Ghost Dance Read online

  Morgan frowned at her.

  "My partner. The coyotes."

  As if her voice had summoned them, the creatures loped into view around them. Alex knew they weren't hostile but she didn't like the wildness in their eyes. The people trapped inside the animal bodies were burning with rage and she didn't want to be its target. "Easy," she said. "We have what we need to help you. We just need to find your real bodies."

  The lead coyote lifted its head and howled.

  "Do you think he understands?" Morgan asked.

  "I hope so. But he's losing himself in the beast."

  The air filled with the musky odour of fur as the creatures kept pace beside them. The sand dunes gave no chance at a long view, and Alex had no sense of how long they'd travelled or how much further they needed to go.

  The sun had sunk lower in the sky, acquiring the first hint of red, when Morgan stopped. He held out his hand to halt Alex beside him. The coyotes seemed to understand some need for caution. The leader sunk to its belly and the others clustered behind it, eyes swinging between Alex and whatever lay ahead.

  "Do you hear that?" Morgan whispered.

  She cocked her head, then nodded. "Voices." They could be anyone, but knowing the way the spirit world worked, they were almost certainly someone connected to all this. The maze would have spat them out into this particular part of the real world for a reason.

  She didn't like the idea of walking into whatever was waiting with only Morgan beside her. He'd lost both his gun and his knife in the spirit world. But her mouth was so dry she found it hard to swallow and she was beginning to feel light-headed, a combination of heat and thirst. If they didn't chance it, the desert would finish them off anyway.

  The dune in front of them obscured what lay beyond, but the voices grew louder as they drew nearer. Alex thought she recognised at least one of them. "That's Coby, isn't it?"

  Morgan nodded.

  She hesitated a moment then walked forward, to the top of the rise and over. The coyotes howled when they saw what lay beyond, a high desperate note that went on and on. Alex tried to see what had spooked them, but it was just a ring of young people, probably Croatoans. They were dressed in Native American costumes, beads and buckskin.

  She couldn't see Coby's face, but there was a shock of curly hair on a man with his back to her and she knew it was him.

  "Coby!" Morgan shouted. "I've got the shofar. You know what it can do, so don't fuck me around." He held the horn above his head and the gold around the mouthpiece glinted in the sunlight.

  The people in the circle shifted and turned to stare at him. Alex saw the skulls beneath their beautiful faces and knew these were the true leaders of the cult, the body-hopping spirits of the old in fresh young bodies. She thought some might try to rush Morgan before he could use the horn. They didn't, though. And they didn't seem entirely surprised to see them. A shiver of unease passed down her back, and then the curly-haired man turned.

  It both was and wasn't Coby. He had the same features and the same wide hazel eyes, but there were crow's feet around them and his skin had lost the glow of youth. He was holding another man, a knife against his throat.

  "PD," Alex gasped.

  "Yes," his captor said, "I know what you're thinking and I am Coby. And yes, I will kill your partner's body if you don't do exactly what I say."

  "I'm not giving you the shofar," Morgan said. "I'm sorry, Alex."

  Coby smiled. "I don't want it. I want you, Alex. Or are you going to sacrifice this man again to save your own skin?"

  "Wait," Morgan said. "Tell us what the hell happened to you."

  Alex guessed he was stalling for time and was happy to let him. Could she sacrifice PD again? But if she saved him at the cost of the shofar, the whole world would suffer. She'd have sacrificed the greater good to salve her own guilty conscience. Wouldn't that be worse than the original crime?

  "Alex happened to me," Coby said. "She pulled me into the spirit world, where events aren't ordered by time, but by their psychic significance, their weight. There was one event - one day in my life - that outweighed all the others. Once she pushed me away with all the force of her considerable power, it was inevitable I'd return to it."

  "The day you murdered the other kids in your class," Morgan said. And then, "You're Laughing Wolf. Jesus, you've lived these last I don't know how many years twice. And the second time you knew everything you found out the first time. You set the trap in the Croatoan centre to draw Alex there so she could send you back in time to set the trap. You probably set up the whole fucking cult just to draw us there. You wanted to go back to the beginning."

  "You're a clever guy," Coby said. "When I was younger, I underestimated you. Now I know I need you."

  "Need me? I've already spoken to Dee for you. I thought it was Alex you wanted now."

  She looked between them, agonised. The knife pressed against PD's throat and the coyotes paced as if they were caged. The leader's lips were pulled back in a fierce snarl and Alex could see PD's face behind the beast's, equally feral. She thought he understood everything and was judging her for her hesitation.

  "I need you both," Coby said, "but Alex first." His face hardened and his hand tightened on the knife. Droplets of blood gathered beneath the blade and fell on PD's white T-shirt. The man possessing his body whimpered but didn't try to pull away. With the blade pressed against his jugular, any movement would have killed him.

  Morgan turned to Alex, the shofar clasped against his chest. "Don't listen to him. His promises aren't worth anything. PD's already dead. You tried. Let it go."

  "He's right," she said thickly to Coby. "I've got absolutely no reason to trust you. I'm not putting my life in your hands along with PD's."

  "I'm not asking you to. I just want what I've always wanted - a chance to escape what I know is waiting for me at the end of my life."

  "You don't deserve to escape it," Morgan said. "And it's not like it's gonna end there. If you're immortal, you can do anything you want."

  "I don't want much. I enjoy killing, why deny it? But I like it personal, one victim at a time. Even if I live forever, the people I kill will be nothing, a blip on the radar. Malaria kills a thousand times as many every day. If you're really so concerned about innocent life, Morgan, why don't you devote your time to finding a cure for that?"

  "Listen to him," Morgan said to Alex. "Listen to the shit he's spouting. You can't let him live forever."

  "Summon the spirit world, Alex," Coby said. "Just draw it in. The circle is here, we're ready to perform the ghost dance to evoke paradise." He caressed PD's face with his free hand, smiling. "We've even got a direct descendant of Jack Wilson here to make the metaphor complete. All we need is for you to take the metaphor and turn it into reality."

  He gestured to the circle around him, a sharp jerk of his head. The Croatoans linked hands and began to turn as the low hum of a chant throbbed through the desert air.

  "Don't do it," Morgan said. "If he gets to Eden he gets the apple - it's game over."

  The coyotes snarled and howled and the circle below moved faster. Their feet churned the sand into a fine yellow fog.

  "But Eden's got a guardian, hasn't it?" Alex said. "And you've got the shofar. I've got to save PD. I owe him."

  Morgan turned to her and for a moment she saw violence in his eyes. Then it faded and his hands dropped. She didn't think he could kill her in cold blood.

  Coby smiled. His hazel eyes were hidden in the shadows beneath his brows as the setting sun dyed his skin red. "Use the dance," he said to Alex. "Jack Wilson knew what he was doing when he taught his people to perform it. He just wasn't as powerful a spirit traveller as you. He could never pull Eden all the way through, though he spent all his life trying. Visualise paradise, Alex, and the dance will bring it to you."

  "Eden," she said. "The biblical Eden?"

  Coby's mouth quirked. "If that's the easiest thing for you to picture."

  She could see him vibrating with
energy. Coby thought he'd won and maybe he had. "OK," she said, then shut her eyes and spread her hands wide in a welcoming gesture.

  She did exactly as Coby had asked - she pictured the perfect little glade she'd imagined as a little girl when she'd first heard the story of Eden. She visualised the apple trees, side by side, old and gnarled, leaves bright against their cracked bark. And then she smiled and pictured the serpent. Coby thought he could escape the judgement he was owed, but if she could contrive it he'd find himself facing it anyway.

  She felt the power build and build inside her until it was too much to bear. Her arms dropped and her eyes opened. Her neck hairs stood on end, springing back up when she ran a hand down to smooth them, as if the air was filled with static electricity.

  The coyotes must have sensed it too. The one which contained PD's spirit cocked its head, ears pricked, then lifted its head and howled. The others joined him. She realised, with a lurch of alarm, that they were howling a perfect counterpoint to the chanting of the Croatoans below.

  She took an unconscious step towards them, tried to pull up short and instead stepped forward again, drawn by the power of the dance. Whatever she'd set in motion here was out of her control - or Morgan's. He walked forward beside her, the tense set of his jaw revealing both his struggle against the movement and its futility.

  Alex stopped beside Coby near the edge of the circle and Morgan flanked the cult leader on the other side. Her eyes met Coby's for a moment, but the pale hazel was unreadable. Then the other man looked back into the centre of the dance and the expression on his face made Alex's stomach churn.

  The Croatoans were running now. Sweat beaded on the beautiful young faces and gathered in the armpits of their buckskin tops. The coyotes had moved to circle them, a snarling, feral outer ring. The Croatoans sensed them and the skulls beneath their perfect skin grinned at the beasts.

  At first she thought it was a shadow in the centre of the circle and looked up to see what had cast it. There was nothing, and when she looked back down the stain had grown and she saw that it was grass.

  It was a vibrant, emerald green, a colour she'd never seen in the desert, not even after a rare rainfall. The grass grew and spread. She felt it sprouting beneath her feet and nearly overbalanced, taking a step back onto sand only to have it too erupt into growth. The air was filled with the bright, fresh smell of it.

  The cultists must have seen it too, but they kept running, faster than should have been possible. The power which had raised the hairs on her neck intensified. She couldn't tell if it was a consequence or the cause of the Croatoans' inexhaustible energy.

  Coby was laughing. He sounded disbelieving and Alex wondered if he'd planned this all these years but never quite thought it could happen. Morgan gazed around him with a soft smile on his lips. He looked entirely relaxed, and she didn't understand how he could be until she realised she was smiling too, as flowers bloomed among the blades of grass, pinpricks of blue and the occasional daisy, like a child's drawing of the sun.

  Something larger disrupted the grass as the grass had disrupted the sand. It grew like a piece of time-lapse photography, first a slender sprouting stem, then a sapling and finally a tree. Green fruit inflated on the tips of its branches and she tensed until the fruit darkened to purple and she realised it was a plum. To her left, another sapling grew, and the sweet smell of lemons wafted from it.

  The circle of Croatoans finally broke, pushed apart buy the wildly growing plants around them. There was an explosion of sound, musical but discordant. A second later a flock of birds swooped towards the trees. The flock moved as one but was composed of a hundred different sorts of bird. She saw the common brown of starlings, a red-breasted robin and a bluetit. Before it was lost in the foliage, she glimpsed the pink feathers and long, insectile legs of a flamingo.

  She looked at Morgan. "Did I do this?"

  "Well, it sure as hell wasn't me."

  She laughed. She knew she should be worried, but something about this place seemed to stifle dark emotions. She felt joy and gritted her teeth to fight it. She'd let Coby get very close to his goal and she had to make sure he didn't reach it. She looked for him among the branches - and heard the first scream.

  They were in an orchard now, the other people lost in the dappled shadows of the trees. It took a moment for her eyes to make out the shapes of the nearest Croatoans and the black holes of their open mouths. She ran towards them, propelled by an instinct to help someone in pain that overrode who these people were and what they'd done. But when she reached the nearest woman she stopped and stared. It was Maria - her body, at least.

  Maria shrieked as her hands clawed at her face. It had changed. She was still the same person, with the same gap between her front teeth and the same soulful dark eyes, but now small furrows radiated from them and her skin was no longer perfect. It looked a little dry and weathered. Older. Coby's transformation had happened to her too, but Alex didn't think it had the same cause.

  "What's happening to me?" Maria said.

  "The spirit world hates lies," Alex said. "You being young and pretty was a lie. This place is correcting that."

  A small coyote slunk forward and whined when it saw Maria. Alex's righteous satisfaction faded into nothing. "Oh god, I didn't think."

  "It's their bodies, isn't it?" Morgan said. "Think this'll reverse when we get out of here?"

  Alex shook her head helplessly as Maria continued to age in front of them. Her body twisted, stooping as her bones lost density and grew brittle and her tendons tightened. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, her hands liver-spotted and gnarled with arthritis. And she still kept aging.

  "In her real body she had cancer," Alex said. "She would have been dead by now if she hadn't stolen Maria's."

  The woman in Maria's body understood what Alex was saying. Her screams trailed into whimpers and she held out her wizened hands imploringly towards them.

  Alex shook her head and backed away. "Everyone ages and everybody dies."

  The old woman's eyes narrowed and her almost lipless mouth twisted. "See if you feel that way when your own time comes." She looked as if she intended to say more, but only a dry rattle emerged, terrible and terminal.

  As the body slumped to the ground it kept aging. Skin stretched tight over bones as the flesh beneath melted away. By the time the corpse lay on the perfect green grass it looked weeks dead.

  "We have to find PD," Alex said. Her chest felt so tight she could barely breathe.

  Morgan looked at her and she knew he thought it was already too late. She turned her back on him and walked between the trees. More bodies lay beneath them. The musk of decay wafted on the breeze but the ripe smell of the fruit quickly overrode it. Alex didn't think this place liked death or unpleasantness. It wanted you to forget them. She had to concentrate very hard not to let her mind drift into a formless daydream of happiness.

  Some of the Croatoans were still alive, though barely. They passed an old man on his knees beside a cherry tree, dry retching into the grass. When he raised his head at the sound of their passage Alex saw that he was blind, his eyes eaten away by disease.

  "I'm sorry," Morgan said to her.

  "Don't be sorry!" Alex snapped. "PD's body could still be alive."

  "But in what kind of state?"

  They reached the centre of the orchard, a small clearing where the sun shone down brightly. Alex realised that, impossibly, it had returned to the height of its daily arc. In this perfect place it must always be noon. The clearing was on a slight rise, allowing a view over the trees to the landscape beyond. They were still in the Mojave. She could see where the greenery gave way to the brown of desert. Bare mountains ringed them.

  Coby stood at the other side of the clearing. His head turned from side to side. For the first time since the ceremony started, he looked less than completely composed. Among all the fruit hanging from the branches around them, Alex couldn't see a single apple.

  "Where is it?" he said to Alex
. "You didn't finish it. Finish the fucking summoning."

  "Where's PD?" she asked.

  He shrugged and looked down at his feet. A body lay there, spine arched in the final agony of death. The skin was thin and mottled and the hair gone, but Alex recognised the shape of cheeks and nose. She felt a pain in her chest that might have been either grief or guilt.

  "Once I got here, they were surplus to requirements," Coby said.

  Alex glared at him. "You don't even care, do you?"

  "I just don't like to share, especially something as important as immortality."

  "But you should care," Alex said. "What can you threaten me with now?"

  She enjoyed his look of consternation. It was transmuting into anger when the ground beneath her shifted. She staggered back and watched the earth gape open. There were two holes and her heart stuttered when she saw the thick bole of a tree push through each of them. Coby smiled triumphantly.

  The ground rolled beneath her as if the roots of the trees ran very long and deep. The trunks were already full thickness when they emerged from the ground and the branches tore out of the soil with them, buds sprouting into leaves as they rose. The apples which grew beside them were green with red cheeks. They looked like they'd be crunchy and sweet.

  A figure sat beneath the trees, cross-legged.

  "Raven," Alex said bitterly. "Trust you only to show up once it's too late."

  "I don't know why you're acting all surprised," he said. "You invited me here."

  "I didn't," she said and then remembered. When she'd thought of the Garden of Eden she'd imagined the serpent. She'd thought she understood what Raven was, but she'd made the mistake of taking the spirit world's metaphors for literal truth. She knew of the trickster god called Raven and that was how he'd appeared to her, but he was a far more universal principle.

  "You're real," Coby said to him. "I always wondered if the dreams were just dreams."

  "Realish," Raven said.