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 uncanny stuff around this house. I don’t think she’s bad—I’m not even sure she knows about everything that’s gathered around her—but she is a bit unsettling.”
“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—running around in here.”
“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 grinned at us the whole time. Then she turned her sharp, dark eyes—barely etched by age—on me and I shivered even in the sweltering room.
“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—”
“Funny, is it?” Grandma Ella shrieked. “If you respect the creature you call him by his true name! He won’t heed your call if you name him something else.
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 cannot escape him. Sisiutl is strong and fast. Three-headed is Sisiutl—the double-ended serpent.”
“Three heads?” I asked, not sure how a double-ended snake could have three heads.
“One head at each end like a snake—as quick and as vicious, with a viper’s tongue and horned brow. In the middle”—she covered her sunken belly with one hand—“a man’s face with mustaches like a sturgeon, horns, and two clawed hands beside it. This is its true head, from which Sisiutl speaks. Between his scales grows hair like cedar strings and he can change his form at will. In water, he swims faster than the seal, faster than orca, but on land he is slower and moves like a snake. He is the guardian of Qamaits’s pool outside the house that leads to the land of the gods, and worthy men may call upon his help, but if they fail to pay him, he will eat.”
“Who or what is Qamaits?” I asked. You’d think I’d be pretty used to the weird and unsettling by that time, but the oddity of the house and its occupant threw me and left me feeling a bit at sea.
Grandma Ella waved my question aside and glared at Fish as she helped herself to more bread.
Fish bit his bottom lip before replying. “She’s another zeqwa, an ogress who eats children. She’s kind of like Baba Yaga and she lives in a magical house.
She’s got a bunch of other names, too, but all her aspects are kind of half-magic, half-monster. Umm… I’m trying to remember the rest of the legend about the house…”
Ella Graham snorted. “See what leaving your people causes? Ignorance!” She returned her glare to me as Fish blushed and lowered his head. “Inside the house of Qamaits lies the staircase to the sky—where the gods live. You can climb to the sky through a hole, like the sisters who married stars did, but that won’t bring you to the gods. If you want to talk to the gods in the sky, you go up the stairs, past Qamaits and past her guardian, Sisiutl. If you please the gods, they will bless your hunting with his help. But if you anger them, squander their gifts, or do not feed their helper well, the gods will be angry and let Sisiutl eat you.”