Shadows of Fear -- Part 10
by Martin H Slusser

Full Moon

Benny slammed the ladder down. He scrambled up to the loft bedroom, shouting, “I don’t care, Mom. I’m not going to any church. Just let me the frik alone, will you?”

He stared down through the trapdoor for a moment before disappearing into the hazy gloom of the loft.

Anna gritted her teeth. She wanted to go up, drag Benny down by his long, shaggy hair. Haul him kicking and screaming out to the shack at the crossroads where Ivanovitch, that jerk stepfather of his, lived, then kick Benny so hard they both fell down.

The thought mollified Anna, but did nothing to ease the very real hurt she felt at Benny’s rejection.

How in the living hell do you make a pain-filled, frustrated and sullen fifteen year old understand that you’re doing something for his own good, and not just to enslave him as the State had. Benny going to a Longhouse-meeting would be a thing his parole officer, and perhaps the judge, would see as being constructive at the next hearing.

Better than Benny’s last answer when asked what he did with his time.

“Nothing. Just hang out.”

Anna glanced at a man-sized hand-carved cedar chest.

Pouring through greenhouse walls and the south-facing window of the living room the last rays of sun caught and brightened the polished red highlights of the wood. The chest looked as though it were in flames. It held all of her estranged husband’s clothing. A few mementos of their short time together. A picture of her at their wedding, wearing jeans and gold feather earrings, Carl’s pit bull face battered, still in prison garb. A fiero lighter taken off of a dead Jivarista warlord during his tour of duty in South America. The wooden cup they shared.

Lips twisted into an almost amused grin.

And a movie CD of their wedding night, taken by correction officers at the Walnut Street pen.

That almost got Carl sent up on Murder One. Carved into the doors were the symbols for Carl’s home name, Yon:v:ki:Doda, Papa Bear. Sunlight picked them out and mocked her. Benny thought the sun rose and set on Carl. For that matter, maybe it did.

From the depth of her womb, a whimper of pain hit Anna. For Benny, yeah, but also for his sister, Anna’s heir, born too soon. The child lay next to her first husband, Ben, under the cold red earth. The chill of stiff red clay and a soft, weeping rain. Anna hugged herself, feeling it in her mind.

Carl would sit on his shack-rat’s porch, staring through the trees at the little cemetery of the Grey’s. For most of the long night he would drink and crush beer cans until he fell into a stupor.

Shoving her hands up into her armpits to stop them from trembling, Anna hissed. At a time like this she needed both her men. Yet, it seemed both were doing their best to destroy her.

“Eagle:Mother, help me.” Eyes staring blindly up, Anna blinked at a welter of tears. She turned inward. A golden feeling of deep and abiding love staggered Anna. Her heart opened to it. Her spirit threading upward, through the Veil of the Sun and into the Forests of Heaven.

In a thin whisper, she said, “Aka:Adohi:yi. Praise be with You. Like, forever.”

Even in the Forest, perhaps more so here, the dark cloud of Benny’s pain washed over her. Anna slid back into her body. The speed of her heart picked up. Blood flow increased to normal. Eyelashes trembled on a tear-stained face.

She needed them. Needed family around her.

“Benny? Please, kid. I thought, maybe -”

Loud, discordant music blasted through the trapdoor.

She froze, stilled for a seeming eternity of time.

With a sigh, Anna left the house and crept to a battered car. On sagging hinges the door gave an ear-splitting shriek of protest. She slumped in the worn seats, the cracked and checked vinyl crackled faintly, scratching at the flesh of thighs and calves. She heard nothing, felt nothing. Only a ragged hammer of pain in her chest. Unable to move, she caught a flicker of movement in Benny’s round, south-facing loft window. In her heartache she ignored it.

The urge to go in, to open the big cedar chest and touch Carl’s things nearly overwhelmed Anna. Lean hands curled into fists to stop them from the act of folding and refolding. She closed her eyes. The smell of cedar and sweat and Carl came to her.

God, but she missed him. Big hulking Carl Ivanovitch, filling the house with his lean bulk and booming laughter . . . Filling her bed with a love that was as shy and gentle as he was war-like and angry out of it.

Tears threatened to ruin the scant makeup she wore. Fine lines etched down along her face. She couldn’t go on like this. Anna grimaced at the cloudy rearview mirror.

As one of the ani, the People, she was born into poverty of the likes few in this country had to face. She entered this world in a rundown shack with coal dirt in her blood, in her food, in her very soul. All she ever knew was hard work and bitter times. Her mother’s first teaching was pretty clothes and good looks will only get you so far. Woman works with her brains and her back and ruled the world.

At thirty-two people claimed she had a face and body many a younger woman would envy. When told that Anna had to smile. She despised vanity, wearing older, loose fitting and comfortable clothing.

Not too tall. Both Carl and her first husband, Ben, were tall men, liked to tease her, saying she was just the right height for kissing. Her hair was black as Raven’s wings. No gray as yet, despite the pain and suffering her former in-laws put her through in their madness of murder and rape.

“Ben, why did you have to die?”

As high priest of the Owl-Men, old man Greylov made the only child he had that he had not murdered himself, Ben, rise from the grave. Then watched his son sacrifice himself to save a six-year-old Benny, Ben’s own son.

The insanity of prison was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the schizophrenia of the Greylovs’. Her years in that zoo-like place had been worth it, because killing old man Greylov prevented him from murdering Benny. She closed trembling eyes and wondered if the scars of that existence would ever fade.

The tiny guardian spirit assigned to watch her car was distracted, just for a moment, by the perfection of a falling leaf but it was enough time for an imp to play with the wiring.

The key was a loose fit in the old warhorse’s tired ignition. Anna turned it.

Dead.

Anna screamed, “No.” She beat her fist on the steering wheel. “Dear God, but I can’t take this anymore.” Tears ran down her face and she tasted them, grimaced at their bitterness.

In a fit of self-hate she spat at her reflection in the windshield and cursed the car.

The old car gave a belated wheeze and roared to life.

Anna sagged and shook her head.

“What’s the root word for whiner? ‘Why me, Lord?’” A weak chuckle escaped Anna and the car ground over the broken cobblestone of the drive, onto the tar and red rock gravel Sandy Valley Road. Anna jerked the rear end to the left and stepped on the gas pedal, heading for the crossroads. Frowning, Anna shook her head.

“What the frik.”

She turned in the wrong direction. Again.

Anna could see Carl’s buxom shack-rat standing on the rickety porch of her unpainted green cottage. There was no mistaking the broad, contemptuous smile on Leda Melancowski’s pampered and haughty face. But no amount of make-up could hide decades of corruption and Leda’s selfishness.

Anna let the car shudder to a halt. She wanted to rant and scream at this . . . this pig who somehow blackmailed her husband into infidelity. For all his bull-size and bearish strength Carl was weak when it came to women. In his desire for love, real love, he let a woman like Melancowski rule him. Only she, Anna, ever gave Carl what he needed, filling the lack in his anything-but-ordinary life. Anna let Carl simply be Carl, with no strings depending on his manhood attached. And look where it brought them both.

The still-handsome prostitute raised a hand in mocking salute to the woman she hated most. The older woman balled a fist. The middle finger snapped skyward.

A slow and careful Anna opened the door. Eyes hard on Leda, she got out.

Leda blinked. Anna never before sought open battle, face-to-face. Nor, for that matter, had Leda. Both knew the range of their powers. In the gentle warmth of an afternoon sun gliding behind Freeland Mountain her hand shook ever so slightly.

Smiling to mask her pain, Anna raised slow hands to the sky. She whispered one word.

“Come.”

The breeze died. Everything stilled. Dark hemlocks towering over Laughing Woman Creek ceased their constant whispering of better times long past.

The prostitute gave a shaky laugh. The shack was the entrance to Buu Holle, Satan’s Hell, the home of Buu, the Owl. Nothing was going to happen. She was too powerful for that goodie-two-shoes.

A black shadow swooped down. Leda shrieked and dived back into her house.

Anna intoned gravely, “O:Tsi:Yu, O:Galon:v:Yu.” Tipping her head, Anna gave the shadow a slight bow.

The shadow fluttered into a lightening struck white pine snag across the road from Leda’s ramshackle house.

The old raven croaked out, “Ha-Ha. Kanonasssioniii, Ana:Wa:iiia. O:si:ioo.”

Anna chuckled.

“Yeah, cool with me. Some day in the Longhouse of the Old-Woman, beloved Friend-Protector.” Lilting, her voice rose in merriment. “Better run down to your Witch Stone, Leda, and use a little more of my baby’s blood to wash this one away.”

Hand cocked on one hip, Anna spat over the rusted, bilious green finish of the car.

“Leda the witch. Leda the bitch. Mark my word, Leda. My day is coming. Goat-sucker, I’ll see you fry in der Holle-Tur.”

A dark and sudden fury hit Anna. Leda took Carl at the Owl’s insistence. Anna did not doubt that. And at the Buu’s insistence Leda had to have Benny, as well.

Leda wanted them all dead. Anna and her family were all that stood between that woman and a grab for power in the dark realms, and Leda meant to slaughter them. But first she needed them weakened. It was Leda who cursed the girl-child she, Anna, had carried. The child would have been Carl’s first-born. All other children he knew about went into Leda. And Leda used those poor kids on the Witch Stone to acquire more power, the greedy bitch.

No, Leda wouldn’t make it. Anymore than old man Greylov. Like Greylov, Leda would die first. The Buu was a hungry, greedy god. Anna shouted a laugh.

“Yo, baby, yo. War all the way, and for all the centuries.”

Crawling back on the ragged car seat, Anna rammed the gas pedal to the floor, popped the clutch and relished the feeling of contempt she felt and now showed Leda. Gravel spurted and she doughnutted a broad circle on the Owl Hollow - Valley crossroads. The car roared, tires hissed and spun, smoking as Anna shot back passed her house and to the White Haven - Sandy Run road.

The old raven-protector called scathingly to the furious, shuddering woman in the house. With a quick snap of wings he threw her a raucous laugh and spun off into the sunlit twilight.

“Wheeee . . . .”

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