Billy almost lurched to his feet in panic. The awful face—the same face he’d seen on the road—loomed closer, red in the flickering light. It thundered, “RUN!” But as before, Billy was frozen with fear.
Are you strong? he remembered Gram asking him. Are you strong in your heart? “Yes I am strong,” he said hoarsely. “Yes I am strong.”
The thing paused, and then roared with laughter that hurt Billy’s head. The second blue eye rolled out of its face, and the two red orbs glittered. Billy almost leaped up and ran—but then the image of the majestic eagle surfaced in his mind, and he steeled himself. He looked the beast in the face, determined not to show he was afraid. The thing’s laughter faded. “All right,” it whispered, and seemed to draw away from him. “I have better things to do. Finish this travesty. Learn all you can, and learn it well. But don’t turn your back on me, boy.” The shape began to melt down into a black, oily puddle on the floor. The misshapen mouth said, “I’ll be waiting for you,” and then the figure was gone. The shimmering puddle caught blue fire, and in an instant it too had vanished.
Something touched his shoulder, and he spun away with a husky groan of fear.
“Lord God, boy,” Rebekah said, her eyes narrowed. “What’s got into you?” She eased herself down before the fire again, as Ramona added wood and leaves to the embers. “You’re shakin’ like a cold leaf! We’ve just been gone for five minutes!” She stared at him for moment, and tensed. “What happened?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’ happened. I didn’t see a thing!”
Rebekah glanced quickly at her daughter, then back to the boy. “All right,” she said. “You can tell me when you like.” She helped him to the edge of the fire again, and he stared sightlessly into it as she began to knead his neck and shoulders with her strong brown hands. “Havin’ this gift—this talent, I guess you could call it—isn’t an easy thing. No kind of real responsibility is ever easy. But sometimes responsibility blocks you off from other people; they can’t see into your head, they can’t understand your purpose, and they mock you for doin’ what you think is right. Some people will be afraid of you, and some may hate you…”
As the old woman spoke, Ramona looked at her son, examined his face in the firelight. She knew he’d be a fine-looking young man, handsome enough to knock the girls for a loop when he went to Fayette County High School; but what would his life be like? Shut off from other people? Feared and hated by the community, as both she and her mother had been? She recalled Sheriff Bromley’s words, that things would never be the same for Billy again, and she felt an aching in her heart. He was growing up right now, in front of her eyes, though she knew that in following the Mystery Walk it was essential to keep part of childhood always within you as a shelter from the storm of the world, and also because a child’s vision and understanding were most times better than a grown-up’s hard, rational view of the world.
“…but usin’ that talent right is harder still,” Rebekah was saying. “You’ve got to think of yourself as a gate, Billy, on the edge between this world and the next. You’ve got to learn to open yourself up, and let those in need pass through. But you’ll have to keep their fear and pain inside yourself, like a sponge soaks up water, so they can pass through with an unburdened soul. That’s not an easy thing to do, and I can’t help you learn it; that’ll come from within you, when the time is right. And doing it once doesn’t make the next time any simpler, either, but you’ll find you can stand it. The first one is the worst, I guess, ’cause you don’t know what to expect.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Kind of. Oh, not the same hurt like gettin’ a shot at the doctor’s office, or scrapin’ your knee on a rock, but it hurts in here”—she touched the center of her chest—“and in here”—and then her forehead. “It’s a hurt you’ll inherit from those you’re trying to help. And I won’t say you’ll be able to help all the time, either, some revenants just won’t give up this world, maybe because they’re too afraid to go on. If they were mean or crazy in life, they may try to do…worse things, like hurtin’ people.” She felt his shoulders tense under her hands. “Or, more rightly, they scare folks into hurtin’ themselves, one way or another.”
Billy watched the wet leaves curl, blacken, and burn. He sat still trembling from seeing that awful boar-thing, and now he tried to puzzle out what his grandmother was saying. “I thought…when you passed on it was like going to sleep, and if you were good you went to Heaven. Isn’t that right?”
“But what if you had to go to sleep, but didn’t want to? Wouldn’t you toss and turn for a while, your restless self just makin’ you miserable? And what if you were doin’ something real important, or plannin’ big things, or lookin’ forward to a fine tomorrow when all the lights went out? Or what if you tried to sleep with an awful pain in you? Then you’d need help, wouldn’t you, to rest easy? I’m not saying all revenants cling to this world; most of them find their own way through. In your lifetime you might only be called on to help two or three, but you will be called, and you’ll have to do something with it…”
“Like what?” He blew sweat off his upper lip; he was still very dizzy, and heard his grandmother’s voice as if listening to crosscurrents of echoes from out of a dark, deep cave.
“I put mine into pottery,” Rebekah told him. “Your mother put hers into her needlepoint. Your great-grandfather could sing up a storm in a hot tub on a Saturday night. That’s up to you to find, when you have so much hurt inside you that you’ll have to get rid of it or…” Her voice trailed off.
“Or what, Gram?” Billy prompted.
The old woman said softly, “Or you could lose yourself in other people’s pain. Several members of our family…lost themselves that way, and took their own lives out of despair. A couple of them tried to escape their purpose in liquor and drugs. One of your uncles, a long way back, lost his mind and spent his life in an asylum…”
That hit him like a fist to the back of his head. Tears welled in his eyes; maybe he was already about to “lose his mind,” he thought with numbed horror. After all, hadn’t he seen a smoke-eagle and a fire-serpent fighting right in front of him? Hadn’t he seen something evil dressed up in his daddy’s skin? He sobbed, and haltingly he told his grandmother and Ramona what he’d witnessed. They listened intently, and it seemed to him that his grandmother’s eyes were as black as coals in her brown, seamed face.
When he was finished, Rebekah dipped her sweatband in a bucket of cool well-water she’d brought in and wiped his face. The water’s chill in the stifling smokehouse heat sent a delicious shock through him, calming his feverish brain. “They’re pictures in your head, Billy. There’ll be more before you’re through. I think everybody has some eagle and some snake in them; they fight to pull your spirit high or drag it to the ground. The question is: which one do you let win, and at what price? The second thing you saw”—a shade seemed to pass before her face, like a thundercloud before the sun—“is what I warned you to watch for. You must’ve shown it you weren’t afraid—but it won’t give up so easily. Ramona, will you pass me that jug?” She unscrewed the sealed brown bottle Ramona had brought in with her and poured into the cup a thick dark liquid that smelled of sassafras and cinnamon.
“There may come a time, Billy,” Rebekah continued softly, “when evil tries to crush you out, like someone snuffing a candle. It’ll try to work on your weaknesses, to turn things around in your head so up is down and inside is out. I’ve seen that thing too, Billy—what looks like a wild boar—and it’s so loathsome you can hardly bear to look at it. It used to taunt me in the night, when I was younger than your mother, and one morning not long ago I woke up to find all of my pottery shattered on the floor in the workshed. My house has caught fire before, for no reason at all. You remember that yellow mutt I had, named Chief? I never told you what really happened to him, but I found him scattered in the woods behind the house, like something had just torn him to pieces. That was the last dog I ever had. And what I mean to say is that the
thing you saw—what my father used to call the ‘shape changer’ because it can take on any form it pleases—has been our enemy for a long, long time. Almost everyone in our family’s seen it; it’s a dangerous, sly beast, Billy, and it tries to hurt us through the people and things we care for. It probes for a weakness, and that’s why we have to keep ourselves strong. If we don’t, it could work on our mind—or maybe physically hurt us too.”
“What is it?” His voice had dropped to a frail whisper. “Is it the Devil, Gram?”
“I don’t know. I just know it’s very old, because even the first Choctaw spirit healers used to weave stories of the ‘beast with skin of smoke.’ There are tales of the shape changer going back hundreds of years—and some in our family, those who weren’t strong enough to resist it, were either beguiled by its lies or torn to pieces by its hatred. You never know what it’s planning, but it must sense a threat in you or it wouldn’t have come to take a look at you.”
“Why, Gram? Why does it hate us?”
“Because it’s a greedy beast that uses fear to make itself stronger: It feeds like a hog at a trough on the human emotions of despair, torment, and confusion; sometimes it traps revenants and won’t let them break away from this world. It feeds on their souls, and if there’s a Hell, I suppose that must be it. But when we work to free those revenants, to take their suffering into ourselves and do something constructive with it, we steal from the shape changer’s dinner table. We send those poor souls onward to where the shape changer can’t get at them anymore. And that’s why the beast wants nothing more than to stop your Mystery Walk.”
“I don’t know what to do!” he whispered.
“You have to believe in yourself, and in the Giver of Breath. You have to keep pressing forward, no matter what happens, and you can’t turn away from your responsibility. If you do, you make a weak hole in yourself that the shape changer might try to reach into. The beast doesn’t care about your mother or me anymore, Billy, because most of our work is done; it’s you, the new blood, he’s watching.”
“Can it hurt me, Gram?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and thought of Chief’s carcass scattered through the brush, pieces of him hanging from low tree branches as if he’d exploded from within.
“I want you to drink this, Billy. It’ll help you sleep. We can talk more about it later.” She gave him the cup of liquid from the jug. Its inviting aroma drifted up to him. His head felt like a lead cannonball, his bones aching from the heat. He thought he could easily fall asleep without drinking this stuff, but he sipped at it anyway; it was pleasantly sweet, though just underneath the sugar was a musky taste, like the smell of wild mushrooms growing in a green, damp place.
“All of it,” Rebekah said. Billy drank it down. She smiled. “That’s very good.”
He smiled in return, through a mask of running sweat. The boar-thing was fading now, as all nightmares do in time. He stared into the embers, saw all the hundred variations of color between pale orange and dark violet, and his eyelids began to droop. The last thing he remembered seeing before the darkness closed in was the ceramic owl, watching over him from its smokehouse hook.
They left him lying on his back on the clay floor, the blanket wrapped around him like a heavy shroud. Outside, Rebekah locked the door. “No need for us to look in on him again until morning.” She stretched, hearing her backbone creak. “Seems to me he understood everything pretty much, but it’s his confidence needs working on. We’ll start again tomorrow night.”
“Will he be safe?” Ramona asked as they walked to the house, following the track of Rebekah’s lantern.
“I hope so. He saw his twin natures, the good and the bad at war inside him, and he looked the shape changer in the face.” They reached the back door, and Ramona stopped to peer through the darkness at the smokehouse. Rebekah laid a hand on her shoulder. “Billy’s already being poked and prodded, picked at for a weak spot. I didn’t know it would start so soon. He resisted this time, but it won’t return in that form again. No, the foe will be different and stronger. But so will Billy be, different and stronger.”
“Should he know about the black aura yet?”
“No. He’ll grow into seeing it, just like you did. I don’t want to put that on him just yet.” She regarded her daughter, her head cocked to one side. “He’ll sleep through the day. If you hear him cry out, you’re not to go in there and wake him up. His old life is being shattered so the new one can start. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Ramona said. “It’s just that…he’s alone.”
“And that’s how it has to be. After these three days are over you might be at his side, but the rest of the way he has to go alone. You knew that before you brought him to me.” Rebekah squeezed her daughter’s shoulder gently. “I was wrong about him; his blood may be tainted, but his heart and soul are strong. He’ll make you proud, girl. Now come on, and I’ll make us a pot of tea.”
Ramona nodded and followed her mother into the house, shutting the screen door quietly.
Within the smokehouse, the boy had curled up like an infant about to emerge into light.
FIVE
Black Aura
20
“BILLY?” COY GRANGER CALLED out toward the grocery store’s small magazine rack. “Found it for you!” He held up a dusty plastic-wrapped needlepoint kit. “It was buried in a box back in the storeroom. Now you say you need some roofin’ nails?”
“Yes sir. Couple of packs will do.” The boy looked up from the sports magazine he’d been paging through and then ambled over to the counter while Granger found the nails. It was early May of 1969, and Billy Creekmore was seventeen. He’d already topped six feet, and now stood as tall as his father; though he was big-boned, again like his father, he was on the lean side, just short of being skinny, and his wrists shot out from the old blue workshirt he wore, dappled with grease and oil from his job at the gas station. With the thinning of his face, his cheekbones had angled and risen up from the flesh, and his eyes were dark hazel, flecked with glints of amber when the light hit them just so. The warm spring sunshine had already darkened Billy’s flesh to a nut-brown color, and his dark hair was a confusion of curls and unruly cowlicks, jumbling down over his forehead in commas. His hair wasn’t cut as severely as it once had been, since Curtis Peel had finally read in a barbershop trade magazine that longer hair was definitely the “in-thing” for his younger customers—much to the chagrin of their parents, who could fly into fits when they happened to hear Beatles music on a radio.
Billy had grown into a handsome young man in the seven years since he’d visited his grandmother and sweated himself into a stupor in her smokehouse. Still, there was a wariness in his eyes, a careful shell to protect himself against the whispers he overheard in the halls of Fayette County High. They could talk about him all they liked; he didn’t care, but once he heard his mother’s or grandmother’s name mentioned, he turned upon the offender with a vengeance. He wasn’t mean, though, and was unprepared for the mean tricks used in after-school fights by country boys who were growing up to be the spitting images of their fathers; crotch kicks and eye gouges were common, and many times Billy had found himself ringed by gleefully shouting kids while his face banged into somebody’s kneecap. There was no one he could really call a close friend, though he dreamed of being popular and going out on Saturday nights to Fayette with the gregarious bunch of kids who seemed to get along so well with just about everybody. It had taken him a long time to accept the fact that people were afraid of him; he saw it in their eyes when he walked into a room, heard it when conversations were cut off in his presence. He was different—it was difference enough that he was dark-skinned and obviously of Indian heritage—and since entering Fayette County High he’d been effectively isolated. His crust of caution went deep, protecting his self-respect and his still-childlike sense of wonder at the world.
He read a lot—damaged hardbacks and paperback novels he sometimes found at garage sales.
He’d come across a real find several weeks ago: a boxful of old National Geographics brought up from someone’s basement, where they’d been moldering for a while. His treks—through forests, following the disused railroad tracks and old logging roads—were taking him farther and farther away from home; often, when the weather wasn’t too chilly, he’d take a bedroll out into the woods and spend the night, content with his own company and listening to the forest noises that punctuated the darkness. Out in the velvet black you could see shooting stars by the hundreds, and sometimes the faint blinking lights of an airplane headed for Birmingham. In the daytime he enjoyed the sun on his face, and could track deer like an expert, sometimes coming up within twenty feet or so of them before they sensed him.
His curiosity always burned within him to take one more step, to just round the next curve or top the next ridge; the world was beckoning him away from Hawthorne, away from the house where his quiet mother and his grim-lipped father waited for him.
“Here you go,” Granger said, and laid the packs of nails on the counter along with the other items—bread, bacon, sugar, milk, and flour—that Billy had come for. John owed Granger a good deal of money, and sent Billy in for groceries these days; Granger knew the Creekmores were just getting by on the skin of their teeth, and that those roofing nails would be used to try to hold that shack they called a house together for one more hot summer. The last time that Granger had demanded his money, at the end of winter, Billy had worked for him in the afternoons for free, delivering groceries; now Billy was working out John Creekmore’s gasoline and oil tab at the filling station. “Want me to put this on your credit?” he asked the boy, trying to keep a hard edge out of his voice; though he honestly liked Billy, his feelings for John Creekmore’s credit were showing through.
“No sir,” Billy said, and took out a few dollars from his jeans.
“Well! John go to market early this year?” He started adding up figures on a notepad.