“Is there more than one Sisiutl?” I asked.
She scoffed. “No! He is the Sisiutl.”
Now came the crazy bit, but I figured there wasn’t much crazier than three-headed sea serpents that eat people and turn into canoes, so I dove in. “What would happen if the—if Sisiutl got loose from his pool?”
“He would eat. As he ate after the earthquake.”
“Which earthquake?”
“After the Second World War. I had been worried for my sons but they came home safe. Then Sisiutl shook the ground and ate the men he found there. Horrible. To survive the killing in Europe only to be eaten at home. We didn’t have the casino and the houses and the shops then. Many people went away from the reservation to work. When Sisiutl came, our people were the only ones who knew it was him. It was difficult to find Qamaits and make her call Sisiutl back to the pool. If Sisiutl had been hunting men, the gods would have been furious, but he was only hungry after so long asleep. No hunters were fed to Sisiutl that day and only Qamaits could put him back into the pool.”
“Where was Sisiutl’s pool? Where did your people send him?”
“It was in the garbage dump, then. But there’s no water there now. When you fight Sisiutl, you’ll have to find another pool for him or send him back to the gods.”
I was taken aback. “Why would I fight Sisiutl?”
Ella Graham spat into the fire and started to get up from her cushion. Fish jumped up to help her to her feet.
Clutching her cane, she glared at us, batted Fish aside, and hobbled to the fieldstone mantle above the eastern fireplace, her white braids dragging on the floor and her loose flesh swaying like weeds in water. She took something off the shelf and returned. Fish helped her down.
“Get me another cushion, Reuben,” she ordered, and Fish gave her his. She sank down and over, so she was reclining on her side, her face gone waxy from some pain. She held out a long brown and gold feather toward me. “You take this, Pheasant Woman. You’ll need it to unpick the knots of dead things.”
I was flabbergasted and shot an irritated glance at Fish. He shook his head rapidly, eyes wide, scared. “What makes you think—?” I started.
Grandma Ella cawed a nasty laugh that made me bristle. “You’re just like Pheasant. Pheasant’s daughter died but he loved her so much he went to the land of the dead to bring her back. He couldn’t see the dead with his open eyes, only when he closed them, but he couldn’t keep his eyes closed and he stepped on the dead and made them angry. They tried to send him away, but Pheasant didn’t want to leave his daughter. He wanted to stay, but the land of the dead is not for the living. So one eye died, and Pheasant sees the dead through one eye and the living through the other. Like you. Take this,” she repeated, thrusting the pheasant tail feather at me again.
Reluctantly, I took the feather and felt her shudder as I touched it. It didn’t seem special, but I could see the wings that folded around Ella Graham unfurl and refold, glittering—they reminded me of something. . . .
“You remind me of Grandpa Dan,” I whispered, unable to keep the words back.
Ella Graham snorted. “Dan! A horse for spirits to ride. He cannot stop Sisiutl,” she sneered and pulled away from me, glowering. “You think I don’t hear the whispers of our ancestors saying Sisiutl comes to the land between? Hm? Our people have grown weak and small in numbers, and Sisiutl feeds on too many. Who but you to gather spirits and send him and his spawn away again, Pheasant? Now you go away. Get out of my house. You, too, Reuben. Come back when the dead sleep properly.” Her voice began fading and her eyes dimmed as she continued. “Bring more chocolates. And tell that rascal Russell I forgive him for sinking my boat.” She dropped her cheek onto the cushion and let out a sigh, closing her eyes, and the house seemed to sigh also, becoming subdued and darker inside than the darkness falling outside would account for.
The three of us exchanged startled glances. Fish put his hand in front of her mouth and looked terrified. Then he slumped in relief.
“She’s just asleep. But we’d better go.”
We all agreed on that point, struggled to our feet, and shuffled out through the topsy-turvy Grey and the cloud of spirits to my truck in nervous silence. No one said a word until we were back on the main road out of the rez. Quinton had returned to his brooding and Fish kept casting nervous glances at me as I drove.
When I had the truck safely back up on I-5, I shot him a look. “What?” I demanded, half irritated but mostly curious what made him so skittish now when he’d gone along so well before.
“Do you really think Sisiutl is killing those people?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I mean—wow. Uh . . . ancient Indian monsters . . . umm . . . chowing down on homeless people in Pioneer Square? It’s kind of . . . kind of . . .”
“Outlandish?”
“Nuts.”
“It’s your monster, Fish; your culture. If you and Russell really think Grandma Ella can curse you for sinking her boat—even if you only think it a little bit and late at night—is it more nuts to imagine that a monster might be real—just a little bit and late at night—down in the Square where things get strange?”
He didn’t look at me. “And you . . .” He gave a nervous giggle, which was pretty funny coming out of a stocky guy who looked more like an outlaw biker gone straight than a doctor. “You see dead people?”
“I hate that movie,” I said, truly nettled and frowning—I knew that was unfair, but still . . . Then I nodded, keeping my eyes on the road. “Yeah. I see dead people. Things that linger, things that go bump in the night. Mostly harmless.”
“But not Sisiutl.”
“If it is Sisiutl.”
“You seemed pretty sure.”
I made myself shrug. “It was the only lead I had. The information isn’t a complete match, so it’s not an absolute.”
“Let’s assume it is,” said Quinton from the backseat. “For the sake of discussion. A legendary, three-headed sea serpent that likes to pretend to be a canoe and eats people, and he lives in a pond outside the house of some kind of goddess ogress who has a staircase to the gods.”
“That sounds pretty damned dumb to me,” I said.
“You’re just stuck on the name.”
“It’s silly.” I realized that it really bugged me. “Something that eats people and gnaws on the remains, leaves zombies in the underground and breaks through four-foot-thick cement walls ought to have a scarier name than ‘Sisiutl.’ ”
“It’s up there with ‘Son of Sam’ and ‘Baby Face Nelson,’ right?”
“All right, Mr. Physics—what about the shape-shifting? You’re the guy with the ‘there are no werewolves’ conviction. If Sisiutl is responsible—if we accept that this legendary, three-headed sea serpent is eating homeless people and spitting out the parts— don’t we have to accept that it turns into a canoe, or a dog, or a . . . rat the size of Cleveland, too? How does that fit?”
“It doesn’t change shape.”
“Whoa! Come back?”
Fish wrenched his head around to stare between the seats at Quinton. “What?”
“It doesn’t actually change shape,” Quinton reiterated. “Not if it has a corporeal form. It can’t—or at least not quickly and safely. We have to assume a corporeal form, since it makes holes in things and has teeth that can and do rend flesh. It eats people— doesn’t seem to be much doubt it gnaws on them, so the missing have probably taken a visit to the literal belly of the beast. So if we assume ‘Sisiutl’ as the cause, we assume ‘corporeal’ as the default expression. With me?”
“Yeah,” said Fish.
“Since it cannot change shape, it follows that it does not change shape, but it may create the illusion of shape change. It wants you to see a self-propelled seal hunting canoe and, if you’re the right kind of person to see Sisiutl at all—and it probably knows if you are—then you see a canoe.”
“What if you’re not the right type to
see Sisiutl?”
“Then you see death. It eats you while you’re freaking out about seeing a giant two-headed, three-faced snake god with horns and a mustache like a bottom-feeder.”
“Sisiutl isn’t a god . . .” Fish objected.
“No, but if you weren’t a Tulalip Indian—”
“Tulalip is the name of the reservation,” Fish corrected. “There’s a group of Salish tribes on the rez, but it’s named for the bay, not the tribes. All the tribes from Vancouver Island down to the middle of Oregon are some kind of Salish—even Sacajawea’s tribe back in the Lewis and Clark days—so you can’t call the place ‘Salish’ or the other tribes would be pissed.”
I could see Quinton nod in the rearview mirror. “All right. Sorry.”
“No problem. Go on.”
“OK. So, what would you think Sisiutl was if you were like me and it came slithering down an alley looking hungry and saying ‘I’m a canoe!’ in Salish?”
“Lushootseed—that’s what we call our language. Hm . . .” Fish mumbled, thinking. “Yeah, I see your point. I’d think I was seeing a giant mutant snake, probably, ’cause that’s what I know— snakes, not sea monsters and not Sisiutl. Huh. But no one’s said anything about giant mutant snakes in the alleys around Pioneer Square.”
“No, they haven’t,” Quinton agreed. “Because the people who see it either die or think they must be hallucinating. It only comes out at night when there aren’t a lot of people and it hunts in the tunnels under the streets or in the alleys where it’s dark. Grandma Ella said it was clever. It must be clever enough to stay away from high-risk conditions.”
“What if it’s not Sisiutl?” I asked.
Both men frowned.
“Hm . . .” Quinton muttered. “That could be, but there haven’t been any leads to other monsters and Sisiutl as Ella Graham described it fits the facts we have without throwing any out—two big steps in the right direction. Its appearances match the pattern we noted in the paper and that Fish found in the morgue records and the fact that the patterns of deaths halted when Indians took action lends a lot of credence to the Sisiutl theory. And the ghost said it was Sistu.”
I nodded this time. “She did.”
Fish goggled at me and I feared he was getting a little hysterical. “A ghost told you about Sisiutl? You called me because a ghost told you to?”
“No. I called because an Indian told me there was a monster that ate people during the right outbreak of historic deaths. She happened to be a ghost and I find ghosts to be very unreliable sources—they lie a lot. I needed a living Indian to tell me what a Sistu—that’s what she called it—was and what it was capable of, so I could decide if I thought the lead was viable.”
“She wouldn’t call Sisiutl by name where he might hear her!” Fish cried, on the verge of panic. “Didn’t you get what Grandma Ella said? If you call him by the wrong name, he won’t come, but if you use his real name . . .”
I glanced at him and then through the mirror to Quinton. “Maybe we shouldn’t then.”
We found ourselves casting nervous looks at each other and out the windows, suddenly paranoid that we’d attract our death.
FOURTEEN
The sun had gone long before we reached Seattle and the road was feeling slicker under the Rover’s tires as I drove. We had fallen silent as we reached the edge of the university, and in the hard sparkle of streetlights on frost, the road had seemed like a tunnel through a mysterious land.
Fish had calmed down a bit by the time I’d dropped him off at his place again, but it was obvious he was still working through some of the hits his worldview had taken. Yet another comfortable reality I’d managed to knock holes in for someone. I hoped Fish would bounce better than Will had. Wistfulness at the thought of my trashed love affair washed over me and faded as we drove away from Fish’s house.
Quinton had moved up to the front seat but was still frowning a little.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“About what?”
“This monster thing.”
“Not sure.”
“All right. What about the guests I had this morning? You think we’re still clear?”
“The Rover is. I don’t know about your office or home. Depends on how much they think you know and if they have the resources to do much about it. I think it’s likely the available resources and time are limited.”
“Why would you think that? Ms. Laguire gave me the impression she was going to put out whatever effort she had to—”
“She may be willing to put herself out,” Quinton interrupted, scowling, “but there is no way the NSA thinks it’s worth unlimited resources. Trust me—it’s Fern alone with whatever assistance she can pull in by leaning on the local Fed office. It’s her personal failure. They’re giving her a chance to redeem it, but that’s all.”
“Then just what the hell is it between you and Fern Laguire . . . J.J.?”
He turned and glared at me. “I don’t want to discuss it right now.”
“This is nice. Usually I’m the one who gets accused of being all mysterious and closed off, but you—”
“I’m not that jackass you date!”
I pulled the truck over into the nearest parking lot—which happened to be the Group Health hospital’s main entrance lot. I put the car in the nearest empty slot and yanked on the parking brake so I could turn and yell at Quinton directly—I could never be called coy in my anger.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” I spat, “but we’re not dating anymore!”
“Good!” he shouted back and swung out of the truck.
I shut down the engine and scrambled after him.
“What does that mean?” I demanded, catching up to Quinton near the main hospital doors.
He shrugged elaborately, as if throwing something off his shoulders, and turned back. The corona around him in the Grey flared a moment before pulling in tight to a pale line of rapidly flickering colors. “What I mean,” he said, his measured tones coming out in puffs of frozen breath, “is that you shouldn’t be dating someone you have to lie to.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“No. I guess not. Or not anymore at least.” He stood there looking uncomfortable. “Why not?”
I heaved a sigh that made a long white column in the air. “Remember I told you about a zombie I was brought on Thursday?”
“Yeah,” Quinton replied, shuffling his feet against the cold welling from the cement beneath our feet.
“Well . . .” I was finding the subject difficult to talk about— though not in the same way that I found myself unable to speak of the nature of the magical grid to normal people. “Will was with me at the time and he freaked out a little.”
“I can understand that. Most people would.”
“Yeah. Well. I had to . . . dismantle it . . . and he didn’t deal too well with seeing that.”
Quinton stared at me and shivered, though from cold or from his own imagination’s conjuring, I wasn’t sure. “Ugh. That would be pretty hard to take. Did he . . . umm . . .”
“Dumped me,” I said, nodding. “Not that I don’t understand it, but it still hurts. We tried to patch it, but . . . You’re right—I can’t date someone who can’t deal with what I am or what I do and has to be lied to or shielded or wrapped in ignorance.”
“I’m, uh . . .” he stammered, biting his lip.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. Because you aren’t. Things just don’t work sometimes.” I found I couldn’t look at him and turned my glance off to the side. Something bright flared in the Grey, but by the time I’d turned my head back, it had gone and Quinton was still just standing there, looking a little too bright and too pink.
He grinned and the energy around him went pinker. “OK, I’m not sorry it didn’t work out.” Then the pink faded down. “But I do wish it hadn’t happened that way. Zombies and shaggy things . . .”
“They’re still out there,” I reminded him, feeling somewhat uncomfortab
le and wanting to change the subject away from my broken love life. “And even if we think we have a likely monster, we aren’t any closer to stopping it or figuring out why it’s doing this.”
A small group of grim-looking people came out from the main lobby, talking about someone’s prognosis and the risks of surgery. It had seemed so late in the frozen dark, we’d both forgotten it was only a little past five.
Quinton caught my eye. “You want to get some hot food and try to figure out where to start looking for answers?”
I gave a crooked smile. “Yeah.”
Dinner was about as un-datelike as you can get: hamburgers at the Kidd Valley across the street from the hospital. But it was hot food and the windows of the building were steamed with moisture. Quinton and I huddled with our food as far from the doors as we could get.
“You think we’re really looking for Sisiutl?” Quinton asked.
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Much as I feel silly saying it.”
“Then we’ll stick to ‘Sistu’ for now, I guess. Even if it doesn’t notice, seems like there’s points in favor of not using the formal name.”
I agreed. “We need to figure out where it’s hiding and what it’s up to—is it just hungry or is there something else going on?”
“Start from where it came from,” Quinton suggested. “Ella Graham said something about a dump. Wasn’t there something else about a dump in one of the papers or something?”
“Yeah. There was a dumping ground south of downtown.”
“Right. About where the stadia are now.”
“Which is where the hotel construction is. Think it’s the same spot?”
“High probability. If the construction broke through to wherever Sistu was imprisoned, he’d escape, and it’s likely he’d eat the first thing he found.”
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