Shapechanger's Birth Read online

  Table of Contents

  Encounter

  Awakening

  Progress

  Destiny

  Danger Road

  Enter the Cat Lady

  The Organization at War

  Encounters, Some Deadly

  What Happens Next?

  Shapechangers's Birth

  by

  Laer Carroll

  Copyright © 2011 by L. E. Carroll

  Summary : In 1854 Irish farmer's wife and grandmother Mary McCarthy awakens in her grave an almost skeletal young teen with extraordinary powers. She sets off to find who and what she is. Which will include orphan, laundry owner, medical doctor, scientist, inventor - and the most feared crime boss in the British Empire.

  Disclaimer : Historical characters are used fictitiously and should not be mistaken for the actual personalities.

  Credits : All-Ireland map is courtesy of MapsOf.net, reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Licence. Maps of Cork City and environs by permission of Cork city Council, www.corkcity.ie.

  Encounter

  July, 1854

  Just past noon in mid-July of 1854 Mary McCarthy slowed to a sedate walk from a leisurely running pace which she could keep up all day. She passed discreetly through the tiny village of Creegh, heading south toward Kilrush on the great River Shannon, and crossed a bridge of the tiny river that gave the village its name.

  Her discretion wasn't enough, however. From a shabby tavern trouble followed her .

  Perhaps twenty minutes past the village she looked back to see if she could begin running again. The winding road through the low coastal hills of County Clare had indeed put her out of sight of the village. However, three horsemen were riding from the direction of the village. She faced forward and continued walking.

  When the clip-clop of the horse's hooves on the packed earth of the road was near she courteously moved onto the grassy verge of the road to let the riders pass.

  They did not. One of them rode off the road then angled his horse toward her, forcing her back onto the road. Another came up to pace by her other side. The third took up station a few yards behind her.

  "Good day, fair lady," said the man who had forced her to change her path.

  Mary glanced up at him. His dress and the tack of his horse told of money and his attitude spoke of arrogant assurance. From his speech she judged him some petty English nobility. He was a handsome man, taller than most as best as she could judge a man in a saddle, with dark brown ringlets, a round face, and laughing brown eyes. The horse was a sleek dark brown, obviously expensive.

  He was silently laughing at her, and her temper flared, but she kept a rein on it. "Good day to you, sir."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To my home over the hill."

  He made a show of standing in his stirrups and shading his eyes under the hat he wore as if to see over the hill. There was an emerald feather stuck in the hat's sweat band.

  "Oh, goodness. I suspect you of a fib, fair lady. I see no cottage ahead. And as I know this country well, I'm sure there is none."

  "I think she's afraid of us," the man on her other side said, a cruel smile on his face. He was much of piece as the first one, she saw. Perhaps a brother or a cousin.

  "No!" replied the first. "Why, how could she think that of us! We only want to be her friends. "

  "I have all the friends I need," replied Mary shortly.

  "Oh, but we're going to be even closer than friends." This was from the man behind Mary. She stopped and turned to look at him. He was younger and blond and his horse was not so good. A poor cousin of the other two, perhaps? Trying to match them in wit and other ways.

  It was obvious that they intended to rape her. She had other plans, however. They did not include getting her clothes bloody, so she needed to get out of her clothes without alarming them. And she needed to get them off their horses. Their mounts multiplied their effectiveness.

  Mary glanced at the man on her right, he with the green feather. He was the leader. She smiled at him and spoke.

  "Well, now, I would be friendlier if I thought you might have some coin about you."

  "Oh, yes, fair lady. We do indeed 'have some coin about us.'"

  "Then let us get to it. Over there."

  The direction of her nod was off to the side of the road up ahead where three trees made a pleasant shade. She began walking again, stepping around the leader's horse and off the road, angling toward the trees. Then, looking playfully back over her shoulder, she laughed and broke into a run toward the trees.

  It took a few moments for them to react. The leader laughed and kneed his horse into a trot. The other two followed suit.

  Under the shade of the nearest tree Mary let her pack slip off her back onto the ground. Then she began disrobing.

  By that time the leader was under the tree too and was off his horse. He hitched it to a branch of the tree and stood enjoying the show. The other two caught up and ground-reined their horses. The leader scowled at them and they hastily hitched their horses the same way.

  Ah, yes, Mary thought. When she started screaming they did not want their animals to run away. She folded her clothes and placed them on the opposite side of a tree, placing her pack atop them. That should shield them from any blood spatter .

  The leader was the first to reach Mary as she stood completely naked, fists on hips. The wind swirled her bright red shoulder-length hair around her face and ruffled the russet pubic hair between her legs. To them she would seem a fourteen-year old girl, with the muscles of a farmer but still lithe and pretty.

  The wind was from the leader to her, and she could smell the cruelty on him. There was no doubt. They planned to do horrible things to her, then kill her.

  She put out a hand toward him and he took the bait. He caught her wrist in a grip that would have pained an ordinary woman. She looked him directly in his eyes. Hurt a child, would you? she thought.

  She twisted her wrist, broke his grip, and it was now his wrist that was captured. He jerked his arm away, or tried to. She saw the exact moment when he understood that he'd made a terrible mistake.

  But by then it was far too late.

  Awakening

  three months earlier

  ...dying, she found, was easy.... She relaxed, fell away into darkness, with no down, only away....

  In that infinite comforting sea floated a ghostly cloud, lit within by an invisible moon. Seeing better as her vision adjusted to the dark, she saw fuzzy cloud-shape resolve into delicate misty leaves and evanescent branches leading down to a ghostly trunk....

  Mary McCarthy woke. An odd dream... It faded, was gone, leaving behind only the sense that it had been really strange .

  She smiled. Her mother was always telling her she had too much imagination for her own good.

  Her mother, husband, and the two younger children were beside her in the family bed. To keep from disturbing anyone Mary lay perfectly relaxed and still.

  Her bedroom was as dark as a cave far underground, but she thought nothing of this. A poor crofter's cottage could not afford a fire for warmth and light after bedtime. Wood and turf cost hours of hard labor.

  But being cold was unusual. The McCarthys could afford several layers of rag and linen quilts on the two beds that filled much of the main room of the stone cottage. Add the body heat of up to a half dozen people and only the bodies at the edge of each bed were in danger of being cold. Since Mary was the third oldest in the house at 53, behind her husband and mother, her proper place was one edge of her bed. But the McCarthys were well off. The covers spilled off the edge.

  Mary lifted her hands to grasp the covers — or tried to. They moved only a little way from their folde
d position on her chest. She was wrapped in a sheet and there was a weight above it molding the sheet to her.

  But there was enough room to let her rub the material between thumb and fingers. It was very coarse and thick and seemed to be wrapped several times around her, even her head.

  She ceased all movement. This was a funeral shroud.

  She could not be dead. She had been very sick, yes, but now she felt very healthy, better than she had in many years. She felt full of energy and well-being and a serene contentment. True, she was also very cold and thirsty and her stomach cramped from hunger, but these were not new experiences for a poor Irish woman.

  Had she been buried? No. She could not be. She would be suffocating from lack of air.

  Then she realized something.

  She could not feel breath moving into and out of her lungs. Her chest was not expanding and contracting. She wasn't breathing.

  Nor was her heart beating — or so she thought. Testing, she found she could move one hand just enough to press her fingers to the pulse point on the wrist of her other hand .

  No. No pulse. Though that proved nothing; it had never been easy for her to find the pulse point. Maybe she had missed it again.

  She considered all this for a time. She felt no panic, no urgency to do anything. She simply wanted to understand what was going on.

  Finally she decided to accept what had happened to her, at least for now. Perhaps it was a miracle. She was a pious and dutiful and loving woman, and it was not beyond reason that God would grant her a small miracle.

  She began moving her hands more, exploring her surroundings as well as she could despite the restriction of the cloth and the earth piled atop and around her. It felt heavy but not crushingly so. Indeed, it felt as if the earth was clasping her lovingly, like a swaddled infant.

  This was so interesting that she stopped moving and simply relaxed and savored the feeling for a time.

  Another interesting sensation attracted her attention: her hands were beginning to feel slightly warm, as if she had immersed them in warm dishwater. They also felt as if they were dissolving into the imaginary water.

  With that sensation came another: she tasted the fibers of the cloth making up the shroud, as if her hands had become her tongue. This was not terribly exciting; the taste was pretty boring.

  Except it was as much feeling as tasting. For suddenly — like an optical illusion where a picture suddenly appears quite different — the sensation that her fingers were dissolving flipped into the sensation that they were becoming smaller, thinner, and much more numerous. Small enough to feel the tiny fibers that made up the cloth. The fibers were very fine and fuzzy, kinking and wrapping around each other to make the threads which made the yarn which made the cloth.

  So vivid were the taste/touch sensations that she could almost see the cloth. And she saw that if she pulled the strands with her imaginary fingers just so — and she found that she could indeed pull them — that the cloth unraveled and became a very fine dust.

  Now, with the cloth around them gone, she could move her hands a little more and could feel/taste the earth. The tiny, normally barely visible grains of earth felt more like gravel, and tasted of iron and copper and other less-identifiable tastes. And her many tiny fingers could move between the chunks of the "gravel," pulling/eating at the stuff which glued the gravel together .

  Slowly, patiently, she extended her real fingers into the softened earth. It caressed her fingers and arms like the softest, finest dust, so fine it felt almost like water.

  Extending her real hands moved her imaginary fingers and their softening influence. She pushed her arms above her chest, above her head, above her torso, and with some effort sat up. It was as if she sat up through water as heavy and resistant as molasses.

  Now she could reach her hips and soften the earth enough to pull her legs out of the cavity in the earth in which they rested. She stood. Her head broke through the earth and she saw faint light through her closed eyes.

  Mindful of the dust on her eyelids, Mary brushed them very carefully with her imaginary fingers — she had no desire to "soften" her flesh to mush — until they seemed dust-free. Cautiously she opened her eyes the tiniest slit. A faint remnant of dust brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them several times until they were clear and peered around her.

  The waning crescent moon shown in the clear sky. It was part way up the eastern sky, just above Finavarra Point where it projected north into Galway Bay. The moon's reflection was silver in the water.

  She was in the cemetery where her father had been buried, on the low hill overlooking the beach. A simple head stone marked her grave and similar headstones around her marked others. The light was too dim to make out the inscription on her grave marker but she knew what it was: what she had chosen years ago. She'd bought the headstone and had it carved to make sure the job was done right: "Loving mother, well beloved."

  A cold wind came from the west. It made the knee-high grass in the fields about her sway and dance so that the grass almost looked like waves of water. The frigid wind caressed her body intimately but she felt no colder than before.

  Interesting, she thought. She was not shivering and did not feel the expected cold-brought goose bumps on her arms and legs.

  Mary put her arms on the waist-level grassy verge around the grave and crawled up onto the surface.

  As she stood upright she noticed with a little pang in her breast that several small bouquets of flowers had been laid against her tombstone. They were so dry and shrunken they must have been there for several weeks.

  She looked down at herself. Dim as the light from the moon and sky was, she could still see that she was a mess, her simple dress thin and dirt-stained, her body equally filthy. She grasped her dress-front and shook it. Dust flew up from it. Her eyes watered, so she faced into the wind to let it take the dust away.

  The dust should have made her sneeze or cough. But she was still not breathing and so had inhaled none of it.

  Her entire dress was dirty. She looked around. There was no one about, hardly surprising at possibly three hours before dawn. She slipped her dress over her head and, returning to her gravesite, swatted her gravestone with the dress, standing so that the wind off the ocean carried the dust away from her.

  It was a disrespectful use of a gravestone but it was, after all, hers. She smiled at the thought.

  With the dress she wiped as much dirt and dust from her face and neck and torso as she could. She noticed then that her long curly red hair, liberally shot with grey, was gone.

  She raised a hand to her head. There was a short nap of very fine hair covering it, like a newborn's hair.

  Mentally shrugging, she used the dress to wipe clean the rest of her body, inspecting herself as she did so.

  She was as skinny as a child. No; skinnier. Every ounce of fat seemed to be gone, leaving her ribs prominent. Her hipbones almost poked through her skin. They were still woman-wide, however. Her skinniness was that of starvation, not a return to childhood. Though, fingering her flat breasts, she could almost believe that. However, her nipples and areolas were still woman-sized.

  She searched again for a heartbeat and found none. She decided that this was not incompetence in finding it. Her heart truly did not beat. Blood did not course through her veins.

  Yet she felt absurdly healthy. Just cold and hungry and thirsty.

  She could do something about that. There was food and clothing at home, water in a small stream that crossed the path on the way there.

  Her body as clean as she could make it, she beat the dress clean again and re-dressed. Glancing about to orient herself, she started walking .

  Perhaps a quarter hour later she came across the small stream. She drank her fill of the icy water. It satisfied her thirst and eased the hunger pains.

  She could have drunk too much and made herself sick. But she had an interior sense of exactly how much water she needed and as she approached that point she stopped
drinking.

  She, and she supposed everyone else, had always had this interior knowledge. But this seemed much clearer than her former vague sensation of being full.

  Her belly clenched. She was hungrier than ever. The water she had just drunk had whetted rather than allayed her appetite. She needed food.

  Standing, she saw that the moon was noticeably higher. She had less time to get food and clothing from her home if she were to do it secretly. And she must do it that way, at least till she had time to figure out how to break the news to her family that she had returned from the grave.

  She got to her feet and set off again on the path through the grassy fields.

  Her home was still quiet when she reached it a bit later. She stood for moments listening outside the closed front door. Carefully she tried to open it and the door swung outward. Good; most poor Irish had so little that thieves had no reason to try to steal from them. She and her husband had never barred the door.

  Pausing, she listened at the cracked door a moment then slipped inside and closed the door to keep out the cold, to keep her family from waking up.

  The hunger in her belly screamed for satisfaction, but she had carefully thought through what she must do here. She ignored the hunger as she had so many times in her life.

  For a moment she stood and listened to her family breathe. None of them snored; she had trained them to sleep on their sides. Two of her youngest daughters were here, the older two married and gone to America. Her oldest son of three was in that country, too. Here was also her mother and her husband and two younger sons.

  But another person did snore. It was the widow O'Toole. For years Timothy had fooled around with her. As long as they remained discreet, Mary pretended not to know. Mary and he had not been husband and wife in a physical way for years, and she had been relieved that he had someone to keep him from bothering her.

  Her heart turned over in her chest, because she just now understood that she was going to have to leave them all. She had left them all. She was dead. Or dead enough. She still did not breathe, her heart did not beat.