XXIII

Grendel dropped to her hands and knees again, eyes squeezed shut against whatever the damned Navy transmitters did to her head. The stereo snarled rage for her.

“Fucking swabbie butt-fucking asshole shit-lickers!”

Dennis dropped back into Army language, his growl matching the drawn-out fart from the speakers. Too many things screamed for attention, all at once, no time for creative cussing. He let fly with another string of crude slang, already sliding the frying potatoes and pan of mackerel across the stove to clatter against the cool corner of the cook-top and grabbing a hypo. His hand shook with anger.

Whatever Alice’s chi transfer actually did, he owed Grendel big-time. His back didn’t even ache today, and she got this for a paycheck?

She looked up at him in the break between dots and dashes. “Sting.” She held out her arm. Informed consent.

He smoothed back her fur to expose black skin, slid the long needle in through hide and blubber until he felt the harder muscle against the point, and then further until he judged he’d reached deep enough. He shoved the plunger home. He felt her relax under his hands and then she sagged away from the hypo and he eased her down to lie on the floor near the stove for warmth. Now he could calm down, almost as if he’d shoved the drug into his own bloodstream. His hands still shook.

He covered her eyes with a damp cloth. She’d be out for an hour or so. Maybe the fucking Navy would have shut the fuck up by then. Maybe they fucking wouldn’t. Maybe he’d run the dinghy across the bay and blow up their fucking towers.

Except he didn’t have any C-4 in the armory. And they’d doubled patrols along the shore since Grendel’s little raid, and stretched their goddamn “national security” exclusion zone damn near to the end of his boat ramp. Dennis wrestled with his anger. The bastard sons of three-legged mangy goats didn’t know what they were doing.

Of course the fucking brass-hats wouldn’t care if they fucking did know. Like that shithead Marine looie. “National Security.” Fuck ’em.

Sandy rubbed up against his shin, looked up with as much of a puzzled expression as a cat could muster, and cocked his head to one side.

“Mrrrt?”

“Don’t know, cat. We tried cutting back the dose, something that would dull whatever’s happening in her head without knocking her out. Didn’t work. If I had a lab full of tranquilizers and anesthetics and anti-seizure drugs and a VLF transmitter I could control, maybe we could fumble our way to something less drastic.”

Talking to Sandy helped calm him down. Yeah, he’d gotten in the habit of talking to the animals. It came from living alone and working with them every day. Plus, they made more sense than most humans he’d met. Apparently Tranh did it too, and look how that had worked out. The animal had talked back.

He thought he might have to change his mind about Tranh. Abrasive as hell on the outside, true cast-iron bitch, but look at what she’d done with Grendel. And she seemed able to put up with Alice, which took some doing at this phase of the kid’s life. Both of those said things about what hid inside that armor.

And there was the thing with Eagle, an outsider speaking with the Naskeag spirit guides. That was fucking weird, like him with Bear. Aunt Jean seemed to think Tranh was worth a second or third look. Her voice sounded in his head again, paired with visions of that sidelong look, “Eagle and Bear are not enemies. They can make alliance.”

The cat rubbed his leg once more and then walked over to Grendel and licked her face twice before settling down against one arm and grooming her fur. How the hell did Sandy know she wouldn’t eat him? Cats were weird.

Maybe he was just drawn by the taste of lobster or fish on her fur. The boathouse already smelled like mid-morning at the Stonefort Lobster Co-op—time to sluice fish gurry off the dock from the trap-bait sales. That was why he’d breaded up some mackerel for lunch.

Grendel. The name grated, but she had accepted it. Tranh said her real name was her smell, her particular blend of wet fur and musk and fish-oil pungency, a name humans weren’t equipped to hear or speak. They had to find some way to get her back to the Spirit Land where she belonged. That transmitter was torturing her. Even the cat didn’t like it, though Sandy always played with his mice or broken-wing birds or chipmunks before he ate them.

Aunt Jean had the beginnings of a ghost of a plan, one she didn’t like but that seemed better than none. It involved that cave locked up under the old house, the Spirit Path of Spirit Point. Which apparently worked both ways. Could they open a path for Grendel without getting a shitload of trouble back?

Eating. He stood up and shifted the frying pans back onto hotter stove lids. Bachelor cookery—apply heat to grease and cook until brown. He never bothered much with food. If Bouchard brought a roadkill moose for the critters, Dennis ate moose steak or moose stew along with them. If he’d picked up a hundred pounds of herring and mackerel from the Co-op to feed a fish-eating homicidal monster from the Spirit Lands, he ate fish. Food was fuel. Having Alice around cooking up fancy stuff, having fresh home-baked bread or fancy pork sausage from Aunt Jean, that moved him into a different world. He wondered if Tranh could cook.

Nah. Alice had made that wisecrack about a can of beans. Campbell’s beans. He guessed food was fuel to Tranh, as well. Some folks live to eat, others just eat to live. Hell, he’d wolfed down Army chow and asked for more.

He poked a fork into the fish. Done. Same with the hash browns. He pulled Sandy’s portion of fish off the warming shelf, just thawed, not cooked, and set it on the floor. The cat deigned to saunter over and nibble a few bites before returning to groom Grendel’s other arm and lick her fingers.

They must taste of lobster. The damned cat was going high-rent on him.

Dennis felt thumping in his gut before he heard it—damned choppers again, Hueys again. Fucking Navy, waking up ghosts. The pounding beat grew and grew and rattled the windows and stove lids and pans until the chopper roared low overhead, treetop height, and Den felt the sting of the grit blown by the rotors and he searched through the mud and stink and smoke of one of those fucking strategic hamlets, Cong had just hit it and blown everything to shit and lined up the local troops and shot them all. And now Charlie had faded away into ghosts before death swooped down from the sky, ghosts vanishing the weapons and surviving women and children into the triple-canopy as if they’d never been.

Someone was crying, off in the smoke and crackling burning thatch. He followed the sound, thin whining tortured sobs almost like a hurt kitten mewing, and found a small brown foot sticking out from under wreckage, he’d never noticed just what the crap was because it was just in his way, something long and wide and heavier than a single man could move but he’d just set his feet and called on Bear and grabbed and lifted and tossed it to one side and found the kids. Two of them. Small, maybe eight years, ten years old, he couldn’t tell ages with Viets. Filthy. Bloody. Shrapnel wounds, mortars or grenades, whatever had blown their hooch to shit. Girl had a mangled foot. Boy had chest wounds. Other stuff.

He slung his weapon and picked them up, one over each shoulder. They stank, sour rotting fish sauce dripping off them, must have hid behind the vat, in the vat, in a spider-hole under the vat, something. They screamed. The girl clawed at him, as if he’d done this thing to them and was going to do worse. He hadn’t bothered to stop her.

He trotted back to the LZ, back to the looie and Red with the squawk-box, call in dust-off for the kids, the looie started to give him a ration of shit and he’d just stopped and stared the lieutenant in the eye and something, maybe Bear, showed in Den’s face and the rotsie-boy backed off rather than risk fragging where he stood. Loaded the kids and a couple of cuts and scrapes from the platoon on the medevac and waved them off and that was that. Got word back in a few days that the boy had died en-route, girl lived, was the darling of the ward hopping around on cut-down GI crutches.

Dennis blinked. The chopper roar passed on and faded back to something felt rather than heard. Even the feeling vanished. Sandy had levitated into his lap and bumped noses with him, concerned. Fish breath.

Fuckin’-A, flashbacks. Haven’t had them this bad in years. Must be the stress. Sounds. Sights. Smells. All of those triggers.

Couldn’t blame Grendel. Couldn’t blame Tranh. Couldn’t really blame the Navy, those were Army Guard choppers and he wouldn’t have moved out here on the point if they’d made a habit of raping the airspace over his head and messing with his dreams. Blame the smell of fish. It sat in front of him. He could do something about the fish. He ate it. He ate the potatoes savory with bacon grease. Food was fuel.

And the animals needed refueling. He shrugged into his jacket, tested the straps on his GI foot, pulled the snowshoes off their pegs, and headed out the door to do his rounds. Life goes on.

Flashbacks, yes, but they were going rational on him. He’d never thought about Bear in one before. And he’d never landed in one of the good scenes before, a place where he’d eased pain rather than piling it up.

And he’d looked at the scene from a distance. He’d known he sat in Maine, sat in the boathouse kitchen on Ghost Point and nobody was trying to kill him. Weird. He felt prickles on the back of his neck.

The shrinks said that eventually, eventually, most people could work through the memories and come out the other side. You could shove them in a pigeon-hole on the mental roll-top desk, not hidden, not forgotten, but set apart as truly in the past and done. They still hurt when you thought about them, but they didn’t force themselves on you in the middle of the night or sitting down to lunch.

Eventually the ghosts shut up. Not like the fucking Navy. The stereo kept buzzing along, Morse code dots and dashes at glacial speed. They had to find a way to send Grendel back to whatever spirit land she came from.

He slogged through wet snow, heavy on the snowshoes and taking perfect prints like a plaster cast, he could have tracked Grendel to hell and back. He could track the baseball-stitch prints of a mouse stealing a nibble from the rabbit chow. No need for Bouchard’s tracker wizardry in this stuff. He fed Hopalong, he fed Peg-leg Pete, he fed the other winter-over cripples. He changed water in the dishes.

And then he nearly walked straight into Bear—silver, huge, glowing in the gray daylight like he’d glowed in moonshine. Bear just stood there, not dancing, standing and staring him in the face so close Dennis damn near shit himself from shock. No footprints—smooth clean snow in all directions—Spirit Bear, Naskeag guide from the Spirit Lands come to Spirit Point, but Dennis could smell him, the strong animal rankness of a healthy male bear in summer prime.

<Come.>

Dennis felt the hair stand up on his arms. Bear turned and walked away, walked upright like a man. Like a Spirit Bear. He left tracks, heel and pad and toes and claws sharp and clean like a steel engraving but huge. Dennis followed, half in a trance, meat foot, plastic foot, equal, his trace of limp vanished as if it had never been. Bear led him past the old garage, past the generator tower and battery shed, to the old house wrecked by fire and the blows of twenty years of unchecked Maine storms.

But the house stood strong, solid, roof lines square and straight and true, eccentric gables and tower etched against the sky. Spirit House, not the charred senile remnant slowly falling into its cellar-hole that he knew. Ghosts filled the landscape, Ghost Point.

Bear kept silent. He’d spoken English, not Naskeag, just the one word. Dennis chased after that thought, a tangent, no real meaning to it, but he wondered if Eagle spoke English to Tranh, or Vietnamese. Did Aunt Jean’s spirit animal speak French to her, concession to her native tongue and youth?

Another shiver ran up Den’s back. Bear led him to the old cellar-way, the side entrance leading down for deliveries of wood or coal for heat, of beer and wine that needed to sit and meditate in the cool underground dampness before they could be served, of all the back-stair doings of a house of money and power. He’d never known the place that well—he’d been just five or six when it had burned, when the deaths, the murders, tainted it forever. The cellar had seemed magical to him then, a place of shadows and strange smells and heats and chills and twists and turns. He remembered one corner that always smelled of apples, even though he never found them.

Bear led him under the small portico, through the door, down the cellar stairs. Led him through the door without opening it. Spirit Land, the rules of physics got thrown into a snowdrift. Spirit Land, the past changed or never been. Dennis didn’t feel murder in this place.

Bear stopped and turned to him. <No taint, but honor to the fallen. I show you.>

They passed through doors and doors, down stairs, through doors again, passages he couldn’t remember or fit to his memory of the house above. They came to a door that he did remember but the younger Dennis had never passed, a door always locked and barred from the outside, only now did he understand how strange that should have seemed. They passed through that, into a cavern lit by torches.

No, not a cavern—a megalithic barrow, a passage grave out of deep prehistory. Torches still burning? Dennis just filed that away, no questions now. He couldn’t breathe, much less think in this place that couldn’t be a place. If he wasn’t breathing, how come he could smell the pitch from burning torches, smell the mustiness of damp earth and stone, smell ozone of spirit auras?

A man lay on a raised stone platform, a large man, broad-shouldered, black-haired and black-bearded and olive skin, no Carlsson genes there. He wore a scarlet toque and sash and satin shirt, blue velvet pants, spit-shined black boots, a French-Canadian logger’s finery but the axe laid on his chest was no logger’s tool. Dennis remembered it, a war-axe out of his family’s past, keen vicious double edges of black steel contrasted with silver inlay that showed twining snake-dragons straight from a Viking’s hoard, fascinating to the young boy he’d been.

Lost in the fire, his father had said. And the man had to be Frenchy LeClair. This was the story those drunks didn’t tell, late nights at the crossroads bar.

At his feet lay weapons, heap upon heap. Abenaki war-clubs, stone axes and knives, spears with fire-hardened wood points or chipped flint. Trophies of foes conquered. Pre-Colombian trophies, not a scrap of metal showing.

Dennis braced to attention, stood for a moment and stared, burning the grave-scene into his memory, and then snapped a salute. No conscious thought, no barked command—it just came naturally, almost from his blood and bone. He didn’t have to understand what he was seeing.

Bear vanished. Dennis stood on snowshoes again, blinking, breathing, teeth chattering, face to the collapsing ruin of his family’s old house. Bear tracks led from him to the portico of that cellar door. Large bear tracks. And the door stood locked, the snow undisturbed against it. He shivered again, nothing to do with cold.

Jesus Christ.

Snow creaked under his feet, a gentle breeze rustled the pines and firs overhead, gulls called. Surf boomed and hissed down on the cobble beach, remnants of last night’s storm and a warning that another followed close on its heels, darkening skies still gray with threat. The weather service said that the jet-stream pattern would be bowling lows up the Gulf of Maine and into Fundy for another week or so. The next storm would be warmer, likely sleet and freezing rain or all rain to turn the snow to mush.

He stared at the snow. Bear’s tracks still led to and through a locked door that hadn’t been opened in twenty years. Dennis blinked and shook his head and the tracks remained.

The Witch holds the key.

Aunt Jean knew that place as if she’d been there. She’d mentioned it, told him of the Spirit Gate and the locked doors locked to keep things in. She was afraid of it. Even Aunt Jean, who seemed to fear neither God nor man, was afraid of it. Now Bear had laid a huge paw on that scale. He’d better get his ass in gear, hike out to the gatehouse and drive to a phone. Wouldn’t want to put this on the CB radio.

First he’d better check on Grendel and give her a backup dose to keep the Navy from fucking with her head, and then go. He turned back to the boathouse. Movement caught his eyes, a shadow flickering through shadows on the snow-packed driveway. Alice or Tranh coming back? It moved like a skier, not Bear with his ponderous walk.

It wore winter cammies, blotchy gray and white and black camouflage, cammies like that asshole Marine wore. Dennis froze and muttered some choice speculations on the ancestry, sanitary habits, and probable destination of the Department of the Navy and all its various nefarious minions. And this time he didn’t have a weapon.

How fast could he get back to that M-1? On snowshoes and gimped up? Not fast enough, racing against skis. Against a good skier, swooping along like Tranh on a downhill, Eagle skimming the waves after Salmon.

Eagle—no, Owl gliding gray silent death behind doomed Rabbit. That gait, that shape . . . Bouchard. Dennis relaxed. Bouchard in Army Guard uniform. Must be drill weekend.

Dennis waited, standing out in the open. A woodsman like Bouchard couldn’t help but see him. And the warden did, and angled across the snow and slid to a stop and puffed for a moment, catching breath from the exhilaration of skiing.

“Guess Alice and Doctor Tranh left about four hours back.” Bouchard waved at the tracks they’d made, stuff he read without thinking. “Sorry about the chopper. We were out checking the islands, Navy’s still running around in circles trying to find its own ass.”

Then he shrugged. “I warned that fucking warrant pilot he was asking for thirty-cal up the ass, flying low over houses and boats like that. Catch a drug-runner in the open, poacher, we’re only half civilized out here. He just gave me this ‘Been there, done that’ shrug. Going by his First Cav patch, he probably had.”

Dennis shook his head. “What’s the stir?”

“That’s what I came over to tell you. A half-eaten body washed up out on Sheep Island, some lobsterman spotted the corpse. Big chief at whiteskin camp want Injun scout to check for Commie war party. Injun scout no find. Injun scout no tell other story.”

“Cut the crap.”

Bouchard shrugged. “Okay. That contract guard’s body floated in, crushed larynx and broken neck, martial-arts type injuries that still showed up even after the sharks and eels and crabs had lunch. The medical examiner ain’t happy. And ol’ Captain Shea still has Spetsnaz on the brain. He wants to know how two armed guards and a combat vet Marine ended up dead or MIA, with those overtones of Top Secret burn-before-reading shit going down offshore. Remember, I haven’t said a word.”

He paused, catching his breath again from the fast ski run, and shook his head. “She-who-swims-dark-waters isn’t even on the map, but we still have a Cold War manhunt on, under the cover of a security ‘exercise.’ Gonna be official this time, Fish and Game, Marine Patrol, sheriff, Forest Service choppers, you name it. With search warrants, when and as needed.”

Fucking brass. Fucking politicians that kissed military ass in the name of “national security.” Fucking Cold War that got the fucking politicians fucking elected.

He was thinking Army again, one universal adjective.

But that did crank up the heat on Grendel. He could tell her to go swimming, stay out there, but he didn’t know if he could hide everything. Searches, with warrants, with guys like Bouchard that knew Maine woods and waters instead of dipshit Marine lieutenants . . . nobody quite as good as Bouchard, nobody who could find tracks under six inches of snow, but the other wardens and Marine Patrol would question Grendel’s tracks if they saw them. They’d even recognize that Spirit Bear’s tracks didn’t belong here and start asking questions about those.

Those three dead men didn’t bother Dennis much. From what he’d seen of that looie, what he’d heard of the contract guards, you could chalk it up to Darwinian selection. Weed the gene pool and hope they hadn’t reproduced yet. Better men died every day. He’d seen them die . . . .

He wiped the corpses off his slate, not his problem. Hiding Grendel, getting Grendel home—those were his problems . . . . “What do you make of that?” He pointed at the tracks Bear had left.

Bouchard slid his skis over and looked. He knelt and spanned a track with his hand, measuring.

“Bozhemoi.”

“Yeah. Old Naskeag word.”

The warden sat back on his heels and stared at the old ruin of the house. “That’s the cellar door?”

“Yep.”

“You ever been in there since the fire?”

“Nope. Well, not physically.” And Dennis told him of the . . . vision? Of Bear leading him in, of the barrow scene, of Bear’s words at the end. Brought Bouchard up to date on what the VLF transmitters did to Grendel, and the only way he could deal with it.

Bouchard nodded. “I’ll tell Aunt Jean. You stay here and work out how to hide our guest.”

Who was flat on her back now, and likely to remain so as long as the Navy kept talking to itself. At least the weather was going to fuck over the searches, chopper and otherwise. That string of lows clear down to Mexico started to look almost friendly. The first rain spattered out of the falling dusk, cold on his cheek.

Dennis started shuffling around on snowshoes, covering suspicious . . . alien . . . tracks with his own.