Haunted Horseheads! Rolled off the tongue with less menace than the reality.

The drive back to town blurred. My attention was repeatedly drawn to the rearview mirror. I experienced a “watched” feeling I’d sometimes picked up on in the Alaskan boonies. That very real sense the land itself wants you gone. Her immune system too reacts to perceived threats by sending agents after you—wolves, bears, blizzards, men deranged by cabin fever, anything handy. What kind of antibodies did this part of the country have at its disposal? Mate a genius locus with a partially constructed supercollider and gods only knew the result. Call me ridiculous and superstitious. I’ve said the occult isn’t my bag, not by that name, anyhow. Nonetheless, after the shit I’d seen pursuing the Croatoan, let’s just say my definitions of the possible were malleable. Argue with the Native Americans who named and ordered the local spirits and lamented the toxic consequences of European incursions. In Alaska, when natives die on the sea ice or go missing upon the tundra, it’s occasionally attributed to the malign activity of entities that were here long before men. Who’s to say otherwise? Not the mysterious dead. Not me.

I leaned on the pedal. The premonition that the cab of the SUV would shear off, and my head with it, receded as miles passed. Slithered into the tar of my hindbrain and curled up to wait.

CHAPTER NINE

I parked in the rear lot of the Hotel Roan, a Victorian mansion reincarnated to its current state in the 1960s. Everything begins as something else. Plants, animals, people. Even architecture progresses from pupae to imago. The hotel sat back from a quiet street a block west of Newtown Creek. Oak trees scraped the building. The lobby was intimate—a drawing room and bar to the right; an equally modest dining room to the left. The type of accommodations where one would be forced to practically sit in his or her date’s lap. Oil paintings of General Sullivan, and the original owner of the mansion, Jedidiah Lark, hung over the reception desk. Paneled windows framed by white drapes let in the muted sunset. I took the stairs to the top, noting that the building indeed possessed the air of a sprawling home rather than a hotel. The kid version of me would’ve searched for dumbwaiters and secret passages. All the joint needed was a plucky heroine in a nightgown stumbling around by the light of a candelabrum.

More paintings and photographs—the example near my door was done in murky oils and portrayed a picket of horse skulls planted along a dirt road. The skulls shone dully in purple twilight. A lone cavalry officer, saber in hand, slumped atop a roan mare; the roan’s muzzle tilted down and toward the viewer. Her eye brimmed with purple fire, bone white at the rim, and she was Death’s mount.

My digs were cozy. The usual amenities, plus a view of Newtown Creek. The tiny parlor featured a rolltop desk and a shelf stocked with clothbound books on regional geography, agriculture, wildlife, and the like. Did anyone ever glance at them besides the maid? I clicked on an honest-to-gods Tiffany reading lamp to bask in the buttery warm glow. Queen-size bed with a thick headboard; chestnut engravings of cavalry horses rampant beneath a full moon. A fifty-dollar-a-night motel would’ve been sensible. I wasn’t in the mood to stare at suspicious water stains or cigarette-burned carpets while sodium lamps fizzed and flickered in a parking lot next to an overpass. The number one reason I chose comfort over utility? Badja Adeyemi was on the hook for expenses.