Edgewise (11 page)

She took two or three steps backward and tried to run away, but now the branches and the briars snatched at her clothes even more viciously, and she became inextricably entangled. She struggled and fought and twisted from side to side, but the more she struggled, the more entangled she became.

“Gaaaahhhh!”
she cried out.
“Gaaahhhhhh!”

She opened her eyes. Her bedside light was still on. Her magazine was still lying open on the quilt in front of her. But there was something different. Her bedroom door was wide open, and she was sure that she had closed it. She always did.

Frowning, she climbed out of bed and shucked on her slippers. She looked out on to the landing. There was nobody there. She didn't expect anybody to be there. Since the kidnap, she had fixed deadlocks on every door and window and upgraded her security alarm so that nobody could possibly enter the house without setting off sirens and flood-lights and alerting the local police.

Yet she had the strongest feeling that somebody had been here. She felt that somebody had somehow managed to enter the house and climb the stairs and look at her while she was asleep.

She sniffed. She could smell something, too. It was curiously metallic, like a red-hot poker. She sniffed again.
No,
she thought.
I'm imagining it.

It was then that she heard voices, downstairs in the living room. She froze, and listened. A man's voice, and then a woman's.

She stepped back into her bedroom and picked up the phone. She was about to punch in 911 when she heard the woman speak again.
“I have jewelry,”
she said.
“Please. I have my children to take care of.”

She felt a prickly, tightening sensation all the way up her back, as if scores of centipedes were crawling up it. That woman's voice: there was no mistaking it. That woman's voice was
hers.

The man's voice said,
“We was sent by God. We was sent by God, Mrs. Blake, to carry out divine retribution.”

And that was him. That was the man who had appeared on TV tonight, calling himself “Victor Quinn.” She was listening to
herself
, and to the men who had kidnapped Tasha and Sammy.

Treading as lightly as she could, she went back out on to the landing, and looked downstairs toward the living-room archway. A fitful light was shining out of the living room. It flickered and jerked like the light from a black-and-white movie projector, so that even the chairs in the hallway appeared to be jumping.

My God,
she thought.
The Wendigo. It's here. The Wendigo is inside the house.

She lifted up the phone again, but then she hesitated. If she dialed 911, what was she going to say to the police?
“I have intruders . . . a Native American spirit and two men who aren't really here, and me?”

She crept along the landing to the top of the stairs. She was too frightened to go down, but she wanted to listen. The voices rose and fell in volume, and she could hear the same hissing sound that she had heard in the birch woods when the Wendigo had first appeared.

“The children is the reason we're here.”

“What?”

“You won custody, didn't you? You got to take sole care of them.”

“Did
Jeff
send you? Is that it?”

There was silence for a few seconds, and then the two men from FLAME suddenly appeared, dragging Lily between them. Their images were unfocused and quivering, as if they were TV pictures from a scrambled satellite signal, but Lily was still shocked. She backed into the doorway of Tasha's bedroom, irrationally terrified that the men might look up and see her there, watching them, a witness to her own assault.

As the men wrestled her toward the kitchen, Lily saw the faintest twist of silvery light come out of the living room, and follow them. As it did so, the long-case clock struck a single chime for two-thirty, and she realized now what the Wendigo was doing. It had been two-thirty in the morning when the two men from FLAME had broken into the house and tried to set her on fire. The Wendigo was reconstructing everything that had happened that night, in real time.

She kept well back in the bedroom doorway, but even so the silvery light appeared to hesitate by the foot of the stairs, and for an instant she saw a long, distorted face, like a portrait seen from a very acute angle. Then the light disappeared altogether, and she could only hear voices, coming from the kitchen.

The man with the horns:
“Do I look like somebody who would hurt a child? There's a whole lot of difference between divine retribution and unnatural cruelty, believe me.”

Lily:
“Just don't hurt my children—or, by God, I
will
come back and haunt you I swear.”

Lily ventured back to the top of the stairs, but she wasn't sure that she wanted to see herself set on fire. She listened to herself threatening and pleading, and Victor Quinn lecturing her about witches and witchcraft, and she saw Quinn's accomplice carry a can of gasoline across the hallway.

It was then that her phone rang, making her jump. She hurried back to her bedroom, closed the door, and answered it. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Blake? It's John Shooks. Didn't wake you, did I?”

“It's here! The Wendigo's here, in my house!”

“You're sure about that?”

“I've seen it! It was in the living room and now it's in the kitchen!”

“Listen—you don't have to be scared. It won't hurt you. How long has it been there?”

“I don't know, but it's replaying everything that happened on the night that Tasha and Sammy were kidnapped. It's like a three-D movie; it's unbelievable.”

“Well, the Wendigo is a pretty unbelievable kind of a spirit, Mrs. Blake. You heard for yourself what I can do—that ghost talking. But the Wendigo can do much more than hear things; it can
see
them, too, and bring them back to life.”

“I've just seen myself! It's
me
, with those two men!”

“I know, Mrs. Blake. The Wendigo is like one of those trackers who can look at a single broken branch and tell you exactly who stepped on it, and how heavy they were, and which direction they were headed. Probably what they ate for breakfast, as well.”

“But how did it get into the house? Every door's locked and it didn't set the alarm off.”

“It
slid
in.”

“What?”

“It slid in, like a sheet of paper. The Wendigo has height, and breadth, but no thickness. Only two of its dimensions ever appear in our world. The rest of its substance never leaves the world of the spirits. You can see it from the front. You can see it from the back. But edgewise it's invisible.”

“You're sure I'm not in any danger?”

“Of course not. The Wendigo's working for you. It just needs to find out what happened that night and pick up the scent.”

“So what's it going to do now?”

“It's going to follow that scent, Mrs. Blake. It's going to follow that scent—and it's going to keep on following that scent until it finds your kids.”

Lily heard footsteps outside her bedroom, and the muffled sound of children crying.
Oh, no!
she thought.
Tasha and Sammy!

She dropped the phone and whipped open her bedroom door. She was just in time to see the dark, semitransparent figures of the two men from FLAME, one of them carrying Tasha over his shoulder, the other carrying Sammy. Both children were gagged. They were kicking and struggling but the men were much too strong for them.

“Stop!”
she shouted.
“You can't have them! Stop!”

But the instant she cried out, the figures all vanished, and there was nobody on the stairs at all. She leaned against the banisters, and for the first time in over a month she let out a heart-wrenching sob.

“You can't have them,” she whispered, hopelessly. “Stop.”

At the foot of the stairs she saw a brief twist of silvery light, and an indistinct collection of shadows that could have been a face looking up at her. Then that disappeared, too.

“Hello?” said the tiny voice of John Shooks, from her telephone receiver. “Hello, Mrs. Blake. Are you still there?”

Although the figures had vanished, Lily thought:
I know where they're going to go next. If the Wendigo is recreating all of this kidnapping, exactly as it happened, those two men are going to take Tasha and Sammy to the barn, to meet up with Jeff.

God, I might see Jeff, too. This is so totally unreal.

She went back to her bedroom and picked up the phone. John Shooks was still trying to get her attention.

“Mrs. Blake?” he was saying. “Are you still
there
, Mrs. Blake?”

“I can't talk to you now, Mr. Shooks. I'm going to follow them.”

“What?”

“I'm going to Sibley's Barn. I want to see what happened for myself.”

“Mrs. Blake—I have to advise you against it. The Wendigo won't
deliberately
do you any mischief, but you're dealing with some heap powerful forces here.”

“I'm not a Native American, Mr. Shooks.”

“Don't have to be, to feel lonely and scared in the forest. You ever
been
in the forest, Mrs. Blake, hundreds of miles from no place at all? The forest has a great dark heart of its own, believe me. You don't want to start interfering with an influence like that.”

“Thanks for the warning, but I'm still going.”

Lily dropped the phone back on the bed. Then she opened up her closet and pulled out a thick black sweater, a pair of jeans, and some thick cream socks. She quickly dressed, and then she hurried downstairs and put on her fur coat and boots.

Outside, the street was icy and silent. At two thirty in the morning most good residents of West Calhoun were fast asleep under their comforters, dreaming of golf, or making love to the redhead next door, or stock options. Lily opened her garage and climbed into her bright-red Buick Rainier. As she started it up, two shaggy gray dogs trotted across her driveway and paused to stare at her. Their eyes gleamed yellow in her headlights.

She drove due east and then south to Nokomis. The roads had been salted, but there were still slippery ridges on some of the tighter corners, and she had to drive frustratingly slowly.

She drove through Sibley's End, as dark and silent as every other development, and parked as close to the Brer Rabbit field as she could, by the briars. The night was stunningly cold, with a northwest wind that made a fluffing noise in her ears. Beyond the treeline she could see red and white lights from the airport, and she could hear the whining of airplanes as mechanics tried to keep them from icing up.

Sweeping the beam of her flashlight in front of her, she trudged across the field toward the awkward, angular silhouette of Sibley's Barn. Its roof was covered in snow, and it seemed to be leaning at even more of an angle than it had before. Even the icicles on its eaves were leaning at an angle.

She was only twenty yards away when she thought she saw a nervous white light in one of the windows. She switched off her flashlight, and stopped, and listened. Nothing at first, but the buffeting of the wind in her ears.
This is mad,
she thought.
There's nobody here. No Wendigo. No Sammy and Tasha. You've lost your marbles and you don't even know it.

She walked right up to the barn and peered in through a narrow triangular crevice at the side of the access door. A chilly draft was blowing through the crevice and made her right eye water. But, as far as she could see, the barn was deserted: straw, packing cases, broken generator—nothing else.

Come on, Lily, this is crazy. Go home. Talk to John Shooks in the morning.
She turned to leave, but she had only walked two or three paces before she heard that hissing noise. It was like static. It was like loneliness. It was like trying to reach somebody on a radio set—anybody—but there was never any reply.

Lily turned back, and pressed her eye to the crevice again. This time she was convinced that she could see a shape standing in the far corner of the barn, under the shadow of the hayloft. The shape was dim and unsteady and out of focus, but she could tell that it was very tall, as tall as a deer standing on its hind legs—yet it seemed to have a manlike face. Or maybe that wasn't a face at all—maybe it was nothing more than a horse collar hanging on the barn wall behind it, and maybe the entire figure was nothing but a tarpaulin draped over one of the feed stalls. Yet the hissing continued, and the shape appeared to move, lifting its arms in a mechanical, disjointed way that reminded Lily not so much of a man, or a deer, but a praying mantis.

With no warning at all, a man in a brown leather coat walked across her line of sight. It was Jeff.

She knew that it wasn't the real Jeff—nothing more than a visual echo of Jeff—but she couldn't stop herself from saying “You . . .
bastard!
” out loud. Out of shock, out of fury, out of sheer disbelief.

Jeff said, “Thanks, guys. You've been amazing.”

Now a big, broad-shouldered man in black came into view. He wasn't wearing his horns now. He had a squarish head, with hair shaved very short. But when Lily heard his voice she knew who he was.

“It's a brotherhood thing. It's man standing up for man. You don't have to be grateful for that. If we don't look after our own, ain't nobody else is going to do it for us.”

Jeff looked in another direction and said, “We're going on vacation, kids. The greatest vacation ever.”

“But I have
school
,” said Tasha, although Lily couldn't see her.

“You've been let off school. I've talked to your principal and she thinks that it's more important for you to take a vacation with your dear old dad.”

“Where are we going?” asked Sammy.