Now, the only thing separating the living from the Spirit World is a curtain. Light as a bridal veil. Soft as linen. Running right alongside the steps of the fools and the wise, of the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the men and the women. The fabric billows silently ‘mid the laughing and the crying, the love and the murder. It hangs there, all around, its hem wading in the churning yeast of humanity.
Folks feel it at times. The soft brush on the arm. A tickle on the back of the neck. They may even see it. Only ever out of the corner of their eye. Something swaying. The curtain is always swaying. Rippling. Forever ruffled by a warm breeze that never rests. And it was that same breeze that tousled Cracked Beak’s phantom feathers.
Though he passed from one world into the next, he had only traveled a single step. He stood on the pottery shards. The flame in the lantern was as gray as all the rest of that realm.
“Where’d he go?”
That was Mr. Doolin, but his voice didn’t reverberate out of his moving lips, it didn’t echo off the walls, it didn’t vibrate the ear canals of Cracked Beak’s little cranium, but popped into the raven’s mind. The blacksmith, his potbelly, his curly head, was all gray and hazy with streaked contours and blurring shadows, like he was a charcoal sketch. Yet, something hovered within the area of his chest. A ball of yellow green light, about the size of softball. A collective of tiny sparks, spinning in the tight ovals, ovals that rotated and tilted like the representational image of an atom. One of the ellipses grew, stretching, till it was almost a line, like a rubber band stretched as far as it could go, but it quickly snapped back, back into that softball diameter where it spun and spun.
“Into the Spirit World of course.”
Cracked Beak pivoted his head toward Cornelius Magnus, still sitting on the gray bed there in the gray jail cell. The huckster’s form was fuzzy, like pencil markings smudged on the page by an excessively oily thumb. The ball of lights in his chest was smaller, about the size of a mandarin orange, but they didn’t just twirl around, confined to the shape of an orb. They streamed up his throat, a glowing esophagus, and swarmed in his head like a hundred lightning bugs trapped in a mason jar.
The breeze blew, tugging gently on the paper money held in the raven’s beak. All four corners of the dollar bill pulled Cracked Beak toward the door of the Sheriff’s Office. He hopped off the bed railing and was about to pass through the iron bars near Mr. Doolin’s boots when he spied a short goblin peeking around the blacksmith’s foggy knee, clutching, pawing at the man’s leg with slow moving hands. Large hands with long fingers and bulbous knuckles. Lazily reaching. Gently petting.
The goblin stared for a moment, tracing the seam line down the side of Mr. Doolin’s britches. Its eyes were small, pale and without pupils, deep set beneath a jagged, scaly brow, a face the color of red mud. “You think you can help poor Mr. Doolin?” Her voice was like a pickaxe chipping at a boulder of quartz in Cracked Beak’s mind.
He never moved his beak, only met the pale eyes of the goblin. “No. But, I can find him gold.”
She angled her head as she peeked, never showing much of nose and mouth, only her eyes. One ear was visible. It was as big as an Oriental hand fan, but the lobe dangled, a bulbous hunk of flesh at the end of a string of connective tissue, looking like a drop of cold motor oil. It swung in the warm breeze. “That is all he wants, you know. I guide him up to the bluffs. Into the mines. We spend days together. Just the two of us. All alone.”
“Is there gold up there?”
“Oh, yes,” she squeezed the blacksmith’s leg. Mr. Doolin began to pace.
“That Deputy could wake up any second,” his voice said within Cracked Beak’s mind. The goblin rode the man’s leg, hugging his calf.
“Well, don’t make any more noise with your foolish pacing,” Dr. Magnus said.
“What if the Sheriff comes back?”
“Just sit down and wait.”
There was a chair along the far wall, opposite of the Sheriff’s desk where the Deputy slept. Mr. Doolin sat down in it. Cracked Beak could only see the goblin’s groping red hands, her pale eyes peeking from behind the leg. Eyes that glowed in the shadows trapped under the chair. Mr. Doolin scratched his leg, his hazy hands passing through the goblins red fingers.
Cracked Beak hopped between the bars, out of the jail cell. “Why have you not led him to the gold then?”
“Because,” she petted the leg.
Cracked Beak scanned the gray office. He flew up to a window along the same wall where Mr. Doolin sat and alighted on the sill. Thankfully, the window was not latched and he nudged it open, pivoting the panes with his beak. The four corners of the dollar bill were itching to leave.
Mr. Doolin jumped in his chair. “What was that?”
“The window, Mr. Doolin.” Dr. Magnus’s voice was sleepy even in Cracked Beak’s mind.
Mr. Doolin hurried to inspect, mindful, though, of the sound of his boots on the floor so he wouldn’t wake the Deputy.
As Cracked Beak spread his wings, about to let the breeze carry him out, he heard the goblin in his head. “Hurry on little bird.”
He glanced down.
“Someone else knows that you are trying to help poor Mr. Doolin.” Her words bubbled into a mean giggle that echoed in the halls of his mind.
Outside the window, the warm breeze blew the same as it did inside the Sheriff’s Office. It never did stop and it never heeded walls. It ran right on through, same as if they never had been constructed. Cracked Beak sailed on its current, carrying him Westward. Two corners of the dollar bill pinched in his beak were also tugging him that Westerly direction.
He alighted on a branch tucked in the shadows caught in the gray cottonwood trees. The gray leaves rustled. He was perched above the bridge, above the gray waters of the river, Twist of Fate. The paper money in his beak was double-minded. There were those corners, hanging out the left side of his beak, leading him across the bridge, over to the livery stable and what looked to be a blacksmith shop, but then there were the other pair of corners, sticking out the right side, that were pointing North, up the river, to the gray bluffs.
It wasn’t usually like this. Typically, it was far simpler. Mrs. Pearl had given him a pocket watch chain and it led him right to the ghost of her son, but this dollar was stretching like a Chinese finger trap and he could feel the paper money on his tongue wanting to rip. The gold he intended to find would obviously be in the bluffs. With his keen raven eyes, he could see the speck of a mineshaft entrance there on a cliffside. But, even the warm breeze, wiggling his feathers, was blowing away from the bluffs, nudging him instead toward those gray buildings on the other side of the gray bridge.
Wondering why, Cracked Beak gazed up at the sky. A phrase he had heard before crossed his mind: ‘The sky’s so big, no one notices it.’
Perhaps on the other side of the curtain, he thought. But not in the Spirit World.
The sky rocked like the ocean under a full moon, as if he was looking up from under the dark water, as the mercurial shine bled through the rolling facets of the cold sea, slowly swirling in a whirlpool.
Caught in the cradling waves were clusters of stars. Billions of them. Forming galaxies of pearls, silver, and alabaster, floating along like churned-up foam, drifting in the undulating embrace, guided up and up, through the spiraling levels of heaven, the circles shrinking as they climbed, the clumps of stars no more than strands of spider web when they reached the nexus: a dot of yellow light. Though thousands upon thousands of miles above Cracked Beak’s head, but it, much like the Sun, was far too bright to gaze directly at.
He reckoned that that was where the breeze came from. The piercing dot. A pinprick of a hole into another realm, a glimpse of a higher realm of heaven. And the breeze rushed from there, skipping down the stars, counter the upward current, catching the cold of the stars’ icy trails, the heat of its solar origin cooling as it blew like a warm breath that seemed to whisper to Cracked Beak, calling him West.
Only a quick survey, he thought, as he spread his wings to fly.
But then he was chilled through to the bone by a cold gust from the South. It ripped through the cottonwoods, bending the branches, yanking leaves from the limbs. He huddled close to the trunk, digging his talons into the charcoal bark, and tucking his head into the pit of his wing. Yet still, the dollar bill whipped violently within the grasp of his beak.
O Warrior…
A voice. Not the raven’s, but still in his mind.
Through the blustering wind racking his feathers, Cracked Beak peered all around. Not a soul stood near the cottonwood tree.
Warrior… Of the Raven Tribe…
And then, as if he was stabbed in the back, the raven realized that the voice was carried within the icy current of the gale.
Where are you?
Immediately, that cold wind died and with it went the voice. There was only the warm, gentle breeze. The breeze that always flowed in the Spirit World. Cracked Beak lifted his head from the shelter of his wing, shrugging his feathers back into place. The ends of the dollar bill dangling out from either side of the raven’s beak tugged in opposite directions. All he had to do was to let it go, release his hold on the conduit and the curtain would appear. He was tempted to drop it. To escape.
But there was Cornelius to fret over. In that Jail.
Cornelius would lie about the location of the gold, he thought. Mr. Doolin would not know any different. We could be far away by the time the blacksmith returned from his fruitless endeavor.
But that notion gnawed at his conscience. At his honor. He shook the thought from his head and clamped firmer on the paper dollar.
Speed, he thought. Find it. Get out. Do not give the Shaman time to find me.
Cracked Beak unfurled his wings and rode the Westerly breeze to the gray river. Then he turned North, swooping low along the water as he flew upstream toward the bluffs. Of course, the Fish People played their games.
They leapt from the gray water. A dozen or so green fish large as bulls. Arched green backs speckled with black dots. Red gills flared. Red fins tucked tight as they splashed back into the gray water, spraying Cracked Beak’s ghostly feathers. More sprang up from the river. Their huge glassy eyes fixed on the soaring raven. Cracked Beak swooped to the side as one of the Fish People tried to swallow him whole. From great, wide, pink mouths they laughed.
Ahead, right as he arrived at the bluffs, three of the Fish People waited in the river. The bodies of the green fish floated, their heads facing up to the swirling sky and their tails aimed downward to the river depths. They bobbed in the gray ripples. Their pink mouths were open and, strangest of all, children climbed up out of them. Children as white as the white of a human eye, with long, black hair, hair that was sopping wet, draped over their naked, clammy, bodies. They stood within the mouths of the large fish as if the fish were only a pair of britches. They waved as the raven approached, but with nowhere to perch Cracked Beak glided in a circle around the triangle of children. The green fish bodies dissolved below the gray water, treading just below the surface, leaving the children standing waist-deep in the river, dark hair encircling them like blotted ink.
“We deceived the Armadillo Shaman,” one of the children said. A girl. Of course, her mouth did not move. Her white skin glinted here and there, patches of scales, like a fish belly, speckled her arms and legs.
“When his voice came on the cold wind, we said you went South,” another child said. A boy. Her brother. He followed Cracked Beak’s spiral flight path, streaks of his black hair fell from his face, revealing large, perfectly round and lidless eyes. The dark pupils consumed nearly the entirety of each eye, leaving only a narrow rim that was the color of tarnished brass.
“He believed us Cracked Beak. We tricked him,” the last child said. Another girl. The youngest sister. She grinned, ruby red lips parting, revealing a sparse row of little, yet sharp, pink teeth. The hues of her mouth, a shock against her pale skin and the gray world.
“I am grateful,” Cracked Beak said.
“Any signs of the princess?” The eldest sister asked, turning to look behind her as Cracked Beak circled them again.
“It is not wise to discuss.”
“He has not found any,” the brother said, his black eyes shining behind strands of wet hair that clung to his face. “That is why he refuses to answer.”
“No, the Shaman could hear.”
“But, he went South,” the youngest sister said. “Because we tricked him.”
“I do not doubt the cleverness of your ruse, little one,” Cracked Beak said. “But, the Armadillo Shaman is very cunning himself. He deceived the Coyote Chief after all.”
The three fish siblings gazed at each other and then the eldest sister said, “May the Great Spirit guide you.”
The brother saluted while the youngest said, “Good luck, Cracked Beak.”
As Cracked Beak flew away, the children, one by one, grabbed hold of the mouths of the green fish that hovered right below the gray surface of the water. They pulled up on the bony lips, lifting them up over their bodies, tucking their arms within the slimy jaws as if they were wrapping themselves in a blanket, and much like any child flipping the folds of warmth over their head, they slipped the upper jaw over their own heads and closed the mouth, and then three green fish dove beneath the surface, splashing their mottled tails as they disappeared beneath the gray ripples of the river.
Cracked Beak alighted on the side of a gray mine car. Tracks led into the narrow mouth of the mine. In the black shadows, several pairs of beady, pale, pupiless eyes blinked.
“A little birdie,” some whispered, their voices hissing, like steam from a pipe, within the raven’s mind. “He’s paying us a visit.”
The corners of the dollar bill wanted to enter. He held it firm in his beak, projecting his thought into the minds of the horde in the cave. “Back vermin!”
The laughter of the goblins was like the sound of a shovelful of pebbles thrown against the dugout wall of the mine. Cracked Beak heard them scuttling, like cockroaches in the pantry, but he could only see their pale, pupiless eyes, gleaming like dull knives, in the impenetrable darkness trapped within the mine. Pairs of the little pallid dots darted across the dirt floor. They crawled up the rocky walls, up the timber supports. Eyes crept upside-down along the ceiling toward him. But those eyes along the ceiling, among the stalactites, parted into columns, ghostly lights on the shoulders of a black road, where another pair of eyes, a left eye red as a droplet of blood and the right the color of bleached bone, slinked, upside-down, along the ceiling. It was this goblin with the two differently colored eyes that pushed his voice into Cracked Beak’s mind. The goblin communicated slow and deliberate. “But why? Why does a warrior of the Raven Tribe approach our land?”
Cracked Beak puffed his chest.
“Of course, he does not come for something so base as…” the goblin let the words dangle. “Gold.”
“I have no use,” Cracked Beak’s shoved his thought.
“Mmm,” one of the other goblins hissed. “He wants our gold, grandfather.”
“Can’t you hear it in his voice?” Another asked.
“Yes, son. And yes, daughter,” the goblin with the blood and bone eyes said. “But now he must tell us why. We must hear it from the Brave Warrior’s own beak.”
“Don’t we already know?” Another of the goblins asked.
Within the cover of the pitch black darkness, the blood and bone eyes spun, pivoting, so now that the red eye was on the right and the white eye was on the left. They lowered a little and then began to swing, like the pendulum on a grandfather clock. A couple of his sons and daughters snickered, which soon swelled into the entire horde laughing.
Cracked Beak unfurled and flapped his wings. “Move aside!”
That only incited more laughter, but the Grandfather Goblin stopped swaying. The red and white grew smaller, and all the mocking eyes, pair by pair, following the lead of the Grandfather Goblin, crawled further back into the black recess of the gray mine. “Of course, make yourself at home.”
The darkness was far too thick to fly, so Cracked Beaked hopped along the ground, led by the pull of the dollar bill same as a blind father guided by his son. But, it soon became apparent that his efforts were in vain. Several times he tripped over the rails of the steel tracks and bumped his beak into hard stone. The dollar bill tugged and pulled to a wall, and though it was plain that the paper money wanted to continue beyond the wall, it did not lead Cracked Beak to an opening by which he could pass and keep going. So he was forced to grope along the rocks (however a raven would blindly feel his way through the darkness) in hopes of finding such a passage.
The goblins followed, creeping along as they laughed at him. They joked and goaded and mocked him. They plucked at his feathers. Told him that he had only a few feet more to find a passage in the wall, but he only ever felt rock.
“We have had our fun, little birdie,” the goblin with the blood and bone eyes said, dropping from the ceiling with a soft pat.
A cold wind swooped through the mine, ruffling Cracked Beak’s feathers. It faded as quick as it came.
The goblins swarming the tunnel snickered.
“Better hurry,” the Grandfather Goblin said, turning to lead the raven.
Cracked Beak hopped through the inky darkness, following the goblin through the labyrinthine mine. For a time, those blood and bone eyes would vanish, and he would have to wait. Wait as the padding of all the horde would slip past him, along the floor beside, along the wall, over his head along the ceiling. And then the red and white would appear in the distance, sometimes close, sometimes far, sometimes to his left, sometimes to his right. Those eyes would squint as Cracked Beaked traversed the length of the new tunnel. The raven added the direction of the new turn, adding another left or right to the growing pattern that he planned to recite for Cornelius.
“Better hurry,” the goblins hissed.
Of course, Cracked Beak was never warned of the objects along his path, the pickaxes or stalagmites or chunks of broken, rotting timber all veiled in the complete darkness. The goblins laughed whenever he tripped or stubbed a talon, especially if Cracked Beak swore.
It seemed hours had been wasted, when at last, as Cracked Beak approached the red and white eyes, wading through a shallow pool, the Grandfather Goblin whispered in mock fashion. “Here, O Great Warrior.”
“I cannot see anything,” he said, tripping over something in the tunnel, falling on his breast. He scrambled back to his feet amidst the cackles of the goblin horde.
“You fell upon the bones of a dead man,” the Grandfather Goblin said. “The gold lies behind him.”
“I need proof. I have no reason to trust you.”
They all laughed. All of the goblins. Like it was the punchline of a joke.
“You will trust because you must.” The Grandfather Goblin said. “By what other means have you traveled thus far?”
Cracked Beak glared at the blood and bone eye.
“Let me tell you something else, Cracked Beak, Warrior of the Raven People. The Armadillo Shaman is looking for you and he has called us into his service.”
“I know.”
“And do you know that we have already told him where you are? No no. Wait, Cracked Beak. Do not drop the conduit yet. There’s more that I am bound to tell you, because we are also enslaved by another and she, too, is aware of your plight.”
“Buffalo Hump?”
“Yes, O Clever Warrior.”
“She has forced our aid upon you.” He laughed, inciting all the sons and daughters to join in as well. “We do enjoy jamming a stick into the gears of the plans of our many masters.”
“Is the guide to gold all the aide Buffalo Hump has squeezed out of you?”
From the Grandfather Goblin, came the squeak of him sucking on one of his long fangs. “She has found a name, but I will not utter it as we inhabitants of the Spirit World speak.”
“Why not tell me this before?” Cracked Beak demanded.
“You forget already. That we serve two masters at the moment. And it is difficult. The balance. One wants to destroy you. While the other wants to help. You can see our conundrum. It really is quite the burdensome curse that the Great Spirit has laid on me and my kin.
“So come closer, Fearsome Warrior, and let me use a little breath to whisper her name, before the Armadillo Shaman falls upon you.”
Reluctantly, Cracked Beaked leaned in, tilting his head, his eye fixed on the goblin, watching as the bone and blood eyes approached, clouds swirling in their pupiless hues. Hard, dry hands cupped around the ear opening directly behind the raven’s eye. The goblin inhaled. Warm, damp breath carried a weak, frail whisper.
“Big…
“…Nose…
“…Kate…”
An icy blast of wind shook the mine. The dead man’s bones rattled under Cracked Beak’s talons. Rocks crumbled from the ceiling, splashing into the nearby pool. The goblins squealed and screeched and Cracked Beak was tossed, rolled, slammed into a stony wall.
Tell me the name…
Came the voice in the cold gale.
Now!
A goblin was sent flying, torn from the stalagmite he clung so desperately to, he soared in the vicious current, and was thrown right into Cracked Beak. It was the Grandfather Goblin and he was laughing. “He didn’t like that at all did he, little birdie?”
With his talons, Cracked Beak shoved the goblin off.
The name, Warrior…
Tell me, Cracked Beak… or be destroyed!
A stalactite crashed into the ground beside the raven. Spectral feathers were ripped from his chest. He opened his beak and the paper dollar was snatched by the wind. But there, beside him, only a step away, was the curtain between the worlds. It shimmered by its own silver light and, despite the violent gust, it rippled serenely. A gentle sway.
I know where your summoner is…
You, Cornelius Magnus, that blacksmith, none of you are safe…
Cracked Beak ducked and rolled under the curtain, where he vanished beneath the undulating folds.