Edgewise

by Graham Masterton

  “This is strange,” said Lily. “Where do you think they are?”

  “Went for a walk, maybe,” said Shooks.

  “A walk?”

  “Well, you know what George is like. He enjoys, like, communing with nature.”

  “Doesn’t he have a cell phone?”

  “Sure, but I’ve never known him to answer it.”

  They went back inside. “So what do we do now?” asked Lily.

  Shooks picked up a half-empty bottle of whiskey from the bureau and read the label. “We could wait, I guess. Or leave him a note, and ask him to contact you.”

  “I can’t stay too long. Tasha and Sammy are expecting me home.”

  “Okay, then. We’ll give him thirty minutes, and if he doesn’t show by then, we’ll head back to the city.” He lifted the whiskey bottle. “Did you ever hear of Old Zebulon bourbon? No, neither did I. Do you want some?”

  He went into the kitchen to find himself a glass. As he was coming back, however, Lily thought she heard something: a distant, high-pitched wailing. It was coming from outside somewhere, but the wind was blowing it down the chimney.

  “I can never get the measure of that George Iron Walker,” Shooks was saying. “I can’t decide if he’s slicker than any white man, or more native than any native.”

  “Ssh!” said Lily, raising her hand. “Listen!”

  Shooks stopped talking and listened, cocking his head to one side. “Sorry . . . I don’t hear nothing.”

  “No . . . there it is again. Like a small child crying.”

  She opened the front door and went out on to the verandah. Although the wind was beginning to rise, she could hear it much more distinctly out here. It was definitely a child. She had the impression that it was coming from the forest off to their right, up the slope where Hazawin had summoned the Wendigo.

  “Yeah, I hear it now,” said Shooks, swallowing whiskey. “Mind you—it could be nothing but a raccoon caught in a trap. Raccoons can sound a whole lot like babies, when they’re distressed.”

  Lily said, “Ssh.” The crying went on and on, with occasional pauses for breath. “That’s not a raccoon. That’s a child. Not too far away, either.”

  Shooks stared at her. “What are you thinking, Lily? You’re not thinking the same as I’m thinking, are you?”

  “William,” said Lily.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  John Shooks said, “If the Highway Patrol couldn’t find your sister’s baby in the truck, or anywheres in the vicinity, then I guess it’s possible the Wendigo took him.”

  They were only halfway up the slope toward the forest but already he was seriously out of breath. Lily was ten yards ahead of him, bounding through the knee-deep snow with her arms flailing to keep her balance.

  “Question is,” John Shooks panted, “why did it take him?”

  “To put more pressure on me—that’s my guess. George Iron Walker must have known that I’d come back here, if I couldn’t give him the land at Mystery Lake.”

  They had reached the tree line now. Lily stopped again, and listened, and now there was no question that a child was crying somewhere in the forest, less than a hundred yards away. The crying was quavering and hysterical, interspersed with agonized gasps for breath. Lily was sure it was William.

  “William!” she shouted out. “William!”

  “Not too sure it’s advisable for us to advertise our presence,” said Shooks, catching up with her.

  “He wants that land,” said Lily. “He may put pressure on me, but I don’t think he’ll hurt me while he still believes I can get it for him.”

  “Hmm—glad you’re so confident about it.”

  The crying seemed to be coming from the clearing where Hazawin had laid out her bones and her mirror. Lily pushed her way through the briars and the tangled branches until she came out in the open. The huge rock in the center of the clearing was covered in snow, and there was no sign of a child anywhere. Lily looked up. Above the tops of the pine trees the sky was so intensely blue that it was almost purple.

  John Shooks joined her, tugging at a briar that had snagged his sleeve. He circled around the rock, and then he said, “It’s stopped.”

  He was right. The forest was quiet again.

  Lily crossed over to the other side of the clearing and shouted, “William! Can you hear me? It’s Lily! Call out if you can hear me!”

  Nothing. Only the wind, and the nervous rattling of the branches.

  Shooks said, “Could have been a ghost voice. Hazawin can do stuff like that—make you hear things that ain’t really there. Kind of like ventriloquistics.”

  “William!” Lily persisted. “It’s Aunt Lily! Where are you, William?”

  Still nothing. Shooks said, “Maybe we’d best get back to the house.”

  “William!”

  Shooks took hold of her elbow. “Come on, Lily. I don’t like this one iota.”

  “But we heard him! We both heard him! He must be here!”

  “I know we both heard him. But like I say, Hazawin can do things that’ll make you believe that day is night or your dead grandpa’s talking to you from inside your closet.”

  Lily stayed where she was, straining to hear that crying again. She felt desperate. She knew that Shooks was probably right, and that George Iron Walker was tricking her, but she felt so guilty about what had happened to William that she couldn’t bear to abandon him a second time, if there was any chance at all that he were here.

  “Come on, Lily,” said Shooks, more gently this time.

  “All right,” she agreed, and allowed him to take hold of her arm and lead her back around the rock.

  As they reached the trees, however, she heard a sharp rustling noise, and then a quick pattering of feet. She turned around, and Shooks turned around, too. There was another rustle, and the crackling of broken branches.

  Out of the trees, an enormous brindled wolf appeared, with shaggy fur and luminous yellow eyes. Its long gray tongue was lolling between its teeth, and its breath was smoking. It stood less than thirty feet away from them, staring at them.

  “Oh . . . shit,” said Shooks.

  Lily heard more branches breaking, off to her right. Another wolf appeared, long and gray; and then another, and another. They came through the trees and stood in a circle, like a gathering of ghosts. Lily guessed that there were more than a dozen of them.

  “This is seriously fucking awkward,” Shooks told her.

  “You said that wolves didn’t attack people.”

  “Not so far as anybody knows.”

  “What makes you think that these wolves are any different?”

  “These wolves set a trap for us, didn’t they? What kind of a wolf can do that?”

  They waited. Lily’s heart was thumping underneath her fur coat. She looked from one wolf to the other, trying to decide if they were going to go for them or not. The wolves kept their distance, endlessly panting, huh-huh-huh-huh, but not showing any signs of going away.

  “Let’s try edging back toward the trees,” Lily suggested.

  “Edging?”

  “A couple of steps at a time. No sudden moves. If wolves are frightened of humans, if they really don’t attack people, then we should be okay.”

  Shooks pulled a face. “Okay. I guess we can’t stay here for the rest of the day.”

  Lily took a cautious step to the left, and then another, and Shooks followed her. She reached the trees and pushed aside a branch with her upraised elbow. The branch snapped sharply, and instantly the brindled wolf trotted forward two or three paces, and all of the other wolves came nearer too.

  “Jesus,” said Shooks.

  “Let’s keep going,” Lily urged him. “It looks like they’re curious, more than anything else. I mean, they would have gone for us by now, couldn’t they, if they really wanted to kill us?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not a wolf expert. Maybe they’re just playing with their food.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said
Lily, “we won’t edge any more; we’ll simply start walking, as fast as we can. We don’t want to show them we’re afraid.”

  Shooks looked around them. The wolves were everywhere, their yellow eyes unblinking, long strings of saliva swinging from their jaws. “You’re right,” he said. “We might be filling our shorts in sheer terror but we don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing it, do we?”

  “Okay then, let’s go.”

  Lily took the first step, and then they began to walk away from the clearing, as briskly as the briars would allow. Immediately the wolves began to follow them. On either side Lily could see their long gray shapes flowing between the silver birches. Somehow they didn’t seem like real wolves—more like the wolves that you would see in nightmares, weirdly misshapen.

  Shooks turned his head. “They’re right behind us,” he said, between clenched teeth. “That big black-and-brown bastard—he’s almost close enough to take a bite out of my ankle.”

  Lily didn’t look back. She was trying hard not panic. She knew that fear was infectious, especially among animals. Dogs often attacked people because they could sense they were frightened of them. She had seen horses go berserk, when they smelled human fear, and cattle collide with barbed-wire fences.

  “Come on, John,” she urged him.

  They started almost power-walking, and then they started jogging. The wolves kept up with them, loping faster and faster. Lily glanced to her left, and she was sure that she glimpsed one of the wolves rise up on to its hind legs and start running like a man. It was then that she lost any sense of control, and started to sprint.

  “Lily!” shouted Shooks. “For Christ’s sake!”

  But now terror had taken over, and adrenaline was surging through her body, and all she wanted to do was get out of there alive. The wolves were chasing close behind her. She could hear their claws clattering over the briars. Shooks was yelling, “Lily! Lily!” but she knew what would happen if she stopped and turned back.

  She caught her ankle on a root, and fell heavily sideways, jarring her shoulder against a rock. Shooks shouted, “Lily!” again. She looked up and saw the trees spinning. Then a huge furry body jumped on top of her, heavy and rancid and snarling, and she felt claws scrabbling against her right cheek. They tore right into her skin, just beneath her eye, wrenching the flesh away from her cheekbone.

  She screamed, but she didn’t know if she was screaming out loud. Her right cheek was clawed away from her face, and thrown aside, like a bloody piece of rag. Then a mouthful of crowded, razor-sharp teeth bit into the bridge of her nose, with a crunch that penetrated her whole being. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even shout out, because it hurt so much. She could hear Shooks still screaming out, “Lily! Lily!” but there was nothing she could do to save him, because the gray wolves were already ripping at her clothes, tearing off her coat and reducing her sweater to multicolored rags.

  The gray wolves worried the muscles from her thighbones, tearing them downward with a crackling noise, and she experienced an agony so intense that she prayed that she would die, then and there. Then they clawed their way into her stomach, tearing open the skin and the muscle, and thrusting their snouts into her intestines. She could actually feel them doing it, gnawing at her ribs, and it made her jump, and jump, because her nerves were so sensitive. With horrified disbelief, she saw one of the wolves dragging out her intestines, across the snow. They looked like red-and-yellow hosepipes. She could see blood everywhere, hers and John Shooks’s, although Shooks had been silent for a long time now, and she could only suppose that he was already dead.

  She let her head drop back on to the snow. The sky above her was still so blue. She realized that she was dead, too, or as close to death as it was possible to be. The wolves had torn her to pieces, pulled her apart, and she was nothing more than the dying remnants of Lily Blake, the last dwindling spark of a woman who had once loved her family, and her husband, and who now lay flat on her back in a forest in Minnesota, breathing her last few bubbling breaths.

  She reached across with her left hand, and she could feel her exposed rib cage, and her lungs, slippery and bloody, but still inflating.

  “I should pray,” she whispered.

  “Why?” said a man’s voice.

  “I’m dying. I should say the Lord’s Prayer, at least.”

  “You’re not dying.”

  Lily opened her eyes. The sun was still shining between the trees. The birds were still twittering, and somebody was making a staccato tapping noise that sounded like a coded message.

  George Iron Walker was kneeling beside her, in his black leather coat. He wore a single silver earring that flashed in the sunlight.

  “You’re not dying,” he repeated.

  Lily lifted her head and looked down at her body. Her fur coat was still intact. She felt her face. Her face was still intact, too.

  “What happened?”

  George Iron Walker held out his hand. “Let me help you up.”

  “I can get up myself, thank you. What the hell happened? Where are the wolves?”

  “Wolves?”

  She stood up, though she tilted sideways and nearly lost her balance. She felt bruised and winded, as if she had been jostled and trampled by a panicking crowd. About thirty feet away, John Shooks was kneeling upright in the snow, angrily brushing his sleeves.

  “John!” called Lily. “Are you okay?”

  Shooks staggered to his feet, and then took two hops toward her. “Me? I’m fucking terrific. I have a ton of snow all down the back of my neck, and I’ve twisted my goddamned ankle. You can’t see my Ray-Bans anywhere, can you? Lost my fucking Ray-Bans.”

  Lily looked around. It was only then that she saw Hazawin, half-camouflaged by patches of shadow and sunlight. She was standing between the silver birches, holding a collection of birch twigs in one hand, and two human thighbones in the other, decorated with feathers and beads.

  “You saw wolves?” said George.

  Lily turned to him. He was standing uncomfortably close. “I’m not sure what I saw. I thought . . .”

  George gave her a strangely humorless smile. “The forests are full of dreams, Lily, but you know what dreams are like. Some of them come true, but most of them don’t.”

  “This wasn’t any dream, George. This was a nightmare.” She looked around again, and then she said, “I heard a young child crying. I thought it might be my nephew William.”

  “We need to talk,” said George. “That was why you came here, wasn’t it?” He held her with a steady gaze, as if he were daring her to look away. It had only been a few days since she had seen him last, but she had forgotten how handsome he was. It was almost impossible to believe that a man so good-looking could be so ruthless.

  “You’re telling me that was William?”

  “Yes, Lily, it almost certainly was.”

  “Is he all right? Tell me! He’s not hurt, is he?”

  “For the time being, he’s fine.”

  “What do you mean ‘for the time being?’ Where is he? You can’t keep him! That’s kidnapping!”

  “You can call it whatever you like. Personally, I call it insurance. We made a bargain, you and I, and I need to know that you’re going to keep your side of it.”

  “You killed my sister! You killed my brother-in-law! You killed my ex-husband! You killed them! You had them torn to pieces, you bastard! You’re nothing but a savage!”

  John Shooks had been hopping toward them, but when he heard Lily say that, he stopped, and held back, with a wary expression on his face.

  But George kept up that humorless smile. “I don’t mind if you call me a savage, Lily. Savage means fierce and it also means untamed—and that, to a Sioux, is a high compliment. Not only that, ‘savage’ comes from the Latin word silva—‘of the woods.’ And right here—in the woods—this is where my heart is, and my spirit. So—yes—you’re right. I am a savage.”

  “Where is he?” said Lily. “Where’s little W
illiam? You haven’t left him out here on his own?”

  “Oh, he’s safe enough. But you could search through the forest for months and you’d never find him.”

  Shooks said, “The Wendigo has him, doesn’t he?”

  George didn’t answer, but Lily demanded, “Is that true?”

  “You’ve seen the Wendigo,” Shooks told her, “partly here, partly someplace else. If you ask me, that’s where it’s taken your nephew, and that’s why you’ll never be able to find him.”

  “This is madness,” said Lily. “What are you talking about, ‘someplace else?’ ”

  “You believe in God, don’t you?” asked George. “You believe in heaven?”

  “I don’t think so. Not any more.”

  “Well, let’s just say that there are places that exist, but which can’t be seen. Your William is in a place like that.”

  “Then I want him back, and I want him back now.”

  “You can have him back, Lily, I promise you. Give me the title to the land at Mystery Lake, and I will lift him into your arms myself. But let me warn you—I can’t wait too much longer. I have to have that title by sundown, day after tomorrow.”

  “And what if I can’t get it for you?”

  “Then the Wendigo will live up to its name.”

  “You’re crazy!” Lily screamed at him. “You’re crazy and you’re totally sick! If you so much as touch one hair on that little boy’s head, I’ll kill you myself!”

  George raised his hand. “Yelling at me won’t change anything. You set all of this in motion, not me. You were the one who wanted her children back. You were the one who promised to give me the land.”

  “Well, I can’t,” said Lily. She was so furious that her eyes were filled with tears. “That’s why I came here today. I can’t get the title. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

  She took off her glove and wiped her eyes with her fingers. “I came to ask you if you could accept someplace else instead. Someplace just as sacred, or meaningful, if you know of one. But just not that particular place.”