Urban Shaman

It was not a comforting feeling after a day like today. I tried closing my eyes and found out they were already closed, but the ceiling still glowed faintly white up above me. I blinked. Darkness came and went, but I didn’t feel my eyelids move. A shock ran through me, radiating out from my heart like the sudden release of a metal-on-metal lock, sharp and high-pitched and tingling through my whole body.

And then I was free, looking down at my shape under the covers. I looked very comfortable. I looked down at my feet, the ones I was standing on. I could see the carpet through my toes.

Something tugged at me, pulling me up. I turned my face up, and disconnected with the floor entirely, floating upward.

Next time I go for a flight, I’ll go out through the window. Even a glimpse of what the upstairs neighbors were doing—well, I honestly hadn’t known human beings could get into that position.

The world outside glowed. I was sure there’d been no moon when I came home, but a brilliant crescent lit the sky with more wattage than usual, silver-blue light weighting down tree branches as if it were snow. Leaves glittered with color, reds and golds and greens that had more to do with neon than nature. Pathways and streets were dark blue streaks undershadowed with something else, like an artist had slapped paint on and let it slide down the canvas to expose other shards of colors beneath it. I stood in the sky, looking down over the streets as the dark blue slowly blurred away.

One exposed path led under an arch of trees that reminded me of Anne Shirley’s “White Way of Delight.” It twisted, sliding underground, and somewhere down it I could feel a heavy presence waiting for me. It felt like it could drink down the light and me with it, like the rabbit hole pulling Alice in. I reached up to tug a leaf off one of the trees, watching it glow a soft silver in my palm. It brightened into a beacon as I scrambled down the pathway.

It met the mouth of the cave, sliding underground. I hesitated at the dark entrance, lifting my leaf up to try to light the way. I saw a reflection, a glimpse of something bright, in the instant before a wall roared up, damming the cave’s mouth. I put my hand against it, the leaf gleaming, but nothing changed except the sensation of the thing waiting for me. It was somewhere beneath the earth, and amused, and patient. I stayed where I was a few moments longer, then slowly turned back up the White Way. The one who waited suddenly felt much more distant, and then I couldn’t feel it at all.

The world changed around me again, then again, and again, until they came so fast I could barely distinguish one from another. Some of the permutations I recognized: glimpses of Paris and New York, places that looked as solid as reality, overlooking the vibrant glow that had nothing to do with city lights and a great deal to do with things I didn’t want to think about. Others were harder to grasp, African plains with seas of violently purple grass, Australian Outback with a sky as bloody red as the stone beneath it. Every one got farther away from civilization, until I exploded into a place of absolute stillness with the hard white light of the stars pricking my skin.

“Well, she’s no good,” a tart little voice said. “Look at her. A baby, spilling out all over the place. You want a cosmic bed wetter to take care of this? She can’t even see us.”

“That’s no way to speak to our guest,” another voice said very firmly. This one was rich and dark and full of very round vowels, chocolaty, like James Earl Jones. “She’s come a long way on nothing but faith.”

“She’s come a long way on our faith,” the tart voice said. It sounded like Granny Smith apples. “She hasn’t got any of her own.”

“She’s a newborn,” a third voice broke in. He sounded like mellow cheese. “She didn’t mean to invite us, but she’s willing to help.” Two more voices chimed in, everyone bickering and sniping at one another until they sounded like a flock of geese. I turned around in a full circle twice, trying to see the people the voices belonged to. The starlight jabbed at my eyes unrelentingly, no shadows or shapes to go with the voices clouding them. It suddenly felt weirdly familiar.

I hadn’t seen Coyote until I believed in him. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that I’d better believe in the voices, because I was pretty sure I had invited them to do…whatever they’d done. Hauled me out of my body to somewhere that horribly murdered people hang out.

My brain just shut down around that thought.

“Look,” I finally said. It got very quiet in the star field. I turned around one more time to find a handful of people behind me, all staring at me with wide, curious eyes. “You’re wrong. I can see you.” I wasn’t sure which one was the Granny Smith, so I fixed them all with a gimlet eye. “And I’m not all that inclined to help somebody who called me a cosmic bed wetter, when you get right down to it.” A tall woman’s long nose twitched. I guessed her to be Granny Smith and removed the gimlet eye from the others to give it just to her. Her nose twitched again.

“Sorry,” she said after being elbowed in the ribs by a short man whom I guessed to be the James Earl Jones voice. He didn’t look anything at all like Jones. I was hideously disappointed.

“You’ll have to forgive Hester,” he said. “She’s not taking well to having been interrupted.”

“Interrupted.” My eyebrows flew up. “You mean murdered?” I was sure these five were the files I had lying on my kitchen table. They were all the right general sizes and shapes, even if I’d only seen photos of their corpses.

He made a moue. “I suppose so. It’s really just an inconvenience, but Hester is young.”

I peered at Hester. She looked like she was well into her fifties, at least. Her mouth pursed up like she’d bitten into one of the apples she sounded like. “Not as young as this one,” she sniffed. I scowled, and suddenly there was an enormous distance between myself and the five, the star field endlessly expanded. I could see, with sharp-edged clarity, the alarm on all five faces.

“Dammit, Hester,” one of the others said, “you’re going to put her off us entirely before she’ll agree to help us at all.” Her voice was absolutely clear despite the distance between us, like she was standing on a sound stage. It echoed faintly. Hester flared her nostrils, then lifted her chin.

“I’m sorry.” It was much less grudging this time. “Roger is right. I was in the middle of something important, and I’m not sure I’d done enough to make it last. But that’s no reason to be rude. You’ve been extraordinarily generous with your invitation already, even if you didn’t know it.” Her voice was still tart, but it was more like the tart of apple pie. I began to wonder if I was hungry. “Will you stay long enough to let us tell you what we know?”

“Well, I’m here,” I said. Distance contracted again, so that the five and I were only a few feet apart, stars glittering around us. “I might as well listen. Maybe you can tell me what the hell is going on.” There was a note of miserable confusion in my voice. I straightened my shoulders and pretended I hadn’t really sounded that pathetic.

“You almost died this morning,” a petite blond woman said. She had dumpling cheeks that went with Earth Mother curves. I remembered from the file that her name was Samantha.

“Yeah, I was there for that part.” I rubbed my breastbone uncomfortably and screwed up my face.

“Do you know that near-death experiences often open people’s eyes to another world?”

“I know that’s what they say,” I replied. Samantha smiled a tolerant little smile. It occurred to me that my current position was a fragile one for argument. “All right.” I gritted my teeth and pushed the words out. “So maybe there’s more than meets the eye.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone again and took a deep breath. “All right, there is more than meets the eye,” I said defensively. “Normal people don’t start burning and smoking when you stick a knife in them. The guy who stabbed me this morning was definitely not normal.”

Hester snorted faintly. Roger elbowed her again. “Be quiet. That’s quite an admission for her.”

“Must it be an admission to come around to stating the obvious?” Hester asked. Apparently sour was just her nature. The moment of grace earlier must have come hard-won. It had worked to make me stay, but she wasn’t earning any brownie points.

“Give me a break, Hes,” I said. She looked up sharply. I bet nobody had called her that since third grade. “Yesterday the world made sense and today I’m standing in a star pit talking to ghosts.” I looked back at Samantha. “So what happened to me?”

“You got to make a choice. Most people don’t get to.”

I spread my hands. “Why me?”

“You must have a lot to offer,” she said. “Many times, those who need the most healing are the ones who can in turn heal the most.”