Kat Richardson: Downpour

They had a physical presence, so they weren’t ghosts and they definitely weren’t any animal I’d ever seen before alive or dead. Their movement reminded me of gorillas, but nothing else about them was apelike. Their faces were closer to those of dogs, but not really, and their horns looked almost like sharpened, burned branches. Their white hides were like a deer’s shaggy winter coat; still short-haired, but thick, scruffy, and unkempt. I hadn’t had much time to notice a smell, but, thinking about it, I remembered an odor as they rammed the truck—a bit like skunk and a bit like doused campfires. They were paranormal things for certain, but what type was still beyond me. They reminded me of hyenas: Not as intelligent as a human, they were still coordinated and smart enough to communicate and work together. They were fast, but they hadn’t outrun the Land Rover, so either they couldn’t, which I hoped was true, or they had decided to cut their losses. That made me queasy.

I’ll be honest: I’d rather face a strong but stupid foe than a smart and vicious one of any size. I hoped they would prove to be passing apparitions, but I somehow doubted it. I’d have to figure out what they were before we met again. I wondered if they could have had any hand in Leung’s disappearance. The thought didn’t please me; if they’d been around five years ago, were they visiting again or had they stayed here all that time? How had they gotten here and what were they doing? Were they doing it for themselves, or under the direction of someone else? It was unlikely that the strangeness of the Grey here and the presence of such monstrosities were unconnected, but which was the chicken and which the egg? Everywhere I turned on this case I got more questions and fewer answers.

I kicked at a hump of crystallized snow that had banked up next to a tree trunk and watched it shatter and crumble. Chaos ran to challenge the snow to a fight, hopping up and down in her weasel war dance and then biting the frozen mess when it wouldn’t play. She made a gagging sound and spit out the mouthful of snow.

“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to eat dirty snow?” I asked her, bending to pick her up.

The ferret gave me a look that clearly said she had judged my intelligence and found it lacking. But she still stuck her nose up against mine and tickled me with her whiskers before attempting to climb up my scarf and under my hair. I let her, and she flopped onto my shoulder and sighed, tired out from her explorations and frosty battles.

“OK, stinky, you can sleep in the truck while I do some more work. And this time, no teasing the monsters.”

She just huffed at me. I got back into the Rover, carefully tucking her into the travel cage in the rear compartment, and drove back down the highway to the Lake Sutherland turnoff.

I turned right just past the East Beach Road intersection beside a double row of mailboxes mounted on a wooden frame. I drove up a low hill until Lake Sutherland Road petered out into a dirt track that burst out of the trees into an open area that seemed to have been scraped clean of vegetation. I followed the packed dirt until it entered another stand of trees with the glimmer of water beyond. A small sign at the edge of the trees had a number on it and the words FISHER POINT/FISHER COVE. I could make out the roof of a house below the thickly treed rise, so it must have been right down on the lakeshore, which was now below the naked hillock I’d driven onto. There wasn’t a mailbox—it was probably among the collection at the edge of the highway—but the number on the sign matched the parcel number the assessor’s clerk had provided me, so I guessed that this was Leung’s place.

I left the Rover at the tree line and walked down the rise a little, toward the roof I’d spotted. I stepped onto a wide wooden walkway that had been built through the trees toward the faded-yellow house. When I reached the building, I could see it was a two-story affair with its top floor level with the bluff top and the lower one sitting on a platform on the shore, just above the water. The upper walkway crossed a short gap at the edge of the bluff to a deck that encircled the top story of the house. There was no other way down that I could see from there, short of a rough scramble along the bluff itself, so I walked across onto the deck and toward what I thought of as the front door.

I noticed that a couple of the deck boards had rotted a bit, but the rest of the path and upper level were otherwise in good shape. I guessed they hadn’t been maintained recently but were well built enough to stand up to the abuses of time and weather. Snow had collected beneath the walkway, but the deck was clear, in spite of the forest shadow that fell on the house from the bluff side.

The red-painted front door faced west, into the trees. There wouldn’t be a view of the famous sunset from Leung’s house. I knocked on the door and got no answer, not even the rustling of startled birds. I would have peered through the nearest window, but all of them had been covered with winter storm shutters long ago. The house gave every appearance of being closed up on a long-term basis. I walked around to the side of the deck that faced the lake and glanced up and down the shoreline from my second-story vantage.

The shoreline of Lake Sutherland was lined with mostly small, older houses on the west and south. Larger, newer houses dominated the north and east shores with signs of a larger development at the northeast bend of the lake. Almost every house had a dock and a large porch or deck facing the water. The water-facing side of Leung’s house was typical: more open, grand, and welcoming than the land-facing side, making the lake the focal point of life in the house. Most of the houses were shuttered at this time of year, just like Leung’s. A few wood or fiberglass dinghies rested upside down on blocks along the abandoned docks, sheltering thin white patches of unmelted snow beneath them. I could make out the wide swath of a public boat launch beyond the big development on the northeast, but there were no boats out on the lake today and the water had a strange, submerged luminescence.

A fast look through the Grey didn’t reveal a lot more from such a distance. The same strange shadows and threads lay on the ground and shore as I’d seen at Lake Crescent, but fewer of them, and the buzzing of the grid seemed softer at this lake. I did spot a bright strand of blue energy deep below the water’s surface, connected to the shore on the east by a fan of silvery lines and smudges like glowing fingerprints and the spiderweb shape of windshield cracks. It would take a closer investigation to discover what the smears and threads were, and I didn’t have the equipment to dive or row to them. I supposed I might still have some ability to grab ahold of such things, but . . . I let it go for now and turned my attention back to Leung’s home.

I looked around the shore and the bluff on each side of the house and spotted a clearing in the trees just south of the house and facing the lake. It would have been impossible to see from almost any other angle along the shoreline. Dark shadows seemed to have drifted up on the ground in the clearing, defying the light that still penetrated through the trees. It wasn’t moving, but there was something decidedly Grey about the spot, and I thought I’d best take a closer look, since I clearly wasn’t going to get into the house.

I circled the house and found a staircase that led down to the lower deck a few feet above the water. From there I spotted a short set of steps that let me out onto the shore. The shore wasn’t sandy but was made of mud and gravel and occasional larger stones. The short stretch of open shore just south of the house had been flattened a bit, leaving a hidden space big enough to drag up a couple of small boats or kayaks. A steep path of gravel and stones pretended to be a natural runoff beside the house, zigzagging from the shelf on the shore to the clearing, but the larger stones were too evenly spaced to be accidental, no matter how well they were camouflaged by the smaller gravel around them. I started for the makeshift stair.