a pendant of some kind. Vivian was close enough now to see what it was, to reach for his arm and try to hold him back. Again, she was too late. He flung this too, directly toward the fire.

At the last possible second the raven swooped down, caught the thing in his beak, and flew to a nearby tree, where he perched, feathers ruffled, radiating disapproval.

“Damn you,” the man said, “give it back.” His body language changed with the outpouring of rage. He no longer appeared shambling or broken, but surprisingly vigorous and straight given his apparent age. Stalking over to the tree, he shook it until the dry leaves rattled and fell. The raven merely fluttered up a few branches higher and peered down, croaking disdainfully.

“I don’t think he’s going to surrender it,” Vivian said. The raven reminded her of Poe and she knew that look. Stubborn.

“We’ll see about that.”

The man strode away from the tree and around to the side of the house, returning with a shotgun in his hands. Putting it to his shoulder, he aimed it up into the tree. Instinct told her it was essential that both bird and pendant be preserved, and she needed to stop this deranged idiot from firing his gun. But behind them the fire roared and snapped. A hot wind gusted in her hair. The hotter the fire got, the more her dragon blood responded. She could feel the change trying to take place—the dragon shape stretching her from within, her mind moving toward the angles and planes of dragon thought.

I am Vivian, I will remain Vivian.
Her will was sufficient to hold back the shift, but there was none to spare for speech.

The raven took care of the problem. Almost lazily, dripping evident disdain, it took flight, keeping the tree between itself and the shotgun until it was well up into the sky, where it flew in tantalizing circles. The man lowered his weapon with a muttered curse.

Vivian heaved a sigh of relief. She could move away from the fire, ease the pressure to make the shift. But before she could take a single step, the lunatic dropped the gun and broke into a headlong dash, straight toward the fire.

It was already a raging inferno, flames shooting out through all of the windows, reaching toward the sky. Vivian wasted a precious instant frozen in disbelief before she raced after him. She was younger, but he was stronger and faster and was lengthening his lead. Head down, legs churning, arms pumping, his long gray hair blowing out behind him in the wind created by the fire.

The heat was intense, a solid wall of wind and energy that pushed Vivian’s control to the breaking point. There was no time to fight it. All that existed was the man chasing self-immolation and her need to stop him. Everything turned into a blur. The distance between them shrank at speed. She intercepted his path and bowled him over backward, wrapping her arms around him and dragging him away from the flames. There was a muddle of air and grass and fire and flesh.

The next thing she was conscious of, she knelt over his body stretched full length on the ground. His eyes, coffee dark, were wide with fear and confusion. His long gray beard had been singed by the fire, his nose and cheeks slightly reddened. A scorched smell wafted off him.

“What the hell are you?” he asked.

This was not a good beginning to the conversation she needed to have with him, but the dragon flare was too recent for her to be able to invoke some therapeutic professional technique that might have de-escalated everything.

“Like you have a right to ask questions. Any questions. You lit a house on fire. Then you tried to run into it. Are you sane?”

“No. Let me go.”

His gaze turned back to the fire, and she read longing and desire.

“Oh, hell,” she said. “Suicide? Maybe next time you could just use the gun like a normal person.”

“Like a—did you just say
normal
?”

“Look—you feel the need to off yourself, fine, but first tell me why you just destroyed a perfectly good dreamsphere?”

“No such thing as a good dreamsphere. And you can’t stop me from killing myself forever, no matter what sort of twisted mutant creature you are.”

It dawned on her that they were a lot farther from the conflagration than they should have been. Also that her vision was extraordinarily clear and that the backs of the hands pressing on his chest were marked with a pattern of scales. Oh, shit. Mutant indeed.

“I need you,” she said. “Needed that dreamsphere too, but it’s too late for that.”

His eyes narrowed. “I’m not helping a sorceress with anything.”

“You will—”

“What are you going to do, kill me? Please, be my guest.”

“Are you always this obnoxious? I bet you’re not even Morgan Weathersby. In fact, you know what? I think you’re Weston Jennings. So what I could do, here, is call the cops and get you arrested and then when you can’t kill yourself, because you’re on suicide watch in the jail, we’ll talk about how you aren’t going to help me.”

“You think they’re going to believe that I’m Weston Jennings? Still alive and kicking at a hundred and three? I think not.”

Vivian smiled at him. Quite pleasantly, she thought, although his face reacted as though she’d just done something threatening. “So you do know about Weston? Do tell.”

His jaw clamped tight. “I’m not telling you anything.”

She shrugged. “Fine. You committed arson. And when I tried to stop you, you turned the gun on me and tried to shoot me.”

“You wouldn’t—”

“Try me.”

He sighed. “And if I tell them that you grew scales and wings and carried me away from the fire, then I get locked up in a mental ward. Is that it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The scale pattern on her hands had gone. Her eyes felt normal; her vision had returned to a more ordinary level. “I’m a well-respected member of the community. Doctor who works in the ER.”

“And I suppose every well-respected ER doc has a penguin following her around.” He was looking over her shoulder now, and she could only guess that Poe had made an appearance.

The raven chose that moment to flutter down and land beside the man’s head. In his beak still dangled the leather cord with the black pendant hanging from it. “May I?” Vivian asked, and the bird released it to her before running his beak tentatively through Morgan/Weston’s fire-frazzled hair.

The pendant was much like her own, a raven rather than a penguin, and Vivian saw why this bird had reminded her so much of Poe. “You tried to destroy this too. Why?”

“Don’t want it, don’t need it.”

There was more in his face, a deep despair that moved her despite herself. She thought of the scroll and the newspaper. Weston Jennings, gone missing in 1925. Weston Jennings, presumed to have massacred his family. A lot of years to live with that sort of guilt, to try to come to terms with the whole thing.

“Why did you do it?”

“What, burn down the house?”

“No—kill your family.”

He had lain still and compliant, but now he began to twist and struggle. “Just let me go.”

“Can’t.”

But he had both weight and muscle on his side and she couldn’t hold him. She looked around for something to subdue him with. No sticks, no rocks; the gun was out of reach and even if she could get to it, what good was it to threaten somebody who wanted to be dead?

He flung her to the side and scrambled up onto hands and knees. He was going to run back into the fire, and she could not afford to let him go.

So she summoned up the Voice of command.

“Stay where you are.”

His body shuddered to a stop, muscles quivering and convulsing with the effort to move on while the invisible barrier held him. Her own gut twisted in sympathy, but she held him with her will and did not release.