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Everyone in the force knew Marconi had a girlfriend, and it wasn't a big deal. We sometimes saw her hanging around the station when Marconi was getting off her shift. She was a kind-faced woman: frizzy brown hair, thin where Marconi was stocky, always wearing something bright and flowery. Marconi didn't say much about her personal life so we knew very little about this mystery visitor. I don't think we even knew her name. She was just another fixture around the station, like Larry the Drunk Wonder, who we brought in to the holding cells every Friday like clockwork.
But when she came to the front desk one misty morning, we almost didn't recognize her at first. She'd traded her floral blouse for a subdued gray shirt and jeans, and her frizzy hair was tied back in a tight bun. It didn't look like she was wearing any makeup. Abigail Shannon - our newest recruit - was working the desk that day, and she gave the visitor a dim smile.
“Name?” she asked.
“Janine,” the woman answered. “Janine Zimmerman.” She swallowed nervously. “I'd like to report a missing person.”
I was busy grabbing my third coffee of the morning, but when I heard the tremor in her voice, I turned to look at her. She didn't seem to know what to do with her hands. They played at her hair, then fell to the counter, then drummed a rhythm on her thigh. Eventually she settled for wringing them the way one might squeeze a wet dishcloth.
Abigail pulled out the necessary forms and grabbed a pen from the top drawer. “Can you give me the name of the missing person?” she asked.
A sense of dread crept over me, and I knew, even before she opened her mouth, what name she was about to say. I placed the coffee pot back on the counter before it could slip from my sweaty hands.
Her voice faint, Janine said, “Olivia Marconi.”
* * * * *
I DUCKED INTO THE MEN’S room, lit up the Inspector’s card with my pocket lighter, and dropped the flaming piece of plastic into the sink. By the time the fire had died down and I’d returned to the main office, the Inspector was already there. He and Nico Sanchez were ushering Janine into one of the interrogation rooms down the hall.
I slipped in behind them before the door could close. Sanchez offered the flustered woman a chair and sat down across from her. The Inspector and I remained standing. I noticed that his cigar was smaller than usual, closer to a cigarette, really, and the smoke issuing from it was thin and wispy. I wondered what had caused the change.
“Why don’t you walk us through what happened,” Sanchez said in his best good-cop voice. “When did you notice the Sheriff was missing?”
Janine tugged at the sleeves of her shirt. “Um,” she said. “Well, she didn’t come home this weekend. We had dinner plans on Saturday but she didn’t show up and she didn’t call to cancel. I thought she might have been on extended patrol or something but I couldn’t reach her cell phone to check in.”
I had noticed Marconi’s absence but had assumed the same thing as Janine: some patrol or stakeout had kept her away from the station for a while. Even so, the fact that she hadn’t gone home at any point was enough to set off warning bells. It wasn’t like Marconi to go so long without keeping in touch. Hell, I could barely get through most mornings without her grilling my ass for one thing or another.
“Do you know what case she was working on?” the Inspector asked quietly.
Janine looked unsure, so I answered for her. “Marconi was looking into the whole thing with those missing campers. Some local teenagers went hiking in the Catamount Forest three weeks ago and haven’t been seen since. She’s been combing the area looking for any trace of those kids.”
Both Sanchez and the Inspector turned to look at me. I probably shouldn’t have spoken, but Janine’s anxiety was getting to me, and Marconi’s safety seemed a lot more important than sticking to procedure. Janine bit her lip and nodded.
“Yes, that sounds right,” she said. “I think I remember something about that.”
The next step seemed obvious to me: book it the hell out to Catamount Forest and scour the trees for Marconi and those missing campers. I was just about to grab Sanchez and organize the rescue mission when Janine spoke up again, and hoo boy, was that the kicker that changed everything.
“I know where Olivia went,” she said faintly. “She was taken. By the wendigo.”
You could see the precise moment when Sanchez slipped over from sympathetic to skeptical; his brow curled up a bit, his mouth tucking into a frown. The guy had never had the greatest poker face. I looked to the Inspector for help, but if the word “wendigo” meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. He only stood there and ground the tip of his cigar between his teeth.
“It lives in the forest,” Janine went on, oblivious to the room’s sudden shift in mood. “It used to be human, but not anymore. It preys on lost travelers and brings them back to its lair to feed. I saw it once,” she added, as if that settled the matter.
Sanchez rose from his chair and gestured for us to talk outside. The officer shifted his belt and led us out into the hall. Through the two-way mirror, we could see Janine stare numbly into space, her hands still trembling.
“The lady’s nuts,” Sanchez concluded. “Marconi’s probably got no reception in those woods, that’s why we haven’t heard from her. ‘Wendigo’ my ass.”
“So Janine is upset and making up stories to cope,” I said. “That doesn’t change the fact that no one’s seen the Sheriff for days now. Sanchez, if there’s even the slightest shred of a chance Marconi is missing, we’ve gotta act on that. You know how important the first forty-eight hours are.”
The officer looked disgruntled. “I hear you, Hannigan,” he said. “But we can’t just drop everything and go stomping through the woods looking for her. We don’t have the men to spare for an operation that huge.”
“Then I’ll go with the Inspector,” I said. “We’ll canvas as much of the forest as we can. If things get gnarly we’ll get the hell out of there and call for backup.” I glanced at my otherworldly partner, who hadn’t said a word since we’d stepped outside. He nodded simply.
Sanchez shrugged. “Your choice, detective. Just keep an eye out for Bigfoot while you’re out there.”
Then he was gone, and it was just me and the Inspector standing outside the interrogation room. The tall figure looked paler than I’d even seen him. His grayish skin had taken on the complexion of ash.
“This... wendigo,” I said under my breath. “Is it real?”
The Inspector pondered the question for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “Not as Janine describes it, anyway. Something in those woods may be hunting down campers, but I doubt it was ever human.”
I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. “More monsters. Great.”
“This could be quite dangerous, Mark,” the Inspector said. “We have no idea what kind of entities are out there. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Marconi needs me,” I replied. “And so does she.” I gestured to the woman sitting alone behind the glass. Janine had stopped shaking, but she was still staring out at nothing, her hand lying limp on the table. As we watched, her fingers closed slightly, then relaxed - as if gripping an invisible hand, for however brief a moment.
* * * * *
THE INSPECTOR RODE with me to the Catamount Visitor’s Center, which seemed as good a place to begin as any; plenty of dirt trails wound away from the center, and the lost campers, as well as Marconi, would surely have started their hike from here. I pulled my cruiser into the sandy lot and killed the engine. The place was nearly deserted - only a few other vehicles sat beneath the shadows of the treetops. The Inspector and I headed for the center and pushed open the stained wooden door.
A young couple huddled in the corner over the wall of travel brochures - tourists in the Glade, always a rare sight - and a grizzled man in the back was thumping the side of a vending machine, which seemed to have swallowed his dollar. The Inspector and I headed to the information desk, where a gray-haired woman in enormous green-rimmed glasses sat reading a home improvement magazine.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m Detective Mark Hannigan, and this is Inspector... Smith, from the FBI. We were wondering if you happened to see a woman in a sheriff’s uniform come through this area in the last couple of days.”
The gray-haired woman - presumably Sheila, given her name tag - set aside her magazine and squinted up at us. “You mean Olivia?” she said. “Nice lady. I see her down at the grocer’s sometimes.” Her voice was high and sweet, like she’d ingested something syrupy.
“That’s her,” I said, glancing at the Inspector. “You’re saying she was here recently?”
“Oh yah,” she said. “Looking for those campers, you know. Poor things.” She began to leaf through her magazine again, as if that settled the conversation.
“Did she say where she was going?” I asked.
Sheila waved a hand toward the door. “Said something about checking out Timberwolf Trail. I told her, that’s the one the campers took, you know.” She flipped the page and peered up at us. “You boys looking for them too?”
“Something like that,” I muttered. “Thank you for your time.”
I gestured to the Inspector that we were done here, and together we headed for the exit. But just as I was reaching for the doorknob, it twisted on its own, and the door flew open from the other side. Standing at the threshold was Janine. She had a camo backpack slung over her shoulder and a water bottle dangling on a strap from her wrist, but otherwise she could have come right from the police station.
“Oh,” she said.
I grabbed her arm and ushered her down the stairs, the Inspector trailing behind us. The door to the visitor’s center swung shut with a low creak. When we were safely out of anyone’s earshot, I let go of Janine’s arm. I hadn’t switched to bad cop mode in God knows how long but I could feel that old side of me starting to resurface.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I hissed. “Half a dozen people have gone missing in these woods and you were just going to wander in all by yourself? Did you even bring any sort of protection?”
Janine’s eyes grew hard, and all of a sudden I saw the same steel in there that I’d seen so often in Marconi. “For your information,” she growled, “I have a compass and a map of the area and the sharpest pocket knife I bet you’ve ever seen.” Then she drew up her baggy shirt, and I saw a pistol tucked into a holster at her waist.
“And I’ve got this bad boy,” she said. “Is that enough protection for you?”
I looked to the Inspector, but he had a wry smile on his face, and I knew I was on my own here. I rubbed my temple and began to pace under the porch light.
“We can’t let you go in there alone,” I said at last. “Even with a gun, it’s just too dangerous. You don’t know what’s out there.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s a wendigo. I told you back at the station.”
I wasn’t sure why I was suddenly being so skeptical - between the two of us, I’d probably seen more weird shit than she would in her entire lifetime - but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in Janine’s mystery monster. “And that’s going to take it down, is it?” I said, gesturing to her gun. “Your wendigo?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. This is for bears or mountain lions. The wendigo has its own weakness.” She swung the backpack around and unzipped the top pouch. Inside was the largest pile of flares I’d ever seen.
“It’s like Frankenstein’s monster,” she explained. “Can’t stand the sight of fire. If it gets too close, I’ll light it up.”
“Or burn the forest down, more like it,” I muttered.
Janine zipped up the bag and gave me a long, pensive look. “I have to do this,” she said. “Olivia’s counting on me. If someone you loved was in danger, Detective, what would you do?”
The sympathy card. Damn. Because Janine very well knew that I’d go to the ends of the Earth - and further - for my wife and my children. I’d be a dirty rotten hypocrite if I stopped her from doing the same.
“Fine,” I said. I shook my head and sighed. “So you’re going wendigo hunting. Doesn’t mean you’re going in there alone. The Inspector and I are coming too.”
Janine looked between us, then shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt, I suppose. But you’re going to need some supplies first. Sheila can stock you guys up before we go.”
“How long are you expecting to be out here?” the Inspector asked. In the shade of the trees I couldn’t see his face at all, just a blank stretch of shadow with a speck of embers at the bottom.
Janine shifted her backpack over her shoulder and looked somberly at him.
“As long as it takes,” she replied.
* * * * *
TEN MINUTES AND A BACKPACK full of hiking essentials later, the three of us finally started down Timberwolf Trail. It was a simple dirt path, littered with bumpy rocks and crunchy fallen leaves. Every so often we passed a streak of yellow paint on a rock or a nearby tree. Even without the trail markers, I had a real hard time imagining the campers losing their way. Unless they were complete idiots and had wandered off to explore the woods on their own.
A low, thin mist hovered over the landscape, and Janine’s form looked a bit fuzzy as she stomped her way along the trail. She had taken the lead without a word, mainly because her long impatient strides kept leaving me in the dust. I shifted the straps of my new backpack and tried to catch up with her.
“So... this wendigo,” I said. “You told us you saw it before. Where was that?”
Janine ducked under a stray branch. “I was on a camping trip with my aunt and uncle,” she said. “I was young - maybe twelve or so. We were gathered around the campfire when we heard these enormous crunching footsteps and saw a shadow the size of a house moving through the trees. My uncle grabbed a log from the fire and waved it at the shadow, warning it to get back. It stopped for a few seconds - like it was deciding what to do. Then it turned around and disappeared back into the trees. I didn’t know what I had seen, but then my uncle told me the legend of the wendigo, and how it’s stalked these woods for centuries.” She looked at me earnestly. “I believed him. After what I’d seen, how could I not?”
I glanced at the Inspector, unconvinced, but he didn’t seem to be listening. His head was turned to the trees and his eyes were hidden. He didn’t duck under the low branches, but they avoided him all the same, somehow sliding past him without moving an inch. Looking at him for too long made me mildly dizzy, so I turned my eyes back to the trail.
Eventually the path tapered off and turned into a leafy clearing, with a warped picnic table and the charred remains of a makeshift fire pit. Janine led us to the table and took a seat, rummaging through her backpack. She pulled out a plastic baggie packed with trail mix and offered it to me. I took a tiny handful of nuts and raisins, popped them in my mouth, and handed the bag back to her. The Inspector politely declined when I offered some to him. He seemed distracted. The thin smoke from his cigar drifted into the nearby trees, as if searching for something.
“We should keep moving,” Janine said after a minute or two. She stowed the bag away amid her stack of flares and rose from the table. I wasn’t nearly as spry as I used to be and a few more minutes of rest would have done me good, but Janine was antsy, and she had every right to be.
“The campers must have spent the night in this clearing,” I said, looking around. “But they had time to pack up their stuff and keep moving. Whatever happened to them didn’t happen here.”
Janine nodded. “We have to go deeper.”
I turned to call the Inspector and nearly jumped out of my skin - he’d somehow approached us without crinkling the leaves under his feet. Maybe it was my imagination, but even his clothes seemed more battered than usual. There were scuffs on his fedora and smudges of something dirty on his trench coat. He said nothing, only tilted his head at the disappearing Janine.
I hastily followed her back onto the trail. The mist had thickened while we were resting and the branches ahead poked like crooked arms out of the gray. Janine’s outline, only a few yards away, was barely more than a smudge. I scrambled across the leafy, muddy rocks until I caught up with her. The Inspector glided along behind us, his shadow as thin as the trees.
“How did you meet Marconi anyway?” I asked Janine, brushing aside a low-hanging branch.
“My nephew’s a Boy Scout,” she replied. “He’d gotten his Eagle rank and the troop was hosting a court of honor to celebrate. Olivia had helped with his project so she came to the ceremony to give a short speech about him. We met at the dinner party afterward. She was... she was the first woman who’d ever shown interest in me.” She looked down at the ground and smiled. “I liked her. She can be blunt - you must know what she’s like, working with her and all - but she’s kind, and honest, and she has a good heart. We went on a few coffee and dinner dates before making things official.”
I tried to imagine Marconi cozying up in a coffeeshop or getting dressed up for dinner on the town. It was surprisingly hard. I knew she must have a life outside the precinct, that she didn’t always wear uniform blue or tie her hair back in the tightest of ponytails. She had people who loved her, who saw more than just the badge. But I’d known her for so long that my image of her had just stuck. To me, she’d always be my pain-in-the-ass sheriff.
“You’re married, right?” Janine said. “How did you two meet?”
I shrugged. “High school sweethearts. I know, I know, it’s straight out of a sitcom, but that’s how it happened. We had a lot of the same classes together and eventually we just got talking. It always felt easy with Ruth - I never felt like I was posturing, trying to make myself look good for her. I was just me. And she appreciated that.”
My shoes squelched in the mud. “We went to separate colleges, but eventually we found our way back to the Glade. Everyone does - you know how it is. And we just picked up where we left off. Two years later we were married.”
Janine’s hand drifted away from the strap of her backpack. Her fingers curled inward, like they had at the station, as if clutching for a hand that was no longer there. Then she lowered her arm.
“I was going to propose,” she said quietly. “At dinner this weekend. And when she didn’t show up, I thought... I thought she knew somehow, and I’d scared her away. I couldn’t sleep at all that night. And then she wasn’t there the next morning, and she never called to say why, and I knew that something else had happened. Something had gone horribly wrong.” Her voice hitched. “I don’t even care about the proposal anymore. I just want to know she’s safe.”
I reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked over at me, her green eyes sad and empty.
“We’ll find her,” I said. “You have my word.”
Janine tried to smile. Her cheeks creased, then slackened. She looked down at the ground again. Then she quickened her pace, trodding through the muck, until she was back to being a vague shadow on the trail ahead.
* * * * *
IT TOOK ANOTHER TWENTY minutes for us to find the first real sign of a disturbance. I had just rounded a particularly tight corner on the mountain trail when the mists parted and I saw Janine standing in front of a charred, blackened tree. The trunk had been cleaved straight down the middle, causing both halves to droop to either side and leaving a small opening in the center. Sap bled from a series of long, deep gashes in the bark - what was left of it, anyway.
“Was it struck by lightning?” I asked, catching my breath.
“I don’t understand,” Janine said. “The wendigo hates fire. Why would it burn a tree like this?”
“Because it’s not a wendigo,” the Inspector said from behind us. He strode forward and ran a thin finger along the trail of drying sap. I thought for sure he was going to taste the stuff, but he simply rubbed his fingers together, leaving sticky strands between them.
“I’ve seen this before,” he muttered. “A long, long time ago. Long enough that I thought they’d gone extinct.”
“They?” I asked, not sure I wanted an answer.
“A tribe of empathic giants,” the Inspector said. “Brutes, most of them, but they figured out how to tear open the rift long before any of us. Their way is messy, destructive; they leave scars whenever they cross between worlds. Scorch marks, poisoned rivers, acid rain. That made it easier for me to track them down.”
Janine was staring at the Inspector in baffled silence, and hell, I didn’t blame her; we’d officially taken a left turn into crazytown. Wendigos were one thing. This... this was something else. I backpedaled a bit and tried to parse through what the Inspector had just said.
“Empathic giants?” I repeated. “What does that mean, exactly? What are we going up against?”
The Inspector knelt by the tree and ran a hand along the blackened wood. “They feed on emotions,” he said. “The time eater we faced swallowed up years, but these creatures, they swallow happiness. Fear. Depression. Hope. Each has a particular taste, and it feeds slowly, keeping its victims in stasis until it can suck them dry. Then it excretes this sap” - he held up his sticky fingers - “and moves on to the next world, the next food source.”
Something else about the Inspector’s story had unsettled me, but before I could pin down what it was, Janine found her voice. “This thing feeds slowly?” she asked. “So there’s still a chance that... that Olivia might be alive?”
I stared at her. The first time I’d heard the Inspector spout his alien gibberish, I’d resisted it - and who wouldn’t? There just wasn’t room in my worldview for beings from outside time and space. It had taken cold, hard evidence for me to erase that doubt. But there was no doubt in Janine’s eyes. And I knew, just as she had believed in the wendigo, that Janine believed the Inspector too. She’d believe any narrative that got Marconi home again.
“There’s always a chance,” the Inspector said cautiously. He rose back to his full seven feet. “Keep in mind, though, that by all rights this beast should be dead. It’s been lurking here longer than you can possibly fathom. Which means it must be hungry. And hungry beasts aren’t known to play with their food.”
Janine yanked the pistol out of her holster and pointed the gun past the charred tree, into the heart of the mist. “A chance is a chance,” she said quietly. “That’s enough for me.” Then she leaped nimbly over the crack in the wood and hurried into the fog.
I shared a glance with the Inspector. “‘Longer than you can possibly fathom’?” I whispered. “How fucking old are you, man?”
The Inspector’s eyes were hidden, but the face beneath his fedora looked grim. “Old enough to know what kind of danger we’re walking into,” he said. “But let’s hurry. We can’t let Janine get too far ahead.”
There was so much more I wanted to ask him, but he had a point. We’d have time to talk later. Hopefully. I drew my own pistol, and together we climbed over the splintered remains of the tree and into the underbrush.
* * * * *
THE INSPECTOR WAS RIGHT: whatever we were following had left a whole mess in its wake, which at least left us a clear path to follow. Trees had been torn from their roots and blasted backwards off the trail. Some of the trunks were still smoking. The dirt had a radioactive tint of green, and the leaves under our feet grew crisper and blacker with every step. There was even a hint of ozone in the air. I had felt that same crackle at the abandoned radio station a few cases ago, and my fingers tightened around my pistol at the memory.
Janine stayed ahead of us, but never disappeared totally from view; I could always see her shadow climbing over rocks and brushing aside half-visible branches. The fog was getting even worse. The Inspector, in all his grayness, seemed to melt into it. I couldn’t tell if his cigar had stopped smoking for once or if the mist was so dense I couldn’t make out the difference.
“Guys?” Janine called back to us. She had stopped several feet away and was staring at something I couldn’t see from this distance. I clambered forward and peered into the fog. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Then a twinkle of red flashed in front of me, and I took a startled step back. The air shimmered like waves rippling outward on a body of water. As I continued to stare, I made out vague shapes in the ripples: a single gnarled tree, a pool of brackish water, distant red mesas on a flat horizon.
“It’s a rip,” the Inspector said. “A doorway to another dimension. The entity’s been here, which means - Janine, no!”
Without warning, she had run forward and plunged head-on into the shimmering wall of air. There was an enormous sucking sound, like water slurping down a drain, and then Janine’s figure was running through that otherworldly red desert. She had made a beeline for the grimy oasis, and suddenly I saw why: there was a body slumped on the ground by the water.
“Marconi?” I whispered.
I started to follow her, but the Inspector grabbed my arm. “Stop!” he hissed. “You have no idea what’s behind that rip. The air could be toxic, the sun could burn you alive, there could be worse monsters than a wendigo slumbering there, waiting for prey to wander by -”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “If there’s even a chance Marconi’s alive in there, I have to take it. You get that, don’t you?”
The Inspector looked dubious, but after a few tense seconds, he let go of my arm. I didn’t wait for him to follow - I raised my gun and hurried after Janine, leaping into the world beyond the rip.
For a second the mist was replaced by a brain-splitting white void, and I felt like my body was being stretched, like a piece of human taffy. Then the world snapped back into place and I was running across a sea of gritty red sand. A surprising chill tickled the skin on my neck, despite the enormous sun that hovered precariously in the orange sky. The air seemed breathable, at least, but there was a distinct aftertaste of copper on my tongue that I didn’t like one bit.
Janine had stopped running and was now staring down at the slumped body on the sand. Fearing the worst, I approached her - but it wasn’t Marconi. The corpse in question was a teenage boy wearing tattered khakis and a large beige backpack. His eyes bulged out of his head like peeled grapes and his hair had turned entirely white. Sinewy green vines sprouted from his skin and dug into the ground like a tangle of thick wires. As I watched, the vines pulsed, sending bulbs of faint green light from the body into the sand below.
“I guess we found one of the missing campers,” I muttered, covering my mouth and nose. The coppery stench was ten times worse over here.
The Inspector approached from behind me and knelt down over the camper’s corpse. His fingers traced the pulsating vines, his brow furrowed. The smoke from his cigar was a thin, weak shade of gray.
“Fear,” he said. “This particular entity likes to feed on fear. I suppose our poor friend here was afraid of starvation, or isolation, or maybe just wide-open spaces. In any case, he’s been bled dry. There’s nothing we can do for him now.”
I looked up from the body, feeling mildly sick, and stared off at the horizon. There was something funny about it. I took a few steps past the oasis, and I realized - there was no horizon. The ground literally ended after a hundred feet or so. The mesas weren’t distant, they were just incredibly small.
I turned in circles. For a second I forgot about the dead body. The oasis was smack dab in the center of this desert, and the desert itself was barely more than an island, floating impossibly in that orange sky. If I walked for a minute in any direction, I’d reach the end of the world.
“Inspector?” I asked. “What is this place?”
The Inspector straightened up and looked off at the fake horizon. His skin looked sicklier than usual under the light of the massive sun.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’ve heard the empathic giants could create pocket universes to store their food, but I’ve never actually seen one before. Supposedly they slow the flow of time to keep the victim alive longer, giving the entities a food source for years. Centuries, even.”
I looked back at the rippling air that led to the misty forest. Through the rip, I could see leaves swirling in a sluggish tornado on the ground, inching along like footage from a stop motion film.
“Olivia’s not here,” Janine said. She left the camper’s body and strode past the gnarled tree. There was another rip not too far away, I noticed; this one spilled over with a green light the color of unripened fruit. Janine approached the tear, set down her backpack, and pulled out a flare from her stockpile. She lit the fuse with a battered lighter and let the flare fall to the sand. Bright red lights spat from the tube and cast shadows across the ground.
“Bread crumbs,” she said. “If time is slow here, this’ll last a while. All we have to do is follow it home again.”
Then she shouldered her backpack and stepped into the rift. There was a familiar slurping sound, and she was gone.
I looked at the Inspector. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but I could see the faintest glint of admiration in his eyes.
“Come on,” he said. “Before the flare burns down. We have to follow her.”
Together, we hurried forward - my body stretched like the world’s largest elastic - and then the world snapped back into place. This time we were standing in a sparsely furnished room, its roof open to a roiling green sky. The wood in the walls stretched up until the planks came loose and floated, disjointed, in the void. Janine was already examining the next body. This one was a young woman in jeans and a denim vest, her hair a gleaming white and her dead fingers clutching at a shattered flashlight. The same pulsing vines draped over her corpse and vanished into the woodwork.
“Dammit,” I muttered. “We’re too late.”
There was no point in poring over the poor girl’s body, and besides, Janine had already moved on. There were no doors out of this room, but another rip floated in the air by the far wall. This one emitted a purple glow the color of decaying violets. Janine lit another flare, dropped it on the floorboards, and stepped into the portal. The Inspector and I were right on her heels.
And so it went. Rip after rip, world after world, we trekked through increasingly bizarre pocket dimensions. One looked like the skeleton of some vast creature with three spines and a jawbone the size of a small house; the portal was buried at the base of its tail. Another was turned completely upside down, so that we had to find our footing on a narrow strip of land or fall up into a starless void. Everywhere we went we found more bodies. None of which were Marconi’s, thank God, but it still made my stomach turn to see those poor dead campers with their pale skin and bulging eyes.
At every stop, without fail, Janine lit another flare to mark our progress. I wondered if she would ever run out of those things. At one point I looked back and saw a dizzying tunnel of flares, a string of lights flashing in scattered, slow-moving patterns. I just hoped they wouldn’t go out before we found Marconi.
There was no sign of the wendigo, or the giant, or whatever the hell we were chasing here, and for a while I thought we might make it to the end of this cosmic maze without running into the damn thing at all. But then the last portal dumped us into a huge cave covered with glowing specks of lichen, and there it was: a hulking, humanoid shape slumped in the corner, so quiet and so still it might have been a statue. But I knew it was the wendigo. The crackle of ozone in the air was so strong I could feel my nose starting to bleed.
“Olivia!” Janine hissed. And there she was. Marconi was propped up against the wall of the cave, still wearing her sheriff’s uniform, vines slithering from her exposed arms into the rock. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. The images of the camper corpses wouldn’t leave my head, and when Janine broke into a run, I was only a few steps behind her.
Our footsteps were muffled by the blanket of lichen on the cave floor, but I had no idea if the wendigo was asleep or resting or just faking it, and I wasn’t going to make a ruckus in order to find out. At one point Janine and I had to stop due to a deep chasm that opened up suddenly in front of us, leaving us only with a narrow footbridge. The bottom of the pit was too far down to make out but I could see the glint of sharp stalagmites jutting out of the darkness. The two of us crossed the bridge as quickly as we dared, the Inspector gliding along behind us on his usual silent footsteps.
Once we were safely on the other side, Janine rushed to Marconi and cupped the sheriff’s cheeks in her hands. There were definitely strands of gray in her hair, but her eyes were closed, and the rise and fall of her chest was unmistakable. Marconi was alive.
I almost sank to my knees in the lichen, I was so relieved. But Janine was tugging at Marconi’s shoulders now, and the sheriff refused to budge; the vines were wrapped so tightly around her she was bound to the cave wall. Every few seconds, pulses of bright green light traveled down the vines, sliding from her arm into the wall of stone. Janine tried yanking at the vines but they were embedded deep in Marconi’s skin. The pulses grew brighter, as if sensing Janine’s resistance, and Marconi shifted slightly inside her tangled prison.
The Inspector appeared suddenly by my side. “I don’t mean to rush you,” he said, his voice low and oddly calm, “but we have company.”
I whirled around. The hulking shape in the corner had risen from its crouched position, and now a behemoth of a shadow blocked out the light from the glowing lichen. Before I’d thought of it as humanoid but there was something... wrong about it, something about the curve of its limbs and the blocky, misshapen head slumped on its broad shoulders. It was too dark to make out its facial features, if it had any at all. I couldn’t tell if it had skin or scales or fur or feathers. It was just darkness, darkness made solid, and I could only stand and stare as the beast took a rumbling step toward us.
I lifted my gun, for all the good it would do, but the Inspector moved before I could. One second a man was standing in front of me, and the next - well, it’s hard to say. Outwardly the Inspector looked the same, but I had the strange sense that he’d grown to enormous proportions, like a giant squeezed into a tiny body. It reminded me of that night he’d shown me his true form on the highway. The figure I knew was just a vessel, a puppet, its strings being yanked by something large and invisible. Looking at him made my head throb.
The Inspector reared back and punched the shadowy beast. His fist struck like a meteor, leaving a fiery imprint on the creature’s hide, causing it to bellow and stumble back. The floor of the cave trembled with each footstep. For half a second I hoped it would fall backwards into the chasm, but the wendigo only took a second or two to regain its footing. It lumbered forward and batted at the Inspector with a clawed, misshapen hand.
I fired a single shot at the incoming limb, but the bullet sank into its hide with a sound like a muffled thwump. Then the Inspector was flying across the cave. His whole body went limp, as if the invisible puppeteer had left it, and when he struck the far wall he slumped into a curled position on the ground. The cigar dropped from his lips and rolled away. Its tip smoldered for a second or two, then went out.
“NO!” I shouted, feeling something snap inside me. I fired another three shots at the wendigo but the bullets only seemed to irritate it. It turned its monstrous head to look at me, and I saw a bulbous globe of eyeballs peering out of its skull, each one bloodshot and vaguely human. It took a threatening step forward. A tremor swept across the ground and knocked me off my feet, whacking my hand against the stone and causing the gun to skitter out of my grip into the darkness.
I didn’t bother looking for it; what was the point? This thing had already proven itself immune to bullets and if the Inspector couldn’t leave a dent on it, what fucking chance did I have? I looked to Janine, as if to apologize - but she wasn’t staring at me, or even the wendigo. She had managed to pry a few of the vines off of Marconi’s face and was kissing her on the lips, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Another step, another tremor. Rocks came loose from the walls and tumbled around our feet. If one of those came down on our heads we’d be done for, wendigo or not.
The creature was leaning down now, blinking its mismatched eyes. I scrambled back against the wall, but there was no time to stand, no time to run - just to cower. The wendigo swung its massive hand downward, the air whooshing as it did so, and I found myself thinking suddenly of Ruth’s face - Ruth and the kids - and I closed my eyes so I could see them one last time -
Then the wendigo faltered. I opened my eyes. Its hand had halted, hovering, just a few feet above our heads. For a second I thought, absurdly, that my memory of Ruth had somehow stopped the creature in its tracks. Then I saw that Marconi was standing. She had her hand on Janine’s shoulder, and even though a web of vines still trailed from her skin into the wall, her eyes were awake and clear.
And she was pissed.
“Hey, shit-for-brains!” she yelled. “Why don’t you back the fuck up?”
The vines pulsed, but instead of the usual green, a hot red light traveled down Marconi’s arms and into the stone. The wendigo yowled like a wounded mountain lion and lifted its hands to its ears, as if Marconi’s voice had ruptured whatever passed for its eardrums. Marconi took a step forward, and the vines moved with her, snaking across the ground.
“You don’t scare me!” she shouted. “You fucking Bigfoot wannabe!”
The wendigo made a series of dissonant yaps and staggered backwards. The cave trembled again, and I leaped aside as a boulder the size of a minivan came crashing down where I’d been standing. Marconi and Janine didn’t seem bothered by the potential cave-in. They stood together, framed in the light of the lichen, two small figures in all that trembling vastness.
“And one more thing,” Marconi said. She’d lowered her voice, but it still carried through the cavern as if she’d spoken through a megaphone. “Stay the fuck away from my friends.”
The wendigo took another step back, but its foot slipped on the lip of the chasm, and suddenly it was plummeting like a felled sequoia. The enormous dark shape slipped out of view. I was afraid to move - what if it came crawling out of the pit, more pissed off than ever? Then something black and gooey spurted upward, followed by the loudest and most agonizing howl of pain I’d ever heard. The walls gave one final tremble. Then the cave fell silent.
Janine let out a choked laugh and flung her arms around Marconi. The vines had slipped from her skin like desiccated IV tubes, shriveling into nothing on the cave floor. Marconi wrapped Janine in a tight squeeze and spun her in a circle, her hiking boots barely brushing the ground.
“Goddamn,” I breathed. “How the hell did you do that, Marconi?”
The sheriff noticed me for the first time. Her hair was streaked with gray and her cheeks were gaunter than I remembered, but the smirk on her face was one hundred percent Marconi. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that smirk.
“Should’ve known you’d be involved in this shit, Hannigan,” she said. “And you. Of course you’re here.”
I turned to see the Inspector approaching us, and relief flooded through me so strong I felt a little dizzy. His body didn’t seem to have taken much of a beating, but his trench coat was torn and dirty, and his fedora had been knocked askew. The cigar was back in his mouth. It was still thin though, barely more than a cigarette, and it didn’t smoke at all. The tip simply glowed a low orange.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “I thought you were done for.”
The Inspector’s smile was faint. “Yes, well, I’ve been through worse,” he said. “But I’m afraid we don’t have time to stand around celebrating. Now that the giant is dead, this universe, and all the ones it created, will come undone. We have to go.”
I peered through the gloom, trying to make out the flash of Janine’s flares amid all the lichen. And there it was - bright orange sparks spitting in slow motion. We had to cross the footbridge to reach it. Even as the thought crossed my mind, a rock fell from the ceiling and smashed through one of the wooden planks. That familiar trembling picked up again, and this time, I was afraid there’d be no stopping it. A loud keening sound filled the air and made my eardrums rattle.
“Can you walk?” Janine asked Marconi. The sheriff took a few shaky steps and nodded. Supporting one another, the two of them moved toward the footbridge as quickly as they dared. Rocks continued to fall around them - pebbles mostly, although there were some large chunks in there too, and one glance across the skull would cut our journey short in a second.
“We need to go, Mark,” the Inspector said in his warning voice.
There was no time to search for my gun, so I hurried after the couple, arms shielded against the plummeting debris. The bridge groaned and creaked under us - it was almost as if the wood was decaying before our eyes - but we made it across in one piece, and together we lunged for the exit. The portal slurped around us, stretching us like an agonizing rubber band, before snapping us back and dumping us in an apocalyptic wasteland. Ten feet away, Janine’s flare sputtered and went out.
“I see the next one!” she shouted. A hot wind had picked up, bellowing in our ears. The tremors of the cave had followed us here, and cracks were zigzagging across the dried soil. Janine held on to Marconi as we staggered through the wasteland toward the source of sparkling light.
Portal after portal, we emerged in worlds that were falling apart. The upside-down universe had been knocked askew, so we had to cling to the ground or fall sideways into space. The rickety old house had developed a sinkhole in the floor that we had to creep around. The ribcage of the massive creature had splintered and our way forward was almost buried under piles of jutting bones. In that case, and in a couple others, the Inspector had to lift the debris out of our way so we could climb through and move on.
The desert world had split into several distinct chunks, and I was worried that Marconi wouldn’t be able to cross it in her condition. But she clutched Janine’s hand and leapt over gap after gap, the Inspector and I trailing after them, until at last we reached the window out and stumbled back into Catamount State Forest. The Inspector turned back to do something to the portal - there was a loud wrenching sound, like someone tearing a branch off a tree - and when I glanced behind me, I didn’t see anything except misty forest. The pocket universe was gone.
I was beyond fatigued, and I’m sure the others were too, but we didn’t stop to rest. We were deep in mountain lion territory here and it wouldn’t do to get too complacent. So we followed the trail as fast as Marconi could manage, clambering over fallen trees and squelching through the mud. We didn’t stop until we reached the empty clearing where the poor lost campers had set up their fire pit. Janine and Marconi took a seat at the picnic table, but the Inspector stood off at the edge of the clearing, staring out into the forest. I went over to join him.
“You haven’t been you lately,” I said. “Ever since we started this case. You look tired, your skin is sickly - hell, even your cigar looks different. What happened to you?”
The Inspector’s lips tightened around the aforementioned cigar. He let out a heavy breath, but only a few wisps of steam curled around the tip, and they were gone in no time. He sighed, took the cigar out of his mouth, and tapped some ash onto the leaves.
“I don’t belong here,” he said quietly. “I never did. Sometimes I forget that. Being in your world, helping you fight these entities - it gives me purpose, but it drains me. I can only stay here for so long, only exert so much of my energy, before I need to return home. To recharge, if you will.”
“Is that where you went in the cave?” I asked. “After the wendigo attacked you?” I remembered the way his body had slumped against the stone, how his whole form looked hollowed out. “It was like the lights went out in your eyes.”
“I retreated, yes.” The Inspector reached up and adjusted his fedora. “For a minute or so. I didn’t want to leave you, but the giant had wounded me badly, and survival is an instinct we all share. I thought a quick dip behind the rift would give me enough strength to fight the creature again. But when I returned, Sheriff Marconi had the situation under control.”
He was twirling a small object between his fingers, I saw now: a thin gray capsule with bulbed ends and a large crack running through the middle. Across the center, a peeling label in faded red letters read CAPRA.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The Inspector glanced at me, then pocketed the capsule. “Something I need to look into further,” he said. “But nothing you need to concern yourself with. Not yet.” He let out another reedy wisp of smoke and said, “Perhaps you should check on Sheriff Marconi.”
I could take a hint. Leaving the Inspector to himself, I walked over to Janine and Marconi at the picnic table. The sheriff seemed to have regained some strength. The hand clutching Janine’s was firm and pink, and there was a rosy glow to her cheeks that had been absent in the wendigo’s cave. The two women looked up at me when I approached.
“You never answered my question back there,” I said. “How did you beat that thing?”
Marconi turned to look at Janine. Her hand clenched, and I saw Janine return the gesture: that same squeeze of closeness, this time with a hand to grip back.
“Janine told me it fed on fear,” she said. “So I gave it the opposite.”
Of course.
I took a seat next to the two women and stared out into the forest. The mist was starting to clear, even as the sky was darkening, and the tree branches stretching out in front of us seemed to float in a dusky cloud. A mountain lion yowled somewhere in the distance. Fireflies drifted through the twilight. The forest was alive, and we were alive, and even though we hadn’t been able to save everyone today, I felt good.
“You realize I’m in this now, right Hannigan?” Marconi said. “One hundred percent. If anything else comes after the people I love in this town, I want to help. And I want to know everything that’s going on with you and that tall drink of water over there.”
I looked back at the Inspector. In the darkening light he looked more like a statue than ever; the tip of his cigar could have been one of the floating fireflies. I thought of him tearing that cigar from his mouth and igniting the old radio tower. I thought of him wrestling with the time eater at the lip of Skokomish Bluffs. He was a dynamo, a source of incredible power, and it was strange to see him so dimmed. We’d been through so much, the Inspector and I, but I wondered if I would ever really know the guy.
“You got a couple of hours?” I said. “This could take a while.”
And as the forest turned to night around us, I told them everything.
