C.E. Murphy – Coyote Dreams (страница 10)

Bradley Holliday had driven up from Spokane the moment his shift at Valley Hospital ended, which was why he wore doctor’s whites. On hearing he was from Spokane, I wanted to know any number of things, like why I hadn’t known Billy had a brother, if he lived nearby and whether or not Bradley Holliday had ever met a teenage girl named Suzanne Quinley who’d gone to live in Spokane after her parents were brutally murdered. I figured the answers were “You never asked,” and “No,” respectively, but I wondered, anyway.

I also wondered why my friend Billy, who loved all things paranormal and who had married a woman like himself, had a brother who became livid at a healer’s drum in a hospital room.

I sat down on the far side of Billy’s bed, making myself as small as possible while I put a hand on his shoulder. It hardly mattered: none of the others were paying any attention to me, but I felt like I needed to be surreptitious, anyway.

The coil of energy flared inside me as I touched Billy’s shoulder, impatience sparkling through my skin like champagne. I felt a knot loosen in my shoulder and let my eyes close for a moment, absurdly grateful that the power was responding. It hadn’t been a couple of weeks earlier, and although it’d been behaving since then, the idea of failing my friends again made my stomach clench with nausea.

In a way it was helpful to have Brad over there talking intently with Melinda and Morrison. It put less pressure on me to be the performing monkey, and I was uncertain enough about what to do as it was. I did know one thing: pouring my life essence into Billy, like Melinda had tried to do, was right out. She didn’t have the healing knack that I did, but that hadn’t been the important part of what she’d been offering. She’d been trying to give him the will to live, and Billy wasn’t missing that. What I’d felt was more like a siphon draining away what would have normally made him vital.

And siphons were a metaphor I could work with. The idea brought a smile to my lips even as I concentrated on my breathing, unwilling to interrupt and bring attention to myself by asking for my drum. Ideally I would pop by the garden that housed my inner self, invite Billy in and do a little fixer-upper from there. Even more ideally, I’d pop right into Billy’s garden and do my work from inside his own head, but the one time I’d fallen into somebody else’s garden, it’d been Gary, and I didn’t really have much idea of how I’d done it. I suspected I hadn’t done it at all, in fact, and that the old man’s sense of self had just overwhelmed my newbie attempts to set up his shop in my head. It all meant that realistically, I was going to try slipping inside my garden, drawing Billy’s soul closer to mine and pinching off the siphon that was drawing life force out of him. It seemed very straightforward and simple.

Oh, what my life had come to, that such things should seem simple.

A few deep breaths had me drifting, like the clarity Morrison’s drumming had brought on was simmering just below the surface, waiting for me to pay attention to it again. My goal this time was an internal journey, not an external one, so there was no lens flare effect or rearrangement of the color spectrum into neons and pulsing life. Instead I slid down a brightly colored rabbit hole, tumbling chaotically through my own mind into a place I didn’t recognize at first.

There were familiar elements. The pond with a waterfall feeding it at one end, for example, and the pathways that lay in straight lines through the grounds. But the grass, usually cropped so short I could see dirt between individual blades, had grown up to ankle-deep, and there was a hint of Kentucky blue to its color now. Leaves were fully open on trees that were still tidily trimmed, and a few of the hedges even bore flowers, though I had no idea what kind. The garden had been rectangular and functional last time I’d been in it, but now the far end, away from the waterfall, seemed hazy, as if fog were hiding the possibility of more.

It was almost pretty.

I stood by the pond, rotating slowly and trying to remember when I’d last actually gone inside myself. I’d been looking outward for days, searching for Coyote—my erstwhile spirit guide, who’d stopped speaking to me after I threw him out of a dangerous situation—but I’d been avoiding taking a look at the state of my soul ever since the catastrophe that had cost two people their lives. It seemed unlikely that those events had led to all the blossoming going on around me now.

Of course not, said a snide little voice inside my head. Because horrible things happening couldn’t possibly have any positive aspects, like forcing you to get your act together.

I really hated that voice. I was almost certain it’d been there before my shamanic powers had been woken up. It was the almost part that made me nervous. Sometimes I wanted to ask if other people had snarky little voices that gave them smart-ass commentary on their lives, but I was afraid they’d say no.

Obnoxious little voice or no, I sat down by my pond, trailing my fingers into the water. It struck me suddenly as being a good conduit for reaching Billy, even working into the siphoning of life essence he was experiencing. I could still feel my hand on his shoulder, in a vague, disconnected way, which was interesting. I’d never tried paying attention to my physical body while inside the garden of my mind. Then again, I hadn’t really needed to, and now I was trying to build a bridge between myself and my patient. Trying to find a way inside him so we could get the healing process started.

It was my right hand both on his shoulder and splooshing around in my pond. The most peculiar thing was that having two body awarenesses going on at once only sounded strange when I tried putting it into words; it felt completely natural. I turned my focus to my fingers, calling up the bubble of power that resided inside me.

It responded as easily as it had before, splashing through me in silver-blue joy at being used. Warmth and glee ran up through my torso and into my arm, washing down the blood vessels just as it had done with Gary, and then poured itself into my pond. The charged water glimmered and shone, quicksilver with life and depth of its own. My consciousness spilled into it, and over Billy’s skin, making me aware of his heartbeat, his breathing, first on the surface, and then slowly from within, as if he was permeable and I was water.

I cut the snide little voice off before it could comment, that time. I knew perfectly well the permeation was what I was trying to accomplish, but it didn’t make succeeding any less surprising to me. Still, having my brain back-talk at me when I was trying to concentrate couldn’t be of any help.

The entire sensation was incredibly subtle, like being brushed by fur so soft I couldn’t be sure I’d been touched. It could also have been insanely erotic, and for a moment I was torn between gratitude I was working with Billy and a fantasy about working with Morrison.

God, I wished I would stop thinking things like that. I set my teeth together both literally and figuratively, and concentrated on the idea of permeating my way through flesh and bone and into Billy’s psyche, so I could enter the garden of his soul and work my anti-siphoning magic.

For a minute there, I thought it was going to work. I slid through dreams, trying not to look at them, under the unlikely logic that they weren’t my business. Traipsing around in people’s unconscious minds: my business. Snooping while I’m doing it: not kosher. I had an interesting set of moral boundaries going on there.

But the water metaphor was working, letting me drain down toward his garden. I got the impression that the idea of the garden was something I superimposed on Billy, and that he adapted to because I was the one awake in this scenario. Regardless, it provided the structure I needed, a bright spot at the center of his being, hints of green visible even from my outside vantage point. I exhaled a sigh of relief.

Warm, heavy blackness came down around his garden like a Carolina night, so thick and dark there was nothing left to breathe. There were faint shining prisms in the black, ripples of purple and blue that had the faintest living texture to them when I saw them from the corners of my eyes, and which disappeared entirely when I looked straight at them, too dark to be seen.

My water metaphor held together, leaving me beading against tar, unable to push through the darkness. I gnawed my lower lip, wondering which level of reality I was doing that on, and tried to pull the droplets of myself back together, coalescing into a whole presence lingering within Billy’s mind as a semi-welcome guest.

Sleepy, weighty midnight swam around me, trying as hard—harder—than I was to enter that core of Billy’s self. It brought slow pressure to bear, something about its presence suggesting it had all the time it needed, and that it would eventually prevail. I, on the other hand, was beginning to think I had a limited window in which to save my friend’s life. The sleepy power didn’t seem to be interested in acknowledging me, and I couldn’t tell if Billy knew I was there. If my water metaphor had failed, there had to be another way. Something more direct, something completely the opposite of what the weight that kept Billy asleep was trying to accomplish.