Wayne Patrick

pwbracken@cox.net

Chapter 43

The shock of air deprivation affected them the same - panic; like being thrown into a deep lake with a boulder chained to one's leg.

The reverend's bulging eyes reflected rampant utter terror. Gasping for air, he mouthed, "I . . . can't . . . breath."

Poulet mouthed back, "Slow . . . down," and resigned himself to death. His phobic fear of suffocation had become a reality.

A sudden blast of bitterly cold wind slammed through the vegetation, burning their noses but inflating their vacant lungs. Hyperventilation ensued. The silence remained, but life sustaining oxygen flooded their lungs. They turned to each other with wheezing respiration and then relaxed. As they caught their breath, Poulet heard something and motioned to the reverend.

They cocked their ears to a distant crying that echoed off the bluff. It cut through the night air with heart-pounding clarity. It was not the cry of an animal or a man, but something distinctly alien. The sound conveyed great pain.

"What was that?" the reverend whispered.

"I was hoping you'd be able to tell me." 

The distant howling became a screaming cry. The sound swept down the bluff in a wave of sorrow, filling the hollow with its reverberating cry. It turned more urgent and immediate.

The earth below their knees quaked, the loud roar becoming so intense they had to cover their ears. They fell over onto their stomachs and buried their faces in the vibrating ground. Reverend Tutwiler pushed himself up and vomited to his side. Poulet's stomach churned and threatened to empty. Then, as quickly as it began, the shaking earth and howling ceased.

A brilliant white light assaulted their eyes. It filtered through the cover of underbrush and grew in intensity in the direction of the cabin.

As they peered at the cabin through the scrub, they watched a buoyant sphere of light float lazily down from a treetop. A second later, another bobbed and bounced through the trees. Then another and another. Dozens of floating orbs waltzed about each other in a radiant display of playful innocence. They formed an ordered pattern. A wall of glimmering light appeared like the rising heat off a desert mirage. It towered above the log house. Queerly bright and peculiar, it was most of all, subdued enough to be transparent.

The reverend slipped the musket from his shoulder. The smooth hand-worn stock rested comfortably in his hands. His sweating palms gripped the gun tighter. Despite finding nothing to target, he raised the sight to his eye.

The wall of pulsating light dimmed. They watched it plummet, swirling to the ground like a flimsy windblown curtain. It seemed to dissolve, but then twisted and stretched into sweeping bands of flashing light. Wave after wave of pulsating radiance flooded over the cabin and formed animated circles. They seemed to be chasing each other.

A putrescent odor of rotting flesh settled on the clearing like a layer of mortal decay. Poulet couldn't understand how objects of such delicate unworldly beauty could be capable of emitting the stench of a common slaughterhouse.

The earth rumbled again. The reverend clutched his musket tighter, but then dropped it as a piercing cry assaulted their ears. In awe, they watched the fallen liquid light beams lift from the ground, intertwine and gather to a point above the cabin. 

The mournful cry stopped abruptly.

The point of penetrating light blinked white-hot against the night's void. It seemed suspended in midair. Its dazzling brightness intensified, becoming so bright, they had to turn away. Poulet envisioned the gates of hell opening upon them. Lying on their stomachs with their faces in the ground, the slap of abrupt silence struck again -- then nothing.

Poulet refocused on the little cabin. The only light now came through the window as before. The smell dissipated. Nothing left but crisp air and the night.

A shaken reverend said, "We should go now."

Poulet pulled himself up and rested on his elbows. "You don't want to knock on the cabin door?" 

The reverend frowned and turned around.

They crawled back through the brambles to the clearing. The embers of the fire still glowed as Poulet picked up his coffee pot, put it back in the saddle bag and heaved it onto his horse.

"Did I really see what just happened," the reverend asked, "or was this all just a dream, or rather, a nightmare?"

"We both saw it and it was no dream. What we've seen here was the same thing Ben Jordan and Stuart DuCamp laid eyes on just before they died. I know of only two other men that have seen this and lived to tell about it."

"Well, this was not real," the reverend stated. "You cannot tell me this was anything more than just a magician's trick. An elaborate illusion this was - yes, chicanery in its highest form."

"Where was this so-called magician, Charles? Can a magician suck all the air from around you? Can he make the earth rumble like that? You cannot deny this. This trick, as you call it, is more than imagination or illusion at work and it has a name - Itopa'hi. It is the work of our old friend Mr. Scratch and I have a feeling whoever lives in that cabin is part of it.”

The reverend turned from Poulet and inspected the night sky. He closed his eyes and intoned, "Lord, protect us from evil. We pray in Christ's name, amen."

"Christ is not going to protect you, reverend," Poulet said, "and neither is a gun. We are stalking a servant of the devil, plain and simple. Christ doesn't concern himself with our devilish pursuit of demons."

An indignant reverend stated, "Don't bet on it, sir."

"I won't," Poulet replied. "When it comes to divine intervention, I am not a betting man."

They mounted their horses and without speaking, rode back to town under the fallen light of a crescent moon and the sound of thunder in the valley.

Chapter 44

In the wee hours of the October morning, Poulet and the reverend followed the eastern horizon with the sinking moon at their backs. A quiet and sleeping Big Cloud greeted them. They brought their horses to a halt in front of 415 Main Street. Poulet dismounted and handed the reins over to the reverend who then started for home.

As he entered his home, Poulet found the candle near the window burning to the nub. He plucked it from the lamp and lit a few more scattered around the parlor. He made his way to the kitchen and pumped a cold cup of spring water and drank half; the other half, he threw on his face. 

Despite his physical fatigue, he couldn't suppress his fascination and enthusiastic curiosity involving the spirit he'd just encountered. 

He walked back into the parlor and over to his bookcase. He ran his fingers over the rough spines and found a large loosely bound book. With trepidation, he pulled out a black leather-bound volume. Flakes of deteriorating binding sloughed off and fell to the floor. He set the book with the faint image of a dragon on his desk. The paint had faded over the years and now showed only a pale imprint of the mythical beast.

The book had been presented to him by Marie Laveau at the same time as the lion ring. She'd given him strict instructions on the use of the ancient text. It was never to be opened unless Poulet's or another's life was threatened. She mentioned that the book and ring were closely related, but didn't elaborate. Poulet remembered her words vividly: "If you ever have occasion to open this, it will require the Supreme Being and the souls of all the dead to protect you. I pray it remains forever closed."

He opened the front cover and a pungent musty odor rose from the pages. On the first page, in bold hand lettering it read:  'Sang du Dragon'.

Dragon blood? Hope I don't have to find any. Don't believe there's much of it around. He thumbed through the delicate pages until he came across a dog-eared page of yellowed vellum. Centuries of tracing fingers had rubbed across the text rendering swaths of smeared fuzziness to the hand printing. He discovered a ritual and incantation in both Latin and French. The spell dated to nineteenth dynasty Egypt and Ramses the Second. The text had been elaborately hand decorated in bold colored letters by monks opposed to the Spanish Inquisition. The monks worked underground out of sight of the Catholic hierarchy. Due to the unlawful nature of their handiwork, a few had been arrested and burned alive.

Poulet read and understood what he was reading. He was cognizant of the power of the ritual, but appreciated the fact that it was fraught with its own danger of misuse and abuse. 

With an experienced confidence, he was certain that the spirit the two men had seen forming was not a benevolent one. Innocent appearing spheres of light aside, he guessed that they were only the harbinger of sinister things to come. He had no idea what he was facing when it came to spirits of the hills. This thing is dark and evil. I know it. His weary eyes moved in and out of focus on the elaborate text. He closed the book, blew out the candles and without removing his clothes, fell back on his bed. 

Sleep came quickly. In an instant, his dream world took over. He found himself lying on his back with his arms crossed across his chest. His eyes flew open and he found only darkness. Wiggling his fingers, he pulled his arms up to his sides. His elbows knocked against a density. He managed to twist and move one arm up. As he pulled his hand away, his fingers brushed across a slick and silky canopy a few inches above him. He raked his fingertips over the soft material, sensing its origin and found pleats: pleats of satin. The wall of material refused to move despite his efforts. He then came to the horrific realization that he was resting in a sealed and buried coffin.

His balled up fist pummeled the lid. His kicking bare feet found no give as they hit the sides. He pushed against the top again in an attempt at escape and let out a hoarse scream. His vacant lungs collapsed and begged for inflation. In a panic, he gasped for air, but there was none. Entombed with only his own mortal terror as his companion, the last he heard was the fading pulse of his pounding heartbeat.

He suddenly awoke and took in a series of clipped deep breaths and exhaled slowly. With his shaking legs draped over the side of the bed, he sat up and tried to stand, but could not. He rubbed his eyes and scanned his surroundings. Reassuring morning light streamed in from the parlor. He turned to his bedroom window and found the light of day.

On unsteady legs, he stood up, stretched and rekindled the fire in the kitchen's cooking stove. He shed his clothes, pumped water into the sink and splashed some on his face. He stripped and washed himself, rinsed off and dried. He set the coffee pot on the warming stove, walked back into his bedroom and put on clean clothes.

At his front door, he hung up the "Open" sign. Monsieur Antoine Poulet of New Orleans was again open for business.

Chapter 45

Jake Duncan contemplated the October sky. Ain't gonna rain today. While saddling his horse, a disgruntled Ida Duncan walked from the house to the barn. The woman's arms were crossed.

"But, I have to go, dear," Duncan said. "The lease taxes are due next week."

"I wish you didn't have to go out. You know how I worry."

"Yes, I do. But, it's how I put food on our table. You know that as well as I."

"I just wish--"

"I wish for a lot of things, too," he said. "Wishful thinking won't get you far unless you're willing to separate the wishful part from the thinking part."

"Well then," she said with a smile, "the most I can say is good luck and I love you."

Duncan wrapped his arms around his wife and pulled her snug against his chest. He tenderly kissed her, still in love after ten years of marriage. 

His stomach rumbled. He lifted his lips from hers. "Where's my grub?"

She walked back to the house and returned with a burlap sack. "Here's some beef jerky and fried potatoes you can warm up. There's ham and a loaf of bread I baked yesterday . . . oh, and a couple of apples."

"Fresh water in my canteen?"

"As always."

He packed the food in the saddlebags, tipped his hat and gave her a roguish wink. “Then, dear, I am off to stalk the wild beast."

Duncan mounted his horse and started down the steep road from their house on the bluff. He glanced back, waved at his wife and then scanned the pack mule, making sure all that had been tied on hadn't fallen off.

A crisp Sunday morning greeted him. The wide Missouri River had receded from the rains a bit, but flowed south and east as it always had. 

The river road hosted no other soul. He welcomed the serenity.

The memory of his last trapping trip persisted. He found it impossible to escape the lingering dread.

He reached into his pocket, found his mojo and rubbed his finger and thumb over the talisman-filled leather pouch. He didn't have a lot of faith in the little bundle Poulet had given him, but wanted to. Jake Duncan had always believed to have faith in only himself, but considered the mojo extra protection. If what Mr. Poulet says is true, then I shouldn’t have to worry about what I may come across - or what comes across me.

He’d made the decision to spend only one day in the hills and not spend the night again in the line cabin. After his experience, he found the after-sundown world an invitation for all things unimaginable and unexplainable.

He followed an alternate route to the south side of Blacksnake Creek and took the fork just south of the bridge that led up through the hollow to Eagle Springs. The alternate fork hugged the river and led to the tiny hamlet of Sparks.

The commonplace chattering of woodland creatures seemed queer. Every sound carried with it the threat of his destruction. Every turn of the trail became foreign and disorienting, as if he'd never traveled it before. The woods were at one time welcoming and warm, but now seemed an alien wasteland filled with looming shadows.

The chill of the early morning wore off. He'd ridden three miles into the hills. He stopped to rest at the edge of Blacksnake Creek and dismounted. Both his animals lowered their heads and sipped at the sluggish water. 

He stretched his arms and let out a yawn before reaching for his canteen. The cool rim chilled his lips and he took a long draught. He tasted a bitterness and an odd odor rose from the canteen, but he was unable to discern the smell. Time to check that well. The water clug-clugged out of the canteen as he emptied the contents to the ground.

Within one minute, lightheadedness and dizziness came over him in disorienting waves. He managed to stuff the cork back in before the canteen dropped to the ground. He bit at his lips and found no feeling, only a tingling numbness. He tried to steady himself, but when his gaze fell to his boots, they weaved in and out of focus. The two boots had become four, then six.

Then the pain started. He doubled over and fell to the ground, but he didn't remember that.

He found himself in a valley of unparalleled beauty. Meadows of wildflowers lent splashes of color. Vast emerald forests bordered one side of the valley and granite cliffs the other. The scent of pine needles floated to his nostrils.

A boulder-strewn stream filled his field of vision. The water cackled by and cascaded in waves of frothy merriment. Fuzzy black and rust-colored moss cloaked some of the smoothly worn and wet stones. Dragonflies buzzed on their iridescent wings. The sun sat high and warm, but he was shaded and comfortable under a flowering cherry tree. With squinting eyes, he looked up at the sky through its branches. Blossoms fell from the top of the tree as if confetti falling from a cloudless sky. They landed on the rushing stream and disappeared like so many snowflakes.  

"Where am I?" he inquired out loud.

"You mean, you don't know?" a melodious voice asked.

Duncan couldn't pinpoint the direction or origin of the voice. It seemed to come from everywhere around him. Soothing and soft, it was sweet sounding and musical.

He studied his extraordinary surroundings and found himself sitting on a hollow log. He closed his eyes and sucked in a flood of fresh air. 

He heard the voice again. "Jake Duncan, do you know where you are?"

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes and looked around. He answered, "No, I don't. Where am I, exactly?"

"Nothing exact. T'is neither here nor there."

A confused Duncan scratched his head and glanced down at his feet. His boots were gone. He wiggled his bare toes and delighted in their simplistic grandeur. He also found he was naked: comfortable, but naked nonetheless. He stretched his bare legs and thighs and marveled at the mechanics. His hands glowed with a warm but otherworldly light. In awe of his moving fingers, he became transfixed, but despite the distraction, he asked the voice, "If this is not here or there, then where is it?"

"You are an insistent fellow, are you not?" it replied.

Though a blizzard of cherry blossoms obscured his view, he glimpsed a rustling bracken fern out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to the flora at the edge of the stream. A beaver's head emerged from the bubbling water. It blinked its black eyes and focused on him.

The beaver pulled itself out of the stream and onto the bank. Its coat was such a deep coal black that it fairly bristled with luminescent highlights of midnight blue. Duncan had never seen such a dark coat. It caught the sunlight and glistened with countless prismatic drops of water. The beaver commenced a shake from nose to tail that sent trails of sparks into the sky. The sparks made an arc and sputtered as they fell back to the ground and landed with a smoking sizzle. The shaking stopped and it waddled over, stood up on its hindquarters and scrutinized Duncan. "It's my voice, Jake," it said.

"But your mouth doesn't move."

"Who needs a mouth when one has a brain?" the beaver said. "You have a mouth, but do you think?"

Duncan shifted uncomfortably on the log, as if to change his perspective on the odd predicament he'd found himself in. He cocked his head and said, "I have a brain and I can think, but I can't figure out for the life of me what I'm doing here."

"It is just a rest," the beaver replied.

"Rest?"

"A rest on your way back to the Earth Mother."

The dumbfounded trapper then came to the conclusion that he was probably worm food already and awaiting the sting of final judgment. He asked, "Earth Mother? You mean I'm dead?"

"Not strictly speaking. You are returning alive, but in a different form."

Duncan became even more confused and wasn't sure what to make of his curious surroundings. He'd never heard a beaver speak. "What is this, uh, other form?" he asked.

The beaver’s face turned to a hideous scowl. "You will soon find out."

The beaver's furry chest puffed out and its round body stretched until it towered over the trapper. Duncan watched in amazement as it grew until it was as tall as the cherry tree. It glared down at him and brought its face in close to his. Chisel-sharp buckteeth and twitching whiskers framed its cavernous mouth. It took in a long deep breath: deep and forceful enough that cherry blossoms were caught in the draft of its incoming breath and disappeared down the void of its gullet. The beaver exhaled. A gust of scorching wind blew against Duncan's face.

An ominous voice now came from the rodent's open mouth. Low in timbre and gravelly, it was thunderous in volume. The beaver's seductive voice had turned disagreeable and into a deafening and snarling kind of shout. The log under Duncan vibrated as the beaver bellowed, "How many of my kind have you killed - killed not to nourish your body, but slaughtered for your own vanity?"

"Many, I suppose," Duncan said in an unapologetic voice.

The beaver tilted its head. "Then, do you now see why you're going to have to return?"

Duncan gawked at the towering beaver and then mumbled, "I would prefer to go home now."

"What you prefer and what you get are two different things!"

The outburst was conveyed with so much force, it knocked Duncan over the back of the log. He picked himself up and crawled back onto his seat.

The beaver stepped back. Its chubby body shrank until it was the size of a rat. The flat tail and squat legs evaporated. Its body stretched into a six-foot cylindrical mass of amorphous animated tissue. Stripped markings of coral alternating with circular bands of black and white emerged and wrapped themselves around its body. Its newly grown lustrous scales glittered as they caught the light. The menacing form slithered through the grass.

Duncan watched in awestruck horror as the serpent writhed and then slinked to the base of the cherry tree. Wrapping its long body around the trunk, it shimmied up the tree and perched itself on a lower branch. Its forked tongue wagged furiously, testing the air as its malignant glassy-eyed gaze fell on Duncan. "Joshua’s shofar is sounding," it hissed, "and it will crumble your walls."

Duncan's ears detected a duo of crude-sounding horns in the distance; their bawls a reedy and hollow lament of despair. The lyrical notes echoed off the granite cliffs and soared throughout the valley. They fell delicately on his ears. The sound was seductive at first, but then swelled into a symphony of discordant blasts. The blaring crescendo caused his vision to ripple and distort as the atonal notes swept over him.

With a blink of his eye, the bucolic valley was gone. His blissful vista had been replaced with a doleful sky above a barren desert. A figure in fringed buckskin sat surveying the foreboding wasteland from its roost on a painted pony. It didn't move. A blistering wind blew past Duncan as he moved toward the figure on horseback. As he approached, the figure slowly turned to face him. Framed by braids of gray hair adorned with eagle feathers, the face was vacant of form: only a fathomless void with eyes burning with emptiness. The figure raised its hand and pointed its spindly finger to the sky. The baking sun explode into countless balls of fire. They plummeted from the sky: slow at first, and then with the force of a hailstorm. The pounding sting on his flesh left him screaming in pain. He covered his head with his arms, closed his eyes tightly and started to sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; they are weak but He is strong."

Duncan sang and sang loudly. The burning faded away. He heard the chirping of a sparrow and cracked his eyes open.

 He found himself on the ground. His horse and mule stood by Blacksnake Creek, grazing on grass along the bank. They turned and glanced at him. The sun was high in the noon sky. Rolling onto his side, his stomach turned. He vomited clear fluid. His head ached.

He struggled to stand, but his aching joints seemed to be lined with rust. The surrounding woods filled him with a comfortable familiarity as he finally got his bearings. He mounted the Tennessee stud and with the mule trailing, abandoned his trapping pursuits and left for home.