“Soo-san.”
The sound came from behind her.
“Yeah, I’m Susan. What the fuck’s it to you?”
And she turned around, and the only one there was Sasquatch.
“Soo-san?”
The creature was sitting up, staring at her, one hand out and finger pointed in question. One finger, just the tip of that retractile claw showing. Susan concentrated on that hand, the sleek furred knuckles and back, the dark leathery pad of the palm and inside face of the fingers like a gorilla’s hand. Her ears buzzed and she fought to breathe.
Speech. Sweet Jesus on the throne of Heaven, the animal could talk. Susan lifted her own hand. She pointed at herself. “Susan.”
“Susan.”
This time, the creature’s pronunciation matched hers, both sound and emphasis. What the hell comes next in the protocol, “Take me to your leader?” She pointed at herself again, repeated “Susan,” pointed to Sasquatch. “What’s your name?”
As if that would make any sense to the animal. Susan glanced around the room and found a bucket of cold mackerel. She picked up one and offered it to Sasquatch. “Fish. Name, fish.” Next to the bucket, a bowl of water. She dipped her hand in it and let it pour from her hand back into the bowl. “Water. Name, water.” Pointed to herself, “Name, Susan.” Pointed to Sasquatch. “Name?”
Damn, I hope she doesn’t think “name” means “food” or “swallow.”
She’d never studied linguistics in college. After all, she’d never need that. Her research subjects couldn’t talk . . . . “I am so totally the wrong person for this. I know how to dissect you and classify you down to genus under the Linnaean system, but I don’t have a clue about talking to you.”
Sasquatch pointed at her. “Susan.” Pointed at the mackerel. “Fish.” Pointed at the bowl. “Water.” Pointed to herself. “Name?” She reached her right hand up behind her ear and rubbed there, brought her fingers under her nose for an exaggerated sniff, then extended that hand toward Susan.
“Name.”
Sasquatch understood inflections, could hear and use questions as opposed to statements. But Susan remembered those claws, remembered the lines of stitched wounds across Carlsson’s back. She could see fangs, teeth that the animal’s lips never hid completely. This creature was dangerous.
Oh, God. Gently. Slowly. Her knees shook, mixed fear and wonder pounding her heart. Step by step, she crossed the distance between them. She reached out and touched the creature’s hand and then beyond it to her head. The fur slicked under her hand, cool, smooth, sensual. It had been hot, sweaty, matted this morning, a sick animal. Now the fever had broken and she must have groomed herself.
Susan caressed the fur, the animal’s head, calming touch like she’d used on Bitch when they went to the vet’s for shots and stuff. Her fingers found a swirled patch of fur behind that ear, stickiness, a lump hidden there. Scent or musk gland? She pulled her own hand back and exaggerated sniffing it, finding pungency.
“Name? Your name is your smell?”
“Name.”
“You know, kiddo, it’s a damn good thing you’re smarter than I am. If you’d left it up to me, I’d have taken a week to get this far.”
Susan stared at her shaking hand. A lot of animals knew each other by smell. This shouldn’t surprise her. She concentrated on breathing. She concentrated on keeping her feet under her and her head on her shoulders against the swirling world. She’d thought Sasquatch was huge when the animal had been just an . . . animal. Not a thinking person, a talking person, a smart person.
Remembered words. Protect her. Guard her secrets.
Remembered words. She is lost and hurt and surrounded by strangers.
Susan’s hands shook. Her knees gave up their battle and she squatted next to Sasquatch, trying to fight back the spots that swirled across the shadows of the room.
Breathe, woman. Just keep pulling in one breath after another. Your brain likes a steady supply of oxygen.
This isn’t a mutant seal. This isn’t an evolutionary throwback. I’ve stepped through the Looking Glass into LSD-land. Science ain’t gonna work.
She felt a touch on her head, gentle, like a mother smoothing her hair. Sasquatch.
That hand, that furred hand with the fishhook claws and hundreds of pounds of hard predator muscle behind it, smoothed her hair.
XX
Dennis shook his head and glared at Ms. Doctor Tranh’s ass disappearing through the doorway and then at the old six-panel door that replaced it with a decisive click. Hell of a habit she had there, ducking into the same room with a homicidal spirit-land monster out of Naskeag myth when she wanted a little peace and quiet.
Nice-looking ass, though, in those stretch ski pants, small and tight and muscular. She’d probably knock him clear into next Tuesday if she ever caught him staring at it. She’d slapped him once already for less cause, no reason to think she’d pass up a second chance. That woman gave off “keep-away” vibes like a porcupine rattling its quills. Which was probably just the aura she wanted to project. He shrugged. He didn’t care much for people, either.
The shrug woke fire in his back. Dizziness again, weakness again—he groped until his hand bumped into a chair and he pulled it out from under the kitchen table and spun it around so he could collapse into it straddling, keeping his own back away from the chair back. Sitting, his eyes and head cleared again and he wiped his sleeve across his damp brow. Damn, would he ever get some strength back?
Aunt Jean had warned him of the price he’d pay if he called on Bear’s strength. Alice quoted the Laws of Thermodynamics at him in her smart-ass-kid tone of voice. Boiled down to words of one syllable, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
The tracks of those fishhook claws struck flame across his back every time he bumped up against something or moved wrong. He didn’t feel infection, though—the penicillin kept doing its job, veterinary grade or no, plus Alice seemed to have a wizard touch with healing. Witch touch, actually. That kid should study to be a doctor or nurse.
Study. He studied her as she clanged around in the boathouse kitchen, warming soup and frying up sausage, pretending the world was normal. She made a lot more noise than strictly necessary, even counting a cast iron skillet on the cast iron cook-top. Like maybe she didn’t want to hear any awkward questions. He hated to pick on the kid, she was only fourteen, but . . . .
“Okay. Dog, eagles, tires, midnight break-in, arson. Anything I’ve left off the list? Oh, and a crooked cop. I nearly forgot him. And the almighty Haskell Witches don’t think mere mortals need to know what’s going on. You keep it up, you’re gonna make Ms. Doctor Tranh look like the voice of sweet reason by comparison. What the hell’s going on around here?”
“Look, can you just forget you ever heard about all that? You don’t want to know. Trust me, you don’t want to know.” She rattled cast iron some more and then clattered a spoon across the stove. He smelled pea soup burning on the hot surface.
“Haskells.”
He shook his head and let the single word hang in the air with the woodsmoke and the sizzle of frying sausage. Good pork sausage heavy on the sage and with a touch of maple and red pepper, dinner sausage rather than breakfast, it smelled home-made. Not any commercial product he’d run across, anyway. Maybe he could hire Alice as a cook. But then he’d have to live with the rest of the package. Another porcupine, three of us under one roof. Four, counting that VC bitch . . . .
“Dog, eagles, tires, break-in, arson, a bad cop. I heard about the dog. From Bouchard, not you and not Aunt Jean. Not a peep of any of the rest. Now I find out that you’ve left that sawed-off runt of a Viet Cong biologist out of the loop, as well. Even though it was her dog, her eagles, tires, and home. Care to tell me why?”
She stared at the stovepipe, at the blued-steel elbow where it rose out of the top of the ornate nickel-plated stove-back trim and turned and plunged into the chimney thimble. She wasn’t rattling cast iron anymore.
&nb
sp; “Because,” she said to the stovepipe, “if those shitheads don’t back off, I’m probably gonna have to kill someone. Dammit, I told you that you didn’t want to know! And if you don’t want me sawing out bird-feeders in the Maine Youth Center wood shop ’til I hit twenty-one, you won’t tell Bouchard or anyone else. Secrets have reasons.”
Ice ran down his spine. Oh, shit. That’s the other side of the Haskell Witches, the road less traveled by. Fourteen years old, and the kid talks about folks that needed killin’.
Of which the human race and Sunrise County offered a regular supply, he damn well knew. But why dump that on a runt kid’s shoulders? He didn’t doubt Alice could kill someone, had the skill and nerve, but that seemed like a job for someone old enough to have built up some calluses on his soul. Her soul. Someone who already lived with nightmares. Someone like him, or like Aunt Jean.
Damn. Aunt Jean had Parkinson’s, not bad, but her hands shook. He’d first noticed it when she was drinking that cup of tea out at the gatehouse. Bad news when you need to handle a gun.
Dennis took a deep breath and then let it out. As often as Aunt Jean’s arrogance rubbed him the wrong way, he trusted her sense of good and evil. Not a legal sense, but a sense of what the community needed for long-term health. Call it surgery. She knew cancer when she saw it, and wouldn’t hesitate to pick up the scalpel.
He stared up at the shelf where he’d set that ivory Naskeag carving Aunt Jean had given him. Bear now watched over the kitchen and guarded the heart of his home. She’d said Dennis was Bear. That made him part of this.
“Kid, take a few more years to grow up before you volunteer to do hard time. I served Eleven-Bravo in ’Nam, combat infantry. If you put a name on a target, I’ve got a National Match M-1 that’s good out to about a thousand yards. I qualified expert in the army, 300 meter target six times out of six with those stupid Mattel toys that Uncle Sam issued to us, and I’ve kept in practice. Even Ms. Doctor Tranh doesn’t deserve the shit they’ve dumped on her.”
Alice shook her head. She kept studying the stovepipe elbow, as if reading dialog off it. “Nope. It may not come to that. And if we do it, enough folks around here will know some history that likely they’ll keep quiet. Good chance. You, you’d miss that chance. Half the township knows about your dad’s M-1. And then Bear would have to pull your brother back from New York City to guard the spirit gate. Push comes to shove, I’ve got a sister and some cousins if the House needs a backup witch while I’m inside.”
She stirred the sausage and then turned it, links sizzling and spitting grease and spreading an aroma that made his mouth water. Then she looked up at the stovepipe elbow again. “One thing you could tell me, it might help tie up a few loose ends. Is Bouchard still DEA?”
He didn’t see how that connected. “I don’t know that he ever was DEA. I think that was just detached duty from his army unit. Stuff like that, classified missions, you don’t ask. But I’d bet money that he’s just a game warden with a weekend-warrior patch from the National Guard. Why?”
Silence filled the kitchen, broken only by the sound of frying sausage and the scrape of the cooking fork as she turned the links again. She was fiddling with that sausage a lot more than necessary, the only sign of any tension in the air. More than she ought to show, if she was going to take over as the inscrutable Haskell Woman and run half of Sunrise County while keeping the other half twitchy.
She clanged the spoon again after stirring the soup. “Idiots.”
He sat and waited. Might as well try to out-wait a cat. “You going to specify what kind of idiots?”
She shook her head. “Aunt Jean keeps telling me that stupidity ranks right up there with heart disease and cancer as a leading cause of death. Guess some people missed that lesson.”
Dennis shook his head. A kid. Killing. Yeah, street gangs off in the cities, it happened every day—kids younger than Alice carrying a gun or knife or length of iron pipe, kill or be killed. He’d seen those kids a few years later in the army, judge gave them a choice of join or jail, tough and gang-scarred and street-wise with a thousand-yard stare before they ever saw combat. Thanks a bunch, Judge, giving me an armed felon on my flank . . . .
But she was right—if anyone in Sunrise County could get away with murder, it would be the Haskell Witches. Locals, even the local cops, first thought would be “Well, the bastard must have had it coming to him.”
Sunrise County had its own set of laws, most of them not printed in any leather-bound book in the county courthouse. Laws that had seen the Governor’s desk carried less weight, written by and for the other State O’ Maine, the three or four counties two hundred miles away toward Boston that had money and people and political clout in them. And as for that dim and distant rumor called Washington, that was enemy territory . . . .
Dennis shook his head. Aunt Jean and Alice would do whatever they thought necessary. He’d made the offer. And he wouldn’t tell Bouchard. Nor would Bouchard ask—he was Naskeag. He knew better than to question those aunts and grandmothers.
The door to the treatment room clicked open. Ms. Doctor Tranh stood there, face strange, Dennis needed a few seconds and some thought to figure out just how it was strange. No scowl. Puzzled instead, barely focused, as if she stood somewhere far away and saw the kitchen on TV.
Funny, without that permanent scowl, the woman could be pretty. No, not pretty, but she had a good face, easy on the eyes. Clean lines and character, and it would age better than “pretty” usually did. Forty, sixty, eighty, she’d look the same only more so.
She blinked and came into focus. “I think you both need to come in here.”
Dennis felt a chill. He glanced at Alice, she glanced at him, and she slid the skillet to the cool side of the stove top and cut the fire back with the damper like she’d been fiddling that stove for years. Cooking over wood was more art than science.
So Alice didn’t like the signals, either? He stood up, the room spun around his head, and he leaned on the table until his blood-pressure caught up with the sudden change and the dots quit swirling through his eyes. Damn. Weak, weak, weak!
Heart thumping in his ears, he fumbled his way into the treatment room, into the dim yellow glow of the kerosene lamp. What the hell has Tranh been doing in here, dissecting the corpse? Vivisecting? If she’s hurt the Swimmer, I’ll kill her. To which some detached alter-ego sneered, Yeah, how, by falling on her? In your condition, you’d have a hard time swatting a fly. Damn good thing Alice turned your offer down.
He caught himself with a hand against the wall and leaned there panting, fire waking across his back from the sudden moves. His vision cleared again, and there was Tranh, standing by the Swimmer and pointing to herself.
“Name, Susan.” Then she pointed to Alice. “Alice. Name, Alice. Alice.”
The creature sat on her pad, staring from Susan to Alice. Then she lifted her paw, her hand, and pointed one finger at the kid. “Al-is. Name, Alice.”
Fast-learning parrot we have here.
But then the Swimmer pointed at Dennis. “Name?”
He just stared.
Tranh pointed at him. “Dennis. Name, Dennis.”
Then she turned from the Swimmer to him, to Alice. “I’m trying to stick to one or two syllables. If you’d prefer last names, say so.”
The Swimmer kept pointing at him. “Den-is. Dennis.” Then her finger moved, point by point across the room. “Alice. Susan. Water. Fish. Bed. Light.”
And then she pointed back at the water bowl. “Thirsty.”
Tranh froze where she stood. “Jesus . . . .” She shook herself like a wet dog. “I never taught her that!”
Alice recovered first. “She’s been listening. I talked to her, Bouchard talked, Aunt Jean talked. All the time we cared for her, anytime we were in the room with her, we talked. It helped to keep her calm, just like with an injured dog or horse . . . .”
And she stepped across the room, picked up the bowl, lifted it to her own lips and sipped. “D
rink.” Then she handed it to the Swimmer.
The creature held it in both paws, both hands, and tipped it up to her mouth. “Drink.” Dennis blinked and shook his head and blinked again, but the scene didn’t go away.
He wondered if he was hallucinating. He felt wet warmth creeping down his back, must have broken a scab or torn a stitch out. Sitting down would be a hell of a lot easier. He was sitting down. Tranh was bitching about something in the distance. Alice looked fuzzy. The creature loomed over him, dark, huge, menacing, hands gesturing. He smelled her, she stood that close, clean fishy furry smell, she’d groomed the sickness and stench out of her pelt.
Must be getting better. She was growing stronger as he grew weaker. Dangerous. She weighed more than Alice and Tranh put together. Hell, probably more than all three of them, and it was strong weight, hard animal muscles under that layer of insulating blubber. She’d killed three men, probably had eaten one of them. And he couldn’t fight her even if he was healthy. His back proved that.
One of those huge furry hands waved near his face, finger pointing, claws still retracted, thank God. Finger pointed at Alice. Finger pointed to the Swimmer. Hand grabbed Alice’s wrist, put that tiny hand on his shoulder, grabbed other wrist, looked like a twig in the palm of that huge paw. Placed Alice’s hand on fur.
Pointed from fur to Dennis. Again, and again.
“Give.”
Alice shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Finger pointed to Alice, back to fur. “Give.” Finger pointed from fur to Dennis. “Give.”
Alice looked frozen. He watched, detached, almost spaced out on drugs or something. The Swimmer pointed to herself, to Dennis again. “Give.”
Alice mumbled something under her breath, he caught snatches of the Pater Noster in Latin before she closed her eyes and shook her head again. Then she looked from Dennis to the creature and back to Dennis. “I think she wants to give energy to you. You know, that chi transfer thing. I gave her chi transfusions, I’d guess you’d call them, Bouchard and Aunt Jean and I donated, when she was sick. I think she understood what was happening. We talked about it when I did it. We all said ‘give’ a lot. She’s damned smart. Extremely smart. She understood that we were helping her.”
Ghost Point Page 22
