Underground

“So, the spy thing… that’s the family business?” I asked.

“Dad’s side,” he said, putting the book down with care and sitting next to me. “I was kind of my mom’s kid and I got into computers and science and math early on because of her—got the nickname because of her, too. I didn’t see my dad much, so the spy thing seemed sexy and exciting—which you can’t say for engineering—and that’s how I ended up working for the government in the first place. I wish I’d stuck to electronics.”

The sound of Ben’s heavy feet on the stairs cut the conversation short before I could ask, “What nickname?”

It took a bit of faffing about to get everything distributed and settled again—Ben’s Russian tea habits being almost as fussy as any formal Brit’s—before Quinton and I could get Ben’s attention.

I curled my hands around the hot glass in its metal holder and noticed the scabs and scrapes from the previous night’s narrow escape. It seemed strangely distant until the memory of fear rushed back in for a moment and made my gut twist. I sipped my tea and caught my breath as Quinton cast a questioning glance my way.

I shook him off with a small, reassuring smile. Ben was watching me, too, but his look was more plainly curious.

“All right. So. These poor homeless folks,” he prompted.

“Aside from the dead, there are several missing and they all seem to be victims of the same thing. They’re being eaten by a legendary Native American monster and, aside from killing people, it also makes zombies,” I said. Ben was capable of rambling for hours, so I figured I’d better nip that tendency in the bud by cutting straight to the bone of the matter.

Ben’s face lit up. “Really?” Then he shook himself and his face went white under his dark beard. “Oh my God, that’s horrible!”

“There’s a lot more to it,” I said. “This monster, Sisiutl, seems to be under someone’s control—partial control. We need to catch both the monster and the man and get rid of the monster. But we’re here because we got up close and personal with Sistu—it’s a safer name to use—last night and it seems to talk in a whole glut of languages, bits and pieces all at once. I think we’d be a lot safer if we can talk to it. It’s clever enough to pull pranks and make deals to hunt in exchange for food, so if we can talk to it there’s always a possibility we can bargain with it—if it doesn’t eat us first. It also seems to cast illusions of shape-shifting. I’m not sure what’s going on and I’d like to be better equipped the next time we run into it. So I thought we should ask you for any ideas about the nature of the beast.”

Ben glowed gold and sparkly with intellectual pleasure. “You’ve both seen it?”

“Not just us. Plenty of people who didn’t know what they saw, or who died right afterward,” I said.

That made Ben a little grimmer as he asked, “What does it look like? What kind of forms does it throw?”

“It’s a two-ended sea serpent—kind of like a hairy snake with a head at each end and a human face in the middle. Its the human face that does the talking.

The snake ends just hiss and bite. It shows various forms—I saw Ouroboros, a gorgon, a multi-headed dog with snakelike necks for each head, a dragon, and a kind of snake with hands. Oh, its default form seems to have clawed hands near the human face and horns on the snake heads. And it sometimes acts as a guard to the house of the gods, sometimes helps hunters and warriors, but its also a bit of a trickster and very, very hungry.”

I thought Ben was going to dance with glee, once again caught up in the excitement of his favorite subject. “Let me think, let me think,” he muttered, scrabbling in his books and papers. He found a pen and made a bunch of quick notes on the back of a legal pad that was already full of other notes on the pages. “Repetition of the snake theme… guardian… warrior… helper… hungry… multi-headed… Oh, man. Its the universal monster.”

“Huh,” Quinton and I both said.

“Well, you know your Campbell, right? His ideas about monomyth—universal themes in myth and religion—and universal heroes?”

We both nodded—it’s hard to avoid Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in college.

“OK, well… he’s a bit overblown and people always forget his sources—Joyce, Ma

Quinton interrupted. “I only saw the one form—the double-ended snake with the head in the middle.”

“Oh?” Ben looked puzzled. “Why is that do you think?”

Quinton scoffed. “Because that’s the shape I was expecting. Harper is the one who sees magic things. I just see what’s there to be seen.”

“Did you have any idea what you might see before you encountered it?” Ben asked.

“Yes,” Quinton replied. “We’d been told by an old Indian woman what it was and what it looked like.”

Ben gri

“Well, it’s fine to see it, just not too close,” I said. “It’s big and it’s got lots of teeth in those heads. If we run into it again—and we have to if we’re to get rid of it—we need to keep it from eating us before we can send it away.

It understands English and speaks a little, but mostly it spews words in dozens of languages at once, which makes it hard to understand.”

“I’m sure it would pick just one if you get its attention long enough,” Ben suggested.

“That’s kind of tricky,” I protested. “Its default form seems to be the native legend—the double-ended sea serpent—and that version doesn’t speak English. Also, I don’t think any of those forms are really native English speakers. Unless it turns out to be Grendel in disguise, too.”

Ben shook his head. “No, Grendel isn’t that archetype and he would have spoken Old English at best, not modern.”

“Well, then…”—I hesitated to ask, since I was already in the doghouse with one member of the Danziger family—“would you come with us to talk to it? Assuming we can catch it? We need to figure out where it came from and who controls it. There’s also an ogress around somewhere who can call it back to her side, and we’d like to send the whole bunch back to the gods and keep any more homeless from being lunch.”

“Well, you can’t compel gods or their helpers; you can only argue with them and get them to agree to leave,” Ben said. “You’ll have to gain the agreement of this ogress to send the monster home after you separate the monster from whoever is currently using its powers.”

“We’re not sure who controls it,” Quinton reminded me, “but we can find out. But we’ll have to catch the thing eventually and it’s not likely we can just throw a rope around its neck and drag it to the zoo. We may need to persuade it.”

“Legends are full of that kind of lawyering—you can’t just banish power from the gods and you can’t kill gods or their guardians. If it’s a clever monster, bargaining will appeal to it,” Ben agreed, nodding. “Yes, I’ll go. I’d be stupid not to. I’ve never seen an incorporeal beastie before.”

“This thing is not incorporeal,” I warned. “It’s got real teeth and they chew through real concrete walls. And if anything happens to you on this excursion, Mara will probably kill me.”

“She’s not like that.”

“She seems plenty upset with me at the moment.”

“I think she’s more upset with herself—we both feel a bit like Ted Bundy’s neighbors. ‘He was such a nice ghost, so quiet…’ Its unsettling and we both wonder what else we may have missed seeing.” Ben raised his eyebrows at me.