Chapter 3
In which our hero walks the shadow realm and discovers magic is more than wands and wishes
The stars burnt down out of a midnight sky, in numbers that seemed uncountable, the Milky Way a streak across the heavens. Elgin stretched his legs as the ground rose, in times past he would have been drunk but since thenElgin’s death he hadn’t touched a drop of the hard stuff, though he’d had a beer with Griffith TwoShoes on Christmas eve and a little cheap Champagne at the Beauty American Legion New Year’s party.
This Sunday night he was walking to try and tire himself out, to wear out the faint but gnawing sense of hunger that never went away and a restlessness that no amount of work could fulfill. He’d done everything around the garage he could, until Winifred had shooed him out only half joking when she threatened him with a broom. He’d cleaned and neatened the Air-Stream until Humph had left with an embittered yowl of frustration.
He’d even worked on the plans he’d started for a complete refit of the Air-Stream and rebuild of the porch his father had built twenty years before and that Elgin had been patching ever since his father’s death. Vincent Walker, the name his father had died under, had been a good carpenter and mechanic like his son, but he’d never really seen the need to do more than the minimum, and often left jobs undone. And thenElgin had followed in his footsteps, but nowElgin found that he simply could not, or would not work, live, that way.
But today nothing had worked and at last he’d had to leave the Air-Stream and walk towards Indian Bluff, the closest spur of the foothills to his aluminum Twinkie. A fairly typical late January thaw and quick freeze had left the ground hard with patches of black ice, but the snow was gone on the flat ground, not untypical of this time of year.
With no snow he should have been nearly blind even with the glory of stars above, but he could see quite clearly, his footing as sure in the darkness as during the day. His big magnum light was hooked to his belt just in case, like he had some other survival gear. There was an odd fuzziness to what he saw, and a faint orange tint to the edges but it was more an impression than anything else.
Reaching the knob of rock at the edge of the tribal lands Elgin stopped to look around again. What he saw made him frown, the lights of Beauty curving around the end of the lake were dim and red rather than sodium orange with a few old mercury green ones still in evidence. There was a faint breeze but the lake surface was so smooth that it reflected the stars, looking like a second sky below his feet. The distant mountains instead of just blacking out the stars were distinctly visible, silvery, with just the very faintest hint of orange.
Strangest of all, far as he could see were tiny flickering lights, just like distant campfires, but not a handful, not a few dozen, not a hundred, but thousands upon thousands of them. Fading into the distance, but still pin pricks on the sides of the distant mountains.
Not far away, in a little group of trees, he could see one, and reflecting its light he could see a seated figure draped in a blanket. Elgin walked towards the fire, towards the man, an Amerind with long gray and black braids falling from each side of his head. The man was staring into the fire his eyes blinking every once in a while. At last Elgin recognized him and came to a stop, the sitting man was Chief RunningElk, the chief of the local tribes, until he’d died from a heart attack the winter before, in the bed of his rather attractive secretary, not his wife of forty years.
“Come closer whoever you are,” RunningElk said, in the local Amerind dialect.
Elgin walked forward and settled cross kneed across from the other ghost.
The chief looked at Elgin now, with eyes that had no white, no iris, no pupil, just black holes that opened onto a vista of distant stars. “You’re Jess’s boy.”
“Jess?” Elgin repeated, confused.
“My niece Jessica Beauty was your mother.” The star filled eyes went back to the fire, an gnarled hand extended out to the fire, the old man sighed.
Elgin opened his mouth, then shut it. He’d only heard his mother referred to as ‘her,’ or ‘that bitch,’ by his father. And occasionally Beauty by his other relatives, he’d no idea that she had been related to the old chief, no idea she had a first name.
“Your Pa wasn’t worth spit except on very rare occasions, your ma was everything he wasn’t, except she could never be at peace, somehow she thought that the combination would make something much greater than the sum. Damn white eye schooling, filled her head with silliness.”
“Why did she leave us?”
“No one knows, its not clear that she did, she was last seen walking home from work. Some folks think a serial killer got her. Others that she hitched a ride out of town on a passing rig. Others suggest it was both. Me? I wonder if your Pa had something to do with it.”
Elgin rubbed his hands on his coat, held them out to the fire, which gave off an oddly attenuated heat. “Where are we?”
“The happy hunting grounds, where else?” the old Amerind grinned at Elgin the stars in his eyes rolling and bouncing as the leathery old cheeks crinkled with the expression, which rapidly faded.
“Is the hunting good, there are a lot of you?” though from here he could only see a few of the myriad fires he’d seen earlier.
“A lot of us?” the old chief smiled, “Perhaps, but the happy hunting ground is as big as it needs to be. It is as big as my memories, as my life and encompasses all I need.”
Elgin realized that it wasn’t only RunningElk’s eye’s that he could see the stars through, but also his body, in fact the stars seemed to dominate the view. He tried to focus, then understand what he was seeing. When couldn’t he realized that the blanket over the old man’s shoulders was gone. So was RunningElk, instead the beaky nosed man sat, bare chested once more.
“What’s your name?” Elgin asked, ignoring the shock of the change.
The ghost rubbed his nose, “Well literally, spear throwing son of the mayor of the cedar groved town with a big wall, but it’s a bit of a mouthful, I was usually called Cutter by those who knew me.”
“Cutter works. You’re inside of me so you know my name!”
This got him a grimace, “I do now, but I didn’t, you don’t think of yourself as Elgin Campbell Chalmers the fourth or even Elgin at least not unless you are thinking in terms of writing things down.”
“Where did RunningElk go?”
“Away, you were boring him, ghosts tend to be pretty flighty.”
Elgin got up and as he turned away the fire he’d been sitting by dwindled to nothing. He could tell the beak nosed ghost was still there, “Why is he out here, and you’re in me?”
“We’re not really the same sort of thing at all. He was a free man tied to the land by his love and life. I lived vastly longer as part of Oldest until the trap killed the physical me, leaving only Oldest’s memory of me. I don’t think that I am a ghost in the same sense as the old chief.”
The semi-physical presence of the other man had faded, leaving only his voice in Elgin’s head as he resumed his walk into the hills, the restlessness and gnawing hunger were still with him.
*You are not feeling your own physical and psychic needs, but those of oldest, at his most basic level. That is why you walked into the shadowlands, the happy hunting ground as it were. The Iffrit needs to stretch and to hunt.*
Elgin was trotting forward, his legs eating up the ground, trying to run from the voice in his head.