“We aren’t leaving,” Darius said. “She knows we’re here.”
“What do you mean?” Billy asked. He looked at the shack again, and then let his eyes roam over the forest that surrounded them. It was mostly balsam fir and spruce, grown so closely together there was no way to walk through them except for several twisting trails lined with brown needles. The cat yowled from inside the house, deeper this time, almost a growl. “She could be anywhere, Darius.”
“Yes,” Darius said. “Exactly.”
“Quit being a goddamn creep.”
Darius turned to him, unsmiling. “We’ll wait in the truck.”
* * *
They were almost out of cigarettes, the windows rolled up to ward off the mosquitoes, when they saw the shape standing at the edge of the overgrown lawn. It was twilight, and all they could see was a silhouette, a wizened figure clutching a bucket in one hand, the other hanging loosely at her side. She was looking not at them but rather at the grass at the edge of the lawn, a few feet away. She crossed over to it and knelt, plucked a strand of long grass with her free hand, and held it next to her mouth. When she stood again, they could see her licking her lips.
“That’s right where I pissed,” Billy said.
“Quiet,” Darius said.
“Does she even know we’re here?”
“Yes.” It was the woman’s voice, Elsie’s voice, high and strident, loud enough to be heard through closed windows. “Yes and yes. Come on, boys. Help an old lady clean some cranberries.”
Billy stepped out into the tall grass. Elsie was moving toward the shack, her back to him, and he saw just how small she was. For some reason, he had always imagined her to be tall, stringy but strong, the kind of woman who would grab you by the shoulders and curse at you face-to-face. This woman was not much bigger than a sixth-grader, and, carrying her bucket into the shack, she reminded Billy of just that, a farm kid coming in from the evening milking.
They followed her, the wind sighing in the firs and spruce. Billy fell into line behind Darius as they stepped onto the pallet and into the house.
Elsie was already sitting at the kitchen table. The smell was intense, the sour stench of unwashed bodies and cat piss, of leftovers scraped onto the floor and not eaten. The only thing he had ever experienced that rivaled the reek inside these cloistered walls was the fur trader’s building, the flensed skins and the barrels full of carcasses in various states of decomposition. He saw Darius stiffen a bit in front of him when the smell hit him, then square his shoulders and keep going.
There were several sections of newspaper spread out in front of Elsie, and she had dumped the contents of her bucket atop the yellowed paper. A small single-mantle lantern hung on a hook above them, illuminating the sprawl of highbush cranberries that covered most of the table. There were some leaves and twigs still attached to the berries, and Elsie’s fingers, disproportionately long compared to the rest of her, picked and plucked even as she surveyed her visitors. Her fingertips were stained red by the juice, the nails long and yellow. She motioned to the chairs.
They sat down and started picking, pulling the clusters apart and setting the cleaned fruit back into the bucket. It was tedious work, and Billy was glad for it—the kind of busy work he had always enjoyed when his mind was in turmoil. There were long oval pits in the cranberries, and the flesh was incredibly sour, not the kind of fruit his family had ever bothered with. Wild strawberries and raspberries were a treat growing up, but blueberries were always the main show. He glanced up and saw that Elsie was staring at him, her hands working below, never pausing even as she surveyed him. She was old, but he had no idea what decade of life might be hers; this far north, fifty years could look like eighty. Her eyes were sharp but rimmed with gunk, her skin mottled and touched by past frostbite. Her teeth were mostly hidden behind the cracked lips, but those he could see were yellow and worn. He looked back down.
“You brought me a Thomas,” she said at last. Her voice, which Billy had only heard when she called out to them, was not unpleasant. “Why?”
“It’s not just you he doubts,” Darius said.
Elsie slid her chair next to Darius and laid a hand on his leg. Billy watched as her red-stained hand roamed over him, up and down his legs, twisting momentarily in his lap, her face intent, studious. Darius sat unmoving, a clump of cranberries in his hand. The cat, which Elsie called Piss-Whiskers, padded into the kitchen to watch. Its head was almost the size of a basketball.
“You’re cloudy, Darius,” she said. “But not completely dark.” She reached down and squeezed the cranberries he held, then traced a line through the bright red juice. “This is not the first time your hands have been red this month, is it?”
“No.” Darius’s voice was little more than a whisper.
She leaned in close, as though she were going to kiss him. “And what did that do for you?”
“It was needed.”
“It was?”
“They came to take. Like you said they would do, Elsie. Take and take, and never give back.”
“And now?” she asked.
“Now we must do what is needed again.”
“Ahh,” she said, then pulled back and withdrew her hand. “I see you leaving soon, Darius, perhaps as early as the coming dawn. Five of you.” She gestured toward Billy. “Even if this one could learn our ways, his own doubt is like a blanket over his head. It would take months, years, to open his eyes.”
“No, I didn’t bring him here for that,” Darius said. “I brought him only to meet you, in case there is a need for . . . guidance . . . in the future.” He took a deep breath. “I cannot see myself returning, Elsie.”
She leaned in close and sniffed, her nostrils flaring. “Have you smelled its breath?”
“No,” Darius said, drawing back. Billy could see him suppressing a shudder, not sure if it was from Elsie’s presence, inches from his face, or her question. “I smell nothing, I see nothing. Not my death, not my return. And the place where we must go is—”
“Speak not of it,” Elsie said. “Bad enough that I have seen it in your mind.”
“We have to go,” Darius said. “We both saw this, Elsie. That which is ours being ripped from the earth.”
She traced a finger through the berries that remained on the table, staring at the path she created.
“Others have gone there and returned,” Darius said.
Elsie leaned back, her arms falling to her sides. After a moment, Piss-Whiskers padded over and nudged his enormous black head into her palm. Elsie stroked him absently. “Yes, but this is not a hunting trip. You go with the red haze in you. To a place we are better off to not visit.”
“What? We just stay here, then—let them do what they want?”
She chuckled. “Your anger is admirable, Darius. This other, this Doubting Thomas, has some of it as well. A fine group of young men. Of warriors?” She sighed. “You want my counsel?”
“I do, old mother.”
“Take the middle path. Wait for them to leave that place, and then butcher them in the forest.” Her eyes gleamed. “String their guts from the branches for the crows to peck on and the marten to gorge himself on. Throw the rest into the swamp. This you know how to do.”
Darius said nothing. Above them, a moth almost the size of his hand circled the hissing lantern. Billy had never seen one like it before, black all the way through except for a band of iridescent blue along the edges of its wings. Its shadow danced along the walls, flittering across shelves filled with jars full of meat; canned venison, the meat gray, floating in its own liquids. The cat watched it with him, the irises in its yellow eyes narrowed to slits.
Darius leaned toward her. “If we wait, they may escape. If we take them in the valley—”
“Yes,” Elsie said slowly. “And yet my counsel is to stay in the forest. They may not even find anything worth returning for, Darius. Wait for them, and they will carry answers with them.” She paused, her tongue flicking at the corner
of her mouth. “If they even make it out.”
“Can you see if they will?”
“Ah.” She smiled. “So that is what you ask of me, then. Your own blindness makes you hard to read, Darius.”
“Can you see?”
Elsie stood and lifted the bucket of cleaned berries from the table. She set them in the sink, then poured some water from a jug into a cloudy glass. She drank deeply, her scrawny throat convulsing. When she turned back to them, water had run down her face and soaked into the collar of her shirt. She glanced at the moth, still circling the lantern, and muttered something under her breath. The moth’s circles around the lantern widened, and a moment later it lit atop one of the jars of canned venison to rest. Billy turned back to Elsie’s face, now even harsher in the slanting lantern light.
“I won’t turn my eyes to look upon that place, Darius,” she said. “Lest something looks back.”
Darius looked to Billy, then back to Elsie. He nodded.
Elsie sat back down next to him. “Wait, and take them in the forest.”
“Old mother, I promise nothing.”
She mumbled something again, and stared at one of the narrow windows. Through the crack in the curtains Billy could see the night sky had gone completely dark. The wind was rising, and he could feel the breezes working through the numerous chinks in the shack’s walls. How she spent a winter out here without freezing was beyond him; the small wood-burning stove in the corner would struggle to keep temperatures above freezing most days. There was no woodpile, just some deadfall she had broken off from the lower branches of the spruces and firs. Maybe she hibernates, Billy thought. Squeezes down into the mud and muck for the winter.
“You said you saw us leaving,” Darius said after a while, “at dawn.”
“Yes.”
“There are four of us, four Okitchawa. Who is the fifth you mentioned?”
She was still looking out the window and spoke without turning. “I send you young fools with an old fool. But one who has been there before, one who has fasted in the forest. He will have counsel for you, Darius.”
“Henry? Henry Redsky?”
She scratched at a patch of scarred skin on her cheek with one long fingernail. “Tell him osikosa says it’s finally time for him to be the wise man he always thought he would be.”
“You said there would be five of us,” Darius said, “before you knew my decision.”
“It is you who are blind,” Elsie said slowly. “Not I.”
Darius stood, and Billy did the same, his knees popping loudly in the little room. Instead of moving toward the door, Darius stepped behind Elsie’s chair and began to knead the back of her shoulders. Billy watched as Elsie’s faraway look contracted, became focused. She turned to look at him, her mouth parting, a line of saliva suspended between her cracked lips. One of her hands creeped up and entwined with Darius’s, their fingers lacing together. The cat, which had been sitting on the floor watching them, gave a low, displeased yowl and scurried into the back room.
“Go wait in the truck, Billy-dog,” Darius said, then grinned when he saw Billy’s expression. “Unless you want to join in.”
Billy fled into the night.
Chapter 8
Jake stood atop the boulder they had chosen for their refuge, the early sunlight filtering through the dense morning fog. He pried a piece of granite from the rock and heaved it into the distance. It splatted down in the mud forty yards away, no bounces, no movement from the saturated ground. Nothing at all.
“Be ready to move,” he said.
Rachel was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. They had been on this boulder for two hours, ever since Cameron had disappeared. As the blackness softened into gray, the landscape had taken focus around them, a strange rock garden that looked like the carnage resulting from a mudslide. Stones ranging from the size of a man’s head to some as large as a pickup truck were strewn throughout the river valley. The boulder they stood on elevated them six feet above the ground, giving them a clear view of the river, a flat, gray expanse just to the north of them. The water was fringed with a sparse stand of cattails, which gave way to sedge grasses and then mossy, muddy ground next to the water. The ground dipped behind them before it reached the valley slope, and it was covered in mud slicks and puddles. Far above them, they could hear birdsong drifting down.
“Are we even going to look for them?”
Jake looked up again at the top of the valley, only a few hundred yards away. If they could thread their way around the soft spots and make it to the top, the satellite phones could bring help. Just as important, they would be on dry ground. Whatever creature was out there, it seemed to be able to move easily through the soft mud of the valley floor, but it could not move through rock or harder ground. It could move on top of the rock, yes, and he suppressed a shudder as he thought of how it could move through the human body as well. But one thing seemed clear; the higher they got, the less likely this thing was to wrap its tendrils around them.
“What are we dealing with, Rachel?”
She looked at him, lips pursed. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “This is the reaction you were talking about, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said, “nothing like this.” Her eyes drifted over the broken ground, then back toward the rock pad where Warren, Hans, and Parkson were still presumably waiting for them. Jake watched her, studying her face. He believed her when she said she didn’t know what was happening—she was in as much shock as anyone—but she had expected something.
“When we were coming back from the pond, you said there was something more the promethium did, besides just transferring properties from one organism to the other.”
“Jake, I can’t—”
“You want to get out of this valley?” he asked. “I can help you do that, but you have to give me intel.”
She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “It’s selective in the properties it transfers. The most basic, the most primal tendencies tend to get transferred first.”
“Eat, sleep, screw?”
“No,” she said. “Survival instincts. I saw the candleflowers take evasive action when I approached, which was transferred from something. Water bugs, or maybe those ducks. There’s one other reaction they could have had.”
“Fight or flight,” he murmured. “And we just rammed it several times with a drill core tube.”
“Yes.”
“And what is it?” That was what he really needed to know, because whether it was people or animals, once he knew what he was up against, he could kill it.
Maybe.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “It’s enormous, obviously, and it can release toxic spores. It has long tendrils made of fleshy material. You said Greer had mold on him?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s some kind of fungus,” she said. “Certain ones that are underground can extend for miles. A honey mushroom in Oregon is the world’s largest living organism, Jake.”
He turned, almost spat, and swallowed it instead. “You saying we’re being hunted by some kind of pissed-off mushroom?”
“That’s not—”
“Because it is hunting us, Rachel. It’s ambushing us and luring us out, picking us off one by one. And it’s doing a damn good job of it, too. The most action I’ve seen out of a mushroom before is when one flipped over by itself in a hot frying pan.” He turned, and this time he did spit, angrier than he had been. “And I blame that one on the butter.”
“Okay,” she said. Her eyes were ringed by purple shadows, but her gaze was steady. “Fine. What’s your explanation?”
He held her gaze for a second, then looked away. There was another explanation, and it was even more ludicrous than Rachel’s. It was the reason this territory was called the bad country, macimaliki. The place where the Whitigo had been buried, even though he—it—wasn’t quite dead. Nobody came here, not from Highbanks or any of the
other scattered Cree villages, ostensibly because there was no game. As Rachel had noted, the area was mostly devoid of animal life, as certain sections of the bush would sometimes be after a pack of wolves moved through it. But whatever the local people blamed it on, they all knew the story, the legend of the valley that had two names, English and Cree.
Resurrection Valley. Asiskiwiw. The heart of the bad country.
“I—”
His voice broke off as the sound came to them, distorted as it bounced off the rock. It was laughter, or perhaps weeping, the thin, high cries coming from the boulder-strewn country to their south. It came again, a gibbering that was impossible to pinpoint. They looked at each other, listening as the cries came again, then slowly faded away.
“Was that . . .” she swallowed hard. She stood clutching her forearms, her skin covered in gooseflesh. Behind her, the bottom of the sun was just separating from the horizon, a pale orb behind the heavy river fog. A ghost of a sun. “Was that Cameron?”
“Rachel,” he said. “Don’t move.”
A small tendril had emerged from the soil at the base of one of the rocks. It was dark, almost black. It rested against the rocks just below them, and for a moment Jake had the distinct impression that it was listening to their conversation; it even looked like a small microphone. Then the top of it split open, and a cloud of dust spread from its ruptured tip. The cloud drifted upward, spreading over them in a hanging cloud. They stepped back to avoid it, and more dust settled over them, emanating from somewhere behind them. Rachel waved at the dusty air with her hands. Then her look of mild annoyance changed to one of painful surprise, and her hands went to her throat, as though she were trying to choke herself.
“Come on,” he shouted.
She stumbled toward him, out of the cloud. Jake caught her hand and turned to escape, feeling the burn in the back of his throat. More clouds were rising into the air all around them, enveloping the small rock formation. There was only one open escape route, a patch of relatively uncontaminated air leading down into an open stretch of muddy ground.
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