Shadow Woman

8

Jane heard a noise in the dark outside. She sat up and listened. The noise came again. She crept to the wall beside the bedroom window and leaned slowly to the side to bring one eye to the edge of the curtain to see. The wind was blowing from the east, making the long, leg-thick limb of the old maple tree behind the house bob its heavy foliage up and down. When it moved, there was a creak. There it was again, a rubbing sound that came once, then was quiet, a sound an intruder would make while he slipped into the house.

She stepped back from the window and watched the soft, hot wind blow the curtain inward so a little glow of moonlight showed her the room. Sprawled on the other side of the bed was Carey, his eyes closed and his jaw slack in an almost-snore, a long silence and then, after it seemed too late, a soft, gentle indrawing of breath. She admitted to herself that she would probably wake up this way for a few more months. She had slept—happily fallen asleep—beside a few men over the years, and Carey was one of them. But now she was sleeping in Carey’s bed in the house where Carey had been a baby, which was now her house too. She had been in another life too long, a place where noises that might be intruders didn’t always turn out to be made by the wind. She sat on the bed and spent a minute staring at him. She let herself adore the big foot sticking out from under the sheet, the long, hard muscles of the arm. She leaned over to stare at his eyelids. She could see his eyes moving in little nervous twitches underneath, and she knew he was dreaming.

She resisted the urge to touch him. She was his wife now, and that was different. She was supposed to take responsibility for the fact that he had to be at the hospital at six if he was going into surgery at seven, not wake him up and ask him what he was dreaming. She slowly lowered herself beside him, then lay on her back, closed her eyes, and listened to the wind fluttering the leaves of the maple outside the window until they made no sound.

After a time, she sensed from the way that the trees around her kept revising their shapes until she got them right that she was in a dream. It was night, and low, thin clouds made the moon a small ball with a rainbow ring around it. She didn’t like the dream, but when she tried to fathom why that was, she found she had already known the answer before she had wondered. It was because the place where she was standing was familiar. She had not moved. She was still on the ground where Carey’s house was going to be built some day.

She felt uneasy as she looked toward the street, because she saw only a narrow gap in the trees. There was no use trying to walk and find her way home, because if the path was there, the road was not yet on top of it, and the forest still stretched like this from the ocean to the Mississippi, and from the tundra to the Gulf of Mexico.

Jane tried to fight the growing sensation that she was being watched. She tried to force herself to be rational. This might be the Old Time, but that didn’t mean there were such things as witches. There were no witches. If there ever had been, they had disappeared from the earth before Jane had been born. But her own memory told her she was lying.

She had been in the courtroom in Atlanta when the judge had looked past little Max Curtin, who sat behind the table that came up nearly to his chin, not seeing his pale face and thin bird-bones showing he hadn’t just fallen down a lot but had not even been given enough to eat. The judge could see no grounds to take him away from his cousin. But the cousin had heard the words, and turned around quickly to gaze at Max Curtin’s face, and the cousin’s eyes had glowed, not only in triumph, but because he was drinking in the sight of the terror and despair that showed in the little boy’s face. The Grandfathers would have taken one look at the cousin and known he was a witch.

She could feel the Workers of Evil were out there, feel them turning their attention to her. She had been thinking about them, and they had heard her thoughts, and now they were looking up, their faces vacant but alert. They were somewhere in the forest, and they began to turn and move toward her. She could feel the emptiness that was in them begin to fill up with excitement, anticipation. They were concentrating on her now, thinking about how happy she had been, and how easily that could be taken away from her. And they were coming.

Jane caught herself worrying about Carey sleeping unprotected in his bed, and she felt a jab of alarm. She had to force herself to hide him in the back of her mind, where they would not find him. She turned her attention to the witches. As long as she concentrated on them, they would see only their own reflection in her mind. There had seemed to be dozens of them when she first had thought of them, all pricking up their ears to search the air for her. But now she saw that they had winnowed themselves down to just two. Because they stood for all witches, they had to be a man and a woman.

There were footprints on the path, so sooner or later it had to lead to a place where people lived. Jane set off and followed it, then worked up to a run. It was hard for Jane to run on the trail at night, and she was ashamed of how clumsy she had become. She had been lazy for the past three months, and she began to get winded after only a hundred yards. Her foot hit the edge of the path, where it was higher, and she tripped. She gave a little gasp of surprise, and she knew it had reached the man and the woman and told them she had been flushed from hiding.

Although they were far behind her, only now reaching the clearing where she had started, she had no trouble seeing them. The man burst through the bushes, breaking branches and trampling the brush at his feet. He saw the path. He hunched over and stared down to read it for fresh tracks. He leaned forward on his knuckles, and his heels came up like those of a runner at the starting blocks. He grinned with a horrible emotion that looked like appetite, and his grin changed him. His lips kept moving, curled upward, and his bared teeth seemed to grow. His heavy jaw thickened, and he sprouted hair along his back, and then his haunches and arms. His small, black eyes lost none of their intensity as he started to move along the path on four feet.

The woman was quiet. She seemed to materialize out of the forest without moving a leaf, as though her feet didn’t quite touch the ground. She stood still for a few breaths, listening. Jane didn’t let herself think about what the woman was sensing about that place, but it was why Jane was trying to draw her away from there. The woman didn’t hurry. She watched the man lumbering away down the path, growing bigger and heavier, his claws now long and black and the fur thick and impenetrable. He was a wolf.

The woman smiled to herself and held her arms up, her long, graceful fingers fanned out, made longer by her pointed nails. She looked up at the moon glowing through the clouds, ringed with the faint colors of the spectrum, and as she did, she seemed to rise. Her fingers were impossibly long now, her neck was elongated to look upward, and her face in the moonlight was beautiful and ghostly. The bright, liquid eyes opened wider.

Jane could see the fingers were the shafts of feathers, and she watched the feathers spread along the woman’s forearms and then all the way to her shoulders. The woman’s skin glowed white and smooth and flawless, and she had a soft, shapely grace that made Jane not want to turn her attention away. The arms were definitely wings now. The woman’s white neck seemed to curve, stretching up toward the moon, and Jane’s heart beat faster—a swan! In the old stories, swans were never evil. As soon as Jane allowed herself to feel hope, it expanded in her chest and she almost cried with joy. The female apparition wasn’t a witch at all. She was probably some powerful woman asleep somewhere, who was now entering Jane’s dream to help her. Jane had acquired an ally, a sister.

But the woman’s face had not stopped changing. The eyes kept growing bigger and brighter, and now they seemed to ignite, to burn with a light from inside that looked like fire. Suddenly the woman ducked forward in some wrenching physical reflex like a retch. Her shoulders shrugged, her neck shortened, the flesh of her feet shriveled and left only curved talons. She was no longer human. She gave the great wings a flap, and she soared into the dark sky. She was an owl.

Jane was stung with shock, and in a few seconds the hurt threatened to soften and degenerate into heavy-footed despair. She strained to run harder, staring at the darkness ahead to discern the deeper black of the trail ahead of her feet, the empty air between the trees that could show her the way.

Jane could hear the wolf behind her and to her right, his body lean and hard but heavy, crashing through the underbrush. He knew the path because he was a human, and he was cutting across the curves. Jane stepped off the path and ran to the right, into the cover of the forest. She had to go more slowly now, slipping through thickets, sliding down inclines and then straining to scramble up the next rise, tiring herself just to get to level ground again. At the bottom of a steep, rocky hill she found the beginning of a stream. She turned with it and trotted for a few hundred paces, splashing along the stony creekbed until she came abreast of a rocky ledge and pulled herself up onto it just because it was difficult and the wolf would expect her to avoid it. Then she shifted her course toward the path, and in another mile she came out onto it again. She knew she had fooled the wolf. Her feet seemed light, running on the clear, even ground.

Then she felt rather than heard the sound above her, not so much a sound as a displacement of air behind her neck. She took two more steps and then whirled and swung hard at the same time so it would be her fist that arrived first instead of her face. Her knuckle felt the soft, downy brush of the breast feathers but swept past, hitting nothing solid at all.

The owl rose high into the air and a high-pitched screech came from its throat, then echoed from the rocky glen Jane had just left. The owl circled above her and called again. Jane could hear the sound of the wolf’s claws scraping the stones as it came up out of the gully, then heavy paws thumping the leafy ground, and the grunting breaths growing louder.

Jane turned again and ran. There was no concealment now, because the owl flew low under the canopy of trees, its wings flapping only to make the curves, sometimes a few feet behind and sometimes so close that Jane turned to strike out at it, but always screaming with that almost-human voice to tell the wolf where she was.

Jane ran with a sob in her voice, feeling the futility of it. An owl could see better than she could, and easily avoided her blows, and a wolf could run all night if it could smell its prey. As soon as she had thought of smelling, she imagined she smelled something pungent in the air. Was it something she had invented because she wanted it so much, or was it really smoke? It must be smoke. All she had to do was follow the smoke to the village, a clearing somewhere ahead where people slept in their longhouses and tended their crops and made love and sang. All she had to do was reach a circle of light. She ran beside the path, weaving in and out of the big trees so the owl couldn’t swoop in behind her neck with its talons.

The owl seemed to sense that it didn’t have much time. Maybe it smelled the smoke too, and maybe it had known where the village was. It stopped screeching and swooped upward.

Jane stepped back onto the path and sprinted, lengthening her strides and holding her head high to open the airway, pumping her arms and knees. She smelled the smoke more strongly now, and she knew she was close. She would dash for the nearest longhouse, duck under the bearskin flap that covered the door, dive through the little anteroom where the corn and beans and squash were stored, and roll into the little circle of light thrown off by the first cooking fire.

She could see a sharp off-turning in the trail ahead, and she knew this must be the path that led up to the village. She cut across a patch of low three-leafed plants she thought were strawberries, but as her ankles slashed through, her skin began to burn. It was poison ivy, but she didn’t care. She dashed up the path, climbing higher and higher. She reached the little plateau on top and stopped.

There, in the clearing, was a strange, horrible sight. The wolf had begun to change back into a man, and he squatted on human legs beside a pile of green brush that he had half-ignited with his human hands. It was smoking heavily but giving off no light at all. The man stood and turned his wolf snout toward her. She could see the sharp yellow teeth and the eyes that gleamed like pale gold-green beads. “Hello, Jane,” he said. “Smell the smoke?”

Jane heard something behind her. The owl alit and began to change back into a woman. “You’re ours now.”

“No.”

“We’re going to make you into a skin woman. He’ll flay the skin off you carefully, and I’ll sew it back together, and we’ll hang you from that tree limb over there. The soft breeze will fill you up a little and there will be a sound like a quiet song coming from your mouth. People passing by on the trail will look up this path and see you. Maybe they’ll just want to pass the time, and maybe they’ll be alone and running, looking for a place to rest and someone to help them. But they’ll stop. They’ll step off the trail and up this little path alone.”

Jane threw herself on the woman, digging her fingers into the throat with her left hand and drawing back her right for the first punch. She could feel the witch changing shapes under her hand, first the scales of a snake and enough of the neck free so the head could curl around and sink its fangs into her forearm, then the scales turning into thick fur and the body widening into a lynx, the jaws now chewing to get free of the hand.

Jane swung hard and woke to the light streaming through the white curtains onto the polished hardwood floor of the bedroom. She held her eyes open in the glare, her breaths coming fast and shallow, afraid that if she closed her lids the dream would still be there. She spun her head and saw Carey, then slowly began to calm down. She was wet, covered with sweat so her nightgown clung to her. She sat up and waited for the dizzy feeling to pass, then eased her weight off the bed. She looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. It was almost six. She walked down the hall quickly, turned on the shower in the guest bathroom, pulled the nightgown off over her head, and threw it on the floor. In a few minutes she would be clean and clear-minded, and Carey could awaken to hear her making his breakfast downstairs.

As she stepped into the shower, she tried to get over the dream. Since she was a child she had heard people clicking their tongues and saying that dreams of the Old Time had begun to come back. The pessimists said it happened only to Senecas who had begun to forget who they were and what they were supposed to do. They were paying the price for repressing their true inclinations. There were others who said the dreams were returning because the supernaturals had stayed on the land with the Senecas all this time and finally gotten used to the way things were now, just as the Senecas had. They recognized that the people had not changed in any way that mattered, and so they had begun to touch them more often in sleep.

Jane felt the terror and claustrophobia of the dream beginning to wash away with the hot water and mental exercise. There wasn’t much mystery about it. She had been holding down a quiet tension since the night when she had agreed to marry Carey. She had done the little she could do to make herself unobtrusive. She had taken a new name and moved into a house that no runner and no chaser could know about. She was living as quiet a life as a woman could. She had even been careful to leave untouched all of the things that pertained to Jane Whitefield: the old house looked occupied, the telephone was connected, the mail carrier still came every day.

She had told Carey that she had kept the house as it was because she couldn’t think of a way to keep her old life from popping in to alarm the new tenants. It had not been exactly a lie, but it was part of the truth. What she had not mentioned was that anyone—victim or persecutor—who was able to satisfy himself that she had moved out of that house, and not merely gone on a trip, might keep looking and find this one. The old house kept them one extra step away from here—not much protection, just something that might buy her the time to see them before they saw her.

The dream had been her subconscious mind protesting, reminding her that the few small obstacles she had placed to hide her own trail were pitiful. No matter how fervently Mrs. Carey McKinnon wanted to ignore it, Jane Whitefield could not forget that the trail behind her was full of wolves.