Chapter 18: Going North
I woke up tucked behind a dumpster, covered in rags and smelling of garbage juice. The slow inhale of night told me that the sun was just setting, but first I needed to be fully convinced that I was alive. My vision had a corona of violet-blue fire, the tunnel vision of half-conscious.
Nudging the dumpster to get some wiggle room, I instead launched it away from the building’s wall, crashing it into a parking stop where it fell over and spread its contents across the grass.
What?
I tried to stand up, and I rose to smash into the branches of the tree above me. When I hit the pavement I thought it felt strange, and when I looked where my palm had landed the pavement was compressed, mushed as if it were wet mud. And I still saw all things within a circular ring of violet fire with tinges of electric blue, ghostly flames that skittered and jumped away if I tried to focus on them.
Exercise … no, this couldn’t just be one day of light exercise, that diamond, that fucking blood diamond, it broke everything and everything grew back tougher, but it broke again … so it grew back even tougher. Though I’m still seeing stars, or … what is this? Kind of like the aurora borealis …
“You’re right,” a voice called down from above. “Please make less noise, it’s hard to charm people away from such a racket.”
I got up, more carefully, and looked down at myself, hearing the flapping of wings overhead.
It was no hallucination – my whole body was cracked apart, and from within the cracks eerie liquid fire bled out. I fancied that I could see each rib. A spiraling crack embraced my knee and dripped magical weirdness down my pantleg like piss.
Ohhhh …
“Don’t pass out here! Get somewhere else!” Raven landed right on my head and yanked my hair. “Stay up! Shuffle that way!”
I complied, and it needed to be a shuffle, because a full step sent me rocketing forward, almost bashing me into a wall. I was cracked apart, bleeding something deeper than blood … but I was also tossing myself around like a twig.
“What … is coming … out of me?”
Raven hopped up and down on my head for a while, then said. “Plasma. Not the blood kind.”
I shambled on, bouncing myself over a parking stop. Raven was maneuvering me into an alley where I could collapse again.
“Plasma … like the sun?”
“Ah,” Raven said, realizing something. “You would call it St. Elmo’s fire, I think. It’s fundamentally the same thing. In this case, it’s a sign of significant damage, damage to your true body, not just the man-form that you wear.”
“This is my true … body.” I cracked my forehead against bricks and Raven flew off, letting me slump down into gravel and old newspapers in the alley.
“You’re a shapeshifter like the rest of us, just stuck in shape number one.” Raven’s bird alighted on a metal fence and spoke down reasonably to the back of my head, as I starred into cigarette butts and white globs of gum. “Your light exercise in the day with the spud kid’s silver tokens at your heart was enough to wear down the man-form, and when you huffed on that diamond so eagerly you ripped yourself all the way through.”
I wanted to curse at the spirit, then I remembered that the manitou had pecked my finger away, making me release the diamond.
“That was the most awful … thing I’ve ever felt. A fucking blood diamond … fuck girls and their goddamn sparkles.” I tried to laugh, and new cracks weeping St. Elmo’s fire grew on my throat.
“Yes, that was no Canadian rock. If your true body can repair you’ll be one tough cookie for your age. A vampire needs to see the glow to get any significant results from exercising. Lesser exercise just touches up the man-form, which is a superficial shell.”
I got to my knees, rolling my head up, chin to sky, looking back at the black bird.
“Wrong workout song was in my head. I was hanging tough and staying hungry, but until I actually eat a tiger … fuck it, dumb joke.” I got one leg down, steadying myself on the wall.
But Raven seemed delighted, and sent the bird back on my head. “Get moving, child of the eighties.” I somehow knew that, for him at least, I had a permanent nickname.
And then the manitou actually sang:
“I can see a new horizon,
Underneath the blazing sky!
I’ll be where the eagle’s flying
Higher and higher!
Gonna be your man in motion,
All I need is a pair of wheels
Take me where my future’s lying,
St. Elmo’s fire!”
I was being run out of town, but I didn’t mind. I was delirious enough to try running across that damn wide river.
Any sailors out on the St. Lawrence between Sainte-Croix and Donnacona would have seen an omen out of the deep and superstitious past, front crawling and flutter-kicking and laughing furiously. The bird circling overhead laughing back and singing down was just unnecessary weirdness.
The water was mild but turned suddenly cold at one point, the current strengthening to pull me to the east, a burning that could have been the brackishness of salt reaching up from below, but this thin band passed quickly as I came back into shallower waters.
Just before midnight I crashed into the true north strong and free, the land north of that great river. An oil slick of buzzing electric fire slowly faded as I looked back south. Reeds and mud filled with terrified frogs mashed and squelched around me, and I had to wade to get some rocks underfoot. Then I found a thin strip of rock beach, where I allowed myself to collapse.
“Thanks … fun way … to die.”
Raven sent his bird down to land on my chest, grinning and winking at me. I was, quite suddenly, convinced that I had killed myself, burned out the last of my energy that was really the stolen energy of the blood diamond, and now I was a husk that would collapse and blow east in the breeze, leaving nothing come morning. I accepted it in a fog of absolute clarity, fishing into my pocket for the lanyard – very luckily for me and Jean-Claude, it had not been swept out to the Atlantic. The hides from fox and deer had been swept away in the confusion.
“Take this … back … his … home … promised him …”
But the bird already had something in its beak. That damn diamond ring.
“Just gotta get the dose right to avoid damage, I’ll control it this time,” the bird said happily. “Close your eyes.”
A thunderbolt of taking, a solid black fist of condensed blood as the raven swung its head down to knock the diamond against my forehead. St. Elmo’s fire flared white-hot out of every crack in my disintegrating being … but the cracks were now shrinking. My eyes were closed, but the hot flare burned through my eyelids, and I could then feel the cracks in my ‘true body’ sealing.
I heard Jean-Claude in my head, calling me by my human name.
This is the soil where you were born, north of the Seaway. A rest here will be a true rest. And you deserve it. Thanks for remembering.
If I can … just release you … Raven, take him out of my head. Enough. Send him to wherever Catholics go when they die.
Lifting off my chest, with the lanyard dangling from the beak, the bird hovered over me, nodding down. Tilting my chin down, I saw that the ring with the blood diamond was now resting over my heart. I slipped it over my pinky, which was just about the right size, and then gave a salute as I lay on my back without care for the bumpy stones, thinking that I saw something shimmering like a ghostly mackerel in the rising bird’s talons, an ethereal fish.
We slept, and Raven flew away.
Chapter 19: Mistaken for Something Worse
Image credit: Dr. G. Hartwig