Shaman-complete

The man was not a hermit by choice, but out of necessity.  His first name was Doug, and his last name no longer mattered.  What few relatives he had still living were out of touch and scattered across the States.  Doug lived in an old shack out in the woods, nestled in the riverbottoms of the Ozarks in a secluded valley.  Considered legally insane by his doctors, whom he visited only a few times a year, he lived a sparse monk-like existence on a meager government disability check.  But he knew that he was quite sane, no matter what any doctor said, and he was a haunted man.  Once a month, when he drove into town for supplies, he felt the eyes of all the normal people piercing his soul, but these were not the eyes he had to worry about.  Any would be guest inside his home, not that he ever had any, would notice a fish hook tacked to the wall someplace in plain view in every room.  And upon these fish hooks hung strips of raw bacon, why he did this only he would ever know, but the strips of flesh lent a meaty odor to the cabins interior.  He did other strange things in an alost ritualistic manner besides hanging bacon on hooks in his house.  The wooden floor of his home was gritty with granules of salt, which he used a hand cranked yard fertilizer to dispense in large volumes, and various herbs hung in tied bundles over every door.  These habits were essential to his survival, and his self taught rituals which will be mentioned later seemed like mad paranoid activities in which a cause-effect relationship was not readily apparent to anyone but himself.





Shadows always crept into Dougs little valley a few hours before nightfall, and that's when...things...would start to happen.  The night time chorus of crickets and other things nocturnal would start up, a soothing sound if not for the deepening tension in the air.  As the sun would slip below the horizon, signs and alarms would go off, telling him when to expect a visit.  And tonight, like many other nights when the tension was so powerful a buzzing would fill his ears and the hair on his head felt like it was standing on end, the bacon on the hooks would begin to twitch.  At first the strips of meat would sporadically jerk and twitch, but soon they would begin to curl up and writhe like worms dipped in alcohol.  The herbal wards above the doors would keep the thing out, as well as the salted floor, which the spirit simply would not tread upon.  But the company it kep could cross these barriers...the dead things coaxed halfway back into a mockery of life in the spirits presence.  Doug never knew what paths the thing walked to get to the valley, but it would gather up a host of denizens before its arrival: corpses from passing through forgotten cemeteries, and roadkill from slinking across dark lanes.





He readied himself, not with conventional weapons, no firearms, nor did he wield such implements as supposed holy water or a mallet and wooden stakes.  The spirit itself was not substantial enough to be physically harmed, and its pets were already dead.  The raking of nails or claws started on the storm door, the cabins only entrance.  And as Doug peered out the window into the moonlit night he saw the thing glistening in the shadow of the well house outside.  What was it made of, he wondered...it had the look of snail slime, and seemed to circulate through a structured network of invisible veins and capillaries, which were confined to a humanoid shape the curvature of which was very suggestive of a young woman.  The she-thing seemed to glide from the shadows and into the full moonlight, and her host of cadavers shuffled from the darkness and pressed their rotting wormy faces against the window.  They could not enter, yet their taunting tormenting presence was both nauseating and unbearable.  They had visited him since the time he was a young man, ever since the hunting accident...he still had a deep scar on his forehead where he had been grazed by a bullet...





...he spent two weeks in a coma, two weeks of confusing nightmares of the incident.  A loud ping reverberated through his head, accompanied by unparalleled pain.  He lay paralyzed on the ground, his view of the sky was cluttered with tree branches, their leaves in full fall color. His head rested against a tree trunk, he could only move his eyes, and he saw his blood spattered on the trees bark, running down, splitting and flowing like veins and capillaries.  Then blackness.  And a dream of a woman clothed in a dress of woven moss, her hair the color of fall foliage, dragging herself from beneath the roots of the tree.  She expired with her head laying on his chest, bleeding her last all over his body, not red, but clear and slimy like the trail a snail would leave behind, and sticky, like tree sap.  After his full recovery was when the haunting started, and through torment, trials, and self taught rituals of practical magic, he had become a self taught shaman of sorts.  Able to keep the she-spirit at bay, if only for another night...





Doug snapped out of his flashback and into here and now.  The corpses seemed content to slobber graveyard mud and lick the panes of glass.  But the spirit seemed to be gathering moonlight, becoming less dim and transparent while gaining luminosity and solidity.  This was something new and disturbing.  Doug had learned to deal with her tricks over the years while her approach and strategy of haunting took on new and varrying characteristics, as though she was learning and improving the art of torment through experience as well.  





The corpses parted as she stepped forward and pressed her semi-solid palm against the window...and the pane cracked.  So, it looked like the haunt was learning to manifest herself physically as well.  She even seemed impressed with this new found gift herself, drawing power from the moons ghostly light.  She threw back her head and let out a cackle that sounded like the strangling of a crow.  And in that same instant her triumphant laugh was cut short as low storm clouds moved in on an errant breeze high above and shrouded the moon, blocking its nourishing light.  The laugh turned to a shriek as the spirit grew dim again.  This sudden waning of power abruptly robbed her of her fledgling solidity and her glistening mass collapsed and splattered into a puddle of phlemy slime on the ground.  The host of corpses she had raised in her passing fell to the ground as well.  





Doug braced himself, choked down his fear, and went outside to investigate the now quiet yard.  He examined the pool of slime and briefly went back inside to fetch several mason jars.  He collected a large sampling of slime, and upon pondering what it was made of he simply decided to take Hollywood's advice and labeled the jar "Ectoplasm".  He also took tissue samples from the undead and labeled the jars "Zombie Flesh".  He would have to test the samples by tomorrow night to see if any substances or rituals could harm or decompose them.  This supernatural harassment had gone on for years, and now he believed he had the means to stop it for good.





The ectoplasm, Doug discovered, actually seemed like a secretion, and smelled like tree sap which would seep from a cut in the trunk or branch of a tree in Springtime.  It had the characteristics of something that would be produced by a plant, yet also conformed to the traditional notions of the ghostly manifestation ectoplasm that was mentioned in so many ghost stories.  So, he surmised, perhaps it was a marriage of both.  The spirit, or what he vaguely remembered of it during the hunting accident, emerged from the tree after it was struck by the very bullet which glanced off his forehead, a trauma that seemed to link him to her.  Perhaps the link was both from the wounding and from misplace blame, as if the undead tree spirit thought Doug was responsible for her death and unwanted rebirth as a haunt.  He ruled out trying to communicate or reconcile with her, there was too much of a grudge between them, fueled by years of moves and counter moves in a chess-game of contempt.





He was not as interested in repelling the zombies and risen roadkill as he was destroying her, because they seemed to be merely a side effect of her corrupted presence.  Doug truly hoped to rid himself of the haunt permanently but if he was merely able to come up with a repellent he would settle for that.  First, there was salt, which he knew was an irritant to her.  That day, Doug made a trip to town to buy things to test on the substance of the cytoplasmic goo.  He returned to the cabin and went diligently to work.  He reasoned that if ectoplasm was truly the phlegmy secretion it seemed to be, supernatural or not, it would react as such to specific drying agents.  So he had stocked up on various brands of sinus pills with red label warnings on the packages that advised the user to drink lots of fluids with them to prevent dehydration, as well as an off brand on the same medicine as Mucinex, which he hoped would break up the ectoplasm the same as if it were phlegm.  He crushed up all the pills with a mortar and pestle and mixed them thoroughly with some salt.  Then is a separate jar he stirred in a powerfull brand of herbicide used for killing brush and mixed it into a thick paste, that he then spread on a sheet of wax paper to dry.  An hour later he had a white slab of what he hoped would be an effect spirit killing poison, or, at least, something that would make her not want to come back.





Next Doug decided on using his shotgun to deliver the toxin.  He got the twelve-gauge pump from under the bed and a box of slugs.  Next he used a pocketknife to cut the end off each shell and pop the slugs out.  The slugs were replaced by chunks of the poison slab, and the ends of the shells he taped over with duct tape.  Next came the removal of the plug from the shotgun so it would hold seven shells.  Locked and loaded, he waited 'till nightfall, when it was time to hang fresh bacon on the hooks.  There was no cloud cover this night, the moon was three quarters full and bright, almost a holy looking night except for the fact that the she-spirit would draw power from that glow...





Soon, the bacon began to twitch, then curl and writhe, but this time its reaction to her approach did not stop there...the strips started flapping like agitated bat wings, and that feeling he got was much more intense, goosebumps came with the feeling of hair standing on end.  There came the raking of nails on the door, and soon the raking became thumping and knocking.  He had swept, mopped, and polished the salt off the floor, this time, he would let her in...into his lair for what was hopefully a final confrontation.





There came the splintering of wood as the outer screen door was ripped off its hinges, followed by a crash as a large bloated zombie bashed his inner door wide open.  The zombie shuffled into the room stiffly, followed by a pancaked possum and a mangled deer with only half a shattered antler.  The true threat charged into the doorway behind them though, and her form was more complete that any other time he had beheld it.  In life she would have been a beautiful Dryad, a sylvan sprite left over from an older age long passed away except for rare and singular occurrences.  But now her form was made of amber slime, held together by a skeleton of dead twisted roots and branches.  She let out a banshees wail and came at his as though to tackle.  Three ear splitting shots broke off her wail as Doug fired and pumped in rapid succession.  Three slugs of concocted poison struck the spirit...one blew her left arm off, the second exploded her chest wide open, and the third disintegrated her head yet still she stumbled forward.  The grip of her right arm was like a vise on his throat.  Another point blank shot sent her flying off of him, giving him time to hip shoot the three remaining slugs into her now melting form.   He knew she was dying at least, the zombies dropped to the floor and the bacon hung limp.  In a matter of moments she was nothing but a pile of twigs and goop.  





There was a horrible mess to clean up, and rotting corpses to re-bury, and he would do it gladly.  Finally, Doug could live a normal life...