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It happened fast.
It was like a cloud had somehow got in the way of the sun. Everything blurred just a little and I worried for a moment that maybe I was going to faint from an overexposure to one too many outbursts of unbelievable stupidity. Maybe I was having some sort of a seizure and maybe I was going to die right here on the shores of Cape Thunder.
Maybe I’d even get to see Dad.
My real Dad.
Maybe this was how Old Nanna Bijou was going to grant my wish. Maybe he had just struck me dead with magic and I was going to finally get to see my real Dad.
Oddly enough the possibility of me actually being dead wasn’t terrifying me half as much as it probably ought to have.
Only I wasn’t dying.
Things were just getting darker, was all.
I had seen a YouTube video of a squid shooting ink once. It looked a little bit like what was happening to me right now. It was as if the entire world was growing darker but just in the spot around me as if I had somehow stepped into a state of permanent shadow.
I glanced back over my shoulder. Bigfoot and Coyote were standing right where I had left them, still looking away from me and up at that walking mountain, Old Nanna Bijou. I could see the sun was shining on the two of them but it was as if I were looking at the sunlight through a half a dozen pairs of dirt-stained dark glasses.
Only Bigfoot and Coyote weren’t moving at all. They were both standing perfectly still as if they were nothing but a cartoon on television that somebody had paused. I could see a bird flying over Coyote’s left shoulder only the bird wasn’t moving, either. It was hung there like it had been thumb tacked to the sky.
“I was wondering just how long it would take you to get here,” said a voice about as dark as the shadow in the bottom of a two hundred foot well-hole. “Usually what I leave my mark on comes back to me a whole lot quicker than this.”
The voice I heard was a voice that sounded about as dark as the darkest of dark bitter chocolate bar, if chocolate could sing - only it did not sound not half as sweet as that.
I looked up to see just who was talking to me.
I think he would have probably stepped dramatically out of the shadows except I think he was made completely out of shadow. He was tall and lean and wore a magician’s top hat that smoked like the old tin chimney that sat on the roof of my real Dad’s summer cabin. As the shadow man stepped towards me he kind of shimmered as if he were made out of shadow, smoke and road tar. It looked to me as if every black Crayola crayon and last-forever Sharpee marker had been smeared and smudged across his soul.
Now what?
Where had Old Nanna Bijou sent me?
“Pleased to meet you,” the shadow man said – reaching out and shaking my hand.
I just stood there and I said nothing – repressing the sudden urge to count my fingers to make certain they were all intact after he had shaken them.
“Can’t you speak?” the shadow man asked. “Did the crow steal your tongue?”
Don’t say anything, I thought to myself.
Don’t you dare answer this freaking weird shadow man.
Don’t you dare say a single freaking word.
“Crows will do that, if you are not careful,” the shadow man said. “They will steal your tongue right out by the roots.”
Not a word.
Whatever happens please don’t say anything to me. I’m just a kid on a summer vacation. I’m in Cape Breton and you are not Darth Vader and this is NOT the twilight zone. I am just bonding with my dorky stepdad, Warren.
No more of this freaky weirdness, please.
“Do you believe in monsters, Teller-boy?” the shadow man asked me.
He reached out to me just the same way a shadow will reach out as the day grows longer. I felt a passing coolness and a heat, like I was standing in the shade of a hot and breezeless August afternoon. I smelled attic dust and wind-blown feathers and the kind of crispy ash that sticks to freshly-burned marshmallows.
I suppose I should have said something.
I shouldn’t have been as scared as I was.
After all, I had lived through my Dad being blown up by a baby carriage. A little thing like a man made out of shadow and ash should not have terrified me like it was doing.
“Do you believe in monsters, Teller-boy?” the shadow man repeated.
I opened my mouth.
My lips were dry and stuck together. My swallow had disappeared somewhere on the other side of the Gobi Desert – probably riding on a camel train of cotton balls and talcum powder and those weird little packets of silica gel that you find at the bottom of your vitamin jar.
I had forgotten how to make words follow one another. I had forgotten just how to string thought together into anything close to making sense.
But I had to say something.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe in monsters and I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy and I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, either.”
Where was Warren when I really needed him?
Where was Bigfoot?
Where was Nanna Bijou?
“You are awfully young to be acting so cynical,” the shadow man said. “When did you learn to not believe in a story told true?”
“Monsters aren’t real,” I said, scornfully. “They’re mythological.”
“Mythological?” the shadow man said. “That is a pretty large multi-syllable-mouthful of a word for a little bitty kid like you.”
Kid?
“I’m seventeen years old,” I said. “That makes me a teenager, not a kid. Do you want to hear me recite my A-B-C’s?”
“Only if you can say them backwards.”
So I turned around backwards, looking away from him, as I began to recite.
“A, B, C, D, E...”
Which I thought was pretty funny – but when I said it out loud the words I was speaking didn’t come out as A-B-C-D-E.
It came out as B.C.W.F.C.O.T.F.O.H.E.
I felt those word-letters spilling out of my mouth like I had chewed into a bowl of apple sauce and come up with a mouth full of cast iron apple seeds.
“And a case of freaking nails,” the shadow man finished up. ”Isn’t that what you were trying to spell, Teller-boy? Isn’t that what really killed your Dad? Of course I mean your real Dad, not your step-dad Warren – isn’t that what really and truly killed him?”
I opened up my mouth.
I closed it.
So far as I could tell no words fell out in between.
“Look at me, Teller-boy,” the shadow-man said.
I don’t do anything for people who end a sentence aimed my way with the word “boy”, but it was as if he had hold of my puppet strings. I turned like my feet were built on a set of well-oiled steel swivels.
“My name isn’t Teller,” I said. “That’s my step-dad’s last name. I keep telling you people that my real last name is Rooker.”
“What do you know about rooks, boy?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“Look at me,” the shadow man repeated, dropping each word at my feet like a single fallen drum beat.
And then the shadow man began to change.
He began to spread as if his shoulders were somehow slowly separating. I saw long dark wing-shadows stretching out above us. I felt like one of those old movie cowboys – like I had been crawling across the desert dying of thirst and looked down to see the buzzard shadows circling about my dying body.
The shadow man was Raven.
The shadow man was the same giant magic bird that had stolen the spirit bear. He was the same giant magic bird that had stolen a piece of Warren’s spirit.
I didn’t get it.
Why had Nanna Bijou sent me to the guy I was trying to run from?
Did he want me to die?
And then I began to change too.
I hate it when that happens.
Nothing sucks worse than change.