C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Morrison blanched and fell behind me. For a while we worked our way up, down, through, around, over, under, and occasionally between valleys, hollers, trees, dells, streams and shrubberies. The wights’ path was mostly clear enough to follow, though I called Morrison forward a few times when I wasn’t certain. The second or third time I breathed, “What, Boy Scouts?” and he said, “Eagle Scout,” without missing a beat.

I laughed. “Of course you were. I’m surprised you’re not a troop leader now.”

He said, “No kids,” in a tone light enough that it was weighty. I narrowly avoided tripping over my own feet as we got started again. It wasn’t so much that somebody had to have children themselves to lead Scout troops as clearly that was how Morrison envisioned himself doing it, and that was a thought I hadn’t gone anywhere near. And I wasn’t going to go any closer to it, either, not now and not for any time in the immediate future.

The sun was overhead before we broke over another crest that lay a whole rich valley out beneath us. A creek not quite big enough to be a river dribbled down the center, visible here and there between breaks in a full-on old-growth forest. The water’s song bounced around the valley just enough to be heard when the wind caught it, and the scent of early wildflowers rose up with the buzz of captivated insects. It was as idyllic a setting as I’d ever seen.

Morrison, softly, said, “But if you insist on moving back South...” which reminded me of the glimpses I’d had of his inner garden: wilderness, as lush and varied as this place, though much more informed by the Pacific Northwest’s landscape. I had miles to go before I caught up with his spiritual development, and I doubted it was something Morrison spent much, if any, conscious time on.

“We’d need a helicopter to get in and out. I don’t think I’m man enough to hike three hours each way every time I wanted to go see a movie. Seriously, though, yeah. I can’t believe it’s not settled. The water must be coming in and out of a cave system, or somebody would have followed it upstream and built a homestead here.” I slid the Sight on, wondering if I could get a glimpse of the water system.

Instead a roar of pain and anger rose from the earth, black wiping out the color and life I saw with normal vision. I fell back a step, shocked, and felt Morrison’s hand at the small of my back again. Not really supporting me so much as letting me know he was there. I could get used to that.

It took a minute or two for the roar to die down, and even then it didn’t disappear, just faded out. I could nearly See that a settlement had been made in this valley, once upon a time. Small buildings, cleared spaces, campfires, and children’s laughter filled my mind, though I knew they were imaginary. I didn’t see ghosts, not the way some people did. But I could See the centuries-buried fire circles, the fallen structures of homes and meeting places. The Cherokee had built wattle and daub homes with thatched roofs, previous to Western encroachment. This valley had been home to buildings like those, and to dozens, maybe hundreds, of people. Their bones faded into view the same way the saed firbuildings had, buried deep and forgotten by time. Bit by bit I realized the trees weren’t actually old-growth, not the way I was thinking. Their roots ran deep, blue strength making concentric rings in the trunks, but they were a couple hundred years old, not centuries on end. One of the fires had burned through the valley, left untended by the dying. Nothing deliberate had happened here, no massacre, no driving the natives out. It had been destroyed through illness, smallpox and influenza carried on blankets and racing ahead of the conquering people.

“No,” I said very quietly, “we wouldn’t want to live here after all.” I shut the Sight down. As I did, something flared at the corner of my vision. I steeled my stomach for a second hit from the death valley and triggered the Sight again, turning north toward the brightness.

Aidan’s aura, unmistakable with its broad tangle of colors, and from the frantic pulse to his magic, he was fighting for his life.

Three things hit me at once: I could not get there fast enough. No matter what was happening, I simply could not get there fast enough.

I could not throw magic that far, not without at least being able to see my target.

I could not do less than try.

I whispered, “Renee,” aloud, and for the first time tried to trigger time-shift magic on purpose.

I had done it before, inadvertently. Done it at Morrison’s home, in fact, and therefore his presence at my side boosted my confidence. I had thrown my spirit forward, gone out of body to see what was happening in a room I couldn’t get into. I still had no recollection of how my body had caught up to that passage of distance. It had just snapped into focus, catching up somehow, and in retrospect I thought I’d done something a little like folding a square of time. A tesseract.

If Mrs Who could do it, so could I.

I cut free from my body. Distance was irrelevant in the spirit world. It was all about expectations, there. One moment I was beside Morrison and the next I was beside Aidan, whose body language was pure last stand: they were going down, or he was.

They were the wights. All five of the remaining ones, whose presence made a sick lurch in the space that was nominally my stomach. There were seven more people back in town who had died in more or less the same way the wights had, by having their lives sucked away through black magic. I should have told Sara to burn those bodies, because I couldn’t think of anything else that would guarantee they wouldn’t rise like these ones had. I guessed they’d be buried by sundown, but I wasn’t at all sure that would be enough. I hoped like hell that once this was over, I would remember to call and tell her that. And that there would be cell phone reception that would let me. And that was the last time I worried about anything but me, Aidan and survival for a little while.

Renee was a firebrand inside my skull, stitching things together with her long sticklike legs. I reached for my sword and remembered two things at once: first, it hadn’t been a good weapon against the wights, and second, I was immaterial. I had nothing to hold a sword with.

The attempt to draw magic, though, got the wights’ attention. Two, then three of them, moved away from Aidan, drawn by the source of raw energy that was me. My shields were in place, rock-solid, but without a body to hou saeds’se my power in, I blazed all over the landscape, a delicious temptation. I still didn’t know how to fight them, and had probably made it worse by de-bodying, but if it was me or Aidan, I much preferred them siphoning off me. Not so much because I was confident of my survival, but because if somebody was going to die here it was not, by God, going to be the twelve-year-old. As the wights closed in on me, I forced myself to think. They were undead. Monsters created by sucking the life force out of others, as they had none left of their own.

The question, then, was what happened if I sucked the power out of them.

The wiser part of my brain suggested it would be nothing good, but I didn’t see a lot of choice in the matter. I extended my hands and waggled my fingers like they were tasty energy sausages, and the wights pounced.

This time I let them land. I kept my shields in place, kept them ratcheted up to full power, and I scrambled for mental imagery that would let me try turning the whammy on the wights. Draining things wasn’t so hard. Oil tanks, gas lines, even air from tires. The thing they all had in common was a valve of some kind.