Edgewise

by Graham Masterton

  “John!” she screamed, banging at her horn. “John, get out of there!”

  Shooks turned toward her. He was shouting something but she couldn’t hear what it was. He looked excited rather than afraid. But the figure made the quickest of moves, and seized him by the front of his jacket. It tore the nylon fabric apart, ripped through the kapok quilting, and then it must have gripped his rib cage and wrenched it wide open, because all Lily could see was three or four spectacular jets of blood, followed by a slippery cascade of stomach and liver and intestines.

  John Shooks was hauled up into the air, completely out of her sight, leaving behind him an unraveling trail of viscera. It had taken only seconds. Seized, torn open, gone.

  Breathless with shock, Lily stamped her foot on the Rainier’s gas pedal. The engine bellowed but the vehicle spun its wheels for five heart-stopping seconds before it abruptly lurched forward. Lily was half-blinded by the smoke from the burning trees, but she kept her foot right down to the floor and careered down the snowy slope at nearly sixty miles per hour. The Rainier bounced and jarred and jolted, but still she didn’t slow down, even when it flew over the drainage ditch at the side of the road with all four wheels off the ground.

  Bang—she hit the road, and as she did so, George Iron Walker’s Subaru appeared out of the smoke and she slammed into the side of it. There was a loud collision and the Subaru was spun off the road and into a fence.

  That was all Lily saw. She was too busy grappling with the wheel to stop her SUV from skidding out of control, and when she had straightened it up she jammed her foot down and kept on driving as fast as she dared, and then some. She veered from one side of the track to the other, her snow chains rippling on the ice.

  About two miles down the road she slowed down and looked back. The forest was burning like a fiery flag, waving in the dark. There was no sign of George Iron Walker’s Subaru, and so with any luck he wasn’t following her. Her heart was palpitating, rapidly and painfully, and it took six or seven deep breaths before it started to slow down.

  Oh, John. He must have known that their plan had hardly any chance of success. But it was obvious that even he hadn’t realized how quick and elusive the Wendigo was, and how easily it could pull a human being wide open.

  She didn’t have any idea what she was going to do now. She carried on driving, more slowly now, but her mind was a kaleidoscope of fire, and trees, and running wolves, and George Iron Walker grinning at her, and the Wendigo, the spirit of the woods.

  As she turned on to Route 169, heading back toward the Twin Cities, she heard a scraping, whirring sound. After a half-mile she pulled over and went around to the back of the SUV. The winch-cable was still extended, and it was dragging along the blacktop behind her. She went back and pressed the button to wind it back in again. Hanging from the cleat that Shooks had used to make a loop was something that looked like a man’s pink-and-beige necktie. It was only when she tried to tug it free that she understood that it was a torn strip of John Shooks’ bowels.

  She bent over by the side of the highway and brought up a bitter tide of coffee and pancakes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  That night she went into the children’s bedrooms, one after the other, to kiss them good night.

  “Where did you go today?” Tasha asked her.

  “Well, we went to see somebody who might know where William was taken, and how to get him back.”

  “And did they know?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, sweetheart.”

  “The Wendigo’s not going to come after us, is it?”

  Lily sat down on the side of her bed. “Try not to worry. I know that everything’s been really frightening. But I’m going to make sure that the Wendigo goes away and doesn’t hurt anybody any more.”

  “How?”

  She smiled, and leaned forward, and kissed Tasha on the forehead. “I’ll think of a way.”

  If only I could, she thought, as she closed the bedroom door.

  When she went to Sammy’s room he was already fast asleep. Since they had witnessed Agnes and Ned being killed, both children had been prescribed Ambien tablets, and they always knocked Sammy out within a few minutes of him swallowing them.

  These nights, though, he never sprawled across the top of his comforter the way he used to: he bundled himself up tight, as if he didn’t want to leave a single gap for the Wendigo to slide into.

  Lily went slowly downstairs, crossed into the living room and poured herself a glass of red wine. She had never felt so shattered and alone. So far, she had heard no local news bulletins about a forest fire out at Black Crow Valley, nor any reports of a man’s body being found in the woods. But it couldn’t be long before somebody missed John Shooks. He had scores of relatives, after all, both Native American and white, and it would soon come out that the last person to be seen with him was her.

  She felt as if she were a Jonah—as if every person she touched was immediately cursed, and that she brought death and pain and disaster to everybody around her, especially Tasha and Sammy. Those were her own two children, upstairs in bed, both of them traumatized and terrified and only able to sleep because she had drugged them. And it was all her fault.

  The long-case clock in the hallway struck ten. Almost as soon as the last chime had reverberated, the phone rang, making her jump.

  “Lily?”

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “Lily . . . this is George.” He sounded very calm, but in a way that was much more threatening than if he had shouted at her.

  Lily didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what she could say.

  “You still there, Lily? Fine mess you made of my SUV today. Fine mess you made altogether, you and John Shooks. Good thing for you those trees burned themselves out. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources takes a pretty dim view of arsonists.”

  “John Shooks is dead,” said Lily, her voice shaking with distress. “That thing of yours ripped him to pieces in front of my eyes.”

  “The Wendigo? The Wendigo isn’t my thing, Lily. The Wendigo is your thing. You wanted it raised. Everything that’s happened subsequent to that is down to you.”

  Lily swallowed, and took a deep breath, and then she said, “Is it any use begging you?”

  “Begging me for what? More time? I’m sorry, Lily, but tomorrow is the last night of the Moon of the Snowblind, and that’s a very significant date for the Mdewakanton. I have to take possession of that land before the Moon of the Red Grass Appearing.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “I didn’t expect you to. But there are only two days in every year when the hunting god Haokah can appear in the mortal world—the first day of the Moon of the Falling Leaves and the last day of the Moon of the Snowblind. These days are the beginning and the end of winter, after Haokah lays down his hunting spear, and before he picks it up again.

  “Haokah appeared to Little Crow on the first day of the Moon of the Falling Leaves and told him that our lands would be lost, when he laid his hunting spear down, and we lost them. Tomorrow is the last day of the Moon of the Snowblind. If we get the land back on the day that Haokah picks up his hunting spear, the legend says that we shall never lose it again, for all time.”

  “George! This is the twenty-first century! All of this is mumbo jumbo! People have been killed!”

  “My people were killed, back in the 1850s—not three or four, but hundreds of them! My people! My flesh and blood! They were deceived into giving up their own land and then they were starved and they were hung and they were shot! Just because it happened all those years ago, do you think we’ve forgotten, or forgiven?”

  “George, please. I can’t get the land. It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible, Lily. Not in this world.”

  He hung up. Lily tried to call his number back, but the line was busy. In any case, what was the point? He wasn’t going to listen to reason. He wasn’t going to listen to
begging. He wasn’t going to listen to anything. Thomas Bear Robe had been right: George Iron Walker had a dark side to him. An old side.

  She dropped another two logs on the fire. She was exhausted, but she wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. She hadn’t asked the doctor for any sleeping pills for herself because she didn’t want to fall into a deep sleep and leave Tasha and Sammy unprotected. Not that she had any illusions that she was capable of fighting off the Wendigo.

  The phone rang again.

  “George,” she said. “Listen—”

  “Lil? Didn’t wake you, did I?”

  It was Bennie. He sounded drunk, and there was Frank Sinatra singing in the background: “Come fly with me . . . let’s fly . . . let’s fly away—”

  “Oh, Bennie, it’s you. I thought you were somebody else. No, you didn’t wake me. The truth is, I haven’t slept much at all, in the past few days.”

  “I’m a little inebriated, Lil. But I just wanted to apologize for the Mystery Lake thing. I was trying to impress you and I made a fool of myself. I’m sorry. I hope we can still be friends.”

  “You caused me a whole lot of grief, Bennie—more than you know.”

  “I didn’t mean any harm, Lil. Honest I didn’t.”

  “Okay, Bennie. What’s done is done.”

  “Maybe I can buy you lunch. How about that?”

  “I don’t think so. But thanks for the offer.”

  Bennie was silent for a moment. She could almost hear him swaying.

  “I think I’m going to hang up now, Bennie. Good night.”

  “Do you know something?” said Bennie. “I was looking through the files on Mystery Lake this afternoon . . . and there it was, the title to that little spit of land you wanted. Well, a copy of it. Kraussman had to buy it separately from the rest of the development, because it was federal land. Damn shame Kraussman got there first. If it had still been federal land . . .”

  “Yes,” said Lily. “But he did, and he refuses to part with it, and there’s nothing more that I can do about it.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “I know, Bennie. Good night.”

  “I always said that about Philip Kraussman. He’s a prime-grade USDA-certified asshole.”

  “Good night, Bennie.”

  She finished her glass of wine and then decided that she would try to get some sleep. The house seemed unusually quiet tonight, although she could hear the oak tree scratching at the weatherboards. She was about to go upstairs, however, when she thought she heard the softest of hissing noises. She stopped and listened, one hand on the banister rail. Silence. Only the tap-tap-tap of the tree. But when she started to climb the stairs, she heard the hissing again.

  It wasn’t a loud hiss. Not like the air-brake hissing that the Wendigo had made when it attacked them on the way to the airport. It was a sliding, sibilant hissing, as if somebody were pouring very fine sand down the stairs.

  She looked around. She could feel a shrinking sensation all the way down her back, and a tingling in the palms of her hands. There was nobody there, and no sand pouring down the stairs. But the hissing went on, and she had a sudden strong feeling that she wasn’t alone.

  She made a determined effort not to run up the stairs, though she found herself climbing them stiffly and quickly. She crossed the landing and went into her bedroom and closed the door, and locked it. She could see herself in the mirrored doors of her closet, and she was surprised how white her face was, and how fixedly she was staring at herself. She thought she looked like a madwoman.

  She listened. The hissing had died away. Maybe she had imagined it. Maybe it had been nothing more than her own blood rushing through her ears.

  She waited for over a minute. Then she sat on the bed and waited a few minutes longer. After a while she decided that even if she hadn’t imagined it, whatever it was, it had gone.

  Tiredly she stood up and tugged off her thick cream cable-knit sweater. Then she unbuttoned her black denim jeans and stepped out of them. She went through to her shower room, switched on the light and reached into the shower to start the water running. In this house, it always took an age for the hot water to reach the bathrooms, especially in the winter.

  She took off her bra and her big warm brushed-cotton pants and put on her tartan bathrobe. She squinted at herself in the medicine cabinet over the washbasin. God, Lily, you look tired. Her hair had grown over an inch now, although it seemed to be much finer than it had been before she had shaved it all off, and it seemed to stick up more. What had Bennie called her? An elf.

  She was just about to take off her robe and step into the shower when she thought she glimpsed a flash of light from her bedroom. It was so quick that she thought she might simply have blinked. But then it flashed again, and again, like a quick, quivering, will-o’-the-wisp.

  She listened. She couldn’t hear the hissing sound, but then the shower was clattering too loudly. Very slowly she reached up and opened the door of the medicine cabinet, so that its mirror was angled toward the mirrors on her closet.

  She almost shouted in fright, but she clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself. Clearly reflected in the medicine cabinet, she could see a tall figure standing in the corner of her bedroom, beside her bed. It was hard to see exactly what it was, because it constantly shifted and changed. In many ways it was like a man. It had a human face, although its features were long and angular, and its upper lip seemed to be cleft, although that could have been the shadow under its nose. It had glittering black eyes that rapidly darted from side to side, but it didn’t seem to be focusing on anything in particular. It stood upright like a man, yet it had an arrangement of horns on its head that resembled antlers, and a deep, narrow chest that resembled a deer’s chest rather than a man’s.

  Its image wavered and jumped, so that it looked to Lily like a weak TV signal, struggling to resolve itself into a recognizable picture. And—yes—she could hear the hissing sound now, like static—not much louder than before, but highly distinctive.

  So this is how my life ends, she thought. Torn apart by a mythical creature in my own house, and nobody will ever know what really happened to me. She just prayed that the Wendigo wouldn’t go for Tasha and Sammy too.

  The Wendigo turned sideways and vanished from her medicine-cabinet mirror as if it wasn’t there at all. But when she looked around, into her closet mirror, she could still see it. Its face appeared to be re-assembling itself, and its body went through one metamorphosis after another. As she watched it, she began in a curiously oblique way to understand what it actually was: it was everything that made up the spirit of the woods—the men, the animals, the insects, and the flickering light that came down through the branches. The Wendigo wasn’t just of the woods, as Thomas Bear Robe had described it. The Wendigo was the woods.

  It turned sideways again, and reappeared in her medicine-cabinet mirror. It was staring directly at her, and she realized that it must have seen her. Please let it be quick. Please don’t let it hurt too much. Agnes was killed so fast she probably didn’t know what hit her. Please let it be the same for me.

  But the Wendigo made no move toward her. Instead, it continued to stare at her, and the longer it stared at her, the more she felt an overwhelming sense of panic. The Greeks had invented the word panic, after Pan, the wood god. Panic was the dread of lonely places, like forests—the feeling of being hopelessly lost.

  Lily started to hyperventilate. She pressed her hand against her chest to try to control her breathing. She could feel that darkness closing in again—the darkness that came before a faint.

  But the Wendigo turned away again and disappeared from her medicine-cabinet mirror. Lily looked quickly around at her closet mirror, but she was only just in time to see the Wendigo folding itself up like origami—except that it was made of thin rays of light rather than paper. It became nothing but a geometric pattern of light on the carpet, and then it slid beneath her door and vanished.

  Immediately, Lily ran across he
r bedroom, opened the door and ran to Sammy and Tasha’s rooms. They were both asleep, untouched and undisturbed.

  She went back to her shower room and stood in front of the medicine cabinet for a long time, trying to read the expression on her own face. She felt an extraordinary mixture of shock and relief, but the beginnings of something else, too: a new understanding of what America must have been, before white men arrived; a new understanding of why George Iron Walker wanted that land at Mystery Lake so much. It was only a vaguely formed grasp of Native American feelings, and she couldn’t find any sympathy for them, after everything that had happened in the past few days, but it moved her, and disturbed her. She felt as if the ground had moved beneath her feet.

  After a while she took off her robe and stepped into the shower. She wondered if the Wendigo had come of its own volition, to warn her, or if George Iron Walker and Hazawin had sent it, as a threat.

  There was one thing she had learned, though. With two mirrors, placed at angles to each other, the Wendigo remained visible even when it turned edgewise. With three, or four, it wouldn’t be able to vanish at all.

  She toweled herself, pulled on a warm pink nightdress and went to bed, though she couldn’t sleep for hours. When she did, she dreamed that she had woken up, and that patterns of antlers were moving across her bedroom ceiling.

  “They’re outside, Lil,” said Bennie. “They’re outside, and they’re coming for you. I just want to apologize.”

  When she woke up it was seven-twenty A.M. She looked in on Tasha and Sammy before she went downstairs. Sammy was still asleep but Tasha was already tugging her jeans on.

  “Sleep all right?” Lily asked her.

  Tasha nodded. “I didn’t have any nightmares, anyhow.”

  Lily went downstairs and filled the percolator with coffee. The morning sunlight was so cold and brittle that it leached all of the color out of the kitchen, like a 1950s photograph. She looked out into the backyard. The snow was beginning to thaw, and where the sun was shining on their upper branches, the trees were dripping.