Helix: Plague of Ghouls

by Pat Flewwelling

  So Two-Trees did a new search, this time for Left Hand Mouse. Buried under stacks of advertisements for left-handed accessories, there was a YouTube clip. Two-Trees borrowed Bridget’s earphones and began to play the video, which had been viewed tens of thousands of times, but didn’t seem to have gone viral. It was taken from a concert. According to the video description, Left Hand Mouse was one of the band’s most popular tracks. In the comments section, written with surprising grammatical accuracy, was a remark about how Left Hand Mouse was one of the most iconic of the Jungle Punk subculture. Someone else commented that the poster’s argument was bad, and that he should feel bad. A third commenter explained that Left Hand Mouse wasn’t one of Chokeswallow’s original songs. It was a cover, originally performed by the postpunk band Backdoor Access on their 1992 Quitcher Bitchin’ album.

  Two-Trees had been so wrapped up in the comments that he nearly missed a key image in the video. He stopped the playback, reversed a few seconds, and paused the video.

  Two-Trees let his jaw drop.

  Wearing a fur bandolier, war paint, a big wig, long black claws, and a lot of makeup, there was Jay Brandywine, prancing and screaming into a wired microphone. If Two-Trees hadn’t had such an eye for bone structure, he’d never have recognized the bastard. He searched for more information on the band, Chokeswallow, only to find band publicity photos with the lead singer’s back turned to the camera, revealing a thorny maze of red war paint on his skin. According to the band’s website, the lead singer at the time was an Englishman known only as Grey Dogue, and he’d been replaced by an American in 2008.

  Two-Trees looked up Backdoor Access, as well. There were five or six videos of that band, mostly from the late eighties and early nineties. There was no official webpage, but Two-Trees had found a few good stills, including one press photo that made Two-Trees clap his hand over his mouth and guffaw. There, in full punk-rock paraphernalia, was Gil Burton, Owen Ishmael Chase, and Jay Brandywine, each trying to out punk the other. He never knew Gil had such a long tongue.

  He played one or two tracks, marvelling to see scrawny but manic Dr. Gil Burton screaming into a microphone as if he meant to chew it up and spew it out. Two-Trees couldn’t understand any of the lyrics, but it didn’t matter. He compared the two performances, and decided he didn’t know which version of Left Hand Mouse he hated more.

  After the initial string of aha moments, Two-Trees’ search led to multiple dead ends. There was no connection that he could find between Jay and the missing kids. There was a vague connection between Jay and the Jungle Punk movement, and an even looser connection between Jay and a single disappearance, but Jay’s concert appearances fell off shortly before the peak of the quarantine, and he was officially out of the band shortly thereafter. From then on, Jay had been doggedly devoted to rounding up victims and guarding Wyndham Farms. Even Two-Trees could attest to that.

  Half a Minesweeper game later, DS Buckle replied to Two-Trees’ email. “Re: Sydney: medical reports show she was a hundred and fifteen pounds in April. As for the score: #1, dead approx. 3 days before discovery. #2, dead approx. 18 hours before discovery. Body three, dead one day. Will have to call in our own dog. At this rate, next body should pop up by noon tomorrow.” A couple of blank lines later, Buckle had written, “I need to know what happened at Pritchard Park.”

  Two-Trees typed in his answer, apologizing profusely, saying that the man with the cadaver dog had to wait until the mechanics opened the garage.

  He did want to come out to Buckle, really he did. He wanted desperately to bitch about werewolves and Ishmael, and how Bridget had been turned in the 1990s, and why Gil Burton had MS instead of lycanthropy. He just wanted to sit down and talk to another, rational, human human being, figure out why Wyrd had marooned them in Halo County, and why now. But he just didn’t know Buckle well enough. After Jay had torched the island, after Bridget had broke ranks, after the Wyrd Council had cancelled all their credit cards, bank cards, and cell phones, Two-Trees didn’t know who to trust.

  He sat back in his creaking hotel room chair, his hands on his face.

  I’m going to have to bring him in on it.

  He’d gone so long, keeping so much a secret, right from the moment the rogue broke into Red Cloud’s house and tore the old storyteller to shreds. Seventy years old, chest slashed open, jaw barely attached to his face, and what does Grandfather do? Takes an axe to the werewolf’s head.

  Two-Trees closed his eyes and pressed his fists to his face.

  Bridget mumbled into the pillow. “You all right?”

  He’d been eleven years old. Too short to do anything but cut the werewolf’s hamstrings. Too weak to do anything but slice, not strong enough to stab.

  “Hector.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. He got up to hit the can.

  Two-Trees had hobbled the lycanthrope, bringing him down to his wounded grandfather’s level, buying the old man precious seconds before the lycanthrope began to self-repair. With his jaw swinging from one corner, Hector Red Cloud Niizho-Mitigoog took a fireplace poker and impaled the animal’s head, from the base of the skull and out through an eye socket.

  Then he pointed at the gun closet, signing for his rifle. He pointed to the kitchen drawer, where he could find the key. The werewolf was already dead.

  “Put me out of my misery, son,” Red Cloud had said, through a broken face.

  Died before I could pull the trigger.

  He stood in front of the toilet, looking at what wasn’t happening. I’m so pissed I can’t piss.

  “Hector,” Bridget said, from the open bathroom door. If they shared a hotel room, they rarely shat with the door closed, and pissing was no different.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not watching.”

  Two-Trees turned his face to the ceiling and thought about Niagara Falls, and cold coffee, and about the time he was stuck in traffic in Duluth and had to piss into an empty two-litre Mountain Dew bottle while changing gears. It helped.

  Michael Crow. Dad called him over, begged him to help out. I told him all about the murder. He didn’t freak out. He said it was Wenabozho—the Trickster, my patron saint—punishing Red Cloud for telling Sister Whitehair’s story outside Waabishkindibed.

  “You should get some sleep,” Bridget said, while his urine tumbled into the toilet water. She stood with her back against the door frame. He shook off, flushed, washed his hands, and poured himself a glass of tepid water to drink. She offered him the bottle of rum. “Long day tomorrow.”

  “I want him out of my town,” Two-Trees said. He ran the water again, so he could scrub sleep and rage out of his face. He needed to shave.

  “Padre?” She pulled the band from his long hair and suggested he shower.

  “Ishmael, Padre, these goddamned murderers . . .” He shut off the water. “But start with Ishmael. He’s sick, Bridget. You and I have seen sick dogs before, even before quarantine.”

  She nodded.

  “And if he can get sick, then what’s to stop . . .” He sighed and pointed at her. “What’s to prevent you from catching it too? And then where . . .” And then where will I be? “Padre’s useless. When’s his cycle up?”

  “Like I said, at least another week,” Bridget answered. “Hector, we can probably do this without him. Do it the old fashioned way, like you proposed. Map and compass. Common sense. Research. Word of mouth. We didn’t need Harvey’s dogs that much during quarantine—”

  “We do need Harvey and his dogs,” Two-Trees insisted. “These bastards are hiding in plain sight, right here in Halo County. They know we’re here. I swear to God, that’s why Padre’s picture was on the eleven o’clock news.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He understood then what had been bugging him. “I tried to figure out who submitted that picture. Instagram username only, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I can’t find any linked accounts, and the bio barely says anything. Female, seventeen-years-old
, lives in Ontario, that’s all it said.”

  Bridget shrugged. “Okay. So we know a girl in Elmbury took his picture. It was probably one of the kids who worked at the store.”

  “If she’s seventeen now,” Two-Trees asked, “how does she remember an old fat dude from when she was only eleven years old? How would she know him well enough to recognize him?”

  Bridget rubbed her arms. “Shit. You don’t think maybe the Reids were going after more kids than Sydney, do you?” She shook her head quickly. “No, Hector, she could be lying about her age.”

  “I don’t know,” Two-Trees said. It was either too early in the morning or too late at night to think clearly. He did need sleep. He’d been getting nothing but sauna-hot cat naps since he’d arrived in Halo County. “Call him up, tell him we’ll surrender Ishmael.”

  “What?” she blurted.

  “Tell Harvey that we caught Ishmael in the act of turning a local against their will, I don’t know. Just get Harvey up here.”

  She leaned in the doorway, watching him.

  “They’re just kids,” Two-Trees said. “We need to get out there and look. Buckle’s right, we’ll have another dead child in a matter of hours, unless we get off our asses and do something.”

  “We’ll find them,” Bridget assured him.

  “We don’t know how many more have been abducted. We don’t know their pattern of predation. We don’t know where these kids are coming from. Fat, that’s the only common denominator. You have any idea how many kids are obese out this way?”

  Bridget raised an eyebrow. “I’d been trying not to notice. I thought Padre was trying to be funny, saying everyone was fat, but yeah. I noticed.”

  “You know what we need?” he asked.

  “Tequila.”

  “Donuts. You need to load me up on sugar until I’ve got a sixty-six inch waist, then you need to douse me in bacon grease, and you need to leave me out in a field.”

  She smiled a little. “I think you should try to get some sleep, first.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “There’s leftover chicken, if you want it.”

  “If they haven’t already slaughtered a fourth kid, they’re on the hunt for one right now. God, how many of them are there? How hungry can they be? I look at Ishmael, and that’s what I see—ravenous. Insatiable.” Demonic, like the monster in the Sister Whitehair story.

  “You need your sleep,” she insisted. “But, I know you won’t do anything but curse and thrash in bed all night long, so come on. Back on the computer.” She pulled out the chair for him and made grabby motions with her hands, teasing him with the promise of a good shoulder rub.

  “I don’t want to get on the computer,” he said. “I want to be outside. I need air that doesn’t make me want to sneeze and wheeze twenty-four hours a day. I want to be looking in all the right places with my own two eyes.”

  She stared at a spot on the floor between them. “Yep.” She turned and reached for her coat. “Donuts.” Two-Trees wasn’t far behind her.

  TWO-TREES SPREAD out the map on the dusty donut shop table. He’d already numbered and circled all the known dumpsites, as best as he could locate them, using DS Buckle’s instructions.

  Nothing seemed to fit within the rough circle his notations made. Some evidence had been found at Pritchard Park, some about six klicks south-east of Waabishkindibed, some near Styroforma, some just outside a quarry. Nothing in the middle seemed to appeal to jungle punks. Farmhouses, a factory, suburbs, gas stations, pockets of small-town commerce, a restaurant or two, and this all-night Tim Hortons.

  And each body dump closer to town.

  He sniffed and rubbed at his watering eyes. In hindsight, he realized that the donut shop was closer to Styroforma than he wanted to be, because here his lungs smarted with whatever burning grime the plant had been pumping into the air. But, at least the café was open, it was bright, and the sounds of good-humoured female bickering kept him alert. Outside, the night sky turned yellow, as thick, wet flakes of snow glowed under the streetlamps, fooling his four a.m. brain into believing it was already first light.

  He tested other theories while Bridget was trying her credit card and bank card at the ATM next door. Two-Trees tried making a straight line out of the notations. When that didn’t work well, he tried a loose spiral; then two lines; an X.

  What am I looking for? Why am I trying to impose a pattern on this?

  Two young employees, both girls, were squabbling behind the counter. One was chucking flour at the other, laughing too loudly. The other was snapping a towel at the other’s hip. When they smiled, they didn’t seem to be having fun. A third girl was sitting at a corner table, playing on her smartphone. “Omigod, you guys! He replied!” The other two abandoned their work—if anything they did could be called work—to see what was going on. He remembered the Padre’s picture on the news, so he shuffled in his seat, turning his hunching back toward them. For good measure, he tucked away his ponytail.

  He closed his eyes and saw the memory of his grandfather behind his easel, when he was painting the cover picture of Sister Whitehair and the Trickster. He wondered why Michael Crow had blamed Red Cloud’s attack on a stupid kid’s book. Why did he make it sound like Red Cloud had broken a secret? It had been a fairy tale made up by Red Cloud and Two-Trees one summer when it was too rainy to fish. There wasn’t even a moral to the story. It sure as hell didn’t mention anything about werewolves.

  But it did mention a kind of wendigo . . .

  “Um, ya,” one of the girls said. “But it’s not like moisturizer works anymore.”

  People who dance until they drop from hunger. A hunger spirit. An insatiable ghost. The more he ate, the hungrier he became . . . that’s how Sister Whitehair managed to trap him in Pouch Lake . . . the devourer of spirits . . .

  This mission has been one unlikely coincidence after the other.

  “God, I mean, look at me,” one of the girls said. “I’m falling apart.”

  Absently, Two-Trees did as the girl suggested. He studied her reflection in the steamed-up window beside him. All three girls were as skinny as pikes, with hair as big as teased wigs, and they had thorny shadows along their cheekbones.

  Two-Trees pivoted in his seat, pretending to look around for a clock. There was nothing wrong with their faces, aside from the fact that they were wearing too much foundation. Judging by their wrists and forearms, they were porcelain pale, and only artificial dyes could put colour in their faces. There was nothing wrong with their hair either. They wore shoulder length, off-bias cuts with a little volume blow-dried in, but they weren’t wearing jungle punk wigs. Two-Trees gave his head a shake and used a napkin to wipe the condensation from the window. Bridget was right. He needed sleep. He’d begun to hallucinate.

  When Bridget walked in, she locked onto the hyperactive young girls, frowning. She came straight to Two-Trees’ table and dumped her wallet on his map.

  “Tell me about Digger,” Two-Trees said, as she settled into the hard seat across from him. “Tell me about the wendigo.”

  “Unh?” Bridget asked. “Oh. Eight feet tall, with horns, and a craving for werewolf flesh. At least, that’s what Ishmael said.”

  “Why werewolf flesh?”

  “I think he’s making a giant assumption about that,” Bridget said. “The only flesh available on the island was of the werewolf variety.” Bridget rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. “The Lost Ones were scavengers too, not just the wendigo. They ate their own dead. Hunted their own living too.”

  “So ‘craving’ was just a dramatic choice of words?”

  “Well . . . they never seemed to spend as much time hunting Helen or Dep,” Bridget said. “I guess you’d have to ask Foster.”

  He pointed at her wallet. “What’s the prognosis? Good news?”

  “No. Both still came back declined. Gave me a 1-800 number. Called the 1-800 number from a payphone, and the message said to call back during business hours.” She took
one of the donuts and inspected it. “Ishmael was right to be paranoid. Damn it.” She was about to put the donut in her mouth when she decided to swear again instead. “Damn it, I should have left him on that island.”

  “No, you’d hate yourself more if you’d left him there to die.”

  She drummed the fingers of her free hand on the table. “Then damn Daniel Grey for having come up with this nightmare in the first place. GMO werewolves, Lost Ones, wendigos, now cannibals . . .” She rolled her fingers up into a fist. He heard tendons creak and snap. “What if this isn’t his fault,” she wondered. “What if it’s something new altogether? What if it’s just a bunch of very, very sick human beings?”

  Two-Trees raised his eyebrows. “God, I hope not. It would undermine my whole crusade to prove human beings are better than . . .” He let the thought dangle, but he regretted it. “Sorry.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine.” She set the donut on the plate and left it there. Her cheekbones were unusually sharp, and her vestigial fangs pressed against the insides of her lips. She was watching the three squealing girls in the corner. He wondered if they were old enough to graduate. After all, this was the overnight shift they were working. Screaming and cavorting was probably the only way they could stay awake, but they’d probably be too wrecked by morning to attend class.

  “Jeez, I don’t even know what day it is.”

  “Saturday,” she said.

  “Good. Less traffic. Listen, I want to go along this route,” he said, running his finger along Samson Industrial Parkway. “When we were here during the Pritchard Park incident, businesses were shutting down during the recession. I want to see if . . .”