Chapter 57: The Perfect Vow
There was snow on the ground when I came to, gasping like a drowned man, spitting up sawdust and string, rolling off my back on my chest and clutching at my chest and gut and groin through clothes made threadbare with hundreds of pin-holes. I hadn’t felt much of Elder Mother’s knitting – she’d tormented my nose a bit and then knocked me out to work in silence.
Snow? What? What day was-
“Ugh.” I groaned, interrupting my own thoughts. I was thirsty. So very thirsty. I looked down as my hands and mouth moved on my own, gathering snow and slush and mud and shoving it down my throat. I didn’t care about the taste. And I didn’t care about the time of day – because for a wendigo all of winter is like the vampire’s night.
Diamond. The blood diamond on my fourth finger on the right hand. If I didn’t use it I would keep eating snow and mud and gravel and then if anyone walked by they’d be going down the hatch as well.
The rush of misery from the diamond’s African victims was nourishing … but not fulfilling anymore. Was the tank sputtering, or was my stomach getting larger? Couldn’t tell, but at least I could try to think again.
“Mother! MOTHER!”
“Shut up,” the bush above me hissed. I knocked its hanging branches aside as I crawled away and got off my stomach, sending snow down on my head. I was licking and nibbling at my lips even when the snow and mud were all gone.
“What day? How long?”
“I kept time,” Nancy Belmont said meekly from within. “It’s December 4th.”
Twenty-one … minus four …
It took me a long time to work out that Nocome’s zenith of power was just seventeen days away. I had assumed that the weeks around the winter solstice would be the most dangerous, but I had also assumed that I would be more prepared. Instead I had been knocked out cold, and plunged right in like those lunatics who jump through holes in lake ice in the winter.
Thirty, minus sixteen … plus four …
“Eighteen fucking days?!” I snarled at the elderberry tree. My teeth felt longer, and I felt stronger – not all from Elder Mother’s doing either.
The tree spirit huffed. “In proportion to your debt! I put all of my skill in you, toe to top. Why are you mad? I kept you hidden, and gave your thirty years to-“
(mine mine mine)
I didn’t hear her finish. My bones felt like they were trying to move on their own, the muscles I still controlled straining to hold them within. And the pounding headache in my head was saying one word, over and over.
(MINE MINE MINE)
“I … am going … to fuck them all,” I hissed. “Fuck them … AWWWWWLLLLLLL!!!”
Late-season birds were taking flight and screaming in an overcast afternoon sky. I could hear dogs yapping in the suburbs, frothing and panicking. How hidden could I be in this condition? I was rising to my feet with each tendon hard, chewing on my bleeding lips. My fingernails – with black mud trapped underneath – looked sharper.
“Oh no,” Elder Mother whispered from her bush. “Oh, oh no.”
I couldn’t really hear her. Names and faces were swirling around my head. Girls. Girls I couldn’t talk to, couldn’t go out with, couldn’t fuck and if you couldn’t FUCK anyone you were worthless you were nothing …
(copper … and MORE is mine mine mine … I can FUCK the copper and the blood of the ohdows, make them tear themselves apart like the sundogs … I can FUCK the little spark this kavdlunait took from the thunderbird chick in Nipigon … I will darken this city and send lightning from my hands)
(really bitch, like fucking Palpatine?)
I gasped. I was me again, for a little while. That quip had let me resurface.
“Nanabozho … the jokes. Taking it all as a joke, all serious and not serious at once, letting things make no sense …” I looked at the elderberry tree with amazement. “That’s how I stay me.”
“Well,” Elder Mother said, clearly about as shocked as myself. “Please do whatever it takes to keep that from happening again.” It sounded like she might not even know what a wendigo was.
“If I can’t I have to leave the city … but I want that berry. It’s MY berry that I put in MY grandmother’s yard and that little urchin fuck who took it will be given a special place in my heart. I’ll drink a whole store of whiskey and make him a drinker like his father before him!”
I slapped myself, and barely felt it. Elder Mother’s knitting had made me tougher after all.
“Argh, Nocome, fuck off. I’ll ask you about Dr. Starling later. Seems he couldn’t finish you, but I hope it hurt!” I looked down at the bush, slowly reaching for my backpack. “I can feel Nocome in my head for the moment as something separate. This might not last too long. But it seems that she can find the berry they took because I want it so bad.” My inner greed-compass had locked on successfully. “It’s inside-”
My eyes widened, as did my drooling mouth.
“At the Mountain,” Elder Mother finished softly, as if uncertain who she should be afraid for.
Mount Sinai Hospital.
There are sacred sites on this planet – made by human belief in their sacredness, as far as I could tell, rather than by an actual Power reaching down to Earth – and at these places a creature of the night would not just be repelled. A single step in their boarder would be instant death for all unclean undead. Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron was one of these places. I had to think that the actual Mount Sinai was something similar, with all three monotheisms enchanting that patch of earth for thousands of years. But to be merely named after such a site would be a step down in power. I had learned this in St. Croix, assuming that the actual Golgotha was another no-go zone for us night-kin.
Well, at least the Movember men were out of power. That silver lining felt so thin I had to laugh, because it was a joke.
“They gathered all my berries there, and it’s in the aether for everyone to hear,” Elder Mother told me as I tried to get serious – but not too serious, since Nocome found it easier to rule me when I was very serious. “While I was reknitting you for those days they did something … awful. Just awful. Also to lure you in when the berries didn’t work – or to bring in the thing that is trying to control you now.”
(what did I say, you underestimated the lengths the tutelaries will go to to get me, kavdlunait)
“They must have known that greed would make you do things even if you knew it was a trap. There is a living man named Dr. Pawel Fidyka. A top trauma surgeon, but with many other specialties – probably the greatest spinal surgeon in the hemisphere, lots of the living doctors said. He was old, but he could have had his coma in a year, or two years, or five. They made him have his coma now, by what the other doctors will call ‘toxic shock’ from an infection. Then they told every tutelary about him, ringing the dinner bell so that you would come running to devour him and take his knowledge.”
I stared down at the bush, frozen. Best of the best with spines, eh?
“You complete idiot.” Because of course now I wanted to eat that doctor, and it didn’t feel like Nocome. I wanted it bad.
That difference will die, the cold bitch said. The difference between her image and mine, and between what she wants and what I want. Fuck.
And I slowly realized that I couldn’t even count on running away at this point. Eventually I would have to stop and rest – and afterward I would wake up to find myself back where I had started or even closer to Mount Sinai Hospital, as Nocome took control more easily as her dark solstice neared, as she lost control increasingly to her own unquenchable hunger while she had my body. Without rest I would collapse and sleep more and more often, giving her ever more time with my body – we were approaching the end of Fight Club in our tug-of-war. Even a momentary lapse of concentration would take me down the wrong street or subway line, subtly guiding me backward when I thought I was in control.
But, trying to escape (or just disguise) the hunger, there was still amazed anger at the thought that they had bumped Dr. Fidyka off the way an angler might impale a worm on a hook, letting it live enticingly for a while longer. That was a stunning, enraging detail in my mind – it was summoning that human, righteous anger that can strike through barriers meant for bloodthirsty night-kin.
Toxic shock. Hadn’t Jim Henson died that way? How many other deaths were staged by the tutelaries?
Yes, that was what I had to cling to: righteous anger at this monstrous bait. And with his consent I would take Dr. Fidyka – not out of hunger, but as the proper ‘fuck you’ to those middle-management pricks. My anger had served me against Deer Woman’s firefly aura and nullified an entwined snake-charm on Dr. Best’s palm, anger at animal-guardian hypocrisy and guardian spirit concern confined to one particular jurisdiction. If I could stay focused on this even greater outrage for long enough …
“Okay. There’s nothing else I can change, just my head.” I looked into the sky over this empty golf course on this dreary day, gathering a sense of where the sun was. Four hours from nightfall, the sky so overcast there would be no sunset. It was about one degree above freezing now, the snow retreated to reveal green and brown across the course – but with a certain bitch’s command the temperature could be plunged.
I spoke, but not to Elder Mother. I was making a vow to myself, intuiting that it was possible for my own words to appear on my ‘template’ or ‘true body’ or whatever it was.
“Tonight I’ll get that elderberry they stole from me. I’ll make sure Nocome doesn’t try to eat it a second time. And I will find the doctor they sent into a coma – and if he gives his permission I will free him to spit in the face of those false guardian spirits.”
Perhaps it sounded heroic, selfish as it was to want to eat such a valuable soul – never mind the man with less impressive credentials languishing in his coma a few rooms over. But however it sounded, I felt extra power that was not from Nocome and not from Elder Mother either, new power from the centre of my heart twisting out and electrifying every sinew for an instant. I suddenly realized that I could feel air swirling underneath my toes, because even though the sun was still not down I was floating.
“That’s your blood talking, not the blood you stole,” Elder Mother said, though I barely heard her in my surprise.
Then I came back down to earth. There was still a new humming, dangerous tension inside me, different from the bone-wrenching power of Nocome’s attempted possession but more similar to it than to Nanabozho’s bewildering enlightenment. Those were powers that I could learn but only borrow or steal from. This was like me possessing me – the strongest and worst version of me all on my own, without another spirit’s corrupting influence.
Where did this power come from, this wrath-force? Was it ancestral power? Paradis had spoken of dying humans being able to send out their curses. Had ‘the Angry Son’ been more than a casual nickname?
And they had called me incel on top of that. In my teens I probably was a few less bad days away from massacring a school than the average moody kid, a bit more inclined to say cringeworthy shit like ‘while you were partying I studied the blade’. Now I knew the truth – while they were partying, I was hating them and jerking off. At my worst I wanted the relationships of others to fail – I never fantasied about actually having my own partner. Perhaps the growing up was incomplete: the tutelaries had mocked my effort to get stronger ‘like a human’, and that made me angry too, maybe angry in that old pouty, sullen ‘incel’ way. While they had more fun and thought that I was a wuss.
But I’d promised myself to exercise at the times I had set out and if that didn’t actually strengthen my body I didn’t care, because I was strong where it mattered in this kind of fight. When you’re actually not insecure you stop trying to prove yourself – when you actually don’t care you don’t need to show off how much you don’t care.
“I am going … to slip in there … and slip out. No massacre. I’ll sneak in and beat them awwwwwlll!” I jokingly made the last word into ‘awl’, mocking my earlier outburst.
If I broke this vow I’d die – but since only death could stop me, it was a full win, the perfect vow!
Chapter 58: Angel Eyes
Image credits: Berthold Werner, Robert Ronald McIan