Chapter 9: Blood-Red Pill
The sundogs that Deer Woman had scared off inched closer as I neared the shore, a brave big one sniffing and snarling closer than the others. I wagged the desiccated deer scalp at the hound, which squinted and cowered, not getting any nearer.
I tucked the two trophies into my widened shirt collar, the pelt and the scalp half in and out and dangling over my chest. I was still taking from both of them, noticeably more from the scalp than the pelt, which was second-hand. I wondered if transfused blood might be less potent than a body’s native blood.
When I turned back to the river there was movement on the other side: rustling in the treeline, which was thicker over there. Maybe getting their own traps and dogs ready, and maybe some ghostly saint or penguin-dressed nun would be the big trouble. I would have to judge the middle of this river, and stick to it as I waded up to my unknown odds at Nanabush’s lake.
As I came to the first trickle of water to pass over in the patchwork of dry stones I paused, letting the audience on the other side of the river wait a moment, before hopping over to the first stone, and then immediately to the second. My balance was getting better – maybe that had been pure nerves.
It was like being a kid again, going off trail where you shouldn’t go, and I heard many footsteps running away through the thick brush on the Catholic side. They’d hoped to see the river become a wall for me, hoped to watch the dogs or the Deer Woman take my scalp and chew on the bones.
I had to get moving – it wasn’t yet midnight, but I had burned through a lot of energy. Though my thirst was mostly quenched by my trophies my limbs still felt drained of the bulk of their strength, waiting for the rougher and stranger fuel I had taken to be processed into something they could use – unlike blood, which I could take and then use immediately.
Some blood would put a spring in my step, but this river looked too low for any fish, and in this part of the country there were dams, sewer pipes and mills old and shut down that would have handled most the fish in stronger waters anyway. And their blood might be alien enough to make me vomit – sooner or later I would have to hit my limit, like a groggy drinker vowing to never touch Drambuie or Jagermeister ever again.
Hopping over my stone lily pads, I went north up the half-dead riverbed, not touching the water until twenty minutes and perhaps seven kilometers. I kept dry by making accurate long jumps when I needed to, and this was easier than brachiating through the trees like a frenzied squirrel.
I had noticed a certain feeling of rising and falling, like inhalation and exhalation, starting since last night and maybe earlier, and this extra sense that I couldn’t name filling lungs I didn’t use anymore hit its peak and switched flow direction at midnight. I realized this and believed it five seconds later, all the conventional skepticism in the world dragged down by a collection of instincts which were surfacing now, or maybe finally done pecking their way out of the egg, instincts that were very pleased by the takedown of the Deer Woman and now stretching, looking around.
My new sense told me that midnight would be very soon, the inhale almost done. Inside this new being I felt myself becoming – like the onset of the drunk in the sober man – there was satisfied bloodlust, even if I hadn’t taken a drop from Deer Woman, and there was finally a slow trickle of new power entering my limbs from my spiritual stomach or intestines or pancreas or whatever turned raw blood or the trophy essence into this body’s magic. Killing something even without blood had done something for me – maybe it was a bit more like a smoker’s itch, the itch in the kind of smoker who can be satisfied for a little while by another person’s cigarette, by a quick pass through a casino in Vegas.
Finally touching the water with wayward toes, perched on a large rock like some gargoyle, I felt my toes burn.
“Hm,” I said, more confused than pained or mad. “Clodd, what did I pay you for?” I examined my toes, seeing them quickly turning pink.
There was a rustling, a whisper inside my tattered shirt. The fox pelt was not entirely dead.
I covered my surprise. “You’ll have to speak louder.”
“The water cure worked. This is spud magic.”
“What?”
“We call them lots of names,” the low voice from the pelt said. It had none of Fox Man’s previous energy, perhaps not having so many speech options with this mangled avatar. “Spuds, for the Irish. I assumed they were all Irish for a while.”
“Ah, Catholics. But these ones will be French. Or Quebecois. Scrambled French. Poutine magic. So I just touched holy water?”
“Yes. They’re blessing the river upstream, everything down from there will sting you. It’s not the real strong stuff when they make so much of it.”
“I figured. I thought the real stuff would be like sulfuric acid. This is more like … harsh vinegar.”
“Yeah,” Fox Man wheezed from beneath my collar. “After they saw you cross halfway I guessed they rushed to the nearest bridge and haggled enough to go halfway themselves. The other hunters who stuck with you this far will be there, save our mutual lady friend.”
“Without a promise of anything … if some sort of power is taken from you in a pelt or from her in a scalp, and not just by blood, is there a way to return stolen power? I’m still working out the mechanics of this particular fantasy universe, so this can be my training level. Tell me how this magical power works, the Newton’s Laws of it.”
The pelt was silent for a few more jumps, which were more careful now. But I could see that sticking to the middle of this river would require getting wet eventually; it bulged and shrank in paces, getting shallower or deeper with fewer dry rocks to choose from, and those dogs were skulking in the darkness to my right, their open eyes occasionally flashing to give away their position. I’d be jumped upon at once if I went that way, and maybe there was blood that I couldn’t, shouldn’t drink.
“Pay up,” I muttered. “My protection money was no good. I had to smash her myself.”
“Fine,” the spirit mumbled. “But I can read enough of your mind to see what Deer Woman saw – you deflect from reality with jokes and stories. You will believe almost nothing.”
“You’re a trickster,” I said flatly. “But I assume that it’s more fun to mix some truth in with the trick.”
Fox Man sighed. “Flip the pelt, please. You’ve got my ass hanging out of your shirt.”
Alighting upon a small rock with the lapping water of the river dangerously close, I adjusted, getting the pelt’s head positioned to look forward.
“Living humans are … well, sort of like batteries,” Fox Man began. “Don’t-”
“The Matrix,” I said, chuckling. “Thermodynamically unworkable.”
“I’ll find ways to annoy you,” the spirit hissed. “Just … think of a food chain. A human body can’t make every vitamin or mineral, so you eat a plant or animal that either makes it or takes it from others. You can’t live on stuff that’s too low down the chain. We’re both in the food chain levels above human now, a food web that bottlenecks at humans. For the most part we can only take sustenance from humans or from things that take their own sustenance from humans.”
“And we are undead? Spirits?”
“Manitou, kami, jinn, and a thousand names that even I don’t know.”
“So I changed species?”
“It’s a metaphor, don’t stretch it.” Fox Man huffed, the pelt’s limp forepaws flapping in a breeze during the next jump. The sudden wind was enough to make me miss my landing, and a I scorched my left foot in the stinging water. It was a bit harder to stand now. I retracted my foot and waited for the stinging and the wind to stop. On the eastern shore pairs of pinpoint sunlight watched balefully, my back turned to them.
“So you take … nutrients of a kind. Humans are sort of like plants, dumping energy into this spiritual ecosystem?”
“Yes. Some eat and kill the source of the nutrients, like the vampire. You’re specialized for that particular method, drinking blood, and it will be slower and less nourishing to take in other ways. Others can draw sustenance without killing for years, like milking a cow. Most tutelaries are like that. They feed indirectly from the places or objects or animals humans suffuse with their aura, though ‘aura’ is like ‘spirit’: a thousand different names. Orenda, qi, mana, presence, ectoplasm, and so on.”
“So no split of good and evil? Just different ways to eat?”
“Don’t ask the spuds. They have all sorts of hierarchies and choirs and chains of command. On the other side of the river it’s generally known that it’s an ecosystem. Even a mosquito like you isn’t what the spuds call ‘evil’.” Fox Man sighed. “I suppose there are good and bad ways to hunt or farm …”
We talked more as I went north into the early morning, singeing my toes and feet more and more on the sanctified stream when I missed jumps.
Fox Man admitted that he actually knew little of vampires – he knew his neck of the woods, but I was an exotic invasive species. He couldn’t tell me about their numbers, their society, or any sub-species. He confessed while explaining his lack of omniscience that he didn’t actually guard all foxes, but had a limited territory defined by the humans who gave his foxes his particular power. He was specialized for taking in that particular way – through their songs, through offerings of tobacco, through their stories from old days down to the children’s stories of foxes today, not through stolen blood. It got harder and harder to feed the farther away from this region he went.
Taking from humans could be done in countless ways, but a crude way like simply devouring humans was a way of life occasionally taken by a ‘manitou’ in every corner of the inhabited world. It was suicidal in the long run, so even vampires generally knew better, making most of their meals survivable. Trophies could be taken instead of the whole human, like the scalp. Trophies didn’t even have to be parts a human wouldn’t miss – baby teeth, hair, fingernails.
In the next level of separation came the things that humans handled in ways that might unintentionally impart this mysterious ‘aura’ into other things: a favorite toy, a work of art, or the animal they placed on their heraldry. While each level of separation diminished the contribution from one human it could also open up delivery of this ‘aura’ from more humans. Like a food chain, with so many blades of grass contributing to a piece of beef, which was higher-density in energy. A long-inhabited building still in use, for instance, was a buffet of this ethereal energy as humans came and went, delivering tiny whiffs of power that grew and grew into a feast.
And if a vampire came knocking, the first-comers would defend their plate. So it generally went for most places of human residence, with hospitals, schools and prisons being particularly impregnable to intrusion.
“So they’ll try to stop me even if there are no humans to snack on inside, after hours?”
“Well, like a real mosquito you can infect the blood as you steal it. There’s a reason why you’re called unclean spirits: you can defile holy places. But they’ll also fight you for turf, for honor, even if the well is a little dry.” Fox Man then said, as if commenting on the weather, “You’re going to need to start wading.”
“I know. And my arms barely healed.” Reaching up, I brushed my head and felt that my scalp was less burned than it had been, after getting set on fire by the sundog’s eyes up close. The odd, crinkled hair was sticking up, though I was still something close to Charlie Brown. “But thanks for the info. Lets see how the pain compares to that damn water cure.”
The river had narrowed and deepened once more, and up ahead it wound around a corner before I could see the next rock I could hop to. I brushed the surface of the water with my fingertips as I crouched, and whistled. This would be like entering a hot tub.
Reaching to my collar, I pulled out the dried deer scalp, folded it roughly until it almost cracked in two. I bit it in my mouth, clenching hard, hopefully taking a little more, and I soldiered on the next bend in the river, and the next rock I could rest on.
My feet were on pebbles and then rippling mud with waving green weeds in patches, the burning water reaching up my calves and sloshing up to my thighs at times. I felt none of that extra, magical weight that the running water had first given me, but its conventional weight and current pushing against me was still enough to keep me slow, slow enough to be followed by a human jogging on the shore, I thought. And I realized that the night’s strange exhale had just begun: it was past midnight.
When I found my next lily pad, resting on a granite ledge that made the river ahead slosh up and them spill over on the Catholic side, I fancied that I could see my leg muscles from the thighs down, exposed through a thin layer of translucent, mushy skin as if I had been flensed. The damage was superficial – I was still able to accept and process the pain clinically for now, and the muscles still worked, but if this spiked water completely penetrated my skin and went into me, circulating … well, that could be more than what felt like a terrific sunburn, enough pain to make me flop around like a human. That could kill my muscles and trap me for the dawn.
So I rested for nearly half an hour, watching the muscles of my legs slowly disappearing under thickening skin, new skin that was almost flawless. I felt a short but intense spike of loss as I realized that none of my old scars were coming back – the three scrapped knuckles on my left foot from a rough pool bottom in Florida when I was ten years old, a white gash on my right calve from picking a bee sting some years before that, none of the gravel marks on both knees either. All gone, resulting in an eerily clear covering. There was a persistent pink dot a few inches away from the bee-scar on my right shin that I’d had for years, maybe a scar or a tiny cyst or the beginning of skin cancer – and it came back, oddly enough.
I looked suddenly to my left forearm, three inches above the elbow. The new flesh that had healed from the scalding by Deer Woman’s aura still retained a small brown smudge, my one birthmark.
So potentially cancerous spots and birthmarks remained, but scars were erased. I’d have to wash my face and clear up some acne dents, those reminders of my sporadic bouts of trichotillomania. Later.
The feeling of taking from the scalp in my mouth trickled away during my healing – my thirst would be coming back in time, and I was only slowly making use of the unrefined ‘aura’ I had extracted. The hair on my head was returning in a thicket, still buzzcut short, and my burned forearms still itched and twitched with incomplete healing, tiny cracks at the joints still sealing.
“You need to hurry,” Fox Man said.
“Fine.” I put the deer scalp back in my mouth, cracking it as the agony of my submerged legs returned. But I forced myself to bound a little faster, pausing for shorter times on dry rocks, managing a few jumps. The river wound back and forth indecisively for another hour of scalding, lurching travel, and around one more sharp bend it widened and sank below knee level, giving my upper legs a break as there were plenty of rocks and gravel patches to give dry footing. This depression was in a gentle valley with unforested slopes on either side, power lines stretching across and humming overhead to my new ears.
I had developed a sense of what I would encounter up here as the potency of the water’s ‘holiness’ escalated with each step upstream, sensing it as I now sensed the coming and going of night, and I was finally at the bridge where undiluted holy water trickled down like piss from three streams, one between the bridge’s two supporting pillars and one on either side.
The Catholics wanted me going no further.
Chapter 10: The Spuds
Image credits: Judicieux, Fralambert