Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,50

fucked up? There’s one more piece of the puzzle.”

“I don’t think you’re fucked up.”

“You’re not the first person I’ve told this. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I told Zahra; she’s my shrink. I told Richard.”

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “Thanks for trusting me.”

“I wasn’t always such a brat, by the way. It’s just . . . I don’t know. Richard puts up with it. And I know I can get away with it. That’s a bad reason. But I didn’t . . . I didn’t used to act like this.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Dag said.

I let my head rest on his shoulder.

“The longest I ever had a boyfriend was close to six months,” Dag said. “I’m just telling you to make a point. And when he left, he just left. He stopped answering my calls. Cut me off completely without a word. And I am not, um, very good with money. So it was two more months before I realized he had stolen my debit card, and my rent checks had been bouncing, my tuition check bounced, and he’d emptied my savings, and I was so embarrassed because I’m a deputy that I didn’t even file charges. I moved back in with my parents when I got evicted, and then I just stayed, I guess. I couldn’t figure out why I should move out again.”

“What was his name?”

“Why?”

“Because I will go cut that bitch.”

Dag laughed. His hand slid to the back of my neck, and he ran his thumb over two vertebrae before turning so he could look at me.

“Can I ask you something serious?”

“My story about my dead brother and parents wasn’t serious enough?”

“Do you know who this guy is?”

He displayed his phone. On the screen was a picture of David, pacing the sidewalk opposite Tamika’s building. He was wearing his winter gloves, the way he always did. The picture had obviously been taken today: I recognized the fire truck parked across the street and the police cruisers.

“Why’d you take this?”

And then Dag explained his thoughts about cattle and feeding, an irregular cycle of hibernation or maybe something had gone wrong, and the idea that the hashok might like to see the results of its work.

“You think David is the hashok?”

“Well, he was there, which was weird, and he was laughing, which was weird, and—”

“David could have been there for a lot of reasons. It could have been coincidence. And the laughing is weird, but it’s not . . . I mean, he’s always done it.”

But I remembered Suzette telling me, It feeds on human lives, especially on pain, and I remembered David laughing at the strangest times, laughing at the worst, most painful parts of people’s stories. Nerves, I had always said. Or just not processing emotions properly. But something twisted in my gut as I looked at the picture on Dag’s phone.

“Well, it’s actually the gloves that make me worried.” Dag reached into the car and pulled out the book from the library. Raising New Orleans and La Louisiane: Chorography, Ethnography, and the Native Episteme, he said, “Have you read the part about the hashok in here?”

I shook my head.

“It’s not called that. It’s called—here it is, ‘A Native Vampirum of Lake Pontchartrain,’ and a lot of the article is this ethnographer talking about how he interviewed an old Choctaw woman who lived in a log house right by the lake, and he goes on and on about how she gathered wood and how she built a fire and how she made her tea and the different uses she had for moss. I mean, kind of your typical ethnography.”

“Right,” I said. “Just your typical ethnography.”

“But when he gets into the folklore, it’s like . . . uncanny. She tells him about the hashok, although he keeps calling it a vampirum. She talks about people hurting themselves, about people killing themselves.” Dag took a breath. “People killing their loved ones.”

I remembered the dream, and the blue fire in Gard’s dead eyes.

“It’s like this chain reaction,” Dag said. “Somehow, it gets into a population, and it just goes wild. One person does something terrible, and then someone else is affected by it, and they do something terrible, and they affect two people, maybe, or three, and they do something terrible.”

“And more and more people suffer,” I said. “And the hashok has more and more to eat.”

“Yes. Up to a point. And then it stops. It reaches critical mass, or its sated, or it hibernates. Or something.