“I can’t believe we’re really going to France,” said Tasha. “It’s like a dream.”
“I’m still not going to eat snails,” said Sammy, emphatically.
Little William, sitting in his car seat between Sammy and Tasha, said, “Nails! Nails!”
As they neared the intersection with I-62, a fierce snow shower blew across the highway, and Ned had to switch on his windshield wipers. “What did I tell you? I sure hope your flight isn’t delayed.”
The snow began to fall even more thickly, and Lily could hear the wind gusting underneath the Explorer with a hollow sound like a huge slide-whistle.
“Whoooo!” said little William, with his eyes wide.
Lily laughed. But at that moment, Ned shouted, “Jesus!” and jammed on the Explorer’s brakes. As the SUV slewed to one side, Lily could see that there was a figure standing in the middle of the highway, only twenty yards in front of them. It looked like a man, but it was taller than a man, and it juddered and jumped like an image from an old black-and-white movie. Lily glimpsed a stretched-open mouth, and sightless black eyes, and arms that looked jointed in all the wrong ways, but then it turned away and disappeared altogether.
The Explorer’s tires slithered on the road surface as Ned tried to bring it under control. Tasha was screaming and Agnes was twisting around in her seat, trying to make sure that little William was firmly buckled up. They spun round almost 360 degrees before Ned managed to bring the Explorer to a stop. They were overtaken by a huge truck, its headlights ablaze and its klaxon blaring like a passing train.
“Did you see that?” said Ned. “Did you see that guy? Right in the middle of the goddamn highway like he had a goddamn death wish or something.”
Lily tugged at the shoulder of his windbreaker. “Ned, let’s get out of here, right now.”
Ned looked around, increasingly frantic. “Did I hit him? I didn’t feel anything, did you? I don’t think I hit him. Where the hell is he? He was standing right in the middle of the goddamn highway.”
“Ned—let’s go! I don’t think there was anybody there! It was like a mirage!”
“But what if I hit him? I can’t just leave him lying in the road!”
Another car came to a halt behind them, flashing its lights and sounding its horn. Then another, and another, and another.
“Please, Ned, let’s get moving,” Lily urged him. “It’s really dangerous, stopping on the highway like this. There was nobody there, I promise you. It was just your headlights, shining on the snow.”
Ned switched on his emergency flashers. “I’ll pull over. I need to get out and take a look.”
“Honey,” said Agnes, “I think that Lily’s right, and we should go. I didn’t feel you hit anything.”
“I saw the guy, hon. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
“Ned!” Lily shouted at him. “Will you please just hit the gas and get us the fuck out of here!”
Ned turned around, blinking in surprise. “Come on, Lily. We got young kids with us here. No need to use language like that.”
Lily was about to shout at him again when they were deafened by a sharp, explosive blast, like escaping steam. The Explorer began to vibrate, as if they were driving at high speed over a plank road, and then it started to shake wildly from side to side, until it was thumping and banging on its suspension. Agnes and Tasha and Sammy all shrieked in terror. Ned let out a deep, frightened, “Whoa!”
“Make it stop!” Tasha cried out. “Make it stop!”
“What’s happening?” said Agnes. “Ned—what’s happening?”
Ned was grappling with the gearshift. “I don’t know! I don’t know! I can’t make it—!”
But the hissing was so intense now that his words were swallowed, and it kept on growing louder and louder until Lily found it almost impossible to think.
“Ned!” she shouted, but he couldn’t hear her. “Ned!”
Through the undersides of the doors, lights began to stream in—narrow, criss-crossing lights, which shifted and altered, forming themselves into all kinds of distorted shapes. Even though she was being shaken so violently from side to side, Lily could see strange attenuated faces sliding diagonally across the Explorer’s floor, and up the back of the seats in front of her—faces, and slowly opening limbs, and what could have been branches, or antlers. She tried to lean forward and shout at Ned again, but she was slammed back so hard that her neck was whiplashed.
“Ned! The doors! Unlock the doors!”
Still Ned didn’t hear her. She had to grip the grab-handle with both hands to stop herself from being jolted against the door on one side and William’s baby seat on the other. All she could think was: Please don’t hurt my children. Please don’t hurt my family.
“Stop!” Lily screamed out. “Wendigo! Stop!”
But if the apparition could hear her, or understand her, it showed no signs of it.
“Stop! I’ll stay here! I’ll do whatever George wants me to do!”
A rhomboid-shaped light shuddered across the glove-box, and then rose up in front of Agnes like a hologram, reassembling itself into a canine head. Two long arms unfolded themselves on either side of it, and then the head began to rise higher and higher, leaning over Agnes at an angle. At the same time it changed itself into a human face, which stared at Agnes with a terrible expressionless detachment.
“Stop! I’ll get the land for him! I promise!”
Agnes shrank down in her seat, raising her hand to protect herself. But the scissorlike arms caught her around the neck, and yanked her straight up again. She turned toward Ned with her eyes bulging.
Ned shouted something that Lily couldn’t hear. He pulled at one of the arms and tried to twist Agnes free. But then the figure somersaulted backward, straight through the Explorer’s windshield, which exploded into thousands of sparkling fragments. Agnes was wrenched out of her seat and into the snowstorm. She literally flew away into the air, as if she had been shot from a cannon. At least half of her did. Her seatbelt kept her hips and her legs firmly in place, and only her head and her arms and her torso disappeared, with long strings of bloody intestines unraveling behind her.
Immediately the Explorer stopped bucking up and down, and the hissing died away. The only sounds were William sobbing and the impatient beeping of car horns. Ned turned around to Lily and his face was gray with shock.
“Ned, get us out of here!” Lily begged him.
“Agnes . . .” said Ned. “Oh my God. Agnes!”
“Ned, for Christ’s sake, put your foot down and go!”
But Ned started to unfasten his seatbelt. “She’s out there, Lily! I can’t just leave her!”
“She’s dead, Ned! You have to go!”
Ned opened his door, but as he did so, something landed on the Explorer’s hood, with a resonant thump.
Tasha screamed.
Lily saw a creature on the hood that could have been a giant spider if it hadn’t been made of nothing but light and shadow and optical illusions. It had a huge head, with an oversized human face, but the head peeled open to reveal a smaller face, more like a slippery, hairless dog. Ned tried to scramble out of his seat, but two arms jabbed in through the shattered windshield and seized him by the shoulders. He was dragged out of the Explorer with such force that one of his boots caught in the steering wheel. There was a crackling noise like a turkey-leg being twisted and his foot was pulled off at the ankle joint.
With his arms and legs tumbling across the hood, Ned was pulled up into the air. Lily heard him screaming, but then there was another explosive hiss, and he vanished into the whirling snow, in the same way that Agnes had vanished. It happened so fast that Lily was left with her hand still raised to shake Ned’s shoulder, and her mouth still open.
She turned to the children. Tasha and Sammy were staring at her in disbelief, both of them stunned into silence. William was still crying, his cheeks bright red and his little face bewildered.
“We have to get out of here,” said
Lily.
“What was that?” Tasha asked her, and her voice was quaking with absolute dread. “Mommy—what was that?”
Lily unfastened her seatbelt, reached over to the driver’s seat and pressed the central-locking switch. “Come on, we’re going! And when you get outside, run!”
Tasha and Sammy opened the Explorer’s door and almost fell out on to the highway. A long line of traffic had been building up behind them, and there was an irritable chorus of horns, but so far nobody had climbed out of their vehicle to find out what was wrong. Lily was finding it almost impossible to extricate William from his car seat. He was wearing a thick corduroy romper suit and his straps were held in place by four fiddly buckles.
She turned around to see where Tasha and Sammy were. They had run a short distance away, but now they had stopped and were waiting for her. She opened her door and called out, “Run! But watch out for the traffic!” William’s seat belt buckles had jammed solid and she was jiggling them in frustration. “Come on, you stupid damn car seat!” William started to cry even louder, a high distressed piping that made Lily feel even more panicky.
She was still struggling when there was a thunderous bang on the Explorer’s roof, and the whole vehicle shook.
“No!” she shouted. “I’ll give him the land! I swear it!”
But the roof began to buckle, and slowly come downward. With a whole cacophony of bangs and groans and warping noises, the entire vehicle started to crumple. Lily was forced to slide off her seat and kneel on the floor. She took hold of the sides of William’s car seat and tried to shake it free from its mountings, but it wouldn’t budge. With another groan, the Explorer’s roof came down as far as the headrests, and the sides started to fold in too.
Lily was forced to crouch down in the foot well, but still she couldn’t get William free. The roof pressed down on the top of his car seat and started to tilt it forward. William was crying so hysterically that he could hardly breathe.
It was then that Lily realized that she couldn’t save him, and that the frame of the open door had been pressed down so far that she only had a few seconds to crawl out of the last remaining space.
She heard somebody shout, “Come on, lady; you have to get yourself out of there!”
She managed to twist herself around, and two buck-skin-gloved hands reached into the Explorer and firmly grasped her wrists.
“There’s a baby in here!” she screamed. “There’s a baby in here! You have to save him!”
But there was nothing she could do. She was dragged out into the snow, and helped up on to her feet, just as the Explorer was crushed up into a tangled sculpture of twisted doors and distorted seats. The noise of protesting metal was deafening, like a car crash in slow motion.
Six or seven men had left their cars to see what was happening, and more were approaching through the snow. The man who had rescued Lily was a tall, rangy truck-driver in a thick plaid jacket. “Anybody called nine-one-one?” he called out. “Listen—there’s a kid inside. Go get a couple of jacks . . . maybe we can lift the roof up.”
“Damndest thing I ever saw in my life,” said another man. “How the hell does a vehicle get itself all scrunched up like that?”
Lily begged, “Please, see if you can get William out of there. I can’t hear him crying. Can anybody hear him crying?”
She leaned against the crumpled-up side of the Explorer and shouted, “William! William!” But she couldn’t hear anything except the swish-swishswish of passing traffic and the sporadic blaring of horns. She stood up straight again and looked around, and she felt as if she were going mad with grief. There was no sign of the Wendigo anywhere, no dimly shifting light, no shapes, no faces. She didn’t even have a mirage to scream at.
Tasha and Sammy came up to her, accompanied by a gray-haired couple in matching green padded coats. Both children looked stricken.
“Mommy?” said Tasha. “Is William dead, too?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. These men are going to try to get him out.”
“Anything we can do?” asked the gray-haired man.
“Did you crash or something?” asked the gray-haired woman, looking at the crushed Explorer in disbelief.
The man said, “Your kids came running up to us and said that you was attacked by some kind of animal. Never saw no animal that could do nothing like that. Not even your full-grown moose.”
“I don’t know,” said Lily. She couldn’t think what else to say. She could hear sirens warbling and honking in the near-distance. “Please . . . I think I have to sit down.”
She was still sitting in the back of the gray-haired couple’s Buick when two Highway Patrol officers came up to her, a man and a woman.
The woman climbed into the car beside her. She had orange-tinted glasses and she smelled of breath mints. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “We’ll have the paramedics take you and your children to the hospital in a couple of minutes.”
“We’re fine. The three of us—we didn’t get hurt. It was only my sister and my brother-in-law, and my little nephew.”
“Well, that’s what I need to ask you about. You said your nephew was in the vehicle, but all we could find was a child’s car seat.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“There was a child’s car seat in the vehicle but there was no child in it.”
“I don’t understand. I was trying to get him out, but I couldn’t. The buckles were stuck fast.”
“Are you absolutely sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure! How can he not be there?”
“Well, ma’am, we’ve searched the whole area and there’s no trace of him anywhere.”
“Oh, God,” said Lily. “What about the others? What about my sister and my brother-in-law?”
The male Highway Patrol officer said, “We’ve found some remains, ma’am. Looks like they both went clear through the windshield when you crashed.” He paused, and then he said, “What we can’t work out, though, is what the heck you guys hit.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They returned home late in the afternoon, as it was growing dark. Tasha ran straight up to her bedroom and closed the door, but Sammy tagged around after Lily wherever she went—from the kitchen to the living room and back again—sucking his thumb like he used to when he was three years old, and saying nothing.
Lily was relieved to find that the crime-scene investigators had swept all of the ashes out of the living-room grate. She laid a new fire with crumpled-up copies of the Star Tribune and a little tepee of dry pine kindling, and soon had it crackling into life.
“Are you hungry?” she asked Sammy. He shook his head, but she went into the kitchen anyway and opened up a can of tomato soup.
She was pretty sure that there was no hope of them flying to France now. The Wendigo wouldn’t let them go. George Iron Walker wouldn’t let them go. He wanted his land and he was obviously going to pursue her until she gave it to him.
She called John Shooks’s number. He didn’t answer, but she left him a message: “Tell George Iron Walker to call it off. I’ll get his land for him, one way or another, I promise. Meet me at my house tomorrow, around three.”
She was shaking, but she managed to restrain herself from telling Shooks how she really felt. She was so grief-stricken for Agnes and Ned and little William that she felt as if somebody had their hands around her throat and was trying to choke her. She was terrified, too, that the Wendigo might come after them here. But more than that she felt deeply burning fury, like nothing she had ever experienced before. She was determined to show George Iron Walker that she was not going to allow him to massacre her family and escape without being punished for it.
She called Ned’s parents, John and Matilda. Two women from the children’s welfare services had picked up Petra and Jamie from school and driven them to Shingle Creek, so that their grandpa and their grandma could take care of them. Matilda said, “Poor kids . . . they’ve been sobbing their hearts out ever
since they got here.” All that Petra and Jamie had been told so far was that their parents had died in a highway accident, and that their little brother was missing—although they had to be prepared for the probability that he was dead too.
As Lily was stirring the soup, a picture of the crushed Explorer was flashed up on the local TV news, but Sammy was sitting with his head resting listlessly on the table, and she was able to reach the remote and switch channels before he saw it.
She had taken the phone off the hook, too, because she guessed that reporters would be calling, as well as friends and well-wishers. This evening they needed nothing but warmth, togetherness and peace.
Tasha appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her cheeks were still blotchy with tears.
“Tasha?”
When she spoke, Tasha’s voice was trembly but accusing. “You know what it was, don’t you, Mommy? That thing that killed Aunt Agnes and Uncle Ned.”
Sammy took his thumb out of his mouth. “I saw its face. It had two faces. It was like a dog. Then it was like a horrible man.”
Lily switched off the soup. “I do know what it was, yes. It was trying to stop us from reaching the airport.”
“Is it a ghost?” asked Sammy.
“In a way, yes. A kind of a ghost. When your daddy took you away, we couldn’t find you anywhere, so I asked this ghost to go looking for you.”
“You did what?”
As simply as she could, she told them about John Shooks and George Iron Walker and Hazawin, and how she had asked them to summon up the Wendigo.
“I don’t believe you,” said Tasha. “There’s no such thing as a Wendigo. How can there be?”
“Yes, there is, Tasha. You saw it for yourself. You saw what it can do. I’m so sorry for what’s happened, you don’t have any idea. I wish to the bottom of my heart that I’d never heard about it. Even if I had never been able to find you again, at least your father would still be alive, and so would Aunt Agnes and Uncle Ned and little William.”
“But if it’s true—why haven’t you told the police?”
“I could. But do you think that they’d believe me? George Iron Walker would say that I was making it all up, and he’d still send the Wendigo after us. There’s only one way out of this, sweetheart, and that’s for me to give him his piece of land.”
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