The Seven Whistlers (4 page)

There was a thrashing sound amongst the trees, and Rose took
a step backward, staring into the darkness. Maybe Lucy wasn’t stupid after all.
Maybe the stupid one was whoever would follow her out into the yard at night
when that shrieking whistle filled the air.

Alan thought it was ghosts. What if he was right? Hell, what
if it was something worse?

Fear raced through her and Rose scanned the trees. Something
moved, and she couldn’t breathe. But then her gaze locked on it, the thing that
Lucy had been barking at, and she could only stare in wonder. A beautiful
silver stag stood less than a hundred yards from her, antlers gleaming in the
moonlight. It flipped back it ears listening to something, and then it turned
and looked straight into Rose’s eyes.

‘Oh . . .” she said, more an exhalation than a word. She had
never seen anything so beautiful in all her life. She wanted to let go of Lucy
and walk over to the stag, perhaps even touch it, but she knew it would bolt
long before she could close the gap between them.

Entranced as she was, Rose almost didn’t hear the shrill
whistling cries that began to fill the air. A twin voice seemed to have joined
the first, two shrieks echoing in the dark, playing call and answer somewhere
deep in the woods.

“Let’s go, Lucy,” Rose said, pulling the whining dog by the
scruff of her neck. She wished she had the leash to slip into the ring on the
dog’s collar so she could have more control.

“Lucy! Come on!”

The dog stood frozen, her whole body stiff, not allowing
Rose any give at all.

The whistling cries came again, much closer than before. Close
enough that Rose whipped her head up and searched the trees again. Lucy began
to bark madly, slobber spraying the grass. The stag hunched a moment, as though
it sensed the approach of whatever owned those cries, and then it took off,
long forelegs bounding through the brush.

It had gone only a few yards before something huge and dark
leaped out of the shadows and dragged the stag down with its claws. Huge jaws
closed on the stag’s flank. The beast was silent as it started to pull the stag
into the underbrush. A second one shot out of the trees and joined the kill,
stilling the beautiful stag’s twitching hind legs.

Rose covered her mouth with her hand to stop the scream that
was building behind her lips. She yanked Lucy back with all her might,
half-dragging, half-carrying the black lab back toward the house. The sounds of
slaughter that came from the darkness of the woods made her stomach lurch with
disgust. But the fear was far worse. The stag had been beautiful, but if it had
not been there, those things might have come for Lucy . . .or for Rose herself.

Her insides felt hollow and cold. When they reached the
deck, Lucy at last began to cooperate, and Rose rushed the dog through the
kitchen door, slamming it behind them. She locked it, threw the bolt, and put
the chain across as well, then she staggered back against the stainless steel
island that stood in the center of the kitchen and slid down into a crouch on
the floor. She couldn’t stop shaking, even when Lucy nuzzled against her, the
dog’s warmth like an electric blanket.

The sun was barely above the horizon when Jimmy Lizotte made
his first cast of the day. Nothing in the world gave him as much peace as
fishing on the lake. He’d get up at five o’clock, walk down to the dock with a
cup of coffee and a bag of the little cinnamon donuts Hannah always bought him
at the Buffalo Nickel General Store, start up the outboard and have the little
boat out on the water before he’d even taken a piss. That early in the morning,
he could whip it out and piss right over the side and nobody was there to see
it.

Now he sat there on the cushion he’d bought over the summer.
The air was cool and the water dark this early. There weren’t any bugs out yet.
His line disappeared into the smooth surface of the lake.

Fuckin’ bliss.

Jimmy took a sip from his coffee, congratulating himself on
how smart he’d been to buy Hannah the machine last Christmas. He could prepare
it the night before, set the timer, and wake up to the smell, like his life was
a tv commercial. No calls for this electrician on weekends. Weekdays, he tried
not to schedule anything before eleven o’clock, so he could get a few hours on
the lake in. Half the time he didn’t catch anything the law would have let him
keep, and even when he did, it was barely enough for dinner, but that wasn’t
the point.

It was called fishing, not catching.

It’s about the Zen
, he told Hannah on a regular
basis. She never got it, but that was all right. Most days she loved him enough
to understand he just needed it, the way some guys needed beer. And fishing
didn’t do to a marriage what too much booze or too many nights in the titty
bars would do. Hannah didn’t mind. Most days. And on the days when she did,
Jimmy didn’t much care . . . once he was out on the lake, what was she going to
do? Skip stones at him?

He took a deep breath and let it out. The pine trees at the
lake shore were silhouetted by the rising sun. The chicory coffee was warm and
sweet. Jimmy set the cup down and slid his hand into the plastic bag to
retrieve a cinnamon donut. God’s perfect food, as far as Jimmy was concerned.

A breeze rippled the surface of the lake and made him
shudder a little. It felt good, though. He took another sip of coffee to offset
the chill. The breeze came again, but this time, it carried a strange sound.

Jimmy frowned. “What the hell is that?” he whispered to
himself.

The whistling noise struck him oddly enough that he
disturbed his comfortable position, sitting up and looking around, trying to
determine where it was coming from. It wasn’t any ordinary whistle, not some
bird call or policeman’s warning. When he was a little boy he’d often heard the
whistle that sounded the beginning and end of the work day at the lumber mill
across the lake, but the mill had been closed twenty-three years, and this
wasn’t the same sound anyway. It reminded him more of the sound falling bombs
always made in Bugs Bunny cartoons, but even then, there was more to it. The
noise seemed a combination of sounds to him; a distant, reedy whistle, and a
scream.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it ceased.

Jimmy kept looking around, fishing rod in one hand, brows
knitted in unsettled curiosity. He told himself it was some kind of bird,
though he’d been fishing on Goodman’s Lake all his life and never heard
anything like it. Some migratory breed, he figured. Global climate change had
driven it north. Or east. Or something.

But as he settled down again, movement in the shadows of the
pines drew his gaze. On the end of the dock where he kept his boat sat an
enormous black dog. At this distance, it was hard to say for sure, but the dog
seemed to be looking at him. Staring. The massive hound must have been wild,
because he didn’t see an owner anywhere. He wondered if it might be a wolf. This
beast was way too big to be a coyote.

It just sat there, unmoving. It didn’t scratch itself or wag
its tail. The dog sat remarkably still, watching.

The tug on his line startled him enough that he nearly
dropped his fishing rod, and he twisted around so quickly that his coffee
sloshed onto his shirt. He cursed loudly and set the cup down, grateful that it
wasn’t hot anymore. At the same time, he jerked the rod back, setting the hook,
and started to reel. He wound in a few feet of line and then let the fish rest
a second. It darted back and forth, struggling to free itself from his hook.

“Come on, baby. Come to Jimmy,” he said under his breath as
he started to reel again. It felt big enough to be a keeper. Maybe big enough to
feed both him and Hannah at dinner tonight.

There were a lot of things Jimmy Lizotte loved about his
wife, but near the top of the list was that she never got tired of eating fish.
Girl new a thousand ways to cook the catch of the day.

The rod arced down toward the water like a dowsing rod. Jimmy
grinned widely and kept reeling. Something silver flashed beneath the dark
surface of the lake, and as he wound in a few more inches of line he saw the
fish fighting him. It had to be a two-footer.

“Come on, beauty.”

The fish was heavy and strong. It gave a massive tug, one
last ditch effort to escape him, and Jimmy rocked on his cushion, the boat
tipping a little. He laughed and looked down into the water, and then a frown
creased his forehead.

There were other silver flashes down there, some small and
some as big as his catch. Fish knifed through the water around the boat. At
first he saw only a few, but quickly they multiplied into dozens. A long dark
shape darted toward the fish on his hook, and the line swayed to one side.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Jimmy said, chuckling in
disbelief.

The swarm of fish — he couldn’t really call them a
school since they were all different sizes and types — gathered around
the one on the hook, swimming right into it, bumping the catch and the line
both. Jimmy tried to reel, but felt another powerful tug in downward. The rod
bent further toward the water.

This was the craziest thing he’d ever seen. It was as though
the fish were trying to save the one on his hook.

He stared down into the water. The sun rose above the trees
and its light shone across the lake. In that same moment, he saw the blood
clouding the water below him, and little bits of floating flesh.

The fish weren’t trying to save his catch. They were eating
it, like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

“No fuckin’ way,” he whispered.

But at least one of them was still on his hook, still
tugging down. Jimmy tried to fight it, but the fish were strong, and the whole
thing freaked him out. He took his knife from the sheath in his tackle box and
cut the line. It had been pulled so taut that when it let go, he fell backward,
and accidentally sliced the knife across the ball of his right hand.

He swore loudly, furiously, and let go of the rod. It banged
on the side of the boat as it fell overboard and instantly sank into the
darkness. Jimmy screamed in frustration and pain, wadding up a fistful of his
sweatshirt and pressing it against the cut. The sting of that slice ran up his
arm, but it hurt even less than the loss of the rod and reel he’d never see
again. The cut could be stitched. His rig was money he could never get back.

Something bumped the boat. Not hard enough to rock it,
really. It was more of a slap. But then it came again, and again, and then it
was as though all of those fish were pelting themselves against the boat from
beneath.

When he knelt to start the outboard, he crushed his cinnamon
donuts beneath his knees. He hung his head and laughed at the absurdity of it
all. He had to use his left hand to start the motor, and for a moment he was
sure it wasn’t going to start. This day had was one piece of bad luck after
another, and it only made sense he’d have to swim back to the dock. But then
the motor roared to life. A bunch of fish swam at the propeller and there was a
grinding noise as the motor worked overtime, hacking them to chum.

He pointed the prow toward the dock, and headed in,
wondering how the day had gone so completely wrong. His Italian grandmother had
always talked about the Malocchio, the evil eye, and it sure as hell felt like
someone had hit him with that whammy. But it wasn’t the bad luck that made him
feel like he had spiders crawling under his skin, and it wasn’t the stinging
pain from the slice on his palm. It was the behavior of those fish. That had
been damned unnatural. Just plain wrong, and weird.

It scared him a little.

Hannah Lizotte woke to the smell of smoke. She called out
for Jimmy even as she leaped from bed and threw her robe on. As she ran down
the stairs, she lost her footing and tripped. Catching herself on the handrail,
she twisted her wrist, hissing in pain as tendons tore. Hannah cradled her
wrist against her chest as she ran into the kitchen and saw the coffee machine
engulfed in flames, the black plastic melting and running down over the kitchen
counter. The fire had started to spread on the counter.

Terror raced through her. There were too many things in this
house that she could not bear to lose. Fire had always been her biggest fear. A
flash of fury went through her as she mentally blamed her husband, thinking
Jimmy had somehow left the machine on, though she knew it could have been an
electrical fire.

Wincing with the pain in her wrist, she ran to the sink,
choking on black, stinking smoke, and turned on the faucet. They had a spray attachment
on the sink that was more powerful than the shower head in their bathroom. She
switched it on, and began to hose down the burning coffee machine.

A fleck of burning black plastic splashed up at her and
stuck to her cheek, burning, searing into her flesh. Hannah screamed, wiping at
her face, trying to get it off, but it was stuck. She managed to keep the water
spraying on the coffee maker until the flames were doused.

Only then did she let herself sink to the floor, tears and a
trickle of blood running down her face.

Half a mile from the Lizottes’ house, a sudden gust of wind
blew down a dead, towering pine tree. It crashed down on Ray Winston’s house,
totaling the brand new Saturn he’d given himself as a fortieth birthday
present.

On Charles Street, the brakes gave way on the mail truck and
Audrey Tosches panicked. Before she could get control of the vehicle, she was
up on the sidewalk and careening through the plate glass window that fronted
Kelley’s bar. She wept as she considered the irony of a twelve-stepper crashing
her postal truck into a bar. Then the jagged remaining portion of the plate
glass window fell like a guillotine and shattered her windshield. The steering
wheel stopped the plate glass before it would have reached her legs, but she’d
had her hands at ten and two like they’d taught her at driver’s ed when she was
sixteen, and three fingers on her left hand were severed.