Edgewise (28 page)

He hung up. Lily tried to call his number back, but the line was busy. In any case, what was the point? He wasn't going to listen to reason. He wasn't going to listen to begging. He wasn't going to listen to anything. Thomas Bear Robe had been right: George Iron Walker had a dark side to him. An
old
side.

She dropped another two logs on the fire. She was exhausted, but she wasn't ready to go to bed yet. She hadn't asked the doctor for any sleeping pills for herself because she didn't want to fall into a deep sleep and leave Tasha and Sammy unprotected. Not that she had any illusions that she was capable of fighting off the Wendigo.

The phone rang again.

“George,” she said. “Listen—”

“Lil? Didn't wake you, did I?”

It was Bennie. He sounded drunk, and there was Frank Sinatra singing in the background:
“Come fly with me . . . let's fly . . . let's fly away—”

“Oh, Bennie, it's you. I thought you were somebody else. No, you didn't wake me. The truth is, I haven't slept much at all, in the past few days.”

“I'm a little inebriated, Lil. But I just wanted to apologize for the Mystery Lake thing. I was trying to impress you and I made a fool of myself. I'm sorry. I hope we can still be friends.”

“You caused me a whole lot of grief, Bennie—more than you know.”

“I didn't mean any harm, Lil. Honest I didn't.”

“Okay, Bennie. What's done is done.”

“Maybe I can buy you lunch. How about that?”

“I don't think so. But thanks for the offer.”

Bennie was silent for a moment. She could almost hear him swaying.

“I think I'm going to hang up now, Bennie. Good night.”

“Do you know something?” said Bennie. “I was looking through the files on Mystery Lake this afternoon . . . and there it was, the title to that little spit of land you wanted. Well, a copy of it. Kraussman had to buy it separately from the rest of the development, because it was federal land. Damn shame Kraussman got there first. If it had still been federal land . . .”

“Yes,” said Lily. “But he did, and he refuses to part with it, and there's nothing more that I can do about it.”

“He's an asshole.”

“I know, Bennie. Good night.”

“I always said that about Philip Kraussman. He's a prime-grade USDA-certified asshole.”

“
Good night
, Bennie.”

She finished her glass of wine and then decided that she would try to get some sleep. The house seemed unusually quiet tonight, although she could hear the oak tree scratching at the weatherboards. She was about to go upstairs, however, when she thought she heard the softest of hissing noises. She stopped and listened, one hand on the banister rail. Silence. Only the
tap-tap-tap
of the tree. But when she started to climb the stairs, she heard the hissing again.

It wasn't a loud hiss. Not like the air-brake hissing that the Wendigo had made when it attacked them on the way to the airport. It was a sliding, sibilant hissing, as if somebody were pouring very fine sand down the stairs.

She looked around. She could feel a shrinking sensation all the way down her back, and a tingling in the palms of her hands. There was nobody there, and no sand pouring down the stairs. But the hissing went on, and she had a sudden strong feeling that she wasn't alone.

She made a determined effort not to run up the stairs, though she found herself climbing them stiffly and quickly. She crossed the landing and went into her bedroom and closed the door, and locked it. She could see herself in the mirrored doors of her closet, and she was surprised how white her face was, and how fixedly she was staring at herself. She thought she looked like a madwoman.

She listened. The hissing had died away. Maybe she had imagined it. Maybe it had been nothing more than her own blood rushing through her ears.

She waited for over a minute. Then she sat on the bed and waited a few minutes longer. After a while she decided that even if she
hadn't
imagined it, whatever it was, it had gone.

Tiredly she stood up and tugged off her thick cream cable-knit sweater. Then she unbuttoned her black denim jeans and stepped out of them. She went through to her shower room, switched on the light and reached into the shower to start the water running. In this house, it always took an age for the hot water to reach the bathrooms, especially in the winter.

She took off her bra and her big warm brushed-cotton pants and put on her tartan bathrobe. She squinted at herself in the medicine cabinet over the washbasin.
God, Lily, you look tired.
Her hair had grown over an inch now, although it seemed to be much finer than it had been before she had shaved it all off, and it seemed to stick up more. What had Bennie called her?
An elf.

She was just about to take off her robe and step into the shower when she thought she glimpsed a flash of light from her bedroom. It was so quick that she thought she might simply have blinked. But then it flashed again, and again, like a quick, quivering, will-o'-the-wisp.

She listened. She couldn't hear the hissing sound, but then the shower was clattering too loudly. Very slowly she reached up and opened the door of the medicine cabinet, so that its mirror was angled toward the mirrors on her closet.

She almost shouted in fright, but she clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself. Clearly reflected in the medicine cabinet, she could see a tall figure standing in the corner of her bedroom, beside her bed. It was hard to see exactly what it was, because it constantly shifted and changed. In many ways it was like a man. It had a human face, although its features were long and angular, and its upper lip seemed to be cleft, although that could have been the shadow under its nose. It had glittering black eyes that rapidly darted from side to side, but it didn't seem to be focusing on anything in particular. It stood upright like a man, yet it had an arrangement of horns on its head that resembled antlers, and a deep, narrow chest that resembled a deer's chest rather than a man's.

Its image wavered and jumped, so that it looked to Lily like a weak TV signal, struggling to resolve itself into a recognizable picture. And—yes—she could hear the hissing sound now, like static—not much louder than before, but highly distinctive.

So this is how my life ends,
she thought.
Torn apart by a mythical creature in my own house, and nobody will ever know what really happened to me.
She just prayed that the Wendigo wouldn't go for Tasha and Sammy too.

The Wendigo turned sideways and vanished from her medicine-cabinet mirror as if it wasn't there at all. But when she looked around, into her closet mirror, she could still see it. Its face appeared to be re-assembling itself, and its body went through one metamorphosis after another. As she watched it, she began in a curiously oblique way to understand what it actually was: it was everything that made up the spirit of the woods—the men, the animals, the insects, and the flickering light that came down through the branches. The Wendigo wasn't just
of
the woods, as Thomas Bear Robe had described it. The Wendigo
was
the woods.

It turned sideways again, and reappeared in her medicine-cabinet mirror. It was staring directly at her, and she realized that it must have seen her.
Please let it be quick. Please don't let it hurt too much. Agnes was killed so fast she probably didn't know what hit her. Please let it be the same for me.

But the Wendigo made no move toward her. Instead, it continued to stare at her, and the longer it stared at her, the more she felt an overwhelming sense of panic. The Greeks had invented the word
panic,
after Pan, the wood god. Panic was the dread of lonely places, like forests—the feeling of being hopelessly lost.

Lily started to hyperventilate. She pressed her hand against her chest to try to control her breathing. She could feel that darkness closing in again—the darkness that came before a faint.

But the Wendigo turned away again and disappeared from her medicine-cabinet mirror. Lily looked quickly around at her closet mirror, but she was only just in time to see the Wendigo folding itself up like origami—except that it was made of thin rays of light rather than paper. It became nothing but a geometric pattern of light on the carpet, and then it slid beneath her door and vanished.

Immediately, Lily ran across her bedroom, opened the door and ran to Sammy and Tasha's rooms. They were both asleep, untouched and undisturbed.

She went back to her shower room and stood in front of the medicine cabinet for a long time, trying to read the expression on her own face. She felt an extraordinary mixture of shock and relief, but the beginnings of something else, too: a new understanding of what America must have been, before white men arrived; a new understanding of why George Iron Walker wanted that land at Mystery Lake so much. It was only a vaguely formed grasp of Native American feelings, and she couldn't find any sympathy for them, after everything that had happened in the past few days, but it moved her, and disturbed her. She felt as if the ground had moved beneath her feet.

After a while she took off her robe and stepped into the shower. She wondered if the Wendigo had come of its own volition, to warn her, or if George Iron Walker and Hazawin had sent it, as a threat.

There was one thing she had learned, though. With
two
mirrors, placed at angles to each other, the Wendigo remained visible even when it turned edgewise. With three, or four, it wouldn't be able to vanish at all.

She toweled herself, pulled on a warm pink nightdress and went to bed, though she couldn't sleep for hours. When she did, she dreamed that she had woken up, and that patterns of antlers were moving across her bedroom ceiling.

“They're outside, Lil,”
said Bennie.
“They're outside, and they're coming for you. I just want to apologize.”

When she woke up it was seven-twenty
A.M
. She looked in on Tasha and Sammy before she went downstairs. Sammy was still asleep but Tasha was already tugging her jeans on.

“Sleep all right?” Lily asked her.

Tasha nodded. “I didn't have any nightmares, anyhow.”

Lily went downstairs and filled the percolator with coffee. The morning sunlight was so cold and brittle that it leached all of the color out of the kitchen, like a 1950s photograph. She looked out into the backyard. The snow was beginning to thaw, and where the sun was shining on their upper branches, the trees were dripping.

There were paw prints criss-crossing the yard in all directions. Stray dogs, probably, looking for scraps. She looked up at the kitchen clock and thought to herself:
Only eleven hours to go before sunset. How am I going to catch the Wendigo before then?

She knew now that if she had enough mirrors, she could
see
it, whether it turned itself edgewise or not. But the mirrors had to be set up in exactly the right places, and how could she make sure that the Wendigo walked into her line of sight? Even if it did, what was she going to do then? How was she going to snare it with her tow cable? Supposing the loop didn't catch around its ankles? The Wendigo would be on her before she knew it.

She kept playing the scenario over and over in her mind, trying to work out a way in which she could lure the Wendigo into the precise location where she could see it, and then catch it, and then drive off with it.

But, single-handed, she could see that there was no way. She just couldn't do it on her own.

Tasha came up behind her and put her arms around her waist. “Mom . . . everything's going to be all right, isn't it?”

“Sure it is. You'll see.”

“Maybe you should call those FBI men to help you. Like, even if they don't believe you, at least they can make sure that nothing happens to us.”

“We'll be okay. The police are right outside, aren't they?”

“I guess. But the Wendigo . . . supposing it gets in here without them even seeing it?”

“Tasha—I promise you, we're going to be okay.”

She had never knowingly tried to deceive her children, not even when she was going through the worst of her divorce with Jeff; but this morning she simply couldn't find the words to tell Tasha how terrified she was. The minute hand on the kitchen clock kept moving on, minute by minute, and each time it moved she shuddered.

She poured herself a cup of coffee, although she felt much more like a double shot of Jack Daniel's. What the hell was she going to do? There was no point in locking the doors. There was no point in trying to run away. The future was coming for her, and there was no way to avoid it and no way to escape it.

She thought:
Condemned criminals must feel like this, when the day of their execution dawns.

She watched Tasha eating her cereal, and it almost broke her heart. Tasha and Sammy relied on her so much, but she had allowed her own selfishness to jeopardize their lives. They would have been better off without her, spending the rest of their lives with Jeff, playing in the sunshine and forgetting all about her.

If only there was somebody she could turn to. Somebody strong. Somebody who could protect her. Maybe Tasha was right. Maybe those FBI agents
could
help her. Or one of them, at least.

Special Agent Kellogg arrived at the house shortly after eleven
A.M
. He looked pale and pinched, as if he had been awake all night, and the cold morning air had given him a hard, barking cough.

“What's up?” he asked her, doing a quick Ali shuffle on the doormat to get the snow off his shoes.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure, but you didn't ask me here for a social visit, did you?”

“It was that obvious?”

“I've been a special agent for fifteen years, Lily. When you called me, I recognized that tone of voice right off.”