Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,51

Until it starts all over again.” Dag paged through the book. “She talks about blue fire; she’s says the hashok can be invisible except for its heart, which is like a firefly. Glowing, I guess. The ethnographer guy takes it as an opportunity to give a whole lecture on cultural similarities to the English will o’ the wisp, and it does kind of sound similar.”

“Leads people astray, right? That’s what a will o’ the wisp does. Leads them off the path. Leads them to their death.”

“That’s what this ethnographer goes on and on about,” Dag said. “But that’s not what the woman says. She says it leads them in circles. I think she’s talking about these . . . these cycles, I guess. People getting caught in these horrible tragedies.”

“That’s a pretty common metaphor for PTSD,” I said. “Stuck in a loop. Repeating the same thing over and over again.”

Dag nodded.

“Suzette said other cultures had the same thing. She said another word for it was vampire, and that it feeds on human lives, on pain.”

“Vampire,” Dag said. “A kind of vampire, I guess. It’s definitely feeding on people. The pain and suffering are part of it, but these people are dead, physically dead. Feeding on human lives sounds literal to me.”

“So,” I said, “it’s feeding on the support group. And there are these ripples, so Ray dies, and it affects Mason, and Mason affects Tamika. Is that it?”

“Maybe. I think . . . I think it might go deeper than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if it is a vampire, or like a vampire, there’s a lot of folklore about them. They can pass for human in some circumstances. They can change shape—bats and wolves, but in some stories they can become fog or mist. You know, kind of like how this thing becomes a firefly. They’re fast and strong, like this thing. They’re hard to kill, like this thing. They can raise the dead, I guess, when they make them into their vampire servants.”

“Ok. Vampires. Spooky, scary, lots of abilities. So why are you focused on David’s gloves?”

“Oh, right. So this Choctaw woman, she tells him that the hashok puts a thorn in the hand of sleeping hunters. Hand or foot, actually. And it makes them capable of evil. So the ethnographer goes off on this long tangent about the aetiology of evil—”

“Right, everybody knows about the aetiology of evil.”

“—and takes it as another piece of folklore. But we know the blue fire is real. We know the hashok is real. We saw it. Why wouldn’t the thorn be real? In lots of stories, vampires have the ability to dominate the will of other creatures, even humans. They turn some of them into servants, like Renfield in the Dracula stories. And sometimes this ability is linked to physical wounds that the vampire gives—bite marks, right? But here, it’s a thorn in the hand.”

“How do you know so much about vampires?”

“I don’t only read about whales.”

“Oh my God, have I got a book for you. In chapter eight this guy asks his dark lord to give him an infernal breeding—”

“Anyway,” Dag said, a flush in his cheeks, “I think David might be, you know, like a Renfield.”

I blinked. “Wait, you think David is like an evil servant to this thing?”

“He’s wearing gloves, right? That’s a good way to hide a wound. He shows up at the scene of a tragedy that we think is connected to the hashok. He’s in the support group. And we know the hashok is feeding off the support group.”

“It could be a suicide cluster,” I said. “Statistically—”

“We’ve got to decide, both of us, right now,” Dag said. “Either we believe this is real, or we don’t. I know I’m not the right person to say that; I’ve been a chickenshit about it. But we’ve got to decide. We can’t keep going back and forth.”

The lake lapped against the shore; an egret broke from a clump of brush, wings flapping hard to bear him up over the water. A jolt went through me, and I blew out a sharp breath.

“Yes, ok. I guess I believe it. I’m crazy otherwise, because I know what I saw. So I guess I believe it.”

“Me too,” Dag said.

“So what now?” I said.

“Now, we start investigating your friend David.”

DAG (12)

We went back to my parents’ house, and the smell of garlic and bacon met us at the door. Dad was in the living room, kicked back in an easy chair; Mom was