Caroline sank into airline hell, a three-hundred-pound woman overflowing the aisle seat next to her and a Hispanic family with five young children yammering a mile-a-minute ahead and behind and around her ears because the dinky noisy shaking turboprop only had two seats per row. And the fat lady smelled like she hadn't bathed in at least a month. Soaked herself in cheap cologne instead.
No, "fat lady" is rude. Not acceptable language. She's "gravitationally challenged" or some such euphemism. Airline still should have made her buy two seats instead of giving her half of mine for free.
Caroline was feeling bitchy. Grandmother Loon hated takeoffs and landings.
She faced at least twelve hours of airline seats and terminals, Flagstaff to Phoenix to Charlotte to Philadelphia to Naskeag Falls, with a half-hour dash between gates in Charlotte where she would probably miss her connection. And if she made it to Naskeag Falls in one piece, odds were that her baggage would wind up waiting on the unclaimed rack in Vladivostok.
Well, she had underwear, sweaters, and another pair of jeans in her carry-ons. And all her research stuff and laptop. She'd learned. The hard way.
She leaned against the cool plastic of the cabin window and tried to blank her mind. The sere brown tortured landscape wheeled under her as the plane banked from takeoff, snaky lines and tufts of pinyon and lodgepole crowning the mountains, sketching the ridges, and she let herself sink back into the canyonlands where she only had to worry about dying from rattlesnakes or thirst.
Death. Grandmother Walks was dead.
For some reason, Caroline remembered the winter solstice last year, walking and climbing through the frozen hours before sunrise, the smell of stone damp with the winter cold and scattered windblown snow, deep in a canyon narrow enough, overhung enough, to be next thing to a cave. Darkness and icy stars in the fog of her breath and then the wash of false dawn. Silence, broken only by the night calls of owl and coyote and the furtive rustlings of small bodies fleeing through dry brush. The bitter sweetness of herbs smoldering in a bowl, sage and juniper and the sweetgrass she'd brought from Maine that told the spirits a new People had joined the quiet waiting.
Standing. Waiting. Her fingers and toes turning numb just like December at home. And then a single ball of light, the first rays of the sunrise, red on red sandstone, dropping in birth from the belly of a pregnant petroglyph that could have sheltered there for twice a thousand years. Five women chanted the songs that welcomed a new child, a new season and year, into the world. That was how Caroline remembered Grandmother Walks.
She'd never told that tale, never written it up for a paper in some anthro journal, points toward her Ph.D. Never mentioned it to Professor Stevens or Dean Johnson. 'That young woman needs to decide whether she wants to be an anthropologist or an Indian.' Well, that ritual was Indian business, not for publication.
Wasn't the only secret she'd kept. The official reason for her trip was collecting data for Professor Stevens' study on pottery diffusion. He'd fry her ears if he knew about a couple of complete bowls she'd seen. Including the one that had held the herb smudge for that ceremony. Whiteware, clay fired in a reducing atmosphere rather than the more common red that came from excess oxygen working on trace iron in the clay. Black figuring.
Most of the whiteware, redware for that matter, any decorations were geometric and sharp — straight lines, bands, zig-zags, triangles, that sort of thing. One particular potter or small group of potters, one site, had done curves. Had done incised figures using a cactus spine. Had worked subtle differences in the form and substance of the pot, the bowl, might even have used something like a potter's wheel instead of building coil pots and smoothing them.
They'd done chemical analysis on some shards, proving the work all came from the same clay bank, the same pigments in the decoration. It had been almost an industry, for a short time and long ago, a single source and enough production to give her data. And the wares had been prized enough to become trade items before the industry, the family, died out. Prized enough and distinct enough that a trained eye could spot them at a glance. Her trained eye.
Working from shards, she was plotting the distribution of the work of a single pottery rather than a culture. Trade routes, contacts and alliances, common ritual, those shards might speak insights about forgotten people far beyond a common piece of fired clay. Professor Stevens obsessed over that study to a point just shy of psychosis. Or maybe past it.
She'd seen bowls by that hand, complete bowls, well outside the distribution pattern they had plotted. And she'd never mentioned them to him, because their location and use were no white man's business. No man's business, no matter what his skin color.
“That young woman needs to decide whether she wants to be an anthropologist or an Indian.” Well, on some things she was going to stay Indian and they could just go fuck themselves.
Anyway, the study made the official reason for her trip. For unofficial reasons, she had a swarm of motives for flying a few thousand miles on her own dime so she wouldn't feel guilty about wasting scarce grant money on chasing wild geese. In no particular order, there were the hunt for the Hunter, a dozen problems of Aunt Alice's including a lover's spat with Aunt Kate, Gary feuding with various parental Morgans and maybe hurt and hiding. Ol' Tomcat Ben was acting weird, tangled up with eldritch relics of the elder gods, probably involving tentacles. Bad string of emails and phone calls.
And she needed thinking space. With Grandmother Walks dead, Arizona had lost a lot of its savor. Grad school had lost a lot of its savor. All that petty-ass politics and pressure, all those elbows in her space, the sense of being an Alabama sharecropper going hat-in-hand to beg seed money for next year . . .
And everything was dry and dusty and hot. Did Kenny Grayeyes make up for that? Grandmother Walks sure hadn't thought so.
Thinking space. She squirmed away from the sweaty bulk overflowing the next seat and dreamed about paddling to an island in a crystal mirror lake, loons calling, clear icy water you could dip up in your hand and drink.
They'd just taken off, she still felt Kenny's good-bye hug warm on her ribs and back and butt, and already she missed him. This was going to be hard.
*~*~*
"Look, they've got me covering two jobs. Okay if I just lock you in and come back in a couple of hours?" Anita Schwartz looked harassed, a typical grad assistant's expression. "Say, twelve o'clock? Lunch?"
Caroline wrinkled her nose in sympathy, glanced at her watch, and nodded. "Yeah, that'd be fine. The shelving system looks straightforward, and I have the catalog right here."
Anita was a stroke of luck. Caroline actually knew her, they'd taken undergrad courses together back at the good ol' alma mater before following different grad school tracks, and she wasn't a university bureaucrat or a rules-bound docent volunteer whose time cost nothing. The anthro world tended to be something of a small town clique, always tripping over old friends and enemies. That hadn't stopped Anita from searching Caroline's laptop bag and satchel, pausing for a moment to drool over the fancy digital camera.
But Caroline and her baggage were as innocent as the day was long. Forget the fact that the days were growing shorter and shorter this far north.
Anita turned to go, paused, and turned back. "Hey, I mean lock you in for real. These doors don't have panic bars, and you need a key both sides. Not a public space. But we've got a sprinkler system, and nothing down here would burn, anyway. Just, you won't be able to get to a powder room if you feel the urge. You okay?"
Caroline consulted her bladder. No coffee since an early breakfast . . . "Yeah, that's fine. I'll make it."
And with that, Anita was gone, striding away with the air of somebody who really needed to be somewhere else half an hour ago, doors clicking and banging with the finality of a jail. Which was just peachy keen as far as Caroline was concerned. She busied herself with unpacking the camera, a compact tripod, the centimeter reference stick and grids, and a few squares of black and gray velvet that she used for photo backdrops. There was no work table in the storage vault, but the floor would do fine for what she needed.
Grandmother Walks' voice whispered in Caroline's head, "The. English. School. Gives. You. Nothing." Wrong, Grandmother. They give me the keys to places like this. Get my degree, and I have a license to poke my nose into all sorts of interesting places. Research. Union card.
The basement under the Memorial Gym even smelled like the trash-bin of history, stale dusty air and old concrete and a taint of moth crystals. One reason Anita was so casual, the whole department was so casual, about this place, was there was damn-all here worth stealing. The Big U didn't even bother with security cameras down here, far as she could tell, just locks and perimeter alarms. Which was also peachy keen. All the good stuff was either on display or in the active research collection. This was potsherds and stone flakes and archaeological GOKs, "God Only Knows."
And maybe, just maybe, a wooden doll ugly enough to curdle new milk at forty paces. If Grandmother Walks' source was right.
But Caroline started down her list in catalog order just as if someone was watching, pulling out cardboard storage trays and sorting through the shards, museum gloves on, browsing the field notes that went with them, finding misses rather than hits nine times out of ten. A few bits of whiteware, Keet Seel 1937, nothing to show they fit her search template. A whole pot, whiteware, a couple of anomalies that might relate, so she set it on the gray velvet with the ruler and shot five frames from various angles and put it back in its bin.
But that one had been bought at a trading post back in the hills, not dug up in situ and tied to a provenance. Pain in the butt, the sort of thing her father did.
She worked down her list and along the bins to G-53 and its contents, allegedly collected in Texas in 1937. Pulled it out casually, as if misreading the label. Looked inside.
Dirty brown wooden semi-face, looked like someone had gouged eye-sockets and nose and chin and the suggestion of a neck out of a rotten pine branch using a dull rock. Close to a corpse two weeks drowned and chewed by crabs, and she'd seen one washed up on the cobble beach near Aunt Alice's. Clothing to match, a muddy dress ragged like it had been caught in a flash flood out in some canyon.
She reached down to touch it, feel the reality of the calico dress. It felt warmer than the storage vault. God damn, that thing was whopped hard with the ugly stick.
"The world of the dead is an ugly place, child of water. That is why spirits will do ugly things to escape it."
Caroline swallowed a scream and came within an inch of climbing the storage rack. She had been alone in here, three layers of doors locked behind her. Now her right side prickled as if she stood next to a high-voltage line. She took a deep breath and turned.
The generic Indian woman stood there, feet not quite bothering with the floor. The Hunter.
Caroline let her breath escape and captured another. She blinked, swallowed, and forced her fisted hands to open. If she hadn't studied under Aunt Alice for more than ten years, she'd be fainting right about now. As it was, the world had turned a bit fuzzy around the edges and cold sweat trickled down her back. Another breath, concentrate, keep oxygen flowing through the lungs and into the blood and up to the brain.
"So this is the one?"
"This is what you hunt."
"If you can show up here, why do you need me?"
"You had to find it for me to follow, and wood cannot move itself."
Surreal. "Why don't you move it?"
The generic Indian woman stood there, eyes narrowed, and studied Caroline from head to foot. Studied her sort of the way Aunt Alice would study a slug she'd found on one of her antique rose bushes. Cross-cultural folklore lesson number one — It's generally a bad idea to piss off God.
Time to grow up and quit being a smart-ass teenager. Caroline swallowed again, her mouth painfully dry. This "woman" ate souls.
*~*~*
Second session, after lunch, 'twere best done quickly; Caroline had met Anita after an extra hour to chase down a couple of pieces of wood to prop up subjects for the camera. And again, she'd been left alone to do her tedious and mostly wasted research. This so-called anthropologist she was tracking hadn't been much interested in data, just artifacts, and "pretty" ones, at that. Only reason the Hunter was here was that it was an oddity. A GOK. Caroline muttered under her breath, comments on ancestry, personal habits, and probable destination of "pot hunters." Like her father.
Pine wood. The Hunter had insisted on chunks of pine, close to size and weight of the artifact. It would be better if they'd been lodgepole like the original, but white pine trim would have to do. Odds were nobody would ever bother to examine the grain with a microscope. And if they did, a "Negro obeah" could be northern wood and nobody would care.
Cotton cloth for padding, and a bit of hemp twine to tie the wood into a makeshift frame. Anita had sorted through the additions and logged them in without a quibble. As long as Caroline didn't take anything out of the vault that she hadn't taken in, the Big U didn't care. Garbage in, garbage out.
And Caroline built the frame and padded it and displayed a whiteware bowl on it at the best angle to photograph the decoration, so everything checked out. And she photographed the rest of her meager gleanings, little more than a footnote on Professor Stevens' research, nothing to justify airline hell, and put the last of the artifacts away.
Hair prickled on the back of her neck. She turned, and the generic Indian woman stood there.
"You have finished."
Caroline took a deep breath and forced some steel into her spine. This was as bad as wakening the Spring in Aunt Alice's cellar. What ever gave her the idea that being a witch was fun? "I have finished."
"Bring wood and cloth and twine. Place them next to the Hunter."
She played a good little girl, an unaccustomed role, and did as she was told. The doll lay on the vinyl floor tiles, next to a couple of one-by-fours and the other stuff, and her sight blurred and the one-by-fours lay on the left instead of on the right.
Well, that solves that problem.
She'd been winging it and had thought she'd have to take a bunch of photos of the doll and carve a substitute to leave behind, however she managed to make the substitution. Getting it in, getting the Hunter out, those were questions she'd been going to answer once she'd cased the joint, once she even knew that she'd found her goal. Answers that probably involved Gary, at a minimum, and maybe other Morgan resources.
The Hunter didn't need Morgans. Just needed a set of human eyes, human hands, human feet to order around. Nice work, being some kind of god.
Just do what the nice Spirit Woman tells you, and nobody will get hurt.
She picked up the one-by-fours, now tied up in a bundle with the twine and cloth. They felt hot, smelled of hot rosin, and she wondered if she really ought to stow them next to the camera. Radiation? The "obeah" felt hot, as well. The vinyl tile had bubbled a little where they had lain. Caroline started to whisper the "Our Father" out of old habit, and then stopped short. She decided invoking one god was enough for the day.
She gritted her teeth and put the substitute "obeah" away in its proper bin, G-53, she double-checked against the catalog. "Is this thing going to turn back into a pumpkin as soon as the clock strikes midnight?"
She turned around, and the Hunter was giving her that "slug on the roses" look again. Note to self — except for Coyote, gods don't like smart-asses.
"It will hold its seeming."
And then the woman vanished. Gone. No fade, no shrink into the distance, no smoke and swirl of wind, no smell of brimstone. Vanished. Here one second, gone the next like a switched-off hologram. Just by "coincidence," Caroline heard the click of locks echoing down concrete corridors. She gathered up the rest of her gear and waited for her jailer.
Anita then sorted through everything and watched Caroline pack it up, verifying that nothing went out of those doors that Caroline hadn't brought in with her. Didn't give a second glance to the disguised Hunter. And the shared courses and letters from the dean spared Caroline a strip search.
Sure helps to have a god weaving illusions around you.
They climbed echoing stairs out of the subbasement, up to the stale-sweat basement locker rooms and then the gym level, Anita locking doors behind and resetting touch-pad alarm systems and not even bothering to screen the code she punched in. Damned lax security, not up to assault by Morgans. Which Caroline wouldn't need, after all.
And then they were out the door, the world surprising her with cool darkness and reminding Caroline that her body had reset time zones just in time to get thrown off again. Anita had some place she needed to be, went one way, and Caroline went another.
And stopped in a shadow out of sight to take a few deep breaths and work the tension kinks out of her shoulders. She'd done it. She hadn't known how she'd do it, but the Hunter had taken care of that. Check one item off her list. If only the others went as smoothly.
"Caroline? Caroline Haskell?"
She climbed down out of thin air and turned to the voice. Someone else she knew? A faceless shadow formed out of the still-darker bushes, and Caroline tensed, her heart racing. The laptop bag could serve as a club . . .
The shadow held up both hands. I come in peace. But Caroline didn't relax. The shadow couldn't have seen her face, not here, not under a pine grove and shielded from the streetlights. And only three people should know she was on campus — Anita, the museum director, and Gary, if he'd read his emails. Which Ben said he hadn't. Even Ben hadn't known when she was flying east.
The shadow didn't move. "I'm Jane, Jane White. Gary told me about you. You look like him."
Holy shit . . . Now her mind raced after her heart. "Do you know where he is? Is he okay?"
The shadow turned and slid sideways at an angle, not coming any closer, very pointedly not threatening. "I was hoping you knew. I need to talk to him."
I damn well knew life was getting too easy. "You got any idea what's going on with him?"
The shadow seemed to shrink and tense up — not ready to attack, ready to run. As much as Caroline could read body-language from a shadow in a shadow.
"I shot at him."
Sweet Christ on a crutch . . . Well, that explained a few things.
"Why'd the hell you go and do a stupid thing like that?"
The shadow seemed surprised by Caroline's reaction. But then, so was she. Witch-sense gestalt, Granny Weatherwax's headology, the Dragon bond she shared with Gary, whatever, the scene didn't add up to danger. Didn't add up to damn-all anything.
Insufficient data, need more input.