They didn’t seem to understand the value of prevention, and Gabriel didn’t know how to explain it to them.
He stepped inside to a warm building that smelled of freshly brewed coffee. His department hadn’t fallen for the Seattle froufrou coffees yet. Whoever arrived first brewed good, old-fashioned grocery-store coffee, not from those pseudo-fancy beans the local Safeway stocked, but from the cans that had been around since Gabriel was a child. Judging from the acidic edge to this morning’s scent, someone had brought in a can of Folgers.
Athena sat at her desk, clutching her coffee mug as if it were a lifeline. She looked worse than Gabriel had ever seen her—her skin so pale that he could see just how blue her veins were. She had shadows under her eyes, and the frown lines beside her mouth looked deeper than usual.
But she was impeccably groomed as ever. Her hair was pulled back in its customary bun, without a strand out of place. Her blouse—a cream color with just a hint of lace trim—looked as if it had been laundered five seconds before. She wore a black, ankle-length skirt that bloomed over her chair, and black ankle boots with just enough of a heel to add a touch of elegance.
She was always so put-together that she made him feel like going home and getting dressed all over again, hoping that this time he would get it right.
When she saw him, she gave a weak version of her usual smile.
“Who’d believe there’s sun today, eh, Gabriel?” she asked. She moved her mug aside, as if she hadn’t really been clutching it like it was the only thing that kept her afloat. Athena’s mood was always evident by which mug she chose from giant mug hanger he had put on the wall. This morning’s was an old one with the characters from the old (and much missed) Bloom County cartoon strip—Bill the Cat looking like he’d stuck his paw in a light socket, and the words “Ack! Stress!” beside him.
Apparently Lyssa’s homecoming had not gone well.
“When the rain stopped,” Gabriel said, deciding that ignoring Athena’s mood was the better part of valor, “it woke me up. I hadn’t realized how used to it I had become.”
Athena’s smile grew into something real. “I would miss the storms if we didn’t have them.”
“Me, too. I’m just happy for the break.”
Gabriel walked over to the coffeepot, which was full to the brim, and poured himself a mug. Unlike Athena, he didn’t use the mugs to define his mood; he just grabbed whatever was closest. This one was yellow with a smiley face painted on it. The smiley face had a single fang showing, and a drop of blood falling to the bottom of the mug.
Perhaps it did mirror his mood after all.
He stirred in some nondairy creamer and frowned. There were no voices, not even the radio.
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
Athena started as if he had woken her up. “Oh, sorry. Suzette’s taking over dispatch for me tonight, so she’s not in yet. And Zeke’s in the back. You have a visitor.”
Athena usually wasn’t that mysterious.
“A visitor?” Gabriel asked.
“All the way from Whale Rock, and believe me, that’s some distance on a day like today.”
It was too. Even though Whale Rock was only twenty miles south on 101, when 101 was down, the only way from one town to the other was through the Willamette Valley. That added at least three hours onto a twenty-minute trip.
“Who is it?” Gabriel asked.
“Hamilton Denne. He heard about Zeke’s find last night.”
Gabriel had forgotten all about Zeke’s find. Gabriel carried his mug through the narrow, dimly lit hallway, to the room that served as a makeshift morgue, generally used only when a corpse had to remain in Anchor Bay until the medical examiner could arrive and take the corpse to Whale Rock.
The door was closed, but Gabriel could see through the single pane of glass. Denne was bent over the metal table, gloves on his hands, and white medical robe covering his clothing. Zeke lounged against the wall, one booted foot crossed over his ankle. He toyed with a toothpick in his mouth, as if it were the most interesting thing in the world.
Gabriel opened the door—and nearly stepped backward from the smell of mud and wet fur. Those weren’t the smells he had been expecting.
Denne didn’t even look up. “Leave the coffee outside.”
Gabriel leaned into the hallway, took a giant sip from his mug, and set the mug on the floor beside the door. Then he came in, letting the door close behind him.
“What’ve we got?” he asked.
“Come see for yourself.” Denne was still bent over the table. Beneath his medical robe, he wore a pair of khaki pants and a pale blue dress shirt. An expensive brown sports jacket hung over a chair.
Zeke kept his gaze on the table itself, like a man who expected something to attack at any moment.
Gabriel stepped beside Denne and looked down. At first, Gabriel thought Denne was examining a toy, a little girl’s stuffed doll. Then he realized whatever it was had once been alive.
The creature looked vaguely female, although Gabriel couldn’t tell what, exactly, made him think that. It had two arms and two legs, a torso with no definition at all—no breasts, no waist, no nipples—and a long neck that led to a very human face.
The face, however, was no bigger than the palm of Gabriel’s hand. The eyes were closed, and the mouth slightly open, a bit of mud on the chin. The skin was grayish, and Gabriel couldn’t tell if that was natural or not.
“What is it?” Gabriel asked.
“Water sprite, I think.” Denne pointed gingerly at film that covered the top of the metal table. “See? Wings.”
Gabriel saw no wings. What he was staring at looked more like fresh Saran Wrap. “How do you know they’re wings?”
Denne picked up the body, holding it two-fingered by the torso. The Saran Wrap on the back rose with it, folding out flat and clear as if something held it in place.
Denne used the edge of his finger to outline the structure of the wings. They were see-through, but if Gabriel looked hard, he saw a hint of a rainbow, like looking at a bubble in sunlight.
“I’ve only read about these,” Denne said, “and not in very reliable accounts. Apparently they move under the surface of the water like a beetle or like a dragonfly will float on top of it. The wings keep them in place and hide them from predators that fly above them. I thought they were oceangoing only, but Zeke says he found this one on Highway 19.”
“I did,” Zeke said tersely. Sometimes Zeke and Denne rubbed each other the wrong way, particularly when they were left alone with each other.
“He did,” Gabriel confirmed. “He found it up there just after I left.”
Denne straightened. “What did you see?”
“It was facedown in a mudhole,” Zeke said. “My first guess was that it drowned.”
“How did you notice it?” Denne asked. He had obviously waited until Gabriel arrived before talking to Zeke. Apparently Denne was aware that they didn’t get along well either.
“My flashlight caught the wings. I thought it was an oil slick, and I learned a long time ago that tiny oil slicks in water near the highway could mean that a car had gone off the road.”
Zeke had actually taught that one to Gabriel. Cars that bounced off the road often left a trail of fluids before vanishing into the underbrush. It always paid to follow those little fluid trails. Gabriel himself had found more than one unconscious tourist hidden by thick underbrush. Without Zeke’s little trick, the tourists might have died.
“How did you know it was a creature and not a slick?” Denne asked.
“I saw the body,” Zeke said. “I thought it was a doll, and I was worried. So I bent down and pushed at it, and the whole damn thing moved—including what I thought was water.”
“You knew then that it wasn’t human?” Gabriel asked.
“And that it had been alive.” Zeke grimaced. “I saw that face. I thought it had drowned too.”
“It can’t drown,” Denne said. “These things live un
derwater.”
“You think,” Gabriel said.
Denne gave him a sideways look, with just a hint of amusement in the eyes. “I think. As I said, the things I’ve read about water sprites are unreliable. I’m going to have to take a real look at her.”
“Like that breaks your heart,” Zeke muttered.
“Actually it does,” Denne said. “I’d like to keep her intact.”
Gabriel winced. He didn’t want to think about taking this little creature apart.
“You call it ‘her,’” he said. “Is it female?”
“As I said,” Denne said, “I’m going to have to take a closer look. She looks female to me.”
“Looks like an it to me,” Zeke said. “There aren’t any defining characteristics. I mean, how do these things reproduce?”
“For all we know, they divide like worms,” Denne said. “Or maybe they leave larvae somewhere and go through a pupa stage, like butterflies. Or they could spawn, like salmon, coming from eggs and—”
“In other words,” Gabriel said, “you have no idea.”
“And I’d like one.” Denne could barely contain his excitement. “What I want to know first, though, is what killed her. To my knowledge, no one has ever found one of these so far away from the sea.”
“But you just said we don’t know anything.” Zeke rolled the toothpick between his fingers. “For all we know, these sprites swim upstream to die.”
“There’s no stream there,” Denne said.
“I beg to differ,” Zeke said. “There’s a small creek that flows into the river. With all that rain, and the way all the creeks have swollen these last few weeks, it might be hard to distinguish the creeks from river water.”
“Good point.” Denne nodded at Zeke. “All of which we’ll need to explore.”
Gabriel bent over the little corpse. It was the source of the mud smell as well as a not-faint-enough odor of decay. Its eyes, which were open, had no whites and looked inhuman. He wondered if they would look like that if that creature were alive.
This water sprite’s mouth was partially open, and inside he could see hints of very pointed teeth—something he had not expected.
He straightened, and it seemed like the men in the room had been watching him. It made him feel awkward. He was not used to being the center of attention.
“All right,” he said, looking at Denne, “so what’s the secret?”
“Secret?” Denne put a hand near the creature. The movement seemed proprietary to Gabriel, as if Gabriel had no right to be so close to the sprite.
“You drove a hundred miles out of your way to get here this morning,” Gabriel said. “Now, I know that for all your bluster, you trust us to handle a corpse here for a few days if you’re too busy to collect it. So what’s going on? What made you drive into the valley and back?”
“Aside from curiosity?” Denne said.
“Curiosity could wait a few days,” Gabriel said.
“Spoken like a man with no interest in science.” Denne’s gloved finger lightly touched the sprite’s torso. From Gabriel’s perspective, the touch seemed to make no difference at all. The torso looked firm, unlike human skin, which would have changed slightly at a single touch.
“I wouldn’t call this science,” Zeke said. “This is pure fantasy.”
“It’s fantasy when it’s made-up,” Denne said. “These creatures are quite real, and this year, I’ve gotten two corpses to prove it.”
Gabriel frowned. “That’s it, isn’t it? The fact that you’re actually gathering proof?”
“I didn’t need proof,” Denne said. “I’m not sure anyone who lives here does.”
“But you want to become some big mucky-muck who discovered the world’s greatest collection of fantasylife?” Zeke asked. “Like those guys who discovered lost tribes in the Andes?”
Denne shook his head. “I’m not sure, exactly. If I did that—if I went public with this little sprite and our fish woman—I would change Seavy County forever. Imagine all the tourists that would come.”
Zeke played with that toothpick. “Not to mention the TV people and the magazine people and—”
Denne poked his fingertip in the sprite’s mouth, moving her jaw. “I’m not equipped to write for scientific journals. I’m a practicing coroner, a doctor—even though my ex-wife never thought so—not a research scientist. I’d have to give these babies up to some research university.”
“Where some other scientists would get the glory,” Zeke said.
Gabriel wasn’t sure if that was a problem for Denne. Denne had never been about glory. He enjoyed mystery and strangeness and the darker side of life. Denne not only found death fascinating, he found its causes just as interesting.
“It’s not that.” Denne moved his finger away from the creature’s mouth and set his hand beside its head. “It’s harder to articulate than that. It’s that our proof is gone.”
“Proof of what?” Zeke asked.
“Proof that what we know to be true actually is.” Denne spread his hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. “We all know that there’s strange things that happen here. We’ve experienced it, whether we like it or not.”
Gabriel leaned against a counter, a realization coming to him as Denne spoke. Gabriel had come back to Anchor Bay because he liked the strangeness and the magic. Because, on some deep level, he needed it.
“It’s like—I don’t know,” Denne said. He looked at Zeke, who shrugged. “It’s like—believing in God. If you believe, you see evidence of God’s existence all over the place, but you can’t translate that evidence to other people. If they don’t believe, they don’t understand the evidence. But imagine if you could introduce them to incontrovertible proof—”
“Like taking them to some cloud and introducing them to a fatherly old guy with a beard and wings?” Zeke asked.
“Exactly,” Denne said.
“If that’s your view of God,” Gabriel said, thinking of all the various views he had encountered in his travels.
“Which begs another question,” Denne said. “If it’s not your view of God, do you then accept the old man with a beard as God or as some old philosopher sitting on a cloud?”
“Why does it matter?” Zeke asked.
“Because,” Gabriel said, “every country, every town for that matter, has legends and myths of its own. Some are rooted in history, and some have disappeared into time. Some are expected—like little ghost stories around a murder site—and some are so bizarre that you can’t quite accept them.”
Denne looked over at Gabriel, as if he couldn’t believe Gabriel was getting into the philosophical part of the discussion. Gabriel wasn’t sure he could believe it either. He tried to listen to conversations like this, not participate in them.
He said, “And if it turns out that all of Seavy County’s legends and myths are true, then maybe all of India’s are too, or those of the various African countries or the stories of the leprechauns in Ireland. And if those stories are true, and there are no more leprechauns, then what happened to them? How did they go away?”
Gabriel’s voice shook a little, as he realized what he had been thinking. All the stories he had heard all over Europe. Elves and fairies and mermaids—pagan rituals gone awry, and Christians slaughtering nonbelievers. He shuddered. If all of those things were true, the bloody history of the world had just gotten a lot bloodier.
Zeke put the toothpick back in his mouth. “I still don’t see how it matters. People aren’t going to care if we call fish women mermaids or if God is some old man on a cloud or some benign being that can spread itself across the sky. We’ll still go on and live our lives just the same as before.”
“Really?” Denne asked. “We make accommodations to the other creatures in our lives all the time.”
“Accommodations?” Zeke asked. “What do you mean?”
“Let’s ignore the lengths people go to, to take care of their house pets and horses. Let’s just talk about business.
Like that fight a couple of summers ago in the Klamath basin over water rights. The farmers wanted to irrigate their land in a drought, and the state wanted to protect the salmon runs. Or the problems we’re still having in the forests over logging rights versus old growth versus the rights of rare and nearly extinct species like the spotted owl. Seems to me, your father moved back to Anchor Bay, Zeke, when a lot of the logging jobs went to the tree farms in Georgia rather than staying in the forests of Oregon.”
Zeke’s eyes narrowed. Gabriel’s stomach was jumping and he wished he still had his coffee.
“Still don’t see how it matters,” Zeke said.
“Like this,” Gabriel said softly. “What if Hamilton tells the world about water sprites, and the world decides these creatures have value. Will we be able to continue running fishing boats in the harbor outside of Anchor Bay? What if the boats run over sprites? What if sprites are rare in highly fished areas? Do we protect fishing rights? Or do we save these little creatures?”
“It might be more complicated than even that,” Denne said. “I gave you examples of things that are valued, but not sentient. What if we can prove these creatures—this little being right on this table—live in a society with culture and a language and everything else? What if her brain is as powerful as ours? What if she just chooses to use it differently?”
“Differently?” Zeke asked.
“There are groups,” Gabriel said, “that choose to live in primitive conditions. People sometimes chose not to live in a technologically advanced society, even though they have the knowledge and the ability.”
“Like the Amish,” Denne said.
“For an American example, yes,” Gabriel said. “Like the Amish.”
Zeke sighed. He pushed away from the wall, rolling the toothpick over and over in his hands.
“Do you understand my point now?” Denne asked.
“Oh, I understand it,” Zeke said. “But having brains and stuff hasn’t stopped people from wiping out other cultures. It seems to be part of the human experience. We exterminate the things we don’t like—only I guess, when it’s something with a brain and a culture, we call it genocide, right?”
Fantasy Life Page 21
