Chapter 3
My adviser, Harper, never used her first name, and she disliked being called “Doctor,” too, even though she had a PhD in art history to go with her MFA. She was tall and skinny, with rich brown skin and black hair that she kept in long dreads. That morning, for her office hours, she wore a red blouse with a denim skirt instead of her usual overalls. I moved a pile of books off the chair in front her desk, set them on the floor where she pointed, and sat down.
“Okay, Cantescu,” she said. “You’re doing the painting and drawing curriculum, so you’re not going to want to work with video or installations and all the rest of that high concept stuff. Am I right?”
“Yes, totally. I’ve got landscapes in mind, but I don’t want to film myself rolling around in them. Uh, is that okay?”
“Depends on your approach. I’m afraid of your work drifting into illustration.” Her lip curled slightly on the word, illustration. “You’ve got the skills to reproduce anything you see, but that’s not going to get you points with the committee. You tend to focus on unnecessary detail.”
I winced at the scorn in her voice. At times my painting did fall into the category of illustration, which the art world defined in their slick magazines as anything realistic that wasn’t photorealism. I hated photorealism. And dead sharks in tanks, à la Damien Hirst. Harper knew that about me.
“You’ve got the talent to dig deeper,” Harper went on. “And that’s what I want to see, something deep. Landscapes that carry personal meaning. Not pictures for middle-class living rooms.”
“Okay. I was also thinking about scale. Murals that, like, opened up public spaces and dissolved the walls they were on. Once I found the right walls and spaces, I’d get pictures of those and photoshop the murals in. So the presentation could be the panels and then a slide show of the locations.”
Harper leaned back in her creaky chair and considered me. When she folded her hands on her midriff, I noticed a smear of neutralized thalo green on one sleeve of her blouse. She wouldn’t have been Harper if she hadn’t had paint somewhere on her clothes.
“I like the idea of art dissolving the wall,” Harper said after a minute or so. “What I want to see first are sketches of landscape forms, not necessarily whole views of a place, but studies of the kind of forms you intend to develop. Bring me a sketchbook or portfolio in a couple of weeks. Then we’ll talk some more. Don’t close the pattern too soon. Panels, Photoshop—sounds like a first pass through the idea to me. Something new could develop under your hands. Leave an opening for it.”
“Okay, sure. I didn’t know if I should give you some kind of formal proposal—”
“No no no. Get the project underway before you worry about the committee.” She grinned at me. “And that’s who the proposal is for, the committee. Not for the art. You’re working, and that’s all I need to know for now.”
I left her office on a modified high. Harper approved of part of my idea, at least.
I went straight home afterward. While we ate lunch, I checked my email. In her usual methodical way, Harper had sent me a follow-up to the office visit, reminding me that the year would pass faster than I thought it would. No goofing off when she was your advisor! The last part of the email contained the bad news.
“BTW, I heard from the cops this morning. You probably remember that the vandal who ruined the paintings also left a nasty souvenir in the corner.”
Some urine on a pile of paint rags, she meant.
“Well, the DNA matches that of the dead guy they found in that parking lot. I didn’t know they could get DNA from urine, but the officer told me that the body generally passes some dead cells along with the liquid. They found enough. Also traces of cocaine. I’ll get a mass email out to the class later, but I thought you should know first. They seem to think the guy has some connection to you. I told them I knew nothing about it. If he does, don’t tell me, because I don’t want to tell them.”
I felt too frightened to write a reply. I turned my laptop around so Tor could read the screen. He scowled when he finished.
“Fuck them,” was all he said. “The cops, I mean.”
I shut down the laptop and concentrated on finishing my lunch.
When we left for San Francisco and the hospital, Tor drove in his usual style, fast but never dangerously. I looked out of the window and studied the urban landscape as it slid past in a jumble of malls and houses and shabby semi-industrial areas. The traffic jammed up, and Tor cut off on Ashby to go over to 580 at the edge of the bay. Once we reached Emeryville I could see the actual bay between the buildings. Distant across the green-gray water lay the low hills of Marin, dark with trees. How would I extract the essential forms from all this? My fingers itched to draw.
Water and trees, particularly trees and their roots, big gnarled roots, twisted, wrinkled, bony fingers clutching the earth and digging in to hold on to life. I could see them, the dark roots of a yew and the pools of water that oozed out between. I walked a little closer and saw how huge the tree was, enormously wide, bigger even than the massive sequoias up in the Sierra, rising so high that I couldn’t see the top—
“Wake up,” Tor said. “We’re here.”
“Unh?” I shook myself and yawned. When I looked out of the car window, I realized we’d parked behind the hospital. “Did I fall asleep?”
“Yeah.” He was grinning at me. “You snored.”
“Not as bad as you do, I bet.”
“I’ll concede that point.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “Let’s go.”
When we walked down the corridor to Roman’s room, I saw the door standing half-open, a good omen for visiting. I hurried in and found him more or less awake in a web of cables and IV tubes. On the wall above his bed a monitor showed a steady heart beat and a flurry of numbers. His half-smile and slurred hello told me he’d been drugged, even though his dilated pupils made him look startled. Brittany was sitting in a chair by the window and embroidering a geometric pattern on a length of hand-woven green fabric.
“Did you want a break, Brit?” I said. “I can stay here for a while.”
“Thanks, but I’m okay. My mom’s taking my grandmother to the doctor this afternoon. Y’know, I’ve decided to drop a couple of classes. I’ll concentrate on the project like you’re doing. Between taking care of Gram and Roman, there’s just not enough time in the day.”
“I wondered how you were managing, yeah.”
“Taking care of people, it’s my karma. I’ve always known that. It’s one reason I stick with fiber arts. It’s clean, once you get done with dying your materials. You can put it down and then pick it up later.”
I perched on the end of Roman’s bed and looked at Tor, who had stayed standing in the doorway. I was about to ask him if he wanted the only other chair in the room when I realized that his eyes looked as sleepy and unfocused as my brother’s. In Tor’s case, though, it meant he’d gone into trance. Brittany noticed as well. She ran her needle into the cloth and laid her work down in her lap. For a few minutes we sat in utter silence, until Tor moved, smiled at us both, and walked further into the room.
“What did you see?” Brittany said.
“Hard to describe,” Tor said. “But something’s in here, all right.”
He paused, glanced around, then strode over to the nightstand beside the bed. He opened the top drawer, rummaged around, and pulled out a square yellow envelope. Tor studied the postmark for a moment, then slid a greeting card out. When he held it up, I saw a slick photo of the ocean with the words “Get Well” floating over the image. Tor flipped it open and displayed a bindrune drawn in red. Roman winced and made an odd little grunt of sound.
“What the fuck?” Roman muttered. “That hurt. Or something did.”
“I bet it did,” Tor said. “According to the time stamp, this was mailed the day after you were shot.” He glanced at me. “He used our return address, the bastard.”
“Nils?”
“Who else? Roman, do you remem
ber opening this?”
“No. But I don’t remember anything from the first couple days. Not a lot after that.”
Tor turned to Brittany and quirked an eyebrow.
“I never saw it, either,” she said. “A nurse must have given it to him.”
“I’m going to go talk to someone at the nursing station,” Tor said. “I need to get this out of the room.” He strode out before any of us could say more.
As soon as Tor carried the card across the threshold Roman let out his breath in a puff of relief. Brittany got up, laid her embroidery down on the chair, and hurried to his side. When she smoothed the sweaty hair back from his face, he smiled at her.
“Feel better?” she said.
“A little, yeah. Like maybe I can sleep now.”
“Good,” I said. “Nils. The gift that keeps on giving.”
Tor returned, but he stood just outside the room in the doorway. “Maya, do you have a pen or something I can write with? A black one.”
I rummaged in my backpack and came up with a wide-nib calligraphy pen. I got up and handed it to him, then watched as he held the greeting card against the wall for a writing surface. I recognized the red runes: Need, Ice, Thorn, drawn in a tidy design surrounded by a ring of reversed Uruz, that is, the rune that signifies physical energy and health. Reversed, it brought the opposite. Tor drew another bindrune over them in black, made up of Torch, Lake, and finally, Tiwaz, the spear-rune of his favorite god, Tyr.
“Torch to burn them, Lake to wash them away,” Tor told me. “I’ll dispose of it when we get home.”
When he carried the card back into the room, Roman felt no effect. Tor handed me the dead rune card, and I put it in my backpack, but he held onto the pen and looked Roman over.
“I guess the doctor would flip out if I drew runes on you,” Tor said.
Roman grinned. “Probably. Or the nurses would.”
“I’ll stick to paper then.” Tor turned to me. “Do you have a sketchbook with you?”
“Always.” I took a small drawing pad out of my backpack. “I’ll tear off a sheet.”
Tor drew a bindrune of Yew and Elk, both protective runes, and added Tiwaz. He put the paper into the nightstand drawer and gave me my pen back.
“If Nils left any more time bombs lying around,” Tor remarked, “that will ward them off.”
“Thanks,” Brittany said. “Do you think the police are ever going to catch whoever it was who killed your uncle?”
I felt guilt twist inside me like a hand on my guts. She’d touched the one secret I could never share with my friends.
“No.” Tor shook his head. “Whoever did it was pretty clever.”
“The police were here yesterday,” Roman said. “They keep asking me questions.”
“Oh yeah?” Tor said. “Do they think you know who killed him?”
“That, yeah. The assholes.”
“I just hope it wasn’t Valdez,” Brittany put in.
“If it was, damn right they’ll never figure it out.” Roman gave Brittany a tight-lipped smile that struck me as more a warning than humor. “Never ask him. Just don’t.”
“Who?”
“Valdez. He’s a great guy, but he’s dangerous.” Roman propped himself up on one elbow to look right at her. “We all are.”
“So okay.” She took a step back. “I won’t.”
Roman’s smile turned gentle. He sighed and lay back onto the pillows. Brittany turned to me and mouthed “you’d better go.”
“We’ll be back soon,” I said to Roman. “We need to get over the bridge before rush hour.”
Since his eyes had closed, I doubt if he heard me. I gave Brit a hug, and we left. I waited till we’d gotten outside to the parking lot before I said anything.
“Tor? Why did Nils send that card? How did he know where to send it?”
“He probably saw the hospital on the news. The first TV clip showed a reporter standing in front of it. As to why, I don’t know for sure. Revenge, probably. He mailed it the day after the ritual.”
“That must have been when he added you to the will.”
“Yeah. He was desperate and realized he was losing the war. It was petty of him, sure, but that’s the kind of guy he was. That’s probably why he’s hanging around now. Trying to get back at us.”
When I shuddered, Tor caught my hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of him tonight.”
Tor spent most of the afternoon alone downstairs, meditating and preparing the ritual room. About an hour after sunset I went down to join him.
In other half of his workshop, across from the lab table, Tor had put down a black carpet marked with a white circle, about nine feet across, enclosing an equal-armed cross. Spice-scented candles burned at each cardinal point, and, that night, he’d strewn dried flowers around the outer edge of the circle. The room smelled like old-fashioned potpourri. I sneezed.
“Sorry,” Tor said. “Is this going to bother you too much?”
“I don’t know.” I found a tissue in my jeans pocket and blew my nose. “No, it’s settling down. I’ll be okay.”
Across the room was a walk-in closet that the previous owner of the house had modified. One wall held a solid rank of shallow drawers that looked like they belonged in a museum to store prints and antique jewelry. In the middle stood a lectern, draped at the moment with one of Tor’s white tee shirts, decorated with runes, Yew and Elk for protection—my ritual garment. He was wearing a pair of white shorts and the old blue hooded sweatshirt that served him as a sorcerer’s cloak. While I undressed and put on the tee shirt, he walked over to the window and pulled back the edge of one of the heavy drapes. He stood looking out for a moment at the view of our back yard and the hillside beyond.
“Moon’s just starting to rise,” he said. “It’ll be full in a couple of days.” His voice turned weary. “At least I can deal with Nils before.”
Before the bear spirit took him over, he meant, and as always I ached for him. He let the curtain fall and walked into the center of the circle. “Maya, go sit in the west.”
I sat down cross-legged where he pointed, clasped my hands in my lap, and waited in silence.
Tor faced north and raised his arms over his head. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke, his voice throbbed and vibrated from deep in his chest, from deep in his soul. He called out the first three runes, Fehu Uruz Thurisaz, then turned to the north-east and chanted the next three, Ánsuz Raidho Kenaz. He turned, chanted, turned again until he’d gone round the entire circle and built a barrier of all twenty-four runes around it. I could see them glowing and flickering like a fire glimpsed through the cracks in a wall.
When he returned to the north, Tor paused, took another deep breath, and began to chant in the language of his ancestors, Old Norse. I understood nothing, but the chanting took me over. The throbbing deep sound of his voice mingled with the herbs and spices until I found myself breathing in the rhythm of his chant. I knew I could never move until he released me, no, until the magic released me, because he was as trapped as I was in the sound of the galdrar, the runespells.
Silence. Tor waited, his arms still held high. In the north, just inside the circle, a shape flickered, hard to see, like a twist of smoke, some tall thing standing on its hind legs, not Nils, no human ghost. Out of the bluish mist an animal stepped forward and held out enormous paws. Shadows defined its head, a flatter skull than modern bears, and a long snout flashing with teeth—a cave bear. I recognized it from the pictures of Paleolithic art I’d studied at school. Tor spoke a few words. The cave bear nodded its huge head, then vanished. Tor lowered his arms, shrugged with an oddly normal gesture, then knelt. With both hands he slapped hard on the floor. The spell broke. I gasped as the released élan flowed over me. For a moment I sat unmoving and breathed in as much as I could gather.
“Nils is gone.” Tor stood up. “Dead as he needs to be. It wasn’t his ghost that the etinwife sa
w in here.”
I stared, utterly confused. He walked over and knelt next to me in the pool of light from the candle nearby.
“You didn’t banish him?” I said.
“I didn’t need to. He’s dead, gone, moved onward.”
“Then who’s the dead vitki?”
“Yeah, that’s the question, isn’t it? We need to know the answer.” In the candlelight his eyes gleamed like flames. “But something else came when I called.”
“I saw that. The bear spirit.”
“You saw her?”
“Yeah. It looked like a cave bear. Is it the same one that possesses you?”
“Yes, fraid so. Look, if you saw her that clearly—
“Did you say her?”
“Yeah. She’s female.”
I hesitated, stabbed by an utterly weird jealousy. Oh come on, I told myself. It’s a spirit, not a woman.
“Maya, sweetheart!” Tor had noticed nothing. “It’s time for you to stop denying who you are. If you don’t learn how to handle your talent, it’s going to control you instead of you controlling it.”
My voice clotted with fear deep in my throat. Tor stood up, then held out his hand. When I caught it, he helped me stand.
“Do you have any idea why you’re so frightened?” Tor said.
I shook my head, gulped hard, and managed to squeeze out a “no, I really don’t.”
“Then it’s got to come from your last life. The one you can’t remember. There are ways, techniques, you can use to—“
“I don’t want to!” I started to say more but I hissed, snarled, hissed again as if I were the one possessed by a spirit, a tiger spirit from my mother’s deep heritage.
“Sweetheart, you need to get out of the ritual space. Right now! You’re in danger.”
I nodded my agreement. I could feel the energy pulsing and swirling around us, raw power, terrifying, seductive.
I grabbed my regular clothes and rushed upstairs to change. Tor stayed behind to put out the candles and vacuum up the herbs and flowers. The nisse might have gotten sick if it had tried to eat the mixture.