Chapter One

The night air danced with energy; raw, feral, unnatural and tainted energy not seen nor felt in the Black Hills of South Dakota for thousands of years.  He could taste the unmistakable metallic tang of magic; it burned his nostrils and lay bitter on his tongue.  Joshua ran at a frantic, reckless pace, his lean frame dodging and darting through the thick pine forest, long, white hair barely held in check by a thin leather thong, whipping his back as if goading him on to a faster gait, black motorcycle boots pounding silently on the deep carpet of pine needles, pine branches clawing at and tangling in his hair, scratching at the smooth features of his face, tearing at his black leather jacket, jeans and the multi-hued beaded fetish tied at his waist as a belt.  The power ebbed and flowed through the deep woods; he heard a pop-pop-popping to his right, then more to his left, above and behind him, then snapping in rapid succession before his eyes, brilliant tiny explosions that would momentarily blind him.  But he could not slow down.  Sooner or later the energy would stop their ebb and begin to flow in only one direction, the direction he furiously ran.  If he had one ounce of sense he would be running as fast as his legs would carry him in the opposite direction but he had never been known for being overly bright or for his sense of self preservation.
  
He chastised himself over and over for not paying heed to the meetings of thirteen pubescent girls returning time and again to the same dell deep in the Hills. A spot replete with risks and perils he knew only too well yet he had discarded the activities of these children playing at witchery, no real threat, no power, just children.  Well he could feel his mistake tearing at his clothes and hair, he could taste his mistake like blood and electricity on his tongue, the wild magic blistered the inside of his ample nose and stung his eyes.  It was one thing for him to pay for his stupidity but the Mother would pay and all the children who lived on her, all the people of the world would pay.  Joshua’s steps quickened, his breaths came quick and ragged, his resolve intensified, he pushed away all wayward thoughts; he did not need distractions right now. 

He saw the glistening illumination of power over the next rise, he was close.  It would serve him better to slow his pace and see what awaited him rather than barge into a situation that could easily get him killed before he even had time to assess the danger. 

Lightning flashed brilliant above his head but there was no accompanying boom of thunder only a taste of malevolence on the building breeze.  Time was running faster than he was, faster than he could.  Joshua called up several incantations and set them on the tip of his tongue.  He would need to move fast and more than likely without thought.  He would need to react, instinct would take over, he prayed.

As Joshua crested the rise he was buffeted and thrown back by waves of wild, untamed, unfocused and malevolent power.  Someone had a great deal more magic than Joshua could possibly have imagined; and no control.  If he didn’t reign in whatever was happening over that rise and soon, there would be hell to pay and a lot of dead people.  

Joshua braced himself as he, once again, made for the crest, it was time to see what a millennium of learning, practice and study could accomplish.  The problem, though, with theory, he thought, was it never seemed to mean much when it came to practical application.  Focus, dipshit, focus, he chastised. 

Hunched over and attempting to use the whipping pines for protection he stood gazing at the scene coalescing below.  He stood at the rim of a shallow granite bowl sparsely populated with Ponderosa pine and conifers, rocks and small boulders were scattered about the clearing at the center.  And that was where the problem danced.

A giant bonfire roared and tore at invisible constraints like a wild animal using every ounce of its might to break free and kill whatever had imprisoned it.  Dancing in slow puppet like movements around the raging, roaring beast were thirteen young girls with no more than fifteen or sixteen years each. 

They were dressed in almost nothing, sheer togas meant to approximate what witches of centuries past would adorn themselves.  Little did they know that the witches, real witches, of the past would have been sky clad, not wishing anything man made to come between them and the Great Mother.  And they would not be seeking to release the power these children obviously were attempting to free.  Joshua sighed, this would not end well.
Soft chanting caressed his ears like siren song filled with so many seductive and enticing promises he found himself wanting to run down the slope and leap into the waiting arms of release.  He fought with all his will to stand where he was.

There was something terribly wrong here, he thought.  And then almost burst out laughing.  Something was wrong??!!  Shit, it would be almost impossible to find something right!  There was immeasurable power attempting to focus on one pinprick of America, the one pinprick that would unleash the most foul, vile evil on the world and Joshua thought there might be something wrong?  But there was.  There should be no possible way for these thirteen young women to create this tsunami of power, yet here it was, tearing at the landscape.  Something was magnifying what little power they possessed; and then he saw the stains on their togas. 
Of course, the blood of innocence; all thirteen were in their cycle at the exact same time.  He had heard this was possible with women who lived together for a long periods of time but he hadn’t realized it was possible to force menstrual cycles to occur at the exact same moment.

The buffeting and swirling storm of power increased as the chanting of the teenagers intensified; their movements jerky and unnatural as if someone outside their bodies controlled their motions.  And suddenly Joshua knew who that someone, or something, was.  He had known this day was coming but after so long as the jailer of such a perfect and escape proof prison he had become sloppy and careless, well, he was about to pay the piper for his incompetence.  He could only hope he would live through the night.

The silent explosions of lightning and the tang of ozone increased, he could sense all other living things with the wherewithal had abandoned this valley; it would be just him and the girls.  And the prisoner deep underground who now, it was obvious, was feeding off the essence of these girls. 

It was at that moment the young girl at the center of this miasma noticed him as he stood on the rise.

“Welcome, old man, have you come to enjoy the night?  Or come to feed the fire?”  A malicious grin split her face and unblinking eyes burned into his irises.

The other twelve girls continued their macabre dance, swaying to the seemingly mindless chant.  They appeared to have been tortured and battered, some sporting broken bones in their legs, arms and torso’s, the bones jabbing through young tender skin, blood dripped from the open wounds,  it was obvious the girls were in excruciating pain, their eyes begging for release from this agony.  Yet they had not control of their bodies, they could not sit or lie down or make any attempt to heal their egregious lesions and lessen the pain; they could only endured the agony. Joshua saw how pain and suffering had disfigured their once youthful beauty.   

Joshua began to weave a spell in his mind that would release these children from this horrific blunder.  He was certain they had meant no malice, they had only come out here to piss off their parents or a boyfriend, some innocent fun playing at witchery, to go missing for a night while they came out to the woods and stripped down almost naked, naughty antics with these other girls, dancing by the light of the moon.  They had no idea that something like this might happen, that magic might be real.  Now they were caught up in a tragedy that had no end only eternal pain and suffering.  He had to stop this now.

“What is it you think to do, Goaler? “  The girl moved her lips but the voice that emitted was coarse and deep, strong and commanding, her eyes blazing a burnt orange.  She grinned and Joshua could feel the hunger.

Joshua slumped, his head bowed, his shoulders folding in on his body, he was, it appeared and as his history would affirm, as usual too late.  He sighed and straightened his spine and shoulders, resolve hardened his features, that didn’t mean he would fail this time.  He spoke three of the true words of power and made a quick snipping motion with his right hand effectively cutting the malevolent lines of power from the puppeteer to his marionettes.  The twelve girls fell hard to the ground in piles of bloody moans and groans; wails of pain filled the air.  Joshua felt for them but he had neither the time nor the attention to spare to ease their suffering.

“I have come to put an end to this affront on nature and seal you back in the earth where you belong.”  Joshua’s voice was soft, he did not lose control as the prisoner wished but rather maintained a steely restraint that was terrifying.  The girl took an unwilling step back before composing herself and again standing her ground.

“Not this time old man.  I have drank of the blood of the fatted calf, and I feed on the lives of these chattel, my strength returns and you, Goaler, must die. “A glistening white smile split ruby lips and a gleeful cackle filled the night air though Joshua could see terror, anguish and fear behind the glee in her eyes as the trapped child fought a futile battle for control of her own mind, soul and body.

Joshua was certain the demon had lured this child with dreams of grandeur and power, all the things she’d never had in her life and never believed possible.  He was sure the demon had found her teen angst, suffering and greed easy prey.  She would finally rule over her friends and family, all those who had wronged her in her miserable life.  She could pay in full all those boys who made their way into her pants and then found a quick exit out of her life.  It would be payback time for all those who had wronged her and fucked her throughout her long fifteen or sixteen years.

 And now realization crept like decay across her features and she knew she had been fucked for the last time and it would probably mean her death.  Joshua could only spare her a moment of sympathy; he needed to concentrate on the true threat at hand.

Joshua prepared another more powerful spell in his mind, and then laid it on his tongue, his right hand twitched with the need to stop this madness before it could get a handhold in this world.  His most pressing concern was to seal the evil back in the bowels of the earth deep beneath the iron heavy granite found in this portion of the Black Hills. Yet he waited, strike too soon and the quarry escapes, too late and, well, Joshua would never know.

The winds swirled, the pines moaned and branches popped with the strain of bending in ways they were never meant to bend, deep red, purple and black clouds roiled in the sky above, silent lightning played hide and seek, jumping from cloud to cloud, unnatural, instead of ground to sky.  The temperature grew cold despite the howling, dancing fire.  Joshua blocked out all but the child standing before him filled with evil and the promise of death.  It was time.

Joshua silently mouthed the words to the ancient enchantment and raised his hand to channel the power into the child and force the demon back to its prison.  Yes, she would die, there was nothing for it; there was no other way, it was now impossible to separate the human from the demon. 
Just as Joshua hurled his spell the demon cast her own incantation catching Joshua unawares and unprepared.

 The spell slammed hard into Joshua’s meager defenses.  He had not bothered to guard himself well expecting only token resistance from the girls; he found his wards to be woefully inadequate.  The demon spell drove hard into his chest.  Every nerve in his body seemed to explode, brilliant white light burned into his eyes blinding him and though there was no outward sound an inner blast rendered him deaf.  The force of the demon spell lifted him three feet off the ground and threw him backward until a large pine tree was kind enough to stop his momentum.

He lay prone on the hard ground, rocks and tree root digging uncomfortably into his left side and back, gasping for breath.  He attempted unsuccessfully to stand, to clear his vision, to gather his wits.  He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he had mere seconds to prepare, and then he probably was going to die.

And yet, there was nothing.  There was not a sound, the air was deathly still, not a creak of branch or chirp broke the unnatural silence.  Maybe he was already dead.  No he hurt too much to be dead.  Joshua smiled and slowly, painfully, unsteadily got to his feet. 

Twelve of the girls lay scattered and motionless about the clearing.  Only the possessed child remained conscious and aware though she was stunned and on her knees at the center of the now dying fire; though she seemed to take no notice of the hot coals where she lay. Apparently Joshua’s spell had slammed home as well and, at least, partially done its work.

Joshua noticed a goat’s carcass, the throat slit, off to the right side of the fire.  These girls had been played perfectly, the chanting, the dancing, this sacrifice, something true witches would never have done, right down to their moon times coming on the same day.  The prisoner must have filled their heads with everything they needed to do for this night’s magic to work.  It had promised them everything their greedy, little teenaged hearts and minds could envision.  And now here they lay scattered, broken and probably dying.  Their moans again began to fill the air, building as their consciousness returned and pain raced through their battered bodies and stabbed hard into their brains, finally ending in a crescendo of shrieks and wails.  It was the most horrible sound Joshua had ever heard.

The nameless child in the center lifted her gaze from the scattered bodies surrounding the fire pit; her eyes, filled with the fire of unbridled hatred, were for Joshua alone.  The hatred, the pure evil, knifed into him from fifty yards away and he realized what happened in the next several minutes would determine the course of human events for the rest of eternity.

Joshua feigned weakness, though it didn’t take great acting ability, he truly did not have much left in him after running most of the way here through thick pine forest and, then, the ferocity of the unexpected attack.  He didn’t know how much strength he had left.  He only knew that whatever he was going to do he was going to need to do it quickly.

Weak coughs escaped his throat and barely made it past his dry, parched lips, his breathing shallow and ragged.  He used all his will power to catch his breath and assess the situation one last time.
The young girl was now crawling on her hands and knees toward him, licking her lips hungrily while smiling seductively.  But there was nothing seductive in her eyes; they burned with disgust and revulsion at his weakness, his surrender.  She would devour him and spit out his bones or she could keep him as a pet when she finally reigned over the world.  Right now, she would just beat him, torture him and make him beg for his long dead mother.

Joshua formed the incantation in his mind, molding and sculpting it to his need until he had the concept perfectly formed within his mind.  Drawing in a deep, calming breath as he drew in energy from what remained untainted in the area, he slowly closed his eyes, focusing his will, and then his eyes snapped open.  He threw every ounce of energy he could summon into the spell, his hand extended at arm’s length as if ordering her to stop. 

He watched in fascination as it bored its way into her ribcage and exploded, igniting her nervous system.  She physically jumped several feet into the air and then was thrown fifteen feet backwards until she came to rest at the foot of a large granite boulder.  She lay there quivering and shaking as if tasered, her teeth chattering, her fingers digging and scraping into the hard rock surface until her hands were a bloody mess.

Her form went still.  Joshua thought she had died; yet when he concentrated he could see her chest rising and falling in fractions of inches.  She lived.  She lifted herself into a sitting position.  She turned and looked toward Joshua, eyes meeting eyes, a terrible hungry grin formed on her perfect red lips and she laughed.  She reached out both hands with open fingers toward the prone, writhing forms of the twelve other girls, sucking the life out of each girl.   Joshua watched in horror as the life force of each of the teens was drained and swallowed by the being.  As they were drained she flicked her wrist in a dismissive gesture and their empty husks were thrown aside until all the lifeless shells were discarded.

The being was growing exponentially in strength; Joshua could feel its power from where he sat like a blast furnace.  He could feel energies converging, being siphoned from every living creature; plants, animals, birds, sea creatures a thousand miles away, life forces pulled from deep within the supposed safety of the Great Mother.  The bonfire roared back to life crashing against invisible bars like a wild, caged animal, huge, vicious, howling and growing stronger with each passing second.   He saw in the hell light her hands weaving and lips silently forming an intricate spell.

Joshua turned his full attention on the weaving.  An indisputable truth had been ingrained in him since early childhood that every spell, no matter how perfect, had a weak point, a loose thread.  Find it and give it a sufficient yank and the entire spell would unravel like a poorly made sweater.  You didn’t need power or great strength just wile and knowledge; you had to use your brain and you had to find that loose thread and pull it before the spell could be fully invoked.  He stared helplessly at the infinite spider web being weaved throughout the clearing and felt impotent.  There was just not enough time.

The tang of ozone stung his nostrils; electrical charges exploded in the air, a smothering oppressive weight bore down on Joshua as if the air was becoming as solid as the granite under his feet.  The wind kicked and swirled in the shallow bowl pulling at his pure white hair until it escaped the constraints of the thin leather head band.  He ignored all the distractions, gathering his wits and forming a spell while his hands twitched anxious to end this insanity.  If he couldn’t find a loose end maybe he could blow a hole in the web and make one.

Joshua opened his mouth to scream the incantation in defiance, the wind howled angrily and shot into his throat choking him and shoving whatever sounds he might have made back down into his lungs.  It filled his mouth, lungs and nose with a stench so foul Joshua was certain he would vomit.  He stood mute and ineffectual; tears filled his eyes as despair filled his heart.

Madness gripped his mind, it was impossible for him to even form a coherent thought as the prisoner grew in power.  He had to do something; he could not allow this evil to escape.  Joshua would not allow his millennium of isolation, of being cut off from any of his kind, to be made meaningless.

Think, he chastised himself, think of all who had given their lives to imprison this thing, think of the battles fought, think of your long dead family, think and see.  See the web. See its strength and its weakness, see the string.  Save the World, asshole, there would be no further loss of life if Joshua could prevent it.
He calmed his ancient, smooth features steeling his will, taking deep, cleansing, calming breaths, concentrating every aspect of his power towards one single purpose; beads of perspiration formed along his brow and flowed down the deep creases alongside his large angular nose.  He could feel the sweat running down his back and soaking his jeans, the effort of amassing all of his will and might working him harder than any physical activity possibly could.

A mist began to form above, intermingling with the towering ponderosa pines and golden aspen as if summoned to complete the shield begun by the massing clouds; as if nature herself didn’t want anyone to witness what was about to take place.  Lightning danced within the cover, exploding in brilliant, silent flashes like a million flashbulbs flashing in succession. 

The wind erupted once again tearing at the congealing mists and clouds trying to expose the coming horror.  The elements seemed insane tearing at themselves, ripping at the skin of the world, attempting to pull out giant hands full of trees and bushes; howling in madness.

Joshua stood rooted at the center of the chaos like a great, ancient oak, immovable and unbending.  Though his face remained composed he fought back fear and a sense of total helplessness.  He filled his mind with a vision of a young woman, beautiful and strong, with almond shaped sky blue eyes, a sharp angular nose and full red, smiling lips.  It was a face he had not beheld in more than a thousand years but he could see every line as if she stood before him right at that moment.  The vision forced all anxiety out of his mind, his thoughts cleared and he felt his body relax.  A surge of energy filled him; her love for him would give him all the strength he would need and Joshua smiled.  She would not allow him to fail as he had failed her so many years ago, he took comfort in her memory and forgiveness and then blocked out all further distractions.

Sorcerous power whirled about him as the effort of the prisoner closed in around Joshua.  The girl was now standing and physically directing that power but Joshua could almost see the surge of energy streaming from a large, fresh crack in the granite.  Dust kicked up, whirlwinds threw stones and small rocks pelting Joshua’s face and body, each splintered piece of granite striking like shrapnel until every inch of exposed skin was pocked with bruises and cuts.  Joshua ignored the pain, squinting his eyes against the dust and focused on the true attack.

Joshua siphoned energy from the chaos surrounding him, magic crackled and popped like static electricity, his hair stood out on end tugging at his scalp, he could feel the power intensify until he was certain the entire area would explode around him if he didn’t release some of the pent up energy.

And then he saw what he had been searching for; the loose end of the spell, dangling off to his right just out of reach in the web.  He would need to pretend to attack the demon while working his way to where he could make a grab for the dangling thread.  Joshua wanted to have a hold to be certain he had the right fuse.
He threw a burst of energy to the left of the young girl, rocks exploding and causing her to dive for some cover, it was all Joshua needed.  He took three quick steps to his right and grabbed the thread and with as delicate a touch as he could manage he sent a magical ignition and watched.

It started painstakingly slowly, burning and sputtering up to the first intersection of the web.  Joshua was sure it was going to go out before it could catch properly but he had to be patient.  Now three strands burned and the web seemed to be loosening, another intersection and three more burned, and three more until the web started to lose its shape.  Each intersection would explode like a small firecracker snapping in a bright flash before proceeding to the next strand.  It was succeeding, the spell was unraveling.
The first massive concussion threw Joshua from his feet and he landed hard against the base of a large boulder, his head rapping the granite with a shock of intense pain.  He fought to hold consciousness, his vision blurred and his head filled with a loud ringing in his ears.  He painfully pulled himself to his knees and tried to focus on what was happening.

What had gone wrong?  And then he saw the traps that had been laid so carefully within the spell.  He had been blinded by his own arrogance and overconfidence.  He hadn’t even looked to see if there might be traps, hadn’t bothered to look for the snares that were now wrapping themselves around his ineffectual magic, strangling it.  The whole spider’s web was imploding like a dying star sucking in all energy and life.  If Joshua couldn’t stop this disaster the collapsing spell would continue to suck in life energy until every living thing was destroyed.
Slowly, deliberately he managed to rise to his knees and then, bracing his right hand on the boulder to his right he stood, his legs trembling and shaking but they held.  He studied the quickly burning and sparking web searching in vain for one dampening point.  There had to be some nexus that he could find to modify, to diminish the damage of the coming destruction.  He stared unblinking, his eyes watering from the effort, find the point, the one knot that would untie this mess and maybe he could still save a few lives.

There it was, just to the left of center, almost framing the young girls grinning face, a square of four knots like the rest yet with a darker color as if they had more of the diseased taint.  He was suddenly filled with a deep sense of foreboding, something desperately forcing his psyche away from that focal point; bile burned his throat as it rose from his stomach and filled his mouth.  That had to be the juncture he sought, he realized, by the intensity of emotion forcing him away from the focal point.  And if it wasn’t well he had nothing to lose, the whole thing was about to collapse in on itself anyway.  If he was wrong he would never know it, as his death would be instantaneous.

Joshua concentrated, forming the simplest spell he could possible summon and threw it before the demon could intercede.  The spell landed softy, unnoticeably into the pocket he had denoted and Joshua watched as the web began to dissipate, nothing grand just a slow dissolving.  If his luck held the demon wouldn’t notice until it was too late and the spell would discharge harmlessly into the iron heavy granite and this episode would end without further destruction.

The demon sniffed the air, eyes darting to the right then the left, she snarled hideously as she noticed what Joshua had begun.  She raised a hand to stop the failure of power and Joshua threw the second spell he had formed to block her from uttering a sound.  Both spells collided on the tip of her tongue and exploded in a thunderous clap and a shower of wild energy.  She collapsed in a heap and the energy coalesced around her stunned form before discharging into the solid rock.

The ensuing concussion threw Joshua like a rag doll hard into the boulder directly behind him again.  The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was a loud crack, whether it was the boulder finally giving way under the constant assault of his head ramming into it, his back breaking or the cracking of the world he neither knew nor cared.

 Joshua Awoke in total darkness, for several moments he was concerned that all the constant meeting of skull on stone had taken its toll and he had gone blind.  But slowly the world began to come back into focus; the light from the dying bonfire penetrating the darkness, easing his distress.  The waning full moon rested on a western hill as if it had been watching over him as he lay insensate.  Slowly stars came back into focus as his eyesight returned until they filled the night sky, sparkling and brilliant in the crystal clear heavens.  All the impurities had vanished from the air and the night was as crisp as he had ever seen it.

Joshua’s ears rang and black spots dotted his eyesight but they were dissipating quickly enough.   Every muscle in his body ached as if he had been beaten by a gang of extremely large men with baseball bats and they had been very inventive finding spots on his body that had never been found before.  Well, pain proved he wasn’t dead and he thought he should be grateful.

Carefully, and painfully, he climbed to his feet, swooning with the effort.  Blinking his eyes methodically as much to clear his head as to ease the pain while he attempted to find his equilibrium as he made his way back to what remained of the fire in the center of the conflagration.

Silence filled the bowl and there was an emptiness; a total and complete absence of life that prickled his skin.  He could not have been unconscious for very long, as the position of the stars proved, but he was completely alone, not another living thing occupied the small valley; not a squirrel, a bird, an insect or a spider.  And not another human being, sadness threatened to overwhelm him. 

Where the girls had been situated around the bonfire were scorch marks burned into the granite.  Bits of skin and hair, bone and threads from the transparent gowns decorated the trees.  The stench of burnt flesh hung heavy in the air assaulting his nostrils.  It combined with the scent of seared rock, wood smoke and the overpowering stench of death.  Everything within a hundred paces of the center of the clearing had been butchered by the supernatural being underground; everything except Joshua.

He stood still as stone with the dying winds eddying and swirling about him taking in the nightmare that the peaceful valley had become.  There was not enough of any one body to determine which piece of tissue belonged to which girl.  They would have to bring in an entire department of crime scene investigators to fish out each clump of human remains off rock and tree then send them off to labs and run banks of DNA tests to find what belonged to whose little girl.  It would take months if not years.  Better if the whole area could be as cleansed as the air and the missing thirteen remain a mystery.  Joshua thought it might be kinder for the families to have some hope; they could believe the girls had only strayed and would someday reappear.

Almost as if in answer to his thought a bank of clouds returned, blocking out the perfect night, lightning flashed from bank to bank until the spark ignited and the clouds released their content on the clearing.  Rain pounded down in heavy, thick sheets as the Great Mother washed away any evidence that anything living had ever occupied the valley. 

Joshua stood at the heart of the scene, the bonfire hissing and spitting, fighting for life but finally succumbing to the deluge.  The rain drummed on his head and chest in rapid staccato rhythm to his heart beats, the pure water washing away his flowing tears. 

He had once again succeeded in the battle but had lost another piece of his soul, not to mention thirteen young women, in the processes.  Why did winning feel so much like losing?  The price was far too high.  Once again he was the only one who survived and had to live with the payment.

No one would ever know what happened in this clearing tonight, no one would know of the horrific end of thirteen innocent lives.  They would become just thirteen more statistics, thirteen pictures on milk cartons, thirteen pictures on posters hung with futile and waning hope on lamp posts, fences and abandoned buildings throughout neighborhoods by broken hearted friends and family.  Too late the parents and siblings would wonder where the children might have gone or why they left.  Never considering it might have been loneliness and need which drove them away.  The girls would become nothing more than faded pictures on walls and memory, their eyes begging for someone to care; someone to love, a place to belong.  And the sad thing was, Joshua knew, they’d probably had all of those things at home but never realized it because of their need for more.

He wept again at the futility of it all; the stupidity that one more word, one more hug, one more minute of time and all of this could have been avoided.  He knew tears would be shed by more than he.  Family and friends would fill their days and nights with tears of wonder, tears of worry, tears of fear but, he thought, at least they would be spared seeing the bits and pieces of their children spread out before them, torn apart like fragile china dolls, they would be spared that.  And maybe that was kindness, he didn’t know, he had never had children and never would.

He knew only that he would need to reinforce the existing spell, attempt to patch the cracks and fissures caused by the girls play at witchcraft and pray he had enough energy in him to strengthen the prison until he could find help. 

He focused his will and vigor into the physical crack newly created in the surface of the granite and filled the fissure with what he could find of living energy far from the dead surrounding area.  It wasn’t much but he hoped it would suffice.  He mumbled one more incantation for good measure as he turned and walked away.

The eastern sky turned a pastel pink, blue and yellow near the horizon as he came upon an old lumber road.  The rain had ceased and a fresh, clean scent filled the air.  Joshua eased himself down on to the stump of an ancient pine in the midst of a small forest of stumps, cut down, no doubt, for the comfort of some yuppie living the wilderness life in a million dollar log home.  He pulled an old, well chewed pipe from inside his leather jacket.  He shoved the bowl into a Ziploc baggie half filled with reddish brown tobacco and filled it well past the lip.  He pushed the tobacco into the bowl until it was packed as tightly as he could pack it then snapped a wooden match to life, lighting the pipe with practiced ease.

He sat considering his options and paths until the sun was well into the clear blue sky.  Guardians would have to be his first step, someone trustworthy and knowledgeable.  Without someone of great strength of spirit and will he could not leave the prisoner unattended.  And he had to leave.

It was time and he would need to begin his search.  The evil buried beneath the rock would break free; there was nothing he could do to prevent that from occurring.  The prison had been weakened and he did not have the power to seal it.  What he had to do was defeat it as the escape took place; that would be when it would be at its weakest.  Each step of the path laid out before him would need to be taken in the proper order or all would come crashing down like a house of cards. 

Tired beyond weary he eased himself up from the stump.  He should feel more invigorated, he thought, the adrenaline should be racing through his veins and his heart should be pumping like a two stroke engine, instead he only felt tired and very alone.  He shambled a quarter mile down the old log road to his mint cherry-red, 1973 Chevy pick-up truck parked just off the shoulder.

                                                                   Chapter Two

 

Raymond shoved a large bite of hot dog and wheat bun into his mouth, not out of hunger but to keep from screaming.  For what felt like the two hundredth time today some shriveled up excuse of a human being just had to tell him how much they enjoyed his ‘tricks’ and that he was every bit as clever as that Copperfield man and if he kept up the good work maybe someday he might even be as famous.   They were morons.  Raymond would have loved to show them what he really could do and let Copperfield rot. 

It was bad enough he had to listen to their drivel in the showroom but not here, not while he was just trying to grab a quick bite of his favorite repast.  He hardly needed these idiots patronizing him; not on his own time.  He might have to put up with their babble when they’d paid the price of admission but they weren’t paying now.
He wanted to rise up to his full five foot eight and three quarter inch height and shout into their moronic, vapid faces explaining in great detail and volume, so they might have some possibility of understanding, that he didn’t perform little tricks and illusions to fool simpletons such as they, that what he did was true magic.  Copperfield fooled them because they were fools and they wanted to be made to feel as if they were idiots.  He was a wizard, a real one, not some slight of hand entertainer. No!  He was born with the ability to actually tap into the cosmos and control whatever he wanted. 

But why bother?   They wouldn’t understand.  How could they?  Even the concept of what he knew himself to be true was enough to make his own head spin.  He could say anything he wanted but try and explain he was a ‘Wizard, a True Star’, as Todd would say, and they would smile, say that’s nice and begin to walk slowly away, fear and confusion behind their smiling eyes and believe him to be, at least slightly, out of his mind.  And they might not be that far off the truth, he thought glumly.

He had attempted, from time to time, since he had discovered as a small boy that he could do something that, apparently, no one else could do, to explain to anyone who would listen how he was able to perform these ‘tricks’.  But they turned a deaf ear, no one wanted to hear his truth because at that point they would have to question their own grasp on reality; they would find it impossible to believe or understand.  They found it much more convenient to believe he was mocking them or attempting to put something over on them. 

His parents had had him psychoanalyzed as well as poked, prodded, X-Rayed, turned inside out, examined and defined so many times he began to think of himself as a specimen for science class.  One day, not able to take the invasiveness of the latest prodding he had thrown what would commonly be called a tantrum; well, a ‘normal’ child would have thrown a tantrum he had thrown the Doctor and pinned him against the wall with a plethora of scalpels and other assorted sharp objects that hadn’t been in the Doctor’s office previously and screamed until his throat was raw.  The result of which was expediting his ‘vacation’ in an asylum for six months until he learned to control himself.  He had learned over the ensuing years to keep his secrets to himself, to be more like the other children and shut his yap.

But he could ‘do’ things.  He could pull objects out of the air, not things cleverly hidden inside robes or sleeves, any hack could do that.  No, he could visualize the object he wished to possess in his mind, concentrate with such intensity that it would force the object to form out of the molecules in the air.   He could create forces with his mind and with the right construct of words. 

When he had been quite young one of the neighborhood bullies had decided that he deserved Raymond’s lunch and milk money more than Raymond did.  So, the bully had started pummeling Raymond right in front of all of his friends.  It had been humiliating.  Raymond had fantasized while the blows fell that he could pick the son-of-a-bitch up and toss him across the school yard; that would show the bastard; he’d respect Raymond then!  And suddenly the blows stopped, Raymond remained laying on the ground, his arms attempting to cover and protect his head, knees drawn up in a fetal position but the kid had quit beating the shit out of him.  When he opened his swollen and tear crusted eyes he saw the bully slumped against the door of a teacher’s car clear across the parking lot, knocked out cold. No one could explain what had happened.  One minute he was slugging Raymond’s head and the next he was flying; a dent in the car door the only proof of such a miracle.  A lesson best left on the playground and kept out of the doctor’s office.

It wasn’t long afterwards Raymond began to get ‘visitations’ from a long dead uncle, or so the ghost claimed.  Within weeks Raymond possessed the ability to ‘see’ other long dead relatives and their friends as well; it didn’t take long before young Raymond’s closest friends were the specters of long dead spiritualists, wizards and witches.  He thought everyone could see the dead walking among the living; he had been shocked to find out it wasn’t so; his mother chalked these sightings to his vivid imagination and childhood invisible friends.

He was different and no amount of explaining was going to change that.  So he let them believe he was a child prodigy, a ten year old with such a grasp of slight of hand that it was awe-inspiring.  He was the child Merlin.
He began touring the world the same year he quit his explanations; his eleventh.  Raymond’s parents were not going to waste a golden opportunity, even if it meant exploiting an obviously mentally disturbed child, and he decided it was easier to just play the part.  Be what the world wanted him to be, anything to stop the testing, the needles, pissing in cups, being hooked up to endless machines and having fingers probing where it was most uncomfortable.  He’d had so many fingers up his ass it was a surprise he hadn’t turned gay just for the comfort of the familiar.  He had decided to stop fighting their perception of reality, go with the flow and be who they wanted him to be.

Yes, when he stopped to consider it that was the real illusion.  But if pretending to be something he wasn’t eased the embarrassment for the sperm and egg donors of this ‘special child’, if it made it so their puny minds could grasp the reality of him then so be it.  He wouldn’t fight to make the blind what they did not want to see. 
It was the same with the great unwashed masses that paid to see the former wunderkind perform his ‘tricks’.  They flew out here to beautiful Las Vegas by the thousands to stand in the oven heat just for the opportunity to gain entrance to see the trained dog perform.    

And yet here he sat with the rest of those same idiots under the broiling sun on another un-fucking-believably hot Vegas August day.  They stared at nothing, lounging on the street of dreams, wondering what had happened to all their money.  They had come out here to make their fortune and now they sat here on concrete benches eating hot dogs instead of steak, drinking tap water in place of Dom Perignon.  Not quite able to get through their substantially thick skulls that all of this opulence hadn’t been built on their winnings.  Schmucks!

But thank God for them, they were the rubes that paid his exorbitant salary.  They were the ones that kept coming back to see him, so, he remained trapped in the gilded prison in the desert.

Another shitty day in paradise.  Not a cloud in the sky; too bad the same couldn’t be said for his state of mind.  His thoughts flew past him like F-14s, strafing him with the frustration of being someone he was not.  His ego screamed into his mind’s ear he was something no one else on the whole fucking planet was, he was unique in all the world, no one could even conceive that someone like him could exist, and yet he had to play the part of a lesser being.  If there was a God Raymond would rule over these non-thinking morons rather than having them chasing him with pitchforks and fire. They should worship him as a demigod at the very least.

It was maddening.  He had prayed his whole life for the gift of one person he could talk to, one person who could understand and believe without thinking him some kind of nutcase.

If he had someone who knew, who understood, maybe even possessed the ability, someone to commiserate with, Raymond could finally prove his claim, could show all of the psyches, the doctors and the spiritualists who had shown such derision at his claims and shove the truth right up their asses. 

It was as if he could see the stray molecules and atoms floating by and could force them into whatever he was thinking about at that particular time.  He’d tried over and over again to explain to his folks, the doctors, whoever would listen even for a minute but hell, he couldn’t even explain it to his own satisfaction, how could he possibly expect anyone else to comprehend?

Yet he could form a force field by compressing the molecules in the air tighter together, could make water jump like a trained dog, could bend metal with his mind and cause things to fly through the sky as if they had grown wings.  It was like he understood the workings of all things on some instinctive level. He couldn’t really understand himself, just, if he thought about something in the right way and concentrated all his mind and energy on an idea it became fact.  Shit, his head started to swim every time he tried to grasp what it was he could create or destroy with a mere thought.  Yet he knew he merely scratched the surface of what his power could be.  He felt all powerful and impotent at the same time, it was madness, but it was a madness he’d lived with his entire life.

These thoughts had been with him so long they were as familiar as a lucky rock worn by time and handled so often that the sharp edges had been smoothed so they no longer tore at his conscious; they were no longer painful or uncomfortable.  There were no injuries more painful than those inflicted psychologically during childhood.  He had come to grips with them all; he’d had to or go insane.  He was so wrapped in these deliberations he hadn’t noticed the building pressure in the air surrounding him.

He glanced around at the other patrons of his beloved and most favored sidewalk café and no one else seemed to notice anything different, they chatted away as if they hadn’t a care in the world, could not feel the heaviness of the atmosphere, the complete still, the absence of any movement of air.  He found it hard to breathe, hard to hold onto any thought, his muscles felt as though they were slowly being turned into jelly.  He tried desperately to shout, to utter any sound at all but the pressure building around him now flowed into his mouth stuffing his throat until nothing, not sound, not his breath, could escape.

There was a taste of something in the air; the metallic tang of blood in the back of his throat.  The scent of ozone burned his nostrils and his eyes began to water.  He felt as though he was a specimen again in a very hot and air tight jar, could sense something watching him as if to gauge his reaction to being slowly smothered. 

He struggled to find a spell hidden deep in the recesses of his consciousness, something from out of the thousands of hours of loneliness.  Time spent in dusty, ancient libraries deep in the bowels of castles so old no one knew when they had been constructed; places where no person, let alone fresh air had been, for centuries, speaking to no one but ghosts, long dead relatives. They had not been familial; he had come to understand this, but related in sorcery, the shades of the past had come to teach the future.  They explained he had the potential to be one of the greats, to be almost omnipotent in the use of magic; that was why they had come to him, they thought he was a survivor.  No, more than that, they thought him a conqueror.  Only to desert him months later for no reason he had ever been able to discern.

Yet now his mind was blank, there was no help coming from his brilliance, no incantation that would free him from this onslaught.  His brain remained empty, his relatives had apparently not chosen well; there would be no help from their past or his present, casting doubt on the future.

Just as he was about to slip into oblivion there was a crackling in the air, a building of static electricity and then, with a deafening roar, there came a massive discharge of energy and he was thrown from the bench.  Raymond Robert Rampon was extremely surprised to find his lean frame lying prone baking on the concrete sidewalk unable to move.

He knew he was uncomfortable lying on the scorching hot pavement but he only knew it somewhere in the back of his mind, not as if he could do anything about it anyway.  The sun was a flaming ball in a cloudless sky, like a great eye staring at only one thing on the planet earth and he could do nothing but stare back.  Oh shit, just another wonderful afternoon in late August in beautiful Las Vegas.

Raymond observed all this from several feet above his lifeless form, he thought it rather strange that no one seemed to want to help the poor chap laying there unconscious and unable to close his eyes.  One would think that some kind soul would, at the very least, come close the poor bastard’s dark brown eyes, staring directly into the sun like that had to be causing some permanent retinal damage.

A thought flickered in his out of body mind that it was funny that he had always believed himself taller than his actual five foot eight and three quarter inch frame.  He looked like nothing so much as a boy of late adolescence laying drunk, passed out on the pavement and he definitely needed a haircut.  His shoulder length brown hair spread out behind his head like a halo.  My God, what would people think?

He didn’t know why there was no other worry connected with any of these thoughts but he truly believed deep in his heart, mind and soul that someone or some greater being would be along any moment to set things to right again and he would wake up perfectly happy once again in his own husk.  He knew this was silly but if he didn’t believe this then he was in a great deal of trouble.

                                               

                                                                  Chapter Three

 

It was an almost imperceptible motion, the negative shake of a head, as if thought moved it, not muscle.  Keefer’s mind denied what he was hearing and his head was going along for the ride.  He was a Yuwipi man and had come from a long line of Yuwipi.  He was so Native in appearance he was almost a caricature.  Skin the color of well-worn leather, a hawk’s beak for a nose, hairless face with the slightly upturned eyes of his people drawn back towards long braided pony tails of salt and pepper hair.  He kept those eyes closed; he knew if the man standing in the doorway opposite him could see into Keefer’s eyes he would know the denial was false.  The strangers’ tone of voice left no doubt, he was being served truth, he could accept that or not, it made no difference.

This was shit straight out of the grocery rags; and he had read the grocery rags.  Who could avoid them?  Waiting in line, your eyes were drawn to them like a pile-up on the highway.  And he had lent the stories about evil spirits the credence they deserved, bullshit, like all the bullshit that appeared these so called newspapers.  Newspapers!  Hah!  The only purpose they could possibly serve was as liner for the bottoms of bird cages.  Demonic possessions, ghosts fathering children, kids attacking their parents in satanic rituals, grotesque torture chambers being uncovered in the basements of supposedly normal parents and teachers, filth to sell these rags, that’s all it was.   Typical Christian fears played out for cash.

Native Americans didn’t give much credence to such stuff, as they didn’t hold with the Christian belief of good and evil.  There was only the spirit.  If someone seemed out of kilter they only needed their Spirit set right.  They were neither good nor evil they just were.  His job as a Yuwipi was to ask the Grandfathers and the Tunkasila to help, to guide the spirit back to the Red Road, to mend what might be wrong and get the person back on the right track.  If that could not be accomplished then that person had to be sent out from the People so he could do them no more harm.   That was the way it had been for hundreds of years. 

And now here comes this man telling him there was such a thing as true evil.  And the embodiment of that evil was buried up in the Hills.  And it would appear that this evil was escaping its’ ‘prison’ and Keefer was expected to help protect the world and help return whatever this evil was to its cage.   Yeah right, see you in the funny papers, it sounded like a bad movie script.  He thought this man standing across the room cool as a cucumber with this impossible story was nuts with a capital N!   Yet he couldn’t get away from the fact that, coming from this man’s lips, it felt valid.

Keefer wasn’t exactly ancient but from where he stood on the path of life he was definitely closer to the end of the journey than he was from the beginning.  He’d been around several blocks too many times and knew these stories for what they were: urban legends.  Something someone had heard from the brother of a friend who knew someone that had been told by the friend of a friend whose second cousin twice removed had overheard in a diner by the friend of someone who actually knew this fact to be Gospel.  He was far too old to fall for this crap, yet here he was sitting and listening to this stranger and believing it.

Believing a man who appeared in the middle of the night lightly tapping at the thin wood door of Keefer’s dilapidated home as if afraid if he banged too hard on it that he might knock the frail wood frame house down.
It was a nondescript place out in the middle of what would be nowhere if it were only fifty or sixty miles in any other direction.  It could be considered an abandoned shack if some improvements were made.  A single story frame house well past what painting might possibly do for it, though it did appear that it had been white once upon a time.   The screen in the front door was mostly memory leaving the aluminum frame and lower window to lend a feeling of desertion to the place.  It was perfect for the old man, everyone stayed away, waiting for him to make an appearance in town before approaching him with whatever little problem they thought he could solve for them.  People feared this desolate hovel thinking he talked to Spirits and performed bizarre rituals here.  It was a fear he nurtured, preferring solitude.  Yet here was this disturbance leaning against the kitchen door frame waiting for some kind of response to his insanity.

Keefer eased his eyes open believing himself capable of controlling any messages they might decide to convey on their own and stared hard at his visitor.  The man was a contradiction.  Snow-white hair barely consenting to be confined by a weathered piece of leather into a loose ponytail, his face so smooth and devoid of wrinkles or lines he looked to be a man in his early twenties except for the eyes.  His eyes spoke of age, they were the only part of his face that had surrendered in the slightest to the years with the acceptance of a few crow’s feet at their corners; they spoke the wisdom earned over a very long life.  They were pale blue and green almost to the point of white yet that wasn’t exactly true either.  One was blue and the other green but you had to look to notice.  Eyes that gave the impression they could see right through you as if you were no more than mist.

And then there was the incongruity of that short, pure white beard like rabbit fur on such a seamless, young face.  The man was a study in contrasts.

 It made Keefer’s skin crawl to be studied by this ancient human being, to be scrutinized like an insect under a microscope.  And that is exactly what was being done right now.  Keefer definitely didn’t care for the feeling.  He heard a crow cry off in the distance.  A warning?  A cry for help?  Maybe just a late night hello.  Right at this moment Keefer needed to concentrate on the enigma standing across the room from him.

In truth the man was not much taller and certainly slimmer than the Yuwipi yet he had the feel of a mountain, unmovable.  If he said he was going to stand there until the end of time Keefer had no doubt he would be standing in that doorway, with nothing else of the house remaining, a thousand years from now.  There was no feeling of malevolence, no threat, just promise and a desperate need.  He would not be moved until given what he asked for.

Keefer forced physical ease on himself, relaxing his body through breathing and habit; his eyes calm, not flitting around the room like birds searching for an open window to escape this trap.  He folded his hands comfortably in his lap; legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, the wood chair tilted back against the wall.  He had the appearance of a man about to take a nap, listening to the breeze whistle through the few trees outside his front door and through the rafters of the attic, not someone who was being asked what this man asked of him.  Not even the glare of the bare bulb gently swaying on the intruding drafts seemed to disturb him.

He suddenly felt very old, old and worn out, which, he had to concede, he was.  No one knew his exact age, not even him, but he guessed himself to be somewhere in his late sixties or early to mid seventies.  He remembered when people didn’t fly or have cars and electricity, but shit, on the Rez that could have been last year.  He could feel it all bearing down on him tonight as if he carried a boulder on his back and it had been there a long time.

He unconsciously pushed back his long salt and pepper hair from his face, though, he thought, it becomes more salt every hour, and fidgeted with the leather thong tied around the ponytail whose only job was to keep the hair from impairing his deep brown eyes.  He should fire it and replace it with a hair clip.  His face, creased leather, worn by years of hard living, weather and too much alcohol for too many years, reflected his incredulity.  He stared hard at the stranger hoping to see the joke with eyes that his other senses might have missed, his hawk nose twitching as if trying to smell out the sham.

“Remember, this isn’t politics, denying something doesn’t make it false.  You know in your bones what I’m telling you is true, why keep running from it?”  The man’s voice was quiet, flat, just reciting facts.  A slight breeze whispered through the tattered curtains in the kitchen.

“But, even if what you’re saying is true what am I supposed to do about it?  I’m not a magic man; I don’t have any special knowledge or power, you’re looking down the wrong road here.”  Keefer lit another cigarette off the dying butt of the last which he snuffed out in an old coffee can and leaned the chair back against the wall.  “Listen Joshua, it is Joshua isn’t it?  You need a sorcerer or a magician or something like that.  You know like they have in the movies with lightning and static electricity and all that shit going on.  You need some young, muscle-bound guy who can save the world, not some old worn out Yuwipi man. 

“Of course, I could do a sort of Native Paul Revere thing, you know ride through the hills and city in that old beat up pick-em-up truck hollering that the demons are coming, the time of evil is Nye, something like that.“  He coughed out a chuckle on white tobacco smoke.

It was hot for late august in South Dakota which is to say it was hot this time of year for Hell.  Sweat trickled down Keefer’s face turning the creases around his cheeks and mouth into small rivulets that emptied off his chin and stained his dark red flannel shirt.  The dark spots under his arms seemed a permanent color of the shirt.  He wondered how this Joshua could stand there dry as autumn.  Didn’t the bastard sweat?

“Heyapi wokiyaka tunkasila.”

“You speak Lakota?  Nice trick but I still ain’t the one you’re looking for”  Keefer stubbed out another cigarette.

“You communicate with the Spirits; I need someone who can do that.  I need your knowledge, your powers.”  Joshua was so matter of fact it was maddening.  It seemed like he was always taking Keefer’s measure, always reassessing what he thought and how he could use that information.

“But I am not a magic man.  You don’t seem to understand the limitations of what I do.”  Keefer became more insistent, not raising his voice, more like speaking to a small child who wouldn’t take no for an answer.  “What could possibly make you think I can do what you ask? “  He tried to relax himself, tried to think things through clearly.  “I talk to the Spirits of my people.  I talk to the Mother and the Father, the Aunts and Uncles; that is far from controlling them.  I ask, they decide.  You seem to need somebody who can command, I think.”

“I can teach you the few things you’ll need to know, the rest of the knowledge you already possess.  What I am asking is really not that far from what you are doing now.  I need you to talk with the Spirits, ask they lend their strength to what I have set up.  It just requires a bit of a twist on the way you think, that’s all.”  Matter of fact, like everything about this man.  There was no doubt in the man’s mind that Keefer could accomplish what he needed him to, at least none that he was willing to show to Keefer.  Keefer almost found himself believing it too.  “You know yourself that you are the strongest of the Yuwipi here or anywhere in the country, possibly the strongest in the Power in history.  Don’t sell yourself short.  You know your power and I can see it like a bright light roaring in your soul.  So, let’s stop dancing.  You can’t possibly think you have all this strength for nothing.  What, you think you were given this gift so you can help people find lost baubles and bangles or tell their future?  That would be a bit of a waste don’t you think?”  Joshua’s tight smile was born of exasperation.  Joshua was done arguing.

Keefer slowly closed his eyes and took another long, deep breath.  How many times could he use that same trick before it didn’t relax him anymore?  He was listening to the dreams of insanity.  According to this man the world was going mad and he had to help stop it.  Really, wasn’t that what he was supposed to do?  Wasn’t he supposed to take care of the Mother?  Wasn’t he by definition of being Yuwipi a caretaker of all things natural?  And wasn’t that what he was being asked to do?

Yet he was being asked to believe in the insanity of the white man’s demons and to put his life on the line to fight them.  And for some unknown reason he knew he was going to.  If what he was being told was even remotely possible, what was there to think about?  He had to do what this crazy white man asked.  What if there was the slightest possibility that all this horseshit was true and he had a chance to prevent it?  He would never forgive himself.  What was it with white people, always dragging the poor red man into their crazy schemes and dreams?  Why couldn’t they be happy just stealing the land, subjugating the people and leave it at that? 

Dust mingling with sage and pine rode a breeze into the house and comforted him.  Earth smells always gave him strength, they were the scent of the Mother and they helped him to concentrate.  The decision was made and yet he had to try one more tactic, raise one more question.

“I thought there was supposed to be some magic man living up in the hills somewhere, why don’t you go find him?  The stories I’ve heard all my life say he’s got some powerful hoodoo.  He’s supposed to be couple hundred years old.  Shit. I been hearing about him since I was a kid and that was a long time ago.  He’s supposed to be a Spirit Talker big time.  Go look him up.”  Keefer smiled at the old children’s tale, he knew it to be just a myth, stories told to kids on rainy nights to keep them quiet and occupied.  But if an old legend could send this crazy white man off on a wild goose chase so be it, as long as it got him out of Keefer’s home.

Of course there had been a time when Keefer had believed in the old tales, he guessed everyone had.  He had been foolish in his youth; there had been a time when he had believed enough to search the Hills for weeks at a time attempting to find the Spirit Talker.  Sometimes he had gone off by himself camping and living off the land, forcing himself to become at one with the Mother and all the Tunkasila in the great hope they would lead him to the legend.  And there had been the times he had gathered friends together thinking they would flush this bird out by sheer numbers but those trips had mostly turned into drunken parties in the heart of the pines destroying any good will he had established between himself and the spirits.   

Keefer had spent most of his adult life as a Shaman and he knew the limitations of the spirits and he knew the wheel of life.  You got one go round, one lifetime and then you moved back into the Spirit World to join with your family and friends.  That was the way of the world.  You didn’t live for centuries no matter how powerful a shaman you might be.  Animals lived and died, birds flew the world but they lived and died, trees lived a long, long time but they, too, died and people lived and died; that was that.

“Iya lila omankansni.  I will be busy.“  Joshua answered cryptically.  He took a deep breath, stared at the floor for a half second and then hard into Keefer’s eyes.  “Listen, don’t you think I know how all of this sounds.  I know it sounds as screwy as anything.  Old magic coming back to haunt the world, mystic ghost men who actually exist, all coming together to end or save the world, it’s nuts, I know.  But you just have to take some things on faith.  The magic man of these hills does exist, look at me, feel my spirit and know the truth.  I am real.” He said the last almost under his breath as if it had been meant for his ears alone; as if trying to convince himself as much as Keefer.  “So, what’s the worst thing that happens?  I’m a crazy man and you waste a couple nights out in the hills watching over something that isn’t real. “   He shrugged.

“You are a crazy man.  You’re saying that you are this old druid, or whatever and you really have some magic powers, like sorcery or some shit like that?”  The Yuwipi looked incredulous.  He barked a laugh that was not as confident as he would have liked it to be.  “Next thing you know you’re gonna tell me there’s an Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and Yeti all rolled into one and he lives up at the Alex.”  Now he did laugh out loud coughing his humor on white clouds of Camel smoke.

Joshua became quiet. There would be no more questions as the face of this mystery man became impassive and closed.  If there were any further doubts they would have to be shelved for the time being.  Keefer was being expected to take what he was being told on faith and at face value, he would either believe or this interview was over and he would be asked no more. 

The night filled with cricket sound as if they, too, had been holding their collective breath awaiting his decision.  Listening for a moment Keefer felt comforted by the sound, connected to life, and made his final verdict.  He had to go along with this madness.  Curiosity was a stronger motivator than reason or intelligence and he had to see how this story turned out.  Not knowing, not being a part of this insanity would make him nuts.  Besides what else did he have to do?  There was no family to worry about, no one would really miss him if he was gone for a few days or weeks.  He was close to the end of his life and this adventure would give him something to live for, maybe give his life some purpose.  Now, his decision made, it was time to start thinking of his needs, all the things he would require to maintain whatever natural or magical prison Joshua had set up in the hills. 

“I’ll need some large quantities of sage and dried white cedar, some sweet grass, tobacco and I’ll need to train others to help or I’ll be dead within the week.”  He glanced into Joshua’s eyes to gauge his reaction to the suggestion and satisfied of the lack of one continued.   “Don’t worry, they’ll all have good strength and be familiar with the Spirits, with a working knowledge and prayers, though you will have to instruct us all.”  He looked at the other man as if appraising him as he counted off what he wanted.  “I’ll also require a rather large quantity of pure, polished silver; it’s going to be expensive. And most important of all,” he stared hard into the blue and green ghost eyes across the room, “you will need to take part in a sweat with all of us so the others can feel the truth of what you say and will be committed with their lives.”  He spoke gravely, almost a whisper and then added, “Sounds like we’re going to need that kind of a commitment.  And with all that’s involved it will tie us together in spirit and we’re going to need that most of all.”

Keefer shook his head, “I’m telling you right now I’m getting too old for this kind of shit.”

“You can have anything you want.  Obviously cost can’t be a concern but you need to know that time is short; I gotta be on the road in two, three days tops.  Which means we’ll need everyone who is going to participate here tomorrow so I can teach them what they’ll need to know and then we can do the sweat tomorrow night.  Sorry for the rush but it can’t be helped.”  They shook hands and Keefer felt the strength in the other man’s grip and strangely felt assured by the contact.

                                             

Chapter Four

Joshua carelessly threw what essentials he would need onto the bed; an extra pair of jeans, couple of Henley’s, a spare pair of boots, some toilet items; deodorant, cologne and mouthwash; just the necessities. The people of this age were very odor conscious, not like in the past.  A hundred years ago everybody smelled but nobody noticed, if you stunk it was hard to notice the stink of the guy standing next to you.  Fashions changed.

Things had gone as well as he could have hoped the night before.  There had been half dozen Yuwipi men at the sweat and they had been instructed as to what was expected of them.  Some would do well and some would die, that was inevitable, but even the ones who perished would serve their purpose; they would slow the preordained.  He hated to be so cold and unfeeling but if their deaths served the purpose of the greater good, well, then so be it.  Whether those sacrifices would grant him the time he needed was yet to be seen.  He could only hope.

He’d had to convince the men of a truth they hadn’t wanted to believe.  Joshua didn’t believe they wholly accepted that truth even now.  There were too many things out of his control, too many minute details which could go awry.  One mans disbelief could be the unraveling of the web he hoped to put in place and all would die.  And they hadn’t wanted to believe.  Even those men who had accepted his truth had needed to force it down.

If what he said was true, they asked, why didn’t he take it to the government?  After all, they reasoned, if there was a battle coming wasn’t it the job of the U S government to protect its citizens?
Yeah, right, he had exclaimed, how did they think people in the Government would react to what he had to say?  Here they were, men who dealt with the spirits on a daily basis and they were finding it almost impossible to buy into what he was saying. The bureaucrats in the government would have him fitted and wrapped in a straight jacket before he could finish the second sentence.

They were not going to battle a traditional enemy; there would not be soldiers and tanks and guns.  They had to get that idea out of their minds.  There would not be armies marching out on the field of battle and attempting to destroy each other.  No, this was a far more sinister opponent.  This creature would work through Sorcerous means.  It would subjugate the will of people, it would possess them and before they would be aware of the horror of their deeds these same good, God fearing people would be committing the most heinous acts all in the name of God or America.  They would see what they were doing as that which needed to be done to protect each other and the integrity of the country.  There was no easier way to make people do evil than to make them believe it was patriotic.  It would be an insidious war; a war most of humanity would never know was taking place; even when if ended badly.  They would live the slavery of the oppressed thinking themselves the oppressor.

The old man, Keefer, was holding something back; Joshua could sense it.  He might be one of the walking dead yet Joshua doubted it, there was too much strength in the old man for him to perish before he was ready.  There was something, though, something buried in his past, a pain, a sin carried for many years; Joshua could almost taste it on the man.  But until Keefer decided to confide in Joshua he could not offer to heal or help carry the burden.  He had to pray the old man had the will to face the horrors he was bound to face as well as those he carried in his heart.

Joshua had to trust in Keefer.  Whatever was hidden in his past it was his prerogative to keep his own counsel.  The transgression couldn’t be that awful, Joshua reasoned, or the Yuwipi would be in prison, dead, a raging alcoholic or drug addict.  Right this minute Joshua was only spinning his mental wheels and digging a bigger hole.  Until Keefer told him what was on his mind Joshua would just have to hold his tongue. 

  Joshua had other problems at hand.  The Indian was only one piece of a very complicated puzzle, a puzzle Joshua couldn’t begin to picture. Too many pieces were missing, too many people had to be found and coerced.  He wasn’t certain of his own path let alone the paths of others but it would be nice to have a better handle on one or two variables.  But worry would do him no good.

Distracted as he was, it was almost too late before he became aware of the supernatural pressure building around the cabin.  He sensed it seconds before it triggered the cabins’ defenses.  A prickling of the hairs at the base of his neck, a bitter, acrid taste at the back of his throat, the scent of ozone and burnt flesh and a souring in his stomach.  A shock of pain raced up his spine from his anus to the center of his brain and he staggered against the wooden dining table grabbing it with both hands to steady himself until the sting and vertigo passed.  He needed to be more careful, more focused.  A surprise assault could kill him before he even knew it was there, and then where would the world be? 

Whatever was hiding out in the woods surrounding his cabin either wasn’t quite near enough the cabin for a full-blown attack or wasn’t very strong.  The fact that it had gotten this close was testament that he had become sloppy; he would have to be more vigilant.  He could not allow himself to become careless.  The years had rusted his senses and he would need to hone them if he was to survive.

He sent out feelers of thought to find where exactly this ‘messenger’ might be.  It was a changeling, a demon whose main capability was to shape shift at will; either imitating someone or something it had recently been in contact with or combining forms to present as horrific a visage as its limited intelligence would allow.  It hid itself behind an outcropping of stone and boulder thinking itself clever.  Believing if he could not physically see it he could not find it and it could catch the druid unawares.  Joshua read the demons thoughts and the crooked smile of confidence it wore.

He concentrated his will until he had the changeling pinpointed sending a sharp sword of power straight into the things head; swift as thought it was destroyed.  He took no pleasure from the killing; Joshua always preferred a quick painless death even for something as disgusting and evil as this.

He angrily stuffed his clothing and other necessities into his saddlebags.  There hadn’t been an actual attack on his person in over a hundred and fifty years and now here was the third such attempt in less than a fortnight.  None of them had been serious challenges, more like probing, but why warn him rather than take him by surprise and kill him?  Maybe the prisoner, whom he could only assume was the architect of these assaults, was sending the best messengers he had and these creatures were the limit of its power at the moment.  But, again, why bother. Maybe they had been sacrificed to discover his competence.  He would need to keep that concept in mind and not give away too much information.  It would appear he was running out of time far more rapidly than he had thought.

The realization crept into his gut and he shivered, forcing him to stop in mid-pace, he hadn’t even realized he’d been pacing the cabin.  His thoughts turned dark as the midnight sky as he considered the implications of so many attacks in such a relatively short period of time.  He did all he could to fight the despondency filling his bones.

“Damn, things are happening too fast.”  He whispered to no one but himself.  “All the wards must be weakening and quicker than I thought possible.  I need more time. 

“The old man has to hold.  He’s going to have to dig deep and find the strength somewhere.  Shit!  Why didn’t I pay closer attention to events?   I am definitely getting too damn old, too damn set in my ways and too damn over-confident.”  He chastised himself because there was no one else to do it for him.

He hated relying on people, they were the most unpredictable species on the planet, yet here circumstance had forced him to do just that.  He couldn’t be in a dozen places at once.  Hell, he was having enough of a problem being in one and not bollixing everything he touched.   His mind reeled; he felt dizzy as he considered all that lay before him as well as his extremely limited amount of time.

At this moment it all felt impossible.  He had known for a very long time that something or someone could cause a breach in the prison.  He had been given instruction as to what actions would be necessary.  But the stopgaps and protections he needed to bring together had been designed for a much smaller world with a great deal fewer people.  As well as designed for the technology and beliefs of a thousand years in the past.  Now in a population of over five billion covering the entire globe he was to search out a disparate group of individuals to fight a threat they wouldn’t believe in even if he shoved their faces into the shithole of its existence. 

That was all he had to accomplish; find eight specific people in the midst of billions and convince them that the embodiment of evil was about to bust loose in the Black Hills of South Dakota and set about ravishing the world.   All they had to do was put their lives on hold for who knew how long to go off and fight fairy tales and horrors out of nightmare and fables; oh and they might possibly die in the process.  And he was pretty sure that would be the easy part.

He would have to rely on chance; chance was always a part of life and therefore a large part of magic.  You could pronounce a word wrong or make a slight variation in a motion for a particular spell and chance would set it right, intent could be a stronger force than execution.  It was worrisome to need to rely on something as capricious as chance and human nature but when they were the only options you just had to go with a roll of the dice.

The first step would lead to the journey’s end; all that was needed at this point was to set off in search of the first of the ‘chosen’ and everything would fall in place from there.  Yeah, right. 

He shivered as he shoved the remaining articles into his leather saddlebags.  Yes, he had been wrong on earlier occasions, had erred in earlier battles, but that was in the past; he was not wrong now.  He recalled the faces of those who had perished because of his missteps.  They had haunted him throughout his life, but now he had to force their visages to the back of his mind.  He had work to do and he had to no one to ask questions of, no one who had the experience; he had to trust himself and his judgments.

He would find the balance.  There always had to be a balance; that was nature.  For every yin there was a yang, for each act of malice there was another of beauty and for every evil there was something good to balance it out.  It sounded so simple, like a child’s story, yet it was the way of life.  It was the way that God had set things in the beginning and only those directly involved in any particular confrontation could change the balance; and then only temporarily.  But if humanity wanted to swing one way or the other not even God could change that; He had given them free will and it was up to them to exercise that will.  That had been the deal from the beginning and it would be so now.

Joshua would fight as he had been born to do.  He had been trained in every aspect of combat, physical and metaphysical, until he had achieved adulthood and then been sent here to guard.  He knew if evil was loosed and allowed to roam freely throughout the world with no checks, no opposition, it would obliterate all that was precious, all that was worth waking up for.  And he also knew that would only happen over his dead body. 

Brave words from the coward.  His hands shook as his past attempted to creep into his conscious; he forced it back down.  There had to be someone to stand up against this threat and he would do everything within his ability to find those who would lend their strength and ability to his.  It was all he could do.

Fear sat like a huge rock in his stomach threatening to paralyze him where he stood, or, at the very least, force him to curl into a fetal position and cry for his long dead mother or, maybe, run as far away as he could and hide.  He grabbed the saddlebags and walked determinedly to his Harley.

                                                Chapter Five

The midsummer sun, motionless in a clear blue sky, poured heat onto the landscape, baking the Rock who sat atop Bear Butte.  The spirit accepted the gift; the warming felt good as it watched the puny, twisted shape of the human boy climbing towards it.

The man/child sweated and strained his way up the hard rock face of the Bear, loose gravel skittering under foot and the Yucca fooling his hands with false handholds, gravity pulling at him like a thousand ton boulder.  He cursed his crippled left arm, bowed severely between elbow and wrist, turning his hand into a chicken’s claw and making it appear as if he was always pointing at himself.  His right foot slipped again, it didn’t have much strength either, twisted as it was, crooked inward toward his left leg. And he fought to gain purchase with his one good arm and one good leg.  Panting, he tried desperately to regain his composure, to conserve what little strength he had left.

His vulgar body was the product of a bad birthing.  He had come out wrong, twisted, his mothers’ body left with no choice but expel his crippled form or die.  The Shaman had advised his mother to take the deformed thing out into the forest and allow it to die.  That would be what the Great Spirit would want, he proclaimed, such a monstrosity could not possibly survive on its own, better to kill it quickly and be done with it.

But she had refused.  She would suckle the child, keep it warm and dry but would offer it no more comfort.  If it was Wakan Tankas’ will that the thing should die then let Him come and take its life.  She would not.  If He wanted it dead then why did He allow it to be birthed in the first place?

But the boy had survived, his spirit strong, maybe stronger to make up for the weakness of his body, she didn’t know, but he lived and grew.  His misshapen limbs, though never of much use, had grown in proportion to the rest of him and he could perform enough of the women’s tasks to be of use to the tribe so he was allowed to remain with them.   Not accepted, but still a part of the Tribe.  

There were many times he wished his mother had heeded the advice of the Shaman and allowed him to die.  Children can be cruel, especially to a deformed and practically defenseless thing.  They mocked his shape and worthlessness, chiding him with the knowledge that he could never be a warrior; he would always be a woman, without honor. 

There were a thousand times he considered taking his own life.  Who would care?  Who would notice?  But he couldn’t.  He could never join the Tunkasila, not if he died by his own hand.  Wakan Tanka must have something in mind for him, this couldn’t just be a cruel joke perpetrated against him by all of creation.  He had to believe there was some purpose behind the constant abuse and degradation; he would survive.

He taught himself to ride a pony, though it had seemed impossible with his crooked leg and almost useless arm.  No one would aid him, why bother?  He would only kill himself in the end and they didn’t want to be responsible to his mother for the creatures’ death.  So the cripple spent hours observing other children learning the art of riding, the care of the horses; he could learn the basics.  Then when all the other children had gone off to eat or to other chores he would attempt to capture any pony left unattended, falling off and hauling himself back up by fiercely grabbing hold of a hand full of mane with his good hand and jumping with his one good leg and then falling off again.  At first the other children and the warriors of the village would hide and watch his attempts mocking him behind his back but as the months passed they began to openly watch and laugh themselves sick while shouting degrading insults; until he didn’t fall off any longer.

He forced his ruined arm and hand to hold firm to the pony’s mane so he could swing a club in the small hope the tribe elders would allow him to take part in a raid, but they just snickered when he asked.  

“Why would we want a woman to ride with us,” they chided. “To wash our weapons clean?  The sight of blood would probably cause you to faint.”  They left him with the children, women and old people. 

In shame he limped to the forest and wept, begging the Great Spirit to take him, end his torture.  But the Great Spirit remained mute.

So now he found himself in the middle of his sixteenth summer, midway up the southern face of the Bear, the sun pounding the strength out of his warped form, seeking the summit to find his Vision. 

He had had to force the elders to allow him this Vision Quest.  Begrudgingly they had allowed him a Sweat thinking maybe if he went to seek a Vision that Wakan Tanka would finally take the cripple and they would be through with him.  So, it was allowed, though they refused him the tradition of several warriors to stand guard while he lay naked and alone before the elements, animals and tunkasila.  Why bother, he would either perish during his ascent of The Bear or would die from exposure to the elements once there; let him be completely alone and vulnerable, there was no good reason for others to be forced to drag his dead carcass down the side of the Bear.  Let his flesh rot where his spirit had failed. 

He accepted all this, he had been alone all his life, and though his body was disfigured he believed his spirit remained strong.  He must keep his heart clean, his mind free of all hate if he had any hope of speaking to the Ancients, to the Grandfathers and finding his true path. 

His mind wandered amidst all the detritus of his life as he climbed and slipped and climbed in the blazing sun.  Visions came and went, ghosts haunted him and laughed at his feeble efforts, insecurities buzzed around his head like flies attempting to make him lose his grip one last time.  The scent of sage and pine filled his nostrils; yucca long past spring blossom with a brown dead sprout in their center begged him to grab their spiked leaves for hand holds only to bite his palms and fingers.

The Rock waited, watching, enjoying the warmth of the sun.  The man/child would either come to him or it would die, he could only observe.

Sweat poured into the boy’s eyes blinding him further, it stung every cut, abrasion, scrape and slice in his battered body.  His stomach protested the lack of food; as he had not eaten for several days to prepare himself for his Visionquest.  He wept at the injustice of it all and wished his mind could force his hand to let go.

Keefer awoke, startled and bathed in sweat.  He quickly took in the sparsely furnished area which served as his bedroom.  An old dresser sat against the exterior wall, a mirror, so ancient it seemed to reflect only memories, sat on top.  The white paint on the walls so thin you could read the newspaper patch underneath or peeling back to allow the wood freedom, the whole thing held together, it seemed, by hope, wire and string.  His iron framed single bed was soaked in sweat. Both the top and bottom sheets tied in knots and tangled about his arms and legs.  He felt as though he had been climbing the Bear all night, his right leg was in knots of cramps and Charlie horses and it ached like hell.  He forced himself mentally to relax the leg and soon the cramping eased and he could breathe again.  He flexed his left arm to regain the feeling as pins and needles spread through his fingers and up toward his shoulders, he sighed relief.  A dream, a nightmare, he reassured himself, and lay his head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes, breathing deep to stop the shaking.

The sun promised to soon top the eastern horizon as birds chirped and sang outside his open window.  A hundred insects, who had allowed themselves in through the missing screen the night before, offered one last chirp or buzz before exiting the same portal.  Pine scent made the attempt to push the mustiness from the room but lost to the scent of dust riding a light breeze.  Another shitty day in Native paradise.

Keefer needed to clear his mind of the depression the dream had imprinted.  He could not recall the details of the dream but the despondency came in loud and clear.  The despair was almost paralyzing.  He found it difficult to breathe as if a boulder sat upon his chest and a dark pall had settled on his brain.  His mind was muddled with the half remembered feeling of hopelessness. 

He forced himself out of bed and into the kitchen; he turned on the cold water and let it run while he attempted to sort out whatever it was he was feeling.  He splashed water over his head and shoulders and then bent to drink deep of the luke warm water coming out of the tap.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the half rusted toaster on the counter.  He didn’t know why he kept the thing it hadn’t worked in four or five years.  He guessed it was because it had been hers and he just couldn’t throw out anything associated with her memory.  The warped view in the side of the dented former appliance looked exactly how he felt.  Damn, was there any black left in his long flowing locks of hair or was it all pure white.  Well, at his age he should be happy he still had any head of hair to complain about.  The dark circles under his eyes seemed to be pulling down the rest of the skin on his face until it drooped to his turkey neck.  Keefer was old; there was no two ways about it and getting older by the minute.

Jesus, he knew he was too old to be frightened by nightmares, boogey men and the dark.  That damned Joshua and all his shit about the coming of demons and evil and all.  Keefer had allowed the son-of-a-bitch into his head and spook him.  He wasn’t some kid still wet in his pants to be listening to all this shit and falling for ghost stories.  If it was true he would fight it but he couldn’t do that by allowing himself to get spooked before the first punch was thrown.

Not this time.  There would be no turning and running with your tail between your legs ever again.  That was one promise he had made and kept for a long time.  No one would die because of cowardice; no one would be harmed because he didn’t have the balls to do what needed done.  If he died, well, he had lived a good life and so be it, better death than to be dishonored again.  And it was always a good day to die.

Old memories flitted like unwelcome birds in his mind.  He mentally waved his arms and yelled to frighten them away but they were not real and were not that easily frightened by his trifling attempts.  They were always there at the periphery of his conscious mind ready to land heavily on the weakest branches of his psyche and torment him. 

They were the faces of his past, not the happy, friendly, loving faces of family and friends; no, those were pushed to the farthest reaches, out of his grasp when these visitations returned.  These were the failures, those who had been most harmed by his inaction, those who had died because he refused to use the power granted him by Wakan Tanka, the Great Father.  His people supposedly didn’t believe in magic, not magic as the white man thought of it.  They didn’t possess spells and incantations, thought it was foolish to believe you could control the Mother or the Tunkasila.  Yet his people had still danced the Ghost dance and believed it would protect them from harm.  Yeah, a lot of good it did against the white man’s bullets.

But, still, it was a different kind of magic the Natives held true.  They had believed in the interweaving of all things, an interconnecting of all living souls allowing them to communicate on a base level with all creatures.  They could ask them to ignore a human presence, for instance, and the animals would remain silent.  Simple things.

And yet Keefer could do more.  He could control people and therefore situations with his thoughts.  With a few words and a concentrated mental effort he could cause objects to move as if of their own volition; stop a gun, melt a knife, connect the dots of life so someone would back down rather than fight.  He could communicate mentally with animals and they seemed to understand his wishes.  It had scared the living shit out of him on many occasions when he was younger. 

He would be walking through the hills, nothing but tree and rock for companions, and soon enough voices could be heard in his head.  Disjointed thoughts scrambled here and there, a need of food or water or procreation in the springtime, not words; but emotion and when he would attempt to answer with his own thoughts some creature would startle in the deep woods, stare accusingly into his eyes and run off. He couldn’t understand what he was doing or how it was being done.  And it had cost him.

There had been opportunities in his life for him to use this power to stop wrongful acts from happening but he had been too worried that someone would notice and tie the action to him and that could only lead to trouble.  He would be sitting in a bar and some guy would be acting the asshole.  Keefer knew he could get inside the guys head and push him one way or another, force him to back off, walk away from a belligerent attack on some poor, weaker individual or hitting on a woman who only wished to be left alone but Keefer hadn’t wanted to take the chance.  What if the person felt him inside their head, what if they could tell it was him and they came after him.  Keefer had never known if he left an imprint where he had mentally gone.

There were too many questions to be answered, questions he couldn’t even begin to formulate let alone attempt to find answers for.  No, better to just keep his secret and let the world revolve as it had for billions of years, ignoring him.  And so people had been hurt; he had been cautious and some had died.  Then came the demons.
He had never really been certain if those had been real or summoned by the booze.  The two seemed to coincide like colliding trains.  The demons had appeared real, had felt real as they pulled and prodded him.  He could still feel their bare claws digging into his skin as they ran all over his naked form.  They whispered promises of women and drink, wealth beyond his imagining all he had to do was come with them, join with them and their master would reward him with his every heart’s desire. And they filled his mind with unbelievable suffering and agony as a promise of what he would suffer if he refused.  He had promised them nothing. He remembered the stench of their slick bodies and it still caused him to recoil from its acrid sulfur bite.  He could almost taste the combination of reek and bile. Lying semiconscious in an alcoholic haze he thought them the product of the DT’s.

Now, after locking them away in a deep, dark back room of his mind, their faces had returned with the improbable tales of Joshua.  The improbable, impossible and yet true tales of this ghost man.  Keefer had forced himself to believe over the years the fiends of his past had only been conceived in his bourbon soaked brain. Now he was being told they were real which could only mean so were their promises and threats.  The implications of that revelation settled deep into his soul and dragged his spirit through the old wooden floorboards of his dilapidated house.

Keefer sighed heavily and lifted his knapsack, pushing open the ragged screen frame door he waded into the hot, muggy night air, heading out to his ancient, beat to hell, pick-em-up truck and prayed he would live to see what happened with this mess.

He had planned on leaving at first light but since he was fully awake now, why wait?  If there were ghosts and goblins to be fought he was as ready as he was going to be right now.  He lit another cigarette as he threw the floor shift into reverse, eased off the clutch, heading out to the sacred hills of his ancestors and whatever waited him there.

 

                                              Chapter Six

 

Raymond’s brain clicked on with an almost audible snap, like someone turning on a stiff, new light switch, though he remained in total dark.  He quickly realized that was because he couldn’t open his eyes.  Not that something held them closed, he was not blindfolded or bandaged, he did not have the physical ability to raise his eyelids.  He knew instinctively in his muddle of thoughts that if he could somehow control the motor commands of his body he could force his eyes to open.  Then, at the very least, he would have some idea of where he was.  But he couldn’t seem to summon the will to raise an eyelid or, for that matter, cause any muscle in his body to move.

So he focused on what he knew; his last day on earth.  Well, the last day he could bring up from the old memory banks. 

From every recollection he forced up from the inky depths of the quagmire his mind had devolved into the day before appeared ordinary enough.  He had been sitting on a tree planter, one of the tree planters Vegas was so in love with these days, concrete with stucco finish imprisoning a hapless excuse for a palm tree, and munching on a hot dog from his favorite vendor.  When out of nowhere, and he did mean nowhere, some Godlike power had blasted him out of his pants, made him feel as if every cell in his body was exploding and left him for dead. 

So far, everything pretty normal; then things got weird.

There was the ambulance, the siren, the sense of speed and urgency, people beating on his chest and breathing into his mouth, that had been disgusting, then the back doors of the van slamming open and bright sunshine stabbing his eyes, blurred recognition of a hospital sign.  He remembered relief suffusing his mind as he watched all this happening from several feet outside his body.  There had been an overwhelming desire to leave, for his consciousness to move on and yet he couldn’t, this was all just too interesting.  And then had come the pain.  First a jolt of searing misery, right in the center of the cerebellum, almost as a reminder of the shocking pain he had felt while seated on the planter.  Then came the stabbing, electrical shocks tearing into his chest.  The voices and visions were to come much later.

A massive jolt of electricity forced his body to jump like fish out of water.  A tingling residue running the length and breadth of his body like a cold river of water flowing over and through him; it would have made him giggle if any of his stomach or facial muscles still worked.  Eight times, his out of body consciousness counted, the doctors attempted to jump start his heart.  First there would be the initial shock, then the intense pain and finally the tickling as the electricity ran its course.  He wanted to shout at them to stop.  It seemed cruel from where he floated above it all to keep torturing his form like that.  Nobody was home, the lights had been extinguished, why couldn’t they just accept that fact and let him move on?

Finally something must have connected and his heart lurched within his chest, his lungs took in a gasp of air and he coughed violently.  The heart muscle taking its cue from the lungs began slowly, very weakly, pulsing, and just like that his ethereal form was slammed back home again and feeling not too damn happy about it. 
All of these events had come together in just the proper order so as to allow him to be aware of the oversized needles being shoved into his arms.  Big, blunt needles to be used for dispensing drugs so he wouldn’t feel the excruciating pain caused by having fat needles jammed through the tenderest skin on your body and into very sensitive veins.  He could only suppose the largest of these tubes was for feeding him large steaks and hamburgers. The discomfort level eased up the scale as some Nordic ice queen forced a very cumbersome tube down his already parched throat; apparently so they could drive air into his lungs.  The tubes up his nose he thought were overkill.  On the periphery of his senses were the tense shouts, orders being given by several people at once.  How in the hell could these people understand each other when they were all talking at once?  It was madness; just like on all the TV hospital shows, only a damn site more uncomfortable.  He decided it was more fun to watch than participate.  If he could have he would have smiled.

The drugs raced each other through his veins and arteries for the shortest route to his brain.  Luckily for Raymond Morphine was the victor and he passed out, floating on a cushion of opiates and joy.
As consciousness returned Raymond found he could think, after a fashion but he could not move a muscle; he had to assume he was either in an actual or drug-induced coma.  It was strange to be stuck in his head and yet be fully aware of outward sensations.  He could smell the antiseptic chemicals that were always pervasive in hospitals, could feel the solidity of the bed beneath him, hear the machines hissing oxygen, beeping in rhythm with his heart, taste the medicines on the back of his dry, raw throat.  He knew where his body lay and yet felt completely disassociated from his surroundings; he was trapped inside his head.  Maybe he was dead and didn’t know it and this was hell.  Yet it was completely different than when he had hovered outside his body, he had to assume, for the moment that he was, in fact, alive.

A presence pricked at the fringe of his conscious, he couldn’t tell if someone had entered the room or, no, it was more an ethereal presence.  He could almost see whatever it was in his mind’s eye but when he focused his attention on it, it would skitter away.  More madness, like his dreams.

He had almost forgotten about the dreams.  Dreams returned from his youth, dreams that had been so real and so vivid he could taste, smell and feel them for hours after he awoke.  Though the substance was never quite so.  He could recall the vile ones most clearly though he would rather not.  They made his stomach roil and the bile would rush up his throat until he was sure he was going to retch up.  They were filled with depraved, disgusting things born of a deeply disturbed subconscious; he would love to know what Freud thought about his inner beasts.  Dante had nothing on him.

His dreams were either a) very sexual; scenes from a porno movie involving several women licking, touching, probing every inch of his body, those he didn’t mind.   Although the ones centering around other men caused him some distress though not as much as he would have thought.  (He always thought those should have bothered him more than they did but didn’t everyone have latent homosexual tendencies?); b) nonsensical weirdness; talking animals and furniture flying through deep purple skies while people from his past spoke gibberish.  He had no idea what the people or the dreams could be trying to tell him about himself or c) the degenerate kind that were the most frequent; base, perverse images involving children and animals, torture, performed both by him and on him in a world gone mad with distortions of all things people held dear. Warped views of love, couples coupling with other couples, drunkenness and drug use beyond anything imaginable, people sicking up on each other while they groped anything they could grab.  There were other dreams of this sort but he could never quite force himself to think of them for long.

His sleep would be filled with images out of a Dali painting only more evil with torture and cruelty the order of the day.  Bent, misshapen things out of nightmare crawled over humans and animals copulating, corrupting and corroding anything they touched.  Anything beautiful was soon distorted into a bizarre image of what it had once been.

Until these same hell spawn would focus on him; he could feel their cold, slimy appendages attaching themselves to him.  He could feel the scales of their flesh, clammy tendrils and sucking lips attempting to feed on his essence.  When he finally awoke screaming and tangled in sweat soaked sheets he could never quite recall if he sustained these beings through his power or if he had been nothing more than a feeder and allowed it because he enjoyed the sensation of their nursing.

Laying here in a physically vegetative state gave him time to consider the dreams as he had never done before.  They had increased in frequency and intensity of late, though he hadn’t really thought about it up until now.  He considered them just part of his tangled mind, something he would always have to live with.  And yet they felt more real now, more terrifying and more seductive.  Yes, they were disgusting but they also made him feel that if he could control them he could control anything or anyone and he loved the feeling of supremacy it gave him.  He could learn to live with that.

Now that he was having a difficult time differentiating between what was real and what was dream, he couldn’t decide if the evil he tasted in his dreams and, therefore himself, was sweet or repulsive. 

 The more he thought on it the more he realized that every time he used his magic lately that taste, the smell of evil, a foul and wretched taste, was there, on the back of his tongue, in his nostrils, he could sense it emanating from every pore on his body.  The fact that no one else seemed to be able to smell the abominable odor didn’t matter.  He knew he permeated the rancid scent and somewhere something was going to be able to smell it too.  He knew in his soul that things would change from that point on and not necessarily for the better.  He tried to convince himself it would be horrible but the truth was all of it aroused him.  Still, a lifetime of Catholic brainwashing being some of the most thorough in the world, he felt compelled to fight the base urges, to fend off the overwhelming magnetism of what he thought of as evil.

And then there was the summoning; the hypnotic voice in his head that called to him and promised him so much.  He could almost hear it, could almost hear his name and its pledge of great things.  Then again, it could be the drugs they were pumping into him or he could be going insane. 

No, not insanity, he was destined for fame and to accomplish wondrous things, wasn’t he?  He would be a leader of men and live in the annals of history.  He couldn’t be going mad; it had to be the drugs, didn’t it?

 

Chapter Seven

 

 

Joshua’s’ thoughts flitted by with the scenery.  First and foremost among the plethora of considerations assailing him was; he should’ve brought the truck.  As much as he loved the bike it was subject to the vagaries of the weather especially here in the mountains.  Yes, it was beautiful at this precise moment in time, a sun filled sky with a warm breeze at his back, but it could just as easily turn bitter cold and start raining or, worse, snowing.  Yet, he loved the feeling of riding, the wind whipping his hair, pulling hard on his scalp, his surroundings flying by in a blur, the sound of the 1455cc engine.  He felt great comfort in the loud rumble; only a Harley had that throaty sound combined with the constant vibration between his legs.  It was Nirvana.

And yet regret pushed deep into his bliss.  He wished he’d had more time with the Yuwipi man.  There was so much more he could’ve taught him but time is always the enemy.  He had given what he could; it would have to be enough. 

Keefer had a well of untapped strength.  Joshua didn’t think the old man knew how strong he really was, maybe he didn’t believe himself tested enough by life.  Though how that was possible considering the old mans past Joshua couldn’t fathom.  Keefer had given Joshua a brief synopsis before the sweat.  He had wanted Joshua to know enough of his past to decide if he still wanted the old man.  Joshua now knew how tested the old man had been and was duly impressed that he had survived this long.  He didn’t think the old man believed the same of himself.  Keefer had believed the trial by fire of his life was weakness, weakness against booze, against drugs, against his own self pitying and loathing.  He refused to believe in his own worth or strength and especially refused to believe in the results of the testing.  But he was strong in his heart, strong of mind and held a great reserve of the power, which was good because he was going to need all of that and more. 

That was the exquisite thing about magic.  It was almost as if it knew what was needed and would find a way to tap into any resources necessary to satisfy that need.  Plus the old man had age and wisdom on his side.  He had a lifetime of tricks and staying alive to fall back on; Joshua felt certain that would sustain him. 

That and a couple of mean forty fives and an ample supply of solid iron bullets, a couple of pure silver knives and arrows tipped with iron.  He didn’t know what is was about iron and silver that demons and their kind found so deadly but it had been that way since time immemorial.  He probably had been told at some time the why’s of it but he’d never really had a head for learning.

His thoughts continued to stray as the first raindrop stung his face.  Well, he knew this would happen; sometimes he felt as though he was the embodiment of Murphy’s Law.  It was about to get a tad uncomfortable.  He pulled off underneath the first overpass he saw and slipped on his dark green plastic poncho and cleaned his goggles with Rain-x, which was as much as he was willing to give in to the weather.  He had traveled through worse conditions and at a far slower pace.  Shit, two hundred years ago he would have been slopping through this muck for a week on foot.  Now, unless it got too slick, he could ride out of this in half a day.  Ah, technology.

He loved the freedom of riding just as a hundred years ago he had loved the freedom of walking.  He guessed at heart he was a minimalist, the less baggage the better.  He had spent months in the old days just wandering the Black Hills, the Badlands, sitting atop Bear Butte for days, watching time, and then heading off to Devil’s Tower.  It had been a relatively carefree time.  He always knew that this time, a more difficult and dangerous time, would come.  The ancient prophesies had foretold of a time when the bonds on the prisoner would be shattered.  He guessed it hadn’t taken a great intellect to figure that out; not when one knew the history and proclivities of mankind.  Sooner or later someone was going to let curiosity and ignorance combine in a very lethal mixture and there would be another battle for the soul of man and the survival of the planet. He hadn’t known when, just that, in fact, it would come.  It was what he had been born and trained for.

He had allowed himself to enjoy the solitude of western North America for as long as it had been possible.   But people and wanderlust were one and the same.  Mankind had to explore and explore they had, marching like ants across the surface of the planet, devouring whatever or whomever lay in their way.  And so they had found their way to North America and had begun the conquest of the continent immediately upon arrival.  It hadn’t taken them long to discover the length and breath of this new country.  Nor the beauty and bounty of this part of the world and they had flocked to it.  Gold had been discovered and greed was quick to follow bringing with it the detritus of humankind.  It was sad how the two always went together.

Yes, he had truly enjoyed the isolation his vocation as Sentinel had brought him and had been very sorry to see it slip away on the eternal roll of wagon wheels.  There had been relatively few humans to bother his studies and practice of the arts in those ancient times.  He traded with the natives, who thought him some kind of spirit man, as up to this point in time they had never seen anyone who looked like he did.  They took his white skin as an indication that he was from the Spirit World, half man and half ghost, and so didn’t attempt to harm him; the Indians were wise in always wishing to err on the side of the ancestors.  They seemed quite content to give him wide berth and leave him alone.

Now everything, the peace, the solitude, the isolation was all gone.  He was left with only the onrushing conflict. 
Now he would venture into a world he did not really understand, amongst people he had no love for and find those who, knowingly or not, possessed enough of the power to make them useful to protecting the Mother.  There would be no money, no fame, no glory just the opportunity to do something good.  He always felt the weakest link in his chain was that he could only promise a hearty handshake, a good feeling and a tip of the hat and that only to those who survived, the other side promised riches and power, beautiful women, anything the heart could desire.  It hardly evened out.

He had observed mankind over his long life but always from as far away as possible. He had received missives from his family and former tutors as to the state of the world under the dominion of man.  Now, though he might have preferred it otherwise. He was out of touch with mankind, had lost his ability to communicate well with the barbarians.  He could always keep track of the degradations visited upon the world by the insanity of men.  Hell, there was twenty four hour news everywhere filled with the misery, the inhumanity, the slaughter of innocents.  The horrors of mankind played out for entertainment. 

There had always been a certain wickedness in the world, it ebbed and flowed with time.  But each time evil escalated, each time mankind found a new and more imaginative way to torture and kill each other Joshua’d been certain that the time had come.  And yet, if he was patient and bided his time, man would find some way to change his behavior and progressively evolve for a time before sinking into bestial conduct again.  But now the evil was palpable and he had witnessed the beginning himself so there could be no doubt. 

The rain increased in intensity.  If it got any worse he would have to find a place to hole up until this passed; it was getting hard to see.  He slowed the bike to twenty-five; it wouldn’t do him any good to run off the road and into a tree.  The rain now came down in torrents, Joshua could hardly see the road surface and the rain was stinging his face like a thousand very sharp needles; he reluctantly made the decision that even though time was of paramount importance he would just have to find himself someplace relatively dry to wait out the storm.

Gliding to a stop under the next convenient overpass he pulled the rain-slicked poncho over his head as he hopped off the bike.  This was as good a place as any to wait out the storm.  He could scooch up the embankment, have a drink of water, a bite to eat and maybe get a few puffs on his pipe.  It wouldn’t hurt to relax for a minute and enjoy the pounding of the rain on the road surface just above his head.

Retrieving a ham and cheese sandwich and a cold bottle of water from the saddlebags he leaned back onto the concrete embankment.  Slowly munching the sandwich and washing it down with gulps of water, he allowed his mind time to roam the rain filled day.  He daydreamed.  Sometimes it felt like pure ecstasy to allow one’s mind the freedom to wander unaccompanied through the waking world without a care.  

Joshua should have had a care.  He should have remembered the attack at the cabin and kept his guard up.  But he had allowed himself the luxury of belief.  A belief that since he was well off the beaten path and that it was almost impossible to track a motorcycle and there had been an attack very recently, that he was safe.  He had set up no defensive spells before relaxing.  It almost cost him his life.

He felt the prickling as the hairs on the back of his neck came to attention.  To the right.  Instincts took over and he palmed a burst of power in a short arc, concentrating its focus on an area within fifty yards, not knowing exactly where the attacker was in the deluge, he cleared anything alive from the field of view.  As the scent of burnt flesh and sulfur reached his nostrils he knew he had been successful.  Another attack and so soon and, more important, how had they found him?  He was certain he had left no clues as to his plans.  How in the Hell did you track a moving vehicle on concrete and blacktopped roads?  They left no track and he certainly would have noticed someone keeping pace with him.  He didn’t like this at all.

He heard the soft scrape of boot on gravel and swung around to his left the spell flying from his lips before he could even see.  He had been taught it was always advisable to have a quick defense spell on the tip of one’s tongue, one you didn’t have to think about or start from scratch.  He threw all of his Chi with the spell changing immediately  into an offensive incantation, it exploded from the center of his palm, hitting the creature, half man and half troll, clearly seven or eight feet tall,  in the center of its chest as it came around the concrete abutment. 

He had been quick but not quite quick enough. The creature had a spell of its own on the tip of its thick, saliva coated lips and spewed it directly at Joshua’s chest in the fraction of a second as it came into view.  The spell was one of force, compressing air molecules until they were harder than diamonds and sharper than needles, the magic hit him and crashed his defenses.  He had been no where near prepared for this kind of two pronged attack.  He had been a fool again.

The spell threw him backwards, the last thing he heard was the sickening sound of his skull hitting the concrete grade like an overripe melon.  He had just enough time to think of the word “stupid” before he lost consciousness and rolled, banging every part of his body as he did, down the hard concrete embankment to the roadside, coming to rest just beside his bike.

 

                                              Chapter Eight

 

The apparition materialized as a young girl sitting on top of the cedar chest, her feet dangling over the dark wood, knees bent, ankles crossed, calves swinging through the wood side as if it wasn’t there.  Her expression one of bemusement as if she were slightly shocked to find herself sitting there.  She waited with as much patience as her young body could contain.

Karen sat at her dressing table oblivious to the fact that this young child had invaded her private sanctuary.  She gazed at, without looking into, the mirror, brushing her strawberry blond hair counting each stroke; eighty-two.  Eighteen more brushstrokes on this side and then a hundred on the left side and she could finally climb under the sheets.  She would like to forgo the ritual of the nightly hair brushing but she had made a solemn promise to her grandmother when she was a little girl and had faithfully performed the task every night since.  Her grandmother had obsessed about Karen’s natural beauty, her perfect Nordic features, striking blue eyes and especially her baby fine, blond hair.  Her grandmother had insisted if Karen wished to maintain that stunning hair she must brush her hair one hundred times, each side, every night.

Right now Karen couldn’t care less about beauty or beauty tips.  God only knew how tired Karen was these days, working overtime at the hospital, volunteering at the nursing home plus giving up her weekends to tutor children at the homeless shelter; all on top of caring for her own invalid mother.  It was all Karen could do some days just to get out of bed.  She didn’t mind the work, helping people was its own reward, she was just so worn out physically and mentally from the strain she could hardly think straight, that’s all.

A piercing clap of thunder jolted Karen from her reverie.  The wind howled through the trees and banged branches against the side of the house, as if knocking angrily to be let in, the windows rattled in their casements.  If there was ever a spooky night, this was it, she thought.  A bolt of lightning flashed right outside her bedroom window and the immediate crack of thunder made her jump off the makeup stool.  She cried out in dismay and immediately felt foolish.  Smoothing her light pink sleeping gown she reseated herself on the half stool, she smiled at her reflection in the mirror; she was acting childish allowing the storm to spook her.  It was, after all, only another thunderstorm on the prairie.

She felt a tickle on the back of her neck as if someone had, very lightly; almost imperceptivity brushed her with the tips of their fingers.  Her hair stood on end all along her arms and up the back of her neck until she felt like she was electrically charged.  Her body was quickly covered with goose pimples and she felt as if someone had opened a window on a very cold room nearby. 

She thought she could sense someone spying on her, there was a prickling at the back of her head, butterflies flew, startled, in a rush round and round her stomach.  There was something at the corner of her eye she couldn’t quite focus on. And yet, she knew she was alone in the house; except for her mother in bed downstairs.  The house sat too far from the road for anyone to be watching her from there and she would’ve noticed someone coming up the drive.  She wanted to turn around and inspect the room but found she couldn’t.  She knew this was silly, there could be nothing or no one there, but she just didn’t seem able to make her body obey.  It was as if she was too afraid to move; but afraid of what?

All of the lights in her bedroom were on even though she was not prone to fear the dark or much of anything she couldn’t see, touch or hold.  She had seen too much working in the hospital and nursing home to worry about fantasies of the mind.  But she also knew people were far less afraid when they could observe everything around them, leaving few places for the unknown to hide. 

‘See, there is nothing there, now go to sleep’, she had reassured a thousand patients, young and old.  All she had to do was turn around and reassure herself of her solitude; turn and see the whole of the room instead of the limited area the mirror afforded.  

‘This is just childish’, she chided herself again, ‘imagine being frightened of a little storm at my age, you’d think I was five or something.’  She took a deep calming breath, closed and then opened her eyes before turning around.  Karen gasped her shock, her right hand instinctively covering her open mouth, her eyes blinking surprise.  She had to consciously prod herself to release the breath trapped in her throat.

The little girl sat on the hope chest as if unaware there were anyone else in the world.  She couldn’t have been more than five years old.  Her shining straw colored hair had been tied into two pigtails that were bouncing in rhythm to a silent song, her head bobbing with the beat.  She was clothed in a pink and powder blue dress that had to date back at least a hundred years; her feet were bare and dirty as if she had just come in from playing outside.

She was the prettiest little girl Karen had ever seen.  It was as if she had been drawn from a book to make you want to hold and comfort her.  Her sky blue eyes, a button nose, pink lips parting in a half smile revealing two missing teeth.  She was the picture perfect poster child from the nineteenth century, well, she would have been perfect if Karen hadn’t been able to see through her. 

Karen reflected on long late hours at the nursing home when all the ‘guests’ were supposed to be asleep and she and some of the other volunteers would sit and watch late night gospel TV.  The screen was always full of stories and images of ghosts, people who had died before their time and now haunted their old domiciles.  Priest and preacher alike had agreed these were souls who needed to be guided to the light of heaven or they would never know peace.

Karen’s thought was this must be one of those spirit children.  A child who had died long before her time and was forced to wander the earth until she could find someone to notice her and set her free.   She just needed to find a good soul to discover how to help her move on to Jesus.  Karen knew this child was a lost soul as soon as she attempted to look into the child’s eyes.  It was a little unsettling as if Karen stared onto the landscape of some far off and dead planet.

“ Hello.”  Karen ventured, not really expecting a response.

“Oh, hello.”  It was a tiny voice filled with surprise, “you can see me?  I’ve been sitting here so long I thought you were like all the others.”  The shy, soft voice of a child, unsure if she should speak, so she spoke as if only she herself  might hear, her eyes staring at the floor directly in front of her.

“Well, yes, I can see you and hear you as well.”  Karen spoke slowly, deliberately not making any movements for fear of startling the child.  “Who, uh, are you?”

“My name’s Sarah.”  Her gaze remained riveted to a pinpoint on the floor.

“Where did you come from?” 

“Why, I live here, on the farm with my Ma and Pa and my big sissy Julie and the twins, Ernie and Paul.  They lived here since Julie was smaller’en me when they moved out from Virginny.  Pa said this is the land of milk and honey, the Promised Land, and this is where the Lord told us to come.  But I think it’s just hot in the summer and cold in the winter and windy most the rest of the time.  But Pa farms it and we eat regular.  Ma says that’s all we can ask.”  She seemed to be growing less wary of Karen, looking up more, not staring at her hands and feet quite so much, warming to Karen’s presence.  Sarah finally smiled, though a little self consciously, and stared hard into Karen’s eyes, anxious to talk as if she had waited a long time to have someone to converse with.

Karen gazed at the child, her curiosity overcoming any horror or revulsion she should have felt at the situation.  After all it wasn’t every day one had a conversation with the ghost of a child. 

“Well, me and my folks, well.., just me and my mom now, have lived here quite a while and I don’t remember seeing you here before.”  Karen prodded, wanting to find out whatever information she could but not wishing to push too hard for fear Sarah would vanish back to wherever she had materialized from.

“Well, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout you and your kin I just know mine been here farmin’ this land since afore I was even borned and they’ll be here farmin’ long after you folks have moved on.”  Her tone indignant she crossed her arms shoving hands into armpits and scowled.  “We always loved it here, despite the weather and such, it were a good life ‘ceptin’ for the injuns and truth to tell they didn’t bother us much neither.”  Suddenly Sarah grew very quiet.  “That’s it, now I remember.”  Her voice was barely audible and tears welled up overflowing her eyes.  “The injuns come and they was awful mad about something and they was whoopin’ and hollerin’ loud enough to raise the dead.  Pa went out to see what the matter was, he thought he recognized a couple of them injuns, but they killed him right where he stood afore he could say nary a word and then they come up to the house and drug out ma and butchered her on the spot like an old pig and then they did something awful to Julie, each one of ‘em, she screamed and screamed for them to stop but they each took a turn and then they just killed her too.  The twins took off runnin’ but them reds shot ‘em both in the back.

“Ma had hid me in the root cellar when they first come up and told me to be quiet as I could be so I tried.  But I could see out from under the trap and I got real scared and then they lit the house and the out barn on fire and the smoke started comin’ down the cellar.  I was already cryin’, what with watchin’ them butcherin’ Ma and Pa and everyone like that, well I started howlin’ and they come and found me and it was awful, they ………” She couldn’t continue as she broke down into tears, her small voice wailing pain and agony.  She collapsed on the hope chest, hugging it as if she could find comfort and warmth in the hard wooden box, finally sitting up, back straight and defiant.  But she couldn’t maintain the façade, her eyes betraying her inner turmoil, she wept, burying her face in her hands.

Karen remembered hearing stories of the family that had originally settled this land and farmed it.  They had come from back east, Christians if she recollected correctly, coming to South Dakota to practice their particular form of worshipping the Savior.  Indians had slaughtered them after drunken miners had attacked the Indian camp.  The miners had raped and killed a good number of the Native women and children.  When the braves had returned from hunting and found the slaughter they had gone berserk, killing anything and anyone they came across until, finally, being killed themselves.  It had been a horrible time.

This little girl must be the shade of the youngest daughter of that family, unable to leave the place of her terrible death and move on to Heaven.  Karen would have to find a way to bring her peace.  Thereby allowing her to move on to her heavenly reward; it was her Christian duty.

Karen was overcome with an irresistible compulsion to hold and comfort the child, but how does one hug a wraith?  Her arms would just pass through the girl’s body.  But she had to do something; the poor innocent could not be allowed to suffer another minute.  She had wandered this earth without peace for far too long and Karen was bound and determined this precious child would wander no more.

Karen quickly stood up and tread the several paces to the cedar chest where the small child sat sobbing, ghost tears streamed down her tiny cheeks disappearing into the top of the chest.  Karen had to find a way to help or she was quite certain she would go mad.  There was something deep down inside her, almost genetic, that caused her to reach out to others.  She could no more stop helping than she could stop breathing.  Most people thought of her as naïve or simple minded because she believed there was always some good to be found in every person, no matter how bad that person might seem. But Karen knew in her heart the Lord would never make someone who was pure evil.  Sometimes she might have to plumb a little deeper to find that spark of goodness but she could always find it.  Besides, this little child hadn’t been on this earth long enough for any evil to have found her, other than the way she had died, and that had not been her fault, that was for sure.  Karen would help her find her way to God.

She eased herself onto the cedar chest, tucking her dressing gown under her as she sat, moving slowly, deliberately, not wishing to startle Sarah.  As she settled her weight on the chest she held out both hands, as millions of adults have to small children for thousands of generations, making an offer of compassion and allowing the child the right to either accept or refuse. 

Locking her eyes with Sarah she willed the girl into her embrace. Love waits here little one, you don’t have to be afraid. Love and release from the cruel world, all you have to do is take the first step; all you have to do is not refuse.

Sarah did not refuse.  She climbed tenuously into Karen’s lap and the security of her outstretched arms.

Karen could swear she actually felt the weight of the little girl settle into her lap and as Karen closed her arms around the frightened babe, Karen could feel this child, substantial and real, as if she held a genuine, living child.  She could feel the small body convulsing in sobs and cries, could hear the wails for her lost chance at life, she could swear tears wetted her nightgown.  She comforted as best as she could, cooing assurances and petting the soft hair, rocking back and forth and holding the innocent close to her breasts.  She began praying out loud for the Lord Jesus to come and help this child find her way home; praying that He would bring this child some measure of peace and tranquility.  Finally Sarah quieted, reassured through prayerful mutterings and Karen’s gentle ministrations.

Others had always said Karen was too trusting, too compassionate but Karen had never cared what others thought she knew her reward came from the helping of others.  It was when she felt most alive.  It was almost as if she fed off the need of others and they satisfied a need of her own.  There had been never been a great love in her life, only boys who wanted to use her body.  Her mother had warned her about those perverted and vile  desires all her life so Karen had stayed well clear of the warped intentions of the opposite sex.

Gosh, she even hated saying that word, it sounded dirty even in this proper context.  No, better to come to the aid of those less fortunate, better to sustain the soul through service to others.  It made her feel almost holy to give up her personal life for the benefit of others.

And this sweet, sweet child needed her more than anyone had ever needed her before.  This could be her defining moment; this would probably be the most important thing Karen would ever do.  She was going to help lead this child on to heaven and put her in the care of the Lord Jesus.  Now, if she only knew how.

“Oh Sarah, what can I do to help you?  What is it you need, what can I give you?  I would give you anything, anything.  If what you need is within me I would gladly give it to you.”  She cooed softly her chin resting on top of the Sarah’s head.

The little girl said nothing as if considering what Karen’s words, taking time to comprehend what Karen was offering and then a hint of a smile began to play at the corners of her mouth.  She pulled back from Karen’s tight embrace and gazed into her face, reading her eyes to see if Karen truly meant the offer.

“You would do anything?  Give me what I need from within your very heart and soul?”  The little girl gasped.

“Anything.”  Karen whispered into Sarah’s soft, blond hair.

Now the smiled evolved into a vicious grin, her love starved eyes filled with an unholy lust as she locked eye contact with Karen and refused to relinquish her hold.  Karen tried in vain to break the contact with the little girl sitting in her lap but it was almost as if the child held Karen’s face in a vice-like physical grasp.  Karen felt an ember of fear begin to glow deep in her belly. 

 Karen could swear the child was becoming less substantial, dissipating as if becoming granules of dust in the light, she became more opaque.  Karen’s first thought was that her love had set the girl free.  But instead of floating on to heaven the molecules of Sarah began to find their way into Karen, the dust motes that were once a little girl floating in the air, now coalescing into a stream of spiritual residue and entering Karen through her nose and mouth.  Like a vacuum cleaner sucking smoke out of the air every intake of breath brought more of Sarah into the offered husk of Karen’s body.

Too late Karen understood what was taking place.  She attempted to scream but felt her throat constrict with the effort.  She immediately realized she no longer had control over her own muscles.  She could sense the essence of the little girl filling her mouth and flowing down her throat, cramming itself into her belly and then pushing through her intestines toward her most personal areas, spreading throughout her body, filling her like water fills an empty container.

Now the essence of the child made its way into her genitalia and she felt disgusting and unholy desires flow through her as the filth touched her in places no mortal had ever dared touch her.  She felt sick and shamed, she prayed to Jesus to cleanse her of this perversion, of this violation of her body and soul, but there only came more waves of disgusting images filling her and a quiet laughter from somewhere in the back of her mind.  She tried to shut her eyes but these visions were happening inside her mind and she couldn’t shut them away. 

She was certain she would go insane, if she wasn’t already, as the imagery intensified.  She wanted to vomit, to purge all of this filth from her body.  She wanted to vomit until she turned inside out if that’s what it took.  She had never felt so unclean in her life and she wished for death before she had to suffer this immorality any further.
The malevolent spirit continued to force its way into her body, filling every nook and cranny until every fiber of her was suffused with vileness, from her toe nails to each strand of hair.  She silently screeched in terror as the thing she had thought an innocent little girl infused her mind with more horrors and perversity than she had thought it was possible for the human mind to conceive.

And as it filled her mind with these images Karen suddenly understood what was truly happening.  This evil, this demon began pushing and prodding the essence of what was Karen to a prison at the base of her skull.

She fought with every prayer and psalm she could think of, fear and terror awaking ancient pleas from deep within what was left of her soul, now I lay me down to sleep, she prayed, Please God just let me die.  Nothing worked.  There was no response from anywhere in the Universe.

Her mind screamed out the name of the Lord Jesus, she cursed God for his impotence and for ignoring her pleas and then begged over and over for His forgiveness.  She commanded in the name of all that was Holy for this presence to leave her but it only laughed, cruel and perverted.

She was dying she knew; no, it was worse than that.  Her fate was worse than any she could have possibly feared, a thousand times worse than any nightmare from the worst subconscious terror.  She wasn’t dying; she was being preserved in her own body for the sick pleasure of this vile thing that inhabited it.  So it could derive pleasure from her horror.  Oh dear God, she prayed over and over and over again as if this one mantra would save her and yet she knew it wouldn’t.

Only she and this vile thing would know she remained.  Only the demon would hear her screams.  Only it would taste her terror.  Even now she could feel it tonguing the horror in her psyche as a child licking an ice cream cone.  A hideous cackle filled her head as she felt what was left of her being forced into a tiny space at the base of her brain and locked tight within that tiny space.

She was now encased in her own mind, trapped within her own being by this vile thing.  She could neither move her own muscles nor communicate with anything outside her body.  And what a luscious body it is, thought the creature to her and laughed. 

She wept inside her head.  It was as if she had been bound and gagged and then buried under a ton of debris, left for all eternity, alive but yet not, never to die only agonize within this form for as long as this thing would live.  And no one would ever know.

She would be able see, feel and sense all the vile and despicable things this wretched thing planned and yet could do nothing to stop it.  If there was a Hell she was in it and God did not care.  God would not or could not help her now.  She wept and shrieked and the demon licked her lips.

                                                             

Chapter Nine

 

Keefer stubbed out the remnant of another cigarette into the rapidly growing pile of tiny, dead white soldiers, tossing the small amount of unburned tobacco into the air with a quick prayer to the ancients.  It was getting on three in the morning and Keefer sat with his back against a pine, wrapped in an old army blanket trying to conserve what warmth he could.  It wasn’t so much that it was cold but a chill had settled in around midnight and had spent the last couple of hours seeping into his bones.  It had now made itself at home.  He was attempting to evict it.

One thing about setting this vigil is he had plenty of time to contemplate the lunacy of this venture.  He was too damn old to be sitting up in the Hills chilled to the bone and waiting for a children’s ghost story to come to life.  Yes, he believed in the Spirits, he had to; he had seen too many things in his life to deny they existed and could affect people and events on the plane of the living.  But the concept of evil just didn’t jibe with his people’s beliefs.  The only thing they had ever believed was truly evil was white people and now here he was uncomfortable, chilled to the bone and missing another night of sleep for a crazy white man.  He could only shake his head and laugh at himself.

Oh, he wasn’t an idiot or blind to what was here in his beautiful Hills.  He could feel the wrongness in the fabric of the Hills like ants crawling on his skin, dirty and sticking like oil, he just wanted to get away from here and take a long, hot shower and scrub himself until his skin was raw, but he stayed.

Yeah, he stayed, the noble native standing guard while the intrepid white went off to save the world.  Gee, just like in the movies. 

No, that wasn’t quite fair. The enigmatic Joshua had taught him things he never would have learned on his own, had opened up a sense of awareness Keefer had not known existed.  Keefer felt as though for the first time in his life he was completely in tune with the Mother, as if he could sense every living thing around him. 

He knew, for instance, there were two squirrels in the pine tree to his left.  He didn’t have to look; he could sense them in the back of his head.  Just as he knew in his gut an old bear had lived in the cave down the hill but had moved on in the spring for less populated areas.  It was as if he could read their thoughts or was in touch with their spirits maybe.  As if they left a trail of themselves, an imprint of where their life force had been, that he could read as easily as a foot print in fresh turned soil. 

He could sense what the owl saw and thought as it flew in search of late night game.  It was as like it had been when he was young but now all walls had been knocked down; no, they had been blown up.  But there was a price, Keefer could now taste and smell, he could sense the evil, yes he said it, that was leaking profusely into the area.  And he wanted nothing so much as to get as far away from this particular spot in the hills as fast as his ancient knees would carry him.  But he couldn’t, he had to maintain his watch and continue to strengthen the barriers Joshua had set up.

Besides he didn’t have a clue what the strange magic man was searching for or how he planned to find it.  It was best that each of them should serve their purpose and do their job.  He could only hope he had the strength needed physically and spiritually.  He would have thought that someone more pure would be needed to fight this sort of battle; purity of mind and body had not been his strong suit thus far in his life.

So he sat, practicing in his mind the ‘tricks’ Joshua had taught him.  Running through the spells and incantations, working the gestures that would add more power to each spell and not quite believing that it all would work; counter to the small successes he had witnessed as Joshua had run him through some tests.  He would need belief most of all.  But belief is a tricky thing; sometimes it took getting slammed up side the head before you could truly believe in anything.

He felt a tingling on the back of his neck, the hairs standing on edge, his arms prickled as if an electrical current coursed through his body.  This was the warning Joshua had told him about, this was the evidence magic was present and about to be unleashed.

He eased himself around behind the tree, though he couldn’t say why, it was not as if he knew where the threat was coming from, he just felt safer with something very solid in front of him; and waited.  He pulled up several of the protective spells Joshua had taught him from the back of his mind so they would be close to his tongue when he needed them.

A twig snapped to his left but he could see very little in the dark of the night.  He found himself wishing the moon was a little further along in its cycle; he could use the extra light.  Then he half heard the sound of cloth on branch moving in front of him.  Whatever was out there was either moving fairly quickly or there was more than one of them.  Keefer found himself wishing he was somewhere else at the moment.  He suddenly felt very old and tired, but not so quite old he wished to leave this life.

There was a glint of movement to his right, then another as if there were someone just out taking a stroll in the hills in the middle of the night.  There it was again, white against the black of the night moving in and out of the pines.  It was definitely human in shape, he didn’t know if that was normal or not but somehow it reassured him.  He didn’t care for the notion of going up against some horrible monster or demon.  The thought struck him like a rock against the back of his head that he should be able to sense what was there, shouldn’t he?  Did that mean that he had lost his connection to the Mother or was this something that didn’t show up on the life radar?  He couldn’t sense anything out of the ordinary, no big cat, bear or person wandering close by.

He saw her again, yes it was definitely a woman, he didn’t know how he knew but he knew it deep in his bones.  And there was a familiarity about her even though he couldn’t make out much about her, flitting in and out of his view like she was, yet there was something recognizable, but what?  He slowly rose into a standing position feeling the need for a better fighting or fleeing posture.

He caught a quick glimpse her and it hit his consciousness like a sledgehammer; he had to lean against the trunk of the tree for support.  What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of the night.  Shit, what was she doing anywhere anytime; she had been dead these past thirty years.  His head swam trying not to drown in old memories.  This was impossible and he knew it and yet there she was, alive as the last time he’d seen her.  Right before he’d killed her.

Not that he’d meant to, of course, it had been an accident, a terrible, horrible accident.  But his heart carried the guilt of it like a huge boulder in his chest as if he had killed her outright. 

As he gazed at her wandering through the pines he was struck again by her beauty just as he had been when they had been so much younger.  She still looked as she had that night.  Her hair hung half way down her back and was black as the night sky, silky and shining in the spare moonlight.  Her eyes, slightly upturned in the way of his people, dark and smoldering, he always thought she could see into his soul with those eyes.  An Asian nose and full pouting lips that had never seen, nor needed, lipstick.  Not a line marred her perfect soft skin; she looked twenty though she was older by a decade.

He wanted to cry out her name so she could come straight to him, he knew she must be searching for him; why else would she be here?  And yet his voice caught in his throat, he couldn’t manage a whimper let alone call out her name.  Kat.

All he could see was her body that night, the life draining out with every drop of her blood where she had been thrown from the truck.  He had crawled to her and held her tight in his arms.  The blood from his gashed head and scraped, sliced arms mingling with the blood pouring from a gash in her chest and from where the windshield had scalped three quarters of her hair from her head.  His tears combining with their blood and a broken bottle of bourbon for a tragic cocktail. 

They’d been in love for years, they’d never bothered to get married, what was the difference; it was apiece of paper bestowed upon them by the white man, that’s all.  They didn’t need the government’s seal of approval.  They shared their lives, their hearts, their souls, their bottle.

It had been their typical night of dancing and drinking their way through Rapid City and then driving drunk as skunks back to the rez.  He missed a turn that he’d made a thousand times before, the car flipped, they’d both been thrown from the vehicle, he’d lived and she’d died and then he’d crawled into a much larger bottle in an attempt to kill either himself or her memory one double shot at a time.  He had failed on both accounts.  It was such a bullshit tragic story, something you saw on late night TV not something you lived.

And now here she was, as real and substantial as the tree bark pressing into his cheek.  He couldn’t help himself as he pushed himself away from the trunk and walked out from behind the tree knowing as he did so it could possibly be his death, this visage couldn’t possibly be her, could it?  But he couldn’t make himself care.  This was his chance to hold her one more time, talk to her, apologize, something.

The night had gone completely quiet, though if it had just happened or had been so for some time Keefer could not say.  He became aware of a stillness that had settled over the land as if nature itself held its breath waiting to see what would happen.

And then she came into full view and he exhaled a breath he had not been conscious he was holding.

She saw him and smiled.  God, how he had missed that crooked, cocky smile.  He didn’t need the moon, the stars or the sun, her smile lit up the world for him and he felt his knees weaken as she slowly walked toward him.

He knew this couldn’t be happening it had to be some kind of trick but if wishes were horses he was going to ride this one for all it was worth.

“How you been babe?”  It was all he could manage.

“Don’t know.  I can’t seem to remember.  Last I recall we were havin’ us a damn good time, singing that damn song, what was it? Oh Yeah, that Witchytaya thing on the radio, you went to turn it up and I found myself out here walking.  What happened?”  Kat looked so lost and vulnerable he thought his heart would just come leaping out of his chest.

“We didn’t make the turn babe, I lost control and the car flipped and you, well you, didn’t make it.  I held you forever, ‘til the cops came.  But you didn’t make, you didn’t make it.”  He wanted to lay down and weep with the heartbreak every time he said it.  “I did some time for vehicular manslaughter and then got drunk for along, long time.”  He was rambling, he knew it but he had to keep her here and he wanted her to know that he had suffered for her but it didn’t seem to be enough.

“But I’m standing here now.  If I didn’t make it how did I get here?”  It was a challenge.

“Don’t know babe, I just know I held you in my arms for what seemed like forever but was no where near long enough, you kissed me and then you was gone.”  The pain came back brand new and he thought he would just collapse where he stood, crumble into small pieces of flesh and sink into the earth.

“Geez, Hon, you tellin’ me I’m dead?  Then what the fuck am I, a ghost or something?  Cause I don’t feel like a ghost, I feel real enough to me.  Maybe you were drunk and don’t remember so good.  Standin’ there tellin’ me I’m just some fucking ghost!”  She was getting that familiar shriek in her voice that always set him on edge; it was how all of their worst fights began.

“Babe, just calm down a little.  We ain’t seen each other in a damn long time let’s not start off by beating each other up.”  He needed her to relax a bit so he could think.   He knew in his heart and head she was dead, had been these past thirty years or more but, hell, he didn’t want it to be true either; and here she was.  Maybe he could make himself believe hard enough and Tinkerbelle would live.  Shit, shit and more shit on a stick, what was he doing.  He had to get his head clear.  This couldn’t be really happening it was all wrong.  She was acting like nothing was different here, hell, she didn’t even seem to notice the fact that he was thirty years older.  He’d been in his prime last she’d seen of him now he was an old man and it didn’t seem to phase her one bit.
She had been gradually moving towards him, not in a straight, direct line more meandering as she ranted and raved about her condition as if her words carried her where they would and she had no choice but to follow.

As she closed the distance between them she became more real, more substantial.  He hadn’t noticed before but now he could see her boots moving the pine needles as she walked, tree limbs bent with her passing.  Maybe she was right; maybe her death had only been an alcoholic mirage.  But if that were true where had she been?  Things didn’t add up.  She was dead no matter what his mind, heart and eyes were telling him. 

But he just wanted to hold her one more time, not like the last time he remembered as she died in his arms but to feel her warm and supple against him.  Keefer couldn’t care less if she was pissed at him right now, hell, she was always pissed at him, she was a spirited woman who loved to fight and loved to make up even more.  It had been a very passionate relationship.

She was talking at him as she came closer but his head buzzed like it was filled with bees and he couldn’t seem to concentrate on what she was saying.  Her tone of voice, her inflection changed as she came closer, she didn’t sound so shrill. Her visage almost glowed as if backlit and she was so beautiful, her radiant smile lit the night, her hair flowed over her shoulders down onto her chest and he just wanted to feel her arms around him, feel her breasts against his chest, to feel her breath on his face.  He had never yearned for anything so much in all his long years.

And then she was on him, embracing him, kissing his neck and making her way up to his mouth.  Well, she wasn’t pissed now.  He thought he would burst, it was happening too fast, he couldn’t think, she was taking control just like in the old days.  He felt his dick come to life, God, it had been one hell of a long time since that had happened and then she was kissing his cheek.  He had to catch his breath.  That’s when it dawned on him. 

He was breathing in rapid gasps like a sixteen year old and she wasn’t breathing at all.
Then she clamped her mouth over his and he felt the life being literally sucked out of his body.  His mind panicked as he fought to get her off him but her hands were like iron vise grips, he couldn’t ease her hold, her arms pinned him to her as she continued to draw his soul’s breath.

He felt a chill wind blow across the barren landscape of his essence and knew he had to do something within the next few brief moments or he would be dead and in the possession of whatever this thing was that wore Kat’s body.  But how does one fight a ghost.

Well, for starters this thing felt solid enough and he had to try something.  He put all of his physical and mental strength into one quick and, he hoped, surprising move, pushing hard on her mouth with his own and forcing her head back then pulling back and throwing all of his might into a head butt.  He was going to have one hell of a headache, but it worked.  The creature stood stunned for the moment and he felt its hold on him loosen just enough he could free one hand.

He put his entire chi into the spell that now stood like a lone soldier on the desolate battlefield of his tongue and concentrating all his power in one desperate shout threw it, aiming its force directly at the thing’s forehead.  It hit in an explosion of sparks and an obscene, ear shattering howl.

He could see the spell worming its way through her skin and boring through the bone of her forehead to enter into whatever acted as her brain and began short circuiting her nervous system.  Everything happened pretty fast from there as she soon stood smoldering, shrieking in agony, melting like the wicked witch of the west.  Her body transformed from the beautiful woman who had been his lover into something far more grotesque and terrifying.  A scaled beast of huge proportion, slime oozing from distended jaws filled with row upon row of pointed, yellow teeth, a hunched back lined with horned spikes.  The magic burst and exploded like the battlefields of his youth in Viet Nam, imploding within the grotesque form before him.  With one final obscene finger gesture and a howl of frustration and defeat it cursed his name and it was gone.

He stood alone on the hillside trying with all his might to find a calming breath but he was gulping air in short shallow spurts and he thought he would either throw up or lie down and cry.  He had killed her again.  And though he knew it hadn’t really been Kat, a woman he’d loved and lost for real, the pain in his chest threatened to crush him and the anguish in his mind only promised insanity.  He just wanted to die and end the agony.  There was no way he could live through her death again, the first time had almost killed him.

He heard the footsteps almost too late and he spun to throw all of his anger and pain at whatever would dare attack him and stopped just in time as Marcus strode over the top of the hill.  He was right on time for his watch and Keefer dissolved at the sight of him.  Physically and spiritually spent he curled into a fetal position and sobbed until he exhausted himself and he slept on the hard, cold breast of the Mother, comforted by Her embrace.

 

                                                    Chapter Ten

 

 

Somewhere in the back of Joshua’s mind the thought sprang to life that if someone didn’t lessen the pressure within his head soon it would probably explode.  The second thought never got the chance to be born as he cracked his eyes open and the ceiling light burned the thought where it had just been conceived. 
That had not been the smart thing to do. 

His eyes burned as if a sharp and very hot poker had been laid across them.  Tears streamed from under now tightly closed eyelids and the headache had shifted to critical mass. 

Well, he wasn’t dead.  Joshua was fairly certain there wasn’t supposed to be any pain after you passed from this green earth.  To be honest with himself he couldn’t say for sure if being alive was a good thing or not considering the amount of pain he was in.

There was nothing in this world that could make your head ache like a good magic asswhuppin’, not even tequila, worms and all.  It just messed with every component of your nerves, exposing every end to the most excruciating pain and then settling in the cranium.  That is if it didn’t kill you, which at this moment, he reconsidered, might have been the preferable alternative.

He had no idea where, geographically, he might be but felt it was reasonable to assume from the scents reaching his nose that he lay in a hospital.  Someone must have found him lying under the bridge and called the authorities.  It was the only reasonable assumption considering the circumstances.  He had to hope they didn’t bother to check into his credentials too closely.  He’d not had proper time to prepare his departure, what with instructing the Shaman and his contemporaries, and he couldn’t quite remember which set of identification he’d thrown in his bags, or if he’d thrown in more than one set.  That could prove to be a problem.

His immediate worry had to be getting himself fit to ride and clear of this hospital as quickly as was humanly and magically possible.  He didn’t have time to waste lollygagging in some cushy hospital bed recuperating while the world went to hell in a hand basket.  Super heroes didn’t work like that.  He smiled and thought the top of his head was going to come off.   O.K., maybe he could lay here for a few minutes, after all, he wasn’t really a super hero.

Besides, he realized, he was exhausted.  Bone weary and mentally tired, it had been a very long century and there had been oh so many fires to be put out all along the way.

His returned to the night before he had journeyed out, the night of the sweat.   Joshua had known all along Keefer’s people did not believe in the concept of good and evil, those being more western concepts, but they had to accept the possibility.  Not all white men were evil nor all people of color victims, there were good and bad on both sides.  Though to help clarify his point Joshua had mentioned the whites controlling the government in the mid 1800’s who had given Keefer’s ancestors cholera infected blankets in good faith trading, they were evil.  Each of the Yuwipi men had had to agree with that.  They’d had to admit there was evil in the world, now they had to believe that was what they were guarding, that was what lay imprisoned below the surface of the Mother. That was the short and concise version; there had not been time for the long version.

Joshua knew there had been leaks in the prison that allowed minor demons to rummage through the psyches of weak and off balanced people.  Demons who could take possession of these fragile individuals with and a minimum amount of poking and prodding could encourage the possessed to go on a spree of death and destruction.  They would transform these poor innocents into mass murderers and serial rapists and torturers creating enough mayhem to fill a few papers and fill the hearts and minds of the general masses with terror.  Then the effort of maintaining control over a human would become too much and the demons would allow the sycophant to be captured, abandoning the poor dumb bastard just as they were about to fry for their crimes.  Jollies for the demon and a very rude awaking for the idiot that truly believed God was telling them it was a good idea to mutilate other people.  It always amazed Joshua what demons could get the human race to believe God wanted them to do.  Hell, he’d even heard of mothers killing their own children because God told them to.  He could never understand how anyone could believe God would want them to commit acts that were so vile but people did, time after time.

And of course there were the big leakages of malignant energy wherein an arrogant megalomaniac would unknowingly welcome a major demon into his inner circle.  The demon just brimming with mischief and easily convincing said nutcase he could conquer the world or decimate some lesser, weaker people.  Bigotry and racism never went out of style and was the perfect fuse to light up a society.  Want to feel better about yourself?  Find some religious or ethnic group to feel superior to and then start discriminating, pushing down, hating and then let the ethnic cleansing begin.  It was as old as man himself and no demon could resist the temptation to play an ancient game. 

There had been many who fell for the trick.  There were promises of riches, world domination, purity of your own people or just plain meanness in the guise of religious superiority.  God loves me more than you; you are impure and must be eradicated from the face of the earth. Hitler came to mind immediately with Idi Amin standing right behind him in the line.  It was a long, long line stretching back for millennium.  Joshua could never understand the pure hatred it took to kill millions and he certainly had never developed the taste for human flesh.

That was why Joshua’s people and the other Elder races of world had attempted to seal off as much of that evil as was possible.  They had created their prison here in the Black Hills several millennium ago, creating as powerful and secure a containment as they could.

But even the most perfect prison has cracks somewhere in its walls and those idiot girls had blown a great big gaping son-of-a-bitch of a hole in this box.  He had to find the people who would become the new brick and mortar to fix that hole and he was lying here, wherever here was, not doing anything.

Well, this train of thought was only steaming further down the headache and frustration track, he had to throw a switch and get on another track; best to start coming up with a workable plan to escape his present situation and be on his merry way.

He took a mental inspection of his physical condition.  He couldn’t detect any broken bones, no internal bleeding, all the major organs appeared to be in fine shape and in their proper general area.  There was a slight bruise due to minor hemorrhaging in his frontal lobes but nothing that would cause any permanent harm.  He might be slightly dizzy from time to time for a while and there would be a smidgen of memory loss but that too would return, other than those small problems nothing important.

He also had to find out what had become of his bike.  No sense breaking out of the hospital if his only option for getting the hell out of town was his thumb.  And, of course, there was the problem of his clothing.  He had no idea where they might have stored his clothes or his saddlebags and he certainly couldn’t go riding around the country with his ass hanging out of this hospital gown. 

He sent out a mental probe searching his surroundings.  He wasn’t going to try opening his eyes again, not yet, and discovered he had the room to himself, that was good.  All he needed right now was to be sharing the room with someone who needed continuous attention.  He couldn’t have nurses coming in and out constantly checking tubes, giving shots and waking somebody up to give them sleeping pills.

Before he went to the trouble of stealing back his clothes and making like Houdini he probably would be best served to find out where exactly he was.  In a hospital, big building, sick people, not funny he chided his humor cortex, where in all of America, dullard!  Shit, for all he knew he could have been life flighted hundreds of miles away from where he had been attacked.  He had to hope he hadn’t been taken too far from the abutment where he’d stopped to get out of the rain.  He’d already wasted enough time laying here recuperating.  He
didn’t know how long he’d been at the hospital; he just knew it had been too long.

His thoughts were interrupted by voices on the other side of the closed door.  He concentrated his energy to bring them closer to him so he might hear anything important.

There was a woman’s voice, she had the attitude of a nurse, not heavy-handed but not taking any shit either.  Nurses were known for their word being considered law.  The only entity who might overrule what she said was either a doctor or God.  And if they decided to go against her they had better have a damn good reason for questioning her authority.

The other voice belonged to a man who was obviously used to people doing what he said as well, without question, unless they wanted a whole pile of trouble they weren’t prepared to shovel.  A cop.

They were arguing about him.  The cop wanted to come in and wake him, ‘just to ask him a couple questions’, and she was having none of it.  The patient needed his rest, they didn’t know what was wrong with him but there had been some trauma to the head and there could be internal damage as well.  Besides he was in a coma, what did the cop think he was going to get out of a comatose person?  Better he should go away and come back when the John Doe was awake.

Joshua wasn’t sure who had the stronger will but he was fairly certain the nurse would win the day on this argument.

Comatose that caught his attention.  How long had he been here?  Well, he couldn’t spend anymore time trying to find out, there was nothing for it but to move on.  It became even more imperative that he get out of here and back on the road.

The nurse had just said something about her adversary being some hot shot cop down in the city but here in Steamboat Springs he was just this much above a tourist.  Well, that answered that, now Joshua at least knew where he was.

At that instant there was an almost imperceptible pop, not necessarily a sound, more a slight change in pressure in the air and Joshua knew he was no longer alone.  He also knew simultaneously that he was in no condition to defend himself.  Weak as a newborn puppy he wouldn’t be able to utter a sound let alone have the necessary energy to voice a spell to protect himself, he did manage to crack an eyelid.
A woman stood to his left staring at him, considering him, like a scientist viewing a particularly interesting specimen; curious as to what this thing might be, head tilted slightly to her left, right forefinger deftly placed at the corner of her brown lips.  She seemed to be weighing what, exactly, to do with this curiosity, as if she had come across him lying on the street.

Her short cropped, pitch black hair stopped just shy of falling in her dark forest green eyes.  She almost appeared Asian.  Her eyes were slanted upwards, following her prominent cheekbones away from a button nose and towards the tip of her pointed ears.
For all her alien appearance Joshua was quite certain he had never seen a more beautiful woman, pointed ears or no. 

He couldn’t be sure from where he lay but she appeared to stand a solid six-foot tall.  Dressed in soft brown leather pants and white billowing blouse she looked to be a giant pixie out of Irish fable.  Whatever she was, and his inclination was towards Elf, he knew she wasn’t human.  The slight greenish tint to her skin was a dead giveaway, and that did not bode well for him.  Joshua had not been a good student and right now he regretted it as he could not remember whether his people and the Elves were on speaking or warring terms.  His only option was patience and that had never been Joshua’s strongest suit. 
He prepared himself for death, better to face that inevitability with as much dignity as he could muster.  Everyone knows his or her time will come yet it’s always a surprise when death arrives, he smiled at the thought.

“You live.”  She whispered almost in disbelief. “That is good, not many could survive an attack by a Fomorian.
“  Joshua couldn’t quite place the inflection of her words, almost Irish with a hint of harsh eastern European.
She said it as if he should know what she was talking about.  She had assumed wrongly, he hadn’t the foggiest idea what the hell a Fomorian was but if that was the things were that had attacked him he hoped he would never run into another.

“A what?”  The sound of his voice stunned him, it was barely a whisper spoken through sand; his throat was too dry to produce anything more.

“I will explain when we have more time.  Now we must leave this place.”  Her words were matter of fact as if she expected him to get up out of the bed and leave with her.  Now she looked about the room as if assessing their chances at escape, searching for alternate routes and, apparently coming to a decision, walked quickly to the door and cracked it open peering out into the hallway.
Listening for a moment to the argument between nurse and policeman she gently closed the door again.

“Can’t go that way.”  She rubbed her chin in thought, Joshua almost laughed, her whole bearing was just too comical, like something out of a movie.

Crossing the room to the small wooden closet, she grabbed his clothing and then strode back to his bedside and tossed them flippantly onto his chest.  What, was he supposed to dress himself right here in front of her?  Besides the fact he didn’t think he could move a muscle without excruciating pain, how was he supposed to sit up or stand up and put clothes on?  She quickly began unhooking the IVs inserted into his arms and the oxygen tube from his nose.  He considered struggling for a brief moment and then decided if she meant him harm she could just as easily kill him where he lay and not go to all the trouble of disengaging every tube and line running into his veins and moving from the hospital. 

Easily lifting him off the bed, and he was all of one hundred and seventy pounds, without so much as a groan for the effort, she stepped backwards a few paces until she was in the middle of the room, giving herself more space.  Satisfied with her position she muttered a few syllables, words not familiar to Joshua, her eyes changed focus to a place he could not see and in seconds the room dissolved around them.
There was slight change in air pressure again and another almost imperceptible pop as air rushed in to fill the gap left by the departing bodies.  The door made a whispered whoosh as the nurse and policeman entered the now empty room and stared in disbelief at the vacant bed before raising an alarm and a fruitless search.