At the end of the footprint track, a body lay. The middle-aged man had been shot with a handgun about a dozen times. I didn’t try to count. In the back suite, an elderly couple had been beaten to death, but unlike the young men in the other one-story house, these two hadn’t gone down without a fight. It was clear that the elderly woman had shot her attacker, emptying her weapon into him, but he hadn’t died fast enough, not until after he had struck both of the elders in the heads with a baseball bat.
I had seen plenty of killings in my life—hogs, cattle, chickens, sheep, goats. I had been on-site when deer and wild boar were processed. I had studied crime scene photos in Spook School. I might have thought that the blood of those deaths would have inured me to most anything. It hadn’t begun to harden me to violent murder scenes. The smells were the unexpected part. At the pond, the air had carried the stench of death away. Here, it was contained and rank. The sickly sweet scent of old blood, the stink of bowels and bladders released in death were all stronger than the fresh-paint smell. The sight of blood in sprays up the soft green walls and soaked into the pale bedding was still fresh—bright and vivid. I feared for a moment that I’d be attacked by bloodlust again, but it didn’t happen. I wasn’t on Soulwood and the bodies weren’t on soil, but on floors, so maybe that was the reason.
I stood in the doorway, doing what I was supposed to do. Getting used to the awfulness of what people did to people. The horror of violence. The utter helplessness of being too late to help, too little to save. I studied each body, teaching my insides not to react, not to feel. Not to throw up.
When I had all I could stand, I left the house, peeling off the uni, throwing everything into the evidence bag at the back door. I went straight to my truck. It hadn’t been towed, but a media person had parked herself at my vehicle, and I nearly plowed her down to get past. She was sleek and polished, with long dark hair and enough makeup to make a good Halloween mask. She finally got out of my way and then out of the way of my truck, as I pulled off. If I made the evening news as an uncooperative law enforcement officer, that would be a good way to end my day.
The tears started on the way home. I had to slow down and then pull over so I could cry, snotting and wailing. I don’t cry pretty. Never have. But when the misery was cried out, I pulled back into traffic and continued home, with a promise to myself to put some handkerchiefs in the car for next time.
EIGHT
Back at my house, I felt empty and raw, as if my heart and soul were abraded and bleeding. I went directly to the garden, where I picked some spinach that had survived the cold, some late squash, and two pumpkins that were in a protected place and were still good, and dug up a batch of turnips and greens. I carried them inside with me, where I kicked off my boots and washed and cut up veggies, walking the floors in my wool socks, feeling the land through the wood flooring that had once grown here, on Soulwood. I was shaky and mad for reasons I wasn’t quite sure of, and the Calhoun’s BBQ had worn off long ago. I was sick to the stomach and yet also hungry, which made no sense at all, except as an indication that I was confused and mad and distressed.
Though I hadn’t had time to buy groceries since I got back, I had plenty of home-canned goods that I could whip up in a hurry. I should put something together. But my brain wasn’t clear enough to know what I wanted to eat.
Moving on instinct and habit, I added wood to the stove and put the greens in a pot to simmer with salt and fatback from the freezer and a few red peppers. I added a couple of whole, unshelled pecans to keep the stink down. The sliced pumpkin went into the oven to roast. I doubted the unit would like turnip greens or roasted pumpkin. Lots of city people didn’t, and cats hated the greens. Still antsy and hungry, I stood in front of the pantry and finally chose a Ball jar of spicy field peas. I made some instant rice, and mixed it together with a can of tuna that made the cats come running. It was dinner, tasteless except for the spices in the peas. And I didn’t particularly love tuna. But I forced myself to eat, and to not think, not think about anything.
Not about the deaths. Not about the bodies in the pond and on the shore. Not about the bodies in the back suite at the last house. Not. But again I couldn’t stop the tears. No matter the classes in paranormal crimes and the crime scene photos, this was not what I had expected my job with PsyLED to be about. I didn’t know what I had expected, but . . . not this.
Shoveling food in, I kept turning my thoughts away, but it was like herding cats. They kept returning to the blood and the death, just as I kept shooing cats off the long table and away from my tuna, an endless loop of failure. But eventually my belly got full and my shakes decreased. I began to calm and stabilize. Mostly the tuna was gone and the cats wandered away in a snit.
But my eyes were still leaking and my heart felt funny, so I took off my socks and carried a clean, folded quilt made by Leah years ago out to the edge of my woods, to the married trees, put the quilt, still folded, on the ground, and sat down on the pad it made. The weather had turned cold. My bare toes were already frozen. They would be even colder soon.
I rearranged my legs and placed my bare feet onto the earth and my palms flat on the ground beside me, and sank my thoughts into the land. In an instant, Soulwood recognized me and enfolded me. Warmth flooded me, the way a mother hugs a child, reaching all inside me, embracing me. I closed my eyes and breathed out the worry, the fear, and the anger that I had been carrying. The grief. I sank into the dimness and the deep of the land, into the broken stone of the mountain’s heart, stone canted up in some massive, ancient earthquake. And I simply breathed. Felt the land fill me, felt it hold me.
Let it tell me that death and life were an endless loop. That life and death were nature’s way. That all things, no matter how cruel seeming, were part of living. That I was loved now when I was alive, and I would be loved when I was dust and ashes and my soul was set free.
I relaxed. Let my shoulders droop. Stretched out my legs. I breathed. And breathed. My heart beat. Time passed. When my spirit was soothed and quiet, I remembered Rick’s orders, issued so much earlier in the day. I curled my legs up into a modified guru position, icy toes inserted into my inner knees, between my thighs and calves, and thought about what I wanted to do. I reached out and around, reading the land.
In the near distance, twisted into a protective ball, was the evil that was Brother Ephraim. There was nowhere to hide, but he was coiled as far from me as he could get, bowed against the boundary that was Soulwood, against the barrier to the land on the other side of the hill, the church compound. Ephraim had been a churchman before I’d fed him to the earth. I didn’t regret killing him. Not at all. Some people just needed killing. But as I studied him, huddled there, as far away as possible, I did wonder, not for the first time, if I had fed him to the land wrongly in some manner. Maybe there was a methodology I had lucked up on the other time I’d fed Welsh gwyllgi to the earth. Or maybe gwyllgi didn’t feed the earth as well as humans, and I had messed up North Carolina too. Or . . . maybe Soulwood was so different from the rest of the Earth that it refused to absorb some foul things. That felt possible. Right, even.
But I didn’t know. And I was honestly afraid to find out.
Near Ephraim, something glimmered. I turned my attention to that odd bit of energy, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. A moment later it glimmered again. Something that rested within the earth near Brother Ephraim. Something was . . . active. When it sparked, I felt an answering flicker closer to me. Much closer.
Curious. Whatever it was, it wasn’t right. Something was different in Soulwood. Something the land didn’t recognize as new and altered. Something bad.
The glimmer came again, and I realized there was a precise interval between appearances, like a pulse, beating back along . . . There! It was beating back along a thin, microscopic strand of something. Not the same kind of something that trailed from the surface triangle to the dancer, to the sleeper, but similar. I had no words for what it was. But something was beating from the wickedness that was Ephraim, into my woods. Directly to the place where Brother Ephraim had been absorbed into the earth. And then that energy pulsed back to his shadow. I studied it. It was nothing like the shadow/light dancer. It was a back-and-forth pulsation along a thin thread of . . . something else unknown.
Brother Ephraim had been almost dead when I’d accepted him into my land. Eaten and chewed on by a black wereleopard. By Paka. That crime should have brought her a death sentence. Killing a human, biting a human, always was a death sentence. It was a grindylow’s job to mete out justice against were-creatures who broke that cardinal rule. Justice always meant killing were-creatures who bit humans. Always. But Pea had been easy to convince otherwise. Pea the grindylow hadn’t killed her for it. Later we had learned that Ephraim wasn’t human. Pea had known when none of us had.
And maybe that was important here and now.
Pea hadn’t been a judge in his death because Brother Ephraim hadn’t been human, and therefore two things: he wasn’t within her jurisdiction, and he wasn’t an acceptable sacrifice to the earth. And perhaps that was also why he was still separate, a discrete energy trapped in Soulwood. Brother Ephraim had been a Welsh gwyllgi, and had also been pure evil as a human. Whatever the cause, he had found a way to keep some part of himself from being absorbed into the earth. On some level, he was still self-aware.
And now he was doing . . . something. That pulsing back and forth. And he assumed I didn’t see it.
I pulled my consciousness into me and thought through my options. I stood, pulled socks and boots onto my cold feet, got a flashlight, John’s old machete, and the limb lopper from the porch, and walked into the shadows, to the place where I feared, where I knew, the pulse was converging. Deep into the shadows of the trees.
Soulwood was composed of trees that had once been standard-sized trees, ordinary twenty-five-year-old trees, the biggest with boles twelves inches or so in diameter. Then I had fed the land the first time, and . . . things had changed. The trees had begun to grow. Now the trunks were big enough that three men holding hands couldn’t stretch around most of them. They were the size of four-hundred-year-old trees. Even older. Because of my magic. My evil.
As I came around the massive boles, I could hear the trickle of water from the spring that fed the small clay-bottomed pool. Could hear the chitter of squirrels and the call of birds. Could smell the stench of pond water, full of decaying organic matter. I realized that I hadn’t smelled the usual pondish stench at the goose pond. Odd, but not calamitous. On my first visit, I had been excited and possibly missed it. The smell of dead humans had been strong enough to mask it on my second visit.
The flash guiding my way, I stepped high, over a root that was bigger than only a few months past, and into the clearing, setting my eyes on the high branch overhead where the Brother had hung, bleeding out his life. Below that limb, on the ground where I had put my hand to take his dark heart and his life from him, there was a something new. A damp place that smelled of rot. I scanned the entire area with the light.