Underground

CHAPTER 16

Mara let us in. She nodded to Quinton and gave me a keen look that wasn’t a smile but wasn’t anything else, either. I didn’t know what had brought on this distance—unless she was still upset about Albert—but her invitation inside was distracted and formal. “Do come in. Ben’s upstairs. I’ll be keeping Brian busy down here, so he’ll not trouble you.”

I gazed hard at her, trying to figure out what was wrong, but she’d cloaked herself in deliberate blankness. I glanced deep into the Grey for any sign of Albert—thinking he might be the cause of her coolness—but I could find no sign of him in the house and only the hard, red ball of the trap Mara had wrapped him in the last time, still clinging to the roof under the twisting gold lines of her protective spells.

“Thanks. Mara,” I started, but she waved the rest of my words aside.

“Not now, Harper. I’ve a lot to think on,” she said, and hurried off, worrying her bottom lip. I looked at Quinton and shrugged. We headed for the stairs and up to Ben’s office beneath the eaves.

Ben was doodling and drinking tea when we entered the attic. He jumped up from the desk, not quite knocking his head against the low ceiling.

“Oh, hello! Sorry, sorry—kind of jumpy since the Albert incident.”

“Why?” I asked. “Has he done something else?”

“No, no, no,” Ben babbled. “But I keep thinking he will and I’m a little stircrazy anyhow. I feel like I’m in Mara’s way. I thought I’d rework my lesson plans since we’ve lost almost a week of classes, but… I just can’t concentrate on them. Oh, who’s this?” he added, finally turning his attention to Quinton.

“This is Quinton. He brought me a… an interesting case and we could use your help. It’s likely to be dangerous, though.”

Ben seemed to perk up. “Is it a Grey thing?”

“Yes. We’ve been looking into the deaths of some homeless in Pioneer Square—”

“I saw some news articles about that,” Ben said.

I nodded. “The ones that said bodies had been found apparently chewed by dogs, right?”

“Yeah. Not dogs, I take it?”

I shook my head and sat down on a clear spot on the office sofa. “Not dogs.”

“Tea!” Ben exclaimed.

Quinton and I both stared at him, startled by the outburst.

Ben blinked back. “Sorry. Tea. Would you guys like some? I have a pot up here; I can get more glasses.”

I considered saying no, but it was a little chilly in the office and Ben seemed to want to do something. “Tea is great, Ben. We can wait.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said, clucking out and bounding down the steep steps so the stairwell rang behind him.

I tugged at the elastic knee brace under my jeans as Quinton cleared some space beside me. He looked at the spines of the books as he lifted them off the seat.

“I can’t even read half these titles and its not just because they’re in German and Russian and… I don’t know what language that is… He’s got some really old books here.” He had a gleam in his eye as he flipped opened a venerable leather-bound tome stamped in faded gold Cyrillic. “Wow. The publication date on this is 1789. That was a hell of a year.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. The French Revolution started in 1789—among a lot of other events that changed the world.” He caught my bemused look. “Hey, I was always good with dates and numbers. Mom was an engineer and Dad was a spy—you pick up skills,” he added with a shrug.

“So, the spy thing… that’s the family business?” I asked.

“Dad’s side,” he said, putting the book down with care and sitting next to me. “I was kind of my mom’s kid and I got into computers and science and math early on because of her—got the nickname because of her, too. I didn’t see my dad much, so the spy thing seemed sexy and exciting—which you can’t say for engineering—and that’s how I ended up working for the government in the first place. I wish I’d stuck to electronics.”

The sound of Ben’s heavy feet on the stairs cut the conversation short before I could ask, “What nickname?”

It took a bit of faffing about to get everything distributed and settled again—Ben’s Russian tea habits being almost as fussy as any formal Brit’s—before Quinton and I could get Ben’s attention.

I curled my hands around the hot glass in its metal holder and noticed the scabs and scrapes from the previous night’s narrow escape. It seemed strangely distant until the memory of fear rushed back in for a moment and made my gut twist. I sipped my tea and caught my breath as Quinton cast a questioning glance my way.

I shook him off with a small, reassuring smile. Ben was watching me, too, but his look was more plainly curious.

“All right. So. These poor homeless folks,” he prompted.

“Aside from the dead, there are several missing and they all seem to be victims of the same thing. They’re being eaten by a legendary Native American monster and, aside from killing people, it also makes zombies,” I said. Ben was capable of rambling for hours, so I figured I’d better nip that tendency in the bud by cutting straight to the bone of the matter.

Ben’s face lit up. “Really?” Then he shook himself and his face went white under his dark beard. “Oh my God, that’s horrible!”

“There’s a lot more to it,” I said. “This monster, Sisiutl, seems to be under someone’s control—partial control. We need to catch both the monster and the man and get rid of the monster. But we’re here because we got up close and personal with Sistu—it’s a safer name to use—last night and it seems to talk in a whole glut of languages, bits and pieces all at once. I think we’d be a lot safer if we can talk to it. It’s clever enough to pull pranks and make deals to hunt in exchange for food, so if we can talk to it there’s always a possibility we can bargain with it—if it doesn’t eat us first. It also seems to cast illusions of shape-shifting. I’m not sure what’s going on and I’d like to be better equipped the next time we run into it. So I thought we should ask you for any ideas about the nature of the beast.”

Ben glowed gold and sparkly with intellectual pleasure. “You’ve both seen it?”

“Not just us. Plenty of people who didn’t know what they saw, or who died right afterward,” I said.

That made Ben a little grimmer as he asked, “What does it look like? What kind of forms does it throw?”

“It’s a two-ended sea serpent—kind of like a hairy snake with a head at each end and a human face in the middle. Its the human face that does the talking.

The snake ends just hiss and bite. It shows various forms—I saw Ouroboros, a gorgon, a multi-headed dog with snakelike necks for each head, a dragon, and a kind of snake with hands. Oh, its default form seems to have clawed hands near the human face and horns on the snake heads. And it sometimes acts as a guard to the house of the gods, sometimes helps hunters and warriors, but its also a bit of a trickster and very, very hungry.”

I thought Ben was going to dance with glee, once again caught up in the excitement of his favorite subject. “Let me think, let me think,” he muttered, scrabbling in his books and papers. He found a pen and made a bunch of quick notes on the back of a legal pad that was already full of other notes on the pages. “Repetition of the snake theme… guardian… warrior… helper… hungry… multi-headed… Oh, man. Its the universal monster.”

“Huh,” Quinton and I both said.

“Well, you know your Campbell, right? His ideas about monomyth—universal themes in myth and religion—and universal heroes?”

We both nodded—it’s hard to avoid Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in college.

“OK, well… he’s a bit overblown and people always forget his sources—Joyce, Mann, Frobenius, Spengler—but there is good support for the idea of universal—or at least widespread and recurring—themes in myth. What you’ve encountered is a great example. The guardian, the serpent god, the helper and slayer of warriors. It comes up again and again. So… my guess is that the shapes it shows are the various forms by which it’s known in different cultures and it can speak the languages of all of those cultures which call it into being.”

Quinton interrupted. “I only saw the one form—the double-ended snake with the head in the middle.”

“Oh?” Ben looked puzzled. “Why is that do you think?”

Quinton scoffed. “Because that’s the shape I was expecting. Harper is the one who sees magic things. I just see what’s there to be seen.”

“Did you have any idea what you might see before you encountered it?” Ben asked.

“Yes,” Quinton replied. “We’d been told by an old Indian woman what it was and what it looked like.”

Ben grinned. “Clearly the monster’s appearance fulfills the expectations of the viewer. Of course Harper sees multiple forms—she sees the magic, so she sees it all. Wonderful! I hadn’t thought of it.”

“Well, it’s fine to see it, just not too close,” I said. “It’s big and it’s got lots of teeth in those heads. If we run into it again—and we have to if we’re to get rid of it—we need to keep it from eating us before we can send it away.

It understands English and speaks a little, but mostly it spews words in dozens of languages at once, which makes it hard to understand.”

“I’m sure it would pick just one if you get its attention long enough,” Ben suggested.

“That’s kind of tricky,” I protested. “Its default form seems to be the native legend—the double-ended sea serpent—and that version doesn’t speak English. Also, I don’t think any of those forms are really native English speakers. Unless it turns out to be Grendel in disguise, too.”

Ben shook his head. “No, Grendel isn’t that archetype and he would have spoken Old English at best, not modern.”

“Well, then…”—I hesitated to ask, since I was already in the doghouse with one member of the Danziger family—“would you come with us to talk to it? Assuming we can catch it? We need to figure out where it came from and who controls it. There’s also an ogress around somewhere who can call it back to her side, and we’d like to send the whole bunch back to the gods and keep any more homeless from being lunch.”

“Well, you can’t compel gods or their helpers; you can only argue with them and get them to agree to leave,” Ben said. “You’ll have to gain the agreement of this ogress to send the monster home after you separate the monster from whoever is currently using its powers.”

“We’re not sure who controls it,” Quinton reminded me, “but we can find out. But we’ll have to catch the thing eventually and it’s not likely we can just throw a rope around its neck and drag it to the zoo. We may need to persuade it.”

“Legends are full of that kind of lawyering—you can’t just banish power from the gods and you can’t kill gods or their guardians. If it’s a clever monster, bargaining will appeal to it,” Ben agreed, nodding. “Yes, I’ll go. I’d be stupid not to. I’ve never seen an incorporeal beastie before.”

“This thing is not incorporeal,” I warned. “It’s got real teeth and they chew through real concrete walls. And if anything happens to you on this excursion, Mara will probably kill me.”

“She’s not like that.”

“She seems plenty upset with me at the moment.”

“I think she’s more upset with herself—we both feel a bit like Ted Bundy’s neighbors. ‘He was such a nice ghost, so quiet…’ Its unsettling and we both wonder what else we may have missed seeing.” Ben raised his eyebrows at me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know of anything else. And I only suspected Albert because his behavior didn’t add up in my mind. So far, my experience with lively ghosts has been predominantly unpleasant.”

“I know…”

“I don’t think this monster business is going to be a lot more fun, but it’s at least something I don’t have to chase on my own. So,” I added, standing up, “you guys ready to go catch monsters?”

Ben stood up and put his glass aside. “I don’t have anything I’d rather be doing. I’ll let Mara know I’m going. I’ll meet you in the hall.”

Quinton and I nodded and we all trooped down the first flight of stairs. Ben peeled off to find Mara on the second floor while Quinton and I continued to the first.

As we stood in the entry hall, I concentrated on buttoning my coat. “So… what about the nickname?” I asked.

“The—? Oh,” he said, remembering our interrupted conversation upstairs. “My mother’s name is Quinn.”

“And you’re Quinn’s son. Quinn’s son becomes Quinton… That’s a terrible pun.”

“It stuck for a while. But my dad never used it—I don’t know if he even knew it existed—and I never used it around my employers. Everyone there called me J.J.”

Once again, Ben’s appearance was ill—or perhaps well—timed and we dropped the conversation to pile into the Rover and head to Pioneer Square in search of Sisiutl, or his hunting buddy—whichever we got to first.

I let Quinton and Ben out at Second and Cherry so I could scout a parking space Laguire’s watchers wouldn’t pick up instantly and Ben and Quinton could walk down the Cherry Street side of the Square. I found a space on Western and sat in the truck a few minutes to check my cell phone for the first time in twenty-four hours.

I wasn’t surprised to see that the intrusion alarm had signaled my phone about six p.m. on Monday. They’d probably walked into the building and hidden until most of the offices cleared out, and then picked my less-than-stellar locks and been on their way in minutes. I’d have to be very careful what I said in my office for a while. I made note of the other numbers and messages on a pad of paper and shut the phone down again, removing the battery as Quinton had instructed. It was a pain, but I couldn’t risk being stalked by Laguire and her minions. With no other way to find me—and through me, Quinton—I hoped they’d keep their eyes on my office and not start prowling around, stirring up trouble.

I walked up into Pioneer Square and found Quinton and Ben standing by the Chief Sealth bust, talking to Fish. I joined the cabal.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Grandma Ella called. Which she doesn’t do. So when she said I should come down here and find you, I figured I’d better… come looking for zeqwas.” He blushed and the blanket of color around him flashed in swirls of yellow and green—nerves and uncertainty. “I was thinking… I know… it’s crazy, but… there’s some power in belief and if… someone thinks there might be a monster after them, maybe, in a way, there is. Maybe… maybe there are things I could do to help you. With my people down here. I’m a bad Indian but I speak Lushootseed, at least.”

I nodded, not sure what to say.

“Fish has been talking to Grandpa Dan and some of the other Native Americans down here,” Quinton said. “They don’t think we’re crazy.”

“Grandpa Dan said it was their duty to be attentive—whatever that means,” Fish added. “And that we’d be granted the aid of the spirits to stop the killing.”

“Someone besides us thinks Sistu is eating people?” I asked.

Quinton replied, “They’re not sure of that specifically yet, but they do think there’s something magical going on—they’re getting superstitious and scared.”

“They’re not all scared,” Fish corrected. “Some are mad. They don’t want a monster on the loose. It’s a bad sign. They want it to go away. They”—he looked a little embarrassed again—“they said they’ll help when the time comes. I don’t know what they think they can do…”

“Did any of them have a crow with them?” I asked.

Fish gave a nervous laugh. “There are crows all over around here, with all the garbage from the restaurants. Of course there were crows.” The apple green color of his aura got brighter as he got more nervous. I’d have bet money there had been crows—and ravens, too—in the thick of that discussion, listening in like crafty old women and carrying off their information afterward. It appeared that Quinton and I were no longer the only people taking this seriously. I also wondered how a single phone call from Ella Graham had convinced him we weren’t nuts and wound his nerves so tightly—he’d been on the verge of rejecting the whole thing by the time we’d dropped him off Monday night.

I smiled at him. “I’m glad you came. Let’s go find a monster.”

Ben and Fish stood watch while Quinton and I popped in and out of the underground, looking for any sign of Sisiutl. We had no luck. Even in the monster’s lair, there was nothing, though there was some sign there might be more zombies somewhere around. Recent casts of the Grey zombie nets and a hand that was still fresh enough to ooze blood made me fear someone else was missing and unable to give up the ghost properly. We came back up into the alley knowing time was against us; Sisiutl was moving.

“It doesn’t look like it’s abandoned its den,” I said as we rejoined Ben and Fish, “but where does something like that hide in broad daylight? Where is it now?”

“I don’t know,” Quinton replied. “Just guessing, I’d say it’s sticking close to its master, so we need to find him.”

“Who, what?” Fish asked, looking from one to the other of us.

“Its not down there. We think it’s on the move,” I explained. “It’s been cagey so far, so if its moving, its either following its master, or following his orders.”

“Master? I’m confused. Qamaits is Sistu’s mistress,” Fish said.

“I should say we need to find whoever currently has Sistu on loan from Qamaits. We think someone did her a favor and she lent them the monster’s aid in hunting—like Grandma Ella said. But so far, I haven’t seen any of our likely choices for the role.”

“That’s kind of unusual,” Quinton added. “Most of these guys usually hang out right around here or over in Oxy Park.”

We all walked down to Occidental Park. Under the glass picnic house, enjoying the beam of the sun through the panes in the comparative heat of 34 degrees—the warmest day since the storm—we found Zip and Sandy still standing watch over Tall Grass, who was babbling and looking sick by turns.

“Hey,” Quinton greeted them. “Have you guys been here all night?”

“Of course not,” said Sandy. “Grass didn’t want to sleep inside, so we took turns.”

Fish muttered something in Lushootseed and Grass jerked his attention to him, letting out a torrent of the language too fast for my uneducated ears to make out as anything but shushes and trills. Fish was taken aback and stared at the older man, crouching down beside him to talk.

We all watched a moment as the two Indians conversed in rapid harmonies of speech.

“I wonder if he knows where it went,” Ben said. “That’s a pretty intense conversation.”

“Where what went?” Sandy asked.

“Um… Tanker. Or Lass,” I supplied, speaking the first names on my tongue, pretty sure I didn’t want to ask Sandy if she’d seen any snake monsters with her zombies.

“Lass took off,” Zip said. “Tanker, too.”

“Took off for where?” Quinton demanded.

“I dunno. I in’t Lass’s buddy; dun’t go drinkin wid im much. Not like Tandy.”

“Hey… Do you know if Lass was with Tandy the night Tandy disappeared? Thanksgiving I guess it was,” Quinton asked, forcing himself to lower his intensity, which roared around his head in tangerine spikes.

“Sure was. Hit me up for smokes—traded me a swig on t’J.D. Dunno where they got it…”

Ben and I didn’t know which conversation to watch.

“Did you see them later that night?” Quinton asked.

“Nah. They dun’t come by me. I was down to the Union fer some turkey afore, but Is long gone to bed whenever t’ey finished off that bottle.”

Quinton shot me a glance. Then he turned back to Zip. “And you don’t know where Lass is now?”

“No, I dun’t! I said so, din’t I?”

“He said he was going to the Showboat,” Sandy said. “I don’t know why he’d say that, though. They tore it down in ‘94. But Tanker was taking Bella to the U, so maybe Lass was following them. I can’t say I like Lass’s behavior lately. He’s obsessed with that dog!”

“Showboat?” I wasn’t as familiar with the campus as I was with Pioneer Square and some of the neighborhoods.

“Showboat Theater. On Showboat Beach on the south end of the campus,” Sandy explained. “It burned in the eighties and they left it for years because of the asbestos. They finally tore it down in 1994.”

“Why would Tanker go to a torn-down theater?”

“He didn’t go there,” Fish said, looking up from his conversation with Tall Grass. “He went to the University dock. Grass says Tanker was going to try to get a job on the research vessel’s dock crew. He says Lass and… Sistu followed him. Grass’s pretty freaked out. He says he saw it following Lass like a dog…”

“Shadow of a dog,” Grass corrected. Then he hid his face in his hands and started shaking.

“Oh, shit,” Quinton muttered. “It’s Lass.”