Underground

I nodded, sure it would be a bad idea to remove the cloak and basket while their ghostly owner was standing and glowering beside them. The specter was clothed in the memory of the cape and wore the basket on his head, which made him look remarkably like the shaggy creature who’d brought me the zombie Friday night—if the shaggyman had been wearing a truncated cone for a hat.

Fish knocked on the door.

A voice like a chorus of seagulls called out in incomprehensible syllables. Fish called back and waited.

“Let yourself in!” the seagull voice screeched. “I’m an old woman, you young fool!”

Fish sighed and opened the door, waving us through ahead of him. The interior was bakery-hot and smelled of sage. Another row of hooks waited for our dry coats and we were glad to use them.

Fish pointed to a slatted wooden tray on the floor. “Take off your shoes and leave them there—she’ll rant for hours if we track mud on the floor.”

I was relieved to sit down to remove my boots—it gave me a moment to get used to the tumbling, twisted state of the Grey inside the house. Planes of time and ghosts of trees stuck up or out at tilted angles and a flight of salmon swam past, disrupted by the jerking loop of an owl that swooped through them in multiple exposure. Bits of people appeared, moved, and vanished as if seen in shattered shards of mirror hanging in the air or scattered across the discontinuous floors of every version of the house and land that had ever existed. Animate sparks of colorful energy broke from the grid and scampered loose through the chaos like animals and mythical sprites. I could barely separate the real house from the illusions, so odd was the construction ahead.

Finally, sock-footed and undressed of outer layers, we trooped through a pair of offset doorways, down a hall, and into a sudden calm—the energy within the Grey snapped into a grid of gleaming threads and all the riotous dislocation and overlapping phantasms vanished, leaving only a thin silver sheen to everything.

The nearly bare living room we entered must have been as large as the original house and a wall of windows faced south to show the Sound outside. There was a stone fireplace on each end of the room and both of them contained blazing logs of cedar and fir that perfumed the air and lent momentary shape to swirls of cold memory. Rugs covered the wooden floor that supported a couple of low, heavy chairs, a rocker, one sofa at one end of the room, and a scattered herd of red-and-black wool hassocks at the other.

The ancient woman sitting on a hassock near the western fire must have been huge once. Now her skin hung in folds over the jagged frame of her bones, and the long twin plaits of her hair looked like two white snakes coiled on the floor beside her and rising to whisper in her ears. Shapes like the wings of giant birds folded around her in the Grey, glinting with gold tips. She was wearing baggy, old, gray sweats and pink socks. A carved wooden cane poked out from under her cushion on one side.

She stared at us, her gaze sweeping over each in turn. Then she put out her hand.

“For me?”

Fish seemed startled, as if he had forgotten she could talk, and stumbled a step forward, holding out the gold-wrapped package with the bag of cigars on top.

“Yes, Grandma. We brought you some chocolate and Russell Willet sent you some cigars.”

Grandma Ella cackled. “Hah! Buttering me up.” Her sharp glance cut to me and Quinton. “You two. Go in the kitchen and fetch out that bread and coffee. Can’t tell tales without food and drink.” She pointed with her skeletal hand from which the skin hung loose as tattered fabric.

Wordlessly, Quinton and I went to the kitchen, leaving Fish caught in a net of Ella Graham’s cawing in Lushootseed—the language we’d heard so often among the Native Americans, both living and dead; the same language the young prostitute’s ghost had spoken to me.

Coffee and freshly baked bread were sitting on the kitchen counter. We gathered things together and put them on a tray, while Quinton said, “She’s… kind of scary, though I’m not sure why.”

“There’s a lot of unca

“That’s a word for it. Fish really jumped when she took notice of him.”

“Wouldn’t you? I mean, even if she’s not some kind of witch, the ghosts around here are paying her a lot of attention and there’s a bunch of other things—magical things—ru

“In here?” Quinton asked, his eyes a little wide as he pointed at the floor.

I thought about lying to ease his nerves, but instead I said, “Not so many in here and none in the living room.” OK, so I’d downplayed the number of things in the kitchen a little. “In the entry and outside there are a lot of bits of magic and… elemental things, I guess. They don’t seem to be interested in us except that we’re visiting Mrs. Graham and they’re interested in her.”

“Hurry up in there!” The old woman’s voice rang in the air of the kitchen without her raising her volume in the living room.

We both started a little, and then I took a deep breath and picked up the tray.

“You know, I flunked food service in college,” I said. “Let’s hope I don’t drop this thing.”

“I can take it,” Quinton offered, his hands full of other bits and bobs.

“I have the impression she expects it to be me. Remember what Fish said about catering to her old-school attitude.”

Quinton nodded. “Yeah, right.”

We marched back into the living room and put the tray down on the floor near the fire, which earned a gap-toothed grimace from Grandma Ella. There was no place else to put it at that end of the room and no place else to sit but on the strewn cushions, so that’s what we did. Fish sat beside the old lady—apparently to play the pan of translator and servant—while Quinton and I sat across the hearthstone from her. The whites of Fish’s eyes were showing.

“Hmph!” the old woman grunted, and I realized she was sucking on one of the chocolate-covered caramels from the now-opened gift box.

“Salty. Good.” Fish breathed a sigh of relief and loosened a little.

There was a ridiculous amount of rigmarole with distributing the bread and coffee and getting one of the cigars lit, putting the coffee pot near the fire so it stayed hot, finding just the right spot for the cigar so the smoke curled into the air properly and the tobacco stayed alight. Mrs. Graham gri

“Sisiutl,” she said, her voice a mixture of serpent hiss and bird cry. She glowered as she said it, as if she’d just noticed something about me she didn’t like. The wing shapes around her head in the Grey heaved slowly upward and fell back down, folding tight around the old woman. “Sisiutl zeqwa…” She continued in Lushootseed for a sentence or two, and Fish translated while she stopped for a sip of coffee.

“You call him Sistu, but he’s properly called Sisiutl. A zeqwa—a monster—Sisiutl is a creature of the water—a sea serpent—that lives in the waters of the Sound,” Fish said. “He is the emblem of warriors who may bathe in his blood to harden their skin against the arrows of their enemies. He is the death of many seals and many men.”

“Sisiutl?” I asked, unable to keep an edge of amusement out of my voice at the sound of the word.

Fish looked nervous and the air near him turned the color of light through ferns. “That’s his proper name. It’s a Kwakiutl word—”

“Fu

Sisiutl is crafty and cruel and hungry. He tells the warrior, ‘Bathe in my blood and be strong,’ but he must not, or he’ll be turned to stone! A single drop is enough for strength. A foolish, greedy man will become a rock and Sisiutl will laugh at his fate. He will become a canoe and offer to take the hunter to the best seals, but if the hunter does not pay him a seal, the canoe becomes Sisiutl again and will devour the man. The man ca