Underground (24 page)
“What is Sistu? What kind of zeqwa?” I asked, knowing I was frowning with interest and the growing throb in my bent knee and hoping I wasn’t frightening her.
“Monster. A . . .” She made a motion with both hands that I couldn’t quite understand. Seeing my confusion, she stuck a finger in the mud and made a long, sinuous line and hissed.
“A snake,” I said.
“Bigger than snake!” she snapped. “Big as you stand.”
“A serpent . . . a sea serpent?”
“Yes! But he comes on the land, too. Three heads. One like a snake on each end, one like a man in the middle. Many, many teeth. Very hungry, very strong. His blood can turn you to stone. His stare make you freeze. I see Sistu in the dark here below.”
“Where did he come from? Where does he live?”
The girl shook her head. “He lives in the pool. He come from the water.” Then she looked over my shoulder and I felt the presence of a ghost nearly on top of me.
I stood, turning and stepping aside as the ghost of a man in work clothes stopped where I’d been crouching. He held out his hand, the phantom sun sending a spark from the coins in it.
The girl ghost stood up and took the coins, looking at them suspiciously. Then, smiling mechanically, she let the man follow her into the crib. As the curtain over the doorway fell, I saw her expression became unseeing and blank as the fragment of time curled on itself in the repetition of her endless loop of memory.
I backed away before I reached out, grabbing for the edges of the temporacline, and slid out of the slice of history, gritting my teeth against impotent fury, frustration, and the grinding ache of old injuries.
I stumbled back into the haunted corridor beneath the street and bumped into Quinton. I could feel the tension in my jaw as I brushed past him. “Get me out of here.”
“What happened?” he asked, catching up to me in a few strides and then passing me to lead the way out.
“I found the ghost of a child prostitute—Indian. She said she saw a zeqwa—a monster—called Sistu about the time of the first deaths.”
“Is it the one we’re looking for?”
“I don’t know. The timing’s right, but she said it’s a sea serpent of some kind with three heads.”
“And you don’t think a three-headed sea serpent is very likely to have done this?”
I felt myself growling and stopped to take a deep breath—or three—and calm down. “I don’t know. Her description doesn’t make sense to me. She must have been twelve! A kid!”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “Shh . . . Harper. She
was
a kid, but you can’t do anything about that. Not now. Let’s find out about this monster. Then we’ll have something more to go on. Now, be stealthy or someone may catch us coming up from here.”
was
a kid, but you can’t do anything about that. Not now. Let’s find out about this monster. Then we’ll have something more to go on. Now, be stealthy or someone may catch us coming up from here.”
I stifled myself and limped after Quinton.
I’d managed to avoid any dire filth this time, so we got a table in Zeitgeist Coffee. We cleaned up and sat down to figure out what to do next.
“I think we need to look at the newspaper archives at the library, ” Quinton suggested. “The central branch will be open for a few more hours today, and we might be able to find out more now that we have the info from the morgue.”
“I need to call Fish and find out what he knows about this Sistu thing. Maybe it’s got some signature or habit or something we can look for.”
“And we can look it up and see if there’s more information. If it’s a local legend, there may be documents in the local folklore and Native American sections.”
I nodded and got out my phone to call Fish. I was still bothered by the ghost, but Quinton was right that there was nothing I could do for her. She had died a century ago and her life couldn’t be changed. I wondered what had led her to be selling herself in an alley, but had to put it out of my mind before I got angry all over again.
Fish was just about to leave the morgue when I called. I asked him about Sistu.
“Huh . . .” he responded. “No . . . don’t think I’ve ever heard of a sistu, but ‘zeqwa’ is a Lushootseed word that means monster— any kind of monster from a man-eating seal to an ogre or a giant dog—so whatever specific thing your source is talking about has gotta be from somewhere around Washington or British Columbia. I’ll ask my mom and my old grandma. One of them will know.”
“Great. Thanks, Fish. Should I call you or will you call me?”
“I’ll call, but let me give you my cell number—I’m off for a couple of days.”
I wrote down the number he offered and disconnected.
Quinton was watching me and pulling a chocolate doughnut to pieces. “What’s he say?”
“He doesn’t know, but he’ll ask some people who might.”
“All right. You want anything aside from coffee before we head out to the library?” He pointed to the part of the doughnut he hadn’t touched yet. “These things are pretty wicked.”
I shook my head. “No thanks. I don’t like chocolate much.”
He just raised his eyebrows and nodded. I appreciated the restraint. Some men might have made a comment about how unfeminine it was not to be gaga for chocolate, but I’d never acquired much taste for sweets—especially chocolate—between my mother’s belief that I was fat and my father’s career as a dentist. I didn’t mind skipping the doughnut, but I didn’t want to abandon my coffee before we went back out into the cold to walk to the library. It was pretty dark and we wouldn’t have a lot of time before the librarians threw us out—no matter what good friends they were with Quinton. I drank a little too fast as we headed out the doors, and yelped.
“What? Are you hurt?” he asked, following me to the corner.
“No,” I mumbled, throwing the cup into the trash. “I burned my tongue.”
“Really? Let me see. Stick it out.”
I did stick out my tongue. And made a face to go with it.
“Oh, God, it’s horrible! A zeqwa!” he cried, throwing up his hands and cowering in mock fear.
I pulled my tongue back in. “Nut,” I said.
“Don’t think you can butter me up with endearments,” he replied, wagging a finger in the air. “I’ve heard that one before. Just before the guys with the straitjackets showed up.”
We both broke up, stumbling a little on the icy sidewalk as we ascended the hill. We must have seemed drunk, giggling like children with me favoring my aching knee so I skipped and staggered unevenly, but we got to the library about an hour before closing time.
ELEVEN
Quinton knew his way around the library better than anyone other than an employee—and possibly better than some of them. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the Koolhaas building but I didn’t think it an eyesore. No, the eyesore was the screaming-yellow escalator enclosure with its strange display of two faces and a giant eyeball projected on mostly spherical blobs that were seen through rough holes in the escalator’s interior wall. Shafts of light seemed to transfix the misshapen faces and eye, making them look like alien trophies as they writhed, mouthing silent words and blinking with disembodied lids. I couldn’t look at it for long. The wiggling, flickering faces reminded me too much of things out of my earliest Grey nightmares.
Quinton caught me turning away. “Disconcerting.”
“That’s a word for it.”
He smiled and we came out of the escalator tunnel into the “mixing chamber”—a huge room that took up the whole floor with clusters of worktables, chairs, standing carrels, shelves, and counters where patrons and librarians were supposed to “mix” to find information. Mostly people seemed to gather in clumps and chatter among themselves, so the room had a constant low din like a tropical jungle. Quinton sought out one of the librarians who was wearing a wireless mic headset like a stagehand in a large, professional theater. After a moment’s conversation the librarian shook his head.
“Sorry, can’t put you on the staff computer right now. Leslie’s got it. The regular computers are open and they’re pretty fast. Here, let me grab you one.”
He darted across the chamber to a computer in a standing carrel. I thought it was a good thing we wouldn’t be using it very long, since the stand-up desk height was well designed to discourage lingering. In spite of the proximity to closing time, most of the computers in the room—and there were a lot—were in use. Many of the patrons looked high school or college age, and I guessed from the fevered looks on some of their faces that they were racing to find materials for papers due the next day. A lot of the library branches weren’t open on Sundays, so this was the natural place to come if you were running late and didn’t have Internet access at home. I wondered how many papers were being plagiarized outright in the last-minute panic.
Quinton ran a quick search and we made a list of newspaper archive dates and issues, which I carried back to the librarian with the headset. He called to someone using the device, and a stack of bound journals and microfiche cards was delivered to me in a few minutes. I put them on a table near Quinton and went to look at his progress before I dove into them.
He was glaring at a page full of prompts and code strings on the computer screen and typing with angry slashing strokes.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
He turned his eyes up to look at me. “I wanted to check some other sources—in case there’s been anything like this elsewhere.” He looked back to the screen and frowned. “This archive is being coy—it wants a bunch of login passwords it never asked for before. Someone thinks they’re being secure but it’s just a pain in the butt. I’ll back-door it. . . .” He patted my hand and drew his away to return to the keyboard.
“OK. I’ve got a pile of stuff from the newspaper archive. Have you found any information about the Sistu yet?”
“Not yet . . . I’ll finish this and get to the folklore section. . . .” His concentration was on the screen and the task of getting around the system’s security. He didn’t see me nod, didn’t notice the withdrawal of my hand, so focused was his attention. I couldn’t begrudge that—I was the same way on a case sometimes. But I wondered what archive he was getting into that fascinated him so, since I couldn’t imagine anything in the library that would have that sort of security—or anything we were looking for that would need it. Quinton intrigued me, but it wasn’t for his transparency or simple life.
I skimmed through the old
Post-Intelligencer
issues, taking notes on all the deaths or other strange occurrences that seemed to fit our pattern in the right date ranges.
Post-Intelligencer
issues, taking notes on all the deaths or other strange occurrences that seemed to fit our pattern in the right date ranges.
The records before the fire didn’t show anything that was a match—even a rough match. The first odd death happened in April of 1890, during the rebuilding, when the Kline and Rosenberg building on Washington between Commercial and Second collapsed during construction. One of the workmen had been buried under the falling bricks and was found dead and missing an arm and a leg once the bricks were shifted out of the hole. The missing limbs were never recovered and the collapse was blamed on piers that hadn’t been sunk deep enough into the mud and sawdust landfill that made up that part of town.
I had to find a map of the original plat to realize that the site in question was now the northwest corner of Occidental Park— Washington Street was still the same, but at the time Oxy had been called Second Avenue and First Avenue was called Commercial Street. The same location where I’d seen the tumbledown building in the city’s memory of 1949. I wondered if it could have been the replacement Kline and Rosenberg building.
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