Chapter 47: Iron and Thunder, Ice and Plastic
The next five nights in Lake Nipigon established that the caribou could be eaten without spiritual retaliation as long as I wasn’t a sadistic asshole and as long as I wasn’t just casually shooting them out the window of a train like buffalo in the Old West. It seemed that the population density here was too great (though their total numbers were a little low), with the wolves having not bounced back enough. Numbers without regard to distribution was careless ecosystem management – I worked this out by walking up to one of the older bucks asking questions like a crazy person, and I ended up talking to Mister Caribou for a little while. The spirit (dubbed Rudolph as oppose to Xalibooz) outlined the general rules, told me where the prime fishing spots were on the lake so I could avoid them, and then cryptically warned me to watch out for dangling hooks above the water as well.
Great, a riddler if not a trickster. Though maybe he just didn’t appreciate the new name.
The inner army had taken a great stir from Nocome’s incursion, the mass investigation by Mr. Bergmann complete with interrogation rooms and secret police, and the abduction of Daphne Laframboise. There was a general sentiment that she needed to be found and rescued, and I had an idea growing about getting her back based on who Nocome had taken pains to avoid at all cost, but I let them have their own thoughts for now. Mr. Bergmann’s primary conclusion was what made me reclusive from my own ‘subjects’: it seemed very likely that the wendigo bitch was reading their minds in addition to my own. She had been able to navigate expertly once inside the defense perimeter with zero scouting beforehand by taking their knowledge of the floor plans – there was simply no other way for her to get through the gardens or the canals or to Daphne’s apartment so quickly, because of course there were no helpful maps on the walls for visitors and even I hadn’t visited everywhere. So now I didn’t want most of them to know all of what came next.
Outside my skull, the exercise had already progressed with experimental dives to ninety meters and quick ascents, this time over a patch of lakebed that was solid rock with no troublesome mud. I could do at least twenty of those and limp back afterward to a big juicy caribou, caring nothing for the flies and foiling any bears by stuffing the carcass up a tree. October 18 was a night of particularly intense exercise, more than Nipigon’s full depth could have provided.
After my pressure gradient torture I gently toured the deeper lake’s utter darkness before rising, putting my ears to work, avoiding pits and boulders with the echolocation. On the surface I thought I could reach perhaps half my speed in the canopy gymnastics workout with my eyes closed. A squirt of holy water in the eye wouldn’t necessarily be a finishing move.
Then, limping up the beach to my treed caribou meal, my ears detected a gentle metallic jangling in the wind in the night’s forest. The sound of flies swarming around my meal was gone, but I heard this new sound clearly. I slowed down, trying to find the source, but hearing it left and right.
The loud, jangling threads made it easier to walk into the limp threads, like the one wrapped into a noose at neck level that I walked right into. Then I was hoisted up into the sky, my fingers clenching over a super-fine iron chain.
And as I struggled, like the fly that I was, the jangling metal linked in the canopy started transmitting the vibrations across the network. I swung at the end of my noose until I found a tree trunk and held on, tearing at the metal. It broke, but clung as it broke, curling around me with a rudimentary intelligence like an octopus tentacle.
“… Pinhead, is that you?” I mouthed, not noticing as I finally yanked the strange metal chain off. It boiled away into mist and then nothingness as soon it dropped from my hand.
New chains whipped down from the trees and the darkness behind the trees, ripping into the bark where I had clung a second before. The thickening rain of chains gave less and less space for me to twist through, and when the first one ensnared my ankle the rest grabbed the first and pulled me back down to earth. Like Houdini I escaped or broke the knots of interlinking iron, biting and shredding through the bigger knots like Alexander the Great, stopping to swing above the ground with only about five chains twisted together at my waist and neck.
(now!)
I had company behind my back, running quick … on too many legs. This wasn’t Pinhead.
The iron dreamcatcher strands were lactated from the back of a hulking iron spider that clanged as it scurried the ground toward me with raised and parted fangs with copper tips, its eyes eight railroad spikes driven into a hairy steel head.
(Daphne’s notes … iron woman … spider guardian … RUN!!!)
But I was in no position to run, my feet off the ground. I had one free arm and I had to corkscrew my body to keep facing the incoming Iron Spider Lady. She tensed and then leapt up at me with a garrot of new chain spun between the fangs.
(well, context about the effectiveness of my exercise program coming in three, two –)
I struck the giant arachnid in the side of its head, and watched the metal ripple like the surface of the lake, hearing the gong-boom of the impact. I saw three of its eye-bolts pop out of its skull, saw the bear-sized body snap away and tear through the trunk of a tree. And then another tree. I only heard the later impacts, as I was twirling around amazingly in my chains after that hit, tearing them apart until only a single persistent strand at my wrist remained, breaking above and coiling around my left arm.
The caribou meal was out of the question – I’d established a pattern, and there’d be more iron webbing there. Fortunately I was never totally naked – my blood diamond ring served its purpose in this emergency, now producing just a second’s lapse in consciousness, and now the second punch wouldn’t be from someone so tired.
(wire him up!)
More metallic scampering, now in the trees, but I wouldn’t be waiting patiently down here. I leapt up myself, dancing around this Iron Spider and her teammate. I slipped around the chains when I could, confirming that they were all connected up here, but they weren’t so responsive when their creator was distracted. I had to get off this island, but I wasn’t leaving without my stuff, certainly not without that elderberry.
I took the scuttling presence on a wild chase around Shakespeare Island and hurled myself back into the water, power-kicking under the surface to return back to my camp, sliding around chains both jangling and silent to dress and pack up. Turning to leave I felt my face brush a strand like a necklace billowing in the breeze, thinner and lighter than the others as a second level of deception, and that line triggered all the others.
Half trapped, tearing out branches and within sight of the pebble beach for all the extra weight (let the spider try to swim after me), the thunderclap from above halted my movements. I had been so distracted by the trees and the chains and the spider that I hadn’t noticed the gathering clouds wiping out the stars one by one overhead.
(jump off now!)
Looking down the shoreline I saw the lightning strike a tall tree in the distance.
Is it all connect-
It certainly was. The lightning was riding me.
The bolt blasted through the chains, the current splitting in a tree on the map to find me. It was a masterful trap, the thunderbird’s warning to the spider below not much warning for me tangled in the webbing. The power of the full strike was dissipated, but a partial lightning strike is still not fun. I was tensed and hurled against a tree by my involuntarily cramping muscles, smelling my clothes burn, my hair smoking, watching five electric bolts shooting from my blackening fingertips on my right hand.
The lake’s …. not a great idea now, is it?
Some of the chains were glowing orange, so they broke apart easily. But of course there were more, triggering by all the noise and bumping around I was making. That Iron Spider couldn’t be far off, and I’d be lucky to even see her as the chains kept piling on.
Karl Ruckert popped into my head, speaking clearly in my ears. “Cocoon yourself, head to toe.”
“What?” That sounded like the opposite of good advice, and the sky sounded ready to provide another strike.
“Like the Michelin Man,” another voice said. It was one of my electricians from North Bay. “Electricity 101, kid. Path of least resistance.”
I slowly got what they wanted to try as I obeyed, rolling in the chains to put out my burning clothes, smoothing them out all around me, adjusting them rather than yanking. Thunder and lightning came again a moment after another psychic call from the thunderbird warning the spider to jump off the web, but this time my improvised Faraday cage worked. Mostly. A fair bit of current still decided to dance between my shoulder and my ear, but this was much better. I was moving about as fast as the Michelin Man, but I now had hope: if I was almost free with one or two chains remaining I’d fry, but now it couldn’t touch me. A third hit came down, and now only my hair noticed, stiffening during the pulse. I plodded to my luggage, picked it up, then hobbled to the beach.
Slow as I was, the Iron Spider smashed me into the ground with no difficulty.
Two copper pincers stabbed down to suck my head dry.
I had just enough freedom at the shoulders to reached and hold those great fangs up, and sent a command into the sky.
(strike now! NOW!)
In the heat of the battle there might be confusion about who is shouting orders, and the confusion I had hoped for worked. And the circuit I had completed by grabbing the Iron Spider’s fangs worked. The spider was very quick with her chains, legs scrambling to kick them all aside from her body just as the flash came, but I didn’t let go of those metal pincers, and I was still mostly-cocooned.
The storm’s current came, and melted her dented head.
One of the railroad-spike eyeballs popped out to tear past my cheek, but I felt elated anyway. I roared up to the thundering sky, smelling ozone.
“Get down here and see your friend!”
The goosebump-feeling of great charge in the air landed hard, a definite match to the feeling of my near-capture at Deep River. But this was a younger thunderbird, a chick not yet with the full purple-black plumage, its eyes smoldering but not glaring so bright that the sun was kinder. Over the water the flapping came and stopped, a great push of air straightening my hair and scattering the loose pieces of chain – though they were slowly boiling away now across the entire island. The Iron Spider seemed to be still alive, twitching and clicking at me in rage, but its metal parts had been fused together and it was mostly a statue now.
I tossed the crippled spider onto the beach, and when the thunderbird chick screeched and zoomed in to hover overhead I jumped from behind the large drum-like abdomen. A confused bolt of lightning struck down to fry the spider a second time, and another misplaced defensive bolt snaked down to fuse the pebbles of the beach into complicated modern art not far from my head. But I finished my jump, hugging the thunderbird’s neck like a tic.
From within, my inner army suggested that I maybe should not-
I clamped down hard with my fangs, finding tough hide under those giant dark feathers … but the hide broke.
In some cartoons an electrocuted person’s skeleton becomes visible. I don’t think that really happened, but it sure felt like that. In my case I lit up my whole circulatory system with crackling lightning, mixed with St. Elmo’s fire to make what I’m sure must have been a very pretty display of firework-lightning-tattoos all over my body.
(he bit me!)
(oh thank Gitchi Manitou he’s an idiot, now don’t shock me a third time. I need you to crack my joints, but carefully!)
But there was power here. A lot of power. There had been a destructive amount of power in my first hit of blood diamond, and that might have been what saved me – I had gotten used to one level of overdose, a stepping stone to handling this overdose. I handled it by remaining mostly conscious and on my feet, except for when I was on my hands and knees, crawling for my luggage, then heading toward the lake for an agonizing swim with charred, itching flesh to the mainland. I was getting the hell out of here, but that elderberry was not being left behind.
The two manitous that had botched their trap were two blurred shapes yelling at each other to my extreme left, not noticing me until I was half-submerged. I lifted a middle finger as a final message and took a dip. The darkness over me in the shallow water darkened further in a flash, and two talons were coming in to yank me back out like a fish-
(kiwapamin)
-only to hit a solid layer of ice.
Because Nocome had known, of course. There was a mountain like Tremblant and Calabogie buried in this lake, collapsed by an earthquake and already forgotten a thousand years ago by any mortal, but remembered by her. She could not have me in Nipigon for very long – the attempt at possessing me had been a distraction, but still very genuine, and she’d left something behind during her incursion as a final effort, begrudgingly saving the both of us. A little dark magic that wasn’t a vampire’s acted now, giving me a ceiling of ice until the deep water had me.
Over the ice, the thunderbird’s clouds were being torn apart by a cold northern wind, the summer strength of a thunderstorm scattered. After Halloween even the adult thunderbirds would need to worry about her sky-magic, but this chick could be handled early.
I surfaced on the southern shore without incident far from Shakespeare Island, hurting everywhere but with all my stuff. I unpacked to check on my elderberry, dried up but still in the sunglasses case. The case was black, but I thought that I should spray-paint it neon green in case I ever lost it during a swim.
After some light brush I hit HW 11 going south from Lake Nipigon with midnight behind me, less than four hours to dawn to make some distance should the lake’s guardians go hunting. I didn’t dare feed from my blood diamond a second time, feeling that the bulk of this new damage was internal overdose damage with a superficial halo of electrical burns. I had been more than a little mad when biting the bird, but hopefully the memory would keep me with my senses if there was another opportunity for thunderbird blood.
My pace was slow, my body’s healing reluctant – I’d need a full day’s sleep to feel like doing anything more than plodding along.
But my exercise was not over for this awful night.
The rhythm that came into my ears was so faint and so regular it could have been an odd heartbeat, so I didn’t turn my mind on it for a very long time. It started with a soft sound like a running shoe hitting the pavement far behind me, then a harder sound that was dryer, the dry hard sound coming with a clicking noise at the same time. With just an hour to dawn on October 19th I stopped, and looked behind me down HW 11. I didn’t see anything, though a rise of the highway wasn’t far behind.
The noise kept coming, slowly gaining on me as I shuffled along, trying to go faster. Persistent. Very persistent. I imagined that it sounded like someone running with an artificial leg, one side flexing smoothly while the other clicked and had to be positioned with a hip roll each time …
“Oh. Fuck.”
I knew who was chasing me. His Marathon of Hope had been forced to end nearby in Thunder Bay, but it hadn’t ended there. All those supporters, in life and death, myself one of them … how powerful would he be as a tutelary?
I jogged, switching to my shoes so I could handle rougher terrain after dawn without crying, and finally made myself run. And behind me the protective spirit of Terry Fox kept coming to put his plastic foot up my ass. Every small victory in the fight against cancer would be his fuel source, and the day’s first birds were chirping ahead of the nearing dawn.
“Ow ow ow. Ow ow ow.”
A new sound crept in. Slow, gathering applause, even as I ran through the reedy swamps and silent woods with their leaves fully changed, but the applause was not for me. When humans encounter ghosts it’s usually the nasty ones who mean them harm. When undead monsters of the night encounter ghosts, it’s usually the beloved ones … who mean them harm. And I had euthanized several people with cancer who, technically, had still had a chance.
The grey sky to the east turned uncertain purple, and then blue, with not a cloud to cover me. My earlier electrical burns had faded but their aches remained under the surface, and soon I would be gasping for breath like a human forced to jog and jog for far too long.
I tried to conjure up some references, some jokes, something to mask the pain, because of course this was a ridiculous situation. But the applause kept getting louder just behind me, discernible cries coming in for the other runner, fogging my head. When I tried to leave the highway to slink away into the trees the applause grew louder, gaining cheers, and my outstretched hand smacked against a barrier, like the kind that protects churches from my intrusion. Of course it wasn’t that easy.
A truck ripped through the air from behind me, almost knocking my swinging luggage from my hand. The driver hadn’t seen me.
Dawn finally started stabbing through the trees to finish me off. I noticed this with eyes that rolled slowly, dryly, too exhausted to be startled, a shock of sweat from head to toe appearing to make my clothes stick to my body. I was human. My stylish silver-loaded suit was packed, and the luggage would have been average for a week-long trip, but now my shoulder was human, and my back, and my hip, and …
I ran anyway. Passing vehicles got closer and farther as I started to waver on the road’s shoulder, and I saw my vision narrow steadily. Those footsteps behind me were very close, and I mashed my fist against the road’s barrier, unable to just roll into the ditch. Fox was powerful enough to pull ghostly stunts during the day, powerful enough to guide mortal eyes away from the scene.
The fog in my head that made even an inner jest impossible also prevented more rational thought. Selling souls back to him, trying to climb up the roadside barrier, trying to grab a vehicle … all of these notions only came later, after I had stumbled and fallen off the shoulder, rolling in gravel off the road and into the ditch, through the barrier that had stopped me before.
In the end, Fox wasn’t here to kill me – he just wanted to run me ragged to get the idea of leaving Thunder Bay.
Half-conscious, and definitely concussed, my legs cramping and knees bleeding, I looked up from the highway ditch and saw the silhouette pass me by far above, not black but grey in the light of the dawn. Very persistent, and running on without slowing, that phantom applause also moving along rather than fading.
Chapter 48: The Hunters
Image credits: Megan Hodges, Yintan, Sergey Pesterev, Richard Keeling