CVU1

Chapter 6: The Water Cure

When night four began I had two followers as I left the barn's cellar to walk the unkempt fields and then the woods filled with chirping frogs and fireflies, looking for a tiny stream. I smelled the faint copper tint of running water nearby, but the tutelary spirits didn't even need to sniff around.

"This one will do!" Fox Man said, hanging back and seeming unbothered when I idly consumed a hare, pinching its brains out of its mouth and nose and eyes with the ease of breaking a grape. I would need no more tonight, I thought, for last night's deer had been big and fresh.

Feeling full with a part of the hare's hindquarters left, I tossed it to the fox that the spirit was possessing, guessing it should be 'paid' as well.

"Over here, monster," Raccoon Man said. The fox gobbled up the scrap of hare.

The tiny trickle sliding between the trees to a small ledge of granite was still enough to pull me down, and I had to crawl on hands and knees to reach the water. I was a bit stronger, I thought, not panicking for the moment – but I would have to maintain this position for far longer now. My palms were sinking into the mud, and my elbows and neck were straining – not hurting, but starting to work. I'd done a few isometric exercises as a human, and tried to summon a part of that old mindset.

"When I piss myself, no laughing."

Fox Man cackled. Raccoon Man's old coon avatar leaped across the stream in an obvious show of my inferiority and hunched down, staring into my face with sharp eyes inside that mask pattern of white and black.

Lowering my head, my chin touched the cool stream. The additional, pinching weight was immediate. And when my lower lip sank under the surface, I felt like I was drinking something heavier than mud. I was trying to drink tar, and I was going to choke. I wasn't enough strong enough to gulp it down. This was impossible.

Damn that. I was not human anymore – I did not need to breathe. Suffocation and drowning had always been my greatest fear in mortal life, but now it was just fear, not death. I did not need oxygen, and I'd had some blood. But the deer from the previous night was still sloshing around inside me, so I didn't need to drink, I thought with my attempt at calm unraveling. I didn't want to drink, certainly not this, and I was so full.

I gulped once. It made me even heavier. My neck was straining, but if I relaxed I would dunk my head. Again, a bigger gulp. The pain had to fade, it had to.

But my insides started to burn after the third gulp.

I tried to make my mouth and throat work automatically so that my mind could wander, and maybe even black out. But I thought of medieval tortures, and this was the water cure. This was being put to the question. A sensation like waterboarding, like drowning made to start and stop and start again. An appropriate fate for a blood-drinker, of course. Fox Man might begin cackling as he saw me realizing his trick, too late.

Can you hear my thoughts, Clodd?

Fox Man's puppet yipped happily, licking its bloody lips. "You're thinking of Tod, from The Fox and the Hound. Would you like me to help 'talk' you through this?"

Both ... please. The fifth gulp was brutal. What was already inside me was pushing back. I couldn't think of a better name for Raccoon Man.

"Azeban," the voice from the stretched jaw said, resigning itself to this half-psychic conversation.

Eighth gulp. Something was going to break inside me soon.

Nope ... you shall be Azkaban. Azkaban and Clodd. Deer Woman needs a name if we meet ... Bambi. no, Bambi was male ...