“Quinton,” I said in a low voice, “there’s a zombie here. I need light.”
He didn’t hesitate but swished through the water to my side, clicking on his pocket flashlight and finding the sad, dead thing with its beam.
He caught his breath in shock and his footsteps faltered a moment before he finally stopped beside me. “That’s Felix. He was the last to disappear before Go-cart and Jenny were killed.”
“If Si— the monster had Felix, why did it kill the other two?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. Maybe . . . this is sick . . . maybe he’s saving him for a snack? Maybe he’s like an alligator and he prefers his meals . . . aged?”
“He didn’t really eat the others. . . .” I said, thinking aloud. “He just killed them and left the bodies behind.”
Felix’s ambulating corpse stumbled toward us, making low noises in its decayed throat. An idea was struggling to form in my mind but crumbled away as the zombie seemed to cry out and fall to its knees, tangled in the mess of Grey threads and mud that spun across the flooded floor.
Quinton’s light wavered and moved off the weakly struggling zombie. “Harper! Do something!”
I admit I hesitated. Once again, I’d have to deconstruct a zombie in front of a man I liked. The last one hadn’t handled it very well. . . .
“Get the light back on him,” I snapped. “I can’t see what I need to do.”
Quinton directed the light onto the moving corpse and I closed the distance between us. I squatted down in the water and, shuddering with disgust, I put a hand out to touch the remains of the man. It was soft but solid, and even with the light I couldn’t see any way to hook out the trapped threads of its life. I did not want to hack the poor thing apart with a pocket knife—revulsion made me turn my head aside and gag at the idea.
“There has to be a way,” I muttered, shivering in the chilly water that had set my damaged joints to aching. I studied the zombie as I shoved it back into a more upright position.
The dead thing slumped against the wall, possibly exhausted, but making no more large movements and few sounds now. Where it leaned against a drapery of the Grey threads, it seemed to vanish into the wall. That was interesting. The neutral Grey stuff must have been as much a form of camouflage as of holding its victims. Or was the trapping just incidental?
The more I looked at it, the more I thought the latter was the case: the Grey web stuff was Sisiutl’s camouflage. It probably spun a web of the stuff over itself and that was how it seemed to change shape as it slithered across time and space. It was smart enough to use the same material to cover the door to this place.
“This is its lair,” I gasped.
“What?” Quinton asked.
“This webby stuff—”
He interrupted, “What webby stuff?”
“There’s some magical material I’ve been finding around the Sistu’s sites. I told you about it. It’s all over the place here, and all over this poor bastard. I think we must be in the lair. Sistu’s hidden it with the webbing—that’s why you couldn’t see the hole until I tore the web away. And that web is all over this guy—Felix. I think that’s why his spirit can’t leave—the magical web has his energy trapped in his dead body.”
“Well, get it off him then!”
I really didn’t want an audience, but we had no way of knowing when Sisiutl would be coming back for his dinner and I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Felix to be released from his prison of rotting flesh only by the bite of the monster’s jaws.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I muttered, shivering in the cold water. I needed to get the web stuff off of him and get a better look at the threads of his energy. I tried pulling it off with my hands, but the web was thicker and more reluctant to part than the other examples had been. It was as if the stuff had been knotted together, not just spun like spider silk. I’d have to untie it or find a way to cut through it. . . . My mind ground through possibilities for a moment. . . .
Something about knots . . . Then I thought of Ella Graham’s feather: She’d said it would help to untie the dead—no, she’d said “unpick” the dead things. She’d lived through the Depression and raised grandkids during the war, and she’d learned frugality the hard way, remaking clothes and salvaging bits and pieces by picking them patiently apart with a bodkin or needle. Maybe I could use the pheasant feather the same way to loosen the knots of the Sisiutl’s snare? Pheasants had one eye on death and one on life, so maybe the feather did have some affinity for the Grey, as Ella had implied. It was nuts but so’s the Grey and, when in doubt, crazy sometimes works.
I still had the feather in the pocket of my jacket and I pulled it out. It was a little bent and wet, but it seemed OK. Feeling like an idiot, I held it by the quill and brushed it at the zombie’s head.
The Grey web split a little. I brushed more and the web began to loosen and fall away. I could see seams opening up in the fabric of it, like faults or runs in a nylon stocking. I swiped and swabbed until the web was loose. Then I tore the last of it away with my free hand. The dead man’s form grew softer and slacker as the web fell away, but it was still knitted together too strongly to pull apart as I had the first time.
Quinton’s light wavered. “I think . . .” he started.
A distant swishing sound had started up.
“I think something’s coming. . . .”
Hurry, hurry . . . My mind felt jellied by the cold—I needed to finish and get the hell out of the water before I got hypothermia. The feathery end wasn’t doing any more work. My heart pounded and, in spite of the cold, I’d begun to sweat.
If there were any gods watching, I hoped they were on my side. Desperate, hoping the picking-apart analogy would keep working, I flipped the feather over and teased the quill over Felix’s slumping shape until the tiny ridges on the tip caught on a thin yellow strand of energy. I resisted the urge to panic and dragged it toward me with a steady pull. A visible loop of energy sprang up out of the density of his form and I snatched it on the little finger of my free hand. Then I reeled it in against the growing pressure of the knot inside him.
The strand popped free and I rocked backward as the hot yellow skein of Felix’s trapped life spun out faster than film from a runaway projector. There was an odd shushing sound and the body fell down, boneless and loose.
A flash of white shot from the body and cut the gloom in two. The swishing sound stopped and something hissed. Then it roared, and the swishing became a hailstorm sound of scales on stone.
I cast one last glance at the rotten body at my knees. Gone, dead, nothing but decaying matter now. Felix no longer inhabited his corpse.
Quinton grabbed my elbow and yanked me to my feet, my knee protesting with a ratcheting sound I felt through my whole body.
“C’mon!” he shouted, dragging me toward the fissure in the wall through which we’d come.
A gigantic head with a pair of horns like a Japanese war mask’s thrust from the hole, roaring and flicking a forked tongue as long as my body into the air in front of us. The horrible sound shook through my chest and rattled us both back a few steps as adrenaline lit a fire in my sluggish blood.
“Other side!” I shouted, pulling Quinton at a right angle to the monstrous head that was coming deeper into the room on a neck as thick and shaggy as a hundred-year-old cedar. A jaw full of glittering teeth snapped at the air where we’d been.
We bolted south across the floor, staying out of the deep water to the west. But any door there had been buried in a cascade of cement, and we found ourselves in a dead end.
“There’s no way out of here!” Quinton yelled.
“We can’t get out until the hole’s not full of monster! We just have to get out of its way until the tunnel’s empty. Then we can bolt for it,” I gasped back, dragging him around the edge of a marble toilet stall.
The hailstorm sound of the creature entering the room petered out and we could hear it thrashing the water near Felix’s body. It shouted something and I thought I recognized the sound of Lushootseed, though I didn’t know what it had said. We peered out.
At the far end of the room coiled Sisiutl, gleaming in the Grey. In the dark, I judged it about thirty feet long and thicker than the totem pole outside. Its shape flickered and melded from one serpentine thing to the next—Medusa’s coils, a dragon, Cerberus with three heads on snakelike necks. . . . Something moved a bit at one end and, with a slithering sound and a splash, a monstrous serpent head reared up and turned our way. I could see the curving shape of its horns and some kind of frilled shape just behind the jaws. The forked tongue that had almost tasted us before shot out and the snake end hissed. Another shifting snake head rose and the whole, huge creature settled into a solidly ophidian form that lay in both realms at once. Then it flipped itself violently into a sort of W shape, and the booming voice shrieked again, coming from the center of the body that now looped toward us like a sidewinder, splashing and hissing through the water at a furious speed.
“Rur! Thief ! Ladro! Vohr!” it roared, flickering through its many shapes.
“Light!” I ordered Quinton. “Let’s see if we can blind it for a moment.”
Quinton snapped on the beam of his flashlight and waved it at the beast. At its center we caught sight of a horrid face with dripping fangs and strands of fleshy hair around a wide mouth that shouted the words as the serpents at each end hissed and spit in rage. The center face yelled as the light caught in its dark-adapted eyes. Two clawed hands pawed at the dazzled eyes and the face screamed a cacophony of languages as we dashed past it.
One of the snake ends whipped after us and I yanked a bit of Grey shield between us, my shoulder protesting the quick movement. The snake head thrust through the shield but let out a sharp hiss and recoiled, shaking as if confused and raising its frilled ruff in a lightning-quick motion that cracked the air with a boom.
The hole lay just past Sisiutl’s body. I shoved Quinton ahead of me as the next head came around and snapped at us with a mouth full of needlelike teeth flanked by venom-dripping fangs. I shoved the point of the pheasant feather at it, hoping it would have an effect, but the thing just pulled back, shadows of its varied seemings wavering over its body like a heat mirage for a moment. Then it firmed again to Sisiutl, the head drawing back in confusion. But the human face with its slash of a mouth shouted some more and the two snake heads writhed as the massive body whipped about, trying to track us.
Quinton dove into the hole as I unholstered my pistol. If the feather didn’t work, I was willing to try anything. The HK made a hard click as I squeezed on the cocking lever.
As the first of the serpent heads darted in, I fired at its eye. In the speed of the moment, I missed the plunging orb, but the bullet hit the head’s nose and the central face shrieked as the whole creature jerked back from us.
I leapt for the crack in the wall and scrambled up, ignoring the complaints of my limbs as Sisiutl screamed and threw itself against the hole in fury, shaking the wall. It appeared I’d done no more than piss it off, but I was still ahead and I ape-scrambled up the tunnel as fast as I could, tearing my shoulders, knees, and gun-filled hand on the rough surfaces of the rift. I heard the hard-rainsound of its scales and the furious hissing of one of the serpent heads as Sisiutl shoved itself back into the tunnel.
“It’s on my heels!” I shouted to Quinton, buzzing from the fight-or-flight chemicals flooding my system. “Get out into the alley and hold the grate for me!”
Fangs bit at my boots and I kicked free viciously.