Underground

CHAPTER 17

We bundled into the Rover and went after Lass. The three of us who’d seen the bodies had no desire to see another. Ben caught our fear and started blurting nervous questions. I just concentrated on getting us there as fast as possible in the fog that was boiling up from the icy water of the lakes and canal, muttering pleas to whatever gods might bother to listen that we not find another body.

“What’s going on?” Ben demanded. “Who are we chasing?” “Lassiter,” I replied, making the connections. “He’s one of the homeless guys and the monster is trailing him around like a faithful hound. He also sent Quinton and me to Sistu’s lair last night, and neither of us—who spend a ton of time around the Square and thought we knew every inch of it—knew about the back door to the comfort station,” I started, reconstructing my thoughts out loud. “What comfort station?” “The one under Pioneer Square.” I turned a glance at Quinton.

“That’s what the revenant on the tour meant—a place with no comfort, between the tides. What are the chances that Lass, who came to you worried about monsters following him in the underground, would know a bolt-hole you didn’t know about? The hole was camouflaged and there was no evidence anyone had ever used that bit of the underground as a flop. And if Lass—the paranoid—knew about such a snug little hole, why would he be sleeping in the bricks and risking the wrath of Tanker and Bella—whom he is now chasing?”

“How would he get control of Sisiutl?” Fish asked. “There has to be a gift made, not just a favor.”

“A gift? What sort of gift?” I demanded.

“A token from Qamaits to signify his command of—Sistu.”

“Well… if it’s following him like a dog, maybe Qamaits gave him the thing’s leash—it must have a leash of some kind; that’s how these things work,” Ben said.

“Why would he want the stunner if he had the monster’s leash?” Quinton asked.

“If he doesn’t speak Lushootseed, he might not know what the ogress had given him. He might not understand that Sistu meant him no harm since he wouldn’t understand what she told him,” Fish said.

Quinton shook his head. “If Lass understands Lushootseed, that’s news to me.”

“So he wouldn’t understand the monster was a gift, not something stalking him.”

“Probably not. But the stun stick wouldn’t have been much help against that kind of monster. So why did he come to me?”

As we turned in near the oceanography buildings, I made a suggestion. “Given Lassiter’s erratic behavior, I’m not sure he knew it wouldn’t help, or that he understood how Sistu operated. He might have thought it just ate whoever it wanted but hadn’t yet attacked him for some reason.”

“He seems to have gotten the hang of it now,” Quinton said in disgust. “He’s bringing the monster right to Tanker and Bella—he hates them—and you know he’d harm them both if he thought he had the tool to do it.”

“I agree. It’s the known dead who are Lassiter’s victims—those are the ones Sistu killed for him. The others, they were just food for Sistu. The legend says you have to keep the monster fed or the gods get pissed off,” I thought aloud.

“It also says you shouldn’t abuse their gifts,” Fish added as I turned into a parking lot. “Qamaits isn’t a goddess, but she still lent out their pet. A couple of days ago I wouldn’t have taken this seriously, but… I may be changing my mind. These legends are kind of specific. This Lass guy will have to answer to the gods for messing up or there’ll be hell to pay.”

The area was under construction here and there behind the medical center—the inevitable expansion of a growing campus—and once I’d parked the truck, we had to run around the west end of the South Campus Center buildings to get down to San Juan Road and the oceanography dock. My cranky knee protested the whole way.

There was no sign of Lass or Tanker at the dock. Quinton skidded to a halt beside me in the thickening mist seeping off Portage Bay. “Where is he?” he snapped. “That damned Lass…”

“Where did the Showboat used to be?” I asked.

Ben came panting up behind us. “To the west a little… that open area we passed… near the gate. We’d have seen him as we came down the street.”

Fish joined us, looking a little ill from the exertion. He bent and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

A dog yelped and growled in the gathering mist.

“That’s got to be Bella,” Quinton said, pointing east toward the salmon fishery.

I pushed normal aside and bolted forward into the Grey that was for once easier to see as the normal filled with thick white vapor. I ran toward two knots of bright life circling each other in between the hard lines of the fishery’s upright towers. Quinton and Ben followed with Fish trailing behind. As I pounded across the ground, I put my hand behind my back to check my pistol and couldn’t put my hand on it. It was there—I could feel it pressing into the back of my right hip—but I couldn’t grab it and panic spiked through me—it seemed as if I was too far into the Grey to grab hold of something as normal as a gun. If Lass had his stunner I stood a chance—though unpleasant—against him, but I had none against Sisiutl without the gun to drive it back long enough to run like hell, and I didn’t think anyone but Quinton had any other weapons on them.

The dog let out a yelp as a white arc dashed between the two bright figures ahead. One of the knots of light spun and began to dart away. The other started to chase it.

In the whispering and muttering of the Grey I heard someone else call out in the normal. “Lass!” Quinton shouted beside me. “Lass, don’t!”

I slammed back into the normal with a jolt and skidded to a halt just beyond the spawning pool and a few feet from Lass, who was turning to stare at Quinton and the rest of us. I started to try again for the gun, but Quinton put a light warning hand on my elbow, keeping his eyes on Lass the whole time. He took a slow step toward him while Ben and Fish stumbled to swaying stops nearby. The power grid of the Grey hummed with tension and seemed to color even the normal mist red.

Lass, half crouched and tight as a spring, had whirled to stare at us, his eyes darting over each of us in turn. The little shock stick he held arced and crackled spastically as he twitched with fear and drug withdrawal and squeezed it in his unsteady fist.

“Q-man,” he mumbled, as if he’d struggled to put the name and face together.

A cloud of sickly olive green shattered by bolts of orange swirled around him in the Grey, and he seemed to have a pair of dark shadows where Quinton had none. I wondered for an instant about Ben and Fish, behind me, but I didn’t turn to look. Lass straightened up a little, his fear easing a touch at seeing a familiar face. “Man… I—what you want?”

“Where’s Tanker?” Quinton asked.

“I don’t know, man! I was—I don’t know. That dog. That dog, man, it was trying to kill me! All dogs try to kill me. They hate me! They follow me around!”

Quinton eased closer to Lass, the long sweep of his coat meeting the creeping fog and concealing his movement. “The dog’s gone. She won’t be bothering you for a while. I don’t think you’ll need the stunner any more.” He held out his hand, still at a distance. “You can give it back to me now.”

“No! The other one’s still out there!” he shouted, stumbling a step backward in fright. “The big… the big thing, the snake-dog! It’s gonna eat me, man. It’s gonna tear me up like Tandy! Got its eye on me. It’s gonna eat me!”

Quinton shifted to the right, herding Lass into a blank wall. “That why you sent me and Harper to its nest? So it would eat someone else instead?”

“I didn’t mean to! But, but… I know… its hungry all the time,” Lass whined, pinging between terror and self-justification. “Gotta keep it fed. And I thought… I thought you knew about the others. Its not my fault! I didn’t make it eat ‘em!”

“I know you didn’t, Lass. It’s been a good hunting dog—it ate your enemies for you. Why would the dog eat its master?”

“I’m not its master! I don’t want it! I didn’t know what it was. It ate Tandy! And then it started following me around!”

Lass had run out of room and bumped up against the wall. He jerked to look at what he’d bumped into and Quinton closed the gap between them, snatching the stun stick from his hand and locking his other arm around the quivering junkie’s shoulders, pulling him in tight against his side. “It’s OK, Lass. I won’t let it eat you,” he said, crouching down and bringing the other man down with him.

“We’re much too small for it to see.”

Quinton waved the rest of us closer, to make a fence between Lass and any immediate ideas of escape. We gathered around in an arc with the dark wall of the fishery building at Lass’s back and the spawning pool at ours.

“These guys will keep the monster away while we talk. Now, how did you end up with the snake-dog?”

Lass shook and huddled under the edge of Quinton’s coat, like a child. “The fat old squaw woman—you know, the one in the park who laughs at everyone. She was stuck in the pit, so we went to help her out. Tandy was pretty drunk. He fell in. I got the old lady out and I was going to get Tandy when this big thing came out of the hole and ate him! It bit him in half! I got the hell out of there. I figured the old lady could run away her own self.”

“Did the old lady give you anything?”

“Yeah, she was all happy I’d helped her and she said she was going to give me something, but all she gave me was a piece of string. I had it in my pocket for a while, but I threw it away.”

“Why?”

“I figured it out,” Lass said, squinting as he tapped the side of his head and tried to look clever. “It was the string that tied the snake-dog to me. I wanted to get rid of it, so I threw the string away. Smart, huh?”

“Where did you throw it away?”

“I’m not gonna tell you! You might go get it…”

“I think the old lady probably wants it back, don’t you?”

I wished Quinton would hurry—the cold fog was crawling into my clothes and making me shiver. I also didn’t much care for Lass and found myself impatient to be done with the creep.

“It’s a bad thing!” he insisted. “It’s the only thing I had—I ain’t got nothing in the world but my clothes, not even family, not even friends—but I didn’t want that piece of string. It’s bad!”

“I agree. But you don’t want it lying around where someone will find it,” said Quinton. “If you tell me where you dropped it, I’ll take it back to the old woman. OK?”

“You would?”

“Yup.”

“In the bricks… After Jenny… I had to get rid of it! You understand?”

Quinton nodded and began to say, “I understand—”

The spawning pool erupted behind us and we all spun to stare as Sisiutl leapt into the air with a rush of water and a shriek like metal tearing apart.

Twisting and flickering through a dozen appearances, it screeched its polyglot language and dove through the air toward us.

Fish shouted in Lushootseed as Lass screamed and jerked out of Quinton’s grip, dashing for a hole between the fog-bound buildings. Confused, Sisiutl whipped toward Fish and roared a string of angry Lushootseed. Fish, bug-eyed with terror, stumbled and fell backward, babbling uselessly.

The face in the center looked disgusted and the serpent heads at each end snapped at the air in fury as the creature whipped around to go after Lass.

Ben waved his arms in the air, shouting out words in as many languages as he could, until the zeqwa turned its attention to him, snapping its various jaws near his head. Ben flinched but didn’t run, continuing to shout and seeming to demand a response.

At last Sisiutl roared a reply and ceased thrashing the air so violently to concentrate on the man between its two hissing heads. As man and monster spoke in a rattle of Latin and several other languages I could almost catch, Fish crawled to me in a daze. He looked sick and shocked.

“Are you going to be all right?” I whispered.

“Yeah… I just… I guess I wasn’t ready for… this,” Fish said.

“No one is. I wish I knew what they were saying…”

“Sisiutl says he wants to eat us. Ben is saying we’re not to be toyed with…

Umm… something about powers and the favor of gods I’m not really getting…”

I stared at Fish. “How do you know that?”

“I can hear him. It’s weird. I know he must be talking to Ben in whatever freaky mix of languages they’re using, but I get Lushootseed in my ears. Some of the words are muffled though. Probably concepts my language doesn’t have.”

Sisiutl rolled like an impatient whale and shrieked.

“He’s losing his temper. He’s hungry. He says the man with the dog wasn’t enough food. He says we’re enemies of the man he helps, so he should eat us.”

Ben frowned and shook his head, making a flinging gesture with his arms as he replied in fast syllables. Then he yelled in English, “I’m telling him he’s free, so he doesn’t have to eat us—we’re not his master’s enemies. He has no master now but Qamaits.”

Sisiutl reared up into a U, the snake heads snapping at us and the main face screaming.

“Uh-oh… he’s going to eat the other guy—Lass. The one who ran off,” Fish exclaimed, scrambling to his feet. “Sistu says he will take him to the sacred ground. Oh, shit…”

Sisiutl sprang into the air and dove into the fog-shrouded water, leaving a knife cut in the rising mist.

“Sacred ground? What? Where?” I demanded.

“There’s a marsh on the other side of the bridge. You know?” Fish burbled, starting to run in the direction Lass has gone. “Foster Island—it used to be sacred to the Duwamish people—they used it as a burial ground! That’s where he’ll go! He’ll herd the man there to kill him! We can’t let him do it!”

“It’s heading for the arboretum!” Ben exclaimed, starting after Fish.

“We can’t catch them on foot,” I said, grabbing Ben as Quinton went after Fish.

“We’ll take the Rover and catch up, but we’ll have to be faster than Sistu—Lass has a lead but the monster won’t kill him in plain sight if the marsh is close,” I thought aloud. “He’ll carry him there in one of his webs.”

“You can’t let him be killed,” Fish said. “He has to answer for his crimes. I–I have to believe those legends. I’ve seen them now! He has to make it good—that’s what the legends say!”

“How?” I asked, starting to run for the truck, thankful for the brace on my knee that kept it from collapsing, and hauling Fish along with me. “The cops won’t believe it.”

“Not them. The sky gods! He used their gift to kill other men—it’s evil! He has to apologize, make good, or they’ll unleash the storms.”

“Storms?” I shouted, incredulous.

“The winds, the rain,” Fish panted as he ran. “These gods… drowned villages for less… in the days of the People. If their… monster exists… the gods must, too. I told you—there will be hell to pay… if this man doesn’t… apologize. Dead or alive.”