Stoneskin's Revenge (19 page)

Not that there weren't a few points on his side, too; 'cause, depending on when the authorities finally decided the murder had been committed, there were several people who could testify to his presence elsewhere. Oh, true, as far as anyone beyond his partners-in-crime on the quest knew, he'd last been
seen
in or around Stone Mountain on Monday morning. (His last actual contact with anyone else prior to that had been with the clerk at a convenience store in Winder.) After that he'd been in various Otherworlds until sometime the following night (it was a little hard to tell exactly, because time ran differently in Galunlati) when he'd linked up with Uncle Dale again near Crawfordville and headed south with him to Cumberland Island, where they'd joined up with David once more. That had been Tuesday morning, and there were plenty of people around who could prove it—like the ferryman down at Cumberland, like the waitress at the seafood place, like the cashier at the Magic Market. Like the cops themselves.

So maybe there was hope after all.

The tough part, then, was going to be accounting for his whereabouts Tuesday evening.

And there were still two other questions: who or what had killed that little girl, and were his two erstwhile companions still okay?

And one thing was for sure, he'd not find any answers by hiding behind trees feeling sorry for himself and practically begging to get caught.

*

By the time he made it back to camp, Calvin had an idea and had already collected most of what he needed. It shouldn't take long either, and that was a blessing, because he had pretty much decided that as soon as he could, he really did need to go back and check on the goings-on at the stone circle.

As quietly as he could, he slipped down into the sinkhole and snagged Brock's empty backpack, wishing he had time to zip back to base and retrieve his own. A pause to check on the runaways and to retrieve his shirt and socks, and he was merging once more with the night.

When he was maybe ten yards out, he set his plan in motion. A stick from a cypress tree—one of the plants of vigilance—made do for a wand, and with it he began scratching a circle in the leaves and moss and undergrowth completely around the camp—far enough out, he hoped, that he would make no noise beyond the low chanting he had begun under his breath: a spell Uki had taught him the last time he'd spent any time in Galunlati.

Yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi,

Yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi—Yu!

Sge! Ha-nagwa hinahunski tayi. Ha-tasti-gwu gun-skaihu. Tsutatalii-gwatina haluni. Kunigwatina dulaska galunlati-gwu witukti. Wigunyasehisi…

It was not precisely a charm of protection. Uki had told him that it had originally been used to “frighten storms.” But it had the
effect
of turning things aside from a certain path, and with a wording change here and there Calvin thought it would suffice to detour snoops from the camp at least long enough for him to get a better idea how the land lay back at the scene of the crime.

Fortunately, the chanting made the scribing go faster, so it was not long at all before he had completed the first part of his work. It wasn't a perfect circle, for he had to zig around a tree or two, but it seemed adequate. The next stage was simpler: four lines leading inward from the cardinal directions, making what Uki called a Power Wheel, except that the center was incomplete. Finally, Calvin set sticks at the four points of the compass and marked them with scraps of cloth torn from his clothing: blue from his jeans for the north, white from his socks for the south, bandanna red for the east, and T-shirt black for the west.

A repetition of the chant at each quadrant, a final one for good measure, and Calvin stepped into the Wheel, feeling, to his relief, a gentle tingle of Power there.

Only one thing left to do now, and that was a thing he dreaded.

Following the by-now-monotonous procedure, Calvin removed his clothes. But instead of simply abandoning them as he'd often had to do before, he bundled them into Brock's backpack and arranged the straps into a very wide loops around his neck—loops hopefully wide enough that they would not choke him when the
change
came.

The rest was almost too simple, and the ease with which the transformation was accomplished took Calvin by surprise. Eyes closed, one hand on the scale, and think what it was like to be a deer, then the pain, and the shifting and the pulling, and the distortion of vision, the dulling of some senses, the sharpening of others, and the falling onto all fours.

The pack was too tight, though, and he almost gagged before he managed to shake it into a looser configuration. As prepared as he'd ever be, Calvin trotted away.

And Brock, who had heard him and followed him, and had seen everything, sat alone in the night for a very long time, his mind awash with wonder.

*

Even in deer shape, it took Calvin longer than he'd hoped to make his way back to the clearing, though mostly that was due to problems with the form he had chosen. He'd tried to transform gradually, so as to keep his own thoughts in control. But what he hadn't counted on was that there would be other whitetails about that this body would scent and want to investigate, which made the animal consciousness want to assert itself even more strongly. There were a
lot
of deer in Georgia, too: about one for every five people, he thought. But he hadn't counted on ever inhabiting a body that wanted to get to know them on a one-to-one basis—and certainly not one that could tell a buck from a doe from a fawn by smell alone.

He was having trouble with his antlers, too. Apparently the
change
more or less translated you into your equivalent age and the appropriate physical aspect for the season which meant that Calvin's head was crowned with the half-grown rack of a very healthy two-year-old stag—still growing, still in velvet, but already starting to itch.

And another, though very different, concern was that the weird thrumming in the ground kept starting up and then stopping again, and
that
he did not understand at all. It smacked of magic, but what kind? For that matter, what sort of magic could there
be
in Willacoochee County? Most places had some kind if you looked deep enough for it, he'd discovered. But how would it manifest around here? He didn't know squat about Yuchi mythology, except that it was apparently fairly close to Creek, and therefore Cherokee. As for the Spanish, who'd come and gone from the coastal isles before the English arrived and stayed—who knew what kind of weirdness
those
poor little monks had practiced when the loneliness and the swamp fevers got to them.

Maybe the thrumming was connected to the little girl's death.

But how?

He was still pondering that question when keen whitetail hearing caught the first distant sound of voices talking excitedly. Almost certainly the sheriff he'd encountered yesterday, he decided as he crept closer. And probably the guy who'd gone off at a run, whom he suspected of being some kind of law-enforcement type as well. There was also the 'coon hunter who'd remained behind, and another man, whose voice was smoother and a little more cultured, along with another whiny-voiced man, and what sounded an awful lot like a woman giving vent to frequent bouts of high-pitched hysterics.

Gotta watch it now,
as he crept closer, taking what advantage he could of the frequent shadows and wishing he could get rid of the blasted backpack, since it made movement awkward and noisy. Noise was the key thing, too, because Calvin had hunted enough deer to know that you heard a lot more of them than you saw. Shoot, he'd once watched a whole herd of them wander to within thirty feet of him and spread out across practically his whole field of vision. But so effective was their camouflage that even when he knew they were there he had a hard time distinguishing them from the surrounding forest. It had been sound that had tipped him off to their presence then; he had to be careful that
he
did not make the same mistake himself.

A few steps closer, and he could finally see somewhat, smell better, and hear well enough to make out even whispers.

What he saw was the rock-girt clearing—only the five people clustered beside the farthest boulder didn't seem at all impressed by the fact that there shouldn't be stones like those in south Georgia. Understandable, given the circumstances.

He'd been right about their identities, too: there was Sheriff Lexington, plus Larry the hunter and Rob the policeman, all of whom he had seen before. But there was also an unsavory-looking skinny guy he didn't recognize, also in Sheriff's Department togs—and a thin, attractive, thirtyish woman, who seemed to be sticking close to that Rob fellow, even though the sheriff was asking her a lot of questions. They kept calling her Liza-Bet, and from the way she was carrying on, Calvin guessed she was the dead child's mother.

The sixth person—who was nowhere
near
a monolith—was a heavyset man of indeterminate age, but old enough to dress with no attention to style and to be bald. He had just set down a video camera with which he had evidently been preserving the whole grisly tableau for posterity, and was now kneeling beside the body and muttering to himself at a furious rate, mostly things like, “Yeah,” and “Okay,” and “Hmmm,” and then quite suddenly and much louder, “Now
that's
odd.”

“What is?” the sheriff wondered. “You got somethin', Bill?”

“Maybe.”

“Well don't keep us in suspense, boy; spill it.”

The man looked up but did not rise. “You're
sure
you found this body just like this?” he was evidently addressing the hunter.

The man nodded vigorously. “Just like that. Just exactly like that.”

“And you didn't notice anything strange about the body?”

“Nothin' beyond what you see. Rob'll vouch for me there.”

The red-haired man escaped Liza-Bet and wandered over to peer over the bald man's shoulder. “What'cha found?”

“Well,” Bill said slowly. “Now don't quote me as gospel here, and I won't know for sure till I can get her back to the morgue, but I've been examinin' this body as best I can and…well, this is gonna sound mighty strange, but…uh, well, the fact is that I…I can't find no liver.”

“What the hell?”

“No, come here, sheriff, and feel for yourself if you don't believe me.”

“I'll take your word for it; 's what we pay you to be coroner for.”

“Okay, then…well, see, it's like this: your liver sorta sets down below your ribs on the right-hand side. It's pretty big, and on a moderately skinny person like this poor little child is, anybody that knows what he's doin' can feel it.” He paused, as if for effect. “Thing is, when I do that to her, all I can feel is…nothin', just a hollow place. It's like something's
removed
her liver, sheriff; taken it clean away without makin' hardly a mark on her body.”

“You're shittin' me!”

“Not on your life, sir. There ain't no liver, and the only sign I can find of how it might have vanished is this little slit of a thing over on her side. Can't see it too good in this light's the problem.”

“Oh Lord,” the sheriff moaned. “Not only've we got us a goddamned serial killer here, but we've got one that mutilates his victims.”

“There was Satanic paraphernalia they found up where that Indian boy's daddy died, 'member?” the skinny guy whined.

“So I've heard,” Robert inserted. “And there may be another victim as well, if what they said about that woman up in Jefferson's true…”

But Calvin did not pay heed to the rest. Something the coroner had said had set his mind to working feverishly, as if a key piece to a puzzle had just been found, which only required turning the right way in order to fit.

No longer caring if he was seen or not, Calvin turned and bolted, noting with a bit of amusement the shouts and exclamations that followed, the loudest and clearest of which was the sheriff's: “Aw, shucks, Bill, it wasn't nothin' but a goddamned deer.”

Goddamned deer indeed!

That goddamned deer was running lickety-split away from there as fast as it could, with its brain awash with ideas that were right on the verge of coming together but wouldn't. It was the deer instincts reacting to strong emotions with a desire for flight, Calvin's human aspect knew. But by doing so, it was also muddling the finer points of his reason.

Which meant he had to change back if he was going to accomplish anything at all.
That,
in turn, meant he had to get a good ways off.

Before long though, Calvin had found an appropriate place: a dogwood thicket fringed with palmettos.

Except that to return to his own shape he had to prime the scale with blood while thinking about how it felt to be a man. And maneuvering a scale around so that it could poke you enough to draw blood wasn't easy when you were a quadruped and had hooves. Last time had been an accident: a lucky adjunct of his half-delirious thrashings. This time he
had
to do it—but how?

Sliding his neck up and down against a tree with the scale between, hoping to impale himself on one of the scale's three points, didn't work—mostly because of the pack that was hanging awkwardly around his neck. Attempting the same thing on the ground didn't succeed either, for the same reason plus the fact that the scale tended to dig into the soft soil. Finally, in desperation, Calvin bit his tongue hard enough for the blood to trickle down his jaw and reach the talisman. Hopefully that would be enough to at least get the transformation started. Truly he hoped that, and was gratified when he felt the beginning of the
change.