Backpacking through Bedlam

Prologue
 
“Being born to the Covenant means there was never a moment when I chose this life. It was chosen for me, before my parents were born, and it was chosen for my children, if ever I had them. Alice was the first person I met who actually believed we all got to have a choice. She
certainly did.” —Thomas Price
 
Just outside the Galway Woods, Buckley Township, Michigan
Sixty years ago
 
Alice Price-Healy, daughter of Jonathan and Frances Healy, married to Thomas Price of the Covenant Prices for exactly one year, backed up until she was pressed against the side of the rotten old barn at the edge of the swamp, cursing herself for a fool the whole time. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence, either the cursing or the foolishness, but the location was a bit out of the ordinary. Alice normally did the majority of her hunting and aimless wandering inside the Galway Woods, the forest of her childhood, where both her mother and grandmother had died.
 
(The fact that Enid had managed to make it all the way home before succumbing to the venom of the Bidi-taurabo-haza didn’t change the fact that she’d received the fatal bite while still inside the boundaries of the Galway. The forest had always done its best to protect the Healy women. Its best had never, not once, been enough.)
 
But today, oh. Today, Alice had been out doing the annual jackalope count—almost as many mature bucks in the colony this year there had been as last year, and that was a good thing, since the population was declining in most of the country— and she’d gotten off track on the way back, woolgathering about what she was going to do for dinner. It was her anniversary, after all. She ought to do something special. If she’d married anyone else, they’d be doing what Grandma and Grandpa had always done, putting on their Sunday clothes and heading into town for a meal at one of the nicer restaurants, the ones where they wouldn’t even let a lady in if she wasn’t wearing a decent skirt.
 
Sure, Buckley was small enough that they only had two places that nice, and she’d have been happier at the Red Angel or Bronson’s anyway, but that didn’t matter. Hell, if she’d married anyone else, they could have driven to Ann Arbor if they’d wanted to! Or they could have done like Mama and Daddy used to do, back when she’d been little and Mama had been alive to do anything with Daddy. Mama had never seen the point of fancy restaurants and putting on airs, called it a waste of time, money, and everything else a body had to waste. Fran had celebrated her wedding anniversaries in the shadow of the Galway Wood, sitting on a picnic blanket with her lovestruck husband and, after a few years, her continually active daughter, eating cold chicken sandwiches and laughing. That was probably what Alice remembered best about her mother. Her laughter, bright as a bell, and ringing all the time.
 
Well, her laughter, and what a damned good shot she’d been. Alice fumbled to reload her revolver, careful to keep her shoulders pressed against the barn. She could have used a damned good shot. Or a damned poor one. Anybody to help her get out of this stupid-ass predicament she’d gone and gotten herself into, letting herself wander without paying attention to where she was going until she had wandered straight into the swamp.
 
At least if she died out here, Thomas would know right away. Wouldn’t that be a hell of an anniversary gift? “Sorry, sweetie, you’re a widower now, but your deal with the crossroads is null and void and you can go wherever you want”? Maybe if she asked really nicely, Mary would help her stick around long enough to go by the house and deliver the news in person. Well, as much as the ghost of your dead wife suddenly appearing in the living room could be considered “in person.” Really, it probably wasn’t a good idea. She was pretty sure it could be taken as being intentionally cruel. “You weren’t there to save me, so I died, and now you get to go outside, aren’t you lucky.”
 
And there she went, woolgathering again. Maybe it was time she admitted that being married to a man who couldn’t even step far enough out the front door to join her on the porch was wearing on her. Oh, she loved him. She had never loved anyone else half as much as she loved Thomas Price, and that was probably for the best, because some days she felt like she loved him so much it might kill her. Some days it felt like it was verging toward the dangerous kind of love, the kind her Daddy’d had for her Ma, the kind that had eaten him alive from the inside out after Fran had died.
 
She figured love was a lot like the swamp bromeliads. Good and healthy in the right ecosystem, but invasive and destructive if it got planted out of place. As long as she remembered the way love had swallowed her father, she thought she could keep her own love pruned back enough to stay healthy. At least, she hoped so. As long as Thomas didn’t go dying on her or something ridiculous like that, she’d be fine. Probably.
 
As long as she didn’t go and do something stupid like dying here, with her back up against a rotting old barn and no one else human for miles. She was outside of Cynthia’s normal hunting range; the Huldra tended to take her prey a decent distance from the Angel, for the sake of keeping other predators from following her back to the bar, but even she didn’t go this far looking for a snack. Desperately, Alice loaded bullets into the gun and tried to review the territories of every local cryptid she knew, from Sunny the boo hag to Earl the Loveland frogman. None of them intersected with this slice of the swamp. Backup wasn’t coming.
 
Oh, someone would find her body . . . eventually.
 
That was assuming the swamp hags left any pieces of her to be found. They might not. Swamp hags ate a lot like hogs: they tore a carcass apart and swallowed every scrap. They were obligate carnivores, and if she’d been paying a lick of attention to her surroundings, she wouldn’t have let herself drift into their territory.
 
Swamp hags were amphibians, like Loveland frogmen, but unlike Earl, they weren’t intelligent beings or proper people. About as smart as the average frog, that was a swamp hag, but with the temperament of a wild boar and the slashing claws of a cougar. Size of a person, to boot, or bigger than a person if the person in question was someone like Alice, who had always been petite. She’d seen at least five of the slippery fucks before she ducked behind the barn.
 
At least their presence explained why the barn—and the associated dilapidated farmhouse—had been abandoned, despite being structurally sound enough to still be standing after years of neglect. Even in a place like Buckley, people mostly didn’t like to live where man-sized amphibious monsters were likely to slide in through a window and eat the kids in the middle of the night. Alice slotted the last bullet into the chamber, snapping it shut, and rested the barrel of the gun lengthwise against her forehead in a brief semblance of prayer.
 
“Mama, if you could help me out with this, I’d surely appreciate it,” she murmured.
 
Swamp hags hunted in colonies, if she remembered right— and years of working solo meant she always remembered right when it came to predators large enough to do her serious injury. For them to be as large as the ones she’d seen, this had to be an adult breeding colony, meaning she could be looking at, oh, twenty or thirty fully grown, hungry hags, as well as any of the little ones big enough to have arms and legs and claws and teeth, but not big enough to hunt on their own just yet.
 
There had always been a few swamp hags lurking around the edges of the swamp adjacent to the Galway, but never anything like this. She should have noticed them getting to this sort of population density, should have read it in the prey animals and the way the bloodworms had been getting scarcer and scarcer. But she’d been distracted with learning how to be a wife and navigating the surprisingly complex political network of the town, and she hadn’t been paying proper attention.
 
She hadn’t been paying proper attention, and now she was going to pay for it.
 
At least swamp hags were ambush predators rather than active hunters. They knew she couldn’t get back to solid ground without running across the patches of marsh between her and safety. All they had to do was make themselves near to invisible in the muck and the mire,
and as soon as she moved, they’d have her. That meant she could delay the inevitable by simply staying still. The only urgency was the time. The sun would be setting in an hour or so, and once it got dark, their hunting tactics would change. Once it got dark, they’d come for her, the same way they had probably come for the people who lived here, once upon a slaughterhouse.
 
Alice sighed, lowering the gun. There was something she could try, but it wasn’t likely to work. It had been working less and less lately. Still, she closed her eyes for a moment, cursing herself for a fool for doing that when she was surrounded by unseen predators, and said, “Mary, I need you.”
 
There was no sound or smell or sign that anything had changed, but still, Alice felt like the air had shifted, like something was different now than it had been a moment before. She opened her eyes, glancing to the side, and there was her babysitter, the long-dead, eternally teenaged Mary Dunlavy, wearing the most recent iteration of her standard “I am a normal teenage girl, look how normal I am” outfit: knee-capper denim jeans and a black-and-yellow checkered top that Alice thought made her look a little bit like a taxicab from a movie. Her long white hair was held back by a yellow headband, and she had a quizzical expression on her face.
 
“Much as I appreciate the chance to catch up, Alice, I sort of figured you’d be at home, since it’s your first wedding anniversary, not standing in the middle of the swamp surrounded by amphibious apex predators.” Her tone matched her expression, more distant puzzlement than any sort of actual alarm.
 
Alice thought there must be something about being dead that made it harder for people to get really upset. She’d seen Mary do it a few times, and it was always alarming and strange. Most of the time, Mary answered every crisis with the same degree of faintly bewildered equanimity, like the world was just an unending series of small, interesting surprises that had no actual bearing on her continuing existence.
 
“I was supposed to be home by now,” said Alice. “I went out to do the jackalope survey, and I got to thinking about dinner while I was walking back to the house, and I guess I got a little bit off track is all.”
 
“You got so off track you wound up in the swamp?” Mary didn’t sound like she believed her. That was fine. Alice wasn’t certain she believed herself, either, and she’d been there. “Alice, you know this forest better than you know the back of your own hand. There’s no way you got so distracted that you wound up here without meaning to. What’s wrong?”
 
“You know, I’d really like to have a heart-to-heart with you about everything that’s bothering me, but maybe not when we’re about an hour away from me being torn to pieces by big weird amphibians who look like ladies for no good reason other than sometimes evolution’s a real asshole, okay?” Alice shot her an exasperated look. “Any chance you can help me out of this?”
 
“Hold tight and I’ll ask,” said Mary, and disappeared.
 
Alice sighed again as she began scanning the marshy ground between her and the tree line for signs of swamp hags. Swamp hags didn’t do tactics beyond the basic ones that instinct provided them with; they were basically big frogs, and if they had a little more in the way of clever than an ordinary frog, it was all down to them having bigger heads and bigger brains, which meant more space for thinking about things. But since they were still frogs, the things they were thinking about were generally food, safety, and whether or not it was safe to make more frogs.
 
So they wouldn’t have chosen sophisticated hiding spots. And that would have been fine if they hadn’t had just enough smart in them to wait until she was good and surrounded by marsh on all sides before they showed themselves.
 
How she’d been able to wander that far across the marsh without noticing was a little harder to understand. Sure, she usually managed to step where she needed to be stepping, and to avoid stepping where she shouldn’t, but she hadn’t been paying any attention to where she’d been going, and yet somehow that had translated to her not stepping in a single puddle or patch of mud deep enough to catch her attention. It didn’t make any sense, which was why she didn’t have any trouble believing it had happened.
 
The less sense something made, the less point there was in arguing with it.
 
Mary reappeared as abruptly as she had vanished, shaking her head. “Well, kiddo, looks like you’re in luck,” she said. “My employers have decided that in this instance, seeing you safely back to the woods counts as a standard part of babysitting duties. Follow me.”
 
She began walking across the marsh, her feet never sinking into the wet ground, her shoes never getting muddy. Alice only hesitated a moment before she followed.
 
Mary had been one of the most trusted people in Alice’s world since she was an infant in swaddling clothes, placed into the arms of a white-haired teenager by a mother who needed a little help. Fran hadn’t known Mary was dead at the time, but the family had figured it out pretty quickly and, rather than firing the girl, had essentially adopted her. Every house needs a haunting, after all, and Mary was theirs.
 
But Mary wasn’t just theirs, and never had been. Mary Dunlavy was a crossroads ghost, a dogsbody for the terrifying supernatural entity that brokered bargains for the unwise and the unwary, the desperate and the doomed. She couldn’t do anything without their permission. When Alice had been young, that permission had been easy—Mary’s babysitting duties were always allowed, unless the crossroads needed her elsewhere. And when Alice had been injured, anything that fell under the heading of nursing her back to health had been considered acceptable. Now, though . . .
 
Now, every request had to be run through the crossroads, and unless they said it was all right for Mary to do without a contract, Mary had to say no or offer to broker a bargain. Alice had never been particularly tempted to deal with the crossroads for her own benefit before Thomas made his own bargain, and now, having seen what they were doing to him, she was even less inclined to push when Mary said the crossroads didn’t want her to do something.
 
She still didn’t know the exact terms of Thomas’s deal with the crossroads, only that it had involved her in some way, and when she died, if she died before he did, he would be freed from the arrangement and able to leave the house again. Maybe it was about time she pressed him to tell her the rest.
 
Drawing her second revolver and holding both at the ready, Alice began following Mary across the marsh.
 
Mary was following the safest route, her spectral nature keeping her from entirely noticing how wet it was. Alice wasn’t quite so lucky. Her own special brand of uncomprehending good fortune didn’t feel the need to step in when she was following a supposedly safe path, and so her very first step left her with one foot mired up to the ankle in muck. Alice scowled.
 
“I liked these shoes.”
 
“Should have thought about that before you woolgathered yourself right into the swamp,” said Mary, not looking back.
 
Alice shot an annoyed glance at her and kept following, pausing to yank her feet free of the mud every few steps.
 
They were halfway to the trees when two lumpy clumps of muddy, grassy earth rose up and reached for her, webbed hands hooked to grasp and tear. Alice shot them both, one in the forehead, one in the stomach, and they fell, more of the ground around them heaving as the other swamp hags smelled blood and prepared to attack.
 
“Alice?”
 
“Yeah?”
 
“Run.”
 
Alice bolted for the trees, not looking back. Mary didn’t, remaining visible and frozen in the middle of the swampy ground. She made a tempting target, even if she didn’t have any actual flesh for them to devour, and with the scent of blood in the air, it was unlikely the swamp hags would realize she wasn’t physical until they actually attacked her. Many prey animals froze when frightened. Mary’s actions were perfectly understandable, if you were a creature with a brain the size of a swamp hag’s.
 
So Alice ran, and Mary remained, and when the swamp hags lunged for her, they passed through her insubstantial body, falling into the muck. Several of them turned their attention to the bodies of their fallen kin, beginning to devour them, while a few of the others turned toward Alice, gauging the distance between her and them.
 
Only three took off after the woman, the rest remaining to squabble over the meat and make ineffectual swipes at Mary. Mary rolled her eyes.
 
“Amateurs,” she said, and vanished.
 
Alice was almost to the trees when Mary appeared in front of her, looking almost bored. “Three on your tail,” she said, studying her nails. “Might want to get rid of them.”
 
“Oh, for—” Alice swore under her breath as she whipped around and dug her heels into the swampy ground, firing three times. She didn’t take the time to aim. It didn’t seem to matter. All three bullets found their places, and three more swamp hags went down.
 
Mary watched this, hand dropping back to her side as her mouth fell slightly open. Even after years of dealing with Alice, the woman could still astonish her.
 
Does she even realize how impossible it is to do what she just did? she asked herself. Everybody needs to aim.
 
Everybody but Alice. When she’d been alive, Mary had believed humans were in charge of the whole world, with nothing to challenge them for their dominion. Dying had been a real eye-opener, in more ways than one. Humans were far from alone where intelligence was concerned; they might have the sheer numbers to put them at the top of the food chain, but lots and lots of other species, many of them humanoid enough to blend in, were also kicking around, looking for their place in the grand scheme of things.
 
Sometimes Mary suspected Alice had one or more of those “looks human enough to bring home to Mom, actually about as human as an opossum” folks kicking around somewhere back in her family line. Something like a jink or a mara or even a Fortuna, something that could bend luck to suit itself. It would explain a lot.
 
Panting, Alice turned and finished running for the trees, only stopping again once she was safely back on solid ground. “Thanks for the save, Mary. I’ll write to Aldo and see if he wants to bring the boys this way for a frog hunt this summer.” She grimaced at the thought of intentionally triggering a cull. Swamp hags were an important part of the ecosystem, but without any local predators, they would overrun their breeding grounds and start throwing the whole forest out of balance if they weren’t culled. Didn’t make killing them when they weren’t an active danger fun.
 
“See that you do that,” said Mary. “And pay attention when you’re wandering around out here! Honestly, you know better than this.”
 
“Guess I do,” said Alice, holstering her guns. “Still, you came to my rescue.”
 
“This time. What would you have done if the crossroads told me not to?”
 
Alice looked away.
 
Mary groaned. “You can’t count on me the way you used to, Alice, you know that! Now get home before that husband of yours starts trying to summon me so he can ask where you are.”
 
“I’m getting, I’m getting.”
 
“And, Alice?”
 
“Yeah?”
 
Mary hesitated, her face going through the complicated series of small expressions that meant she was fighting against her own rules to say something she thought was going to matter. Finally, in a rushed tone, she said, “Talk to him. I know it goes against everything you think is natural, but you need to talk to him. Nothing gets better if you don’t open your damn mouth. Okay?”
 
“Okay, Mary,” said Alice, blinking. “I’ll talk to him.”
 
“Promise?”
 
“I promise,” said Alice.
 
“Good girl,” said Mary, and vanished, leaving Alice standing alone in the Galway Wood, near the edge of the swamp, the late afternoon light slanting through the leaves.
 
She turned, feeling out her location in the quality of the soil under her feet, and started in the direction that felt the most like home. She was quick, and nothing in the Galway that afternoon was hungry enough to get in her way. She made it home before the sun finished going down.
 
Thomas’s silhouette was a dark blur in the kitchen window. Smiling, Alice broke into a run, on her way back to him once more.