Chapter 48: The Hunters
My luggage had followed me into the ditch halfway, and not spilled open. Once again my stuff was fine while I was a mess.
I cleaned the cuts on my knees and shins and right forearm in a cool stream, wincing like a human and finding the sensation of the enduring wounds quite remarkable. The novelty of the hurting, after all this time playing safe during my human hours, almost made the feeling not unpleasant. They didn’t seem too deep, and they’d be as faded as childhood scars by sunset, though never gone. The knock to the head didn’t seem like much now, but there would be some enduring dent or bump or crack for a phrenologist to comment upon whenever someone got hold of my skull.
I hid in the woods off the highway until the late afternoon under a maple tree half-shed of its leaves, sleeping for most of it. Cold rain came to splash me awake, but no thunder, and when I looked down at my legs and pulled up my pants I saw faded stains over the cuts with a thin crust of dried blood, the stains probably beyond the notice of a human eye. My other aches had been fixed as well – now I just thirsted terribly. Not enough to be stupid, however.
At the end of HW 11 I waited for a ride heading west on HW 17, away from Thunder Bay and Lake Nipigon, choosing the back of an 18-wheeler to hop on at dusk. With one hand clawing into the metal roof and the other clenched on my luggage I traveled like a remora all the way to Timmins. I’d snack on something on the outskirts and find another truck to carry me down HW 144 to Sudbury tomorrow. After that a Greyhound bus might be more comfortable.
Getting off to slink away when the driver stopped for gas and coffee at Timmins just before midnight, I didn’t notice the temperature change as I had in the fall of last year and every year before, because I wasn’t breathing this time. I didn’t notice until I stopped suddenly on the trail of a pheasant in the early morning of October 20th, looking up to see that the stars were moving and falling down because they were snowflakes.
I wasn’t stupid in Sudbury either. It was the biggest city in northern Ontario, and if ‘middle management’ in Toronto or Dr. Best’s hitman or any of my own kin had a vague idea of where I was they’d be expecting me to come through here. I ate no one, taking a Greyhound out, keeping the sun over my head during the whole stay and hoping that kept me unnoticed.
My bus stopped in Orillia a few hours from October 21st, showing me Lake Simcoe again. But I wasn’t interested in the lake or the city. While hopefully away from the thunderbirds I was once more close to Toronto, and I needed a place free of tutelaries to finish my preparations. The Land of No Trees had a big patch of trees in the east called Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands Provincial Park, a fragmented and token bit of greenery for city people to call wild. A forest ranger that I had consumed in North Bay gave me all the advertising I needed. The park was still in its planning stages, with no visitor facilities, and the forest itself wasn’t even old – it was all healed after logging and fires, desecrated and vacated of its native tutelaries. It was young and empty, lobotomized land that needed a refill of memories: perfect.
The only thing I took from Orillia was blackberries, raiding a grocery before dawn and loading them into a brown backpack. I’d be sniffing and sorting through them carefully before I was too hungry to focus, making sure that no elderberry or any other plant had snuck in. After some testing I scarfed down the first handful.
The Queen’s Wildlands were a literal breath of fresh air – Sudbury and Orillia had stunk powerfully at times, and the din of the traffic and hum of electrical wires had been almost overwhelming when I had left on the Greyhound bus from the downtown terminal in Sudbury. My senses had grown some more with all that time underwater, but I wouldn’t be acclimatizing just yet.
My night fasting would be enough of a chore after all the arboreal gymnastics; by day, my flying head had some ground to cover.
I made a home in an old bear den far from the sounds and smells of humans, confident that the bear had been gone a while as well. I supposed that I would have a chat with that guardian, but I wasn’t in the mood for new enemies or tricks. When day came on October 22 I folded myself up like a dead bug and hurled my mind into the aether, temporarily free from the growing thirst in my body.
I tracked my way back over fields and rural roads from the park to the edge of Orillia. Nothing out of the ordinary. There was some seething in Lake Simcoe’s heart, but I didn’t aggravate it by getting closer.
I didn’t get so close to Sudbury with my flying head. I skipped over to Timmins, and backtracked further on the way to Nipigon. I eyed the roadways but didn’t see any one-legged men jogging their way through eternity around Thunder Bay. This remote vision wasn’t a perfect spy: not only could some sense it and look back, but a powerful spirit might cloak altogether.
But if I had hunters, would they cloak at all hours? Could I catch them, as I had back in Quebec?
During my second day asleep in the Queen’s park I stopped short of Lake Nipigon with my remote vision. Hovering near the shore, I started to slowly pick up a tremor from below like an engine struggling to start – that was the buried mountain where the thunderbirds had once circled. I could start to recognize this feeling and make a map if some of the other mountains were broken or hidden. My wandering third eye had watered near Manitoulin Island, making a belt of unsearchable territory. Like a frustrated fly at the window I couldn’t even try to get closer. Nevertheless I was going farther and striking more energetically against the barriers.
But, I thought on my third day in the park: why be so flat? If I could go hundreds of kilometers horizontally, why not up? Down would be an adventure for another time.
During the remote viewing on October 24 I hit a ceiling well before that, surpassing the airliners and the highest clouds, seeming to float at a height where the fields and roads resembled a computer circuit. The sky above me was starting to darken and purple in a way that I found frightening, and as I looked around me I thought I could just about make out the curve. But the satellites were still overhead.
Looking down and widening my psionic eyes and ears, I encountered a humming, buzzing din and speckled light show. As a sound it was what you might expect from an entire stadium of people all whispering to each other: nothing intelligible, but it was altogether quite loud.
“Mr. Luce, I’d like to give your engine a try here.”
My inner army had more than ten thousand years of cumulative experience for me to search through – lots of it nonsense, but there were gems, and I had an engine to mine for those gems. Percy Luce, a computer programmer who’d gone a bit funny and reclusive in his last years with a tumor in his brain, had joined my merry crew during my diving in Nipissing. I’d found his hut and drained him, guessing that he wasn’t quite as lost as Kaczynski, and it turned out he actually knew how to make a basic replica of Google. His search engine inside my mental fortress was looking for keywords in memories to find the more valuable ones, though they weren’t all literal ‘words’. Hot topics included conventional warfare, martial arts, hunting, driving and piloting vehicles, basic science, civil and military engineering, espionage, native and Abrahamic mythology, horror movies and novels, and strategy games from chess to Warhammer.
Here, though, the search engine would be looking for actual keywords from the millions of whispering external psychic voices.
Mr. Luce’s whispering voice answered, always so low you needed to focus, his spoken words always so clipped.
“It should work. Hold on. Yes.”
Vagabond.
I got too many that were about tutelaries complaining to other tutelaries about moving their wards along. Damn, these guys were just continuing the human shit into eternity.
Vogelfrei.
There we go. Following the line of my recent travels, I had hits in Barrie, North Bay and in the wilderness between North Bay and Lake Nipigon, in the ocean of brown and orange that I could survey from up here. Timmons was clear of mentions, as were Sudbury and Orilla, so they were behind, whoever they were.
I checked out the ones who seemed closest on my path near Nipigon first. These guys made my mind defensively and hysterically protect myself by comparing them to the hellish biker in Raising Arizona. Three men on roaring engines rode fast in the afternoon across two lanes of highway, fearing no cop. I could take one wild guess as to why, and what might happen to the cop whose tutelary did not keep the officer away from the three vampiric bikers.
Their leader had a forked beard of solid black, not a grey hair to be seen, and the face under the glasses and shock of curly black hair was unnaturally pale for someone who stares into the distance across handlebars all the time. Clenched fists steered his ride, each knuckle lined with a different symbol – a cross, an ankh, a swastika, a heart. A skinnier, more rat-like man flanked the leader’s left, pointed teeth chewing on his lips, his greasy black hair in a top-knot, his long nose hairs billowing in the wind, a shrunken head dangling off his neck from a gold chain. On the leader’s right side was an obese biker forcing his bike to roar as fast as the others with a boosted engine and a thicker exhaust trail of inky black smoke that made them very easy to find visually at a lower height. The right-hand man had bare arms to his armpits with silver tattoos in the shapes of skulls and wolves and snakes – because pure silver alone would be the only thing able to give these bikers their marks.
Through my mental telescope, I had one step short of first contact.
In my remote psychic vision the skinny left-man lifted his hairy nose into the air. The leader’s head turned half a millimeter, but they didn’t need to look at each other to talk.
(what it is?)
(something down from above, feels like a peeper)
I flew up in a rush that felt hot, then very cold.
(the vogelfrei peeping means he’s close)
(he might watch this road at a greater distance, so if he knows where to look we go off-road …)
I didn’t eavesdrop on anything else. Later I could be pleased that they didn’t know I could find them wherever they were by filtering with a search engine, but I was too shocked for that thought at once. For a moment I was stunned, idly staring from the stratosphere … but then my mind got bored of being stunned and tried something that could be smart or stupid. But I was sure they were in the right place.
(HEY FOX! YOU’VE GOT THREE BIKER CREEPS TRYING TO GET THROUGH YOUR TURF!!!)
Carefully going back down, I found the black smoke coming from fatso’s bike easily, and found my pursuers halted on the road’s shoulder, all three sniffing the air.
Just before I raced up again to avoid detection, I saw something interesting: the leader’s bike was farthest from the road, and it was suddenly in two pieces, split almost exactly lengthwise as if a blade-thin wall had come down on the side of the road. The rat-like vampire with the sharper nose leaped away from the road’s shoulder and nearly got smashed by a truck. The roaring and cursing of the bikers faded away as my flying head zoomed up, receiving more and more quiet signals from hundreds and then thousands of different sources, back to grey confusion.
I’d been lucky, assuming that they couldn’t send their own remote vision after me without first falling asleep. I’d slowed them down, and Terry Fox might give them more than a dead bike. I’d also pissed them off, but my odds with those three once I was caught couldn’t be lower anyway.
And I knew that flying heads could be spotted by other vampires, with some individuals adept at sniffing them out. A sudden fight with a tutelary might make tracking unworkable for those three, but if this happened again in Barrie or North Bay I wouldn’t be able to bring all of those hunters a challenger, so they’d have nothing to distract them from their own psychic voyaging. I couldn’t buzz them … and after today buzzing any of them would be a problem. There could be two parties – hospital holy men and vampiric bikers, racing each other – but I wouldn’t easily know which was which until I was smellably close and they’d probably be talking to others from the same tribe. On major roads and key cities they’d be looking up and waiting after this. If I found them travelling in the middle of nowhere their guard might be down, since these three had assumed that I was just watching the road, but I didn’t want them to know about my search engine.
I returned with my remote vision to Nipigon, feeling the hum of the buried mountain.
(three biker creeps coming, might want stronger webs and an older bird this time)
The underground hum intensified, and though the sky over Nipigon was empty of clouds today I heard a great crack that didn’t sound like thunder, more like the hatching of a great egg. I got the hell out of there.
I’d been on the road travelling west to Nipigon on October 11, so they were just thirteen days behind me. And they had been gaining on me, since I had been in North Bay in September for more than three weeks. I might have set them back a bit with Fox and the two manitous at Nipigon, but I didn’t like the idea of staying in the Queen’s park for longer than a week – so Halloween would mark my exit at the latest.
Chapter 49: Tulpamancy 101
Image credits: Tony Webster, P199, Antonino Vara, Dietmar Rabich, Davide D’Amico