Magic and Murder Among the Dwarves

By Erik Bundy

A murderer. Supernatural evil. A psychic who doesn’t know the meaning of “quit”.

If you try to shun your gift, it will punish you. Recently widowed, Amanda Knight moves to the Blue Ridge Mountains to quietly grieve and build a normal life. But her neighbors, who never come above ground until after dark, ask her to find a missing baby and to solve a gruesome murder for them.

As she chases the brutal and clever killer, Amanda’s life becomes part of the deadly stakes.

And sometimes your worst enemy is inside you.

Then the dark side of Amanda’s psychic power turns against her. Now she faces an evil presence more sadistic and cunning than any murderer. She must face her fears and outwit an enemy who cannot die.

She is no longer fighting for a normal life but to stay alive . . . and death is no longer the worst thing that can happen to her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Bundy
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781311438904

Book preview

Chapter 1

Fate didn't announce itself by rapping its hard-luck knuckles against my green cottage door. Nor did it bother to crawl in through my cranked-open bathroom window. So I gave it no more attention than I did the mountain air I breathed every day. That was my downfall, my sin. Fate might forgive greed, gluttony, or even bloodlust, but it never ignores being ignored. It punished my neglect with death and a demon. It yoked guilt like a leprous shadow to my heels .

Fate's wakeup call came to me one cool spring night after I had lived on Crying Woman Road for about a year. I was in bed, just skirting along the edge of sleep, when a guttural, female voice called, Amanda, through my window screen.

My bedside clock, instead of displaying numbers, looked back at me with a luminous green eye. Startled, I watched it, waiting to see if this obvious sign would make its meaning known. The eye winked, and the clock became normal again with the numbers 11:02 displayed brightly. The numbers added up to four, the number of wholeness. It didn't describe me at the moment.

Fully awake, I rose up on one elbow, tucked a tuft of hair behind my right ear, and listened. Beyond my open window, the tidal racket of katydids rose and fell with the shrill anguish of self-centered insects braying for sex. I stayed quiet, hoping the female would go away but knowing I shouldn't let her leave. The sign indicated this meeting was important. On the other hand, my body felt raw and jangled with a restless need for sleep. She could come back.

A second time she called my name from the tangle of darkness and moonlight in the woods. At least it was not a ghost's voice. It had breath in it. The throaty intonation, though, was not quite human, the vowels veined in iron, the consonants ancient and startling.

Not tonight, I yelled back.

Now, the female insisted.

I punched my pillow. My eyes felt dry as dust, gritty, and probably looked as though threaded with varicose veins. One consolation was that they paid in gold, and come flood or parching drought, I was going to make them pay me a bucketful of nuggets this time.

Peevish as a cat sprayed with a garden hose, I delayed getting up and wished mouth sores on the jolly, jowly realtor who had sold me this cottage a year before. As he handed me two sets of door keys, he had said, There's one other little thing you might want to know. His blue eyes twinkled. Most of your neighbors are a bit peculiar. They live in a colony and only come above ground after dark.

I knew about dwarves, of course. Everybody did, but I hadn't known my newly bought property bordered the treaty land of one of their colonies. The realtor had lied by saying nothing. He had conned me, a young widow, and deserved the ulcerated mouth I wished on him.

When the realtor saw his late disclosure angered but didn't alarm me, he threw his head back and yodeled laughter at a ceiling fan.

They're allergic to sunlight, see. His eyes widened with mock delight. It paralyzes them, turns them into granite statues. He held up an open hand. Scout's honor, petrifaction is their preferred method of suicide. It's painless, see. It's clean and saves their families the cost of a funeral pyre.

He patted my arm as if to let me know I didn't need to thank him for the favor of his settling me near these considerate suicides. Not amused, I flinched away from his presumptive familiarity. Sourwood was a valley village isolated by mountains, a place where everyone bumped into everyone else often. He and I would meet again.

Don't expect a Christmas card from me, I told him and punched his forearm.

All the same, the realtor had been wrong, and I took childish satisfaction in knowing that. Tall Tristan, he with the precious green eyes, and my closest human neighbor, had put the lie to that tale. The suicidal dwarves didn't turn themselves into fossils to save their heirs the price of a funeral pyre. No, they did it for revenge.

They bequeathed a monumental problem to their daughters and sons. Where do you put Uncle Steen after he has become a statue of himself? The irascible Uncle Steens of the colony usually committed suicide because they felt unwanted and ignored. On their granite faces after death were the smirks of those who knew they now had their kinfolks' full attention, even if only for long enough to find permanent storage for them.

So why would a female dwarf come calling on me? Did she want to use my psychic power, my oddsense, to find another killer? I had already solved two dwarf murders for Brialdur, the colony's sheriff. He had been considerate enough, though, to come calling just after sunset while I was still awake.

A chesty cough for attention outside curtailed my reverie of resentment. I was not being neighborly. I glanced at the clock and saw only the time, no eye or other sign. Oh well, you couldn't ignore a dwarf any more than you could the constant flush of a stuck toilet.

So I slipped out of my canopied bed and slid into a fuzzy white robe that fit my body like a sock. The dwarf outside knew I had gotten out of bed. She could hear a spider tickle along its web towards a struggling fly.

I baby-stepped through my dark living-room so as not to stub my toes against furniture, wrenched open the cottage's reluctant front door, and strutted outside onto the moonlit porch. There I knuckled my fists into my hips and stood balanced on both feet, my back straight, posed as if to `wrestle any half-quart boogeyman that dared show up. I was a modern young woman, fearless and capable (with mace spray in my robe's right pocket), and I didn't care who knew it. Attitude was everything when dealing with dwarves.

Chapter 2

Afemale (no beard) marched around the right front corner of my cottage in that solid rolling gait of theirs. I hummed surprise: no male escorted her. She-dwarves rarely visited humans and never without a male escort. Only Brialdur the sheriff had status enough and was bold enough to mix a human, a woman at that, in official dwarf business. So this visit was off the record and as important as a funeral to her .

The female smelled fungal, as one might expect of someone who lived underground. She wore a goat-leather dress, an iron belt buckle engraved with runes to ward off demons, and gray suede boots halfway up her blunt calves. No panty hose and probably no panties. Two braids of unbelievably black hair, their ends tied off with leather thongs, dangled over her shoulders and down her dress front. She looked like a miniature Cherokee squaw modeling leather clothing for a pioneer-days catalog. I tried to remember her name.

You are welcome here, I said, smiling sweetly.

It was the expected greeting. Too bad there wasn't a belt buckle for warding off dwarf visits when you wanted to fall asleep and dream of lovers. But they were my neighbors, and my hill-country mother had tried to teach me the gospel of politeness, though it never became my true habit. Also, I was now as curious as a coyote as to why she had come.

I didn't flip on the porch's electric light because even the muted glow of soft-white bulbs over-amped their night-seeing eyes. Besides, more light wasn't needed even for me. Moon glow flowed across the porch's rough bricks like poured silver.

Remembering stern Brialdur's two visits, I whispered to myself, Hope I've got enough cold schnapps.

You say?

Yep, dwarves had pin-drop hearing. I had to stop muttering to myself. Here I was only in the bottom half of my thirties, and already I had the affliction of mumbling my thoughts aloud. At sixty, I would be lecturing cereal boxes in florescent grocery aisles.

The she-dwarf stopped in front of the three steps leading up to my porch and stood in the platinum moonlight with her hairy forearms folded under her breasts.

I wait long time, she said.

Dwarf mothers didn't handicap their young by teaching them to be polite. My neighbors were as short on manners as they were on stature.

Well, I said, I was in a pre-sleep stupor. We humans have the silly habit of sleeping at night.

The she-dwarf's blunt face didn't soften with apology. Instead, she looked as though she had done me a royal favor by disturbing my rest.

Oh well, it doesn't matter now, I said. I'm up.

We have need of you, the she-dwarf said, her breath strong with the stink of fried onions and squirrel meat.

I leaned backwards and exhaled through my nose to blow away the stench. I could smell a pheromone across a football field, which was one reason I avoided stadium sports.

My sense of smell had often been stunted when I had worked alongside Brialdur. Dwarves believed sweat was bath enough for them, and their rancid breath would have floored a skunk. Their body odor bit into my nose like Clorox.

Daksin! That was this one's name. I had met her twice. A widow, she was richer than a third world dictator. I remembered her all right. Not only was she built like a cedar fencepost, she also acted like one: always tough and uncompromising.

Come on in, I said.

Daksin frowned at the dark doorway. Man inside?

I laughed. Jason's ghost had appeared along with my household goods when I had moved to Sourwood. This evening, it had come as usual and pleaded with me, then had faded away with the dying light of sunset. So no, there was no man keeping me company, not now. Besides, the ghost of a husband didn't count as a man any more than phone sex resembled the real act.

Around us, the night clattered with katydids still calling for mates. Daksin knew that I, too, was a widow, and that my bed too was bare. But as with most dwarves, she believed human morals were held together by rubber bands that broke at the first spurt and stretch of a hormone. Dwarves learned about human behavior from pirated TV programs. Soap operas and crime shows gave them the idea we were all sex zombies.

Truth be told, I knew one or two people who fit their low opinion of humans, but I wasn't one of them.

I wouldn't have heard you calling me, I said, if there had been a man with me.

Humans, Daksin said and glanced around as if looking for a place to spit.

And had there been a man here, you would still be listening outside my bedroom window.

Daksin swaggered up the steps and shook my hand, her momentary grip like pliers. I waved her into the living room. Following her inside, I asked what she wanted to drink.

Red wine.

So Daksin was not an apple schnapps drinker like most of her kind. Maybe I should stop assuming female dwarves behaved exactly like their males did.

Not sweet, Daksin added, as if I might serve her wine from a four-dollar jug. Red, she repeated. It was not a request. Arrogance was tattooed on their personalities.

Not hurrying, I slouched into my clean kitchen and smelled a rodent, its musty odor like that of a dirty sock...another unwanted guest. Before folding open the pantry's accordion door, I rapped on it to scare Mr. Mousy back into the crawlspace under my cottage. Tomorrow, I would find its entrance hole and plug it with steel wool.

Tristan, a true street-corner philosopher with a tendency to preach, said if the mice didn't attack you, they weren't a problem. Their droppings were just little soft markers showing you where to vacuum. Of course, he was used to hosting a houseful of male dwarves, their boot treads clotted with mud. They probably picked lice out of their beards and dug for ear gold with their pinkies.

Jason had also been more tolerant than I was towards mice and dirt. For a moment, I stood stricken at the loss of him, my throat clogged with grief. These abrupt bouts of sorrow always struck without warning.

Jason had joked that dust bunnies under the bed were pets he didn't mind keeping: they never whined for food and didn't require a litter box. They also didn't wake you up at night by barking at passing raccoons.

It would have amused him to see me replace our cottage's multicolored ceramic tiles–a floor that hid splatter stains, food particles, dust, and bug droppings–with white planking. But I had to know when to wet-mop my floor. If I expected to sell croissants and chocolate bonbons and marzipan to the local bakery, my kitchen had to resemble an operating room. One outbreak of client diarrhea could ruin my business.

In the living room, Daksin cleared her throat, obviously not pleased with my lack of alacrity. Her restless boots scraped my innocent floor, and I cringed.

I pulled the chain of the overhead light in the pantry. On a shelf beside the virgin olive oil stood a bottle of Bordeaux with a French chateau printed on its label. Aunt Ida had given it to me as a birthday gift. I uncorked the bottle, smelled it to make sure the wine hadn't soured to vinegar like the French aristocracy had, and poured a crystal wine glass etched with ivy leaves two-thirds full. It was much too fine a vintage to pour on top of roast squirrel and fried onions, but I had nothing less to offer.

And this was, after all, an occasion. I should feel honored. Female dwarves were like yetis–shy and rarely seen. Yeah, and also like yetis, they had foul breath, were hairy, and hulked around red-eyed with constant anger. I was one of about three people in Sourwood who had ever talked to a dwarf female.

When I shuffled back into my living room, I found Daksin sprawled near the cold fireplace on the maple-wood floor. Had she ever been in a human home?

Tristan said dwarves found human chairs too high, but not too wide, and like animals, would generally stretch out on the ground or as near to it as possible. He said they somehow also always managed to dominate a room from floor level. No way was Daksin going to humble me in my own home, not from knee high. I would sell myself into slavery first.

Daksin accepted the French wine with languid dignity, as though she were an empress accepting a glass from a slave.

You not drink?

I sat down in my bentwood rocker. Alcohol at this time of night lies in my stomach like battery acid. You said you needed my help.

Instead of sipping her wine, Daksin dipped the tip of her fat tongue into it like a swimmer testing a pool's temperature with her big toe. She shrugged her approval, drank some, and smacked her lips. This good. Somebody take baby named Jens. We need you to help us now he gone.

The baby's mother and father, too, would be frantic with grief and guilt. I knew the black hole feeling of such a loss. At least this wasn't a murder case, not yet, anyway. Was the baby safe or did we need to find it before sunlight's caress turned it into a rock?

Since only electric bulbs irritated dwarf eyes, I got up to light a pine-scented candle. My nose needed relief. The candle's soft glow showed an aura around Daksin's head and shoulders. It was electric orange. Surprise, surprise–the queen was a bit nervous. She was a gifted pretender. If I hadn't seen her aura, I would have thought her calm as snow.

You believe someone just took this baby? I asked. Where could they ever hide it in your colony?

Daksin frowned. Baby not crawl away. Our colony not small. It city underground with many tunnel. Many place to hide baby. Maybe find, maybe not, but for mother this no good.

I swallowed and asked, Would someone harm it?

Why harm baby, Daksin asked, disgusted by such a silly question. Somebody want a baby. Somebody take. You tell us why this happen.

Maybe it had been a mistake to light a candle after all, even if its perfume masked some of Daksin's stink, and its flame revealed her aura. Now I also plainly saw her face, pale as a pearl. My hand fairly itched to slap the sneer out of her expression. We didn't have pirated dwarf TV programs to teach us their foreign ways. She thought my ignorance was the same thing as stupidity.

No human has ever visited your colony, I explained with sisterly sweetness.

Daksin shrugged, acknowledging my human inferiority. Now her aura was arrogantly purple. To her, there was no difference between fact and her personal opinion.

I winged an abrupt question at her, Where's Brialdur?

A frown skimmed Daksin's blunt features. She looked at the wall, not me. He not in colony now.

The victim in the last case Brialdur had asked me to help solve was Daksin's own husband. Dawn's soft light had turned his corpse into granite. Was he now stored in a used cavern among smirking Uncle Steens? Or had Daksin finally found a use for him? Had she, maybe, chiseled out the top of his head and turned him into a standing flower pot?

I pressed the point. Brialdur enforces your laws.

Daksin puckered her lips. He gone to Ouachita Mountains. He not come back for long, long time, I am thinking.

Separatist rebellion? I kept my voice neutral.

Two federal marshals were killed the previous week while trying to enter a colony in Arkansas. Most dwarves living under the Appalachian, Ozark, Ouachita, Rockies, and other mountain ranges didn't consider themselves citizens of the United States, though of course, the American government insisted they were. Dwarves had settled the mountain ranges before the United States existed. Unlike our forked-tongue history with the Native Americans, most of the dwarf treaties had been honored, mainly because humans didn't care to live underground.

Independence meeting, Daksin said. She pointed an accusatory forefinger up at my face. We see senator on TV who say dwarf smart enough to clean house, he think. We good for the cleaning of under furniture. Dwarf good to work in lettuce field, too.

It doesn't take intelligence to be a senator, I explained. One of our politicians, Kissinger, said, 'ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.'

Since I had left the subject of human intelligence undefended, Daksin pounced on it. Human not very smart. Not know us. And poison all, they–

I cleared my throat to interrupt. If Daksin shifted into cruising speed on the topic of humans ravaging nature, this was going to be a tiresome, one-sided conversation. Dwarves, not without reason, believed Americans were polluting themselves out of existence. They applauded poisoning your enemies, that was clever, but to eat peaches coated with pesticide yourself, or to feed arsenic to penned chickens you raised for food...that was communal suicide.

Humans think–

Will Sheriff Wyeth also investigate this baby's disappearance? I asked. Like Brialdur, he would come down heavy as a rock slide on uninvited amateurs.

Daksin's laugh was a slap of ridicule. No dwarf talk to him. This colony business. She sniffed and dismissed our sheriff, He wear uniform.

Any adult who wore a uniform, and that included postal employees, was a dwarf foe. They treated our football games like enemy maneuvers.

Baby Jens need you to help us, Daksin said.

She was using the baby as bait. Did she somehow know of my secret child? I felt as if a trapdoor lay under my feet.

Brialdur not here and other males want wait for him. We show them female solve this better than Brialdur do.

Brialdur trusted my loyalty to him. How had Daksin known I would be eager to help dwarf females prove their prowess?

A light glimmered on the other side of the French doors leading to my sun porch. I watched a fog of self-contained luminosity congeal into human shape. Why would Jason's ghost come back now? It had never visited me twice in one evening.

Daksin twisted until her chin touched her right shoulder. She tapped the protective rune on her iron belt buckle. Ghost of husband?

Even though the French doors were closed, I felt a sudden drop in the living room's temperature. Frowning, Daksin turned back to face me. She crossed her forearms over her bra-less breasts, hunched forward, and rubbed her meaty hands up and down her upper arms.

I remembered a green military cemetery with routine white crosses. Soldiers lifted the Stars and Stripes off a coffin gleaming as though it were spit-shined. They folded the flag with military precision before one somber sergeant presented it to me as a neat triangle. The echoing crack of graveside shots fired in Jason's honor had seemed tactless.

I left my bentwood rocker wobbling behind me and picked up the nozzle of a canister vacuum cleaner I had left out to remind myself to clean the floors in the morning. I aimed the hose at the ghost as a threat. A vacuum cleaner, of course, couldn't harm a specter, but it might disturb it a little by distorting it. I was willing to find out.

The ghost wasn't. It pointed at Daksin and shook its pale head in warning before glimmering away.

I dropped the ribbed hose with its steel nozzle on the maple-wood floor with a clunk. Daksin flinched. I apologized for my gratuitous noise.

Smiling, Daksin studied my vacuum cleaner, obviously amused by its value as a threat to ghosts. She blew out her breath. I blinked and leaned away from the reek of French Bordeaux spiced with half-digested onions and squirrel meat. The stink could have fumigated my living room. One whiff and stray cockroaches would scurry for wall exits. Moths would swoon.

My husband come also, Daksin said. We sing him away for all time.

You can do that? You can sing away ghosts?

Gregor can do this.

Could arrogant Gregor also sing a human ghost to its final rest? Would he do it for me? But now was not the time to worry about that. There was a baby missing. Daksin needed to drink her wine. I needed to get her dancing down the trail.

While we were gone, my cottage could air out. So far the pine-scented candle had been no more effective against Daksin's body odor than a breath mint in a public toilet.

Let's make you more comfortable, I said and cranked open two windows to create a draft. It wasn't a complete lie. Dwarves enjoyed night sounds and breezes.

I stood in front of the window, inhaling, wishing the wind would sing a more robust song. Outside, the lovelorn katydids droned like an ill-tuned bagpipe.

I sniffed, frowned, and turned to Daksin. I smell blood.

Daksin stood up in a single, swift movement.

Chapter 3

The primitive odor of blood almost made me wretch. I remembered the killing of squealing hogs for winter meat during my childhood and pulled my fuzzy robe closed around my throat, as if I were cold. I took comfort in the cylinder of mace lying snug in my robe's right pocket .

It's close, I told Daksin. You didn't hear anything?

Her black eyes shone in the candlelight. Blood? she asked, ignoring my question.

Yes, ripe and savage. I stepped away from the blood's cloying smell. Maybe a coyote made a kill. Or a cat.

Daksin snarled at the mention of a cat. She slipped her left hand into the pocket of her leather dress where I knew a silver knife hung in a leather sheath down her warm thigh. It would be sharp as a surgeon's scalpel. Females threw knives with their left hands; males used their right.

You smell this blood only when open window?

Yes, and it's almost strong enough to cause a sneezing fit. It overpowers other smells, wet fur and damp earth and my pine candle and your leather dress. I didn't mention fried onions or wine or her mildewed odor. She was my guest.

Daksin came to the open window and listened. Old blood?

No, fresh. I didn't smell it when we were outside, when we met at my porch.

Daksin set her jaw, and I knew a pronouncement was coming. Rain, she also wash all clean before I come. Blood not there when we first meet.

She?

Daksin's expression was that of a martyr. My ignorance was causing her to suffer. All rain storm female. You not know this? Wind is dry, is male, and it come many time with female, with wet storm.

I too felt the faint stirrings of martyrdom. There was blood outside, maybe signaling danger, and she was lecturing me on the wind's gender?

Daksin again put her hand inside her left pocket. She marched to my front door, flung it open, and charged outside onto the brick porch. Above her left shoulder, she held the silver-bladed knife by its point.

Taken aback by her sudden decision and her courage, I hurried after her. Was it the blood of the missing child? I stayed behind Daksin, not looking at the ground, not wanting to see a dead baby.

Daksin stared at the front wall to our right. A dark ring with something in its center was smeared on the cedar siding. She sheathed her knife. After a moment's hesitation, she walked to the spot and knelt on one knee, two of her stubby fingers touching the runes on her iron belt buckle. She chanted a phrase three times in her own growling language. Had something been sacrificed?

Not having Daksin's night sight, I stood behind her and blinked a few times to un-blur my vision. The spot in question was partly shadowed by a dogwood. Squinting, I saw a crude circle painted in blood not far from the window I had opened. In its middle was a single rune that resembled a cross with its arms raised.

In the flower bed below the drawing, under a forsythia bush near Daksin's knee, lay the dark slender lump of a dead squirrel. A shiver shimmied up my spine. Thank God, it wasn't a dwarf baby.

Still kneeling, Daksin pointed at the rune drawn on the wall and cleared her throat. Dwarf do this.

I strode a few paces away into my rough-and-tumble yard and lifted my nose moonward to sniff the cool post-rain air. It was deliciously damp, the kind of air that made skin plump, that made a body feel fertile and alive. I understood why dwarves considered a storm that nourished the earth feminine.

I smelled no dwarf other than Daksin. There was, though, a scent, just a few stray molecules now, a surprise–cinnamon?

Relieved, I told her, There's no one here now but us.

As Daksin rose, she picked the stiff squirrel off the ground by the nape of its neck.