“Quinton,” I said in a low voice, “there’s a zombie here. I need light.”
He didn’t hesitate but swished through the water to my side, clicking on his pocket flashlight and finding the sad, dead thing with its beam.
He caught his breath in shock and his footsteps faltered a moment before he finally stopped beside me. “That’s Felix. He was the last to disappear before Go-cart and Jenny were killed.”
“If Si—the monster had Felix, why did it kill the other two?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. Maybe… this is sick… maybe he’s saving him for a snack? Maybe he’s like an alligator and he prefers his meals… aged?”
“He didn’t really eat the others…” I said, thinking aloud. “He just killed them and left the bodies behind.”
Felix’s ambulating corpse stumbled toward us, making low noises in its decayed throat. An idea was struggling to form in my mind but crumbled away as the zombie seemed to cry out and fall to its knees, tangled in the mess of Grey threads and mud that spun across the flooded floor.
Quinton’s light wavered and moved off the weakly struggling zombie. “Harper! Do something!”
I admit I hesitated. Once again, I’d have to deconstruct a zombie in front of a man I liked. The last one hadn’t handled it very well…
“Get the light back on him,” I snapped. “I can’t see what I need to do.”
Quinton directed the light onto the moving corpse and I closed the distance between us. I squatted down in the water and, shuddering with disgust, I put a hand out to touch the remains of the man. It was soft but solid, and even with the light I couldn’t see any way to hook out the trapped threads of its life. I did not want to hack the poor thing apart with a pocket knife—revulsion made me turn my head aside and gag at the idea.
“There has to be a way,” I muttered, shivering in the chilly water that had set my damaged joints to aching. I studied the zombie as I shoved it back into a more upright position.
The dead thing slumped against the wall, possibly exhausted, but making no more large movements and few sounds now. Where it leaned against a drapery of the Grey threads, it seemed to vanish into the wall. That was interesting. The neutral Grey stuff must have been as much a form of camouflage as of holding its victims. Or was the trapping just incidental?
The more I looked at it, the more I thought the latter was the case: the Grey web stuff was Sisiutl’s camouflage. It probably spun a web of the stuff over itself and that was how it seemed to change shape as it slithered across time and space. It was smart enough to use the same material to cover the door to this place.
“This is its lair,” I gasped.
“What?” Quinton asked.
“This webby stuff—”
He interrupted, “What webby stuff”
“There’s some magical material I’ve been finding around the Sistu’s sites. I told you about it. It’s all over the place here, and all over this poor bastard. I think we must be in the lair. Sistu’s hidden it with the webbing—that’s why you couldn’t see the hole until I tore the web away. And that web is all over this guy—Felix. I think that’s why his spirit can’t leave—the magical web has his energy trapped in his dead body.”
“Well, get it off him then!”
I really didn’t want an audience, but we had no way of knowing when Sisiutl would be coming back for his dinner and I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Felix to be released from his prison of rotting flesh only by the bite of the monster’s jaws.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I muttered, shivering in the cold water. I needed to get the web stuff off of him and get a better look at the threads of his energy. I tried pulling it off with my hands, but the web was thicker and more reluctant to part than the other examples had been. It was as if the stuff had been knotted together, not just spun like spider silk. I’d have to untie it or find a way to cut through it… My mind ground through possibilities for a moment…
Something about knots… Then I thought of Ella Graham’s feather: She’d said it would help to untie the dead—no, she’d said “unpick” the dead things. She’d lived through the Depression and raised grandkids during the war, and she’d learned frugality the hard way, remaking clothes and salvaging bits and pieces by picking them patiently apart with a bodkin or needle. Maybe I could use the pheasant feather the same way to loosen the knots of the Sisiutl’s snare? Pheasants had one eye on death and one on life, so maybe the feather did have some affinity for the Grey, as Ella had implied. It was nuts but so’s the Grey and, when in doubt, crazy sometimes works.
I still had the feather in the pocket of my jacket and I pulled it out. It was a little bent and wet, but it seemed OK. Feeling like an idiot, I held it by the quill and brushed it at the zombie’s head.
The Grey web split a little. I brushed more and the web began to loosen and fall away. I could see seams opening up in the fabric of it, like faults or runs in a nylon stocking. I swiped and swabbed until the web was loose. Then I tore the last of it away with my free hand. The dead man’s form grew softer and slacker as the web fell away, but it was still knitted together too strongly to pull apart as I had the first time.
Quinton’s light wavered. “I think…” he started.
A distant swishing sound had started up.
“I think something’s coming…”
Hurry, hurry… My mind felt jellied by the cold—I needed to finish and get the hell out of the water before I got hypothermia. The feathery end wasn’t doing any more work. My heart pounded and, in spite of the cold, I’d begun to sweat.
If there were any gods watching, I hoped they were on my side. Desperate, hoping the picking-apart analogy would keep working, I flipped the feather over and teased the quill over Felix’s slumping shape until the tiny ridges on the tip caught on a thin yellow strand of energy. I resisted the urge to panic and dragged it toward me with a steady pull. A visible loop of energy sprang up out of the density of his form and I snatched it on the little finger of my free hand. Then I reeled it in against the growing pressure of the knot inside him.
The strand popped free and I rocked backward as the hot yellow skein of Felix’s trapped life spun out faster than film from a runaway projector. There was an odd shushing sound and the body fell down, boneless and loose.
A flash of white shot from the body and cut the gloom in two.
The swishing sound stopped and something hissed. Then it roared, and the swishing became a hailstorm sound of scales on stone.
I cast one last glance at the rotten body at my knees. Gone, dead, nothing but decaying matter now. Felix no longer inhabited his corpse.
Quinton grabbed my elbow and yanked me to my feet, my knee protesting with a ratcheting sound I felt through my whole body.
“C’mon!” he shouted, dragging me toward the fissure in the wall through which we’d come.