Chapter 7: Flying Heads and Eyeballs
On this night, starting with perhaps just three hours to go, I fully appreciated the deer’s blood. There didn’t seem to be any space in the forest too small for me to pass through, between the needles of conifers, around densely packed saplings, around and avoiding twigs that would crack loudly, inside thick bushes of thorns that I never touched, and all at unprecedented speed. I seemed at times stretched and thin, not fully solid, squishing and sliding and torpedoing through the wilderness beyond the power of any human contortionist. I felt that I could appear in the headlights of a lonely driver in the dead of night and, with a single blink, go unseen as I raced.
With such overconfidence, I leaped over a second stream just before dawn. While there was no longer a crushing weight my balance still wavered, and next I had broken my right arm and cheekbone by slamming into an old oak. The pain of the hit was bright and then dimmed without disappearing. The blood in my system seemed to rush like steam into my face and broken arm, and there were somehow uncracking sounds. Healing, knitting sounds, and a brief itch. But my contented fullness was gone, and I would have to go to sleep for the coming day with a slight hunger. I had to find a good hiding spot, trusting that I had travelled far enough from the broken barn where I had met the two tutelary spirits, a distance of perhaps twenty kilometers, too much of it in a straight line.
Coming to my senses, and castigating myself for my stupid linear path, I decided that I might as well try and use it – I backtracked some distance from my path, wondering what scent if any the hunters used. They would encounter a split in whatever trail they did follow, hopefully causing confusion. A few more loops and switchbacks and a final jump off a ledge that might look like another backtrack had me down in a gully, hopefully with a tangled net of footprints and magical residue to confuse the coming hunters. I found a suitable cave down where the streams became a small patch of rapids that I crossed, and thought that the running water might further deceive the hunters should they get as far as this.
Dawn punched through clouds suddenly, sending a yellow beam down into the gully that struck the water and sparkled, hurting me more than my accidental hit on the tree. I slunk away into the cave, gliding harmlessly over sharp rocks and lying in old, lifeless mud and grit up in the shadows.
My dreaming eyes saw them clearer now. They studied the tree that I had hit, less than three kilometers from where I slept. At times words came to me.
“… force himself over with a sprint … hit tree.”
“Should be slow … broken every bone, but he left quickly, aura is light …”
So they knew that I wasn’t the pale bitch, the original vampire that they had hunted, but they chased me regardless. And whatever they tracked was an ‘aura’, not a scent.
“Close to Becancour, where the Papists might interfere.”
“He couldn’t know …”
“I think he does. Someone told him.”
“Who would …”
These voices came from blurred features that were sharpening, my mental telescope’s focus slowly adjusting. I saw … a completely ordinary man. Middle aged, sunscreen on the nose, water bottles for him and his crew. No leathery badasses covered in swords. And he was white, which confused me further – but lots of people will claim to have a minuscule fraction of native ancestry.
I wanted to know: how did they plan to kill me?
A second figure was an elderly woman, and I realized it was the crone from the student residence. She was hunting me in sandals, bending down to touch my footprints, then touching the stream that I had crossed, worrying her bottom lip with her stained teeth.
There was a third figure that wasn’t coming into focus like the first two. But I knew that it seemed big. Bear-big. And it looked ‘up’ as I peered down on them.
“He is a true Flying Head. He’s watching us now.”
There should have been fear, outright panic … but somehow I held my glare back. The Flying Head monster in the legend of these tribes was said to detach from a human’s corpse, a metaphor for the roaming psychic presence that could watch while the undead monster’s body rested during the day. Not knowing this then, I instead thought of the villain in my favorite novel: Randall Flagg, sending his Eye out to survey the land, to find the spies sent from the Boulder Free Zone. And I could aspire to that level of diabolical power – because Randall Flagg, like me, had been born human.
“You’re a little smart. But that won’t matter,” the blurred, bear-big shape said.
An old part of me, a silly part, tried to develop retorts. A new part of my mind, the part that had extracted a real price out of Clodd, made me silent. Or ‘silent’, whatever that means in dreams or remote viewings.
“You know not to talk, as I could follow a voice. That monster instinct is really kicking in, kid. Soon you’ll be unwrapping people like candy bars.”
An appeal to my waning humanity, my new self suggested. Typical.
“Who told you to go to the river?”
I did not answer.
“I said, who told you to go to the Becancour river?”
My new self was numbing, fading, not quite strong enough. My vulnerable human mind was left alone, a less competent driver. “Palantir,” I said in confusion. Another distraction that was actually a connection. I would not crack. This guy was trying to play the older villain with an evil Eye: Sauron, using the Palantir to torment Pippin, trying to find the location of the One Ring.
“He’s near … a white tree.” But the bear-big blur sounded doubtful. Did he know the story, the story that had flashed in my mind, that had accidentally distracted the hunter from seeing in my mind the gully and the rapids and the cave where I really hid?
“No birches around here …”
My dream sense untangled, my flying head returning home.
Chapter 8: Taking
Image credits: Theo Segonds, Canadian Forestry Association