Underground

CHAPTER 13

The temperature was up to thirty degrees when I rolled out of bed Monday morning. The snow was still sticking, but it didn’t look so impressive once it had been plowed and shoveled into dirty piles only a few inches high at the curbs with the rough shapes of shrubs and grass poking through in the fields and yards. It was still too cold for most of the schools, though—some still operating without electricity or heat—and kids would be loose on the remaining snow before noon. Otherwise, it was an average Monday. I did the morning routine, working on my knee and shoulder for a while before heading to my office to dive into neglected work for Nan Grover.

At twelve minutes past eleven the door alarm Quinton had installed months ago pinged me and a matronly woman walked into my office, followed by two men with the look of guided missiles. The woman had chin-length gray hair naturally streaked with white and looked about fifty. She wore a charcoal gray suit with black running shoes and a black wool swing coat under an aura the color of battlefield smoke lit by gunfire. The men didn’t match: both fit and thirtyish, cloaked in rain-colored energy coronas, one wore a pair of slacks and a sport coat under an East Coast-style overcoat; the other had on jeans and a padded stadium jacket. They sent off a cool psychic stink of no personal stake in whatever had brought the woman to my office. They came to follow her orders.

All three had their coats undone over the telltale lumps and wrinkles of concealed pistols. I thought I’d seen damn near every variation and rip-off of this group that existed, but never one headed by a grand-old-lady type before.

The disconnect between the woman’s appearance and her energy bugged me—not to mention the gun. I didn’t bother asking if I could help them and stayed put behind my desk where my own pistol and the panic button on the alarm were a handbreadth away.

“Are you Harper Blaine?” the woman asked. Her tone was bored, as if she really didn’t need my answer but she would stick to the form.

I didn’t see a point in skirmishing over it. I gave her a bland look back as her attack dogs stationed themselves on each side of my door. “Yes, I am. And who are you?”

She didn’t carry a purse, so she brought a leather ID folder from her coat pocket. She flipped the folder open, saying, “I’m Fern Laguire. I’m with the NSA.” She closed the distance between the door and the desk and stood so close she loomed over me as if it was just an accident of my cramped office space.

Then she flapped the folder closed before I could read it properly. I’d done that a few times myself, so I looked up at her and put out my hand.

“May I see that again, please—a bit slower? I don’t speed-read.”

Laguire clucked her tongue and showed me the ID again, not releasing the folder but just holding it open in front of me, as if I was kid with ADD and she a harried teacher. She did seem a little teacherlike, in a smile-and-yardstick sort of way, but I noticed she narrowed her eyes as she held the folder for me. The washed-blue irises gleamed like ice chips.

The ID wasn’t helpful. It did have her name and the agency name, seal—an eagle standing on a key—and office address in Maryland, but it didn’t have any indication of rank or deployment beyond the words “Field Liaison.” She could have been a secretary or the director for all the card said, though I guessed she was probably as close to an actual spook as “No Such Agency” had. The great mystery of intelligence agencies: a cryptology unit with more tentacles than a school of squid and more pull than anyone wants to admit. I’d have bet even money that the backup were on loan from the CIA or FBI because they certainly didn’t look like mathematicians or computer geeks.

I let the card go and Laguire flipped it closed, dropping it back into her pocket. Her New England schoolmarm personality seemed a perversely appropriate choice for an NSA field operative, but it didn’t really go with the glacial eyes and the disturbing energy cloud around her—the effect was creepy, like seeing your grandmother whip out a flick knife and dispatch the cat for spitting up a hairball.

“I don’t do wiretaps or foreign data transmissions,” I said, “so I doubt I’m going to be much use to you.”

“We’re not interested in you, dear. Not in any professional capacity, at least,”

Laguire replied. “We want James Jason Purlis.”

“Who?” I wasn’t faking ignorance; I’d never heard the name before in my life.

Her voice was soft and refined, but it left a hard wake in the Grey that would have caused most people to toe her line. “Oh, but you do know him, Ms. Blaine. You were in his company yesterday. Caucasian, brown hair, brown eyes, thirty-five years old.”

I’d been in a lot of people’s company Sunday and about half answered that description. “You have a photo?” I asked.

Laguire pulled a five-by-seven black-and-white from her pocket and put it on my desk, pushing it across the blotter to me with both index fingers. It was a blowup of an ID photo, grainy and bland. Judging by the clothes, it was about ten years old. The young man in the photo was a generic white-bread nerd—as if he’d tried to be unmemorable—short hair, clean shaven, overweight, slightly sullen or just bored. Aside from everyone else, I’d talked to Fish, Quinton, and the Danzigers, as well as a few waitstaff, librarians, and a gas station attendant yesterday, and many of them could have been the man in that photo, given different hair, weight, glasses, whatever. I knew who she wanted, but I wasn’t going to turn.

I shoved the photo back across my desk. “I spent all day tracking witnesses and evidence for investigations and for cases going to trial. I spent a lot of that time with some homeless people who don’t exactly hand over their business cards, and the rest of it in a glorified trash dump. Which one of the hundred or so people I talked to or stood next to do you think I should recognize from that picture?”

“Only JJ. Purlis. He went to ground years ago and we’ve been waiting patiently for him to show up on our radar ever since. Yesterday he did. Now he’s vanished again, but you were ID’ed and here you are.” She seemed to imply I soon might not be.

“Who told you I was with this Purlis, and where?” I asked. “You give me a clue and I might give you your man.”

She shook her head with a disappointed smile. “I won’t name our source. That would be ill-advised. Purlis is a danger to national security and to the health and safety of people like you. He has knowledge, skills, and the mind to cause harm. You have a duty to turn him over.”

“You make this guy sound like a terrorist,” I said, flipping my hand to dismiss her drama.

“As information is the real source of power and since crypto systems are now defined as matériel, he well could be. I imagine you think you’re protecting a witness or an informant, but all you are doing is standing between us and a fugitive.”

“Fugitives are the purview of the federal marshals’ office and law enforcement. Not Fort Meade’s carnivores.”

A palpable hit. Laguires mouth tightened at the reference, but her voice stayed calm, if a bit chillier. “Mr. Purlis is our asset. We will reacquire him. You will not stand in our way.” She leaned in a little. “I don’t need to play games with you. I can get what I want other ways, but you won’t like them, Ms. Blaine. It’s very simple. All I want is Purlis’s location.”

I stood up and Laguire had to tilt her head up to meet my scrutiny. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t want to step back and even the distance—it might look like retreat. “I don’t have your mystery man’s location, Ms. Laguire. I don’t know a J.J. Purlis and your photo is worthless. You can—”

My suggestion was cut off by my cell phone—lucky for both of us.

“Excuse me. I need to answer my phone, but since the nature of my work is confidential, I’m sure you understand my asking you and your associates to leave now.” Then I shut up and gazed at her without blinking or hostility, just blank and expectant.

Her smoky aura flared with frustrated explosions of orange and red, but she laid her card on my desk, turned silently on her heel, and strode out of my office.

Her bodyguards followed her.

It was possible she’d left a bug or had some kind of tap on my cell phone or something, but I doubted she’d set up any such thing. If she’d caught a latenight flight, she’d have been on me, I agreed I’d be seeing him and paged Quinton. Then I went out to find a noisy place to grab some lunch I could wolf down in twenty minutes. The drive to Montlake was usually fifteen minutes from my office, but it sounded like a long day ahead and I both needed food and wanted to minimize Laguire’s chance of picking up any of my conversations. Some things are worthy of paranoia, and she and her agency gave me the chills.

My phone rang again as I was crossing the Square. In the frosted cold, the area was mostly deserted except for the snow drifts and ghosts, and I glanced around for any sign of surveillance or monitoring. Not even the phantoms were interested in me.

Spotting nothing, I still answered the phone in a sharp bark unlike my usual tone. “Blaine.”

There was a pause. “Um, this is your alarm company,” Quinton said. “You left a message for us to return your call…”

“I have three nines and I’m running late because of an official visitor.” Three nines was the pager code Quinton had programmed to indicate a break-in at my office—it was also the UK version of 911. “Tell the installer I’ll meet him at Bakeman’s in a couple of minutes.” I hung up without waiting for a reply and hoped Quinton knew me well enough to guess my meaning and show up both quickly and discreetly.

Located on Cherry in a basement row of little lunch spots that mostly catered to local office workers, Bakeman’s was determinedly blue collar in service and atmosphere. The odor of roast turkey and meatloaf wafted out the sunken door along with the clang and shout of the staff passing orders and moving customers at New York speeds. The hard, slick walls and Formica tables reflected the noises of the busy kitchen and the hurried diners into a rattling cacophony. No one lingered over a cup of joe at Bakeman’s or “took meetings” at the no-nonsense tables without risking the owners notorious sharp tongue. If Fern Laguire or her mismatched muscles wanted to snoop, they’d have to come in, order up, and join us at our table to have any hope of eavesdropping or getting in without drawing attention.

I’d barely sat down with my food when Quinton popped in through the lunchrooms back door from the building above.

“Hey,” he said, sliding in next to me to facilitate a lower-volume conversation.

“Hey. Two things first. We’re going to Marysville to talk to Fish’s grandmother about the Sistu, which should take a few hours so you better grab some food if you’re hungry. And I got a visit from the NSA about thirty minutes ago.”

Quinton looked thoughtful. “I’ll be right back.”

He returned in ten minutes with one of Bakeman’s famous sandwiches and a can of soda. “I always think I’ll have the pie next time and I never do,” he said.

I finished my soup and glanced at him as he wolfed his food. I was glad he hadn’t run, though I hadn’t really expected him to. “You know anything about this Fern Laguire?”

He nodded and swallowed. “I hear she was heartless at twenty and had passed ‘ballbreaker’ in her thirties. Ten years ago she’d advanced to vitrified in all human emotions except anger. The scale appears to be logarithmic.”

“She has two assistants who smell of Fed, one probably CIA, the other local Feeb.”

Quinton nodded acknowledgment.

“Do we have a problem?” I asked.

“There’s a hole in something. I don’t want to discuss it right now. In fact, considering communication is the name of the game with them, probably best to get moving and talk as little as possible. Fern may not have you bugged yet—if she just hit town she hasn’t had much time.”

“Unless she came on a private flight, I’d guess she couldn’t have arrived before eight-thirty this morning—assuming flights landed on time with the snow.”

He hummed, thinking. Then he asked, “Do you need your cell phone for this trip?”

“I need to call Fish for directions to his place.”

“Use a pay phone—it’s safer. I’ll have to disable the cell—otherwise they may use it to track or bug us.” He put out one hand for my phone and picked up his soda with the other, draining it in three big gulps.

I handed him the phone, which he looked over and put on the table.

“Remove the battery, will you?” he asked, rummaging in his coat.

As I pried the battery out, Quinton pulled a big folding knife from his pocket.

I started to snatch my phone back, but he stabbed the side of the soda can near the upper crimp and cut the top off. Then he wiped the remaining soda out of the can with a napkin and dropped my phone in before squeezing the can into a flatter shape and folding the ragged edges down, making a sort of tight metallic envelope. He handed me the phone and the battery, and the tiny spark that seemed to pass between us when his fingers brushed mine had nothing to do with the phone. “Hold on to these, but keep them apart and don’t put them back together until we’re back in Seattle—unless you have to. I want to check the Rover before we go. Call Fish and I’ll meet you at the parking garage.”

Quinton folded the paper over his remaining half sandwich and stuffed it into one pocket of his coat and the knife into another pocket.

Then he left through the door he’d come in by. I figured that Laguire was probably still waiting for me at the Cherry Street door, if she was watching, so I used a pay phone across the street to call Fish, buying Quinton time to get to my truck unseen—I hoped—while I got the directions.

Quinton was lurking in a dark corner of the garage and slipped into the Rover’s backseat when I unlocked it. He gave me a thin smile. “No sign of spooks or bugs.”

We picked up Fish and headed for the Tulalip reservation west of Marysville.

Fish told us about his grandmother as I drove and Quinton sat in the back, scowling at his own thoughts.

“We’re going to see Ella Graham. Now, she’s not actually my grandmother,” Fish explained. “We call her Grandma as a term of respect because she’s old and wise—and kind of scary. I’m not sure how old she actually is, but my mom says she’s about a hundred and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. She’s also… crotchety, I guess is the word, so you have to cater to her a little. Pretty old-school. If she had her way, she’d live in a long house with her whole family and smoke salmon over the fire. But she knows all the stories and legends and she’s got a good memory for stuff she saw or heard when she was younger. She said she’d talk to you, but she wanted a gift.” He held up the large goldwrapped box he’d had on his lap all this time. “My mom tipped me she’s a sucker for chocolate, so I got some Fran’s.”

“Give me the receipt and I’ll reimburse you,” I said.

Fish chuckled. “Heck no. I want to see how she eats them—they’re caramels. We’ll have to stop at the casino and get some cigars for her, if you want her really happy.”

“Cigars? You’re kidding.”

“Nope. She doesn’t smoke ‘em. She just likes to smell ‘em burning—says they smell like the old days. If we get lucky, Russell will have some Cubans he got from his cousin in Whistler and let us have one or two.”

I shook my head. “Cuban cigars and handmade chocolates. Not exactly the combo one expects to bring when visiting elderly ladies.”

“Not just any old lady—Grandma Ella. It won’t seem so strange when you meet her.”

I shrugged. “If you say so. Who’s Russell?”

“Russell Willet. He’s a buddy of mine from, hm… preschool, I guess. We ate mud together. He decided to work for the tribe. He’s a good manager, but he gets bored when things go well for too long, so he keeps changing jobs. At the moment, he’s working in the casino, but he’s always got contacts in everything.”

“Willet, Graham… I know one of the bigwigs in the tribal council is named McCoy. How come you ended up with the stereotyped name?”

“That’s my mom for you,” Fish replied, shrugging. “I think she was mad at me for giving her so much trouble in the womb. She didn’t even give me a name for three years—some Indians wait to name their kids until they do something of merit or ‘find’ a name themselves. It’s not a very common practice, but it’s still around. Mom just called me ‘dirty boy’ for a while—‘cause I was really good at getting filthy and tracking it all over everything. My original birth certificate just says ‘boy, Williams.’ ”

“You could have changed it,” I suggested.

“Nah. It was a little rough when I was a kid, but now I kinda like being Reuben Fishkiller. ‘Reuben Williams’ would have been boring.”

I was a little confused. “But you call yourself Fish, not Fish-killer.”

“Not all the time,” Fish said. “Most of the kids I grew up with have a totem name of some kind—an Indian name we earned—but we don’t usually use them outside the tribe. It takes some explaining and… well… it sounds kind of pretentious on most people. I mean, you’d look funny at some guy who came to hook up your cable and his name tag said ‘Swimming Bear,’ right?”

I chuckled. “I’d look pretty funny at anyone whose name was ‘swimming naked.’ ”

Fish sputtered and laughed. Quinton snickered and fell silent again as Fish and I chatted on, but Quinton’s mood didn’t have the same brooding feel after that.

When we got to Marysville, the casino was easy to spot. The Tulalip reservation started just to the west of 1–5 and went all the way to the waters of Puget Sound around Tulalip Bay. The area was beautiful once you got away from the highway, and when I’d first moved up to Washington, only a few billboards advertising bingo and cigarettes had given any indication there was commerce tucked away in the tree-covered hills of the rez. That wasn’t the case anymore.

The consolidated tribes of the Tulalip reservation had replaced their kitschy old casino and “trading post” with the largest casino complex in the state and a pair of massive malls—one anchored by a Wal-Mart and the other filled with designer-goods outlets—right up against the freeway where there had once been nothing but fields of creek-fed bracken and marsh grass. Now there was hardly a sign of the overgrown fields behind the new buildings and the massive lot that hosted the Boom City fireworks marketplace every year from mid-June through Independence Day.

Fish directed me to the main casino, which featured a pool with a realistic, life-size orca—the reservation’s emblem—rearing out of it and an imposing bronze statue of a native spear fisherman about to get his point across to a smaller creature a little farther up the driveway’s artificial river. I parked off to the side of the massive, triple-peaked portico with its colorful pyramid lights on top.

Construction of a hotel tower had begun beside the casino, and the site had a lightning-struck look in its winter weatherproofing.

“Its almost too bad they’re going to put up the hotel,” Fish said. “Until recently, you could see those lights on top of the casino for miles when they turned on the show. Drives the Marysville people crazy.” He chuckled and got out of the Rover, stepping carefully onto the ice-crusted asphalt of the parking lot. Quinton and I followed his example.

In spite of the development, the parking lot had a fair number of ghost images, flickering like film projected on smoke. Several of the spirits, both human and animal—and some were a bit of both—turned their night-sky eyes on us as we passed and watched us with curious expressions.

Quinton and I followed Fish into the building, through a soaring lobby of stone and murals and colored lights where the hotel’s reception desk would someday greet guests. Then down a wide corridor and into the gaming rooms with a ceiling of twinkling stars and sudden simulated thunderstorms. Circular banks of slot machines stood in treelike groves around the periphery, raising neon branches into stylized Art Deco canopies. The walls swam with murals of salmon, orca, otter, and trout, and the carpet was patterned with water currents and stones.

The space felt disorientingly like a drowned forest in which the patrons floated in a watery twilight. The building itself was so new it hardly had a ghost, but a few were there, as were the silvery striations of time and the blue and yellow lines of the Grey’s power grid. A pair of sly eyes in a vague, misty shape kept a close watch on us from beside a tree of nickel slots as Fish led us over to a small gift shop against one of the river walls.

A burly man in a three-piece suit rearranged a group of expensive watches under the glass countertop. He looked up as we entered and grinned, his eyes taking in everything in quick twitches. He had the hot, gold-sparked aura of a man with boundless energy. “Hey, Fishkiller!” he cried, closing up the case and dropping the keys into his vest pocket.

“Heya, Willet.”

“So, what is it?” Russell Willet asked. “Your mom’s birthday or something?”

“Nah. Taking these white eyes out to see Grandma Ella.”

“Whoa!” Willet peered at us as if we were exotic beasts. “What do you want to see Grandma Ella for—No, wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“Nope, y’don’t,” Fish said.

“But I bet I know what you want.” Willet turned and ducked down under the counter, rummaging through a cabinet. He brought out a wooden box a little larger and flatter than a shoe box. When he opened it, the smell of tobacco, cocoa, dark soil, and pepper floated up into the air. A red triangle around a little gold crown adorned the white label inside the lid, with the word “Montecristo” under it. Neat rows of cigars about as thick as my thumb and twice as long nearly filled the box. Willet carefully removed two of the cigars, which made an oily crackling sound as he touched them, and slipped them into a bag before he put the box away again.

He handed the bag over to Fish and admonished him with a raised finger and a twinkle in his eye, “All right, then. Those are for Grandma Ella—because I swear she’d put a curse on me or something if she knew I didn’t hand them over.

That is my personal high roller stash for buttering up the big winners. If you want your own, there’s plenty to choose from,” Willet added, pointing to a humidor cabinet on the back wall of the tiny shop.

“I don’t smoke,” Fish objected.

Willet looked at Quinton and me again; we both shook our heads. “Too bad,” he muttered. I started to reach for my wallet, but he put up his hands. “No, no. Can’t accept payment for a gift to Grandma Ella. Just tell her I sent them. I want to start off the year on her good side.”

Willet shooed us off to deal with a couple of other customers and we continued on our way.

Back in the Rover, Fish directed me deeper into the reservation. We headed down toward the water, into an area called Priest Point, where the Snohomish River emptied into Puget Sound. The building I parked near, at Fish’s command, was quietly lunatic—a collection of additions and repairs under which the original building couldn’t be detected, the whole perfectly painted and clean in the midst of its frost-withered yard and a fog of spirits. A narrow dock stuck out into the water a few dozen yards behind the house. I could make out a trail of Grey habit worn down to the end of the dock where generations of fishermen must have sat or stood to cast their lines.

The path to the door looked odd—frosted with Grey and wandering through sudden dislocations of time that looked like fence posts of neon yellow and sparkly blue. As I stepped forward, the smells of brackish water, cedar smoke, and some kind of hot fat sizzling over flame wafted over me in alternating waves. The short walk felt like miles across one of those fun house floors of sliding planks and bouncing, slipping slabs. I was grateful Fish was in front and couldn’t see how hard I concentrated on every footstep. Quinton stayed just behind me and when we reached the comparative stability of the front stoop, he touched the small of my back and caught my eye, giving me a questioning look.

I felt a little dizzy, but I murmured, “It’s all right. There’s just a lot of ghost stuff here.”

He nodded and redirected his immediate attention to the house, though he left his hand a moment longer on my back and a little spark of orange leapt from him in my direction and tingled a second on my skin like the brush of a blackberry leaf.

The front door lay up some steps and behind an enclosed porch with a deep overhang. Inside the porch, several sets of fishermen’s bright yellow foulweather gear hung on pegs above a bench with two pairs of muck boots under it.

Next to the foulies someone had hung a basket that looked like the oversized bell of a French horn and a shaggy cape of some kind with bits of shell sewn on in patterns obscured by the folds. Fish saw me studying the hairy garment.

“That’s a cedar cloak—it’s made of shredded cedar bark. I’m not sure anyone wears it anymore, but I don’t want to ask.”

I nodded, sure it would be a bad idea to remove the cloak and basket while their ghostly owner was standing and glowering beside them. The specter was clothed in the memory of the cape and wore the basket on his head, which made him look remarkably like the shaggy creature who’d brought me the zombie Friday night—if the shaggyman had been wearing a truncated cone for a hat.

Fish knocked on the door.

A voice like a chorus of seagulls called out in incomprehensible syllables. Fish called back and waited.

“Let yourself in!” the seagull voice screeched. “I’m an old woman, you young fool!”

Fish sighed and opened the door, waving us through ahead of him. The interior was bakery-hot and smelled of sage. Another row of hooks waited for our dry coats and we were glad to use them.

Fish pointed to a slatted wooden tray on the floor. “Take off your shoes and leave them there—she’ll rant for hours if we track mud on the floor.”

I was relieved to sit down to remove my boots—it gave me a moment to get used to the tumbling, twisted state of the Grey inside the house. Planes of time and ghosts of trees stuck up or out at tilted angles and a flight of salmon swam past, disrupted by the jerking loop of an owl that swooped through them in multiple exposure. Bits of people appeared, moved, and vanished as if seen in shattered shards of mirror hanging in the air or scattered across the discontinuous floors of every version of the house and land that had ever existed. Animate sparks of colorful energy broke from the grid and scampered loose through the chaos like animals and mythical sprites. I could barely separate the real house from the illusions, so odd was the construction ahead.

Finally, sock-footed and undressed of outer layers, we trooped through a pair of offset doorways, down a hall, and into a sudden calm—the energy within the Grey snapped into a grid of gleaming threads and all the riotous dislocation and overlapping phantasms vanished, leaving only a thin silver sheen to everything.

The nearly bare living room we entered must have been as large as the original house and a wall of windows faced south to show the Sound outside. There was a stone fireplace on each end of the room and both of them contained blazing logs of cedar and fir that perfumed the air and lent momentary shape to swirls of cold memory. Rugs covered the wooden floor that supported a couple of low, heavy chairs, a rocker, one sofa at one end of the room, and a scattered herd of red-and-black wool hassocks at the other.

The ancient woman sitting on a hassock near the western fire must have been huge once. Now her skin hung in folds over the jagged frame of her bones, and the long twin plaits of her hair looked like two white snakes coiled on the floor beside her and rising to whisper in her ears. Shapes like the wings of giant birds folded around her in the Grey, glinting with gold tips. She was wearing baggy, old, gray sweats and pink socks. A carved wooden cane poked out from under her cushion on one side.

She stared at us, her gaze sweeping over each in turn. Then she put out her hand.

“For me?”

Fish seemed startled, as if he had forgotten she could talk, and stumbled a step forward, holding out the gold-wrapped package with the bag of cigars on top.

“Yes, Grandma. We brought you some chocolate and Russell Willet sent you some cigars.”

Grandma Ella cackled. “Hah! Buttering me up.” Her sharp glance cut to me and Quinton. “You two. Go in the kitchen and fetch out that bread and coffee. Can’t tell tales without food and drink.” She pointed with her skeletal hand from which the skin hung loose as tattered fabric.

Wordlessly, Quinton and I went to the kitchen, leaving Fish caught in a net of Ella Graham’s cawing in Lushootseed—the language we’d heard so often among the Native Americans, both living and dead; the same language the young prostitute’s ghost had spoken to me.

Coffee and freshly baked bread were sitting on the kitchen counter. We gathered things together and put them on a tray, while Quinton said, “She’s… kind of scary, though I’m not sure why.”

“There’s a lot of uncanny stuff around this house. I don’t think she’s bad—I’m not even sure she knows about everything that’s gathered around her—but she is a bit unsettling.”

“That’s a word for it. Fish really jumped when she took notice of him.”

“Wouldn’t you? I mean, even if she’s not some kind of witch, the ghosts around here are paying her a lot of attention and there’s a bunch of other things—magical things—running around in here.”

“In here?” Quinton asked, his eyes a little wide as he pointed at the floor.

I thought about lying to ease his nerves, but instead I said, “Not so many in here and none in the living room.” OK, so I’d downplayed the number of things in the kitchen a little. “In the entry and outside there are a lot of bits of magic and… elemental things, I guess. They don’t seem to be interested in us except that we’re visiting Mrs. Graham and they’re interested in her.”

“Hurry up in there!” The old woman’s voice rang in the air of the kitchen without her raising her volume in the living room.

We both started a little, and then I took a deep breath and picked up the tray.

“You know, I flunked food service in college,” I said. “Let’s hope I don’t drop this thing.”

“I can take it,” Quinton offered, his hands full of other bits and bobs.

“I have the impression she expects it to be me. Remember what Fish said about catering to her old-school attitude.”

Quinton nodded. “Yeah, right.”

We marched back into the living room and put the tray down on the floor near the fire, which earned a gap-toothed grimace from Grandma Ella. There was no place else to put it at that end of the room and no place else to sit but on the strewn cushions, so that’s what we did. Fish sat beside the old lady—apparently to play the pan of translator and servant—while Quinton and I sat across the hearthstone from her. The whites of Fish’s eyes were showing.

“Hmph!” the old woman grunted, and I realized she was sucking on one of the chocolate-covered caramels from the now-opened gift box.

“Salty. Good.” Fish breathed a sigh of relief and loosened a little.

There was a ridiculous amount of rigmarole with distributing the bread and coffee and getting one of the cigars lit, putting the coffee pot near the fire so it stayed hot, finding just the right spot for the cigar so the smoke curled into the air properly and the tobacco stayed alight. Mrs. Graham grinned at us the whole time. Then she turned her sharp, dark eyes—barely etched by age—on me and I shivered even in the sweltering room.

“Sisiutl,” she said, her voice a mixture of serpent hiss and bird cry. She glowered as she said it, as if she’d just noticed something about me she didn’t like. The wing shapes around her head in the Grey heaved slowly upward and fell back down, folding tight around the old woman. “Sisiutl zeqwa…” She continued in Lushootseed for a sentence or two, and Fish translated while she stopped for a sip of coffee.

“You call him Sistu, but he’s properly called Sisiutl. A zeqwa—a monster—Sisiutl is a creature of the water—a sea serpent—that lives in the waters of the Sound,” Fish said. “He is the emblem of warriors who may bathe in his blood to harden their skin against the arrows of their enemies. He is the death of many seals and many men.”

“Sisiutl?” I asked, unable to keep an edge of amusement out of my voice at the sound of the word.

Fish looked nervous and the air near him turned the color of light through ferns. “That’s his proper name. It’s a Kwakiutl word—”

“Funny, is it?” Grandma Ella shrieked. “If you respect the creature you call him by his true name! He won’t heed your call if you name him something else.

Sisiutl is crafty and cruel and hungry. He tells the warrior, ‘Bathe in my blood and be strong,’ but he must not, or he’ll be turned to stone! A single drop is enough for strength. A foolish, greedy man will become a rock and Sisiutl will laugh at his fate. He will become a canoe and offer to take the hunter to the best seals, but if the hunter does not pay him a seal, the canoe becomes Sisiutl again and will devour the man. The man cannot escape him. Sisiutl is strong and fast. Three-headed is Sisiutl—the double-ended serpent.”

“Three heads?” I asked, not sure how a double-ended snake could have three heads.

“One head at each end like a snake—as quick and as vicious, with a viper’s tongue and horned brow. In the middle”—she covered her sunken belly with one hand—“a man’s face with mustaches like a sturgeon, horns, and two clawed hands beside it. This is its true head, from which Sisiutl speaks. Between his scales grows hair like cedar strings and he can change his form at will. In water, he swims faster than the seal, faster than orca, but on land he is slower and moves like a snake. He is the guardian of Qamaits’s pool outside the house that leads to the land of the gods, and worthy men may call upon his help, but if they fail to pay him, he will eat.”

“Who or what is Qamaits?” I asked. You’d think I’d be pretty used to the weird and unsettling by that time, but the oddity of the house and its occupant threw me and left me feeling a bit at sea.

Grandma Ella waved my question aside and glared at Fish as she helped herself to more bread.

Fish bit his bottom lip before replying. “She’s another zeqwa, an ogress who eats children. She’s kind of like Baba Yaga and she lives in a magical house.

She’s got a bunch of other names, too, but all her aspects are kind of half-magic, half-monster. Umm… I’m trying to remember the rest of the legend about the house…”

Ella Graham snorted. “See what leaving your people causes? Ignorance!” She returned her glare to me as Fish blushed and lowered his head. “Inside the house of Qamaits lies the staircase to the sky—where the gods live. You can climb to the sky through a hole, like the sisters who married stars did, but that won’t bring you to the gods. If you want to talk to the gods in the sky, you go up the stairs, past Qamaits and past her guardian, Sisiutl. If you please the gods, they will bless your hunting with his help. But if you anger them, squander their gifts, or do not feed their helper well, the gods will be angry and let Sisiutl eat you.”

“Is there more than one Sisiutl?” I asked.

She scoffed. “No! He is the Sisiutl.”

Now came the crazy bit, but I figured there wasn’t much crazier than threeheaded sea serpents that eat people and turn into canoes, so I dove in. “What would happen if the—if Sisiutl got loose from his pool?”

“He would eat. As he ate after the earthquake.”

“Which earthquake?”

“After the Second World War. I had been worried for my sons but they came home safe. Then Sisiutl shook the ground and ate the men he found there. Horrible. To survive the killing in Europe only to be eaten at home. We didn’t have the casino and the houses and the shops then. Many people went away from the reservation to work. When Sisiutl came, our people were the only ones who knew it was him. It was difficult to find Qamaits and make her call Sisiutl back to the pool. If Sisiutl had been hunting men, the gods would have been furious, but he was only hungry after so long asleep. No hunters were fed to Sisiutl that day and only Qamaits could put him back into the pool.”

“Where was Sisiutl’s pool? Where did your people send him?”

“It was in the garbage dump, then. But there’s no water there now. When you fight Sisiutl, you’ll have to find another pool for him or send him back to the gods.”

I was taken aback. “Why would I fight Sisiutl?”

Ella Graham spat into the fire and started to get up from her cushion. Fish jumped up to help her to her feet.

Clutching her cane, she glared at us, batted Fish aside, and hobbled to the fieldstone mantle above the eastern fireplace, her white braids dragging on the floor and her loose flesh swaying like weeds in water. She took something off the shelf and returned. Fish helped her down.

“Get me another cushion, Reuben,” she ordered, and Fish gave her his. She sank down and over, so she was reclining on her side, her face gone waxy from some pain. She held out a long brown and gold feather toward me. “You take this, Pheasant Woman. You’ll need it to unpick the knots of dead things.”

I was flabbergasted and shot an irritated glance at Fish. He shook his head rapidly, eyes wide, scared. “What makes you think—?” I started.

Grandma Ella cawed a nasty laugh that made me bristle. “You’re just like Pheasant. Pheasant’s daughter died but he loved her so much he went to the land of the dead to bring her back. He couldn’t see the dead with his open eyes, only when he closed them, but he couldn’t keep his eyes closed and he stepped on the dead and made them angry. They tried to send him away, but Pheasant didn’t want to leave his daughter. He wanted to stay, but the land of the dead is not for the living. So one eye died, and Pheasant sees the dead through one eye and the living through the other. Like you. Take this,” she repeated, thrusting the pheasant tail feather at me again.

Reluctantly, I took the feather and felt her shudder as I touched it. It didn’t seem special, but I could see the wings that folded around Ella Graham unfurl and refold, glittering—they reminded me of something…

“You remind me of Grandpa Dan,” I whispered, unable to keep the words back.

Ella Graham snorted. “Dan! A horse for spirits to ride. He cannot stop Sisiutl,” she sneered and pulled away from me, glowering. “You think I don’t hear the whispers of our ancestors saying Sisiutl comes to the land between? Hm? Our people have grown weak and small in numbers, and Sisiutl feeds on too many. Who but you to gather spirits and send him and his spawn away again, Pheasant? Now you go away. Get out of my house. You, too, Reuben. Come back when the dead sleep properly.” Her voice began fading and her eyes dimmed as she continued.

“Bring more chocolates. And tell that rascal Russell I forgive him for sinking my boat.” She dropped her cheek onto the cushion and let out a sigh, closing her eyes, and the house seemed to sigh also, becoming subdued and darker inside than the darkness falling outside would account for.

The three of us exchanged startled glances. Fish put his hand in front of her mouth and looked terrified. Then he slumped in relief.

“She’s just asleep. But we’d better go.”

We all agreed on that point, struggled to our feet, and shuffled out through the topsy-turvy Grey and the cloud of spirits to my truck in nervous silence. No one said a word until we were back on the main road out of the rez. Quinton had returned to his brooding and Fish kept casting nervous glances at me as I drove.

When I had the truck safely back up on 1–5, I shot him a look. “What?” I demanded, half irritated but mostly curious what made him so skittish now when he’d gone along so well before.

“Do you really think Sisiutl is killing those people?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I mean—wow. Uh… ancient Indian monsters… umm… chowing down on homeless people in Pioneer Square? Its kind of… kind of…”

“Outlandish?”

“Nuts.”

“It’s your monster, Fish; your culture. If you and Russell really think Grandma Ella can curse you for sinking her boat—even if you only think it a little bit and late at night—is it more nuts to imagine that a monster might be real—just a little bit and late at night—down in the Square where things get strange?”

He didn’t look at me. “And you…” He gave a nervous giggle, which was pretty funny coming out of a stocky guy who looked more like an outlaw biker gone straight than a doctor. “You see dead people?”

“I hate that movie,” I said, truly nettled and frowning—I knew that was unfair, but still… Then I nodded, keeping my eyes on the road. “Yeah. I see dead people. Things that linger, things that go bump in the night. Mostly harmless.”

“But not Sisiutl.”

“If it is Sisiutl.”

“You seemed pretty sure.”

I made myself shrug. “It was the only lead I had. The information isn’t a complete match, so it’s not an absolute.”

“Lets assume it is,” said Quinton from the backseat. “For the sake of discussion. A legendary, three-headed sea serpent that likes to pretend to be a canoe and eats people, and he lives in a pond outside the house of some kind of goddess ogress who has a staircase to the gods.”

“That sounds pretty damned dumb to me,” I said.

“You’re just stuck on the name.”

“Its silly.” I realized that it really bugged me. “Something that eats people and gnaws on the remains, leaves zombies in the underground and breaks through four-foot-thick cement walls ought to have a scarier name than ‘Sisiutl.’ ”

“Its up there with ‘Son of Sam’ and ‘Baby Face Nelson,’ right?”

“All right, Mr. Physics—what about the shape-shifting? You’re the guy with the ‘there are no werewolves’ conviction. If Sisiutl is responsible—if we accept that this legendary, three-headed sea serpent is eating homeless people and spitting out the parts—don’t we have to accept that it turns into a canoe, or a dog, or a… rat the size of Cleveland, too? How does that fit?”

“It doesn’t change shape.”

“Whoa! Come back?”

Fish wrenched his head around to stare between the seats at Quinton. “What?”

“It doesn’t actually change shape,” Quinton reiterated. “Not if it has a corporeal form. It can’t—or at least not quickly and safely. We have to assume a corporeal form, since it makes holes in things and has teeth that can and do rend flesh. It eats people—doesn’t seem to be much doubt it gnaws on them, so the missing have probably taken a visit to the literal belly of the beast. So if we assume ‘Sisiutl’ as the cause, we assume ‘corporeal’ as the default expression. With me?”

“Yeah,” said Fish.

“Since it cannot change shape, it follows that it does not change shape, but it may create the illusion of shape change. It wants you to see a self-propelled seal hunting canoe and, if you’re the right kind of person to see Sisiutl at all—and it probably knows if you are—then you see a canoe.”

“What if you’ve not the right type to see Sisiutl?”

“Then you see death. It eats you while you’re freaking out about seeing a giant two-headed, three-faced snake god with horns and a mustache like a bottomfeeder.”

“Sisiutl isn’t a god…” Fish objected.

“No, but if you weren’t a Tulalip Indian—”

“Tulalip is the name of the reservation,” Fish corrected. “There’s a group of Salish tribes on the rez, but it’s named for the bay, not the tribes. All the tribes from Vancouver Island down to the middle of Oregon are some kind of Salish—even Sacajawea’s tribe back in the Lewis and Clark days—so you can’t call the place ‘Salish’ or the other tribes would be pissed.”

I could see Quinton nod in the rearview mirror. “All right. Sorry.”

“No problem. Go on.”

“OK. So, what would you think Sisiutl was if you were like me and it came slithering down an alley looking hungry and saying ‘I’m a canoe!’ in Salish?”

“Lushootseed—that’s what we call our language. Hm…” Fish mumbled, thinking. “Yeah, I see your point. I’d think I was seeing a giant mutant snake, probably, ‘cause that’s what I know—snakes, not sea monsters and not Sisiutl.

Huh. But no one’s said anything about giant mutant snakes in the alleys around Pioneer Square.”

“No, they haven’t,” Quinton agreed. “Because the people who see it either die or think they must be hallucinating. It only comes out at night when there aren’t a lot of people and it hunts in the tunnels under the streets or in the alleys where it’s dark. Grandma Ella said it was clever. It must be clever enough to stay away from high-risk conditions.”

“What if it’s not Sisiutl?” I asked.

Both men frowned.

“Hm…” Quinton muttered. “That could be, but there haven’t been any leads to other monsters and Sisiutl as Ella Graham described it fits the facts we have without throwing any out—two big steps in the right direction. Its appearances match the pattern we noted in the paper and that Fish found in the morgue records and the fact that the patterns of deaths halted when Indians took action lends a lot of credence to the Sisiutl theory. And the ghost said it was Sistu.”

I nodded this time. “She did.”

Fish goggled at me and I feared he was getting a little hysterical. “A ghost told you about Sisiutl? You called me because a ghost told you to?”

“No. I called because an Indian told me there was a monster that ate people during the right outbreak of historic deaths. She happened to be a ghost and I find ghosts to be very unreliable sources—they lie a lot. I needed a living Indian to tell me what a Sistu—that’s what she called it—was and what it was capable of, so I could decide if I thought the lead was viable.”

“She wouldn’t call Sisiutl by name where he might hear her!” Fish cried, on the verge of panic. “Didn’t you get what Grandma Ella said? If you call him by the wrong name, he won’t come, but if you use his real name…”

I glanced at him and then through the mirror to Quinton. “Maybe we shouldn’t then.”

We found ourselves casting nervous looks at each other and out the windows, suddenly paranoid that we’d attract our death.