Seawitch (25 page)

I looked at Solis, huddled in his blanket. He looked pale but it appeared he wasn’t ready to give up just yet. I was still a bit damp and battered myself but better off than he was.

“You still with us, Solis?” I asked.

He nodded with more vigor than I thought needed. “To the bitter end—if it comes to that.”

“I hope not.”

“This is becoming a most bizarre adventure.”

“I’m not sure I’d call it an adventure,” I started.

“What else can it be? It’s no longer a case, per se. I cannot report most of what’s occurred today without running the risk of being accused of . . . flights of fancy.”

“You mean being crazy,” I corrected.

He shrugged with a small bow of his head and half-raised shoulder. “That, too. I am finding it quite . . . eye-opening.”

“If by ‘eye-opening’ you mean, ‘staring in terror,’ yeah, it is that,” Quinton said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going up with Zantree to take a look at the charts and nav and try to figure out where we’re going and how to spot it before it’s my turn at the wheel.” He gave me a significant look—including a half-raised eyebrow—and turned to head up the steep steps to the bridge.

When he was out of earshot, I turned my attention back to Solis. “I’m sorry—” I started.

“For what?”

“For getting you into this mess and getting you half-drowned.”

“You did not get me into any mess. This came with the case—which I requested—and while I find it uncomfortable, it is necessary. I would not be diligent if I didn’t pursue this, however strange it becomes. I’m not of a delicate mind that cannot stand a challenge,” he added, leveling a finger at me as if I’d implied any such thing.

“I never said so,” I objected.

“But you think me inflexible.”

“I find you . . . rather traditional.”

He snorted. “Hidebound.”

“No. Just somewhat . . . by the book.”

“It depends on which book. . . .”

I laughed. “I suppose it does. Which book do you favor?”

“I no longer know. But . . . I am not what you think I am.”

I raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything to stop whatever admission he held, trembling on the verge of words.

He took several slow breaths, glancing around as if he were gauging the room’s ability to absorb what he was about to say without mutating into something even stranger than the creature that had snatched him from the deck. “I must be honest: I have looked into your background, Blaine. I . . . wanted to know if you were, perhaps . . .”

“Dangerous? Crazy?” I offered.

“Untrustworthy.”

“Personally or professionally?” I asked. I wasn’t offended; I would have checked up on him, too, if I’d had questions about the reliability of his information or person. And he’d had occasion to question mine once or twice, since I’m such a source of strange cases and freakish accidents. That was understandable and it didn’t bother me . . . anymore.

“They’re the same, in most cases. As you know.”

I nodded. I’d done enough background investigation and legal discovery to know that people who aren’t on the up-and-up in one aspect of their lives usually don’t meet a higher standard in any of the others. Unless they’re a particular variety of sociopath.

He spoke haltingly and without letting his eyes rest on mine for more than a second or two at a time. “But I found nothing of that sort, in spite of your . . . penchant for the unsettling. I have found you frustrating in the past—and still do—but I trust you.”

I think I let a tiny smile sneak onto my face at that admission; it would have been inappropriate to grin. I just murmured, “Thank you.”

“What we are heading into may require more than that. We may be stepping into the land of nightmares—my nightmares, at least. You seem to take such waking horrors in your stride, but I . . . When that creature pulled me over the railing, I fought because I did not want to die and I thought I might break free. But in the water where I was blind and couldn’t draw breath, my old nightmare returned.”

I sat still and breathed as quietly as my aching ribs would allow, letting him say what he needed to. He inhaled and exhaled slowly and went on, gazing directly at me for a moment as he asked, “You recall after we found the bell aboard
Seawitch
you asked what I had experienced? And I told you it was the bad dream of my youth: sharp circumstance closing in until I could only go helplessly forward. In the dark tunnel of the water with that song in my ears, I felt my death was inevitable, that I had no alternative but to go meet it.”

“That was the song of the sea witch, not your dream.”

“It was more than that. It was everything I fear. It is why I wanted this case, why I joined the police, why I found and married Ximena. . . . The dream is an allegory my mind torments me with: my inability to stop something horrible from happening, my inability to make it right—to retrieve the moment the evil became inevitable—because I have already lived through it and it will never be right. As a young man—a boy—I helped my mother hide from my father the bodies of three men she had killed in our kitchen. I had watched her kill them. I did not help her—I was too afraid—and I did not save her.

“My mother had been frightened, too, but it did not stop her. When they lay dead, she cried. She sat on the floor and wailed as if they had injured her, and she was so covered in blood I thought they had—you could not even see the pattern on her dress through the gore—so I came out from my hiding place and I tried to comfort her. At first she seemed not to know I was there. After a while she noticed and she got up. Now it seems almost humorous that she tried to straighten her dress and her hair, but that’s the woman she was—very concerned for things to be proper. Perhaps even more so because the situation was so very improper. She put her arm around me and said we must clean up so my father wouldn’t know what had happened. I did not question that. My father was a policeman. Such a thing—such a mess—in his house would not do. Now that so many years are past, I cannot recall how we did it, but we carried the men away and we buried them and then we returned and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. . . . My mother burned her dress and we never told a soul. I never felt I had a choice as we did it. It seemed my life had led inevitably to that unforgivable moment where one evil piled upon another and I could never take it back. When I left Colombia, I hoped for something better—for a cleaner justice—than what we had done. For the ability to make things right.”

I was confused. “I can understand why you’d help your mother, but why did she kill them?”

Solis blinked and shook his head as if he had been sleepwalking and was now awakening. “They had come to rape her. The drug cartels were at war—Medellín and Cali—and she was the wife of a Cali policeman who would not take their payoffs to turn a blind eye. They thought they could destroy him by hurting her, by . . . making her worthless. You understand the culture of the place and time would have condemned her as much as the men who raped her. It would have reflected badly on my father to be married to a woman who was . . . soiled in that way. They told her what they wanted and she fought them. They tore her clothes and held her down, but they didn’t know how fierce my mother was. She killed two of them with a kitchen knife and the last with a shotgun my father kept at the back door.”

“And she didn’t want your father to know.”

He shook his head. “It would have embarrassed him. I told you she was a very proper woman.”

“How old were you?”

He thought a moment before he answered, “Twelve.”

“Your father never found out? Not even when the bodies were discovered?”

“They never were that I know of. Santiago de Cali lies in a fertile valley and there are places a body will simply melt into the ground. If picked bones were found some year after a cane burn, few people would ask where they came from.”

My stomach lurched a little at the image that rose in my mind of blackened skeletons and remnant flesh gnawed by the rats and other things that might run through the tangled growth of sugarcane fields. I’m still a wuss about that sort of thing, no matter how many times I’ve seen death memories or dead bodies, or died myself, and I hope I never become inured to it. “It didn’t bother you at the time?”

He blinked at me. “At the time I could not think at all—I only acted. But I have never forgotten the horror of it. Of looking down into the ruin of what was a man, of how my mother fought them and then cried over them, of the blood—how we scrubbed it and hid it and lied about the stains that wouldn’t go. We told my father I’d killed a chicken—it’s true, that saying about headless chickens—to explain the splashes on the walls that we couldn’t remove in time. That was what decided me to come here and join the police—somewhere I thought the law and justice did not give each other a cold shoulder. I have learned that it is not always the way here either, and I despise that, but it’s better than my home country was when I was a child and criminals thought they could harm my father by ruining my mother. There was no safe path once they came into the house. We let them dictate our shame, even if we did not let them win. My mother and I hid what had happened because dead criminals in her kitchen would have been almost as bad for my father as if she’d let them rape her. She killed them but they still owned a piece of her soul until the day she died, and they still own a piece of mine as well.”

TWENTY-TWO

S
olis’s words echoed in my head. I swallowed a lump in my throat and couldn’t think of what to say. “I . . .” I started in a weak voice.

Solis shook his head and looked aside. “An unpleasant tale. I offer it so you will know where
I
am broken and cannot be trusted. But if you do not want it . . .”

“Don’t you dare.”

Solis raised his eyebrows at me.

“Thank you.”

“Why?”

“You can’t take something like that back. It can’t be unheard. And you are not broken or untrustworthy and I don’t want to forget how much you’ve entrusted to me. No matter how ugly it is, it’s still precious.”

“But it is ugly,” he agreed.

“So are my feet and I don’t apologize for them. Of course, I also don’t wear sandals. . . .”

He looked puzzled.

“You know I used to be a dancer.”

He nodded. “It’s in your record.”

“Never seen a dancer’s feet? I spent so much time in dance shoes as a kid, en pointe, or hoofing in road shows more weeks on than I was off that my feet look like they were run over by a truck. Dreadful, crippled-looking, knobby things. I earned them through pain and vanity. They remind me of what I left and why I left it. I don’t show them to most people because they’re . . . well, they’re awful, but they are part of why I am what I am. And I don’t regret that.” I studied his face to see if he understood and it seemed he did. He nodded, scowling a little. I nodded back and gave a tiny laugh. “But they’re still disgusting.”

“More disgusting than those creatures in the waves?” he asked with a grimace.

“There’s a lot that’s more disgusting than those,” I said. “Most of the things coming over the rail were illusions filled with water to give them weight. They wasted our energy and distracted us from the real ones coming up behind them. I tried to let you know, but I didn’t have the breath to shout—I’m sorry about that.”

He shrugged and I had an odd spark of hope for his nightmare’s resolution. “I have survived. What manner of attack comes next?”

“I’m not sure. They may just try to batter us to death in this storm, since we’ve figured out their weakness.”

“I haven’t. What is this weakness?”

“The sea witch’s power is limited and she has to choose where she’ll spend it. The merfolk—or, more likely, the sea witch we keep talking about—casts illusions to create the impression of an army of her minions. But only a few are really flesh and blood. They aren’t pushovers—though I’ll admit the illusions are powerful, too—but once you know most of what you’re seeing isn’t real, it’s easier to dodge the real ones and break the false. The merfolk aren’t quite impervious to the motions of the water in the storm, so while the storm may continue to wear us down, I think they’ll have to make their next sally against us in a less-unsettled circumstance. Anything else that comes at us will be magic, not meat.”

“That may reassure
you
, but I do not feel better hearing it. What if she’s holding the majority of her men and power in reserve against the eventuality of our arrival in her domain?”

I mulled it over. “That could be. But if you were her, wouldn’t you want to get rid of us as early as possible? Unless there’s some reason she needs us in her lair before she tries to suck up our souls to power her spells, why let us get any closer than she has to? Consider that the
Valencia
was wrecked way out at the southwest point of Vancouver Island, west of here, but Fielding implied that her base is east of here, so her reach is—or can be—fairly wide. But the farther she wants to reach, the lower her power. So she has to play it close to her vest unless she’s willing to come out of her place of safety.”

“If, in fact, it has always been the same sea witch. But if Shelly usurped her mother and Jacque is doing the same now, each wreck would have a slightly different profile, since the perpetrators, though related, are not the same.”

I hmphed and gave it a few moments’ thought. “Possible. I guess we won’t know until we are face-to-face with her.”

“Is that wise?”

“I don’t see any other way to fix the problems we have. We both need an explanation for the disappearance of
Seawitch
. You can understand better than anyone that I need to set some things right with those ghosts and Gary Fielding.” I saw a question forming on his lips and cut it off. “I can’t go into the reasons but I also have a duty to the world I live in—I didn’t choose it but it’s still mine. And that includes, at the moment, doing something to free the ghosts of
Valencia
and
Seawitch
and get Gary Fielding straightened out in some way.”

Solis narrowed his eyes. “If he caused the deaths of the people on board
Seawitch
, it will require more than straightening out.”

“That’s another thing we’ll have to deal with when it comes. We may not have any way to bring him to human justice. If that’s even applicable. You may have to swallow dealing with this my way.”

His face settled back into his customary stillness and he didn’t say another word.

I wanted to tell him he couldn’t do anything to change it, but I just shook my head and got up from the galley table, wincing as new bruises expanded the zone of discomfort in my back, side, and chest. “I need to dry off and warm up before my muscles freeze up completely.”

“Your rib. My apologies; I’d forgotten.”

“I wish
I
could. This is slowing me down more than I’d hoped. And it hurts!” I added with an attempt at humor that fell a little flat on our ears. “I’ll tell you this, though: If we have any chance to catch one of those merfolk, we’d better take it. We could use some more leverage than just the bell.”

I left him to put on an extra layer of clothes. While I was in the cabin Quinton and I had been sharing, I took another look at the bell. Fielding had mentioned it as he disappeared. Examining it now, at my leisure and without someone looking over my shoulder, I let my vision shift as I sank closer to the Grey.

The bell was no longer bronze but black, wrapped in green tangles that sent out long, thin streamers that vanished into the eastern distance of the Grey. The boiling agitation of the ghosts within pushed outward into a thick smoke of faces and forms twisted into one another. I put out one hand, wondering if I could just pluck the mess apart and let the ghosts go their own way, but a warning roar came from the ghosts and they flared red as if their agonized faces were washed in the light of a conflagration. I guessed that was a pretty strong hint that if I did anything to the spell that held them in the bell now—or here—the situation would only get worse. Though worse for them or worse for me, I didn’t know.

I eased back a little, still immersed in the Grey, still concentrating on the bell. “Well,” I whispered. “You wanted them and I’ve got them, but damned if I know what I’m supposed to do with them now.”

I raised my voice a little and tried to call the Guardian Beast, concentrating on its form as if my thoughts could pull it to me. “I could use a little help here. . . .”

Nothing replied except the ghosts of
Valencia
, moaning like the wind. I tried reaching out into the Grey, gathering threads and pulling or shaking them, begging the Guardian to show its misty hide, but nothing seemed to have any effect. I couldn’t even hear it in the distance as I sometimes did, going about its business. In desperation, I tried appealing to Will or whatever might remain of him, but to that the silence was even colder.

“Come on, you slippery bastard!” I shouted. “Get over here and tell me what I’m supposed to do! I’ve got the lost you wanted, but I’ll lose ’em if you don’t give me some clue what you want me to do with them!”

I turned again to the bell. “It said ‘Find the lost’ and I’ve found you. I think. But now it wants to play coy. Obviously just finding you guys isn’t the end of this situation. It’s not as if the Guardian actually cares about suffering, because it’s never done a damned thing about it before, so what’s the problem?”

“Power,” the ghosts sighed. They stretched out from the mouth of the bell in wisps and eddies, curling around me, dizzying me with their ever-changing faces and forms.

“Yes, all right. Your souls represent a storage unit of power, but why does it care about that
now
?”

“Now the cycle renews itself. Now the floodgates open. We were not alone.”

“Oh no . . . He—it—the Guardian Beast wants me to free
all
of the souls the sea witch controls? How do I do
that
? Without becoming one of you, too.”

They made the incorporeal equivalent of a shrug, billowing around and moaning minor-key arpeggios that moved the mist of the Grey in swirls of smoke and blackness.

If she had other captive souls—and she certainly had at least four from
Seawitch
and possibly more
—
then she kept them where she’d kept the boat for so long. “Open floodgates . . .” So the door was open and where creatures like the merfolk who’d attacked us could get out, others, like us, could go in. But wherever it was, it would have to be a place with a twin in the Grey. It had swallowed up living things before, so . . . it was a sort of Grey Brigadoon—a magical place that appears for a while and then disappears again, going about its business, undisturbed in the ghost world, until the door is open again. The door had opened long enough for Gary Fielding to slip out with
Seawitch
and the ghosts of
Valencia
, but it was closing again.

“We have to find the cove. Where is it? Can’t
you
tell me?”

The spirits sang on in their dreary, coiling tune of hopelessness and told me nothing. I pulled back toward normal, seeking warmth as much as respite from the company of ghosts, and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the bell.

It was heavy and plainly wrought with the little loop and a bead around the top and the flattened edge at the mouth upon which the name had been engraved. Not cast, so the ship hadn’t been important enough to make a custom casting, but enough to cut the name into the bronze lip rather than let it go without; enough to tie it to one ship only. A ship so long lost that only a single lifeboat and a few pieces of timber had ever been recovered.

I flicked a fingernail against the bell’s lip. It made a dull chime that rippled across the Grey and washed through me with a sensation of pressure and cold that made me cough and catch my breath. The green coils around the bell sparked bright for a moment, sending a pulse out into the distance along the threadlike tendrils that reached to the east. The ghosts moaned and flared into a bright curtain of terrified faces, frozen as if by an actinic flash. Then they faded away to no more than a distant whisper and the feel of ice water trickling down my back. The green light around the bell faded more slowly, lingering like a disturbed phosphorescence on the surface of nighttime waters.

I yanked a heavier sweater on over my still-damp head and found some thicker, drier socks to pull on before I resumed wearing my wet shoes. Then I tucked the gun I’d left on the bed earlier into a zippered interior pocket of my jacket and put that on, too, before I picked up the bell and carried it to the main cabin.

Solis, coming up from the galley, gave me a curious look. “The
Valencia
’s bell?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how we’re going to get into the place
Seawitch
was held, since it remained hidden for twenty-seven years. So it’s a place that exists more in the paranormal than the normal, though it has a normal twin. You don’t just walk into that sort of location—or motor, as the case may be.”

“Indeed?”

“Take my word for it. The easy way in is to die. I don’t think any of us want to do that just to take a look around the merfolk’s living room. We need a door opener. And after thinking about Fielding’s last words, I think this is—literally—it.”

“How?”

“Well . . . not only is it connected to two of the boats and crews who’ve been trapped in the mystery cove we’re looking for, but it’s a bell.”

Solis looked puzzled and Quinton glancing down from the bridge hatch asked, “Why is that important?”

“What?” Zantree asked, out of sight.

“The bell,” Quinton explained.

“What are bells for?” I asked.

“To ring signals,” Zantree shouted down.

“And to ring for assistance. Or entry,” I responded. “Magic is sometimes ridiculously literal. In this case, the bell is . . . also a doorbell. I think.”

“What makes you think so?” asked Solis.

“I felt it. I flicked the edge of the bell with my fingernail and the ringing sent out a wave that I could feel passing in the paranormal fringes. Like a ripple on water. This bell is tied to the location it was hidden in, so ringing it causes a reaction there—in the paranormal ‘there,’ that is.”

“Some kind of magical entanglement, like electrons?” Quinton asked.

“If you say so,” I replied, carrying the bell up to the bridge station. Solis followed me. “Also I noticed that the merfolk made a noise as they retreated that sounded like something clanging in the distance. Or they were responding to the clanging—I’m not sure which. Either way, ringing or clanging, a bell is a bell and this one rings in the cove where
Seawitch
was kept for the past twenty-seven years. I’d bet my life on it.”

“That doesn’t mean it’ll open the front door for us,” Quinton said.

“No,” I agreed, “but the sea witch will if she wants it back, which I’m quite sure she does. We just have to find the cove.”

“That’s not going to be easy.”

“It can’t be very far away, since the merfolk could hear the recall bell when they attacked us. And there is a practical limit to how far even the most powerful wizard can cast an illusion spell like the sea witch used on us.”

“Sound travels easier and farther underwater since both air and water are liquids. Water is denser so the rate of energy loss is lower,” Quinton offered.

“But even so, I’ll bet it doesn’t travel around corners,” I said.

Quinton shook his head. “Only insofar as the sound waves fan out when they exit a restriction. The direction of travel from the source will be straight until the sound waves reflect off something, and the more they bounce around, the faster they decay.”