People of the Mist(28)
Six
Fear tickled her belly.
She glanced up at the hovering bird: a laughing gull, called that because of the strange humanlike cackles it made as it hunted the shore. People said The Panther could change himself into any animal he wished. Dog, worm, or bird. They also said he could scare a person’s soul right out of her body, but the person didn’t always die. Often, the terrified soul wandered the land, whimpering and thrashing tree branches, until it turned into an evil forest spirit with hollow and lifeless eyes; the person’s soulless body continued to move among the living, but could no longer speak or take care of itself.
She had seen one soulless body in her four and ten Comings of the Leaves. An old man named Brightness. He’d lost his soul the previous summer. Every day after the event, his family had set him on a grass mat outside their house and, while he’d peered openmouthed at nothing, drool had dribbled down his chin. The horror still coiled in Sun Conch’s belly.
Above her, the gull let out a loud laugh, and flapped away. She paddled as if being chased by enemy warriors. The canoe shot across the bay, skimming the water like a swallow.
She’d seen four Comings of the Leaves when she’d first heard of The Panther, Old Wolf Leggings, one of the Sun Shell Clan elders, had been racing through the village with a bag of salt in her gnarled hand. As she’d scattered it around the palisade, she’d whispered darkly that “The Panther” had returned. “He’s making corn husk dolls of each of us,” she’d said, “and witching them.” That same night a big black dog had loped around the palisade, howling Wolf Leggings’ name. They’d found her the next morning, dead, her fingernails clawing at the earth, as if she’d been trying to dig a way out of her house.
A cold gust of wind lifted the hair on Sun Conch’s neck. She shuddered and stopped paddling. The canoe listed sideways. Aunt Threadleaf had cursed Sun Conch using The Panther’s name. Had he heard?
“Panther?” she called to the fluttering gulls. “I am coming to speak with you, but I am just a girl. I mean you no harm.”
The gulls cackled and dove, their wings glistening whitely against the golden background of dawn.
She steered her canoe toward the point in the distance. Despite her resolution, her gaze kept straying to the skies. Clouds hung low over the eastern shore. Never had she paddled so far, and the muscles in her arms, chest, and shoulders began to ache. She hadn’t understood the immense size of the Salt Water Bay, or the terror that lurked in those long swells that raised and lowered her canoe.
Gasping and wincing at the pain in her strained body, she paddled on. She flinched at her skin blistering on the wooden paddle handle, but the sores would heal later. As she neared the low island, wind-sculpted trees crowded the shore. Shadows leapt everywhere, ghostly and indistinct, like forest spirits vying for the best position from which to view her arrival.
“I am coming, Panther!” she said. “I’m afraid. I’m very afraid. But no one is going to stop me. Not even you.”
The water of the bay shone like silver in the midday sun. Ducks speckled the surface and, here and there, jumping fish left ever-widening rings that interlocked and vanished into nothingness. In the distance, the western shore resembled humped gray fuzz capped by billowing clouds.
At the edge of the water, the marsh grass gave way to pebbly mud flats He came here at low tide in mud-soaked moccasins. In one hand he carried a digging stick, in the other a leather sack.
Over his long life, he’d had many names, but now he only knew himself by the name given him by his victims: The Panther.
Periodically, he’d stop, use his stick as a lever, and pry a clam from the mud. At other times, he’d whack a skittering crab in the shallows, and drop it into his bucket with the clams.
To his left, dormant cord grass rose in thick unbroken ranks, a vast carpet that spread to the east before finally giving way to the distant groves of trees. To his right lay the great Salt Water Bay, its spirit mysteriously quiet today.
His only company was the birds. Herons and egrets watched from a safe distance; plovers, turn stones and sandpipers trotted out of his path, to rush in behind after he passed. Overhead, a handful of gulls soared. The old man cracked a clam’s shell with the hard butt of his stick, and tossed the treat up for the squalling gulls. As they snatched the morsel in midair, he grinned, never tired of their aerial grace.
He found the place he was looking for and sloshed out into the water, as if walking straight out into the bay. The chill ate into his calves, and then his arthritic knees as the water deepened. Around him, small fish darted and churned the surface. His reflection wavered as he walked, and periodically he glanced at his distorted image. He wore his gray hair loose, letting it tumble around his shoulders in a stringy mass. A ragged breech clout hung from his lean hips, and a faded red fabric cape lay over his left shoulder, its tattered threads hanging. Panther’s skin had turned grainy with age, and had loosened from the ropy muscles on his arms, legs, and belly, but his eyes remained keen, staring out from under a weathered brow. His nose, once hawkish, had grown long and curved over a flat mouth.