Relicts & Revenants: Monsters of the Week II

The Words of Night

Denise trusted the bear fence: trusted it no matter if the windmill hadn't been spinning overnight, if the battery was low. They understood by now, respected it: but there were other things in the gray fog of the morning – other things, and even now Denise still wasn't used to it, not enough to roll up the flap and leave the yurt until she could be decent sure that the fog had burned off, was going to burn off, and the world would still be like she left it. She had to be hearing things – had to be, there was no one else on this coast, that was why she'd come out here – but under the quiet green wall of the trees and the mountains, looking out into the immensity of the sea down the inlet, it was easy to lose track: easy to believe in those Indian stories of Raven stealing the sun out of the east in its box, giants reaching down the smoke hole.

Something grumped through the felt of the door and the wall like metal shifting on sand, and now Denise did get up, did reach over for her rifle on her one chair midway between the stove and the door. The squeak-grind of the aluminum keel meant something was screwing around with the boat, and bear or no bear or whoever or whatever else, if the boat was gone or fucked up Denise had no way of getting to Anyox and she would be really screwed. She worked the lever under the grip as loud as she could manage: if whatever or whoever knew what it was, then maybe they would go away – and if not, the bullets in this thing were the size of her ring finger and would hit anything between the door and where her boat was like a truck. The boat squeaked against the sand again, and Denise nudged her feet across the planks of her deck towards the door: quiet, rifle before her, ready.

Outside, the same: the same as it was, as it should be. The fog stood up in a solid curtain out of the water: the air damp with every lungful like she was under water, breathing in the whole of the Pacific Ocean. Salt smell of the ocean and the green of the pines: nothing like animals and no stink of gas exhaust like someone'd taken their own boat up. Her boat still there: still up on the sand, its insurance painter still draggled around its big wave-washed rock. The bear fence still in one piece, the windmill still turning, lazy, half in and half out of the gray blanket hanging in midair.

Everything was as it should be, but there was still something out there, something else in the fog, which was playing wrong in the lee of the boat, hanging closer and denser than it should have, without the billows of a fresh wind: cold air off the mountains across warm water swirled down through the Gulf from Japan, and the fog came ashore in waves – you saw the waves, and here it was hanging like a tattered curtain where it shouldn't, another yurt door in mid-air between Denise and what shouldn't be here, off of the boat now like they'd figured out what it was and not moving because now she was out of the yurt, rifle in both hands, staring into the phantom bank, looking for who or whatever was behind. She brought the gun to shoulder, eyes still locked on the fog, trying to follow the shapes in the flows of mist, identify something separate from the trees beyond, the mountains up behind the inlet.

"I don't know who you are," Denise called out over the empty sand, "but you're on my land and if you don't get out, get away from my boat, I will shoot you." Nobody told her to drop the gun, that she was under arrest, so she could get away with it: this was only Denise's land because no one'd bothered to clear her off it or cared that she had a yurt on this inlet, and actually shooting someone was asking for a lot of trouble, a lot of bad questions. But – so was living out here, if she didn't mean to shoot trespassers who needed shooting. "I mean it – get lost! Go! Go!"

The air ground – like interference on a broken radio, but with all the static filtered out: something echoing wrong, exhaled, modulated and flowing but not operating like human language – not like any language Denise ever heard of unless it was one of those Indian languages from here, isolates spoken only up one or two glacier valleys, forgotten as soon as white people came to the coast and impossible to link up with anything else. But – the Indians around here, the Indians in Anyox or the Indians way out, over on the Alaska islands where there was still a reserve, they wouldn't speak like that: they definitely wouldn't talk their village talk to a white lady pointing a gun at them, on her land or not or if they thought it was theirs. And the Indians – it wasn't 1850, it wasn't a greasepaint Western, the Indians out here wore pants like normal people and it wasn't an Indian's thigh, solid white brick and it felt like it must be shoulder high through the mist. It was an illusion: the fog and you lost sense of the ground, the distance from the yurt platform down and along the shore. "I told you! Go, or you'll get shot!" Nobody moved. Denise sighted on the leg, obvious as a leg, and the recoil of the shot exploded off the mountains, glanced like a skipping stone off the empty water.