Chapter 3
You ask me what my name is,
And what I’m a-doing here;
They call me John the Wanderer
Or John the Balladeer…
John’s my name, and it’s no brag for me to say that I’ve seen many a strange thing and been in many a strange and terrible place, but there were few places I ever saw in my whole born days half so terrible as the place they called Chosin Reservoir in a land they call Korea. “Frozen Chosin” we called it, a frozen-over lake way up north near China. I didn’t like it air bit, air way, when I first saw it and the things that happened there; and when I started a-seeing it in my dreams years and years later, I liked it less than the first time.
I first saw it when I was a boy who wanted to see the world and went off and joined the Army. Most men do when wars come around, but that doesn’t make it the slightest bit wiser. I took my training along the other fellers they put me with, I learned how to tell my hay foot from my straw foot – that’s your right from your left, it was easier for a lot of us mountain boys to learn it that way – how to make my kit and march all together and take orders from sergeants that were, thank God, wiser than we were. If I’d been any wetter behind the ears I reckon my helmet would have slid right off my head. They fed us meat seven days a week, which made me feel like I’d sure enough died and gone to Heaven; most times as a youngster living with my old aunt I figure we saw meat maybe two-three times a week, except when I potted some rabbit or squirrel or bless us, a deer for venison or maybe a bear for meat to be smoked and dried and made into bacon.
They tried to teach us how to use our rifles too, but there they didn’t need to worry ary way. I knew just about every way there was to use a rifle; needed to, growing up, before and after I was a-working for Ranson Cuff.
I remember how my sergeant watched me shooting at the target. I aimed and pulled the trigger fast, eight times right after the other before the clip popped out with a ping!, and he said, “Johnny, what the devil is wrong with you? I told you to aim before you pulled that trigger, you clodhopper, you think Uncle Sam can afford to throw his money away on the bullets you just wasted?” He said some more, too, but if you been in the Army you can probably figure what it was he said. No need to go repeating it here.
“I didn’t waste a single one of those bullets, Sergeant,” I told him. I pointed at the target, which might as well have been a barn door for the size of it. “You can just look if you don’t believe me.”
The sergeant, a short thick-built fellow with a face that looked like someone chopped it out of the mountain rock back home, waited until everyone emptied their gun. He walked down to the target. He looked, poked at it with his finger, swore some, and came back to me.
“You a regular Sergeant York, ain’t ya?” He frowned on me, but he looked pleased to be doing it.
“I can’t say if I’m as good as him or not, Sergeant,” I answered him back my politest.
“Well, I will say it,” he said. He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead. “All eight right smack dead center, close enough together I could put the palm of my hand over them?” He started to smile then. “Guess I can tell your division commander he’s got himself a new champion marksman.”
I figure he must have, because when I went to my unit the officer right over me asked to see me do it again. So I did, and then I did it for his officer and the one over him and a fellow with a right fancy uniform who everyone in the division answered to, and he called me the best shot he’d ever seen. “I imagine you got your share of turkeys back home,” he told me. He talked better educated than anyone I’d ever known afore except maybe a preacher or two. “You have quite the marksman’s eye, private. Ever shoot a man before?”
“No sir,” I told him. “I purely hope I never ever will, either.”
He looked just the least bit sad on me. “A good wish,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s one unlikely to be fulfilled where we’re going.”
It wasn’t either. We got to Korea, a land halfway between China and Japan. We marched and marched and marched until I wondered our legs didn’t fall off us, and found ourselves all the way up north by rocks and hills and ridges as barren as what the world must have looked like before even the first beasts and plants were on it and then I did it for his officer and the one over him and a f. The wind blew down colder than anything I ever knew in the hills, cold enough that I saw men’s hands and noses turn black from it, cold right through even the good thick winter clothes we had to wear. Cold enough that some of us had to pass water on our rifles in the morning just so they could be fired, and the artillerymen joked with us that they didn’t need ammunition, they could just go a-shooting the blocks of ice they found in their gun barrels every morning. It was so cold you wondered if when you called your last, the words would fall down frozen on the ground.
For there was a lot of shooting and screaming and a-crying out when I was there. If you’ve been in a war you know what it’s rightly like, and if you haven’t then thank God every night of your life for it, and you don’t need to know from me. It was like what the Good Book says, all screams and confusion and garments rolled in blood. I saw more men a-dying in that valley than I air thought lived in the whole wide world before. My friends and the other fellows too, some called them gooks or chinks or worse, but they fought as hard as we did air time we met.
Like I said, I saw more death and dying there than I air did want to see and did my part to bring it about. I was best shot in my platoon, best shot in my company, best shot in my division, and most times I got told off to shoot down air fellow I saw a-coming at us. I did it too; made my stomach turn all over the first few times but after that I stopped noticing much, other than to be glad that it wasn’t me or friends of mine a-dying. Not that time, anyway.
I came away alive, of course, but a right many fellows I knew didn’t. Not my old sergeant, nor the fellow who loaned me his guitar that I had for so long after until I met Mister Onselm and the Ugly Bird, nor the one from Montana who told all of us that Korean winters were nothing compared to home, nor either the skinny fellow from that town they call Arkham up north who had nightmares near every night and could tell you long sections from what folks call the Classics and who made me want to be reading them my own self.
I came away, but a part of that place came away with me, and I see it in my dreams now and then ever since. It reminds me air time what someone once said, how when you wake up and remembers your dreams you should ought to be glad. If it was a good dream you were happy to be having it, and if not, you were glad it was over and done with. And after time those dreams got to be less and less, and I began to hope I’d have them nair more.
But lately now, since my own love Evadare and I moved into our cabin at the Fork, and since I went off to one of the strangest places any man could ever speak of and returned , they were coming back, worse than ever. Worse even than the real things that gave them to me, which I’d reckoned to be impossible. I woke up screaming and shaking, again and again. I woke Evadare up with them too, and she held me and spoke to me like you would with a little child until I remembered where and when I was.
I did all the things I could think of to make them stop. First natural things, like drinking some tea made for me by my good friend Reuben Manco that he swore would help. Then working myself until I was happy just to collapse into my bed at day’s end, so tired I reckon I fell asleep afore my poor tired head hit the mattress, and still no good. I even went to a fancy city doctor, and he looked at me and asked questions and ran some fancy machine over me and said there was nothing wrong with me and he wished himself to be half as healthy as me.
“But if it isn’t any natural thing, what is it?” Evadare asked me after I came back, from riding buses and then walking almost a day back up to our home. Reuben Manco was there as well, short and lean and with his eyes bright with the wisdom he gained to become a medicine man of his people, the Tsalagi, what we white folks call the Cherokee.
“I hoped that doctor could help,” he said, his voice deep and not the least happy. “He’s helped my folk when my own medicine wasn’t enough, and asked respectful questions before and after to be sure he did right by them.” He looked at me, “I begin to wonder just what on Earth or off it could be doing this to you, John.”
“That won’t be helping you,” Evadare looked unhappy to see me making up coffee for myself so strong and black you could have floated an axe head in it. “You can’t be going on like this, John.”
“Why are you a-telling me a thing I already know?” I snapped back at her, and right the moment after, “I’m sorry, Evadare. I’m feeling like a gone gump right now. I hoped that doctor fellow could be telling me what it was.”
“What if it’s not any natural thing?”
I stood up straight then. Those who know me know some of the low-down wicked spell-hurlers I’ve dealt with in my time. Mister Onselm and his Ugly Bird, Mister Loden who’d lived three hundred years and might have lived three hundred more if not for me, Shull Cobart who Evadare and I both were saved from by Kalu Barebones, Brooke Altic and his Shonokin people who said they ruled these lands before either Indians or white men came, and who meant to do so again. Rowley Thorne who I met in Equestria, and many the more besides. All of them mighty evil and evilly mighty, and I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for stopping them. All dead and gone, I thought, or were they?
“If it’s something a-hiding itself in my dreams to be doing this,” I told Evadare, “then that’s where I’ve got to be a-meeting it.” I walked over to my shelf and took down two-three books that I’ve used aforetimes. The Long-Lost Friend from up in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, blessed and helpful to me and many a more. The book by Albertus Magnus that uses so many holy names it might as well be a prayer in itself. And Spence’s Encyclopeda of Occultism.
I opened the last one first. I read for dreams and nightmares, and found what I was a-looking for. “’If a sorcerer wishes vengeance upon some enemy’,” I read out loud, for Evadare and Manco as well as myself, “’let him and his fellows gather in concert’…”
“Like a witches’ coven,” Reuben Manco muttered. “Or like the singing to death I’ve read of, done overseas in the Pacific islands. I’m sorry John, please go on.”
“’Let the sorcerer and his fellows gather in concert’,” I read the words, and felt myself getting colder as I did, “’and enter the dreams of their enemy, by the insignia and spells taught by a conjured angel to Dr. John Dee. Once there, let them remain hidden and use their collected will to alter the dream to their own desires. By so doing they may make an end of him, by either slaying him in body or reducing him to self-destruction.” I thought back on what my dreams were like the past month or so, and said, “That sounds rightly like what they’re a-doing. Whoair they might be.”
“They want you to kill yourself,” Reuben said, his voice grave. He walked over to me and looked me in the face, making sure I heard ary word he said. “That or exhaust you to the point where they can attack more directly with magic or more mundane means, and kill you that way.”
“No!” Evadare hurried over and hugged me good and hard. “You know what they’re doing, can’t you stop them now?”
“If they came at him any other way, even magically,” Reuben Manco told us both, “I and John could do something about it. Bless the house with cedar and tobacco, with prayers to your God and mine, and it would make them retreat. But in dreams?” He rubbed his chin and frowned, the wrinkles in his face going deeper. He looked up. “John, show me the picture of that ritual figure again, the one from the book.”
“Here it is,” I said, a-handing it to him. “It looks the least bitty bit familiar to me, though I misremember where I’ve seen it before.”
He took the book and looked at the image, frowning more than before. He set it down on the table between us.
“This isn’t any of the Enochian poor deceived Doctor Dee got through his conjurings with Ed Kelley,” he finally said. Tapping the writing in the figure, he said, “It reminds me more of the ideographs I’ve seen used for Chinese, or something like that. I’ve read enough in my field, and I think you have as well John, to know that there are rumors that Dee actually did once manage to summon an angel at the court of Emperor Rudolph. An angel in the shape of a great winged unicorn, black as night. Normally I would question that, but given the story you told me and Evadare about those three days you were missing…”
“Those horse-folks wouldn’t be doing air such a thing,” I told them both. “If they were a-wanting to be talking to me again, they’d try and visit me, not use some witch’s magic on me.”
“You know them better than I do,” was all Reuben Manco said. Leastways they didn’t look funny at me any more when I talked of it, even though they’d seen Twilight and her friends right as I came back to them. I thought no more of it then. Reuben Manco didn’t say any more on it either, just went back to what he’d been saying afore.
“As I was saying, John, it seems the best way for you to handle this is to go into those dreams of yours again, and to look for the parts that don’t belong, and examine them closely.”
“See what doesn’t belong,” I repeated him. “I remember thinking then and now that I and those other fellows that were there were what didn’t belong. But I’ll do what you say. Find what’s in my dreams and a-making them worse, scout them out and find out whoair they are and whatair they want.”
“Exactly,” Reuben said. He reached into the pocket of his old shirt, made from deerskin and set with beadwork, and took out something that glittered brassily in the light. I looked the closer and saw it to be an old pocket watch, the kind that railroad conductors used to use, big and heavy and with a train worked into the metal of the lid.
“Glad now I kept this after leaving Dartmouth,” he said to no one in particular. “It would be better if we did this under more controlled circumstances,” Reuben lead me to the bed with Evadare following. “But right now speed is more important.” He made me to lie down on it and held that watch up afore my eyes. It shone in the light from the lamps. He began to spin it lightly. “Watch this, John. Focus all your attention on it.”
I did, a-knowing what he was doing and not being worried the way I might could be if someone else were to be a-doing this. This was hypnotism, or entrancing some folks called it. I never had it done to me afore but I’d seen it be done one-two times, and some witch-folks I’d fought against did something like it but the stronger to bring you under their will.
“I’ll put you under,” he told me, his voice going smooth. “This way, if or when something goes wrong, we can bring you back out that dream swiftly. Trust me, John, my friend and blood brother. Trust and relax. Relax. Relax and return to the frozen valley, knowing we will stand by to aid you. Relax…”
I sort of fell into those words of his. I felt like I was sinking down away from the goose-down filled pillow and straw-stuffed mattress, away from the when and now I was in and back towards memories I kept a-wishing I could forget forever. I felt for maybe a moment long like something circled out there around me in the dark, like a pack of hungry wolves ready to bite or maybe something stranger and nastier than wolves, something or other like the Flat or the Raven Mockers. Then I felt a jerk like from falling off a wagon into the snow.
And I looked and saw what I knew I’d see. Snow everywhere, and barren rocks, and the sky gray and hanging low overhead like the lid of a chest you were being shut up in. The wind whipped and howled in my ears near as loud as the mean I heard a-fighting and dying all around me air place, bullets whipped all over. Bugles blew harsh and shrill, a music you nair wanted to hear, because a moment later came the sound of Chinese burp guns and mortars and wild yells full of anger and hate and maybe even fear.
“Here come the Chinks!” I saw a fellow I’d not seen for twenty years and more, short and gaunt and stubbly, dirty blond hair poking out under that round green helmet of his, looking and smelling like a bath would do him as much good as me right then. He raised his rifle and fired, and I marveled that I heard the flat crack over ary thing else. He looked at me. “Get up, damn you! Keep lying there and those guys will –“Another crack then, ending in a wet noise, and he fell back and kicked the once. I didn’t look at his face. He didn’t have one any more.
I snatched my rifle and sat up, looking over the rocks me and my platoon were a-sitting in when it all happened. Snow whipped at our faces and I made to squint. But I saw them. What looked like a rising tide, a whole sea’s worth of men in padded coats yelling and waving banners and blowing their horns and a-shooting at us. For this was Frozen Chosin, and those were the Chinese soldiers that came into the war then, and they were a-coming to try and kill us all.
I snatched my rifle up, aimed as best I could, and started to shoot. I saw one fellow after another drop down, and if I regretted it later, I regretted it the less than I did the fellows I saw falling all around me, fellows I knew. Some shot, some hurled grenades, and maybe one or two just huddled in terror until the sergeant kicked them up and got them shooting using words you wouldn’t want written for your last.
“Where the hell are the quad fifties?” Someone yelled right close by. He started to stick his head up to get a better look, but the sergeant yanked him down and gave him a kick to boot.
“They’re there! Hear them shooting?” We all tried to listen, and I did hear them off somewheres, going like mad with the heavy sound of their firing. I heard another noise too, one I knew but shouldn’t have heard there. High-pitched frantic screams like a woman in terror. They were the kind of noises a horse makes. But more familiar, someways.
I slipped down from my place on the rock and headed back where I heard them. I half wondered why no one yelled at me to get back where I belonged until I remembered. This was a dream, something long gone by. And maybe whoair was after me here wanted me off from even dreams that might could be a help.
Well, I thought as I headed for that panicked screaming, whoair is doing this better hope they don’t catch me now. Because while I didn’t like using it to shoot people I had a rifle in my hands, and if someone meant to try sneaking around in my head and a-using things like this against me and maybe other folks too, when I found them I’d give them a reason to know why old General Sherman said war is hell.
I thought that and rounded a turn in the rocks and double quick slammed my rifle to my shoulder when I saw a squad of Chinese led by a man in clothes that looked like they belonged in the hills charging right at me. No, I thought even as I fired, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam and then that ping! as the clip came out. Eight men dropped down afore me to nair rise up again in this world; the one who’d been in the back of them turned and slipped off, vanishing like between one breath and the next. They weren’t a-charging me, but a-charging –
“Lord have mercy!”
A tiny horse huddled between the rocks, about the size of a newborn foal, eyes tight and screaming. A little mare I’d known once for three days, purple as Spring lilacs with a pink-purple six-pointed star marking her flank and a spiral horn six-eight inches long a-rising from her forehead.
“Twilight Sparkle? Whatair are you a-doing here?”