The Book of the Emissaries: An Animism Short Fiction Anthology

by Kevin J. Anderson

  So that morning in October, his wife stood there in the mud of his driveway, watching us drive off with a look on her face that could have curdled milk. I remembered what she'd looked like back when we was kids and I was sad for her. Life with Lenny had not done her much good.

  We drove out towards the Gods’ Lake, the ground fog lying close to the shore, sun just coming up, spraying light over them red and gold leaves. We were heading to a good spot, one that a lot of the fellows from the mill liked to use for hunting, maybe used it a bit too much. A friend of dad’s, Watson MacEvoy, used to say the deer were so thick there it was easier’n buying a hamburger. Maybe it was because the natives just didn’t hunt there: no matter how hard up they were, they stayed well clear of the lake. When you asked them why, if they was in an answering mood, they’d mutter something about “wapiti” and skulk to the other end of the bar.

  All the more for us, I guess, but them woods was getting hunted out. We needed to be lucky, but on a sunny morning like that, once you got clear of your personal miseries in the front yard, it was easy to feel that way.

  So we drove, shooting the shit about the boys at mill, whether there might be any work down at the docks, and, I remember, Lenny was in good spirits that day. We were going to try a new plan, one he'd thought up himself: we were going to use the "walkie-talkies" he'd bought for his kids last Christmas ("Them little shits never did use 'em but once," he'd said) to spread out and cover more ground. Get twice as lucky.

  We were going to hunt all day through the woods, probably, then drive home at dusk. The woods was still thick then and you’d get a kid wandering off every so often, but you’d have to be a fool to get lost. And if it got dark, I had my flashlight. "Instant sunshine," Lenny crowed when he'd seen it. Lenny never was above jacking a deer or two if it come to that: he didn’t give a damn about rangers or limits. No one really did.

  We left the truck by the road and started hiking up the scrub trail that led to the Gods’ Lake where the deer liked to come take their water. I don't know if I could find that trail today; all I know is where you used to stop on the old road out to St. Stephen to find the path.

  We moved through the brush quietly, talking in low voices. The going was easy with the leaves crackling under our feet, the last birds of the season twittering quietly, the occasional dry snap of branches crushed underfoot. As we got closer, our talking stopped altogether and we started to listen ourselves. To the quiet of the woods.

  When we reached the lakeshore, Lenny hauled out them walkie-talkies and handed me one. "Squadron captain, this is Eagle 5. Come in, eh?" His voice squawked and crackled over the radio and we both got to laughing at how stupid he sounded.

  "So, Willy," he says to me, "how about you take the south side of the lake and I'll go round the north side and we'll meet up over there." I looked around and shook my head. The north side was easy going, dry and good terrain for deer. The south side was marshy and wet; it’d be alright if we was out for ducks, but they wouldn't fly back through here till dusk. But that was Lenny for you: if we'd been out for ducks, he'd have tried to screw me out of the south side. He was my friend and all, but he was also crookeder than a dog's hind leg.

  "I'll flip you for it," I says, digging in my pocket and coming up with a young-head quarter.

  "Are you sure," he says back, knowing I'd always had terrible luck when it came to betting. He won, like he always did, and started off, waving his radio at me. "Be sure and call in every now and then to let me know how you're doing," he yelled as he started into the brush. Grumbling to myself, I started slogging south.

  It wasn't as bad as I'd thought it was going to be, but I made slow work of it still. The black mud would seep up over my over my boots in some places if I wasn't careful and it'd only loosen its grip with a long sucking sound. I kept my eyes open but I didn't run across any deer. Saw some good places to set up a duck blind though and hoped I'd remember for later. You’d need a lot of ducks to make up for a deer, but I didn’t have a lot of options.

  After a while I heard that little radio in my pocket crackling so I pulled it out and hauled up the antenna.

  "Lenny, is that you?" I asked the black plastic mouthpiece, the word "ZAPPO" worked into the blue plastic, with a sticker showing a cartoon boy, smiling at his walkie-talkie.

  His voice came over strong and clear through the distortion. "Yeah, I've think I've got one ahead of me in the brush here. I’m gonna keep pushing him 'til I get to some open space."

  "Yeah, well good luck. There’s nothing over here." I don't think he was listening anymore. I folded up the antenna, dropped the radio back into my pocket and kept pushing on, hoping to hit some open ground, thinking that when it came to some things, Lenny was one lucky bastard.

  A few minutes later, I heard a pair of shots ring out over the lake, shattering the morning stillness. I waited but there was nothing more. I tried the radio.

  "Lenny, Lenny did you get him?" I asked. There was no answer. I kept trying, felt like adding "Zappo!" every now and then as if it was a magic word. I was about to give up when Lenny called back.

  His words were still strong as ever. "Hey, what do you know, Willy I got myself a doe!" He sounded excited but a little disappointed; we were both hoping for a buck.

  "Well that's still plenty of meat on there. Guess I'll just have to be the one to get the buck this year." I said back, a little edge of triumph into my voice.

  "The hell you say. She's only a little doe, not enough meat on 'er to last the winter."

  "Well, you just sit tight and start gutting her. I'll backtrack and catch up to you." I'd have used any excuse then to get out of that stinking marsh. He signed off with a grumble and I started back.

  The sun was getting high as I pushed my way through the fens. A little while after I got going, Lenny calls me up on the radio. "Hey, Willy, there's this big buck moving up the hill over here. I'm going after him."

  Again I thought, this bastard has all the luck. "Go ahead but keep an eye out for rangers. You've already got your limit."

  "Don't worry, he's dead close. If I see a ranger we'll say she's your doe and I'll take the buck. I gotta go."

  Well, I kept picking 'em up and putting 'em down, sweating through my flannel shirt. All them deer just jumping into Lenny's lap and here I am slogging through this bloody swamp. I needed to get something for the bag and Lenny weren’t the sharing kind. I heard a rifle crack from the north and figured Lenny'd got his buck. The radio crackled.

  Lenny's voice was a little fainter this time but still pretty clear. "I missed the son of a bitch. I'm going after him."

  "Well don't go too far. I ain't going to gut your deer for you."

  "Don't worry, I'll keep the lake in sight."

  Another round of slogging, another rifle shot, fainter this time. The radio crackled. I pulled it out, thinking this was getting to be like listening to a hockey game on Saturday night.

  "I can't believe I missed the bugger." The voice was much softer now but still pretty clear. "You should see him, Willy. This lad is as big as a horse and just as solid as rock. I'm gonna get him, by God. Willy, you've never seen the like."

  "Listen, Len, you keep in sight of that lake. You're getting pretty faint over here. I don't want to spend all night looking for you like we did for that Thibodeau kid last year."

  "Don't worry, this fella'd be worth it. Seven points by Christ! The lake's just behind that hill back there," he whispered. A few minutes later the radio rasped in my pockets. Zappo, I thought as I pulled it out.

  "Christ, Willy, I must be losing it. I fired three shots and they all missed." The voice was very faint now, so I thumbed the little volume button up all the way.

  "Look, Len, don't go too much further, alright. I can barely hear you over this radio and I didn't even hear those rifle shots. Let him go, you've got your doe."

  "Now don't worry. I've got him cornered in this little orchard across the river. I'm just going to walk in there and bag the bastard."
Whispery voice over the gravelly static. The cheery cartoon boy smiled at me, showing the blue gap between his front teeth.

  "River? Look, Len where the hell are you?!" To the best of my recollection there was no river around there for miles. "Len!" But Zappo wasn't talking now.

  I really pushed it then, almost running through those quiet autumn woods, the only sound the branches cracking under my running feet. Cedar rods whipped back and forth at my passing. All of a sudden it seemed like I was making pretty bad time.

  When I reached the path, the sun was beginning its downward slide. My only thought was to get close enough to Lenny so I could keep him in radio contact. I didn't know where he'd wandered off to, but I figured he could get pretty lost; in those woods, people would hunt them all their lives and then one day just wander off and vanish. I was about to start along the north shore to where Lenny’d bagged his doe when the radio crackled again.

  "Lenny, where the hell are you?"

  For a while nothing came back but static and clatter. I stood there looking at the grinning kid on the blue plastic. Then words forced themselves through the feedback.

  "... buck ... trees aren't ... seems like ... oh God, WILLY ... "

  Then nothing. Just scatter swishing from the radio as I stood there under that October sun. Zappo, I thought. The boy's face was gleeful. I began running.

  It didn't take me long to find the body of the little doe. She was sprawled in a gully, dried blood staining her breast, little pink tongue jutting from her mouth. Her glassy eyes had no answers for me nor did the few flies that buzzed around her.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon searching the woods, calling for Lenny. For some reason, I didn't want to try the radio, didn't want to see that kid's face mocking me no more. I tried to follow Lenny's trail from the gully but it quickly became confused. I couldn't find any sign of the buck's passage at all.

  Just as night was falling and the autumn shadows were starting to get long in the woods, the radio crackled again. I reached for it with relief, then jerked my hand back as if there was a snake in my pocket. Static sifted from it, then after a third time I forced myself to draw it out. Fingers trembling, I extended the silver antenna, its surface gleaming faintly in the last light of day.

  "Lenny?"

  There was nothing for a second, then from the static came heavily distorted words.

  "It's me. Come give me a hand. I hurt my foot." An eldritch sound.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you had me worried you son of a bitch!" I was worried, but more about the mood of the woods. They'd gotten sour as the night drew close. "Where are you?"

  "On top of the ridge. I have a big deer. A stag. Come up." Again, the words were forcing themselves out of the static, barely understandable. Except the invitation.

  I got real nervous all of a sudden. I tell you at that "come up" all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as straight as the straw on a broom. I switched my rifle to my right hand. "Where are you, dammit? It's getting dark. We haven't got time for games."

  In the thickets on top of that ridge, there was some shaking in the branches, back where the little light there was left wouldn't easily penetrate. "I am here. Come up."

  I took a few steps forward and stopped at the bottom of that incline. I said into the radio, "If you walked this far you just come a little further, Lenny, and I'll help you down that hill."

  The branches shook some more and I could see a shape come out into the shadows. Over the radio, the heavily distorted words came out again: "Come up."

  Trembling so hard I thought I might drop it, I pulled out my big industrial flashlight and gave the top of that gully a blast of instant sunshine. Thank god I didn't drop that light or lord knows what might have happened.

  Standing there at the top of that gully was a huge, well-muscled buck. He had a massive rack of iron-black antlers, seven cruel points, and his coat was deep grey. Dark mud covered his muzzle and his forefeet and his neck was bound with iron.

  As the light focused on his head, it caught his eyes and even from that far away I could see them flash venomous green and murderous red. What the light couldn’t quite show were the other creatures crouching at his heels. Dog-like, they slavered through oversized fangs but there was something almost human about their eyes.

  By this point, my light was shaking something fierce, but I tell you this fellow uncoiled himself and stood up on his hind legs just like a man and I heard a sound like hard laughter echo from the top of that little hill. He brought one of his forehooves up to his muzzle, dripping with thick dark blood. His jaws moved.

  "Come up, little man. It is time for the hunt." Zappo spoke clearly now with no trace of static. And its voice was not human. And now I could hear the hounds starting their insane baying. And now I could hear the infernal blasting of horns made of bone.

  I ran screaming into the night, howling like the devil himself was after me. And he was. He was. I lost my gun, my hat, that damned radio, pretty well everything with them branches scratching at me like witches’ fingers. There was sound all around me, a crashing and howling as if there was fifty of them after me with their glowing eyes.

  I fell to the ground and hit it hard, but I kept my light and somehow found the path and made it back to the truck. I yanked on the engine and threw on them lights but I didn't see nothing in the woods. I didn’t hear nothing. Them trees had closed like a door to me and only blackness stared out. I got that truck moving and flew back into town.

  They never did find Lenny.

  The next morning after a long and sleepless night, I told the police that Lenny had just wandered off into them woods looking for the buck and never come back. There was a big search but it found nothing, not even the doe. I didn't bother looking ‘cause I knew there wasn't nothing to find.

  His wife figured he'd run off with some waitress down at Reid's diner and gone to work high steel down in Boston. She told me that as she was packing herself and her kids off to her mother back up Barnaby Ridge. I don't know where Lenny finally fetched up that day in October of '62. But I figure it was thousands of years and millions of miles from anyplace where they worked high steel.

  I don't go back in the woods anymore, as you know. I don't even like to drive through the woods much, though sometimes I get caught after dark on that winding road that runs along the banks of the Gods’ Lake. And I drive fast with my lights on high. And I don't stop for nothing until I see the lights of town ahead of me. Because he knows me now. And he's waiting. And I never roll down the window to feel that night breeze on my cheeks, in case somewhere in the distance, I hear his hounds baying again at the moon.

  The Trickster's Last Trick

  by Jordan Ellinger & Nis Bojin

  There is a line on the globe called the Arctic Tree Line, north of which the land is bare and the only plants that thrive are small crippled things huddling close to the ground like lonely orphans struggling to stay warm. The air is cold and moisture is trapped in the permafrost. The sky yawns above like a hungry beast, and exposure is only a misted breath away. But among the natural terrors of this hostile terrain are things much more implacable and much, much hungrier...

  ••

  I’d been on the road, pursuing the Book of Emissaries for about twenty years when I received word of the madman at Rankin Inlet from one of my former students – a fine lad who had been, from time to time, faithfully updating me on the contents of my derelict mailbox. Hunched into a payphone booth outside a motel, I listened intently as he read my messages one by one. He soon came to a letter that caught my immediate attention. After hurriedly jotting down the details and placing a few calls I found myself in an eardrum rattling, single-engine Cessna, flying low over an unprepossessing arctic expanse.

  I’d chartered a last-minute flight through the quaintly named Beaver Air to fly me to Rankin Inlet – a small town of several thousand souls situated in a secluded bay just north of the tree line. Though the town had a mayor, the letter I received was fro
m Sheila Williams, a local member of the Mounted Police. Sheila was an avid watcher of a documentary chat show called Mysteries of our Histories which aired with surprisingly regularity on the region’s cable Channel 6. A madman had apparently stumbled into her town babbling about the “destruction of a great cycle” and, having recognized me from one of my numerous “expert” appearances on Mysteries, Sheila felt that I might be the only man on Earth who knew what to make of it.

  Oddly enough, she was right.

  Mere moments after the sea plane’s skids skipped across the waves, we were docked and I took my first wobbly steps onto the jetty: a mangle of rotting wood planks kept astonishingly afloat by used tires. The water hugging the shore was dotted by yellow foam and the air was saturated with a mix of petrol fumes and the malodorous stench of fish. A few seagulls fought over crab shells that had been thrown onto the dock by a nearby fishing trawler.

  Ms. Williams’s flawless Red Serge, the uniform of the RCMP, fairly glowed in the colourless surroundings, so much so that it took me a moment to notice the woman who wore it. She was perhaps forty years of age. Raven black hair and tanned skin denoted possible aboriginal descent, but unlike most of the Inuit women I’d met, she was small and thin-boned like an Arctic Tern. Her eyes were sharp and clear, and I got the impression she’d taken my measure before my foot had hit the dock.

  “Welcome to Rankin Inlet, Professor Grey,” she said shaking my hand. “I hope Sparky didn’t shake you up too much.”

  “Sparky?” I followed her glance to the grizzled, already rime-bearded pilot who’d flown me in. He was a bush pilot, and as a group, they had a reputation for insanity. But save for a brief diversion where we’d flown only a few hundred feet above the permafrost chasing a herd of caribou – he’d actually been quite buoyant.

  “Oh, quite right. No. No, he was most pleasant, I assure you.” I turned to give a restrained wave to Sparky. He replied with the tip of his ushanka hat.

  “Ms. Williams, not to skip any formalities, but I am quite interested in this letter of yours, the madman speaking of doomsday prophecies and so forth.”