STORY EXCERPT

Liberty clung to Garrett’s arm, her eyes shining with passion. “Let’s try it.”

“Yes,” Garrett agreed. “Maybe your mother will guide our hands, Zeke.”

Items were soon gathered, and the table in the dining room was cleared of all objects, save for the board, candles, and a pencil and blank paper. The table was too long for them all to reach the planchette, so Liberty and Zeke sat at one side and Garrett and Levi around the corner from them.

“You don’t have to hold hands,” Zeke assured them.

“That would be pretty hard to do,” Garrett started to point out. “If our hands are on the planchette, how can we—” But Levi’s kick under the table shut him up.

Liberty sipped her sarsaparilla. “What question are we asking?”

Zeke said, “I want to find out if my mother is still with that greengrocer in the afterlife!” He heatedly gulped his own whiskey.

Levi said calmly, “Why don’t we ask something that will interest all of us? For example, the whereabouts of Shady Barnhart.”

“Yes!” cried Zeke. “I was wondering where that worthless jackass had gotten to, myself. One day he’s selling me a bunch of necklace beads wrapped in a skunk skin for four dollars, I mean just absolute extortion, and the next day he’s gone.”

Liberty’s mouth was a thin line. “Zeke, he was supposed to give those things to the Indians. For free.”

Zeke chuckled. “Ah, well! It’s just a bunch of…I mean…” Only his eyeballs moved, glancing from Levi to Garrett and back to Levi. “You know…Indians…”

Liberty sighed with exasperation. “Besides, what do you want necklace beads for, anyway?”

Zeke explained, “But it was such a good deal!”

“All right,” said Levi. “Our question is, where is Shady Barnhart?”

Everyone agreed they would pose this question, and they placed their fingers on the woven rim of the upside-down basket. They took it lightly at first, laughing and joking.

It was actually Zeke who reprimanded them. “This is serious business, people. I’ve been witnessing some pretty important happenings here in town lately. I tell you, the psychic vibrations around Laramie are at their highest right now. Don’t laugh.”

Garrett actually wasn’t laughing. He’d witnessed enough psychic vibrations lately to convince him of the truth in all of this supernatural stuff. He just felt self-conscious putting his fingers on a basket and looming over a board that talked about a fish.

But almost the moment Zeke lectured them, the planchette began to move. Everyone gasped as it raced over the polished board to the letter S. Then an H. Then an A.

“Shady,” whispered Liberty.

Zeke said, “Don’t think ahead of time of what it might say. Try to keep your mind a blank. Otherwise your hands might accidentally intentionally push the planchette where you want it to go.”

That made sense, but it still spelled out SHADY IS SCARING BRULE.

“Brulé,” Garrett told a quizzical Liberty. “That’s the tribe of Sioux we have here.” Louder, he said, “Where is Shady scaring the Brulé?”

ROCK WITH TREE.

“Great,” said Levi. “We already knew that. But where is this rock with a tree? Paddy, is that you?”

The planchette swished to where YES was printed on the board.

“Paddy,” said Levi. “Where is this rock with a tree?”

The basket spelled out SHADY SCATTERS BONES. Then, HE HAS WAKAN.

Liberty frowned. “What is wakan, I wonder?”

Garrett explained. “Wakan means anything that is strange or mysterious to the Indians. Like, if we call someone a medicine man. The Sioux call him wakan man. Taku-wakan means anything that is wakan.”

“Yes,” agreed Levi. “They have another word that means spirit or God, but the word wakan is never used that way.”

“So,” said Liberty. “Shady is being…mysterious or strange. By scattering bones.”

“Yes,” Garrett agreed. “I suppose that’s how he’s scaring the Indians.”

Zeke exploded, pounding the table with his fist. “Wakanana, I knew it!” The other three séance-goers jumped. “Wakanana, Illinois, was where my mother met that greengrocer Ernest! Ma! Ma!” he beseeched the ceiling with hands shaped like claws. “How could you do this to us? Why aren’t you with Pa on the other side?”

“Son of a gun!” cried Liberty. “Zeke, I don’t think this has anything to do with your mother. Garrett just explained what ‘wakan’ means in the Sioux language. I think—”

But Zeke was now on his feet, shrieking at the ceiling. “Ma! Pa crossed over to the other side five years ago! Why aren’t you with him? That chiseler Ernest was always trying to swindle us out of our school money, charging five cents for lettuce—how can you say you’re happy with him on the other side?”

Garrett would have disregarded this as the grief of a misbegotten son—he had heard that Zeke had suffered a brain injury during the recent war—but just then, a shower of rappings engulfed the room. The three remaining séance-goers slowly pulled back from the table, casting glances all about, but it was impossible to tell where one rap sounded before another rap came from the other side of the room. Were they coming from outside the house? Or were tiny little fists knocking the interior walls of the dining room? And what were the rappings telling them?

“Is it spelling out something?” Liberty wondered.

Garrett said, “It seems like the more Zeke rants, the more insistent these raps become.”

Levi suggested, “Let’s just put our fingers back on this thing and ask the next question.”

So the three of them—Zeke had thrown open a window and was wailing out of it about the greengrocer—put their fingers back on the basket, and this time it was Garrett who asked, “Paddy, where is Shady? Where is the lone pine that sticks out of the rock?”

Swiftly, as a hail of raps sounded all around them, the planchette spelled out BEWARE.

“Beware of what?” Garrett asked logically.

WATCH OUT FOR LIBERTY.

“Oh, dear God,” murmured Levi. “Paddy! Something is going to happen to Liberty? Tell us what. When?”

WATCH OUT FOR COLD WATERS.

ADULT EXCERPT

“That’s right,” said Levi. “Hold her bud in your mouth. Slather your tongue all over her flower,” he said, using the terms of the erotic manuscript.

Liberty was splayed back on one of their beds, wearing only a white camisole, her naked pussy revealed for the first time in all its glory. Levi noted that already the shell pink of her clitoris had turned a darker rose when Garrett had lapped away at it. It expanded and elongated in response to his stroking, protruding from the labia enticingly. Levi had no doubt Garrett could bring her to climax using only his strong tongue, but now it was Garrett’s able-bodied ass that excited him.

Crouching on the floor behind Garrett, Levi ran a hand over the solid ridges of his abdominal muscles. He hunched over his friend, luxuriating in the heat of the dark body pressed to him. His lips felt as though they would be burned when he mashed them to the vertebrae at the back of Garrett’s neck. He slid his hand down and into the crisp bush at the base of Garrett’s jutting cock. He always loved the first moments when he gripped that monumental tool. It made his mouth water to squeeze the heft of it.

Levi realized it was entirely possible to love a man. It was the same, yet strangely different, as loving a woman. Touching, stroking, loving each other seemed to enhance his own virility, not detract from it. It had something to do with the duality that Caleb had been discussing the night before. Caleb considered himself a “Two Spirit” who loved both sexes equally. But Levi had a feeling that if one touched the actual person of Caleb, one’s body would be extinguished in a column of pure flame. That was how strongly Caleb’s spirit burned. He was a powerful seer indeed, not just the scorned blacksmith and “Spookist” that some citizens claimed.

Levi had been eagerly waiting for this moment. Garrett’s face was busily buried in Liberty’s bald muff, so Levi unbuttoned his chaps and slid his red drawers to the floor. He rubbed his cockhead against the velvety, hot skin of Garrett’s ass, humping his friend like a dog while clutching the hardened limb of his cock. Reaching to take Liberty’s dildo from its box, Levi rubbed the pointed end with the soap she’d brought from Freund and Brothers, a mixture of fat and wood ashes. He nudged it against the tight rim of Garrett’s ass, waiting for a response. If Garrett didn’t like it, he wouldn’t continue. But then, Levi had never known a man who didn’t enjoy being reamed up the ass.

Garrett moaned as his fat tongue plied Liberty’s engorged clitoris. Levi felt his plump cock twitch in his hand when he massaged the anal ring with the dildo, so he slid it in an inch. It went easily, as though being eagerly sucked in.

He pumped Garrett’s taut cock while fucking him with the dildo. Groaning against Liberty’s button, Garrett humped his hand eagerly, gyrating his muscular hips. Whether he craved Levi’s fist or the dildo, Levi didn’t know. But his mouth watered watching the play of muscles in Garrett’s back, the creamy skin sliding over sinews as he clutched Liberty’s hips, his head bobbing up and down as he licked.

Leaving the dildo wedged up Garrett’s ass, Levi dropped to the floor and twisted his body, his shoulders flat against the floorboards. Garrett slumped, too, pasting his haunches to the floor and spreading his thighs wide, allowing Levi to continue fucking him. Levi was face-to-face with that impressive meat now. Sentences from the erotic manuscript came into his head. “He was used to being with more than two women in the same room at the same time, but this situation was something that he had not even dreamt about. The man next to him was relaxing on pillows. One of his feet was stretched out, trying to reach the organ of the young man who was massaging him.”

It had aroused Levi to hear Garrett read that chapter aloud. “This pleasure is different from the pleasure that you get from a woman,” one character had claimed. “A woman may be soft and inviting, but a man is more challenging and rewarding in the ultimate pleasure.” He had never held a man’s penis in his mouth before, but just looking at the bulging, dusky cock throbbing in his fist made Levi dive on in, sucking more than half the length down his throat.

From the sounds of Garrett’s gasps, Levi knew he’d hit the right combination of sucking and reaming. It was difficult at first to coordinate the two actions. He found he could do them in tandem at the same speed, raising his head to the humid crotch at the same time as he inserted the dildo and withdrawing both at the same time. Listening to Liberty’s catlike mewling let him know she, too, was close to climaxing against Garrett’s face, so he swiftly learned to synchronize his toying.

He was proud to know that, being a man, his mouth was bigger than Liberty’s, and he was able to inhale more of the impressive penis. When it lodged up against his tonsils he nearly choked on the cockhead and was gratified that he learned to back off a tad and continue.

Nudging the dildo as far up as he could, Levi jiggled it around, to find the sensitive spot he knew was there. Ah. He knew he’d found it when the anal ring grabbed at the dildo.