Shaman's Blood (30 page)

Evil sonofabitch, deceiving her all those years. Well, she was going to make him open up all the dirty laundry, hidden agendas, buried memories, and leftover secrets still squirreled away. He might even redeem himself a little. She’d give him that option, at least.

*    *    *

Tires crunching on shell and gravel, Alice pulled into the driveway at Dunescape right at dusk. Shutting the car off, she heard Carlisle barking. That was odd. Not that he was barking, because he always sounded the alarm when people drove up in front of the house, but that he was loose in the front yard. Suzanne would have never let him outside like that by himself.

“Hey, big fella,” she said, calling to him as she got out of the car. “What are you doing outside?”

Carlisle continued to bark nonstop, jumping in little hops around a clump of weeds and grass beside the front steps, completely ignoring Alice.

“Hey, buddy, I know you’re mostly deaf, but, HEY!”

Unable to get his attention, she shut the car door and walked toward him, then froze in midstep. Even in the fading light, she could see what the dog was fixated on: the characteristic tan and dark-brown scale pattern and large triangular head were unmistakable. Carlisle had cornered the longest Diamondback rattler she had ever seen. A heavy-bodied snake under any conditions, this one was massive, with at least twenty rattle segments on its loudly buzzing tail tip. The biggest ones she’d seen in captivity were around six feet, and this one was easily that or more.

“Carlisle! Come here!” she screamed.

Having read that rattlers were sensitive to vibrations through the ground, she was afraid to move any closer, but she had to pull Carlisle out of the snake’s strike range, which for the Diamondback was more than half its body length. Alice had seen enough nature programs on television to know the basics, and she’d read up on snakes when she’d moved to the Florida woodlands. Occasionally, she’d found their calling cards, discarded molts of skin turned inside out, in the garden or along a trail. Now, everything she’d ever learned and feared about the Eastern Diamondback was materialized there in front of her.

The snake was coiling and recoiling in mesmerizing loops near the steps, hissing and rubbing its rough, ovoid-shaped scales together as its rattles buzzed an agitated warning. Carlisle barked in sharp bursts, feinting in toward the snake with little snaps of his long muzzle and then dancing away. Unlike western varieties of rattlesnakes, the Eastern Diamondback typically did not make repeated quick strikes at its prey, preferring instead to size up the target and deliver a single lethal blow, a tactic Alice hoped would give her a quick chance to dodge in, grab Carlisle by his collar, and drag him away before it decided to strike.

Breathing in short gasps, Alice took a step forward, and the snake raised its head several inches higher.

“CARLISLE you fucking mutt, come here!” she screamed, again with no effect.

Taking a deep breath, Alice rushed in, reaching for the dog just as the rattler uncoiled. Carlisle jumped in the air, and Alice saw in a flash the curved fangs unfold and thrust forward in its wide-open jaws as they flew past her face. She screamed as the rattler’s jaws fastened on Carlisle’s neck, and both fell flopping on the ground at her feet. Without another thought, she punched at the snake’s head, screaming and kicking at its body. It released the old hound and, with a swish of scales in the grass, disappeared under the house. 

“No, NO!” Alice was beside herself, holding Carlisle’s head as his tongue lolled out. He was panting fast, his front feet jerking as the venom coursed through his carotid artery. Her face bathed in sweat, Alice wiped away tears and dashed up the porch steps and into the house.

“Hal! Carlisle’s been bitten! Hal, we have to get him to a vet!” She stood in the living room for the briefest of seconds, waiting for an answer. Where was he? The room was shrouded in darkness, the final rays of sunset obscured by thunderclouds. Fumbling around for the wall light switch, she clicked it on, but nothing happened.

“Hell!” Alice felt her way to the kitchen and looked through the window toward the neighbor’s houses; all were dark, which meant the storm must have knocked out the power. She had no idea where Hal and Suzanne kept their flashlights, but she did remember that there was an oil lamp shaped like a dolphin on a shelf near the sink. She found it and the box of matches beside it, then by its flickering light she went to the kitchen phone and paged through the phone book, looking for animal hospital listings. She found several, including one with a circle drawn around it, which she assumed must be a vet Suzanne had used. She called, but got their after-hours message advising her that they were closed for the day.

Fighting back tears, Alice picked up the lamp and went back into the living room. “Hal? Are you here?”

A muffled voice came from upstairs, where his study was located. “In the bathroom … down in a minute.”

“There’s a huge rattler under the house! It bit Carlisle! I think he might die …”

Alice put down the lamp and went back outside to the old hound lying flat in the sandy yard. It was almost dark now; the rain had stopped, and a stiff breeze was blowing the shards of clouds away toward the northeast.

She bent down to lift Carlisle’s torso, and his head fell back. “Don’t die on me, dammit,” she cried, massaging his chest, but she knew he was gone.

Stricken, she sat down on the wet ground and pulled him into her lap, holding him tightly against her face. All her grief and anger and sense of loss and loneliness tied to Suzanne and her poor old dog poured out of her in wracking sobs, raking her throat and blinding her eyes. Alice cried as she had never cried in her life, with complete abandon and a sense of desolation that went far beyond the death of one dog. The pain in her throat and chest left her breathless, and yet she couldn’t stop.

Gradually coming to her senses, she wiped her eyes and smoothed Carlisle’s silky fur, wishing him farewell. She laid him carefully back on the ground, and went to face Hal. This would be a blow to him as well, since he’d planned on taking the dog with him to Miami.

She hurried back inside, wary of what lay under the porch steps, and picked up the oil lamp; it cast long misshapen shadows across the living room and over the stairwell.

“Hal? I-I’m sorry…” she called toward the stairs.

She waited, but there was no answer. What on earth, didn’t he even care about his damn dog? “Hal, this is Alice. Are you all right?” More silence.

Then she heard his muffled voice again. “Alice? … not feeling well … power’s off. Could you come up and help me?”

“What’s wrong? Should I call nine-one-one?”

“I need your help to get down the stairs.”

“All right, I’ll come up, just sit tight.” Alice frowned. She heard a thump upstairs and what might have been a couple of shuffling footsteps. That was worrisome. Hal wore a pacemaker and had weathered several past heart attacks. She imagined the worst.

Because Hal’s study was basically a conversion of the attic space, the stairs went up at a steep pitch to a landing that opened onto one large room. Under the slanted ceiling its single small window looked south toward the Gulf. Shelves and storage cabinets lined the walls to left and right as one stepped off the stairs up onto the attic floor. 

The area near the window contained comfortable furniture suitable for a man’s study. Sturdy desk, storage credenza doubling as a computer desk, lateral file cabinet, and bookcases, all in polished cherry. The few times Alice had been up in Hal’s study, it had seemed a lamp-lit, cozy place redolent of leather and pipe tobacco, mixed with other smells coming from the home improvement supplies stacked in boxes and cans in the storage areas. Some pine paneling had been installed on the south wall, but the work was unfinished and building materials lay stacked up to the low end of the ceiling.

Alice came up the narrow stairs, watching her step in the yellow lamplight, not knowing what she might find. If Hal were ill or actually having a heart attack, there was no way she could get him down the stairs to the car. She’d have to call paramedics or the sheriff’s office to transport him to a hospital. Gull Harbor wasn’t strictly rural, but it was beachfront property and sparsely built up in the area where Dunescape and other large vacation homes nestled among the sand hills. It could easily take an ambulance or other emergency responder twenty to thirty minutes to get to them.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Alice could see nothing amiss. She stepped onto the attic floor and looked across the room, holding the lamp up above her head.

Her uncle’s desk chair was empty, but he might be in the bathroom. She walked across the darkened study and knocked on the closed door. “Hal?” she said softly. “Are you in there?” The door swung open at her touch, and when she held the oil lamp up high, she saw that he wasn’t there, either.

Slowly, Alice’s shocked brain worked its way around to the realization that Hal couldn’t have called down the stairs to her because clearly he wasn’t here. But something had spoken to her, and she was beginning to suspect. Her blood ran cold as she looked around the attic, with its sloping roof and shadowy shelves. She was shaking, wondering where the damned thing was hiding.

She went back to Hal’s desk and saw a large envelope with the Gull Harbor Regional Bank logo in the corner and Alice’s name in Hal’s handwriting across the front. She reached for it, folded it once, and tucked it into her back pocket.

Then Hal’s not-quite-right voice spoke to her from the shadows just beyond the stairs.

“Dear Uncle Hal is indisposed, I’m afraid. He didn’t like my new look, scared him to death, quite literally. Didn’t even have to touch him. He wasn’t edible, either, too old and shriveled for my taste.” A shuffling, bumping noise came from the area beside a stack of boxes containing the plastic branches of Suzanne’s dismembered Christmas tree.

“I sent a friend to deal with the dog. Did you find him, I wonder?”

Alice ground her teeth. “You know I did.”

A shape darkened the space at the head of the stairs, and she caught her breath.

“Shall I show myself to you? The lovely Margaret didn’t much care for this form, but it didn’t frighten her quite as much as it did the old man.” The voice had taken on a dry, papery sound with an unpleasant click at the end of each word.

Alice was shaking uncontrollably, trying to collect her wits. She knew that blind panic wouldn’t save her, but the shape-shifter’s mention of Margaret shocked her nearly senseless.

“Why do you want to harm us? What have we ever done to you?” Alice asked, her voice breaking.

“Well, mate, that’s the big question, innit?” said the voice, adopting an Aussie accent on top of its clicking squeak. “Y’know, I thought Black Harrow would straighten things out once you opened the door for him, finding his book of spells and all that, but look what happened—whole freakin’ Sky Home comes calling. Now you can’t even find a smear of him on the landscape. What Margaret would call epic failure, I believe. His fault I’m stuck between here and there, and now, of course, it’s yours.”

“H-how?” Alice said. Her eyes searched the area of the desk and credenza for anything that might serve as a weapon. Hal’s ornate letter opener lay close by, but Alice had no intention of getting close enough to the creature for the sharp point to do any damage. The only thing available was the oil lamp in her hand, and a straw wastebasket full of crumpled papers, plastic bags, and an empty Kleenex box.

“How indeed. You figure out how to be a proper shaman,” the voice rasped from the shadows, “and release me. I’ll be gone right smart. If not, well …”

 A shiny black insect-like leg stepped out of the dark into the pool of light. Something vaguely spider-shaped, but flatter and nastier, was emerging from the shadows, its tough chitinous abdomen scraping against the floorboards and humping along like a Galapagos tortoise. Alice saw the barbed mouthparts on its head in the lamplight and nearly blacked out. In that same moment, white-hot pain lasered into her ankle and up her right leg. The barb has speared through her right ankle, hooking her fast.

Dazed, Alice fell to her knees, too traumatized to even scream. The tick-Quinkan slowly pulled her leg out toward its swaying body. Finding her voice, Alice shrieked her throat raw and rammed the lamp down into the trash basket, setting the dry contents on fire within seconds. Blind with pain and terror, she hurled the burning wastebasket directly at the head of the shape-shifter. It flinched just long enough for her to rip her foot free and careen past it to the stairwell. In a daze, she stumbled down, losing her footing and nearly falling before she reached the bottom. Scrambling to her feet, she limped toward the porch, her entire leg numb and mostly useless.

She pushed open the screen door in the dark, but then froze. The buzzing rattle of the Diamondback was somewhere just in front of her. In the light of the rising moon, the rattler was barely visible, but Alice could make out its raised its head, tasting the air with its tongue. Then it struck at her, but not far enough to connect; instead, it seemed to be herding her back toward the stairs. Undulating in liquid s-curls, it came over the doorstep and into the house.

“Hell no you don’t, you sonofabitch!” she yelled, falling over a coffee table in the dark. Unable to see the snake, she coursed the sound of its buzzing tail tip, and scrambled away in the opposite direction.

Suddenly, an explosion sent flames billowing down the narrow stairwell in a sudden wall of heat and smoke. Stunned, Alice felt her way to the kitchen, emerging out onto the back patio, where she received another shock. Hal reclined in his patio chair, clutching his shirtfront just over his pacemaker. His other hand hung limp at his side, his tumbler of whiskey shattered on the terrazzo.

“Uncle Hal?”

Alice touched his shoulder, and then fell back in revulsion, tripping and dragging her injured foot. Harold Blacksburg’s corpse wore the horrified expression of a man who has looked at a walking nightmare.

Above and behind her, Alice heard window glass breaking and turned in shock as flames climbed into the air, painting the roof red. Then she remembered that other things besides Christmas decorations were stored in the attic: several kerosene heaters and jars and cans of paint, acetone, and other flammables packed in boxes under the eaves. An old gas heater connected to the same line that fed the stove in the kitchen had been installed on the wall behind Hal’s desk. It must have been the source of the explosion.