Downpour

EIGHTEEN

I wasn’t halfway down when I wished I’d ridden back to the lake instead of hiking by myself. Surely I could have figured out where Willow was headed without having to stumble along in the brush.... There was a trail, but it was steep and treacherous with loose scree. I couldn’t see where I was headed half the time and only the fading glimmer of Willow’s energetic trail told me I was on the right path. Here and there, I lost it and had to take a recon in the Grey to find the steadily fading sign of her passage—a hint of dimming colors on the silver mist. It was also growing dark a lot faster than I’d expected and I realized I’d lost track of time. It was past noon and the winter sun was heading for the notch in the mountains before it sank into the sea. Yet another meal missed . . . For a moment, I thought I should have started carrying protein bars or some kind of snacks in my bag. Then I remembered the bears and cougars prowling in the hills and was glad I hadn’t.

I continued, hoping I would make it to the populated levels soon. After a while, I came around a switchback on the trail and suddenly had a view toward the lake. I was lower than I’d thought, with maybe thirty feet of elevation yet to lose before I’d be down on the dirt road that connected the houses and campgrounds along the northwestern shore with Fairholm on the far west and Piedmont on the north.

The trail had brought me out closer to the Piedmont end, and I found myself looking down toward the hook at the lake’s most northern end on my left and a deep, round miniature bay on my right. A delicate-looking bridge crossed the tiny bay from arm to arm. A rambling log building stood just northwest of it. I stared at the odd hole in the shoreline, thinking I knew something about it, but not quite bringing it to mind. I started walking again, knowing the information was more likely to pop into the front of my head if I didn’t work so hard at it. With only four switchbacks to go, the information came: The hole must be Devil’s Punch Bowl.

Strother had said Costigan—no fan of the Newmans—lived there. I wondered if he was a friend of Willow’s, since the trail she’d taken down the mountain seemed to end just a quarter mile from his house. And did he have anything to do with the lurching thing that had come up from the lake a week ago while I’d watched at a distance? I’d have been willing to bet he did. That made him the fourth magic flinger I’d found around the lake—if I counted whoever was making the Grey do strange things near the hot springs.

I stopped and thought about the location. Jewel’s house lay in the mouth of the dragon-shaped lake, to the east and slightly north, with Lake Sutherland farther east behind it. Turning, I could see Fairholm down to the extreme west and a couple of miles south of Devil’s Punch Bowl. The lake wasn’t actually very long from north to south and had, in effect, two north shores, the top of the dragon’s head being the more northern and eastern shore where I’d found Leung’s ghost the first time; and the dragon’s back stretching nearly level from just below my position at the back of the dragon’s head to Fairholm at the tip of the dragon’s tail on the extreme west. The only landmark on the south shore—which wasn’t very far south—was Barnes Point, where the Lake Crescent Lodge and Storm King ranger station sat, the rest of the southern shore—the dragon’s belly—being steep and mostly barren next to Highway 101 all the way to Fairholm. The bright lines that ran toward Sol Duc were barely threads seen from here, but I could tell they were pointing south, exactly as I’d expected.

Willow had said something about cardinals. At first I’d thought she meant something like the Catholic kind, but she’d also said I’d have to restore the quarters and I didn’t think that was a coin. I’d seen enough spell work in the past four years to have picked up a few principles, and one thing I knew was that the points of the compass—the four cardinal directions—turned up again and again. Many traditions start ceremonies and spell casting asking for the protection and attention of the powers of nature by addressing each of the directions; it’s called “calling the quarters.”

I sank into the Grey, past the level where the seeping puddles of light and color lay, down as close to the humming and muttering of the grid as I dared, and looked out at the lake without the distraction of buildings and roads. I studied the lines of power that lay in the matrix of rock and water, searching for the crossing leylines that would tell me if I was right or wrong. There was the throbbing river of blue that crossed through Lake Sutherland, shooting straight from the curve of Devil’s Punch Bowl. And across it, gleaming green sparked with gold, I could see another power line. It was harder to pinpoint where this one crossed the edges of the glacial trench that contained the lake since I was looking at it from the side, but it seemed less focused and slightly crooked, like a line painted by a drunk and then walked over while it was still wet. At the tail, seemingly unconnected from the power line, but dragging it in a loop as if it were a garden hose caught on a stake, the sudden fan of energy struck out toward Sol Duc.

There was something wrong about the geography of the big power lines.... They should have connected four cardinal points by two straight lines that crossed in the middle. But they didn’t. It looked as if both lines crossed just offshore of Jewel’s house. And while the Newmans’ house and Devil’s Punch Bowl seemed to be in a straight line, that line lay imperfectly west to east, and there didn’t seem to be any anchor points for the other line that should have run north to south. It just meandered from about where Steven Leung’s car had come ashore at last to someplace near the ranger station at Storm King, then sent its lazy, looping tail off into nonsense directions that touched the cliffs, Fairholm, Pyramid Mountain, and points south and west without any pattern I could make out.

Maybe this was another reason magic ran wild here: The power lines not only weren’t a neat grid, but they didn’t run straight for some reason. It looked more as though the east/west energy had become anchored by Jewel’s house and the Devil’s Punch Bowl than that the houses had been built near a naturally occurring nexus on the power lines. I’d seen misplaced power lines before, but not anything as big as these. And the last time I’d seen such a thing, it hadn’t been a good sign. No wonder the Guardian Beast had practically shoved me through a brick wall to come here. And I was sure that, somehow, this connected to the death of Steven Leung. How was what I needed to discover.

I eased away from the grid and back toward the normal. Pausing a moment in my ascent, I could see the puddles and streamers of wild magic that lay around the lake. As I watched, they seemed to grow and change shape and size, drawing together like beads of mercury and sucking in other loose bits of energy from whatever they touched, before spilling into the lake in lambent streams. Even the ghosts that seemed to swarm in impossible numbers along the shore drew inexorably toward the water. Did the lake rebuild its power by literally sucking up ghosts? Was that the fate of Anna Petrovna and the other spirits I’d seen moving helplessly toward Lake Crescent? I turned away from the unsettling idea and pushed back toward the normal.

Coming out of the deep Grey, I shivered and staggered a few steps. I’d lost track of time in the Grey and been standing still for so long, my limbs had stiffened in the cold. I needed to get the rest of the way down to the road before it got dark, or I’d never get back to my truck.

Ridenour and Strother were probably put out with me for taking so long to get down the mountain. I wondered if they’d found any trace of Willow at their end. I hadn’t found much and now the trail was literally too cold and faint to follow. I was still certain she’d headed for Costigan’s place—it seemed too big a coincidence otherwise—but they might have some other ideas, since they knew the area and residents better than I did; you don’t have to know anything about magic to know what people may do. I got moving again and found myself on a comparatively wide, groomed trail following the curve of the shoreline. I headed north because, although it led away from Fairholm and the most likely direction to find Ridenour and Strother, it was a shorter distance to the road, and I’d driven that stretch of East Beach enough to feel confident I could find my way to someplace with a phone—possibly Costigan’s house....

The trail finally died out at a tiny parking lot a few yards from the river that was the lake’s only outlet. A sign told me my wide trail had once been the right of way for the Spruce Railroad and now connected the head of the Lyre River with Camp David Jr. I wondered for an irreverent second if people sent aspiring presidents there to summer camp. I turned toward the Devil’s Punch Bowl and Costigan’s house and began trudging.

Along the short bit of road was a line of small lakefront houses. Most boasted short docks for tying up sporty little boats, just like the houses on Lake Sutherland did. No boats currently swung from any of them nor did any of the houses pour light out onto the road. This was strictly seasonal housing. I was almost to the end of the road that could actually be called one when I saw a cluster of people huddling at the edge of the pavement, nearly hidden under the long shadow of Pyramid Mountain and the boughs of alder trees near the water. The smears and strands of colored energy that lay across the ground and plants seemed to crawl toward them.

“You should go,” the group whispered. “Get out of here. You’ll end up like us, like him. . . .”

I frowned and walked closer to them. One of them strained to pull away from the others, walking a few steps toward the nearest house and then falling back, flickering and jerking like a film running backward.

They weren’t people; at least not live people. But they weren’t thin and fading like most of the ghosts I’d seen recently around the lakes. These were almost present, almost . . . alive, and they seemed to become more solid as the sun dropped. I stopped close to them, but not close enough for them to reach me—I hoped. They were far more disturbing than most ghosts I’d seen. They were . . . wrong. And they had a smell like something that had lain bloating in water for a long time. One of them swayed and turned eyes like rough, unpolished marble in my direction. I recoiled. This one looked like the white thing I’d seen come up from the lake a week ago. It was not a ghost but a sort of walking corpse, half-eaten away by whatever lived in the lake, the remaining flesh and bone dull white and rot gray. It made a low noise but didn’t move any closer.

“What—” I started, but had to stop and swallow hard before I could go on. “What are you . . . doing here?” I asked. Were they zombies, ghosts, ghouls? I didn’t know, but they sent some part of my brain screaming in horror and I had to work hard to keep from letting that part run the show.

They knotted themselves closer together and seemed to speak from a single breath that rattled through all of their decaying throats. “Drawn, tied. Run away.”

“Who’s keeping you here? How long have you been here?”

“Him . . . Days on end. Run. . . .”

They were dead. The dead don’t know everything, but sometimes they know something. Much as the conversation sickened me, I asked them, anyhow, “Do you know what happened to Steven Leung?”

“In the lake . . .”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Do you know how he got there, who put him there?”

They were silent, staring at me for a few moments. I hesitated to call what they did thinking, but it seemed to be something of that nature. “Because . . . the anchor.”

“Is that a person?”

“No. . . . Cause. The anchor . . .”

“An anchor was the cause of his death?”

They let out a collective sigh and one slumped to the ground in a wet heap, a noxious odor bursting up as it hit. I jumped back, closing my mouth and holding my breath. “Run,” the rest reiterated as dusk deepened under the ridge in the shadow of the setting sun.

Then they lurched toward me and I could hear something like a snake moving swiftly through dry grass. I backpedaled as fast as I could, gaining ground without taking my eyes off them. The slithering noise stopped with an abrupt whipcracking sound, and the standing dead were suddenly free of whatever had restrained them. They staggered and began shambling toward me, gaining speed the longer they stayed upright.

I swore and whirled, breaking into a full run toward the narrow bridge that crossed the Lyre River. I was a few feet ahead and I thought my living legs were probably more powerful than their dead ones, but I didn’t want to turn my head to find out. I’d know I was wrong when I felt their rotting hands on me. And that thought goaded me to run faster.

I pelted down the road in the lowering darkness, the lake a momentary red flash as the clouded sun tipped beyond the edge of the mountains on my left. I didn’t pause to admire the effect. I just bolted in the direction of East Beach Road. Whatever Costigan might have been able to tell me, I could try for it another time.

I ran like hell. I could hear them—or I thought I could—gasping and thrashing across the ground after me. I aimed for the bridge. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away. . . . I thought maybe, if I crossed it, I’d be safe. I hoped so, at least.

As I ran, I saw something moving in the trees on my left where another small road came down toward the bridge from the mountain. Friend or foe? I couldn’t slow down to find out. I’d have to deal with it when it hit me. I didn’t hear an engine, so it wasn’t a truck, though right that second I’d have been thrilled to see Ridenour or Strother, no matter how freaked they might be by the zombies in my wake. I dodged a little to the right, to make room for whatever was coming.

A flash of black and white and then a confusion of shapes and colors burst from the intersecting road. For a moment I thought I saw a swirl of black hair, but I didn’t look too hard. Something barreled into me, almost shoving me into the lake, and then snatching me back at the last moment and pushing me toward the bridge again. The thing closest to me howled and I knew that sound.

I turned my head a fraction, glancing at the big white monster next to me.

Jin, a double exposure of white demon and black-suited man, grinned back. “Hello!”

“Hi,” I panted, feeling a stitch knitting tight in my side.

“Cross the river. They’ll stay back after that.”

“Goody,” I gasped, stretching for the last few yards to the bridge.

I almost lost it and fell down when my feet touched the wood and steel of the short span across the Lyre. Jin grabbed me under the arms and flung me the last ten feet, jumping to join me on the far side.

Then he turned back and looked across the bridge. I picked myself up from my undignified sprawl and rushed to my feet, ready to keep running, but seeing Jin standing still and grinning back at the other shore of the river, I turned back, too.

With gruesome black liquid oozing from them here and there, the undead things on the other side milled back and forth in their lurching, teetering manner. They shambled forward one by one and fell back, turning their dead eyes on us to stare for a moment. They twitched and re-formed their strange, pressing cluster as if they were too weak separately to speak until they had compiled themselves into one mass. “Not safe.” Their common voice sighed. “Don’t return for us.”

Then they separated, turning individually and shambling back the way they’d come.

I shuddered. They knew I’d try to come back and let them go and they didn’t want me to. Being told not to release them from whatever dread enchantment held them in their rotting flesh was worse than making the decision myself. I wanted to throw up at the feeling of helplessness and the pain in my side.

Jin laughed at them as they left. “Senseless, useless things.”

“They’re pretty good guard dogs,” I panted. “That’s hardly useless around here.”

“Hah! That depends on what one wants.” He glanced around; then he turned and faced me, composing his human features into a pleasant expression while his white demon face leered in hunger. “Now you owe me two stories,” he whispered.