Sonny and Billy hadn’t mentioned an attack from the water, but if they had considered an airplane loaded with C-4, they must have thought of a boat.
When I turned from the lake, I saw movement past the south end of the dam, beyond the last lights, a lesser darkness in the deeper dark. Squinting brought no further clarity, only the same impression of restless motion.
Reaching beneath my sport coat, keeping one hand on the Glock in its holster, I walked south to have a closer look. When I was about twenty feet from the end of the dam, the visitors’ shining eyes turned on me, three pairs mirroring the crest lamps, intently staring. As I came to a halt, they ventured a few steps out of the shadows.
During the past twenty-one months, coyotes had been a recurring presence in my life, beginning on the night before Stormy’s death, when three of them had stalked me outside a rusting Quonset hut on the abandoned grounds of a commune where once had lived people who believed that extraterrestrials had created human beings and that the ETs would soon return. Just four months before I found myself on the crest of the Malo Suerte Dam, I’d been through hard and desperate times in Magic Beach, California, during which I had been threatened by coyotes in packs.
On one such occasion, Annamaria had been with me, walking the wild rim of Hecate’s Canyon in Magic Beach, when a pack approached with such an obvious intention to make dinner of us that they should have been wearing bibs. Usually coyotes fear humans and keep their distance from us. A loud noise will frighten them off, as will a tossed stone that doesn’t even hit them. But the pack that came out of Hecate’s Canyon had exhibited no fear whatsoever.
I’d had no gun that night, because I’d loathed guns then as I did now. And we were on a greensward where I couldn’t find any of the impromptu weapons to which I often resorted: buckets, brooms, garden rakes, Granny Smith apples, cats that when thrown will reliably take out their fury not on the thrower but instead on the person at whom they’re thrown. I didn’t like throwing cats or animals of any kind, as far as that goes, but every once in a while, in a life-and-death situation, there was nothing to be done but grab a cat and throw it, or an angry ferret.
Anyway, as it turned out, I wasn’t without a weapon, after all, because Annamaria proved to be a weapon herself. She had said that the coyotes were not only what they appeared to be, and she’d stepped toward them instead of cowering, unfazed by their threatening demeanor. She spoke to them not as if they were bloodthirsty beasts, but rather as if they were naughty children who had gone astray and needed to be put on the right path again.
Now, months later, as the lantern-eyed pack crept onto the crest of Malo Suerte Dam, daring to stalk me, I didn’t want to shoot them. I didn’t shout for help from Sonny and Billy, who were beyond the outlet-control building and not in my line of sight, because I didn’t want the coyotes to be shot by anyone. I’d had enough of killing to last me a lifetime. I might have to do it again, maybe more than once, but I didn’t have to do it here and now.
Ears flattened close to their skulls, teeth bared, hackles raised, tails tucked, they tentatively approached me, every muscle in their lean bodies taut. They were bony specimens, in need of a good meal; but it would be a mistake to conclude that they were weak. Were I not to use my pistol, just one coyote would be enough to finish me if it could not be frightened away.
I spoke to them as Annamaria had spoken to the toothy crew on the greensward near Hecate’s Canyon. “You aren’t only what you appear to be. You do not belong here.”
The leader of the pack halted, and the other two drew nearer to it, closing up what had been a three-prong attack pattern. Their pointy ears were no longer back against their heads, but were instead pricked, as though they were interested in what I said.
Their mouths cracked wider, however, and they regarded me with malevolent grins.
Again echoing Annamaria’s admonition to that other pack, I said, “The rest of the world is yours … but not this place at this moment.”
Back in the day, I hadn’t understood what she had meant by those words. Now I thought perhaps I did.
Far to the south, pulses of heat lightning billowed deep within the heavy clouds, again too distant for the associated thunder to reach us.
Although their backs were to the southern sky, and though the celestial flare was too faint to cast even a wan reflection upon our immediate surroundings, the three coyotes shivered, as if aware of the storm light and affected by it.
“I am not yours. You will leave now.”
They didn’t depart, didn’t move so much as an inch, but neither did they growl.
The coyotes in Magic Beach had not at once obeyed Annamaria. They had been stubborn, or maybe whatever wished to use them had been stubborn.
And so I repeated, “You will leave now.”
The predatory trio looked around as though confused, as though unsure how they had gotten where they were. Their hackles smoothed, and although they nervously licked their chops, they no longer bared their fearsome teeth. Ears pricked, regarding me not with hostility or hunger, only with curiosity, they warily backed away.
“Leave now,” I repeated.
They turned and slunk off the crest of the dam, toward the darkness out of which they had appeared.
When they paused in the pale light of the narrow shadowland that separated the brightness of the dam crest from the blackest night, I watched them watching me, and I knew they were now only what they appeared to be: coyotes or prairie wolves, whichever you preferred. Briefly, some vicious twisted spirit had entered them and had overridden their fear of me. But for all its malice, it was a weak entity that obeyed a simple order to leave once its presence had been recognized and resisted.
The coyotes moved away into the blinding dark, gone as if they’d never existed. I felt again the mysterious nature of the world, its deeply layered and profound strangeness.
I wondered at my inability, until now, to understand what Annamaria had recognized in the coyotes in Magic Beach and why she had felt that she could command them to leave us alone. Considering that I saw the spirits of the lingering dead and bodachs — whatever they might be — it troubled me that I had not realized she could perhaps see other entities unknown to me, such as spirits that were not and never had been human, that sprang from origins even darker than the worst specimens of humanity.
I’d long known Annamaria possessed some power of her own, that she had well-guarded secrets. She, too, was more than she appeared to be. I had come to believe that her powers, whatever their nature, were greater than mine. But now I was chagrined to realize that I had failed to grasp how we were at least in one way alike: Some things visible to us were invisible to the vast majority of human beings, even if perhaps each of us saw different things from what the other perceived.
At the railing once more, I peered toward the farther reaches of Malo Suerte Lake, which were cast in such perfect blackness that I couldn’t discern either those waters or anything of the shore that embraced them. When I turned my attention down to the water lapping against the dam, I couldn’t see it, either, not really see it, for it was black, as well, and I could know that it slopped against the tainter gates below me only because reflections of the crest lights undulated upon its surface.
Standing there, I was overcome by the certainty that, since returning home to Pico Mundo, I had failed to see much more than just the malicious entity that had sought to use the three coyotes against me. A monstrous act of terrorism would soon be perpetrated. The truth of it, the approximate place and the general nature of the threat, had been revealed to me in a prophetic dream; or if they had not been fully revealed, they had at least been strongly suggested.