Emergence

Part II of the Bad Man Black story, which started in my short story entitled "Convergence", which is in my main gallery.

Emergence

His back hurt. It had been three weeks since the boy’s run-in with the mysterious skinwalker, whom the boy could only presume was called ‘Bad Man Black.’ He hadn’t told any of his close friends, but….

She was an older woman—older compared to him, that is; to his eighteen years, she was at least four years older. And she touched him. She told the boy, “You have been marked,” and placed those horribly long fingernails on the bulges that had formed three inches under his shoulder blades. “How long has it been?” Naara purred. The boy couldn’t take his eyes off of hers; they weren’t green nor hazel, but an amber, golden color that he could only hope were contacts. No one’s eyes were really made of honey, were they?

“Three weeks,” Samuel said. Her toothy grin was hungry, giddy, and sad. “It always happens in threes. Call me.” It was always Call me, but Samuel couldn’t wrap his mind around it. She wanted something, and he had it; what the hell was it he had that a woman like her didn’t already have?

It’s in my back. Like Maggots. He stretched his long fingers and itched the rampaging, rolling balls of fat and grimaced. The forest was calling—Samuel had to go back—not because he wanted to, but because the magic that had occurred there had ensnared him; it had curled up inside him, poisoned him and kept him so coolly under its spell, summoning him in like the cawing of a crow.

The voodoo inside his back lurched painfully then; falling to the floor in an agony, Samuel gave a primal yalp and staggered to get upright, grabbing his cell phone and untangling his Subaru keys from the chain he kept tied to wallet. Lord God, he whispered as the moon shone in through his beat-up Venetian blinds; Have mercy on my soul.
000

The red leaves had turned to a thick brown mush on the floor of the forest, making the squat maples look like tendrils that beckoned him in. With a humble kind of whimper, Samuel (quickly scanning the sky,) took a step over the cement barrier and into the rich, Autumn forest. His heart should have been racing, but somehow, it seemed to have stopped beating all together.

A secret cackle bristled in the thicket and Samuel shrugged his quarter-length jacket around his neck, as if warding off vampires; it did little to keep out the cold, but it was short enough to not bother the horrid, crawling lumps below his shoulder blades. Was it just him, or had they gotten bigger the last three minutes since he had gotten to the old maple glen?

It always happens in threes, Naara said.

He walked, looking a bit like a bird that had fallen from its nest: confused and new to the ways of this strange world; if only a cat would come up and put him out of his misery. There was a sudden chill in the air and a shift in the water at the tadpole swamp. How far had he come since he got here? It was just a little public dog park, right? How big was the glen?

“It’s best to beware the way of the crows,” someone said from behind him. Samuel pivoted to turn, but fell suddenly in agony.

“NO!” he cried, panting. The trickle of blood warmed his Old Navy T-shirt and he grasped at his back, pulling at the fatty, puss-infected sores.

“Little Samuel, don’t you know that sparrows are God’s birds?” The boy’s pupils were slits; “Hahh—” he breathed; “The Quran said if you saw a sparrow on your pathway, that Allah had blessed you.” The claws on his back pulled his jacket to his knees and stripped him from his shirt. “NaaarrrrRRRRAAAA!” Samuel cried; “Ahhh!”

The claws met Samuel’s hands and they worked together in unison as they tore the flesh from the damp, reddish-brown down that was deep inside. As Black and Samuel tore the skin away from the down, the wings pushed up dramatically until they were free from their constraints, the air drying them from the gushing blood that came from his back. Black left then, watching from the trees, laughing softly. “That’s right, little sparrow; you’re just like me. Just a bird hiding in human cloth. Skins covering secrets. Secrets coving lies. Where can you go that I cannot see you?”

The phone seemed to have dialed itself. Samuel flumped onto his back, the heavy, decomposing leaf-litter sticking to his back like little natural band-aids.

“Na..naara…”

“Samuel? God,” she said in her sleepy, cat-with-cream voice.

“Wings….” Samuel breathed.

“Oh god, Oh; oh god; it happened? Already?”

“Black…” his voiced trailed off. He didn’t hear her voice on the other end of the receiver reassuring him in both his stupidity and braveness—somehow intertwined—or the medics picking him up from his bloody bed—but as the ambulance drove off, his new-found appendages felt lithe and alive; the bones felt sturdy yet lightening-quick; and as the TMA assistance nurses patched up his wing holes, Samuel couldn’t help but stretch the wings out, showing them off to Naara, who smiled obligingly at him from the surgical viewing window. Her golden eyes and razor fangs suddenly didn’t seem so out of place; her flashing, glistening claws a comfort as she helped him readjust in the rehab. “Where am I?” Samuel pleaded, his wingtips twitching as he breathed.

“Hell.” Naara smiled. “Welcome to the Therian Medical Association, birdboy.”

The dying moonlight gave birth to the silver strands of morning dew. Samuel couldn’t help but notice a shadow lurking outside his window, two stories above the lower level.

“Naara?” Samuel blinked. Following his gaze, the catwoman hissed at the shadow until nothing was left in the trees but a cackle. Samuel tried to hide a growing erection; Naara, however, seemed pleased-as-pith, and looked him straight in the eye.

“Mrowl,” she purred.

Author's Note

Critique please.