Monstrous Affections

Janie and the Wind

The eaves of Mr. Swayze’s island lodge rattled like soup bones loose in a bin. There was a wind up — a wind roaring across the bay that shook the eaves — a wind that’d knock you down where you stood, if you hadn’t a grip on something solid. It’d knock you down like Janie’d been knocked down herself not long past; except Janie’d have been able to get up right away if it were just the wind, and not her husband Ernie who’d done it to her.

Ernie had hit her bad, worse than usual. And Janie didn’t know why, which also wasn’t usual.

She was looking at the stem of a birch tree, cut short for the leg of Mr. Swayze’s coffee table, and past it to the big front window — which ought to be boarded up, the way the sky was rolling and darkening beyond it. She was on the floor, and her chest hurt and when she tried to swallow her neck felt like a needle was in it, and her head was in some stickiness that Janie figured was some of her own blood.

Why’d Ernie hit her like that?

It wasn’t like she’d been up to anything, after all. She was just looking through one of Mr. Swayze’s little story magazines, the ones that he sometimes wrote for. Her reading was getting better, improving each year, and the magazine had pictures at the front of each story, which gave her a good clue what ones she’d enjoy. Janie’d found one with a pretty girl and what looked like a horse but it had a long, corkscrew horn coming out of its head, which reminded her of something—

—and then her husband Ernie’d showed up.

He was supposed to be out fishing. That’s what he spent the days at, for the entire week they were at Mr. Swayze’s lodge on Georgian Bay.

Sky had been clear when Ernie stepped inside. Janie hadn’t heard the boat, but she was getting going in her story so she maybe wasn’t too attentive. The door rattled closed, and Ernie cleared his throat.

“Hi,” said Janie. She placed her magazine down on her page. Ernie stepped out of the doorway, and scratched at his neck. Sunlight made the hair there glow like copper.

“You hold still now, Janie,” he said.

Janie did like she was told — but it puzzled her. Ernie would only say that, in the way he just said it, when she got to one of her spells and was set to do herself some harm.

“I’m just readin’,” said Janie. She stood and held up her magazine, cover-out, to prove it.

“Hold still.” Ernie was born with sad eyes. They drooped at the corners like he was going to cry. And his mouth wasn’t happy either, not as a rule. Janie would smile and frown and cry and yell depending on how she felt, but Ernie only ever looked sad. Janie thought sometimes that Ernie’s face muscles just didn’t work.

“You upset, Ernie?” Janie couldn’t read it from his face, but he was moving funny. His shoulders were bent, and his hands hung from them like hooks on the end of a couple of chains. He was looking right at her.

“Don’t move,” he said.

Then it came to her. Janie put her hand up to her mouth, made a fist and gasped. “You — you see a wasp, don’t you?”

Ernie didn’t answer — just kept coming.

Janie stood still. Jeez Louise, a wasp! Janie’d been stung last summer, out behind Ernie’s shed, and oh! How it’d set her howling! There’d been a whole nest of them, and when she touched it wrong they’d stung her seven times, then spit poison into the sting-holes that made them hurt like the Devil, then stung her some more when she got mad and started whacking at the nest with her shovel. She’d learned her lesson about wasps that day — Ernie’d explained it to her: “Stand still when there’s a wasp around. Stand still, an’ if it gets near you, let it get a sniff and go on its way. It’s more ascared of you than you are of it.”

Janie didn’t think that was possible. But she sure could stand still, scared as she was. She shut her eyes tight and clutched her story magazine to her chest. “Oh, Ernie, get it, get it, get it.”

“I’m sorry, Janie,” he said. “I shouldn’t have eaten it. I was just so hungry, Janie, so hungry. Mr. Swayze said it’d be a good thing, but now it’s in me.”

What’s all that got to do with wasps? she wondered for just a second, before she realized what was what.

He hit her in the stomach first, and she took that hit hard. Usually when Ernie hit her, she’d done something to deserve it, so she’d know it was coming and could prepare herself. But what’d she done? Read a story magazine? She hadn’t broken nothing, hadn’t swore or soiled herself or embarrassed Ernie in the grocery.

Janie bent forward, and as she did her hands came up. The story magazine ripped apart and the pages scattered around the porch-room. It felt like her innards had tore loose inside and she couldn’t even breathe it hurt so bad. She fell on her knees and bit down on her lip.

Ernie cuffed her in the ear. She fell sideways, and her elbow hit the floor first, and that sent a juicy kind of pain up through her shoulder so strong she thought her heart would blow up from it. She put out her hand and managed to hold herself upright, but only barely and not for long.

Because next Ernie kicked that arm out from under her. He was wearing his big work boots, and they added weight enough to the kick that she fell completely.

She rolled onto her back. She was wearing boots too — not as big as Ernie’s, but high and black and plenty hard in the heel — and though she knew better, she used them to kick up at her husband. She caught him in the knee, and it wasn’t the right angle to knock him down, but it sure must’ve hurt. Because he yelled something fierce then — louder even than when he’d chopped near-through his pinkie finger with the wood-axe that time, mad enough to put a bit of fear in her.

He jumped back on one foot, and clutched at the other one with both hands and hopped around some. Janie finally sucked in some air, which was good because her eyes were starting to go all speckly for lack of it, and she started to get up.

She was up on one knee when Ernie let go of his knee and stopped hollering. His foot dropped to the floor with a thump, and his hands fell back to his sides again. Janie put her other foot beneath her and stood up. Hers and Ernie’s eyes met, and Janie thought again about the wasp rule.

Should have done like I was told, she thought, fear still working at her middle like a little gnawing mouse. Should have kept still.

Let him get his sniff.

Because sad-eyed Ernie didn’t look sad any more. His eyes had lost their droop, and his mouth had managed to turn itself up at the corners, opening a little more than usual in the middle. She’d seen him smile once or twice at least in their twenty years together, but Janie didn’t remember her husband having so many teeth.

He jumped at her.

He came so fast she might as well have had her eyes closed. One second he was standing there grinning, showing off those teeth — the next, he was on top of her, and she was back on the floor. He punched and punched. Lying now on the floor with the sky turning black before her eyes, Janie remembered him hitting her in the stomach, in the ribs, a bad hit to her neck, and then, when she put her wrist up to block him, he bit—

And that was all.

“Ow,” muttered Janie. She brought her hand up to her head, touched it to a crusted-over gash above her ear, and took it away again. She didn’t remember getting that one. Must’ve happened after the neck punch and the bite; in that whole time Janie couldn’t remember when the sky had gone from blue to black.

Janie put the hand underneath her, and pushed herself upright. She was scared that she wouldn’t be able to stand up, and she was a bit dizzy at first. But she shut her eyes and counted to three, and when she opened them again she felt better. She got to her feet and looked around her.

The pages from the story magazine she’d ripped were still on the floor. Some of them had blood on them. There was a lot of blood on the floor where her head had been. The front door from the porch was closed. The floor lamp by the big window had fallen over. When Janie went to pick it up, she looked out and saw that the waves were so big they washed clear over the top of the dock. There was no boat at the dock. So Ernie was gone.

Janie looked at the floor where her head had been, and although she knew it would hurt, she touched the cut over her ear. The cut was shaped like a crescent, and had scabbed over it felt like. Janie knew better than to pick at it. She looked outside again.

Mr. Swayze’s island wasn’t very big — it didn’t have room on it for more than his lodge, a shed for the gas generator and one dock for a motorboat. That was all Mr. Swayze needed, though. He liked to come out here to write his stories these days, and like he told them both when he gave them the keys last month, too much room is distracting.

Ernie was gone. He had given her a beating for no good reason and now he was gone. It didn’t figure.

Somewhere outside, something fell over with a clang and a bong. It was probably a drum, one of the open ones that didn’t seem to do nothing but collect rainwater by the side of the lodge. When she had met Mr. Swayze and they learned that he was a writer of scary stories, Ernie had said, “I guess you want a horror story, can’t find nothing scarier than that acid rain. Kill a whole lake full of fish with just a drop. There’s your horror story.”

“That’s pretty scary all right,” Mr. Swayze had agreed. “I’ll have to put it in my notebook.”

Maybe the rainwater gave Mr. Swayze ideas for his acid rain story. Well, now it had fallen down and was spilt out everywhere and no good to nobody. Janie opened the front door and stepped outside.

The wind felt good on her — it was cold, colder than it had a right to be for early September, and it cooled her cuts and bruises like an ice pack. When she turned to face it, however, it took her breath away, so she moved with her back to the wind, down to the dock.

“Ernie!” She cupped her hands around her mouth, and called off across the waters. “Ernie! Come on back! I ain’t dead! You got nothing to fear!”

For surely, thought Janie, that was what had happened. She had fallen down into her blood, and there had been so much of it, and she had been out like a light, and poor Ernie had thought the worst — that he’d killed her.

So he’d run. The OPP had already come by the house two times, on account of complaints from neighbours, and each time they asked Janie if he’d been doing anything to her. Like hitting or punching or kicking or biting, or even just pushing. Janie’d said no both times, and the second time — with Ernie in earshot — the one policeman had told her that she had to complain; they could only arrest him otherwise if he killed her and it was murder. “I don’t want it to come to that,” said the policeman, and Janie had replied, “Then me neither.”

“Ernie!” She yelled so loud her voice cracked and turned to a scream. “Ernie! It ain’t murder! It’s okay! I won’t complain!”

There was another gust of wind then, and it nearly blew Janie off the dock. It sent the water-drum rolling down the rock face, and it entered the bay with a splash that sprayed ice-cold water up the back of Janie’s dress. Janie steadied herself, and opened her mouth for one more yell, then shut her mouth again.

It wouldn’t do her no good. Ernie was long gone.

The drum clanked up against the dock, and Janie kicked at it as she passed it on the way back. The kick sent the lip of it underwater, and that was enough. The rain-drum started to sink.

There was a shelf in the lodge’s living room that had every one of Mr. Swayze’s books — although not one of them had his name on the cover. Mr. Swayze used what he called a pen name, so all the books were “by” Eric Hookerman even though Mr. Swayze wrote them.

There were a lot of books, and Mr. Swayze said that a lot of people bought them in their time. Janie thought that might be true. Sometimes, she would even see one at the drug store in Fenlan, and they only ever got in the best books. It was no wonder that Mr. Swayze could afford to own all that land outside Fenlan and this island here in Georgian Bay.

“I guess you can’t call me a starving artist anymore,” he joked one time.

“You’re not starving,” said Ernie. “You don’t know what starving is, Mr. Swayze.”

And then Mr. Swayze had laughed — a scary laugh, like those books of his must be. “I guess not,” he said.

Janie had never read any of Mr. Swayze’s books — she was just getting to reading stories now; anything bigger than ten pages made her feel sleepy, even if she picked it up in the morning. But she looked at the pictures on the covers, and she read the titles, and she had a pretty good idea what they were about. There was THE HAND, and it had a picture of an old dried-up hand with long fingernails and a drop of blood on the tip of each; THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL, with an old-fashioned hand-pump, and a snake poking its head down out of the spout looking all fierce and frightening; and ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD, with a cover that was all black, but had raised parts that Janie could see as the shape of a bird with wings spread, if she held it just so in the light. That cover took some work to enjoy, you couldn’t just look at it and see, but it was her favourite of them all.

When Janie stepped into the living room, she nearly tripped on ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD. That book along with most of the rest were spread all over the floor.

“Oh, Ernie,” she muttered, “look at the mess you made.”

Janie flicked the light-switch on the wall, to get a better look at what had happened, but it stayed dark. Did the wind knock out the generator too? If it had, it’d be up to Ernie to fix it — Janie could lift and haul things, she’d always been a big girl that way, but machines and such were beyond her. She flicked the switch once more, to no avail, so bent down and in the grey light from the window she started to gather up the books. Fine thing that’d be, thought Janie. Mr. Swayze loans out his lodge to us, we ruin all the books he wrote. Never invite us to dinner again.

Sometimes, Janie wondered why Mr. Swayze bothered with Ernie and her at all. Mr. Swayze was smart, and he must know a lot of people, and he sure had a lot of money. Ernie and Janie didn’t have much money — Ernie’s work with his chainsaw and his contracting wasn’t steady, and paid poor when it came; they sure didn’t know many people; and smart? They did their best with what they had — but folks in town said Ernie and Janie were a good match for each other, and they didn’t say so in a kindly way either.

Yet from the time he moved up to Fenlan, Mr. Swayze took them on. He bought the land back on Little Bear Lake in the 1980s some time, and after asking around hired Ernie to come lay foundations. Land was no good, and Ernie told him so — more than half of it was swamp, and most of the rest was bare, knobbly rock. Mr. Swayze said he knew that now, but he bought it because he liked the feel of it and hadn’t been thinking practical. Was there nothing that Ernie could do? “Not for cheap,” said Ernie.

“Then let’s not do it cheap,” said Mr. Swayze. “Tell me what it’ll take.”

It took a lot, but Ernie’d done pretty good for him by the time it was done. Found him a level spot on high ground to build his house, then brought in some fill and a digger and made a road across the firmer parts of swamp so Mr. Swayze could get in and out. Sunk a well through the rock, deep — so Mr. Swayze wouldn’t have to be drinking swamp water — and strung a power line in so he wouldn’t have to be using candles and oil lamps to see at night.

Janie’d spent more than a few workdays out at the site — in those days, she was as good a worker as any man and came twice as cheap, or so said Ernie. That was when they’d got to know Mr. Swayze and learned about what he did to make ends meet. And that was when he started inviting them for dinner — first at the farmhouse Mr. Sloan rented him about five miles up the concession road, then once his own house was done, in there.

Got so they’d dine with Mr. Swayze one time a month — whether at his place or theirs. And oh, those dinners would be fine! Mr. Swayze was a real good cook — a magic cook. He could take a chicken and make it taste like Thanksgiving turkey; make a cheap cut of steak into a restaurant-fine meal that’d dissolve on the tip of your tongue. He wasn’t much on vegetables, but that was fine — neither was Ernie, and Janie didn’t much care one way or the other.

Ernie figured that Mr. Swayze cottoned to them so well because there weren’t many others who’d accept him in town. He lived alone, and Ernie said many in town felt that might be because he was whoo-whoo. When Ernie said whoo-whoo, that meant he was talking about a fellow that liked to lay with men and not women. But Janie didn’t think that was true about Mr. Swayze on a couple of counts.

For one thing, the way Mr. Swayze was working, she didn’t think he’d have time to lay with anyone, man or woman. The day he moved into his house at Fenlan, he started writing. From dawn to dusk, he wrote and wrote or so it seemed. When she was working in his yard, the typewriter was going clackity-clack all the day long. When they got together, there was always a new stack of paper by the typewriter and he would often go and just look at it, making a mark here and there. One time she asked him how he wrote so much, and Mr. Swayze said, “Because when I’m here, I feel like it. The place here inspires me. It’s got a soul to it. I just look at the rocks, and there’s a spirit in them. Sometimes I can find it written in their face. Do you understand what I’m saying?” “No,” she’d said, which was the truth. So he winked at her. “Maybe you just inspire me, Janie.”

Which was another reason she didn’t think he liked to lie with men.

When she got up with a stack of books in her arms to look at the shelf, she saw what’d happened. The shelf was the kind that screwed into the walls, and right on this wall a couple of those screws had come loose. The shelf must have fallen off. Screw-holes must’ve been stripped, and it must’ve fallen off. Probably happened while she was outside just now.

Probably the wind shook it down.

Janie set the books down on the floor beneath it, and tried to reset the shelf. She found the screws on the floor okay, and the bracket for the shelf, and after feeling around on the wall found the holes they’d come out of. But when she lined up the bracket and tried to push the screw in with her thumb it wouldn’t go. Even though it must’ve been stripped, the hole in the wood wasn’t big enough. It’d take a screwdriver to put the bracket back on. Just like it hadn’t been shook out at all — but unscrewed.

Janie punched the wall in front of her with her good arm, and even though she knew she’d likely be punished for it, she swore. What the hell was she worrying about the books for? Her Ernie’d gone off in his rented boat because he thought he killed her, and now there was a storm up on the Bay that’d swamp him in a second if he were out on it, and here she was stuck on an island with no phone or nothing. Mr. Swayze didn’t even keep a radio here. He said he bought the place a long time before anyone had a radio on these islands, and he liked the privacy — like his place in Fenlan wasn’t private enough. These days, Mr. Swayze had a radio in his boat, and he said another one here would just be a distraction.

“I’d welcome that distraction now,” said Janie. “Goddamned right.”

She giggled — let Ernie come and punish her now for Goddamn swearing — and felt bad about it almost right away. Then she took a breath, and felt her rib aching and her elbow starting to smart, and remembered the cut in her head, and thought about Ernie doing all those things for no better reason than because she was reading a story magazine… and she let herself laugh again.

“Let him,” she said. “Let him come.”

When she got to the kitchen, Janie wasn’t laughing any more. She went there figuring to empty out the fridge into the big cooler they’d brought with them, so that she’d at least have fresh food for a day or so longer. But the cooler was gone from where she’d put it by the stove, and when she opened the fridge, it was all empty — but for a little jar of French’s Mustard and a quarter stick of butter that’d gone rancid yellow where the wrapping didn’t cover it right.

The three steaks, the potato salad, the jar of pickles, the big jug of milk, two-dozen eggs and near a pound of bacon were all gone. She went and checked the cupboard next, and sure enough, the case of Campbell’s Soup was gone too.

Lord, Ernie must’ve thought her dead for sure — in his big panic to get out, he’d left nothing behind to sustain her alive.

Nothing but the butter and the mustard that was here when they arrived. Janie thought about making a meal of that — she was starting to get hungry despite all her pains — but no matter how you made it, a dinner of butter and mustard just wouldn’t taste right. Even Mr. Swayze, with all his kitchen smarts, wouldn’t be able to make much of that.

“Butter and mustard go on food — they ain’t food themselves,” she said, and the little window by the stove rattled in its frame, like it agreed with her.

Outside, something cracked — like a tree-stem breaking when Ernie’d bend it back over his boot. Janie didn’t look to see what it was, though. The wind would blow hard, and it would break things, and if you were fool enough to have a boat in open water, it would drive you to and fro and send waves as big as a house over your bow, and those waves would swamp you if your boat wasn’t a big one too. There was no need to look outside again, because whatever it was that broke, it would just be another bad thing Janie could do nothing about.

And anyway, Janie was already started through the rest of the lodge. She was pretty hungry all right — it felt like she hadn’t eaten in days — and she needed to do something for that.

But the lodge was picked clean of food — there wasn’t even any liquor on hand, though she managed to find quite a few empties stashed in the wood-bin.

Janie searched the three bedrooms, looked under the mattresses and in all the wardrobes. She found her clothes — Ernie hadn’t taken them with him, at least — and among them was her raincoat and boots. So after she’d satisfied herself there was nothing to eat inside, she pulled on her boots and did up her raincoat and went outside to see what was what on the rest of the island.

The wind was blowing worse by then. She had to lean against the door to make sure it’d open, and when she managed to get out it was a good thing she was wearing her yellow slicker and boots, because she would have been soaked to the skin if she weren’t.

It wasn’t raining. The water was coming up, not down, as it smashed against the high rocks on the edge of the little island and funnelled up through their cracks and bends in white fingers of spray. She squinted down to the dock, but she couldn’t see it for all the flying water. Ernie’s boat could be tied up there right now, and she’d never know it.

Janie didn’t go down to check it out, though — she didn’t think there was anything at that dock, and anyway…

She thought she’d figured something better. The lodge was on the lower of two rises on the island, built on the kind of bare rock that Ernie said made for bad land, and Janie thought she’d make for the higher one. At the top of that one, there were a few trees that’d managed to fight their way out between the boulders, and she knew that on some of these islands, you could find blueberry patches in such places.

And Janie did like her blueberries.

So although the rock was slippery most of the way and hard to see at times on account of the water, and although her arm was hurting and her rib still ached, Janie managed the climb. She was more than hungry now. She was starving, it felt like she hadn’t eaten in days, and it was like she could taste those blueberries already.

Janie got her foot into a crack in the rock, and found another crack higher up with her fingers, and then it was just one more pull, and she was up—

And over.

“Ow!”

Janie fell on her behind, which didn’t much hurt, but bumped her bad elbow on the way, which did. She could scarcely believe it, but the wind didn’t seem to get up here.

She’d gone over a kind of lip of rock at the top, and as she looked around she saw she was surrounded by rocks about as high as her neck, with a half-dozen tree-trunks growing up right at the edge. It was like she was sheltered in the palm of some giant hand, the trees were its fingers, all pointing upward. “Wonder if there’s blood drops on the fingertips,” she said to herself, and giggled again.

Then she remembered what she’d come for: the blueberries.

Janie got up off her duff and started looking for them. The palm of this great big hand was covered in all kinds of greenery, so it would take some searching. She walked bent over for a little while, but her leg started to hurt so she got down on her hands and knees going through the low greenery. For awhile, she wasn’t sure she was going to find anything — nothing but ferns and tiny little evergreens barely spawned from their daddies’ seed — but finally, in a little corner of the palm where maybe the thumb would crick out, she found a patch of them.

“You-hee!” she howled when she sighted the familiar leaves. She didn’t get up — just crawled over on hands and knees, like a baby hurrying across the lawn for his new toy. Saliva fed into her mouth and her still-sore stomach glowered and muttered impatient.

She grabbed at one of the blueberry plants, turned it over. Nothing there, so she grabbed at another one. And another after that. And one more—

And then she howled again.

Because it looked as though someone had been here before her too. Only they hadn’t picked the blueberries.

They’d stomped them. Taken a pair of boots, and stomped over every square inch of this little blueberry patch. Janie’s fingers were blue where she touched the leaves — but when she licked them, there wasn’t even enough berry there for a sweet.

Jeez, but Ernie’d taken time to do a lot of things for his dead wife, before he ran away in his boat. Janie felt the hot coming on.

“Baaa-sterd!” she yowled, head turned up to the sky. “Baaa-sterd!”

She didn’t care who heard it. She didn’t care if she caused an embarrassment, or broke something valuable, or swore, or just did something stupid. She didn’t care if Ernie was down at the dock now, listening to her — she didn’t care if he came back up here right now to teach her another lesson. If there was a wasp’s nest here, she’d probably find a shovel and hit it.

“Baaa-sterd!” she screamed, and as she did, she felt a gust of wind come down on her, pouncing like a tree-cat on a mouse. This high up from the waves, it was a drier wind, but it was cold all the same. She opened her mouth wide, and faced it this time, and when she yelled again the wind took it from her and she didn’t mind.

“I’m hung-ry!” she hollered. And as the darkness came complete to the island, the wind hollered it too.

Janie would get spells some days. That’s what Ernie’d call them, because that’s how they must have seemed to him, like magic witchy spells that made folks strange. She called them her hots, because that’s how they’d feel inside. She got hot, from her toe-tips up to her eyebrows, so hot she itched for things she couldn’t say and did things she barely knew. One time, she went out and smashed all the windows in Ernie’s pickup truck with his new axe-handle, then broke the axe-handle too somehow. Another time, she ran bare-naked out to the township road, and Ernie had to come after her with a rope and a stick to goad her back inside. Sometimes during her hots, she remembered seeing things. Folks dressed in black dancing jigs all across her roof so hard the ceiling started to wobble; or a lot of birds flying in a circle around her head and pecking at her sun hat so as to knock it off; or big old bugs crawling out of the cracks between the sidewalk stones outside the grocery carrying their grubs under their wings. Her momma used to think she saw into the spirit world, but Ernie called them dream-things and said for to pay them no attention. Like the wasps — let ’em have their sniff, and they’ll leave soon enough.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, crooked up against a rock covered in dry white lichen, she thought she might have seen a dream-thing.

He came up over the same way she had — up over the rock from where the lodge sat — but he wasn’t dressed for the cold wind. He wasn’t dressed at all in fact. He was a funny man: bare-naked, not even shoes and socks on, and even his privates dangled out for all to see.

“Ain’t you cold?” Janie asked, but the funny man didn’t even look at her.

Maybe the cold didn’t bother him. He had a lot of hair on him, looked like blue in the dark. It went all up his back and down his chest, and the hair on his head and chin was real long, and his beard came up near to his eyes. And it seemed like there was a fire in those eyes — Janie didn’t get to look at them directly, but she could see that everywhere the funny man looked got covered in a flickery orange light, like it was sitting near the firelight of the funny man’s eyeballs.

So fired on the inside, furred on the outside, maybe clothes’d just heat the funny man up too much for his own good. Sometimes Janie felt that way too, particularly when her hots came on.

The funny man was moving on feet and fingertips the whole time, and his face kept close to the rock, like he was snuffling it. He was saying something over and over — Janie thought it sounded like Yum-tum, yum-tum, yum-tum, which were no words that she knew. He crawled over the top of the rock, and face-first down the inside slope of it. It was a pretty good trick — Janie’d fallen on her behind when she tried to get over and then she’d had to stand on level ground and get her bearings. But the funny man didn’t even need to do that. He just turned around and started moving along the sides of those rocks, like he was a spider or an inchworm or some sticky-footed fly. When he’d come to a tree, he’d squeeze behind it if he could fit, and if he couldn’t just lift his arms over it and sort of jump-like with his long hairy legs, and keep on yum-tum-ing along the rocks like nothing had happened. Janie’d put her fist to her mouth and gasped at that — he was sure a good climber, the funny man was.

And he kept at it, until he’d gone half-the-way around the rock circle and come up beside Janie where she leaned against it. For a minute, she thought he was going to crawl over her like she was another tree, rub his dangly privates all along her middle and then go on along the rock like he hadn’t rubbed nothing. But the funny man didn’t. The rock glowed next to her shoulder where he looked at it, and then his fire-filled eyes moved up to her yellow-clad shoulder and made it glow, and underneath the sweat oozed out of her skin like pus from a dirty cut. And then he said yum-tum again, and she knew it wasn’t words at all. It was the sound his tongue made when it licked against the rock, tongue-out-yum, tongue-in-tum, right next to her arm.

Janie pulled away from him a little — she sure didn’t want that long, knobbly old tongue licking her next, any more than she wanted those privates on her middle — and quick as she did, the funny man yum-tum-licked the rock where she’d been leaning. A big strip of lichen came away when he did.

Janie put her hand to her mouth again, and let out a little squeal. Of course! That’s what the funny man was doing — she followed the path he’d taken around the rocks, and the whole way she found a dotted strip as wide as a tongue, like the passing line on the highway.

“Hey!” she said, turning back to him. “That lichen any good to eat?”

But the funny man was already gone. Or so Janie recalled as she sat up in the middle of the night, and looked at the rock beside her.

The funny man must have been a dream-thing, because the lichen on the rock face hadn’t been touched. He’d just given it a sniff, and made on his way.

Janie ran her fingers across it — it was rough and dry and flaked under her thumb, and it was blue like the funny man’s hair. It didn’t seem much better than mustard and butter, but then Janie didn’t see any harm in giving it a try either. She leaned close to the rock — so close she could feel the match-flame heat of her breath bounce back at her.

“Yum-tum,” she said, and swallowed.

Outside the rock circle, the wind had been roaring and splashing and rattling things all night. But by the time Janie was done eating, it stopped making all that racket and went quiet. The lichen meal didn’t quiet Janie’s stomach any, however. It was twisting and yelping up at her like a colicky baby. Her aches elsewhere weren’t so bad, but her belly…

Her belly would need quieting.

Janie peeled off some more lichen — just a little, a strip not much bigger than a postage stamp — and put it on her tongue. It was dry and tasted like dirt, and seemed like even the wet in her mouth wouldn’t go near it. She shut her mouth, and made herself swallow, but the dry lichen gritted up in her throat like she was swallowing sand. She didn’t let herself cough, though. Just kept swallowing and swallowing until the last of it was down.

Then she got up, and looked over the rock.

The water was still now, and the sky was clear. There was a tiny bit of moon up there. It was just a little crescent, like the cut on her head, like a bite mark, and it didn’t give off very much light. There were a lot of stars, though, and the dim moon let them shine all the brighter. Janie could see a long swath of them across the middle of the sky. Stars had names, each and every one — but Janie didn’t know any of them.

She cast her eyes down, and looked instead at the rock-face she’d near licked clean. She was pretty stupid, she guessed — couldn’t even find something good to eat when her belly needed it. Not but butter and mustard and dry old lichen from the side of a rock.

Stupid dumb hoo-er! hollered her stomach. If it were a bear it’d have bitchya!

“Quiet, stomach,” said Janie. She leaned closer to the rock, squinted at it now instead of the sky.

There was something written on it where she’d cleared away the lichen. No, she thought as she looked closer. Not written.

Drawn.

It was a picture — of some kind of animal it looked like. But it was no animal she’d ever seen, not altogether. There was a snout, and a big twisty horn coming out the middle, like the horn had come out of the middle of the horse’s head in the story magazine. But there were wings too — open wide like it was flying, or pinned, like on the cover from ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD — and a snaky tail that turned around twice coming out its behind. There was someone reaching for that tail, but below the wrist was covered up in lichen still.

For just a second, Janie wondered what else she’d find, when she licked off the rest of the lichen.

But her belly wouldn’t have any more lichen, it’d had more than its fill of that dry old awful stuff. And her mouth wasn’t about to make no spit to soften it, neither. So she would just have to keep wondering.

Maybe, she thought then, that butter and mustard wouldn’t be so bad to eat after all. Her stomach didn’t complain much at the thought of it, so she got up from the rock and clambered up over the lip of the circle.

It took her hardly no time to get down this time. It must, she thought at the bottom, be the lack of a breeze.

Janie didn’t go straight to the lodge, though. Because now that it was clear and the water was still, she got a good view of the dock. And she could see a canoe there.

It was a pretty big canoe — near to three times as long as the ones she’d seen folks using in the lakes near Fenlan. Whoever’d brought it had hauled it up onto the rock rather than leave it in the water, and turned it over on its top — to keep any rainwater out of it, Janie guessed.

Janie tromped down the side of the rock to look at the canoe a little bit closer. It was bark — made out of birch-bark, like those little souvenir toy canoes you could get for ten dollars at the Indian Trading Post on the highway. But those canoes’d break like matchsticks and paper if you squeezed them too hard, and Janie didn’t think that this one would give in that easily.

Lordy, breaking this canoe’d bring down a beating like she’d never felt before.

If Ernie were here to give it, that was.

Janie felt herself grinning.

Ernie ain’t here. I’m on my own now. Just me and my hungry old belly.

Janie bent over and picked up the end of the canoe. It was pretty heavy, but Janie could lift cinderblocks all day and not complain. The wood at the other end complained some, as it scraped against the wet rock. Janie lifted it over her head, then stepped back and let go, and the canoe-end landed at her feet with a bang.

She walked around to the side of it. She kicked it, and it rocked back and forth. She kicked it again, harder, and it nearly rolled over upright before it fell back down in its old spot. It rolled, but it didn’t break. That is some strong birch-bark, thought Janie.

Save it, said her belly.

“Who are you,” said Janie, “to tell me what to do?”

She kicked the canoe again. This time, however, rather than kicking out, she raised up her foot and brought it down with her weight behind it. And that seemed to do the trick. The canoe didn’t roll this time — it stayed put, and there was a great crack as one of the wooden ribs underneath the bark gave way. When she lifted her foot to look, there was a dandy-looking dent in the bark, although she hadn’t holed it yet.

Don’t break it, said her belly. I’m warning you, Janie…

And to make its point, Janie’s stomach spewed a little acid, and some of the lichen that wasn’t digested yet along with it, in a thin stream back up her throat.

“Yech!” Janie spat and swallowed and did it again and again until the taste was nearly gone. But her throat still burned when she stopped, and she felt all out of breath.

“Goddamn stomach,” she said — daring it to try it again. Nothing happened, though; if Ernie didn’t like swear-words, her belly didn’t seem to mind.

Janie looked at the canoe and stepped back from it. Ernie’d always said she could use some self-discipline. She wondered if this was what he’d meant.

Janie turned away from the lake — she didn’t feel as much like making mischief on the canoe anyhow. She went up the steps to the lodge, and as she went, she wondered just who it was who’d bring that canoe. Could have been the funny man, but he was a dream-thing, and that canoe was pretty real, so it probably wasn’t the funny man.

Janie’d just started to wonder if maybe the owner of that canoe wasn’t hiding up in the lodge waiting for her, thinking to do her some mischief, when she heard the shaking. It sounded like the wind had sounded outside when she woke up — like the bone rattle where it shook the eaves on the outside, with a crack! when it broke something and a bong! when it knocked down a drum.

But now, she was on the outside. And it sounded like the wind was on the inside. “Isn’t that something?” she said, and hurried up the weather-worn steps to the front of the lodge.

She peered in through the big front window, and sure enough, that seemed to be what was happening. There was a fierce Georgian Bay blow whirling around the rooms of the lodge. As she watched, maybe three paperback novels bounced off the window as the wind drove them across the room. Some of the pages of the story magazine Janie’d been looking at were stuck to the window, and if they weren’t all upside down she might have read them. Mr. Swayze had a little iron hanging light, and it was swaying back and forth in the breeze — occasionally swinging so high that the side of it hit the ceiling with a thunk! noise.

Janie pressed her ear to the glass. Oh, it was cold! Seemed like the wind had taken all the cold it’d brought with it outside, and moved it inside. As she listened, she could hear the yowl it’d brought with it too. And she could hear something else. It sounded like—

—a chopping.

Janie closed her eyes, and caught the rhythm. Thunk! Then a moment while the axe-head pulled out of whatever it was cutting. Then thunk! again. And the same all over. It was just like Ernie would get, when he was cutting wood for the stove.

“Yep,” she said. “Someone’s chopping.”

Then there came a crack! and Janie jumped back and held her ear. She hadn’t been looking, and it had taken her by surprise.

Something had hit the glass hard, hard enough to crack it. She glared at the glass, and the little spider-web of cracks in it. Something else hit the glass, in the same spot, and the cracks spread.

It was one of Mr. Swayze’s books. BOTTOM OF THE WELL — the back cover, the part that contained a little summary of the story and what the Philadelphia Enquirer had said about THE HAND — “First-class chills! Hookerman writes like he’s lived it!” — and what Publisher’s Weekly had said about THE CLOUD — “Richly detailed and un-put-downable!”

Janie giggled. It was like the wind inside was showing it to her — like it’d hit the glass once to get her attention, then put this here for her to read it.

The glass shook a bit under the pressure, and Janie could hear it moan as the cracks spread further. Janie read the summary, out loud: “When… they dug for… water, they didn’t expect… to find a more…” she struggled, turning her head as the book slid and shifted along the glass “…an-ci-ent… ancient!” She clapped her hands together and smiled. Ancient. That meant old. “Ancient hunger,” she finished. “Now… it’s…” She frowned. Lost? No. “Loose! An’… And… they’ll… never be… the same!”

And that was as far as she got, because the book flipped over and she was looking in the eye of that snake-head coming out of the pump-spout. Then she wasn’t looking at anything, because the wind-pressure finally got too great, and the glass exploded outward.

The wind must’ve knocked Janie off her feet, and knocked her out for awhile too. She woke up in the lodge’s main bedroom, where she and Ernie had been sleeping — all warm and covered up in a big quilted blanket. She looked under the covers and saw that she didn’t have clothes on underneath.

That wasn’t the only thing that changed. She felt her rib, and her elbow, then the little crescent-cut over her ear. They all felt better; like they’d been mending a few days, not just a couple more hours. Her hair was tied back, like she liked it, and she smelled all clean and pretty, like she had a bath.

The only thing that didn’t change was how hungry she was. It was like a wound in her middle, all the more nagging, because of the smell that was coming in through the doorway. It was the smell of cooking — the salty-greasy smell of frying meat, with some spices maybe.

Janie got up out of bed. She didn’t see clothes, but that didn’t matter — she just wanted some of that food. She threw the comforter over her shoulders and opened the door to the living room.

It was like nothing had happened. The books were all up on their shelf, and the pages of the story magazine were nowhere to be seen… And there was no blood on the floor either, although she didn’t remember cleaning up any of it. She’d almost say that the whole thing was just one of her dream-things, but the room was still freezing cold, on account of the broken front window. Some of the glass from it was sitting in a little garbage can by the fireplace.

“Janie!”

She almost jumped out of her skin. Mr. Swayze was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was wearing a dirty apron, and held a spatula in one hand, and a screwdriver in the other. He was smiling, but he looked a bit worried too.

“H-hello, Mr. Swayze.” Janie clutched the blanket around her shoulders.

“It’s good to see you up and around,” he said. “You look like you’ve been through a lot.”

Janie looked down at her feet, which were thick and bare, and her toes were pointing together. She straightened them. “E-Ernie, he took—”

Mr. Swayze put up his hand, and his face went all serious. “I know about Ernie,” he said. “Don’t worry, Janie. I found him before he got far. Ernie’s in hand. Everything’s taken care of. See?” He held up the screwdriver. “I even fixed the shelf.”

Janie felt drool ridging over her lips.

“Hungry,” she said, and looked over Mr. Swayze’s shoulder into the kitchen.

At that, Mr. Swayze grinned again — a big toothy grin — and he laughed. “I bet you are, Janie,” he said, and laughed again.

“Lichen doesn’t take you very far, does it?”

Janie’s stomach twisted like a hand-wrung facecloth — oh, it wanted that food bad — but Janie stood her ground for a minute.

“Lichen,” she said, frowning. “How’d you know about lichen?”

“Why Janie,” he said, and his grin widened some more. “If it weren’t for the lichen, you and I wouldn’t be here, having this conversation now. That’s how he gets in, Janie.” And then Mr. Swayze shut his eyes, and opened his mouth real wide. “Yum-tum,” he said, and his tongue flicked out and back, like it was a frog’s or something. He opened his eyes again, and as he did Janie had to look away. They were too bright.

“You’re a quick study, Janie — a lot quicker than Ernie, which I wouldn’t have expected.” Mr. Swayze stepped over to her, but she still wouldn’t look at him. He put his hand under the blanket and rested it on the bare flesh of her shoulder. It was hot.

“I wouldn’t have expected it,” said Mr. Swayze, “but I have to say, I’m glad.”

Janie took hold of Mr. Swayze’s hand on her shoulder, tried to lift it away. “Don’t go touching me,” she said. But he wouldn’t move.

Her stomach bent around behind itself, it felt like. Hungry! Food! And Mr. Swayze let out a breath of hot, stinking air. “The spirit’s fed me,” he said. His voice trembled, like from hunger. “It’s the wind and the sky and the cold, but oh Janie, it’s fed me. Done me well. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Let me go,” she said.

“You know — you just can’t say yet. It’s the spirit of the land here. It’s the wind-walker — and it’s the spirit of you too, Janie. You were always close to it — but you’ve never been closer than today.” He squeezed hard on her shoulder. “This is like the property at Fenlan — another special place, Janie. You saw the drawings on the rocks, didn’t you?”

“Like your book covers,” said Janie. She thought about the twisted horn, and the hand and the snake, and the wings of the DEAD BIRD, all there on the rock face where she’d licked the lichen away.

“Right,” he said. “Very good. And all that, my Janie…” His tongue came out, and caressed the sharp tips of his front teeth. “All that’s just a yum-tum lick and a bite away.” His smile went broader, and his nose twitched, like it was catching the smell of the cooking in the other room.

“Food,” said Janie. “You take the food from here and stomp on that blueberry patch, Mr. Swayze?”

“Wendigo.” He whispered it like a dirty word in church. “That’s what they call me, Janie. And that old food was no good for you. It wasn’t what you needed, any more than that butter and that mustard’d do the trick. And forget about blueberries! You’re not a blueberry girl anymore, Janie. Now you come on with me to the kitchen — and eat some meat.” His eyes went all yellow with the heat in him.

“You may be Wen-digo, but you ain’t Ernie,” she said flatly. “I don’t got to do nothing.”

It was true, Janie thought. Because although the smell of cooked meat was all over her, although Mr. Swayze wouldn’t let go even though she told him to, although she was so Goddamned hungry she could just about gnaw off her own arm for it and would have just loved to go into the kitchen for some meat now, none of those things could compel her. Ernie was the only one who ever really could, and he was gone.

Janie reached up and grabbed Mr. Swayze by the ear, which his big old grin had nearly reached. He stopped grinning when she twisted it and his face went like that wasp nest that time, all angry and twisted and ready to bite. She twisted it some more, and then there was some blood, and then Mr. Swayze’s hand came away from her shoulder and took hold of her arm.

It didn’t do him any good, though. Janie felt the heat in her arm before his hand got to it. She made a fist, and there was a tearing sound, and then Mr. Swayze howled, and the last bit of bloody gristle went snap! and his ear came clean off. Mr. Swayze stumbled backward, holding onto his head and squealing like a pig.

Without thinking, Janie pushed the ear into her mouth. It was crunchy, like a chicken knee, and it tasted a little bitter on account of the ear wax. She got it down in two gulps, and as she swallowed, her stomach stopped complaining.

The fire went out of Mr. Swayze’s eye then, and he turned and tried to run from her, but she wasn’t going to let him go. She kicked out, and caught him in the small of the back — and when he fell, she stood over him and kicked down, like she had on the canoe. She heard the crack of another couple of ribs breaking — these ones in Mr. Swayze’s chest and not in the canoe. Her stomach didn’t give her any trouble about breaking these ribs, though, or about breaking the skin on the next kick.

If anything, she thought it might be egging her on.

Janie kicked him once more in the head, and with that, Mr. Swayze’s neck cricked all funny and he stopped moving. For a moment, she thought about bending down and opening her mouth wide, and just finishing him that way.

Instead, she stepped back and sealed her lips.

Yum-tum, said her stomach as she moved over to the bookshelf. She pulled down the copy of ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD.

Janie ran her finger along the book-cover’s feather-bumps. They were pretty good feathers. She wondered for a minute whether they might have used a real feather to make it — some complicated thing where you pressed the paper on top of the feather with a steam iron, so the real thing would be there in the book. Maybe the book people had come out here, and rubbed it off the stone up the hill.

Janie opened up the book.

“Pro-log-oo,” she said. “Oh. I get it. Prologue.”

Yum-tum. There were other smells too — more exquisite in their way, coming off of Mr. Swayze’s cooling corpse by the kitchen door. Janie could imagine burying her face in that fresh meat, lapping up the blood like it was a fine liquor.

“The — the—” Janie concentrated on the next word. “Laughing,” she finally said, and laughed herself. “The laughing man stood on the side of the dirt road and — and…”

…and watched the storm boil in from the west. It was going to be bad, he knew; twisters like claws from some ancient beast would scour the lands and lift the things of those lands high into the sky. The storm would ride this place — ride it, and devour it. Nothing would be left in its wake but ruin and sadness. The laughing man thought about that. It would leave the land exposed. And that would be bad for the ones who were left. Because they would be easy pickings, he knew.

Easy pickings for It.

Behind her, glass cracked as the wind outside grew, and flung something at the house — no doubt to get Janie’s attention. She hunched over the book — let her mind go to the words inside it, the way the wind — the Wen-digo — wanted her mind to go to it.

Mr. Swayze’s book didn’t say it yet, but Janie had a pretty good idea what “It” was. In the book, it was more than likely that DEAD BIRD from the cover.

Janie closed ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD and put it back on the shelf. There had been a photograph underneath the author biography at the back of the book, but it wasn’t Mr. Swayze’s. They’d taken a picture of a bearded man — hair down to his shoulders, up near to his eyes. Might have even been the funny man. Or maybe the Laughing Man? Laughing and funny: the words meant just about the same thing, as Janie thought about it.

“Yum-tum,” she said.

The wind outside wasn’t letting up — if anything, it was getting worse. Frothing the waters; scouring the land; exposing those that remained… Making them easy pickings.

Easy pickings for Janie.

That was just how it was going to be.

That wind was calling to her, it was time to move on, and somehow she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay put anywhere for very long now. She ran her tongue along her sharpening teeth. Good thing she hadn’t holed that canoe, else she’d be swimming.