Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller by Alexes Razevich

“Not me personally. Naheyo wouldn’t allow it. But I’m sure one of the Helpers wouldn’t mind walking over tomorrow. You’d have an answer in a couple of days. It’s the best I can offer.”
    “ Thank you,” he said.
    They ’d stood the whole time they talked, and his ankle had begun throbbing. He set the cane on the cot and sat down, relieved to get the weight off his feet.
    “You found a cane,” she said, eyeing the stick. “Does it help?”
    He nodded. “I think that by tomorrow, with some practice, I should be able to get around pretty well.” He looked down at the cane, rolled it away on the cot—gently with three fingers, as though it might turn into a snake—and rolled it back. “Naheyo brought it.”
    Pilar took that in. “Did she? She said you were ready for the next step in your healing. I hadn’t thought she meant it so literally.”
    He twisted on the cot, leaning his back against a wall so he could stretch out his injured leg, get his throbbing ankle on top of the folded blanket again.
    “How did such a young girl become a shaman?”
    “ She’s thirteen,” Pilar said, settling at the foot of the cot. She set the camera between them. “Naheyo began her training when she was three. The Lalunta believe that when a shaman dies, the soul flies into the next child born in the village. The child becomes the new shaman. There’s no choice about it, but it’s a high honor, so no one complains.”
    It felt good to talk, to hold a conversation in which no one angled for the advantage. Jake wanted it to go on. He wanted her to move closer. He reached for the camera, his longer arms crossing the distance so quickly it surprised him. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands.
    “ This work?”
    She looked puzzled. “Yes.”
    “ The batteries haven’t died?”
    “ Different sort of battery than what my phone uses.” She touched his leg lightly. The heat of it seemed to radiate through his whole body.
    “ You’re better, but you’re not well yet,” she said. “You need rest.” She stood up. “I’ll be off.”
    “ What does lish gorum mean?”
    Pilar crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head.
    “Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right,” he said. “They’re words Naheyo used.”
    She glanced toward the rough-cut window in the wall behind the cot, and then back at Jake. “You’re pronouncing the words fine. Lish gorum means ‘infected.’”
    “ As in having a disease?”
    “ As in contaminated by evil spirits. Possessed.”
    He wasn’t fool enough to laugh. “Is that how your shaman sees me?”
    “ Evidently.” Pilar untangled her arms and rubbed her hands against the denim shorts covering her thighs.
    “ How big a problem is it?” he asked.
    “ Big,” she said. “The Lalunta take these things very seriously. Naheyo will likely feel she has to do something about it.”
    Jake forced a smile onto his face. “Rain forest exorcism?”
    She didn ’t smile in return. “I don’t know. I’ll talk to her. I don’t have any authority here, but I’ll try to convince her to leave you alone.” She picked up the camera from the cot. “Naheyo calls me little sister, though I’m almost twenty years older. She might do it as a favor to me. Maybe I can convince her you’re harmless.”
    There was something surreal about being thought possessed. And something unpleasant in the idea that a thirteen-year-old shaman girl was in charge here, that she held the power to either get him to a phone or hold him back.
    His eyelids felt weighted. He sank back on the cot. “Thanks,” he muttered, his mouth so heavy that he could barely open it to get out the words. He didn’t see Pilar go—only the last flutter of the blanket door settling into place.
     
     
    The early morning alarm clock of woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tatted loudly enough, Jake thought, to be heard in Manaus, hundreds of miles away. He felt head-to-toe stiff and rusty, as though his eyelids would creak when he