Fiction World of Darkness: Attrition - Campfire Stories

[Finn]

If it’d been the middle of the day, with the beautiful California sun shining down on it, Finn had a feeling that there still wouldn’t be much to say about the Leo Carrillo State Park, other than that it was a state park, and one that allowed camping with tents (as opposed to a lot of the beach-side campgrounds around here, which only ever seemed to allow RVs for some damned reason). But it wasn’t the middle of the day and the sun – Californian or otherwise – seemed like a distant memory at the moment; it was the nighttime, and a long ways into it, too. And right now there was something distinctly otherworldy about the park – and not in the vague way that humans used the word to describe anything that didn’t fit into their limited, and usually self-centered view of what ‘the world’ was, or that they simply couldn’t explain. When Finn used the word ‘otherworldly’ to describe the Leo Carrillo State Park, he meant it in precisely the sense that there was something about – or at least somewhere within – the place that was quite literally not of this world.

Leo Carrillo State Park was just a little place, nestled inside of a small, narrow valley that sat comfortably in between low, scrub-covered hills along the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. It sat landward of the Pacific Coast Highway, but it connected, via a tunnel underneath the highway, with a fairly nice beach (which was the real attraction for Finn). The place had been the brainchild of, no surprise, a guy named Leo Carrillo who’d been semi-famous at one point, back around the dawn of Hollywood, for playing ‘Pancho’ on some old television show called The Cisco Kid. And yeah, that really was about all one could say about the place from a mundane perspective.

But from an otherworldly or supernatural perspective, however, it was obvious to Finn that there was significantly more going on here. It made sense, really. A tiny, out-of-the-way park, miles from any sizeable center of urban development, lots of people passing through, relaxing, having fun, building memories, and then moving on. It was the kind of place that slowly built up its own kind of energy, a sense of weighted expectation that even mundane mortals might pick up on. Clusters of trees and scraggly bushes often seemed to conceal more than just the landscape beyond them, while the low scrub-covered hills crowding in on three sides seemed to be watching from above and it almost felt like something was waiting beyond each twist or turn of the paths that snaked throughout the campground. There was a sense of things and events that were always just out of one’s sight, or that one had only just missed, or that would happen soon, if one could simply wait in that spot long enough. If a person did wait, and waited long enough, they might imagine they could hear voices on the wind, mingled with the sibilant rustling of sun-parched leaves, whispering half-heard remnants of stories never told, in a language as old as time.

Finn knew that this feeling or presence would be there, if only as a barely-noticeable prickling in the back of a normal man’s mind, even in the daytime. But it was the middle of the night, with a full moon in the sky, and there is nothing blacker nor deeper than a shadow cast by mother Luna. A shadow cast by the sun conceals little – and that reluctantly – but even the smallest of moon shadows is capable of concealing all the mysteries of Nature within its bottomless depths, and stories untold are amongst the least of these.

So Finn was only mildly caught off guard when, upon passing through the shadows cast by a stand of trees and stepping into the outer edge of a semicircle formed by the simple (actually rather unimpressive) outdoor amphitheater that sat in the campground’s backmost corner, he suddenly found himself within the Spirit Realm. There had been no warning, nor had there been any effort or desire on his part. One minute he’d been walking through some very dark, but nonetheless mundane shadows, and the next minute he’d stepped fully in the realm of spirits.

Having spent much of his life – both as a human child and as one of the Xa’aidlatha – on a sparsely inhabited island far away from the intruding presence of human civilization, and living as he now did in the border realm where land met sea, life met death, and spirit met flesh, Finn had experienced this before, if only rarely. A Verge. Probably not a permanent one, but one of the ones that came and went, depending on times or events. Finn did not pretend to know how or why such things came into being, he just knew that they did and that, in his experience at least, it never happened without a reason.

Whereas the amphitheater and its surroundings had been swathed in midnight darkness in the ‘real world’ (Finn was less and less sure that that term was in any way an accurate description of the place), here it was roughly illuminated by a large bonfire that burned just in front of the theater’s tiny stage – a stage so small it was barely more than a raised podium. The fire in front of it crackled and burned with a brightness and a vitality that didn’t exist in flames outside of the Spirit Realm and the shadows it sent flickering across the aged and weathered benches surrounding the theater’s stage surged and pulsed with a life all their own. Finn looked again, and saw that here, in the Shadow, the platform wasn’t made of cut and painted wood, nailed together with machined nails from some factory, but was made of sticks, logs, and mud and looked like something one might find in a recreation of an Indian village from back in the 1800’s – if any of the Pacific coast Indian tribes had been into building stages. Finn looked a third time, and this time he saw the spirit seated upon the stage itself.

The spirit looked like a man, who seemed ‘aged’ without seeming to be any certain age in particular – he might’ve been fifty and he might’ve been one hundred – or, more likely, neither, seeing as how he wasn’t even a man in the first place. For convenience’s sake, Finn decided he would refer to him as one anyway. The ‘man’ looked decidedly Native American, but Finn didn’t pretend to know enough about any of the local tribes to try and posit a guess as to which one he was supposed to belong to. He had long, thick hair, mostly black but with a hint of salt mixed in with the pepper, which was divided down the middle and braided into two braids on either side of his head. Over clothes that looked like they might belong to any time after about 1880 or so (old boots, faded jeans, and an equally faded dark button-up collared shirt), he had on a blanket whose color was as indeterminate as its owner’s true age and was frayed and worn around the edges. A hand-rolled cigarette was in his mouth and a knowing smile on his face as he watched Finn approach.

“Wind-Dancer”, the man said and nodded at Finn in greeting, “You, Finn of the Xa’aidlatha.”

“Alath”, returned Finn with a polite (if wary) smile. “You”, he began, attempting to duplicate the spirit’s archaic greeting protocols, but then he faltered and finished somewhat lamely, “… I don’t know your name.”

The strange spirit chuckled easily and blew ephemeral smoke from his ephemeral cigarette. “Just th’way I like it, sonny”, he said.

Finn gave him a friendly enough smile, but he stopped his approach and watched the ‘man’ with frank wariness now. It wasn’t the first time that a spirit had known Finn’s name without him telling it, but that wasn’t what was making the big Haida feral nervous. Spirits generally didn’t look all that human, unless they’d breached somehow or another and were riding some poor mortal, but this spirit was still inside the Shadow and he didn’t just look a little human, he looked almost perfectly human. If Finn hadn’t already noticed that his eyes glimmered with a light that came from somewhere other than the fire, moon, or stars, or that the shadows under his blanket moved independently of the flickering firelight, Finn could almost believe that he was human. The feral Wind-dancer noted with some amusement that he was made more uneasy by the sight of a normal-seeming human inside a Verge than he would have been by the appearance of an obvious spirit.

The spirit chuckled at him again, seeing his discomfort, and pointed at himself while saying, “You can call me Hides-in-His-Story, if it’ll make ya feel better, little brother.”

Finn gave the ‘man’ a half-smile and a little nod, saying, “Yeah, I guess it would, thanks.” He hesitated for only another instant and then approached the spirit deliberately and sat down across from him. “Hides-in-His-Story, it is an honor”, Finn said, using some of his patchy First Tongue to add an extra element of respect to his greeting. It was always a good idea to be polite to the spirits. Grandmother had taught him that early on, and the lesson – thankfully – had stuck.

“So”, Hides-in-His-Story asked, “what brings ya here to my campfire on such a fine evening, little Finn of the People Who Guard the Boundaries of the Worlds?” Hides-in-His-Story was speaking only in Uremehir now, and Finn was a little surprised at how easily he could follow him so far (his First Tongue really was a little rough).

“Just passing through, actually”, answered Finn (also using Uremehir, though he didn’t immediately realize it), “on my way to the City of the Angels in the mortal world.”

“Oh?” Hides-in-His-Story clucked his tongue in disappointment, his strange eyes shimmering as he regarded Finn. “Too bad”, he said and took another drag on his hand-rolled cigarette, “s’pose that means ya won’t have time t’stay and listen ta any stories, eh?”

“That what you do”, asked Finn, “tell stories?”

“Might be”, answered Hides-in-His-Story, and the shadows under his cloak shook like trees in the wind. “But if’n I do, little changer”, he went on, “there’ll be a price t’pay at the end.”

“Price?”, Finn asked, one brow arched high, and with an edge in his voice.

“Sure’n there’s a price”, the aged spirit answered mildly, puffing smoke from his nostrils as he did so. “They all gotta pay, so it’s only fair t’ask the same o’ you, sonny.”

“They?”, asked Finn. The old spirit only smiled wryly and stuck his chin out towards the rows of benches lining the darkness out beyond the fire. As Finn’s hyper-acute eyes strove to peer into the otherworldly darkness that gathered beyond the flames, that same fire surged briefly, illuminating everything from the little stage to the backmost bleacher, and in that brief moment he saw them all. At some point since he’d sat down next to the old man (or spirit, or whatever), the benches around the stage had filled up with other spirits – and these ones had the decency to look like spirits, at least – but Finn had missed it entirely until Hides-in-His-Story had pointed them out. This bothered Finn.

There were mostly bird spirits filling the benches, from what Finn could see, but also a fair number of coyotes, serpents, and lizards, along with the odd assortment of other animal spirits. But there were also other, stranger forms scattered here and there. Tree spirits, desert spirits, a few mountain spirits – who always made the Oceanborn feral just a bit uncomfortable, for some reason – and something that Finn took to be a spirit of the Road, or perhaps of hitchhiking. And three hirdab – scorpion spirits. This bothered Finn even more.

He looked back at the old spirit and the spirit looked back at him with eyes that glimmered with their own subtle light and a smile filled with too-large teeth.

“C’mon”, Hides-in-His-Story said in an almost-whisper, “stay awhile.”