Underground g-3, page 24
part #3 of Greywalker Series
“I’m fine.”
“You were pretty hysterical…”
He glared at Quinton and stared around. Seeing me with the hat still in one hand, he darted over and snatched it from me. “That’s Jenny’s hat.”
“You said it was Bear’s hat.”
Tall Grass looked trapped, his eyes shifting restlessly between us. Its not.
“C’mon, Grass,” Quinton went on. “We all know it was Bear’s hat. You said you saw him get eaten by a monster.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Yes, you did. We want to stop it. We want to find the thing that ate Jenny.”
“I didn’t see the S-s — … I didn’t see it eat her!” Grass wailed. He leaned against the nearest wall and buried his face in the cap in his hands. “We were sleeping and it came in the dark. Like rushing water. And she made a noise and then… then I felt something cold and it smelled rotten and stinking. I opened my eyes and saw it swimming away through the walls. It swam through rock! All I had left was this stupid, stupid hat! And tonight I saw John Bear. Bear’s ghost. Walking through the bricks and he stopped and looked at me and said, ‘You keep the hat.’ Then he left. He left me with this hat. He cursed me with it.” Even with his voice muffled by the fur of the hat, I could hear him sobbing, and his shoulders shook with the spasms.
“Its not the hat, Grass. Believe me, that’s not what got either of them killed,” Quinton said. “Bear wouldn’t curse anyone. He just wanted to make sure his things went to the right people. You know how Bear was.”
Tall Grass shivered and raised his head. He didn’t look at us, but he spoke to us nonetheless, stuttering as he caught his breath. “The z-zeqwa… took her. S-s—”
“We know what it was. We want to find it and find out why it came.”
“I don’t know,” Grass whispered fiercely. “If someone sent it to eat Jenny, I’ll tear his head off!”
“We’ll find out. You go find a fire to sleep near tonight. Don’t sleep in the bricks. Don’t sleep in the skid at all. Hear me?”
Tall Grass nodded mutely, still dazed at his own outburst of grief and anger. We walked him up to Occidental Park and left him with a scowling Sandy while we went on to try to find the grate that led under Pioneer Square.
“Why would he say that?” I asked. “That someone sent it?”
Quinton shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he believes it came hunting her.”
I frowned and let that tumble in my head.
We discovered a grille loose in the alley floor between the Seattle Mystery Bookshop and the back of the Pioneer block. A steel frame and hinge marked where it had been embedded at one time, but now had been twisted out of its frame and laid back on top of the hole. To my eyes, the whole area was clogged with cold silver mist, the grating outlined and blazing in neon red and yellow—not the most comfortable combination.
Quinton glanced around as if making a mental note of the place. “I never knew there was anything under this.”
“Me, either.” I bent and pulled on the grille. It swung up and revealed a narrow vault, barely one person wide, that led to a tunnel angling down sharply to the west, leading tinder the Pioneer Building. Narrow steel-clad doors stood shut before what proved a steep metal staircase. We eased down the ancient stairs by the beam of Quinton’s flashlight. Something about the location and disposition of the narrow stairs made me think of a servants’ or workers’ entrance, even though we’d reached it through the alley. It looked as if the area had been rebuilt at some point, cutting off the original access, but I couldn’t decipher the tangled time planes of the Grey at that location to see what had once been there. The Grey was in complete disorder here, as if layers of time and memory had been heaved about by magical earthquakes.
At the bottom of the stair was a very short corridor that logic told me dove under the edge of the sidewalk in front of the Pioneer Building. And ended abruptly in a wall.
“Dead end,” I said, but there was something wrong about the wall…
I let everything normal slide away from me as I stared at the wall, moving deeper into the Grey until the wall was a black shape crazed with red and yellow energy threads and wisps of pale gray. I crouched down and inspected the gently waving pale threads.
As my face drew near, I felt the thin breeze that animated them, thick with age and mud, salt water, and things gone rotten. The threads weren’t just gray in color, they were Grey in substance. I grabbed onto the web of it and pulled it apart.
A hole had been chewed through the real wall, leaving a narrow tunnel. I turned back to Quinton, who looked more like a bulk of steam around a bright tangle of energetic strands than a person at that moment.
“I guess its time to get dirty,” I said.
He looked nervous and his eyes shifted from a spot just above my head to the rift in the wall that had been hidden by the Grey threads. I realized he was looking where my head would be if I were still standing—he couldn’t quite see me in the gloom as I crouched near the energy grid of the Grey, just as I wasn’t seeing him normally, either. I wondered if this was how ghosts saw us, but I doubted it, since most of them don’t seem to exist as close to the grid as I did.
I pushed my way back up to the world as I normally saw it: the normal, living world, slightly misty, shot with gleams of energy and ghostlight and the watery currents of time and memory.
Quinton jumped a little and adjusted his gaze down to me. “Where did you go?”
“Not far, just far enough to find this. Want to see what’s at the other end?”
“Yes, and no. It gives me a creepy feeling.”
“Can’t say I’m thrilled with it myself, but Lass said he saw a ‘snake’ down here, and the camouflage is the same material I found before.”
Quinton took off his hat, rolled it into a tube, stuffed it into a pocket, and started to climb into the hole.
“Hey,” I whispered, feeling a little oppressed by the place—even a touch scared—and protective of my companion. “I see better in this stuff. I should go first.” I didn’t want to, but it was smarter. If there was something otherworldly waiting at the end of the tunnel, I’d have a better chance of seeing it than Quinton would.
I crawled into the hole, getting unhappy signals from my shoulder and knee that no amount of working out would compensate for stupidity. I took a deep breath and crept forward into the silver-skinned gloom of the burrow. I felt the ghostly material brush against me as I went, and I could hear Quinton rustling along behind me.
The rough bore was wide enough for us to pass through without squeezing, but the dank, dark feel of it and the smell of watery decay ahead lent our journey the feeling that we were crawling through the closing grip of a stone fist. I could hear the gentle slosh of water ahead, echoing as if we were approaching a subterranean swimming pool. A low moan, like distant wind, came and went in the hollow tone ahead and sent a shiver over my skin that left goose bumps in its wake that had nothing to do with the cold.
I could see a hard line ahead at knee level—just a micron of harsh yellow energy against the Grey-swathed blackness of the tunnel. I felt forward with one hand, a few inches at a time, patting at the chewed floor of rubble, dirt, and crumbling cement and sliding my knees along to keep pace. My hand found a smooth platform that ended in an abrupt squared-off edge. Reaching down, I felt another smooth face and another platform… Steps.
I dragged myself forward until I could tuck my hips under and sit on the edge of the first step. My boots made a tiny splash as they touched the surface farther below me.
I turned my head and whispered back to Quinton, “There’s a room here. It’s big, from the sound of it, and there’s water on the floor. There might be something moving around in here, but I can’t tell yet.”
“Right behind you.”
I stood and moved forward, sliding my feet gingerly on the slick floor. I felt liquid lap over the tops of my boots and wet my ankles. Something muttered and sloshed off to my right. Peering into the depths of the Grey, I saw the room seem to brighten with the filmlike light of ghosts and the flicker of energy.
The floor stretched away under the water, showing marvelous geometric patterns in colored marble and stone. The walls were white marble streaked with veins of pink and gold, dividing the space into rooms and corridors of stalls with polished wooden doors. The wreck of an old oak chair bobbed slightly in deeper water way across the room. The murmuring thing lurched toward me and I caught a sharp breath in surprise.
It was a zombie. Before it could make its way closer, I shot a fast glance around, looking for any shape that might be Sisiutl, but there was nothing above the surface that looked like a snake or a sea serpent. I shuffled farther into the water until it was up to my thighs and, wincing at the thought of what was in it, ducked my head down to look below the surface of the brackish, smelly water.
Dimly I could see how the marble floor had subsided, allowing water to seep in at high tide through the cracks that must have formed over time. One end was misshapen by a mass of cement—probably the stabilizing material that had been poured in when the pergola above had been rebuilt. But even with the best concentration I could expend, I couldn’t see any sign of Sistu in the depths of the water and I couldn’t hold my breath much longer. I stood back up, soaking wet, and threw my hair back, gasping for air. The “subterranean comfort station” was festooned in webs of Sisiutl’s Grey stuff, as was the once-human creature that struggled nearby. Where the soft Grey strands hung, the shapes and colors of the surfaces beneath were hard to see clearly. I could see the gleam of the dead man’s life tangled in the Grey web that held his flesh in form, but I couldn’t see deeper. The moisture had attacked his skin, and where his legs had been soaking in water, they were bloated and soft, the rest of the body being slack, darkened, and exuding the rotten smell I’d whiffed in the hole. In the corporeal dark, I couldn’t make out more than its form—no face was visible—but it definitely wasn’t as close to total decomposition as the last one I’d been this close to.
“Quinton,” I said in a low voice, “there’s a zombie here. I need light.”
He didn’t hesitate but swished through the water to my side, clicking on his pocket flashlight and finding the sad, dead thing with its beam.
He caught his breath in shock and his footsteps faltered a moment before he finally stopped beside me. “That’s Felix. He was the last to disappear before Go-cart and Jenny were killed.”
“If Si—the monster had Felix, why did it kill the other two?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. Maybe… this is sick… maybe he’s saving him for a snack? Maybe he’s like an alligator and he prefers his meals… aged?”
“He didn’t really eat the others…” I said, thinking aloud. “He just killed them and left the bodies behind.”
Felix’s ambulating corpse stumbled toward us, making low noises in its decayed throat. An idea was struggling to form in my mind but crumbled away as the zombie seemed to cry out and fall to its knees, tangled in the mess of Grey threads and mud that spun across the flooded floor.
Quinton’s light wavered and moved off the weakly struggling zombie. “Harper! Do something!”
I admit I hesitated. Once again, I’d have to deconstruct a zombie in front of a man I liked. The last one hadn’t handled it very well…
“Get the light back on him,” I snapped. “I can’t see what I need to do.”
Quinton directed the light onto the moving corpse and I closed the distance between us. I squatted down in the water and, shuddering with disgust, I put a hand out to touch the remains of the man. It was soft but solid, and even with the light I couldn’t see any way to hook out the trapped threads of its life. I did not want to hack the poor thing apart with a pocket knife—revulsion made me turn my head aside and gag at the idea.
“There has to be a way,” I muttered, shivering in the chilly water that had set my damaged joints to aching. I studied the zombie as I shoved it back into a more upright position.
The dead thing slumped against the wall, possibly exhausted, but making no more large movements and few sounds now. Where it leaned against a drapery of the Grey threads, it seemed to vanish into the wall. That was interesting. The neutral Grey stuff must have been as much a form of camouflage as of holding its victims. Or was the trapping just incidental?
The more I looked at it, the more I thought the latter was the case: the Grey web stuff was Sisiutl’s camouflage. It probably spun a web of the stuff over itself and that was how it seemed to change shape as it slithered across time and space. It was smart enough to use the same material to cover the door to this place.
“This is its lair,” I gasped.
“What?” Quinton asked.
“This webby stuff—”
He interrupted, “What webby stuff”
“There’s some magical material I’ve been finding around the Sistu’s sites. I told you about it. It’s all over the place here, and all over this poor bastard. I think we must be in the lair. Sistu’s hidden it with the webbing—that’s why you couldn’t see the hole until I tore the web away. And that web is all over this guy—Felix. I think that’s why his spirit can’t leave—the magical web has his energy trapped in his dead body.”
“Well, get it off him then!”
I really didn’t want an audience, but we had no way of knowing when Sisiutl would be coming back for his dinner and I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Felix to be released from his prison of rotting flesh only by the bite of the monster’s jaws.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I muttered, shivering in the cold water. I needed to get the web stuff off of him and get a better look at the threads of his energy. I tried pulling it off with my hands, but the web was thicker and more reluctant to part than the other examples had been. It was as if the stuff had been knotted together, not just spun like spider silk. I’d have to untie it or find a way to cut through it… My mind ground through possibilities for a moment…
Something about knots… Then I thought of Ella Graham’s feather: She’d said it would help to untie the dead—no, she’d said “unpick” the dead things. She’d lived through the Depression and raised grandkids during the war, and she’d learned frugality the hard way, remaking clothes and salvaging bits and pieces by picking them patiently apart with a bodkin or needle. Maybe I could use the pheasant feather the same way to loosen the knots of the Sisiutl’s snare? Pheasants had one eye on death and one on life, so maybe the feather did have some affinity for the Grey, as Ella had implied. It was nuts but so’s the Grey and, when in doubt, crazy sometimes works.
I still had the feather in the pocket of my jacket and I pulled it out. It was a little bent and wet, but it seemed OK. Feeling like an idiot, I held it by the quill and brushed it at the zombie’s head.
The Grey web split a little. I brushed more and the web began to loosen and fall away. I could see seams opening up in the fabric of it, like faults or runs in a nylon stocking. I swiped and swabbed until the web was loose. Then I tore the last of it away with my free hand. The dead man’s form grew softer and slacker as the web fell away, but it was still knitted together too strongly to pull apart as I had the first time.
Quinton’s light wavered. “I think…” he started.
A distant swishing sound had started up.
“I think something’s coming…”
Hurry, hurry… My mind felt jellied by the cold—I needed to finish and get the hell out of the water before I got hypothermia. The feathery end wasn’t doing any more work. My heart pounded and, in spite of the cold, I’d begun to sweat.
If there were any gods watching, I hoped they were on my side. Desperate, hoping the picking-apart analogy would keep working, I flipped the feather over and teased the quill over Felix’s slumping shape until the tiny ridges on the tip caught on a thin yellow strand of energy. I resisted the urge to panic and dragged it toward me with a steady pull. A visible loop of energy sprang up out of the density of his form and I snatched it on the little finger of my free hand. Then I reeled it in against the growing pressure of the knot inside him.
The strand popped free and I rocked backward as the hot yellow skein of Felix’s trapped life spun out faster than film from a runaway projector. There was an odd shushing sound and the body fell down, boneless and loose.
A flash of white shot from the body and cut the gloom in two.
The swishing sound stopped and something hissed. Then it roared, and the swishing became a hailstorm sound of scales on stone.
I cast one last glance at the rotten body at my knees. Gone, dead, nothing but decaying matter now. Felix no longer inhabited his corpse.
Quinton grabbed my elbow and yanked me to my feet, my knee protesting with a ratcheting sound I felt through my whole body.
“C’mon!” he shouted, dragging me toward the fissure in the wall through which we’d come.
A gigantic head with a pair of horns like a Japanese war mask’s thrust from the hole, roaring and flicking a forked tongue as long as my body into the air in front of us. The horrible sound shook through my chest and rattled us both back a few steps as adrenaline lit a fire in my sluggish blood.
“Other side!” I shouted, pulling Quinton at a right angle to the monstrous head that was coming deeper into the room on a neck as thick and shaggy as a hundred-year-old cedar. A jaw full of glittering teeth snapped at the air where we’d been.
We bolted south across the floor, staying out of the deep water to the west. But any door there had been buried in a cascade of cement, and we found ourselves in a dead end.
“There’s no way out of here!” Quinton yelled.
“We can’t get out until the hole’s not full of monster! We just have to get out of its way until the tunnels empty. Then we can bolt for it,” I gasped back, dragging him around the edge of a marble toilet stall.
The hailstorm sound of the creature entering the room petered out and we could hear it thrashing the water near Felix’s body. It shouted something and I thought I recognized the sound of Lushootseed, though I didn’t know what it had said. We peered out.
