Chapter 13
“Virgil!”
“Lauren?”
As the shadows of the old woods envelop me, I duck under several low-hanging oak limbs bigger than my torso. The thick branches reach for me like pointing fingers.
“Lauren!” My name echoes through the trees. Close to me.
I spin but see nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing. I blink and look again.
He sounds so close. Above me, wind tangles in the sprawling oak limbs. They groan as if a storm is rising.
“Lauren! Lauren!” Leaves rustle with my name.
My head snaps in every direction, looking for Virgil. The leaves of the nearest oak shiver and shake as if someone has just run through them.
“Virgil! Where are you?”
I run deeper into the shadows in the direction of the voice. A tall longleaf pine leans heavily against another with the deepening of the breeze, not quite touching and then sliding down the bark with a loud “Laur-nnnn!”
My shoulders sag. Catching my breath, I lean against the trunk of the oak a few feet away. The lowest branches are so low I can almost touch them. I rest my hands on one, feeling the skeletal branches dig into my palm.
“Lauren?” someone whispers behind me.
I pirouette just in time to see the grayish-black smoke take the form of a man I once knew. He looks right through me at something in the past where the spirit is still trapped. He raises an old flashlight and shines the beam ahead. I can barely see it in the present, but I remember its brightness in the past as it cut through the moon shadows of the swamp where I hid. The shadowy form steps through me, muddy and pausing, and I shudder at the electrical sting of that old energy passing through me.
Holding my breath, I watch as Bobby’s ethereal form floats through the woods ahead of me, drawling my name thickly as he tries to find where I’ve run to escape him so he can punish me for my so-called willfulness. I had forgotten how insulted I always felt as a child, that for all his professions to my parents and to me of how much he adored me and planned to name me as his sole heir and how often he showered dainty opal earrings and delicate pearl pendants and 14-karat gold bracelets with the wrong fucking name carved in delicate script. Not Laurie or Lauren but Laurn. He didn’t even care enough to get my name right.
“Laurie?” Virgil huffs to a stop in front of me and grabs for his cane before I can hand it to him. He rests heavily on it, bending over, heaving. “You okay? I heard you calling, and I ran as fast as I could, but, well, damned legs won’t let me go any faster.”
“Lauren!” The two trees kiss again just deeply enough to join our conversation.
“I’m so sorry, Virgil.” I fling my hand toward the two noisy pines. “I heard that and thought you were calling me. I thought you were lost in the woods. Or… or something.”
Finally, he catches his breath, then laughs. “Good Lord. I hope I don’t sound like that to you when I call your name.”
“Not at all. I just, um, got spooked.”
Virgil points at the trail just wide enough to allow the farm truck between the trees. The makeshift road disappears into the shadows. “What’s your mom been doing back here?” He studies the road, then walks over to inspect the tire tracks. “These are old, but they’ve been here since the last rain and that was a month ago.”
He stares down the pathway into the dark threshold of the swamp. I follow his gaze. A pale wisp of energy weaves its way along the road and disappears into the shadows.
Virgil throws back his shoulders, his backpack slipping to the ground as he tries to pretend he didn’t see it too. But I know. I know he too has the gift, just as his mother did.
“You saw it too. Tell me you did.”
Virgil stares straight ahead. He dares not meet my gaze.
His Adam’s apple bobs with a single swallow. “I did.” He nods to himself. “And if you did, too—?”
“I did.” My confession comes out in a whisper.
“Then what I’ve been told about you is true.” A statement, not a question.
My pulse quickens. “Well, well, I don’t know. I have no idea what you’ve been told about me.” I’m stammering like a buffoon.
Finally, he smiles and this time, he meets my gaze. “No worries.”
“I didn’t hear it from anyone who lives here.” Seeing my expression, he chuckles. “I looked you up a few years ago. Well, a few times over several years. Maybe a bunch of times. I was curious whether you had come back here after your first marriage ended, and when I did some checking up on you, I found out you were running a healing center with your second husband, a place called The Center of Light. Very well known in certain pagan circles. You created something that gave a sense of belonging to a lot of gifted outcasts. And then when it closed you morphed it into something new and different. Your daughter and her partner took what you built and went viral with it. My mom and I caught the Nashville show of the Sonnet and Christabel Love Attraction tour around two years ago before my mom got too frail to leave her bed. Mom and I agreed that your daughter looks just like you did at that age.”
Both pride and fear swell within me. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t mention this around town. It’s hard enough for me to fit in without giving them yet another reason.”
He pretends to zip his lips, turn an imaginary key at the corner of his mouth, and then throw away the key. It’s a gesture I taught him when he was a child who had to be convinced to keep secrets, especially when those secrets meant that I’d been caught ogling his big brother.
“So, Virgil, tell me about—”
“In time. But not now. At this moment, you know more about that part of my life than anyone living in this area.”
“And Dix?”
“Especially Dix.”
“If you don’t mind, Laurie, I’d like to live here for a few more years peacefully before anyone figures out who I am or what I can do. I’m a native son and a war hero who came back home to volunteer to watch over the last days of the parents and grandparents of the people I grew up with. I’d like to keep it that way for now. Otherwise, I won’t be allowed to do the work I came back here to do if people fear me.”
“I-I understand.” All too well. I slide my fingers over his shoulder and squeeze. “Your secret is safe with me, Virgil.” Then I make the motion of zipping my lips, locking them, and throwing away the key.
He laughs and shuffles as he braces on his cane. He kicks at his backpack in the grass next to his booted foot. “Sorry I took so long getting back. I stopped along the way to get a few samples of pine beetles and bark to take to the county agriculture agent on Monday. I heard you calling my name and came looking for you.”
There’s a bigger part of me that I want to admit to that feels touched by his words. In all the years I’d been married to Quent, he’d never come looking for me or ever seem to worry about my safety. With Jesse, he was always there for me until he wasn’t except for those few times when he’d been too depressed to get out of bed. With almost every man in my life, whether romantic or platonic, I ultimately depended on myself. I didn’t expect anyone to save me, and this swamp is the genesis of that particular quirk of mine. It was here in these shadows ahead where I had begged every entity I could name and a few I couldn’t to save me from Bobby’s intentions. But no human had come to my rescue. This place, in the deepest of shadows, is where I’d met The Morrigan and the Old Gods.
Virgil reaches into his backpack, careful not to open it quite wide enough for me to see inside, and pulls out a plastic bag with what looks like crumbling pine bark and debris inside. He holds it up to show me, grins, and replaces it.
“You know, Virgil, I could have run back to the four-wheeler and got your pack for you. Or dug through it looking for plastic bags.”
Empathically, I feel him raise his shields. Something about this backpack makes him nervous. He doesn’t want me to see inside.
“Is that what I think it is?” He peers into the deeper shadows along the vanishing road. Hoisting his pack over one shoulder, he shuffles forward, pushing away an occasional small oak limb with his cane.
I follow in his footsteps. I’m not exactly a tenderfoot when it comes to walking barefoot, but the landscape here isn’t sole-friendly. The trees above are so thick now that even the afternoon sun rarely pierces the canopy, and when it does, the shade is dappled with what looks like crescent moons.
Today’s sun isn’t the only bright light to struggle through the thick leaves above. Yesteryear’s moon had been full and high in the sky when I’d fled through swamp and muck, choosing to feel safer among the creatures of the swamp than with my dad’s illustrious big brother. Rich, pillar of his community, leader in his church. Denied nothing by anyone but me.
Bobby can rot in hell.
But I don’t say it aloud. I’ve been taught since toddlerhood that I’m supposed to forgive. Even if the offense is repeated without remorse. Probably applies to pedophiles, too—if we could acknowledge the ones in our families.
The smell of decay and stagnant water stings my nostrils. Not many wetlands left by comparison, but still boggy enough in places. I glance over my shoulder at the bright sunshine, like a wall of light between the planted timber where we’d entered this forest and the old woods that surround us now.
I listen for the squish of Virgil’s footsteps before I plant my bare feet in their hollows and feel the cold swamp mud ooze over my toes. The moss squishes under our feet, and I imagine for a single moment that we are in a dark, haunted forest filled with monsters. I pull myself back to reality. This is a dark, haunted forest filled with monsters—both human and the kind that crawl and slither on their bellies.
Virgil doesn’t notice. He almost runs now, excited and reaching out ahead of him, but for what, I cannot tell.
“Wow! I haven’t seen one of these in ages!” He stops abruptly in front of me, and I, looking at where to place my next step, plow into him. His backpack is harder than I expected.
In front of us is a felled oak. The wind must have caught it because it’s broken off about three feet from the base. The stump has rotted into a bowl-shaped hole full of clear water that mirrors the trees and sky like a witch’s scrying bowl intended for seeing the future.
“Um? You haven’t seen a fallen tree in the woods lately? Try living on a farm longer than five months.”
Virgil snorts at teasing and then digs in the pack again, this time careful to keep it on his back and out of the water, which is now about two inches deep and covering the arches of both his work boots and my bare feet.
“Oh, Laurie! It’s much more than that. Much. The tree snapped in two, but if you look at the stump—” He points at a scar across the bark and inner lining. “And over there.” He gestures at the trunk and branches of the tree, slowly decaying, and the long, curving burn mark wrapping around the trunk and tearing into the bark. “Lightning struck it. And this, this is stump-water. Some locals call it spunk-water instead.”
The bowl of the stump is lined with fallen oak leaves, and though the water is stagnant, it is still crystal clear. He splays his fingers and presses his palms into the water, letting it cover both hands up to the military tattoo on his left wrist and strange sigil on his right. Virgil giggles as if I don’t know the magickal purposes of stump-water. The Elders of the Grand Coven, before they split off from the Grand Coven and formed their own, once explained it to me: stump-water is known for its healing properties but also for one very important ritual dealing with necromancy.
I take a step backward. For a man with death all around him, could he be dealing in some of the darker forces? Most Wiccans consider themselves witches, but not all witches consider themselves Wiccan or live by the code of “do no harm.” Not at all to say that they’re bad, just different shades of belief and practice.
Virgil pulls a plastic bottle with only a few swallows left of drinking water from his pack and offers it to me. When I shake my head, he quickly downs the water he’d brought with him to work. He plunges the empty bottle into the bowl of stump-water and watches as it fills to the brim, then caps it off and drops it into a pocket on his pack. Whatever his intentions are, the land spirits here don’t seem to mind. Even the wind above us hushes. He doesn’t take all the water, and though it may not have rained here in weeks, the bowl is fuller of water than I would have suspected.
Backtracking, I search for higher ground. Drier ground, too. The oaks give way to cypress trees with their knobby roots rising out of muck and water like sharp, wooden stalagmites intending to wound any foot that finds them.
I remember this place.
I remember crouching under a full moon and trying to hold my breath so that Bobby wouldn’t hear when he strode past me, swinging his lantern, scraping the darkness with sweeps of light. I remember the sound of his footsteps crunching through the leaves and soggy debris on the ground in front of me. I remember the smell. I remember the cacophony of sounds—insects, bugs and bullfrogs, crickets. The sounds of mosquitos swarming overhead, some landing on me and stinging as I forced myself to stay utterly still. Branches creaking and groaning between the moon and me, their trunks looking like twisted arthritic hands against the circle of light.
I still know this place energetically, but I don’t recognize it. What was once a lake in front of me is now filled with—
“What the actual hell?” Virgil mutters as he catches up with me. “Someone turned your family property into a garbage dump!”
I try to make sense of the muddy, half-visible mess in front of us. An old lawnmower. A… toaster oven? An old ironing board. A bent tin dollhouse that looks exactly like one I had as a child. A broken wheelchair like the one my dad had used shortly before becoming bedridden. A harvest-gold-colored stove from the 1970s, though the color has faded with age and filth. An old window fan like I used to have in my bedroom as a teen, back before my parents gave into air conditioners. All I can do is stare as I slowly realize that the old lake is now full of all the broken appliances and junk my mom has hoarded in the barn and five storage sheds around her house for the last fifty years or more.
“Not someone,” I murmur. “My mom.”
She must have hauled the bigger appliances here in the back of the old farm truck, backed up to the water’s edge, and pushed them from the truck bed into the swamp. How she ever got anything that heavy loaded on the truck in the first place, I can’t imagine, but she’s always been resourceful like that. She probably brought the smaller appliances here on the back of the four-wheeler. Her feeble pink energy weaves all around us like yarn through and between the trees. How many months it must have taken her to fill the swamp completely, but why? Why would she do that?
Why would she dump so much garbage on top of the very spot where Bobby is buried? She doesn’t even know that it’s his final resting place.
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