Spirits Rising (6 page)

I picked up the Scotch bottle. “Any noncorrosive liquid can be used to make really good Kraft Dinner. It’s a scientific fact.”

“Scotch is pretty corrosive.” Then he said, “And that isn’t real KD.”

I looked at the generic box of macaroni and cheese. “So? It’s all the same.”

“Heathen. You haven’t really made it with Scotch, right?” He cocked an eyebrow, all Spock-like. I resisted the urge to jump him and rip his clothes off.

Words cannot express how badly I needed to punt this man out of my life.

“I lived with a couple of friends in university. The first month, I bought two cases of the cheapest no-name brand I could find and spent the rest of my grocery money on liquor.” I grinned. “Trust me when I say anything can make good KD.”

A high-pitched shriek split the silence of the night air. Jeremy jumped from the table and flipped on the porch light. Mrs. Saunders was rushing across my backyard, still wearing her multicoloured wool slippers, one hand over her heart, the other holding her cane. She was screeching like a banshee.

“Help! Demons! Dear God, help!”

I flung open the door. “Mrs Saun—” my voice died. A total melee of red-painted men clashing with the fur-and-leather men broke out behind her. My banishing had not worked.

And, worse, they’d followed me home.

I grabbed the hockey stick from my back porch closet while Jeremy flung the door open and ran to grab the old lady. I chastised myself for getting distracted by my personal life. I hadn’t listened to the other around me, and put Mrs. Saunders and all my neighbours in danger.

A woman in a square hide dress, her dark hair spiralling in the wind, sat next to my woodpile and hurled my ceramic planting pots at a burly, bearded Viking male. One pot came dangerously close to Mrs. Saunders’s head. I ran down my stairs, hockey stick gripped firmly in hand, and swung it at the back of the spirit woman’s neck.

She collapsed to the ground. Seconds later, her figure faded.

Jeremy had his arm around Mrs. Saunders by now and ran with her, his arm raised to shelter their heads from the volleys of arrows, rocks, and chopped wood from my winter fuel supply.

“Dammit,” I muttered. I’d worked hard to pack the wood pile to be ready to cure for the winter.

I grabbed the old lady’s hand and helped her up the stairs. I was surprised she’d managed to rush across the yard with only a cane. Tough woman. Mrs. Saunders staggered past me and into the house, wide eyed and breathing hard. Jeremy came up behind her.

“Look out!” I shouted as a rock hurled towards his head. He ducked and the rock sailed past him, landing harmlessly on the ground. He pushed me into the house, slammed the door shut, and flipped the switch to lock the exterior aluminum door.

“Are you all right?” I asked Mrs. Saunders.

She nodded her head, her wrinkled hand still pressed against her chest. “Spirits and demons. Shockin’. Just shockin’. ”

“What are they doing here?” Jeremy shouted, panting.

“I don’t know!” My heart thudded in my chest. “Jeremy, stay with Mrs. Saunders. I have to lock the back door.” I cursed my neighbours for getting me into the habit of never locking my doors. There is a reason to lock them: risen flesh-and-bone spirits.

I hurried about the house, locking the back door and windows. I could hear the screaming agony as a spirit battlefield stretched out across the one-road town. The cries of pain, surprise, and hate shook the ground and my soul to its core.

Even worse was the guilt of having brought these others to my sleeping village. What was I thinking? I’m not an exorcist. Hell, I’m not even a very good anything. About the only thing I excel at magically is attracting dead stalkers. What the hell was I thinking, trying a banishment spell? The only things I’ve successfully banished were individual spirits who pestered and haunted me, and most of those were just harmless, chatty types. These spirits were powerful and angry.

What would I have told Mrs. Saunders’s family if she’d been killed? Or any of my neighbours?

Come on, Rachel. Pull it together.

The spirits could still break a window and come in, but they seemed more interested in killing each other as opposed to attacking us. There was something to be said for hostilities so strong that they extended beyond the curtain of the living world.

I returned to the front porch. Jeremy had draped a large brown quilt over Mrs. Saunders’s shoulders, one he’d grabbed from my sofa that I used when I slept in front of the TV. Mrs. Saunders sat at my table and was pouring scotch into Jeremy’s coffee cup.

“Mrs. Saunders!” I chided. “This isn’t the time.”

She ignored me and kept pouring what looked like three shots worth. “Don’t tell your elders what to do.” She began drinking Jeremy’s leftover coffee-and-scotch mixture. She smacked her gums. “Not as good as the gin latte you made me.”

Jeremy stood at the door, looking through the glass. “They seem to be fighting each other.”

I peered around him. The chaos wasn’t directed at us, but rather the two factions outside. Rocks thudded against the house and I prayed none would hit a window.

Mom had suggested shining a flashlight at them, which really made no sense to me, but what did I know? I flipped on the porch lights. No effect. I opted not to hunt for the flashlight. If the halogen flood lights didn’t work, I doubted a ten-dollar flashlight from Canadian Tire was going to make that much of a difference.

I saw my neighbour’s living room lights flip on across the street. Their porch light flicked on a moment later. “Crap,” I said. “Tobe is awake.”

Moments later, pot-bellied Tobias Mercer and his teenaged sons, Dwayne and Cory, came out of the house, each with a hunting rifle.

“Get on, wit’cha!” Tobe shouted in his basso voice. “Leave ’er alone!”

A short man in loose-fitting pants and a tunic slammed against the storm door. The Plexiglas shook and I stumbled back in surprise. Even Jeremy flinched. The spirit turned, his eyes wide and pleading. He pounded on the door for a moment, before grabbing the handle and shaking it. The man shouted at us and kept looking over his shoulder. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but his frantic expression spoke for him. A piece of firewood hurled at the door and when instinctively I ducked, it hit the man’s skull. He slid down the door until out of view.

The roar of Tobe Mercer’s rifle cut through the night silence and drowned out the crashing waves for an instant.

The spirits turned on Tobe and his sons and rushed them. Mrs. Saunders still stood at the door, cringing and flinching, but glued to the scene outside. “Merciful Father.”

I scanned the room, looking for the rabbit’s-foot necklace given to me by my grandfather and the medicine bag found with my infant self. If they broke through the defences, I would need something of faith to protect us. I spied the bag beside the necklace on my cluttered desk, next to my laptop. I rushed over, snatched up both, and stepped back to the old neighbour.

Jeremy cracked the door open and shouted, “Tobias! Get back inside!”

Dwayne, or maybe it was Cory—it was hard to tell in the darkness with the porch light blinding my night vision—was knocked over by a Viking’s massive punch. The other kid swung his rifle like a club at the Viking’s head. The spirit went down, disappearing before hitting the ground.

Three native spirits dressed differently than the Beothuk spirits—these looked to be in seal skins—jumped the other kid and he went down with a scream and a curse. Jeremy grabbed the hockey stick from me and vaulted out of the house and across the street, swinging at anything in range.

“Jeremy!” I shouted after him.

My heart thudded in my chest. Sandy, my neighbour whose husband worked away in Fort McMurray a month at a time, came out in her housecoat and slippers. She had a baseball bat in her hands and smashed two Vikings on her front step.

“Sandy!” I screamed over the fighting and the endless crashing of the surf behind our houses. “Get back inside! Call the Mounties!” I glanced at Jeremy, who whacked a spirit in the ribcage. “Tell them Jeremy’s here and we need help.”

I ducked back inside and asked Mrs. Saunders, “Do you have your crucifix on?” I pulled the rabbit’s-foot necklace over my head, my hands shaking.

She held up her rosary beads in her hand. I hadn’t noticed them in the excitement.

“Good,” I said. “If they break through, we will both need to pray.”

She gave me an odd look. “You don’t believe in the Holy Redeemer, dear.”

“No, I don’t, but you do.”

Mrs. Saunders looked back outside. “Who are you going to pray to?”

“My ancestors, your ancestors.” I left off “and pretty much anyone else that’ll listen.” I didn’t want to shake the old lady’s confidence.

As I gathered my wits and focus, I collected my thoughts and began to whisper, calling the names of my ancestors. Some I’d already met, while some I’d only learned about. And then the nameless, faceless countless ones, too old and too powerful for me to even comprehend . . .  I put all that aside and called on all of them. This was not the time for hesitation.

Crushing pain pressed against my senses. I shivered, as the spirits around me turned their attention to me. Beings of spirit recognize spirit callers and many feel drawn to those whispers like moths to a flame. In my case, it was more like gawking middle-aged women to a train wreck.

Focus, dammit.

I pushed aside my insecurities, my anger, my fear. I pushed aside Mom’s voice over the phone. I ignored the feelings Jeremy stirred up whenever he came near me. I trampled the frustration and empty hurt I had over Jeremy trudging up the details of my birth. I even pushed aside the pain.

I let it all go.

I stepped into a quiet, peaceful place.

Screams and shouts echoed in the background of my senses, but I ignored them. I let them turn into the background noise, like when reading in an airport. The sounds became part of the peace.

I gathered myself and readied my senses to attract the attention of every single marauding spirit in the entire freaking area, along with every single ancestor who was listening to me.

As I opened myself to begin the calling, I noticed a change to my surroundings. They were quiet. Silent, in fact. No screams. No curses. No gunshots.

My soul soared, free from the pressure of the supernatural.

I opened my eyes, a little dizzy and chilled. I looked out through the door. One moment my yard and the area around my house was a no man’s land of spiritual warfare. Now, it was a littered mess with several of my neighbours, and Jeremy, standing in confusion.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked, not actually expecting an answer. I hadn’t called the ancestors. I hadn’t even spoken to these spirits to ask them to buzz off. There was no way I’d done this.

“Oops,” Mrs. Saunders whispered, clutching her rosary. She had dragged the kitchen chair next to me and was seated in it. I didn’t remember her doing that.

I turned to her, eyes narrowed. “You did that?”

She gave me a sheepish little grin, the one she usually gave when she passed wind at dinner.

I exhaled and ran my hand through my hair. My pulse raced, the pent up adrenaline I’d put aside now free to assert itself. I stared at the blushing woman. “Mrs. Saunders, you practice magic?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “I’m a Christian, young lady.”

I looked back outside. Jeremy was speaking with Tobe, who rubbed his elbow but looked fine otherwise. “Magic. God. It’s all the same in the end,” I whispered.

Dammit, Mom had been right. Faith was the key. If I could somehow bridge my senses with Mrs. Saunders’s . . . whatever she did, we’d create a force doubly strong. The ancestral spirits of Newfoundland would recognize two women of power. Having a very old woman, like Mrs. Saunders, might even lend some visual legitimacy to the banishing. Old people have their own kind of spiritual strength, built from decades of experience and living.

I turned to Mrs. Saunders and said, “I think I’ll need your help. You up for it?”

The old lady straightened her back just a tad, joints snapping. “I could use a little excitement. It’ll give that new priest of ours something to talk about at mass for a good month.”

God, I love old people.

Sleep didn’t come easy or quickly. I crashed in Mrs. Saunders’s spare bedroom; I didn’t want her to be alone. At least I had the comfort of knowing no one had been injured. I’d never forgive myself if one of my neighbours was hurt. I also couldn’t push down the welling gratitude over seeing Tobe and his sons coming out to my rescue. While they were outmatched against ancient spirits, they still stood out there, trying to scare them away from my house.

People always say Newfies would do anything for a person and that they are nice people. There’s hearing it and there’s seeing people put themselves in danger to protect you. I would not take these people for granted ever again.