The Blood List – A teaser
. . .
The dream cascaded around Van like a whirlpool, held her under and sucked her backwards into a vortex. Sharp claws ripped flesh from her body, hair from her head; slime and putrefaction and bile burned her nose; screams and heinous laughter echoed in her head. The life force was squeezed out of her body by the vice, by the sucking force that dragged her down.
The black man, his white teeth flashing like a beacon, floated toward her through the thick coils of detritus. He held out his hand. Van reached for it, but she swam in mud, unable to move forward. Movement to the left drew her eyes. She turned her head in that direction. The black mouth opened wider, shaped words; the black hands gestured wildly. She turned back to him. He raised one hand to his ear, opening the palm like a conch shell.
Open her ears; open her mind. Van visualised a door she unlocked. The process was similar to the pattern she used to remember things. She remembered how to do it. She had not gone mad. Her mind was locked, that’s all. She could unlock it now. She could go on. Her hand reached out and touched his. His hands held her in a firm clasp, pulled her toward him until she was close enough to see the hairs in his nose. Van breathed in. She felt safer now. Safer; not secure, and not free.
“The path is not clear. You must stand by the roots you have put into the soil.”
Van did not understand. She should understand. His mind was as close to her as her mind was to herself. A separateness, but not. A sameness, but different. His voice drifted, bringing her awareness closer to something she could feel; something with energy, alive.
“We are not made to kill our own kind. It is against all laws but those of the guardians, the spirits of the law. These,” he indicated the morass swirling around them, the black and blue and purple, anger and rage and claws, “are the result of distortion. Of the choice made to go against nature. It was not passion or fear, not defence or madness, that caused these ones to torture, to kill. They chose. They still choose. Their choices are warped by other choices, of justification, rationalising. They are absorbed into themselves; they have absorbed other life into themselves, and in turn, are absorbed by it; they are never again truly their own shape, their own soul.”
Visions swirled through the haze in her mind: visions of murder. Fury erupted in the form of blood that howled and burned when a limb was hacked apart; red terror pounded the air when a head was bashed into an unrecognisable lump. Hate, purple and black and filled with vile green lightning, pummelled at a broken body, kicked until there was nothing but mist and gore. These were not her visions; they did not belong to Van. These were visions from the things surrounding her. These were the ones without souls, and the souls they had stolen. This never-ending display was what they had done to their victims – whose souls they had stolen. The stolen souls were now part of their killers. They would not let go, they could not forgive. The ones who were murdered now held the murderers in the place where there was no other place; where there was nowhere to go, nowhere to be. No before, no after.
“Is this true vengeance?” she asked Mouyi – she knew his name; it had whispered itself into her ears. His laughter sounded hollow, felt hollow, through his hands.
“It is where the one who dies, the innocent and the not so innocent, can grant the gift – or not.”
The noises around Van were easing, becoming wails, sinking into the well below. “Many choose not to grant forgiveness. Many hold vigil over the soulless, tie its claim here, to ensure the soulless can never be reborn.” Van felt his sadness. “But they remain also, when all that is required is to forgive, to let go of the previous life.”
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I am not here. I am not anywhere. My tree holds my soul until the Naji, the spirit of my tree, decides to let go. Dies, or is killed. I am with my tree spirit.”
“Why do you wait? What holds you here?”
“I wait for the last of my people to seek my lore, the lore of Mouyi, the lore of my country. They have lost the lore, the spirit of place, and I wait for them to seek me. Until my tree dies, the tree of Mouyi, they may come to me. That is all I have now. Only hope.”
Van saw the tree. The huge white tree, branches swinging high in the sky and hanging almost to the ground. Sounds; warm, bright, living sounds ricocheted from the leaves, from the soil. A smaller tree was growing near the drip-line of this one. She walked over to it, releasing the black hand, Mouyi’s hand.
“That is your tree,” Mouyi said. “It takes protection from my tree, and therefore, from me. We are linked by the proximity of the trees in the forest.”
“Why do I need to be here?” Van asked. Was that the question she needed to ask? Should she have asked why she was here at all? Why . . . It didn’t really matter why she was here – how could she get out? How could she keep this place, these horrors, out of her mind?
“You must trust your tree. Trust your spirit. Know where it is your spirit lives, where it waits for you. In the darkness, it will be your only light, your only salvation.” Mouyi was moving away.
“Wait – what about my mother? What about . . . ?” Van did not want to say her name. This was not the place to call someone to by naming them. Van was here. It was not where she wanted to be, and it was not where she was going to stay. She had a life, and she wanted it back. The way it should be; the way it used to be.
Mouyi did not answer, anyway. His tree absorbed his spirit, and Van felt the breeze drift through her as she opened her eyes to the other world, her ears open to the roaring of the bull koala bashing his way through his territory.
. . .
