Chapter Twenty-Two

Binder of Souls

The gray creature began to convulse with laughter, its decaying body a gelatinous ripple of malevolent delight. I stepped back from the Binder of Souls, keeping my hands buried in my coat pockets to hide my fear. I had prepared myself for death but not for this. The Binder had other things in store for me.

Almost imperceptibly a fissure opened up like a scar along the side of its leathery face. The oily blackness of raven’s feathers became visible in the crack, but just as suddenly the torn skin healed itself. I got the sense the demon absorbed the darkness of the wood and used it to shift its shape.

“Your friend suffered last night,” it wheezed. “She cried when they poked her with their sharp needles.” It sniffed the air and then looked deeply into my frightened eyes. Laughter emanated from that ancient, rotting thing. “Your thoughts are filled with sweet death,” it taunted.

The Binder moved lithely toward me, becoming younger with each stride. Gone was the mask of rotting leather. In its place was the skin of a young woman. Her lips were pink, and her round breasts were barely concealed by a low-cut black leather dress. She stared at my throat and slowly closed the distance between us. Her features were alluring, but her eyes had not changed.

I turned away from the sultry, dark-haired girl and sprinted back toward the felled branch of white ash that would have served as my weapon against the wolf. The autumn wind sent waves of blood-red leaves scurrying along the forest floor. Gray twilight was the final illumination of the day. I tore through thickets of burdock and sprinted toward the weapon as the Binder of Souls slithered noisily behind me. It had become old once again and wheezed heavily as it neared.

I reached the trampled grasses where Jean first spoke Isabel’s name. I found the threatening branch at the edge of the clearing. I bent down and grabbed the weapon, certain it would serve as a talisman against the Miskenupik spirit.

I heard the crunching of bone before I felt the white-hot pain. The creature now wore the face of an angry child. It pressed its skeletal foot down where my hand touched the severed branch. “Fire Walker!” it spat through yellow baby teeth. “You have been more trouble than you are worth.” The voice was that of a sullen boy. It seemed to delight in the gathering darkness with an orgy of shifting appearances, all of them impure.

It grabbed me by the hair and flung me into a nearby hemlock, head first. My scalp was bloodied by the impact, but it had not thrown me hard enough to break either my skull or neck. I picked myself off the forest floor but got no further than my knees. The demon flew toward me with alarming speed.

I looked up to find myself inches from its lifeless eyes. The blackness of them never changed, no matter the shifting of moods. The creature’s rotten breath sent waves of nausea through my body. The smell of decay setting in after recent death. It produced from beneath its burial garments a small reed-like instrument which it fingered with bony dexterity.

“Your soul is like no others. Today I get to weaken you. This will make the binding of the ninth all the easier.” Each syllable was a waft of putrid decomposition. It placed the wooden reed against its colorless lips and moved the other end toward my throat. I lifted my right arm instinctively for protection and cried out when the Binder crushed my broken fingers in its vise grip. The foul smell and the pain caused me to feel incredible nausea, but in the recesses of consciousness I realized my left hand was free. With my last bit of strength I made a fist of my left hand and struck the instrument like a hammer pounds a nail. The creature wheezed violently as the reed impaled the back of its throat. It coughed gray ash and fell backwards on its haunches.

The Binder pulled the fluted wood free from bone and again coughed a billow of ash and smoke. It stared at me with clinical detachment as it returned its attention to my crushed hand. The sound of crunching bone deadened all other sensation. The world blackened, and I began losing consciousness.

A blur of motion crossed my field of vision before the punishing weight lifted from my hand. I had just enough strength left to turn toward the terminus of the nebulous streak. The demon struggled against Light as my four-legged savior locked its jaws over the Binder’s throat. The wolf tore into its rotting flesh, sending plumes of gray smoke into the air. The baleful creature flailed its arms wildly, landing an occasional blow against Light’s hard skull. The wolf took the punches with no obvious effect, snarling wildly as it ripped a chunk of black tissue. The Binder lay motionless for several moments before decaying into a mass of ash and charred fabric.

* * * *

When I awakened the sky was black and the dim light of distant stars shimmered through autumnal treetops. Searing pain made me instinctively massage my hand. It was splinted with neatly trimmed branches and deer-hide strips. Jean and Light sat across from me, both damp and slightly restless.

“The Miskenupik was unable to complete his task.” The steel-eyed hunter spoke with emotionless precision. “He did injure you, though, so you will forever feel great pain.” As he spoke the injured hand throbbed with near-unbearable intensity.

“The Binders know who you are. We’ve very little time.” The strange pair stared at me as if of one mind, their patient silence belying a hidden intensity. Jean carefully helped me to my feet, and we began to walk, albeit slowly.

I was in great pain. I was dazed, hungry, and weak. I struggled to remember how I ended up in the middle of a haunted forest. “If I was following the mark of the True Path,” I asked Jean while he and Light led me through the inky blackness, “how did I end up here?”

“The world is spinning off its axis,” Jean replied. “The True Path now runs through dangerous places. Broken places. Perhaps someday when their four Pillars are destroyed...” He let that thought trail off. I finished it for him.

“Until then, the Binders will hunt for souls to bind into the eternal darkness of the bay.” Isabel had told me as much. Her myth regarding the Door of Death was not fantasy. The woods we walked through might be hidden from most of the world, but the danger, the darkness, and the Binders of Souls were all very real.

Jean grunted approval. We stopped walking in short order. We had come to the end of the trail.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I took notice of the landscape ahead of us. A stand of hawthorn apple trees marked the edge of the forest. A grassy slope rose toward the muted red brick of a quaint old church. Candles within the building flickered in shades of blue, violet, and burgundy through the elegant arch of stained glass. A tall brick tower marked the south side of the building. The brass bells were now silent, their last chiming merely an echo from memory.

“Where is this place?”

“Gill’s Rock,” Jean answered. “The Gill’s Rock Light is just beyond that stand of trees,” he said as he pointed north of the church, “and beyond that is the Door of Death.”

“Gill’s Rock!” I was dumbfounded. We had completed a seventy-five mile hike in the span of a few short hours. We followed a trail through old growth forest from the bottom of Green Bay to the tip of the peninsula. No continuous stretch of forest grew on any map I had ever seen. Most of the primordial woodlands had been felled a century and a half ago by lumbermen who traded trees for dollars.

“Isabel told me this was possible.”

“Dark Woods can shift its shape,” Jean commented. “It is sometimes bigger on the inside than the outside. Sometimes just the opposite.”

We were out of Dark Woods and had returned to spring. Or was it summer? The Hawthorne apple trees sprouted only small green fruit, but flowers were in full bloom in front of the church.

“How long have we been gone?” I asked.

Jean didn’t answer directly. “Time moves in mysterious ways when one travels Dark Woods.” He scratched Light’s ears absentmindedly. He reached into a deep inner pocket and handed me a single piece of parchment, startling me out of my thoughts. “You know this one?”

The Kesemanetow he handed me felt cold in my hand. The Fire Walker. I ran my left thumb along the face of the card and marveled at the beautiful artistry. Electricity ran up my arm, and I welcomed the sensation. The buzz numbed the pain in my broken hand.

“Isabel wanted you to walk the True Path to meet me,” Jean explained. “The Kesemanetow are not given out easily. They have to be earned.” He made the sign of the cross after speaking her name, perhaps out of habit. He advised that I place the parchment in my coat pocket for safekeeping.

“Izzy’s people once razed the Pillar of Tyranny,” he said. “After their victory, children stopped disappearing, and the landscape slowly returned to whole again. This happened long ago. They failed to destroy the other three Pillars, though, and now Tyranny has been regenerated. The lost Miskenupik have been discovered. And reawakened.”

Jean was referring to Umbra’s evil cards. That sent me to wondering. “The Binder told me it intended to weaken me, to make the binding of the ninth easier.” This was more of a statement than a question, and Jean nodded his understanding. “What did it mean?”

Jean’s eyes informed me my question placed him ill at ease. “The Miskenupik have found a way to bind the souls of living children. They believe in the binding of the nine:

“Four souls to eclipse the sun,

“Four souls to darken days

“One soul to lead them out, to lead them all astray.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Nine is a number of power,” Jean replied. “It is the perfect trilogy. All of humanity will suffer if all nine souls are taken.”

A cold wind tousled Jean’s dark hair, and he lifted his collar against the chill. I caught myself brushing remnants of the forest off my overcoat and stopped. The once-fine wool was torn in numerous places. Bilious patches of dried mud stained much of the lower hem. I was dressed in the raiment of a life I left behind even before this day began. My eyes pressed Jean for more information.

“The Binders are bound away from the Center and yearn for a connection with the living,” Jean explained. “They sense the dreams of those living souls who thrive on separation, anger, and hatred. Those dreams lead them to their victims.

“When the Binders find their prey they attach themselves and feed off the soul. They feast on misery, despair, and loneliness. When that living soul dies the Binder pulls it into the dark waters of the bay, forever binding it.

“There is something about the children, I suppose, that might allow for a premature binding.”

I thought about the fate of brain-damaged children who survived. What had Amanda’s mother said? “Our daughter’s soul is trapped in a body that doesn’t allow it to respond to other souls.” These were children who couldn’t see, couldn’t talk, couldn’t respond to the world around them. Perhaps the prison of isolation put their souls at risk of the Binder’s black magic. Coincidence led them to Umbra’s territory, where they found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Before I had a chance to reflect further, Jean commanded my attention. “I bear the torch to find the Binders,” he explained. “They have a vulnerability. There is a mark upon their throats. It is the mark of the Broken Path.” He bent down and scratched his index finger through the dirt, drawing the shape of a fish in profile, but I had already seen its likeness.

“You must strike their throats at the mark,” he instructed. “This allows the light of this world to enter their darkness, turning their dark souls to black sludge and ash. They can never rise up again.

“Light has the advantage of his strong jaw, but I do just fine with my staff. White ash is the best for reasons that are still unclear to me. Isabel’s people planted stands of them within Dark Woods.”

Jean bent down to pick up the branch I dropped earlier.

“Your instincts are quite good,” he complimented me. “This would have made a nice weapon against the creature, in the right hands of course.” He jabbed the branch like a spear at a make-believe enemy to demonstrate the proper technique. I nodded in understanding.

“Light and I are combat warriors, but your skills lie in a different area. The Binders will come for you, however, and you may need to defend yourself.” Jean handed me the branch and taught me how to carve it into a staff.

“What must I do?”

Jean understood my question had little to do with my torn garments and injured hand. He placed his hand over the left breast of my overcoat where the Fire Walker Kesemanetow now lay hidden. For a moment his cold green eyes thawed, but the moment of compassion did not last.

“You will find the answers there.”

Jean and Light bade me farewell with little fanfare. They simply put their backs to the morning light and made their way back into the dark forest.

“We will meet again, Fire Walker,” Jean called without looking back.