Edgewise (27 page)

“John,” said Lily, “you'll be careful, won't you?”

“Of course I'll be careful. I may be reckless, but I'm not stupid. How do you think I've survived for all of these years? You be careful, too. When I tell you to, you drive twice as fast as you've ever driven in your entire darned life, and don't stop until that thing is totally incinerated. You can come back for me later.”

Lily climbed back into the driving seat. In the rearview mirror, she could see Shooks tramping this way and that, sloshing gasoline all over the trees. When he had finished, he came back and stowed the empty can in the back of the SUV.

“Just remember,” he told her. “As soon as I give you the word, you go like a bat out of hell.” Then he slammed the rear door shut.

Lily sat waiting, with the window open. The wind blew a soft coda to “Hotel California,” as if it had picked it up from Shooks and couldn't stop whistling it.

She looked at her eyes in the mirror.
This is all madness,
she thought. But at the same time she felt a determination far stronger than any emotion she had ever felt before. She was going to finish this thing for good. She was going to protect herself, and protect her children, and she was going to have her revenge on the Wendigo for Agnes and Ned.

The sudden explosion of fire caught her by surprise, and gave her a sick little jolt in her stomach. The chair, the kitchen, the men in masks. Within seconds, at least fifteen pine trees were blazing—the flames rippling up their trunks and shriveling their branches.

Shooks shouted out, “Woo-hooo! Woo-hooo! Come on, Wendigo, your woods are on fire! Come on out, you two-dimensional piece of crap! You want to see your whole forest burn down? Wind's in the right direction, feller! Come on out!”

He was right about the wind. It was blowing sharply from the northwest, and it had been rising ever since they had arrived here. The fire turned tree after tree into a hundred-foot torch, and as it reached the upper branches, it seemed to run from one branch to another, like hordes of blazing squirrels.

The air was becoming thick with the aromatic smell of pine smoke, and the popping and snapping of burning twigs was almost deafening.

“Wooo-hooo! Come on, Wendigo! Come on out!”

Lily looked down toward George Iron Walker's house. As she did so, the front door opened, and she could see light shining on to the porch. She just hoped that the Wendigo appeared before George Iron Walker could get up here and discover what they were trying to do.

As the pines burned more fiercely, the wind seemed to blow more strongly too, as if it were eager to feed them with oxygen. After only a few minutes, all that Lily could see behind her was fire, and John Shooks's silhouette dancing in front of it, waving his arms.

“Come on, Wendigo! Come on out of there!”

She glanced back down the hill. George Iron Walker's house was too far away to see him clearly, but the brake lights of his Subaru Forester suddenly lit up, and the vehicle began to back up and turn in a circle.

“John!” she shouted. “John! George is coming up here! John, can you hear me?”

“What?”

“George is coming up here! George!”

Shooks cupped his hand to his ear to show her that he couldn't hear her. Lily could see George Iron Walker's headlights now, and he was definitely headed this way. Every pine tree along the top of the ridge was burning now, and the flames were jumping fifty and sixty feet into the air. In spite of the snow and the coldness of the wind, the blasts of heat were enormous, almost enough to take your eyebrows off.

Lily didn't know what to do. If the Wendigo failed to appear before George Iron Walker reached them, he would probably try to stop them—or Hazawin would, if she were with him, and God alone knew what
she
would do. After the wolf-pack hallucination, Lily was seriously frightened of her.

“John!”
she shouted, but he still couldn't hear her.

She started to climb out of the SUV. Shooks momentarily disappeared in a great swirl of smoke and sparks.

“John! George is coming!”

Shooks reappeared. This time he heard her shouting, and he turned around. As he did so, however, Lily saw a flicker of silvery light through the smoke. It vanished again before she could be sure what it was.

“What's wrong?” Shooks called out.

Lily stared into the smoke. She glimpsed another flicker of light, and then—over the rifle-fire crackling of the burning trees—she heard that distinctive
hissing
noise.

“Wendigo!”
she screamed, pointing.

“What?”

“John, it's the Wendigo! It's there! It's right there beside you!”

Shooks spun around. For a split second Lily saw a tall figure approaching him—a figure with antlers and a long, animal-like face—yet with arms that appeared to be jointed all the wrong way. It was no more than a glimpse, and then the figure turned sideways and vanished.

“It's there! John—it's there!”

“Back in the truck, Lily! Get ready to go!”

Lily scrambled back into the driver's seat, slammed the door and gunned the engine. She looked frantically into her rearview mirror, and she could see Shooks ducking first to the right and then to the left, and then back again. She twisted around, trying to see if there was any sign of where the Wendigo might be, but the flames were too bright and she had to shield her eyes with her hand.

Shooks was jinking around behind her like a football player trying to find a way through a tight defense. He jabbed out his right hand, and then his left, and it was obvious that he had no idea where the Wendigo was, or how close.

Lily looked into her rearview mirror again, and this time she saw to her horror that the figure was only two or three feet away from him.
She
could see it, because it was face on to her, but it was edgewise to Shooks, and invisible.

“John!”
she screamed, banging at her horn.
“John, get out of there!”

Shooks turned toward her. He was shouting something but she couldn't hear what it was. He looked excited rather than afraid. But the figure made the quickest of moves, and seized him by the front of his jacket. It tore the nylon fabric apart, ripped through the kapok quilting, and then it must have gripped his rib cage and wrenched it wide open, because all Lily could see was three or four spectacular jets of blood, followed by a slippery cascade of stomach and liver and intestines.

John Shooks was hauled up into the air, completely out of her sight, leaving behind him an unraveling trail of viscera. It had taken only seconds. Seized, torn open, gone.

Breathless with shock, Lily stamped her foot on the Rainier's gas pedal. The engine bellowed but the vehicle spun its wheels for five heart-stopping seconds before it abruptly lurched forward. Lily was half-blinded by the smoke from the burning trees, but she kept her foot right down to the floor and careered down the snowy slope at nearly sixty miles per hour. The Rainier bounced and jarred and jolted, but still she didn't slow down, even when it flew over the drainage ditch at the side of the road with all four wheels off the ground.

Bang
—she hit the road, and as she did so, George Iron Walker's Subaru appeared out of the smoke and she slammed into the side of it. There was a loud collision and the Subaru was spun off the road and into a fence.

That was all Lily saw. She was too busy grappling with the wheel to stop her SUV from skidding out of control, and when she had straightened it up she jammed her foot down and kept on driving as fast as she dared, and then some. She veered from one side of the track to the other, her snow chains rippling on the ice.

About two miles down the road she slowed down and looked back. The forest was burning like a fiery flag, waving in the dark. There was no sign of George Iron Walker's Subaru, and so with any luck he wasn't following her. Her heart was palpitating, rapidly and painfully, and it took six or seven deep breaths before it started to slow down.

Oh, John.
He must have known that their plan had hardly any chance of success. But it was obvious that even
he
hadn't realized how quick and elusive the Wendigo was, and how easily it could pull a human being wide open.

She didn't have any idea what she was going to do now. She carried on driving, more slowly now, but her mind was a kaleidoscope of fire, and trees, and running wolves, and George Iron Walker grinning at her, and the Wendigo, the spirit of the woods.

As she turned on to Route 169, heading back toward the Twin Cities, she heard a scraping, whirring sound. After a half-mile she pulled over and went around to the back of the SUV. The winch-cable was still extended, and it was dragging along the blacktop behind her. She went back and pressed the button to wind it back in again. Hanging from the cleat that Shooks had used to make a loop was something that looked like a man's pink-and-beige necktie. It was only when she tried to tug it free that she understood that it was a torn strip of John Shooks' bowels.

She bent over by the side of the highway and brought up a bitter tide of coffee and pancakes.

That night she went into the children's bedrooms, one after the other, to kiss them good night.

“Where did you go today?” Tasha asked her.

“Well, we went to see somebody who might know where William was taken, and how to get him back.”

“And did they know?”

“It's more complicated than that, sweetheart.”

“The Wendigo's not going to come after us, is it?”

Lily sat down on the side of her bed. “Try not to worry. I know that everything's been really frightening. But I'm going to make sure that the Wendigo goes away and doesn't hurt anybody any more.”

“How?”

She smiled, and leaned forward, and kissed Tasha on the forehead. “I'll think of a way.”

If only I could,
she thought, as she closed the bedroom door.

When she went to Sammy's room he was already fast asleep. Since they had witnessed Agnes and Ned being killed, both children had been prescribed Ambien tablets, and they always knocked Sammy out within a few minutes of him swallowing them.

These nights, though, he never sprawled across the top of his comforter the way he used to: he bundled himself up tight, as if he didn't want to leave a single gap for the Wendigo to slide into.

Lily went slowly downstairs, crossed into the living room and poured herself a glass of red wine. She had never felt so shattered and alone. So far, she had heard no local news bulletins about a forest fire out at Black Crow Valley, nor any reports of a man's body being found in the woods. But it couldn't be long before somebody missed John Shooks. He had scores of relatives, after all, both Native American and white, and it would soon come out that the last person to be seen with him was
her
.

She felt as if she were a Jonah—as if every person she touched was immediately cursed, and that she brought death and pain and disaster to everybody around her, especially Tasha and Sammy. Those were her own two children, upstairs in bed, both of them traumatized and terrified and only able to sleep because she had drugged them. And it was all her fault.

The long-case clock in the hallway struck ten. Almost as soon as the last chime had reverberated, the phone rang, making her jump.

“Lily?”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“Lily . . . this is George.” He sounded very calm, but in a way that was much more threatening than if he had shouted at her.

Lily didn't say anything. She didn't know what she could say.

“You still there, Lily? Fine mess you made of my SUV today. Fine mess you made altogether, you and John Shooks. Good thing for you those trees burned themselves out. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources takes a pretty dim view of arsonists.”

“John Shooks is dead,” said Lily, her voice shaking with distress. “That thing of yours ripped him to pieces in front of my eyes.”

“The Wendigo? The Wendigo isn't
my
thing, Lily. The Wendigo is
your
thing. You wanted it raised. Everything that's happened subsequent to that is down to you.”

Lily swallowed, and took a deep breath, and then she said, “Is it any use begging you?”

“Begging me for what? More time? I'm sorry, Lily, but tomorrow is the last night of the Moon of the Snowblind, and that's a very significant date for the Mdewakanton. I have to take possession of that land before the Moon of the Red Grass Appearing.”

“I don't understand what you're talking about.”

“I didn't expect you to. But there are only two days in every year when the hunting god Haokah can appear in the mortal world—the first day of the Moon of the Falling Leaves and the last day of the Moon of the Snowblind. These days are the beginning and the end of winter, after Haokah lays down his hunting spear, and before he picks it up again.

“Haokah appeared to Little Crow on the first day of the Moon of the Falling Leaves and told him that our lands would be lost, when he laid his hunting spear down, and we lost them. Tomorrow is the last day of the Moon of the Snowblind. If we get the land back on the day that Haokah picks up his hunting spear, the legend says that we shall never lose it again, for all time.”

“George! This is the twenty-first century! All of this is mumbo jumbo! People have been killed!”

“
My
people were killed, back in the 1850s—not three or four, but hundreds of them!
My
people! My flesh and blood! They were deceived into giving up their own land and then they were starved and they were hung and they were shot! Just because it happened all those years ago, do you think we've forgotten, or forgiven?”

“George, please. I can't get the land. It's impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible, Lily. Not in this world.”