Edgewise (31 page)

“You can stay and watch if you want to,” said George Iron Walker.

“Stay and watch what?”

George Iron Walker held up the land title, so that it fluttered in the wind. “Don't you understand? I needed this title by tonight so that I could call Haokah. I couldn't have summoned him here if the land hadn't been given back to the Mdewakanton.”

“I don't understand. You're going to summon Haokah?”

“We're going to bring him back from his exile. No god can pass from the world of gods into the world of men unless the place where he passes through is owned by those who believe in him. When white men came here, they took possession of so much land that scores of our gods were sealed away from us for ever. Haokah was one of them, even though Haokah is so powerful. But you, Lily—you have made it possible for him to return.”

After four or five attempts, Hazawin had set fire to the dark-green lumps of wax in the bowl. They gave off thick, pungent smoke that smelled like pine. She stood up, taking out her bones again, and rapping them briskly together.

“Haokah, god of blood, god of the hunt, hear us calling you!”

Special Agent Kellogg stepped forward. “Who's Haokah?” he asked George Iron Walker.

“As Hazawin has said, he is the god of the hunt, the god of pursuit, and the god of righteous slaughter. He is the god of opposites. He feels cold in summer and warm in the winter. Mdewakanton braves used to plunge their fists into boiling water so that they could feel how cold it was, the way that Haokah felt it.”

“And what exactly do you hope to achieve by calling on him?”

“I thought that would have been obvious, my friend.”

“Well, maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but it's not so obvious to me.”

George Iron Walker's face seemed to be transfigured. He was still handsome, but there was something feral about his eyes and his nostrils flared as if he could smell blood.

“We are calling on Haokah to revenge all of those Mdewakanton who were killed or starved by the white men—every one of them: every warrior, every hunter, every woman, every child. Tonight will be the night of the greatest reckoning in Sioux history. Haokah will sweep through your cities and there is nothing that you can do to stop him. It will be like a terrible wind, which smashes down your buildings and uproots your roads and breaks hundreds of your people into pieces.”

Special Agent Kellogg turned to Lily. “Is this guy nuts?”

Lily shook her head. “I wish he was. But I don't think so. My God, you've seen the Wendigo for yourself.”

Hazawin rattled her bones again, and began to circle the iron bowl. “Haokah, god of blood, god of the hunt, we have opened the way for you! Haokah, O great one, hear us calling you!”

“You really think this is serious?” asked Special Agent Kellogg.

There was another crackle of lightning, and thunder bellowed behind the trees. But almost immediately the wind began to die down and the snowy rain began to thin out. Lily looked around. The trees had stopped thrashing so wildly and the surface of the lake was no longer broken with spray. She felt as if Mystery Lake were quietening itself down, in anticipation of some momentous arrival.

“Haokah! Haokah! Hear us, Haokah! Appear to us now and give us the revenge we have been waiting for!”

Lily said, “Nathan—I think we need to get out of here. Really.”

But she had taken only two steps back toward her SUV when the ground beneath their feet gave a huge shudder, as if it had been struck from underneath by a massive hammer. This was followed by another shudder, and another. Small rocks jumped up into the air, and larger rocks cracked in half with a noise like rifle fire.

“Haokah!” screamed Hazawin, whirling around and around. “Haokah! He who weeps when he is happy and laughs when he is sad! He who feels hot in winter and cold in the summer sun! He who boils ice-water and freezes steam! Haokah! Hear us!”

There were three more devastating shudders. The first one threw Lily off balance, and she was just picking herself up when there was another, and another. She stayed where she was, on her hands and knees, waiting for a fourth. But a fourth never came.

“Haokah! Hear us, Haokah!”
Hazawin shrieked out. But George Iron Walker grabbed hold of her sleeve.

“Stop!” he shouted. “It's futile! Haokah cannot get through! He beats on the door between the worlds but he cannot get through!”

He lifted up the land title in his fist. “Lily! You told me that this was legal! You said that this land belonged to me! But if Haokah cannot get through, you were lying to me!”

Hazawin wrenched her sleeve free. She stared blindly at Lily and Special Agent Kellogg and her face was distorted with fury.
“Now it's too late!”
she screamed.
“This moon will pass and Haokah will still be trapped!”

She started to climb over the rocks toward them. She was so quick and agile that it was hard to believe that she couldn't see. She held out her bones in front of her and knocked them together again and again.

“You will die for this! You will be my sacrifice to Haokah! The Wendigo will tear you to pieces and devour your body and your spirit will go to Haokah and serve him forever!”

Close beside her, Lily saw a brief flicker of light.

“Nathan!” she warned him.

Special Agent Kellogg reached inside his coat and hauled out a massive Desert Eagle .50-caliber automatic. “Hold it!” he ordered. “I have a very large gun here, lady, and it's pointing directly at your head.”

“You think that a
gun
can stop the Wendigo?” said Hazawin, and spat on to the rocks in contempt. “Even if it could, how can you shoot something which you cannot see?”

George Iron Walker started to approach them too. “Lily,” he said, shaking his head, “you don't know what you've done.”

“Oh I do, George, and believe me, I feel as guilty as all hell. But that doesn't mean that you're not going to be punished for what
you've
done.”

“I liked you, Lily. I liked you from the very first day that we met. But now I have to watch you being torn apart. You—and your friend here—and your children. The Wendigo will hunt down your entire family and it will eat them all.”

“Wendigo!” called out Hazawin. “Wen-
dee
-go!” She came nearer and nearer, clattering her bones, and her purple eyes staring at nothing at all. Lily backed toward her Rainier, and Special Agent Kellogg backed toward his Jeep.

Hazawin threw her head back and let out a long ululation that made Lily's skin prickle. Then she cried, “Wendigo, you can take these people! You can drag them up into the sky and feed off their flesh! The promise has been broken, and they must pay for their trickery!”

Lily could hear the Wendigo softly hissing but she couldn't see it. Now and again she thought she glimpsed a dancing pattern of light, but when she looked again it had vanished. She started to breathe faster and faster, which made her feel light-headed and giddy. She knew that the Wendigo must be very close now, but she was terrified that when the moment came for her to act, her arms and legs simply wouldn't obey her.

The day went completely still. Except for the hissing of the Wendigo there was no sound at all. No wind blowing, no lake rippling. A crow flew over them, but it flew silently, not even a fluttering of wing feathers.

“Wendigo! Take them!”
Hazawin screamed, in a voice so high that it sounded more like an animal howling than a woman.

“Lily!” shouted Special Agent Kellogg.
“Now!”

Lily released the catch and the Rainier's rear door sprang upward, lifting the mirror upright on its wires. Special Agent Kellogg opened up his Jeep, too, revealing the mirror that he had wedged into the luggage space at the back. Both mirrors showed all four of them on the lake shore, like characters seen through two different windows.

In her mirror Lily could see Hazawin screaming at her, and George Iron Walker a little way behind her in his long black oilskin, and the lake. But when she looked at the double reflection in Special Agent Kellogg's mirror, she could clearly see the Wendigo—a stretched-out creature made of restless lights and complicated shadows, with a rack of up-curving antlers and a narrow, insect-like skull. It was already raising its arms to seize her, and its glistening white lips were peeling away from its teeth in anticipation of biting into her head.

Lily jerked backward, jarring her hip against the side of her SUV.
It's all gone wrong. I'm going to be torn to pieces, and die.
Her dread was so intense that all she could do was make a hopeless barking sound, like a clubbed seal.

She felt something like a huge serrated lobster claw tear into the shoulder of her coat, and another claw seize her left arm just above the elbow. At that moment, though, she heard Special Agent Kellogg yell out,
“Lily!”
and a sharp, pressurized crack.

A fine mesh net billowed in the air above her, and the next thing she knew the net was full of lights and antlers and pincers, struggling wildly on the ground in front of her. It was the Wendigo, completely entangled. It hissed so loudly that Lily couldn't even hear Kellogg shouting at her, but she knew what she had to do. She limped to the open door of her Rainier and climbed into the driver's seat.

Special Agent Kellogg ran over to the back of her vehicle. He looped the strings of the net around the tow-hook, using its heavy black handle like a tourniquet to pull them tight. As he did so, the Wendigo was hissing and screaming and thrashing furiously from side to side. Parts of it appeared and disappeared as it twisted around in the net, and every few seconds its face changed, from human to animal to insect, as if it were trying every possible manifestation in its fight to get free.

Hazawin and George Iron Walker were already hurrying toward them, but in her rearview mirror Lily saw Special Agent Kellogg lift his Desert Eagle. George Iron Walker stopped, and held on to the strap of Hazawin's shoulder bag to stop her too. Kellogg banged the back of Lily's SUV with his fist and Lily slammed her foot on the gas pedal. The Rainier took off in a shower of dirt and stones, dragging the hissing, battling Wendigo behind it.

Lily drove as fast as she could back up the hill toward the logging road. For a two-dimensional creature made of light and shadows the Wendigo felt impossibly heavy. The SUV's transmission whined in protest as Lily neared the crest of the hill, and it was all she could do to keep her speed up to thirty-five m.p.h. In her mirrors she could see the net slewing wildly from side to side, and now and then she saw a claw emerge from the mesh as the Wendigo tried to tear its way free.

In the backseat little William suddenly started to cry. “I want my mommy! I want my mommy!”

“William—we're going to see mommy now! But sit down, darling, please! Just sit down and I'll take you home as fast as I can!”

But William continued to cry, louder and more desperately. “I want my
mommy
! I want my
mommy
!”

Lily had reached the logging road now, and she jammed her foot right down to the floor. She had seven miles of dead straight driving ahead of her, and she prayed that it would be enough to burn up the Wendigo. The Rainier's speedometer needle gradually wavered up through forty—fifty—sixty—until she managed to get it up to seventy-five.

After only a mile, though, she was jolted so hard that she nearly hit the windshield, and the SUV slowed down to fifty-five. She looked in her mirror and saw that the net appeared to be much closer to the rear of the vehicle than it had been before. The Wendigo must have managed to get a grip on the lines that fastened the net to the tow-hook, and it was gradually pulling itself nearer and nearer.

Oh Jesus,
she thought.
What if it pulls itself right up to the rear of the SUV, so that it can untie the net, and get itself out?

There was another jolt, even harder this time, and the Rainier swerved from one side of the road to the other, so that pine branches rattled against the windows. William was sobbing so hysterically now that he was almost choking, but there was nothing that Lily could do to help him.

Two miles . . . three miles. The Wendigo pulled at the SUV again and again, and Lily had to struggle to keep it on the road. The pine trees seemed to be crowding her on both sides, as if they were deliberately trying to catch hold of her bumper grille and snatch at her side mirrors and slow her down. Maybe they were. After all, the Wendigo was the spirit of the forest. The Wendigo
was
the forest.

Four miles. Four and a half miles. In spite of the Wendigo's constant jolting, and the branches flailing and clattering against the SUV's sides, she was managing to keep her speed between fifty-five and sixty, and when she looked in her mirror again she thought she saw smoke. Just a brief blurt of it to start with, but as she passed the fifth mile, it started to pour out more and more thickly—brown smoke, tinged red from her taillights.

“Come on, you bastard,” she whispered to herself.
“Burn!”

She sped through the forest, with the Wendigo tumbling behind her in its net, a kaleidoscope of lights, with smoke billowing out of it. Even before she reached the sixth mile she saw flames. The Wendigo was ablaze now, leaving a long trail of fire behind it, and setting alight the branches of the trees on either side of the road.

But, even though it was burning, the Wendigo kept on jolting her. It couldn't be dead yet. And inch by inch it still seemed to be hauling itself closer to the back of her SUV. Almost all she could see in the rear window now was fire, and in the fire she could briefly see antlers and claws—all burning, but still inching toward her.

She didn't know what to do, except to keep going as fast as she could. John Shooks had told her that Wendigos eventually burned into nothing but ash, but how long did that take?