FIVE
Highway 101 hadn’t changed since I’d driven up and down it a few days earlier, but I found myself alert for signs of the strange and ghostly. Not that they would be easy to spot through the glass and steel of the truck, but I felt unsettled by what I’d seen so far and the information I’d gathered. I kept expecting something else weird to happen.
Perhaps that was why I noticed the creatures beside the road. I knew that deer, bears, and the rare mountain lion lived in the Olympic National Forest. I’d seen plenty of deer on the previous trip and they didn’t have any real fear of people—which wasn’t too smart of them, considering that they weren’t immune to bullets or speeding cars. They came right down into the ditches on each side of the road to graze the early plants that struggled up where the frost was thinnest next to the heat of the tarmac. At first, that was what I thought the things walking around on the other side of the road were—some kind of deer.
They walked on four legs and they had black horns, but deer aren’t white all over like these things and their faces are long and narrow with the horns near the fronts of their skulls. These creatures were hard to keep my eyes on; I felt an unnatural desire to turn my gaze aside, and that alone gave them away as something paranormal. I wanted to get a better look, but I admit I was a little scared and wanted to observe them with caution.
The road was a single lane in each direction, but the verges were broad enough to pull into if you didn’t fear the ice, so I stopped the truck on one of the wide spots and turned in the driver’s seat to look back at the cluster of three large, white-hided, crook-horned things on the other side of the road. I couldn’t tell too much about them through the glass, nor could I tell whether the area had the same strange, colored patches and lines of energy that I’d seen at the lake before, so I cranked down my window and peered at them through the Grey.
The ground seemed dappled with colored shadows that moved and re-formed without a visible source, the uncanny puddles of energy pooling most thickly near the white creatures. At first, the beasts ignored the Rover, continuing to walk a ragged circle around something in their midst. Their shape and movement had given me the impression that they had four legs, but when one of them reared up to bat at whatever they were surrounding, I realized they were two-legged creatures with a bent, brachiating posture. Their unusually long forelimbs ended in hands that sported black claws that dripped colors in the Grey. The one that rose up stopped walking and kept its weight on three of its limbs while it swiped with the fourth and made a shrieking noise like a heron caught in a wood chipper.
The thing they circled lurched aside, and another of the white creatures screamed at it and poked it back into the middle of their circle with its own raised forelimb. Their motion reminded me of school yard bullies shoving a smaller child around during recess. I opened my car door and stepped out onto the icy ground to get a better view, letting myself slide a little deeper into the Grey in hopes of figuring out what these things were.
One of my feet brushed a strand of wayward energy as I put it down. The third white creature suddenly jerked its head up in my direction, snorting as if it could smell me. The other two ignored it for a moment while they kept on tormenting their prey, shoving it back and forth while the third stared toward me.
Even at the width of the highway I could see that its eyes were tiny black coals under a heavy brow ridge, the kinked black horns growing out from its forehead like a cat’s whiskers. It had the jaw of a bulldog and a complement of sharp, hooked fangs. It squealed and rose onto its haunches to slap at its nearest fellow, thin strands of red light flaying outward from its claw tips.
Suddenly, all three white things were staring at me and sitting stone still. Their quarry, forgotten, slumped to the ground in a mist of miserable green and scuttled away into the trees. It looked like a person dressed in black, but it moved like a spider along the strands of the energy web, and the sight made me shudder. On the seat behind me, Chaos exploded out of my bag and bounded toward the open door, scrabbling up my back and onto my shoulder. She made a harsh hissing noise into my ear and I jerked my head aside, breaking eye contact with the monsters across the street.
They let out a collective bark of excitement and leapt forward. A whining sound, like a generator winding up, vibrated through the Grey. Chaos barked back and tried to jump to meet them. I cursed and snatched her out of the air, diving back into the truck as the three . . . things halved the distance between us in two bounds. I slammed the door shut behind me. I shoved the ferret into my sweater and mashed down on the door lock—I wasn’t sure how much like hands those big white paws were, but I didn’t want to find out.
I’d just snapped the seat belt closed around me and the wiggling ferret and was twisting the key in the ignition when all three hit the outside of the Rover, rocking it hard. The engine caught and I yanked it into gear. The wheels thudded down again onto the dirt, throwing the truck forward and onto the road. Ice from the roadside spattered onto the surface. I tromped on the accelerator and felt the truck shudder before it dug into the road and leapt forward, racing up the hill toward Lake Crescent with the white things chasing after us.
I passed a sign for a general store with an arrow pointing to the right before I even registered the clearing it stood in. I didn’t turn or stop. I figured it was safer to try to outrun the creatures than possibly drag them into the path of innocents. A few yards later, I glanced in the mirror and saw no sign of the white things. I dropped my speed a little to make a curve, half expecting them to bound out of the trees, but they didn’t reappear. I didn’t take the turn to Lake Sutherland but drove past, heading for the stretch of road next to Lake Crescent where the cliffs press in on one side and the lake on the other; the monsters would have to come out of cover there if they were still pursuing me.
The road remained empty behind and ahead. The white creatures had vanished into the forest.
I pulled into the first driveway I came to and turned the truck around before unbuckling my seat belt and removing the very agitated ferret from my clothes. Chaos glared at me and chittered her disgust. “Sorry, but you looked like you wanted to go have it out with those things and I don’t think you would have won that fight.” The ferret just wriggled around in my grip and scratched at my hand. I fought with her for a moment but managed to get her snapped into her harness and leash before stepping out of the truck for a breath of air; the fuzz butt wasn’t the only one who’d nearly had the poop scared out of her.
Here, too, the strange manifestation of the Grey was evident in patches of color on the ground and a constant buzz from the grid far below, as if a hive of wasps went about their business beneath my feet. It seemed to bother Chaos less than it did me. We took a short walk around the picnic tables at what turned out to be a ranger station so I could calm my nerves and Chaos could heed the call of nature. The restrooms next to the parking lot were unlocked but no warmer than the outside air; I envied the ferret her natural fur coat as much as her ability to ignore the freakish behavior of the Grey. I noticed the little animal had given me a few scratches and made a mental note to clip her claws before I foolishly shoved her into my shirt again; given the magical state of the place, I feared I’d be doing that a lot. I was wishing I hadn’t brought her along after all, but it was a little late to change the fact. After I cleaned myself up a bit, I fed the ferret and let her run around on her leash while I wondered just what the hell the creatures were that we’d seen.
They had a physical presence, so they weren’t ghosts and they definitely weren’t any animal I’d ever seen before alive or dead. Their movement reminded me of gorillas, but nothing else about them was apelike. Their faces were closer to those of dogs, but not really, and their horns looked almost like sharpened, burned branches. Their white hides were like a deer’s shaggy winter coat; still short-haired, but thick, scruffy, and unkempt. I hadn’t had much time to notice a smell, but, thinking about it, I remembered an odor as they rammed the truck—a
bit like skunk and a bit like doused campfires. They were paranormal things for certain, but what type was still beyond me. They reminded me of hyenas: Not as intelligent as a human, they were still coordinated and smart enough to communicate and work together. They were fast, but they hadn’t outrun the Land Rover, so either they couldn’t, which I hoped was true, or they had decided to cut their losses. That made me queasy.
I’ll be honest: I’d rather face a strong but stupid foe than a smart and vicious one of any size. I hoped they would prove to be passing apparitions, but I somehow doubted it. I’d have to figure out what they were before we met again. I wondered if they could have had any hand in Leung’s disappearance. The thought didn’t please me; if they’d been around five years ago, were they visiting again or had they stayed here all that time? How had they gotten here and what were they doing? Were they doing it for themselves, or under the direction of someone else? It was unlikely that the strangeness of the Grey here and the presence of such monstrosities were unconnected, but which was the chicken and which the egg? Everywhere I turned on this case I got more questions and fewer answers.
I kicked at a hump of crystallized snow that had banked up next to a tree trunk and watched it shatter and crumble. Chaos ran to challenge the snow to a fight, hopping up and down in her weasel war dance and then biting the frozen mess when it wouldn’t play. She made a gagging sound and spit out the mouthful of snow.
“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to eat dirty snow?” I asked her, bending to pick her up.
The ferret gave me a look that clearly said she had judged my intelligence and found it lacking. But she still stuck her nose up against mine and tickled me with her whiskers before attempting to climb up my scarf and under my hair. I let her, and she flopped onto my shoulder and sighed, tired out from her explorations and frosty battles.
“OK, stinky, you can sleep in the truck while I do some more work. And this time, no teasing the monsters.”
She just huffed at me. I got back into the Rover, carefully tucking her into the travel cage in the rear compartment, and drove back down the highway to the Lake Sutherland turnoff.
I turned right just past the East Beach Road intersection beside a double row of mailboxes mounted on a wooden frame. I drove up a low hill until Lake Sutherland Road petered out into a dirt track that burst out of the trees into an open area that seemed to have been scraped clean of vegetation. I followed the packed dirt until it entered another stand of trees with the glimmer of water beyond. A small sign at the edge of the trees had a number on it and the words FISHER POINT/FISHER COVE. I could make out the roof of a house below the thickly treed rise, so it must have been right down on the lakeshore, which was now below the naked hillock I’d driven onto. There wasn’t a mailbox—it was probably among the collection at the edge of the highway—but the number on the sign matched the parcel number the assessor’s clerk had provided me, so I guessed that this was Leung’s place.
I left the Rover at the tree line and walked down the rise a little, toward the roof I’d spotted. I stepped onto a wide wooden walkway that had been built through the trees toward the faded-yellow house. When I reached the building, I could see it was a two-story affair with its top floor level with the bluff top and the lower one sitting on a platform on the shore, just above the water. The upper walkway crossed a short gap at the edge of the bluff to a deck that encircled the top story of the house. There was no other way down that I could see from there, short of a rough scramble along the bluff itself, so I walked across onto the deck and toward what I thought of as the front door.
I noticed that a couple of the deck boards had rotted a bit, but the rest of the path and upper level were otherwise in good shape. I guessed they hadn’t been maintained recently but were well built enough to stand up to the abuses of time and weather. Snow had collected beneath the walkway, but the deck was clear, in spite of the forest shadow that fell on the house from the bluff side.
The red-painted front door faced west, into the trees. There wouldn’t be a view of the famous sunset from Leung’s house. I knocked on the door and got no answer, not even the rustling of startled birds. I would have peered through the nearest window, but all of them had been covered with winter storm shutters long ago. The house gave every appearance of being closed up on a long-term basis. I walked around to the side of the deck that faced the lake and glanced up and down the shoreline from my second-story vantage.
The shoreline of Lake Sutherland was lined with mostly small, older houses on the west and south. Larger, newer houses dominated the north and east shores with signs of a larger development at the northeast bend of the lake. Almost every house had a dock and a large porch or deck facing the water. The water-facing side of Leung’s house was typical: more open, grand, and welcoming than the land-facing side, making the lake the focal point of life in the house. Most of the houses were shuttered at this time of year, just like Leung’s. A few wood or fiberglass dinghies rested upside down on blocks along the abandoned docks, sheltering thin white patches of unmelted snow beneath them. I could make out the wide swath of a public boat launch beyond the big development on the northeast, but there were no boats out on the lake today and the water had a strange, submerged luminescence.
A fast look through the Grey didn’t reveal a lot more from such a distance. The same strange shadows and threads lay on the ground and shore as I’d seen at Lake Crescent, but fewer of them, and the buzzing of the grid seemed softer at this lake. I did spot a bright strand of blue energy deep below the water’s surface, connected to the shore on the east by a fan of silvery lines and smudges like glowing fingerprints and the spiderweb shape of windshield cracks. It would take a closer investigation to discover what the smears and threads were, and I didn’t have the equipment to dive or row to them. I supposed I might still have some ability to grab ahold of such things, but . . . I let it go for now and turned my attention back to Leung’s home.
I looked around the shore and the bluff on each side of the house and spotted a clearing in the trees just south of the house and facing the lake. It would have been impossible to see from almost any other angle along the shoreline. Dark shadows seemed to have drifted up on the ground in the clearing, defying the light that still penetrated through the trees. It wasn’t moving, but there was something decidedly Grey about the spot, and I thought I’d best take a closer look, since I clearly wasn’t going to get into the house.
I circled the house and found a staircase that led down to the lower deck a few feet above the water. From there I spotted a short set of steps that let me out onto the shore. The shore wasn’t sandy but was made of mud and gravel and occasional larger stones. The short stretch of open shore just south of the house had been flattened a bit, leaving a hidden space big enough to drag up a couple of small boats or kayaks. A steep path of gravel and stones pretended to be a natural runoff beside the house, zigzagging from the shelf on the shore to the clearing, but the larger stones were too evenly spaced to be accidental, no matter how well they were camouflaged by the smaller gravel around them. I started for the makeshift stair.
“Looking for the owner, y’won’t have much luck. It’s just summer places round here.” I knew that New England drawl....
I spun to my left, seeking the voice’s owner, and saw Darin Shea standing on the shore beside the next house to the south. He was wearing the same olive green parka and dirty work jeans as he had the first time we’d met and he kept his hands in the jacket pockets while he knocked his heavy hiking boots against the ground, shaking off a crust of icy mud. His aura was, as before, a weird mix of blue and gray with spikes of red, as if the world offended him in some degree and he was going to small talk it into submission.
“Hello again, Mr. Shea. You know the owner?” I asked, stopping where I was.
“That’s Mr. Leung’s place,” he said, sauntering toward me. “Ain’t seen him in a while, but the house is all wintered up. Safe guess he ain’t around.” He stopped a f
ew feet from me, nodding as if we were just meeting for the first time. “Nice place, yeah?”
“Seems it,” I agreed, slightly put off by his slow-paced chattiness once again. “Do you do any work for the Leungs?” I asked.
“Nah. His daughters and son-in-law watch out for the house.”
“Do his daughters live nearby?”
“Yup.”
I’ve rarely wanted so much to brain someone with a heavy object. Plainly he didn’t feel like giving me the information yet. I tried a different tack. “Any idea when Leung left?”
Shea shrugged again. “Nope.”
“So . . . you’re staying on the lake?”
“Yes and no. I’m house-sitting one of my projects.” He waved in the direction of the southeastern shore. “Down there a ways.”
He had indicated south of the strange underwater lines, but not on them. I considered asking him about the clearing, but if he wasn’t volunteering information, I wasn’t sure I wanted to call his attention to either thing. I didn’t like the way Shea had just turned up, what with his weird aura and no visible way to have arrived here. I hadn’t heard an engine, or a door, and I didn’t see a boat at the dock or any footprints on the deck of the house behind him, though his boots had been muddy enough to leave some. There was also no boat in sight, and I didn’t think he’d walked on water or scrambled down from the tree line above without making a sound. With the oddness of the world-in-between around here, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d turned out to be a ghost. I wasn’t sure why it felt so strange to meet him here, but it just seemed . . . odd.
“What business y’got with Mr. Leung?” he asked.
“My own business.” Shea’s eyes went a little cold and flat as I said it, as if he were about to do something I wouldn’t like. I continued. “Just trying to find him; nothing sinister. But he’s not here, so . . . I guess I’ll ask his daughters.” I turned and stepped back onto the deck, away from Shea, starting toward the stairs to the upper story, then turned back in a rush, expecting to catch him moving. But he was just standing the same way, with his hands back in his pockets. “You couldn’t tell me where I could find them, could you?”
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