Chapter 6: The Water Cure
When night four began I had two followers as I left the barn’s cellar to walk the unkempt fields and then the woods filled with chirping frogs and fireflies, looking for a tiny stream. I smelled the faint copper tint of running water nearby, but the tutelary spirits didn’t even need to sniff around.
“This one will do!” Fox Man said, hanging back and seeming unbothered when I idly consumed a hare, pinching its brains out of its mouth and nose and eyes with the ease of breaking a grape. I would need no more tonight, I thought, for last night’s deer had been big and fresh.
Feeling full with a part of the hare’s hindquarters left, I tossed it to the fox that the spirit was possessing, guessing it should be ‘paid’ as well.
“Over here, monster,” Raccoon Man said. The fox gobbled up the scrap of hare.
The tiny trickle sliding between the trees to a small ledge of granite was still enough to pull me down, and I had to crawl on hands and knees to reach the water. I was a bit stronger, I thought, not panicking for the moment – but I would have to maintain this position for far longer now. My palms were sinking into the mud, and my elbows and neck were straining – not hurting, but starting to work. I’d done a few isometric exercises as a human, and tried to summon a part of that old mindset.
“When I piss myself, no laughing.”
Fox Man cackled. Raccoon Man’s old coon avatar leaped across the stream in an obvious show of my inferiority and hunched down, staring into my face with sharp eyes inside that mask pattern of white and black.
Lowering my head, my chin touched the cool stream. The additional, pinching weight was immediate. And when my lower lip sank under the surface, I felt like I was drinking something heavier than mud. I was trying to drink tar, and I was going to choke. I wasn’t enough strong enough to gulp it down. This was impossible.
Damn that. I was not human anymore – I did not need to breathe. Suffocation and drowning had always been my greatest fear in mortal life, but now it was just fear, not death. I did not need oxygen, and I’d had some blood. But the deer from the previous night was still sloshing around inside me, so I didn’t need to drink, I thought with my attempt at calm unraveling. I didn’t want to drink, certainly not this, and I was so full.
I gulped once. It made me even heavier. My neck was straining, but if I relaxed I would dunk my head. Again, a bigger gulp. The pain had to fade, it had to.
But my insides started to burn after the third gulp.
I tried to make my mouth and throat work automatically so that my mind could wander, and maybe even black out. But I thought of medieval tortures, and this was the water cure. This was being put to the question. A sensation like waterboarding, like drowning made to start and stop and start again. An appropriate fate for a blood-drinker, of course. Fox Man might begin cackling as he saw me realizing his trick, too late.
Can you hear my thoughts, Clodd?
Fox Man’s puppet yipped happily, licking its bloody lips. “You’re thinking of Tod, from The Fox and the Hound. Would you like me help ‘talk’ you through this?”
Both … please. The fifth gulp was brutal. What was already inside me was pushing back. I couldn’t think of a better name for Raccoon Man.
“Azeban,” the voice from the stretched jaw said, resigning itself to this half-psychic conversation.
Eighth gulp. Something was going to break inside me soon.
Nope … you shall be Azkaban. Azkaban and Clodd. Deer Woman needs a name if we meet … Bambi. no, Bambi was male …
“Then I can start calling you Flying Head,” Raccoon Man retorted, crossing his animal’s paws. If my mockery meant nothing to him, his mockery only confused me as well. ‘Flying Head’ would turn out to be the popular translation of the names for what Europeans called ‘vampire’ among this particular tribe of guardians.
I had stopped counting gulps by now. The simultaneous feelings of choking, vomiting and constipation made the attempt at a distracting conversation more sluggish and incoherent.
Like with … cyanide … little doses to build up … tolerance … maybe works … old story of king who did that then … couldn’t die when he … tried suicide … which sounds great, right now.
“I know that story from your white tribe,” Fox Man chattered happily. “Mithridates. Sixth of his name. But this might be more like getting rust on your liver as an experienced drinker.”
Ring of salt stopped … Drac’s wives. Should try potato chips next.
Outside my tiny window of awareness, my bloated body was rumbling, churning, surely about to soil itself from both ends. There was a ripping sound, tissue and pants together.
“Thar she blows!” Fox Man cried.
“Disgusting,” Raccoon Man mumbled. “I know of a Flying Head fiend like you once forced to consume salt. It melted and stank up the spot where it died for years. Don’t do it anywhere nearby.”
Thanks … think some … Chinese emperor … tried to live forever on … mercury … tricky business.
I was definitely squirting in every way a person can squirt, front and back, eyes and ears and nose too. But the huge pressure in my body was gone, and it felt like a tight spring releasing. I gasped like a fish, rearing up, mouthing soundlessly to the crescent moon above.
I had reared up.
No. I was floating, like little Regan, my hair and tattered clothes waving around me.
I turned in the air, half-willing it, putting my bare feet down. Blood and bile streamed down my legs, as if I had given birth like some farm animal, but I felt almost no weight at all still. I looked down at the stream.
I stepped over it. There was a wavering of my balance … but no oppressive weight now came.
“Good … good.”
Fox Man peered up at me, the small grin under that sniffing muzzle not exactly impatient or demanding. He knew I wouldn’t forget.
“So now … I make my vow. No foxes, killed or fed upon. Not sure if a hand over the heart matters for things like me.” I managed to smile, though just moving my lips took effort. “But what do you really offer, Clodd?”
The fox’s head tilted in confusion.
“I didn’t forget the terms. You gave me this water cure for free, to counter the stinginess of Azkaban over here. And you giving good word on me to Deer Woman is not acceptable at all: if your eyes, ears and mouth can come out of these animals, she must watch the deer in a similar way. So she already knows that I simply finished off the deer struck by the truck. You’ll have to give me something of value for my vow.”
Raccoon Man was making a strange noise, a deep purring that was interrupted with hiccups. This was laughter, at his colleague’s expense.
Fox Man barred his creature’s teeth briefly, then sneezed. “Tricking tricksters usually doesn’t end well.”
I ignored the threat. My introductory sense of how these entities worked suggested that there would never be something as simple as a shot in the dark – if Fox Man wanted to get me back, it would be an intricate plot. It would be me shooting myself, somehow, with time for him to gloat at the end.
“Ingesting salt would just melt me, he said. So what other things can improve me, like this water cure?” I grinned back fiercely. “A garlic enema?”
“That would only make you run around screaming,” Raccoon Man said reasonably. “For garlic, resistance in your kind usually only comes with age. But silver can be worked against with gradual exposure like running water. Slower, though. Use tiny amounts, they’ll weigh you down and burn you at first.”
“Stop it!” Fox Man growled. I realized that Raccoon Man was eliminating easy options, trying to make Fox Man really pay up.
“Salt, water, garlic, silver, all crossed off,” I told Fox Man with a gleeful hint of threat.
“There’s only one more general problem you can help me with.”
The red fox before me scowled and shook his head. “You mean the sun. That magic is beyond me.”
I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up, but I continued. It was strangely easy to know immediately what I wanted – perhaps there would be a mental change after all, turning me appropriately greedy for blood and all else I wanted. “Then there’s a specific problem: Deer Woman. Keep her off my back. There seems to be a whole lot of politics and backstabbing in this spirit world, so … think of my vow as protection money.”
Fox Man’s glowering silence was perhaps a silent yes. A temporary indignity.
“I’m going to have to hear your ‘yes’ if it’s a yes, Clodd. If not I could make things open ended.” I changed my voice to make an awful impression of a weak-voiced old man. “Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me-“
“You have your ‘yes’.” Fox Man actually made his avatar spit on the ground afterward, an odd thing to see a fox do. The narrowed eyes rolled over to the old coon. “This is half your doing.”
I decided to use Raccoon Man’s proper name. Catholics and Micmacs might be used against each other, but this was my first real exercise in navigating this dangerous spiritual world, at least as dangerous as the world of Don Corleone. “Now, given Azeban’s first warning, I should be running hard to make it to that DMZ boundary at the river. I can’t say it was a pleasure doing business, as my guts still ache … but thanks, both of you.”
“We’ll be watching,” Raccoon Man said solemnly. “You’ll need to run hard, they are close already … but that deer will help.”
Fox Man’s old mood stirred back to life. “I’ll send a little psychic hunting horn into your ears when the dogs are hot on your heels.”
The pain of the water cure had faded further, and as the sensation and disorientation left my senses were finally noticing the danger feeling. The goosebumping skin, the chill when I looked to the south, not even knowing why I had suddenly turned in this direction. But I knew. Whoever they were, they were much closer now, after I had spent most of tonight gurgling and pissing, and I had at most one day left.
Saluting them both, I then ripped the air, hurling myself to the northeast.
Chapter 7: Flying Heads and Eyeball
Image credits: Peter Trimming