Wolfwraith by John Bushore Page A

mouth.
    Soon he crossed over the old road he had driven on earlier. Moist, dead leaves muffled his footsteps as he walked out of the sunlight and under a canopy of twisted, gnarly live oaks. Here in the shadows, silvery-white lichens tinged the bark of the trees. Gray Spanish moss hung thickly, like funeral draperies. The wind off the sea didn’t reach to this side of the dunes, creating a solemn hush.
    The weathered steeple of the former Wash Woods Methodist Church stood like a lonely sentinel over the abandoned graveyard. Jenny said the church was built from cypress lumber salvaged from a shipwrecked schooner in the nineteenth century. The building itself had collapsed several years ago. Most of the debris had been hauled away, but the peak of the steeple, shaped like a tee-pee of the western-plains Indians, had been left behind. It stood intact except for a recent, make-shift cross, cobbled together and nailed atop it to replace the missing original icon, perhaps by someone who couldn’t bear to see a Christian church without its defining symbol of crucifixion. Twice the height of a man, the steeple roof had been set to stand upright within the confines of the low, brick foundation of the former church. Covered with narrow, mossy wooden shingles, the conical structure looked as though it could be the home of forest gnomes, surrounded by a foot-high brick wall.
    As he approached the structure, Shadow was perplexed by small, white, irregular objects resting atop the bricks of the foundation. They had not been here the last time he visited the cemetery. When he got near, he saw they were obviously skulls of small animals, but it puzzled him as to why they were placed around the shrine-like steeple roof. He recognized the head-bones of raccoons, foxes and squirrels, among others. There was also the skull of a large bird, probably an osprey. Had they had been placed there to guard something within, their sightless eye-sockets and bare, pointed teeth or beaks pointing outward?
    Shadow stepped over the low wall of bricks into a space that had once been the interior of the church. A thick, invisible miasma of energy enveloped him. It became hard to breathe. His movements became slow and drawn out. His skin tingled. It was different from the sensation he had felt pulling the girl’s body from the bay. This was like drowning in a slow moving river, unable to tell where the water was coming from, but knowing it was wet. He wondered if this force was something left by whoever or whatever had placed the macabre ornaments on the bricks. He swallowed the jellybean he’d been sucking. It went down like lump of coal.
    It was the same sort of energy he’d felt as a child, when his grandmother Min had occasionally called for assistance from one or another of the primeval forces her people had always known. Almost all the spirits his eccentric grandmother had summoned had been benign, but when she was angry, a heartfelt curse could evoke more than a hint of more malevolent essences.
    Young Shadow had been scared. His grandmother, apparently surprised he felt the forces so strongly, had reassured him. She told him he shouldn’t fear the hostile entities she sometimes skirted with; he possessed a power of his own to protect him.
    “But Grandmother Min, I’m a Christian. Like Grandfather,” Shadow protested. The old man was devout in the Baptist faith and had instilled many of the Christian Bible’s values in his grandson.
    “I go to church. Am I not a Christian, too?” Grandmother asked. “Nevertheless, the old ways are in our blood. Be strong in each belief and both of them will someday serve you well.”
    Shadow had always known everything had a spirit if you only looked at it in the right way—like the wood, which told him how he should sculpt it with his knife. As a child, he had found many an old arrowhead in the woods. Some spirit in him shared the memory of the long-gone toolmakers, who had chipped away at the edges of a