by Alex Archer
“The Navajo wolf, or skinwalker, is basically the worst kind of witch. You can only gain that kind of power through extensive contact with the dead—something most of the Southwest Indians are very leery of, and which the Athabascans in particular dread. Also, the shape-changing power can only be won through committing one or more ritual murders.”
“Wow,” Annja said.
“That’s not a life-way I’m terribly conversant with. Modern Navajos don’t like to talk about it for two reasons. The acculturated ones dislike associating their people with what seems to them a potentially pernicious superstition. The traditionalists dislike talking about religious beliefs to outsiders because to talk about witches invites their attentions, which traditional Navajos believe can be literally deadly.”
Watson shook her head. “Really, I’d say even a lot of the most modern Navajos feel at least a certain thrill of dread about skinwalkers. Just as atheists raised amid Christian society sometimes harbor secret fears of hell.”
“I’m familiar with that phenomenon,” Annja said.
“Now, there is someone who might be able to expand on what little I can tell you about the Navajo wolf phenomenon. I can put you in touch with Dr. Yves Michel of the World Health Organization. He’s spent the past couple of years among the native peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, studying Southwest Indian health issues on behalf of the U.N. Particularly mental health issues—he’s a psychiatrist as well as holding a doctorate in cultural anthropology. A very erudite man. Although I have to caution you—he can be difficult.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“He does, however, like to talk about his areas of interest. In particular, he’s made an intensive study of the skinwalker belief complex. While he has yet to publish any papers, he’s passed drafts around to many friends and colleagues that I understand have created quite a stir.”
“Wait—I think I’ve heard of him.”
In fact, Annja was pretty sure she’d seen his work on skinwalkers discussed on alt.archaeology, a Web site she frequently visited that was devoted to discussions of fringe archaeology. While she considered herself a stout skeptic, she also felt she owed it to her discipline to maintain an open mind; hence, her continuing attention to the outer limits of archaeological research. It was entirely possible that among the piles of printouts stacked on the sofa or coffee table of her Brooklyn loft apartment was actually a copy of Dr. Michel’s draft paper. She spent so little time there these days she couldn’t keep track of everything.
Dr. Watson took out one of her own business cards and wrote Dr. Michel’s phone number and e-mail address on the back of it. As she did so Sallie came racing back with Eowyn loping behind her. The girl plopped herself on the cold cement bench near her mother. The Lab lay down beside her, panting and grinning.
Annja found herself studying the girl. Sallie noticed and, like any bright child instinctively mistrusting adult scrutiny, said, “What? Do I have a booger?”
“Sallie!” her mother said sharply. She passed the card to Annja. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. It’s rude to stare. You just look familiar somehow.”
“Wait till I’m famous,” Sallie said. “I’m going to be a superheroine.”
Watson sighed exaggeratedly. “We Plains people tend to have active imaginations. A cultural thing, I think.”
She reached out to tousle the girl’s hair. Sallie endured it a moment, then leaped up and went dashing off once more with Eowyn in happy pursuit.
“I guess you wonder why a middle-aged woman has such a young daughter,” Watson said. “She was the outcome of an attempt to save a marriage.”
She sighed. “And like most such attempts, it didn’t work. I try not to talk about that where she can hear. I hate keeping things from her. But it’s a terrible responsibility to lay on a child. She’s a wonderful child.”
Light began to dawn on Annja. “She wouldn’t have an older brother, would she?”
“Yes. His name’s John. He’s fourteen years older than she is. They love each other, but there are limits to how close they can be across that kind of gap.”
“I think I know why she looks familiar. Please forgive my asking a highly personal question, but you wouldn’t happen to have been married to Lieutenant Ten Bears, would you?”
“Yes,” Watson said.
Annja sagged as if she’d been sandbagged. “So that’s why he recommended I talk to you.”
Watson laughed again. She had a hearty laugh. “I’d like to think a degree of respect for my competence influenced him. We do respect each other, even if we’re miles apart in most of our viewpoints on things. I’m a leftist, if not an entirely respectable one—he’s a right-winger, a total gung-ho patriot. I guess what you’d expect from a war hero and lifelong cop. We still feel…affection for each other, too. The divorce was amicable. Of course, you couldn’t say that for the last few years of our marriage.”
“Wait—your son’s name is John? Johnny?”
“Why, yes,” Watson said. “He served with the Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he came home he was changed.”
“And now he’s leader of the Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club?”
“He’s a community activist,” Watson said, “who prefers to think of himself as an outlaw biker. Not that I altogether approve of what he’s trying to achieve. Sometimes he seems way too much like the militia crazies of the nineties, who’re starting to make such a comeback now. But I’m much calmer about his activities than my ex-husband is.”
A dog barking vigorously broke the thread of conversation. Annja and Watson looked across the large park. The sun had set. The air grew chilly, with only a bloodred band on the horizon and reddish undertints on a few clouds. The evening filled the hollows of the park like velvet.
Down in the bottom of the depression between the slope the picnic table stood on and a hill, Sallie was digging her heels in to restrain Eowyn, apparently newly leashed. The adolescent Lab barked furiously toward the top of the far hill. The yellow pup didn’t sound floppy-friendly now. Even a hundred feet away Annja could see the hackles standing up on her neck. She was in serious guardian mode, with only Sallie’s determination keeping her from launching a preemptive attack on something she perceived as immediately dangerous.
Following the line of the dog’s fury Annja felt the hair at her own nape rise. Silhouetted on the hillcrest was the broad head and pointed ears of what appeared to be a wolf. Otherwise, it was indistinct, a black shadow against the twilight.
“Why is Eowyn so mad at that Malamute, or whatever it is?” Watson asked, rising. “She’s usually so friendly with everybody. Dogs as well as humans.”
Annja was up and running down the slope.
As she came up to Sallie the girl finished reeling in the leash, grabbed the bristling Eowyn’s collar and sat down with her legs braced. “You’re not going anywhere, girl,” she said through clenched teeth. “What’s gotten into you?”
The wolflike head vanished as Annja started uphill toward it. She wasn’t sure what she intended. If the animal attacked her, and she had to use her sword to defend herself, she would have many, many questions to answer that she frankly never wanted to face.
When she reached the top of the hill she saw no sign of the creature.
She spotted a doglike shadow flitting between a couple of the houses across the street on the park’s other side. She got an eerie sensation down her spine again as it turned and looked directly at her. Then it vanished.
Annja stood and watched for half a minute, her heart pounding in her chest far more than the brief exertion—even at a mile’s altitude—would account for. She didn’t see the animal again. Deciding she was not going to go tramping around through people’s yards hunting for what would almost certainly turn out to be somebody’s stray husky, she turned and walked back down toward where Watson had joined her daughter, kneeling beside Eowyn. Both stroked the animal and spoke soothingly to her.
Why did
I get so worked up about a dog? Annja asked herself. I shouldn’t let myself be so suggestible.
It was fatigue, she decided. Physical and emotional. Had to be.
The tall Plains woman stood. Eowyn had settled down. She wagged her tail and grinned at Annja, inviting her to admire her heroism. Annja bent down and petted her head and told her she was a good watchdog.
“Was it just a dog, then?” Watson asked. Her tone sounded strained.
Annja looked at her sharply. “Why? What else would it be?”
Watson turned her eyes away from Annja’s. She seemed shaken.
“Thank you for your willingness to protect my daughter,” she said. “We’d better go now.”
8
“It’s a great honor to meet you, Dr. Michel,” Annja said in French, shaking hands with the psychiatrist.
His face was pinched. “Please,” he said in thickly accented English. “Americans should not try to speak French. It is almost a form of cultural imperialism, to butcher the language so.”
Annja tightened her lips. His tone as well as his words cut like a slap to the face. Especially since she was proud of her French. Justly so—she’d spoken it all her life, so far as she could remember, had minored in Romance languages in college and, most to the point, passed among the French themselves for a native speaker on more than one occasion.
She forced herself to draw a deep breath to calm herself. I think I see what Dr. Watson meant about him being difficult, she thought.
She wasn’t exactly unaccustomed to arrogance from the French, although they could also be a lovely, charming people. This man definitely pushed the envelope of rudeness, though.
He was short, a head shorter than Annja, dressed in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, khaki pants, hiking boots. He had broad shoulders and a marathoner runner’s build. Despite the fact his close-cropped hair was steely, and his résumé, which Annja had looked up online the night before, said he was in his early fifties, his narrow features were quite youthful, relatively unmarked. Surprisingly so given a tan of apparent long-standing. He wasn’t what she would call a handsome man, but his appearance and manner suggested a kestrel; and that dark tan made his eyes, of a blue so pale as to be almost silver, look striking almost to the point of eeriness.
At least I lucked out when it came to tracking him down, she reminded herself. He was currently working in Sandia Pueblo. It formed basically the northern boundary of Albuquerque, stretching from the river to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and north to within a few miles of the town of Bernalillo. For whatever reason, Dr. Michel had chosen to meet Annja late in the afternoon at a scenic lookout spot in the foothills, along the road past the exits that led to the pueblo’s immense and relatively recent casino and the Bien Mur Indian Center.
The Sandias’ flat gray faces rose almost a mile above the river valley. They looked anything but watermelon-like, though that was what the name meant in Spanish. While various explanations for the name existed, Annja tended to believe that the Spaniards thought the north mountain looked like a big slice of watermelon. At sunset, at certain times of year, the westward-facing cliffs turned a startling red. Annja had seen that herself.
When she arrived at the appointed spot, a little before the agreed-upon time as was her cautious custom, she’d found the doctor already waiting for her, leaning with arms folded against a vehicle that was apparently his mobile living quarters. It looked to Annja like the front end of a Toyota pickup mated to a body, like a panel van customized into an RV. She wondered if the U.N. had shelled out to build it or if he’d found it somewhere used. It bore the markings of many miles.
“What can you tell me about the skinwalker phenomenon, Dr. Michel,” Annja asked in English. What with one thing or another she figured the best course was to get this interview over with as quickly as possible.
He nodded briskly. “First you must have a basic understanding of the Navajo witch. He, or she, is a follower of the Witchcraft Way. The Athabascans of the Southwest fear ghosts more than anything. Not unnaturally, they associate ghosts with corpses, of whom they consequently feel a peculiarly poignant terror. They likewise fear owls, whom they suspect to be ghosts—and also of serving as spies and servitors to witches. The basic reason for this fear is that contamination by ghosts or the dead can cause a wasting ghost sickness or corpse sickness, which can bring about decline, decrepitude, even eventual death, to the victim. And make no mistake—people have died of ghost sickness. They die of it today—they will into the future, unless the white man succeeds in finally murdering the native culture. Or the entire planet. It is a phenomenon like ‘pointing the bone’ in Haiti.”
“A psychosomatic effect?” Annja asked.
He sneered. His fine, mobile features, the cheeks and chin lightly stubbled in silver, lent themselves well to it, she had to admit.
“Does it comfort you to think so? The symptoms in such cases are real. And so, as I say, are the deaths. Call that psychosomatic, if you like.
“The most dangerous medium of the ghost sickness is corpse powder—human bodies dried and ground. The corpse powder is the very core of the witch’s power. Far from shunning contact with death or the dead, he revels in it. It is his route to his chosen supernatural power, what the Westerners used to call medicine. It is the source of magic and effective personality. Corpse powder’s most potent and coveted form is that obtained from the bodies of young children.”
Annja set her lips against what she felt trying to rise from her stomach. She wasn’t squeamish. Nobody who’d spent time on protracted digs around the world and survived was. And she’d seen and encountered things in the gross and horrific departments since inheriting her sword that went far beyond what she’d found on her plate as an academic archaeologist.
But if he’s trying to spook me, she thought grimly, he’s succeeding. She was dead set on not giving him the satisfaction of letting him know that.
“Now, you may look down on all this in dismissal from your lofty perch as a Western-trained, so-called scientist. Let me assure you this matter is deadly serious. These people, who are as human as you or me, take it with literal deadly seriousness.
“There exists today a small community, which I will not name, whose population consists entirely of Navajos believed to be witches and their descendants. They went into exile rather than face punishment. The tribe allowed them to do so, rather than face the white-eyes’ retribution for punishing them according to the ancient ways. I have gone among these exiled witches, spoken to them. When they and other Navajos encounter one another, each pretends not to recognize the other. Otherwise, there would be blood.”
“Do they still practice witchcraft?” Annja couldn’t help herself asking.
“Some say they do. Some say they do not. Who is to say who lies and who tells the truth?”
“Wouldn’t they be natural suspects as the source for our killer?”
“They have learned to survive by keeping their heads down—to fly under the white-eyes’ radar, as you might say. They chose to accept permanent partition from their clans, from their sacred earth, which are as much a part of them as their bones and flesh and blood. If they made that sacrifice, would they jeopardize the safety they bought at such terrible cost?”
“Dr. Michel,” she said through clenched teeth, “fifteen people, including a very dear friend of mine, have died at the hands of one or more apparent Navajo wolves. I think the last thing you need to worry about is whether I take the phenomenon seriously.”
He smiled thinly. “Bon. Now, the most terrible form of witch is the skinwalker. It is the most extreme and difficult path of the Witchcraft Way. It requires rituals even more horrific and forbidden than the less esoteric witchcraft. Needless to say, murder, blood and corpse powder figure prominently in its attainment.”
“Of course,” Annja said. By this point she felt need for a bit of flippancy to save her sanity, and damn the risks of this uptight man’s overly sharpened tongue.
/> If she hadn’t seen the photographs of the victims, if her friend hadn’t virtually died in her arms, she would not be reacting so strongly to Michel’s catalog of horrors, no matter how much relish he recited them with. She was vulnerable. He seemed to sense that, and enjoy taking advantage.
“The skinwalker is said to have many fearful gifts,” Michel went on. “The power to read thoughts. The ability to imitate the voice of any person or animal, sometimes impersonating loved ones to lure victims to their doom. Some stories even credit them with being able to steal another’s body by gazing deeply into their eyes. And, of course, they have the power to assume animal form—predominantly, though not restricted to, that of a wolf. Hence, the common appellation Navajo wolf. Some others assert that they assume a sort of hybrid human-animal form. In these altered shapes, or skins, they are said to possess strength, speed and resistance to damage far in excess of either human or animal.”
“I see,” Annja said. “That would be a pretty formidable package.”
He shrugged. “Most likely, of course, you are dealing with a mere poseur—an imitator, a copy cat, you might say. If you are dealing with a real skinwalker, you are in very grave trouble, indeed.”
“Define real in this context, Dr. Michel, please.”
He laughed. “A skeptic, eh? Very well. When I say a real skinwalker, I mean a person who has undergone the grueling, horrific and largely illegal rituals prescribed for becoming a Navajo wolf. Such an individual would likely possess above-average intelligence and almost superhuman determination.
“Indeed, as you would know had you read my paper, which I have circulated on a limited basis in preliminary form, I theorize that the witch, particularly the skinwalker, constitutes a peculiarly Navajo life-way for what we would term a sociopath. Such people, in other cultures, are known for high intelligence, resourcefulness and a complete lack of conventional inhibitions. They can behave quite obsessively in pursuit of their goals. Including developing their skills to an extraordinarily high level.”