“You want that land at Mystery Lake, don’t you?”
“Of course. But you don’t have to give me that land until your children are safely home. That’s our bargain, isn’t it?”
“All right. But if you put me through all of this, and I find out that you’ve been taking advantage of my feelings for my children, I swear to God that you’ll really find out what frightening means.”
George laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her. “You are a very determined person, Lily. I like determined.”
SEVEN
That evening, she was whipping up eggs for a cheese-and-tomato omelet when the doorbell chimed. She crossed the hallway wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. Through the spyhole in the front door she could see Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg, with snow on their shoulders, their noses red with cold. She opened up at once.
“What is it?” she asked.
Special Agent Rylance raised one leather-gloved hand to reassure her. “It’s okay, Mrs. Blake. We don’t have any news about Tasha and Sammy. But we may have some kind of a lead to the people who took them.”
She led them into the living room. “You look frozen. Can I get you something hot to drink?”
“No, we’re fine,” said Special Agent Rylance. “We don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“Here, sit by the fire,” she said.
Special Agent Rylance unbuttoned his overcoat and sat down. “We had a report less than an hour ago that these FLAME lunatics have attacked another estranged wife—in Winona this time—and kidnapped her son.”
“That’s terrible. Was the woman badly hurt?”
“That’s the reason we came around to see you personally,” said Special Agent Kellogg. “The woman suffered third-degree burns and she died on the way to the hospital. We didn’t want you to hear it for the first time on the TV news.”
Lily said, “Oh my God. How can anyone be so sadistic?”
“Hard to understand, isn’t it? But people do all kinds of terrible things to each other, every day of the week.”
“The woman was only twenty-nine,” said Special Agent Rylance. “Her son was four.”
“Do you think it was the same men who tried to kill me?”
Special Agent Rylance nodded. “A neighbor saw them leaving the apartment. One of them was wearing a headdress like the one you described, with horns.”
“The neighbor also saw their vehicle, a black Toyota SUV.”
“We’ll find them, Mrs. Blake,” said Special Agent Kellogg. “And when we do, there’s every chance that we’ll be able to locate your ex-husband, too.”
For a moment, Lily was tempted to tell Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg what had happened in Black Crow Valley that afternoon—the chanting, and the bone-rattling, and the dim, flickering light behind the trees. But it all seemed so unreal, and she didn’t want them to know how gullible she had been. How could a Native American spirit find Tasha and Sammy when the FBI couldn’t? A Wendigo? Much more likely that it was a hoax—a setup constructed from strobe lights and loudspeakers.
Special Agent Rylance said, “We’ll keep you informed of any developments, Mrs. Blake. Meanwhile, as usual, if you hear anything . . .”
“Of course,” Lily told him.
Lily was spooning Purina Dog Chow into Sergeant’s bowl when the FLAME story came on Channel 41 news that night.
Jerry Duncan, the newscaster, said, “. . . Ms. Whitney’s robe was drenched in water. Then she was tied to a kitchen chair, doused in gasoline, and set alight. She died of her burns before the ambulance could reach the Community Memorial Hospital.
“Her four-year-old son, Dean, was kidnapped from his bedroom and so far his whereabouts remain unknown. Police are looking for his father, Morris Whitney, whose last address was in Good-view. Mr. Whitney was apparently involved in a series of legal wrangles with his former wife over access and alimony.”
Lily immediately stood up and walked through to the kitchen, just as a wedding picture of the Whitneys was flashed on to the TV screen. They were both laughing, Lily couldn’t help thinking how ordinary they looked: Mr. and Mrs. Happy Average.
Jerry Duncan continued, “Less than an hour ago, Channel 41 News received a webcam message from a man claiming to represent the men’s action group FLAME—Fathers’ League Against Mothers’ Evil. In recent months, FLAME has been committing increasingly violent acts against mothers who have been granted custody of their children after a divorce. In three cases they have kidnapped the children and presumably handed them over to their fathers, although all efforts by law enforcement agencies to find these children or their fathers have so far met with no success.
“The FLAME representative—who said that his name was ‘Victor Quinn’—claimed that FLAME was responsible for burning Ms. Whitney alive, and that more mothers would face a similar fate unless they were prepared to be far more reasonable about custody, access, and maintenance payments.”
The silhouette of a man appeared—a man wearing a headdress that looked like a pair of devil’s horns. Behind him was a solid orange background, with the word FLAME painted on it in letters that were supposed to look like fire.
The man said, in a flat, dry, Minnesota accent, “Today, we executed another witch.”
Lily started to tremble. She had had so many nightmares about this man, but she had never believed that she would ever see him again or hear his voice. But here he was, right in front of her. She was so shaken that she had to pull out a chair and sit down.
“Witchcraft is no longer a crime punishable by death,” the man continued. “It used to be, in the thirteen original colonies, and some people think that it still should be. Women may not work spells any longer, or consort with Satan, but they are still regularly using trickery and deceit to destroy the happiness of decent and hardworking men, and to deprive them of their right to fatherhood. If that isn’t witchery, we don’t know what is.”
My God, thought Lily. She knew that her own behavior had been far from saintly while she and Jeff were breaking up. At times she had been unforgivably spiteful and awkward, and she had never made it easy for Jeff to keep up his relationship with Tasha and Sammy. But no matter how mean-minded she might have been, no woman deserved to be burned alive for it.
The phone rang. She was trembling so much that when she picked it up, she nearly dropped it.
“Mrs. Blake? This is Special Agent Kellogg. Are you watching the TV news?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“You can see this man ‘Victor Quinn?’ Is he the man who broke into your home and kidnapped Tasha and Sammy?”
“Yes. I’m sure of it. I’d know his voice anywhere.”
“Are you okay? This hasn’t disturbed you too much, has it?”
“I’m shaking like a leaf, to tell you the truth.”
“Would you feel better if I came around?”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll be fine. It was a shock, that’s all.”
“Okay, Mrs. Blake. I’ll probably call you again tomorrow. Thanks for the ID. I believe it could help us a lot.”
“Just find him,” said Lily. “Just find him, and find my children.”
She went to bed early that night. It had stopped snowing for a while, but the roof was thickly covered and the whole house creaked like a ship at sea. She picked up Minnesota Monthly and tried to finish off the cryptic crossword she had started yesterday, but none of the clues seemed to make any sense at all. “Brushes with insects help crones to become airborne.” What the hell did that mean?
She closed her eyes. Her head fell back against the pillows. She began to breathe deeper and deeper, and her fingers opened so that her ballpen rolled out of her hand and dropped onto the floor.
She dreamed that she was walking through the birch woods. She wasn’t alone. She could hear footsteps all around her, and people whispering, but she couldn’t see anybody. She realized that she was lost, and that she had no idea where she was going, or how she was going to get ou
t of the birch woods before it grew dark.
On either side of her, behind the trees, she saw pale-gray shapes running through the undergrowth. Wolves, she thought. But maybe they weren’t wolves. Maybe they were witches.
Oh God, I’m frightened. Oh God, I’m frightened. The branches scratched her face and caught in her hair, as if the birch trees themselves were trying to stop her from escaping.
Her heart beat faster and harder, and she started to run. Up ahead of her, she thought she could see a light flickering—a dim, silvery light, like a figure from a black-and-white movie.
The light flickered again, and again. As she came nearer to it, she saw that it was making its way between the trees on two legs, yet it was strangely hunched, and it had an odd, jerky gait, as if it were a four-legged animal that had been trained to walk like a man. It was then that she realized what it was, and she stopped, her chest constricted so tightly that she could hardly breathe. It was the Wendigo, It was turning around and around, in some kind of slow, spasmodic dance. When it turned to face her, she could dimly see it. But when it turned edgewise, it vanished altogether—dissolved, as if it simply wasn’t there.
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 fol
lowing 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.”
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