Jumlin's Spawn (6 page)

“Yes, we do,” Yancey said, drawing a deep breath as
if to steady himself against frustration. “Let's get real here. The
three of us have always had feelings for each other. We've loved
and, yes, fantasized about each other. That kiss we shared a minute
ago should prove that to you. After you saw Oliver and me together,
you were jealous. And that's why you took off to New Orleans. ”

“Oh, now your ego has really taken titanic
proportions, Yancey –” she said.

“Deny it all you want, but it's true,” Yancey
said.

Elfie shook her head. “No, it's not true. I will not
be a pathetic third wheel in some pity sex arrangement to appease
me.”

“That's not what I mean and you know it,” Yancey
said. “I mean that we don’t want any man closer to you than we are.
We never have. That should be obvious.”

She rubbed at her more-than-weary eyes. “I'm sorry.
It's not possible.”

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is
done,” Oliver's voice piped up as he smoothed the blond stray hair
out of his eyes.

“Robert Heinlein had more patience than I do,” she
said. “I have trouble maintaining one relationship at a time.”

“You don't have relationships,” Yancey snapped. “You
have serial one-night-stands. Your longest lasting relationships
should also be fucking obvious.”

“You are talking to me about temporary
relationships?” she yelled back.

“Oliver and I changed our ways. We figured things
out. Time for you to get on board,” he said, grasping her arm
insistently and pulling her close again. “You know why you’re
scared?”

“No, I don’t; care to enlighten me?”

“Because,” Yancey said, “the idea of making love to
us scares the shit out of you. The idea would be hotter than fuck.
It would also be addictive. It would be forever. And it’d be true
love. The very idea of that terrifies you.”

She jerked her arm free. “Regardless, I said no,” she
said, reaching for the jeep's door to push it open. “I have to take
a walk. I'll be back.”

Yancey thrust an arm in her way. “Are you kidding?
You're not going out there.”

“I'm afraid I have to,” she said. “I require the use
of that luxurious open pit toilet provided by our benevolent Parks
Department.”

He moved his arm down. “Okay, but you're not going
alone. You heard Severin. There's a pack of wild dogs roving.”

“Trust me, if I see a pack of wild dogs, I will
scream. It's only sixty feet or so. I appreciate the concern, but I
can do this on my own.”

“What don’t you want to do on your own?” Yancey shot
back.

Stopping a moment, she shook off the comment without
a reply.

She stepped down into the blustery night and slammed
the door behind her. The outside wind struck her with a cold,
bracing shock to her system. Something to throw water on her inner
fire.

She had come so close to saying yes. So close to
getting into something she knew she could never, ever end. So close
that she could never tell them how close.

She walked toward the rustic hut in the near
distance.

The night around wore a haunting glow. It lent luster
to its dust devils and ghostly tumbleweeds and even to the infinity
of stars. Lightning flashed through the sky, to highlight the land
around her, but there was no rain. She looked up and down the swag
of the valley. The valley through the gorge from Old Peso to the
distant peaks. She thought the peaks might be the Angel Caves.

There appeared another, nearer mountain. She saw on
its rise what she thought at first to be lights from some campsite
– after a moment, the lights appeared life-sized. A string of them
surfaced suddenly from the dark, all glowing like marble angels in
a moonlit graveyard.

From a distance in another direction, she heard a low
burbling sound, similar to a baby's babble. It sounded the same as
the noise they had heard earlier in Duryea’s storage room.

She turned in that direction, only to see a two-foot
tall
something
toddling toward her. An animal? A small
person?

“Hi?” she said, squinting in confusion.

Its eyes gleamed with a spectral blue and pearly baby
fangs thrust over its thin black lips. It hissed, like a hungry
animal about to pounce.

She stood, ready to run, when a lowing sound, an
animal distress call, shot up out of the distance. The hissing
figure whirled around and ran in the direction of the distress
call.

Elfie damned near ran back to the jeep.

Had to be the beer. Had to be. Then, her mind started
busily transforming what she had seen into the face of a dog. Yes,
it had to be a dog…like that Severin guy had said, a wild dog.

By the time she crawled back into the jeep, she
almost believed the dog story.

“You okay?” Oliver asked, as the two men sat up on
the bunk they were sprawled across.

“Fine,” she said quickly. “I saw a dog. Maybe a wild
dog, like your friend said.” She surrendered herself onto her own
bunk, with her pillow, blanket and personal bag. “I got back here
fast.”

Yancey looked to Oliver. “I should go check it
out.”

“No, it’s okay,” Elfie said quickly, pulling her
blanket to her chin. “I think he ran away. He's gone now. Let's
just go to sleep.”

Yancey stared at her for a long moment. “Our earlier
conversation isn't over.”

“Whatever you say,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Please. Just let me sleep now. We can sort everything out after
this is all over.”

Yancey rolled back onto their bunk, as if giving
ground to her request.

As she tried to fall asleep, she made herself the
following promises: she was not in love with Yancey and Oliver, and
what she had seen was a dog. A hissing dog. A weird, strange,
hissing dog. That was all.

Soon she fell into the dreamless sleep of denial.

Chapter Three

Conversation from the night before echoed in her head
in words and whispers – “Everything is theoretically impossible,
until it is done” - “Robert Heinlein had more patience than I
do.”

They echoed until the words joined a much older carom
of sound. The images flickering past were from junior high. Chess
Club. The evening before their match against Wade Middle School's
killer chess squad. Oliver had insisted they could win.

A teenage Elfie had shaken her head sadly. “It’s
impossible, Oliver.”

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is
done,” he’d replied.

Her eyes had gazed back in frank surprise. 
“Heinlein!”

“You like Heinlein?” he’d asked, equally
surprised.

“I adore Heinlein.  You like Clarke?”

“I love Clarke!” he had said.

Oliver had been a straight-A student, a marathon
runner, the unbeaten head of the debate club, and a major
uber-geek.  How she had worshiped him from afar.  “Afar”
eventually became “up-close” when he joined her junior high chess
club, and she actually had to form coherent sentences in his
presence.  She eventually had to make ordinary light
conversation as the two of them became the club’s ranking chess
players.

Oliver had always been her personal rock star. He had
always been both her champion and her toughest critic, her best
friend and, at times, her taskmaster. The very appearance of his
face, in her younger years, would set her heart skipping over
stones. She had worshiped him then.

She was actually forming whole lucid sentences in his
presence by the day they beat Wade Middle School at chess for the
first time ever.

And that had commenced their friendship, during which
they had exchanged any number of complex sentences.  Given how
unique he was, and his mythic trappings, she had not been terribly
surprised to learn he was also Yancey’s friend.

She had known Yancey before Oliver. 

As her dreams shifted, the scene changed to junior
high and its main school hallway.  She saw herself backed up
hard against a wall of metal lockers as the usual gaggle of bully
girls snarled words into her face.  Elfie had been too slight
and slender to wage a defense.  Their words kept pounding on
her. The detail of their words didn’t matter…they made for a
hateful whirring in her head. 

In the dream, a tall young man rushed around that
corner and stuck an arm between the bully girls and the girl Elfie
once had been. 

“That’s enough,” the young man had hissed. 
“Stop it.  Now.”

That was the moment she met Yancey.  He had come
around the corner, taller than anyone she’d ever met.  
He had walked between her and the bully hive and stuck out an
arm.  Yancey drew a line in the sand she couldn’t draw. 
She had loved him immediately.

She had never seen a whole group of people turn in
unison and walk away. 

He would have been the perfect target for them if he
hadn’t been so tall.  Yancey had never hidden anything, ever,
in his life. He had known he was bisexual since his early teens, so
“half-fag” and “near-queer” were yelled at him from across the
football field.

He never flinched. He carried himself with pride.
He'd been a Sioux kid in a white jungle for long enough to know
how. And he taught her, a white girl, all the moves.

Yancey-love was demanding, overpowering, a gripping
primal force that excused nothing, allowed nothing, and held
nothing back. She loved him as much as anyone she had ever loved,
and the fact scared her.

Dreaming of the familiar, she awoke to a moment that
was instantly alien. Oliver sat beside her, reading over something.
With his blond hair in disarray, he looked every inch the
tousled-haired poetic figure of her moony girlhood imaginings.

Yancey had been right. She preferred semi-romantic
skirmishes with slight attachments over real relationships.
Midnight adventures and a morning breakfast, followed by promises
of phone calls that were never kept.

Maybe because she knew, all the time, she belonged
with Oliver and Yancey?

As she thought through the ramifications again, it
felt like every sinew in her body was tightening. Loving Oliver and
Yancey at the same time might possibly kill her, though she
imagined she would die with a smile on her face.

The jeep door yanked open. “You guys awake?” Yancey
called in. “I need to show you something.”

He walked them around to the side of the jeep, where
a small pile of cremains now lay. They hadn't been there the night
before, Elfie was certain.

“Could someone have brought them here?” Yancey asked,
shaking his head. “They sure as hell weren't here last night.”

“Someone came up to the jeep and spread ashes right
by it?” Oliver asked Yancey. “Without us noticing?”

Yancey stared down at the cremains with obvious
concern. He shook his head slowly. “No. They couldn't have. And
they wouldn't have. Not like this. Not in the opening, near a
car.”

“Maybe they aren't cremains?” Oliver asked.

“They're cremains,” Yancey said, as if at the point
of despair, “since there's a circle of consecration around
them.”

“But overnight?” Elfie asked, looking around them
until she spotted something strange just beyond where they
stood.

She walked about twenty steps away to kneel down and
study the dirt going in one direction. Splashes of coagulating
blood, tufts of brownish hair in a line pointed toward what looked
like a standup cave.

“What did you find?” Yancey asked.

“Looks like buffalo pelt,” she said. “This might
explain what I heard last night…what I saw last night…after
I…walked out.“

“You said you saw a dog,” Oliver said.

“I saw a dog…I'm pretty sure. There was very little
light, so it looked strange. It had to have been a dog, though. And
it was making a weird sound, like it was going to attack. From a
distance, there was the sound of another animal in distress. Then,
the…dog, I guess…ran away.”

“In other words, you’re not sure at all you saw a
dog,” Oliver replied.

“And you haven't thought to tell us until now?”
Yancey asked quickly.

“I wasn't exactly in the mood for conversation last
night when I came back in, was I?” she snapped. “I told you the
basics.”

Oliver looked around. “So where does the blood trail
lead?”

“Only way to know is to follow it,” she said. She
pulled up the jeep's storage bay and yanked out her tool tray bag.
“You guys focus on the cremains. I'll be right back.”

Yancey turned around to look at Oliver, and they both
turned back toward her. “Is it safe for you to go in the grotto,
you think?” Yancey asked.

She had already advanced toward the distant standup
cave. She turned around to give them a smile while she continued to
walk backward. “Yeah, I don't think I can't hurt it too badly.”

Obsidian, she recognized. The little cave was lined
with obsidian. But, the depression only went six feet or so into
the cliff. The grotto looked like a giant geode, cut open to the
light.

The blood and shredded pelt had indeed come from a
buffalo. The carcass lay there, small enough to fit inside the
grotto. It appeared to be young. Its curly brown pelt felt soft to
the touch, its skin still warm with life. The other carcass had
felt stiff from the twin effects of death and weather.  This
carcass had just bloated and started to putrefy, which became too
apparent with its overwhelming stench.   

This poor thing had fought like hell. Fought for its
life, against an enemy far stronger than it was, or so it appeared
from the butchery that had been done.

She knelt to check for life signs, but there were
none. Once again, the major arterial junctures felt deflated, empty
of blood.

Just then, she heard a too-familiar burbling sound
behind her.

She felt the presence of something by her shoulder.
She slowly looked around.

Its white face gleamed like high-fired porcelain. The
lambent blue eyes burned dark as soot at the center. The worst part
was the deadness in them, the vacancy of soul or anything remotely
human. It looked like a toddler child, its limbs pink and pudgy. It
burbled with the innocent sound of a human baby, but there was
nothing innocent about it.