An Unearthly Undertaking Read online

  An Unearthly Undertaking

  The Dreamer Trilogy

  Book 2

  By

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2018 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter One

  Warrior Twins

  “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight,

  and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

  Oscar Wilde

  THE RESERVATION OF the Mescalero Apache lies on the eastern flank of the Sacramento Mountains in Southern New Mexico. It was July, the time of the girl’s puberty ceremonial, when the girls become women. High above the mesa where the preparations for the ceremony turned the normally empty land into a beehive of activity, the Warrior Twins looked down, watching. The two men were startlingly handsome with long, black hair; their moccasins had long, flowing heel fringes and the manes of their horses were fire.

  Thunder scowled. “The people are doing the right things,” he said. He shifted his weight on his black horse while Lightning stroked the neck of his blue steed as he stamped out his impatience.

  “And yet something has not come together correctly this year,” Lightning said. “The preparations lack an essence, or balance.”

  Thunder nodded. “True, my brother.” Then he looked to the east. “The People and the world they live in are not in harmony. She must tell the singers of this; she must pass along her knowledge of the lack of harmony so it can inform their visions. The People must find a way to bridge the old and new. They must adapt.”

  Lightning scowled. “And who must tell them all this that they cannot see? Do you speak of The White Painted Woman?” asked Lightning turning to look eastward where his brother had indicated. “She arrived long ago to prepare the girls, to teach them what they must know.”

  “I do not mean Changing Woman,” Thunder said, using the other name, the Navajo name for the goddess. This shift indicated that his concerns went beyond worrying about the Apache below, but the tribes throughout the region. “She is not troubled with that awareness and does not speak to the visions. I mean the new dreamer.”

  Lightning turned to look at his brother. “And is she the true one? She has not come yet and she might not come. Does she even know of her role? She is untrained, unfamiliar with the ways of The People.”

  Thunder growled. “She must be made aware; she must be brought here. She is needed. The visions are fading and failing. The songs do not keep pace with the world. If not the dreamer, then who? Changing Woman understands the seasons, the coming of age, she knows the rites of fertility that replenish the land and people, but this is not about these things. It has nothing to do with the changing of time or season. New forces are troubling the people, confusing them, making the old values seem unimportant.. They are in a time that requires new songs be sung and the world seen with new eyes. That requires vivid and clear dreams”

  “They have the old dreamer.”

  The black stallion snorted and Thunder stroked his head.“But she is old now. As she grows frail her visions are increasingly unclear. More often her dreams attempt to reach the young dreamer and cannot help The People with the problems they face.”

  “Why is this time so hard?”

  “The world is changing, but the visions are of the older world, her dreams are old dreams. The people know this and her power with them diminishes. Soon she will fade. Before she is gone the new one must come to meet her people and take her place among them.”

  Lightning nodded. “Other powers, other forces from outside the people are rising among them, especially the young. With a foot in the outside world, they are losing direction; becoming confused. They must have a dreamer—a young dreamer who speaks to them in the language of now.”

  “Yes. This is a complicated time, brother.”

  “A time that requires vivid dreams. A time for powerful singers and great dreamers,” Thunder agreed.

  Lightning stared at the mesa. “So how do we bring her here? How do we connect the dreamer to the people?”

  “She must be shown the need for her presence.”

  “We have called to her, but she has trouble hearing. Can the White Painted Woman speak to her?”

  “White Painted Woman prepares the girls who become women. The dreamer doesn’t even know to hear her.”

  Lightning sighed. He touched his fingers to his heart, the side closest to the Creator and the source of his power. “Must I throw my spear and light the sky up so that she sees it?”

  Thunder considered the idea. “We cannot know but you must try; perhaps she will see the sign.”

  The two men stared down again and again felt displeasure. Intruding on the workings of the people was not something they did willingly and now their scowls blackened the skies over the mesa. Below them, the people preparing for the ceremonies to celebrate the coming of age of the girls of the tribe, those who still looked for omens and tried to understand, began to run for shelter. As they did, thunder roared his unhappiness across the sky; Lighting outstretched the fingers of his left hand, gave a mighty grunt and unleashed a jagged spear that hurtled down to the mesa. His careful aim sent it so that it struck in an open space where it would alarm the people scurrying for cover on the mesa but do no harm to them.

  “Wake up, dreamer. Go help your people,” Lighting said. He raised his arm, and another spear flashed into his hand. “See my sign,” he said, unleashing it toward the heavens in the east.

  “Hear our call,” Thunder roared, his black stallion rearing up.

  When the echo of Thunder’s voice had faded, they looked at each other. “Now we see what happens,” Lightning said.

  “She must come,” Thunder said. “She must.”

  Chapter Two

  Dawn Thoughts

  Charli Gordon came awake, sitting bolt upright in her bed. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood upright, and she smelled ozone. It took a moment to realize that the smell came from the lightning that had just struck just outside her window, waking her.

  As her brain made the shift from dream to whatever the present was, she heard the roar of rain, coming down hard, almost hard enough to be hail. The rain was bittersweet news. While it meant that the drought was broken, it also could mean there would be flash floods, and sure enough, the cell phone on her nightstand began flashing an alert: “Flood warnings in this area until 9:00 am.”

  “And other vague warnings in my dreams, seemingly forever,” Charli muttered to herself.

  Thunder crashed outside her window, reminding her that the thunderstorm was real, not just some figment of her dream. A glance at the clock on her nightstand told her it was way too early to get up�
�it wasn't even four in the morning yet, but she knew she wasn't going back to sleep. Not anytime soon, anyway. Images and thoughts from her troubled sleep tumbled around her head and demanded attention. From experience Charli knew that the only viable option was to surrender to the inevitable. Despite the early hour, the only thing to do was to get up, have a cup of really strong coffee and face the day. She needed to get herself together and come fully awake.

  Some lonely neuron in the back of her brain fired, sending off a message. It was received and interpreted as a strange thought, a warning, an alert. She needed to be ready. Unfortunately, the message didn't mention what she needed to prepare to deal with. “Be ready for what?” she asked.

  “Prepare like a warrior,” came the words in her head.

  She smiled to herself. The odd words sounded remarkably like the remnants of her unsettling dream about the Indian warriors, and that was nothing but a rather obscure dialog between two fictional characters. She knew they were fictional because before going to bed she had been reading about them: Thunder and Lightning. The twins were important figures in the belief system of the Mescalero Apache—her own people, in terms of blood, but yet a culture she’d known nothing about until she took it upon herself to learn about her heritage.

  The woman they talked about in her dream was familiar as well. White Painted Woman, Changing Woman, was the bringer of change and fertility. She was the central figure in the ceremony celebrating girls becoming women, passing through puberty.

  The book had many such primitive stories that were told by The People, the Mescalero Apache, to explain birth, puberty, and the actions of the powerful forces of nature. The raging storm outside now emphasized their importance. People wanted to know what was happening around them; they wanted to understand things that affected them but were outside their control. These were actions of their Gods, their spirits, and it was all personal.... relatable entities were altering the circumstances of survival.

  After reading about these views of the world, it was only natural that her mind played with them, turning them over. And asleep, her mind had been interweaving what she read with the sounds of the approaching storm. Her far-too creative mind had created that unsettling dream.

  That was all that had happened.

  Returning to her studies, curling up with her book seemed the way to survive the morning. She took her coffee to the couch where she’d left the book. It was one of several books she had ordered concerning the myths and legend of the Mescalero Apache and how they influenced their lives, dictated the way parts of their society operated.

  She'd learned that the Mescalero beliefs were similar to those of other tribes in the area. That made sense. Like those of most indigenous peoples, the myths and legends related to the forces of nature, acknowledging that power. The kinds of things they dealt with were regional and so the stories similar. In addition, the stories provided explanations for creation. Instead of Adam and Eve, they had First man and First woman.

  She picked the book up and when she opened it, a sigh of relief escaped her lips. Her bookmark was right after the part about the warrior twins. That reinforced her own belief, her own myth of the creation of that dream. A simple explanation was a relief. The book put ideas in her head. They always did. And although she could attribute some of that to an overactive imagination, the truth was that some ideas stuck, refused to go away because, however fantastic they were, they contained exciting kernels of truth.

  Charli was a cultural anthropologist, and it was only natural, not to mention appropriate, that she take an interest in the way other cultures interpreted the universe. But as a scientist, she had to admit that choosing to study a culture because it began to invade your dreams, and because you had a personal connection to it, wasn’t the best plan. Scientists were expected to be objective and dispassionate. Her choice was hardly either. It was emotional, and necessary.

  Yes, necessary. She didn't feel that she had a choice. In this case, what she didn't know was who she was, what she had come from. She wondered about her heritage, about her place in the world—this investigation was about learning those things, discovering her own beginnings.

  Doing research for a dissertation or a paper for publication would be totally different. But now she looked for a single truth—what made Charli Gordon who she was?

  Ever since she’d realized that her dreams connected to the world she lived in, this had become more urgent. For years she'd dreamed of mythic characters; more recently she'd begun to learn that they were sometimes real people, living and dead. Now she felt compelled to explore the source of those dreams, to see if she could figure out why her dreams were so... compelling and, at times, prophetic.

  Initially, she had convinced herself that she could make her study as a professional would. She would make it an academic project that she'd keep at arm's length. Maybe she would even write a paper. And yet, from her first steps she undermined that effort. And how could she do otherwise, because she had to begin with learning about her own family, and then her own people.

  None of this, she knew, was entirely new. From the time she was young, Charli had frequently dreamed the stories of that she encountered in books and stories. From fairy tales to more epic stories, the ways they attempted to explain the world fascinated her. Some were terrifying, others romantic.

  Ultimately, that fascination drove her into majoring in anthropology where she could seriously use her curiosity to explore myths under the cloak of formal studies. She loved learning how various people chose to explain the wonders around them and found it curious how often different cultures used the same metaphors, the same references even when their civilizations seemed to have had no direct contact.

  Now, reading about her own heritage, learning about it for the first time, she was amazed to learn how familiar it all was. Looking at this through the lens of her training she identified two factors that helped explained this familiarity. The first was that many myths exist in multiple cultures. The names change, the circumstances change, but the fundamental stories of passion and violence and love and hate—the stories of the forces of the world, repeat. The second, more unsettling factor, was that the icons, characters and even stories in her dreams were turning out to be deeply rooted in the Mescalero Apache culture. That made no sense. How could that be when she had never been raised among the people and she had never been exposed to the culture?

  Her mother had kept their home a modern, American home without a hint of Indian culture. Charli was reared in a world of video and social media. She’d never known her grandparents or even been to the reservation. Yet, studying the myths led her down familiar paths. The lessons that the stories taught, the wisdom they passed along, generation to generation, while vague, were things she had seen in her dreams. And now, as she learned more, they coalesced into more vivid dreams.

  While it was a relief to find an explanation for her dreams, most of them, at least, there were others that had nothing to do with the Apache or their legends. Over the years, some of her dreams had an uncanny correspondence to things in the real world—in short, at times, for no apparent reason, she saw things. And sometimes even saw them before they happened.

  She’d learned not to tell people about those dreams. Even friends, like Elle Kramer, who knew of her weird dreaming, couldn’t begin to understand them. Charli found it embarrassing to have her friend know that she could see things without there being any logic to it.

  Elle never laughed at her, but she knew her friend thought that Charli was a little off-kilter. That didn’t stop Elle from wanting to hear the dreams. Recently, Elle had even talked her into using her dreams to find a missing person who was insured by the company she worked for.

  As she couldn’t think of a way to stop dreaming, she began trying to understand what the dreams meant. They had to have some purpose, or at least a use. And now that she had located the source of some dreams, Charli was determined to explore them even more deeply. Perhaps understanding more
about why and how she dreamed would give her some relief. The ‘real-world’ dreams were hard to follow, but now she knew where the myths came from and she was determined to find out how she came to know them.

  She looked at the book again. She had learned that the singers, the men, typically, who chanted their songs as teachings at ceremonies were guided by visions. That too had been in her dream. When he’d read about Shaman, she saw no mention of dreamers.

  Clearly, in her sleep, she tried to resolve her own mysterious dreams with the legends. For an anthropologist with a bent toward fantasy that seemed natural. It didn’t explain much though. And as she read she began to wonder. Who was this young dreamer that the twins mentioned? Her presence seemed important.

  It struck her that she was acting as if those two actually included me in a conversation and weren’t just a dream. In that case: “Okay, I hear you. Just tell me what you want.” She said it out loud to break the spell. Then she laughed at herself and felt as if a weight had lifted from her; she sighed and put down the book.

  Charli went into the kitchen to make more coffee. Sleep was impossible now and she'd given up totally. Her stomach grumbling, she made some breakfast.

  With a steaming cup in her hand, she went out onto the enclosed patio. Although it was still raining, the storm was moving Eastward and the sky clearing. One of the nice things about Union City, Tennessee was that it was a small place and light pollution wasn’t a huge problem. She stared upward taking in the magnificent schizophrenic sky, pitch black and impenetrable in the East, and with Orion clearly visible to the southwest. Suddenly, the sky lit up with a brilliant flash. It was lighting, a cloud-to-cloud discharge that washed out the stars for a moment.

  Her mind spun, and a phrase echoed in her head as if it was being said to her now. “See my sign,” the voice said. A deep rumble followed that sounded distinctly like the words: “Hear our call.”

  She sat, transfixed, waiting for something, but nothing else came. Finally, she glanced at her watch. It was barely approaching dawn and too early to be calling people, but it was about the only time she could be sure her mother would answer her phone. The A-type businesswoman was on the run from morning to night and Charli wasn’t at the top of the list when it came to urgency.