The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  His head, slimy with mud, broke the surface, and he tore in great chunks of air. The arms reached for him. He dove under water again and caught its foot with his hatchet as it took a step. The blade missed, but the wide edge grazed the foot, and that was enough.

  The thing shouted, the cry coming from behind the bangs of hair covering its face, and lunged again. Jason was swept by the current down toward the lake. His last view of the monster was of its arms held above water as it walked to the opposite shore. The devil was gone. Burning bright in the forest of the night.

  The river shallowed over stones just before spreading into the delta of still water around the lake. The frigid water sent convulsive tremblings through Jason’s body. He rolled clear into the reeds and lay still, shocked to the depths of his soul.

  Deformed—Kimberly did not know how right he was! That face burned away everything else in Jason’s memory. He had always believed such faces to be imaginary, the kind of silly debris to be swept from one’s mind in order to build rational foundations.

  The face was conical, as though funneling out through a delicate chin. The hair on its head was long and stringy, covering the thing’s cheeks down to his jaws. The mouth was thin and narrow, but large teeth protruding forward pushed the outer edges of the lips into a perpetual grin.

  The eyes were narrow and gloating. Just above them on the outer edge of the brow were two small horns. A perpetual grin and horns.

  It was not a gorilla’s face. It was the face of Satan, deli­cate and long, stamped onto an ape’s skull. The picture of the devil as inscribed in hundreds of thousands of medieval paintings.

  Jason did not remember getting to his feet. His body functioned even though his mind did not. His legs carried him past the lake, through more brush, and planted him firmly on the road. He realized too late that he was walking away from his car.

  Gradually the animals came alive again. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of frogs, beavers, and birds, but to Jason they coalesced into one night creature that swirled around, waiting to tear him to pieces and drag him underground.

  Blazing eyes lit up the trees along the road. Another monster’s breath shivered the land as it forged toward him. Jason feebly held up one hand to ward it off, but instead a horn blared, brakes screeched, and he sank to his knees on the pavement.

  The footsteps were wary.

  “Snakebite,” he gasped.

  “There’s a Ranger station down the road. Can you walk?”

  It was a young woman wearing a granny dress. She had thin, surprisingly strong hands that grasped him under the armpits and guided him to the car.

  Damn his luck, it was a Volkswagen, barely big enough for his legs. He rolled down the window and threw up. “Sorry,” he choked.

  “How long since it happened?”

  “Few minutes.”

  The girl was in her twenties, with a wide, spare, attractive face completely devoid of makeup. She shifted gears. The car turned back the way it had come. “Don’t worry. You’ve got time. But you’re lucky I came by.”

  Jason squirmed on the seat, trying to find a comfortable position.

  “It won’t work.” She smiled. “It happened to me once. You can’t get comfortable.”

  “I think I’m in love with you.”

  She laughed.

  “What’s your name, for my will?”

  “It’s Martha Lucas. And you won’t have to worry about your will. You’ll be fine.”

  He should have used bigger traps, long rectangular ones that would have taken its foot off completely. Set up ultraviolet lights. Poisoned the apples. Something. Something! He had almost caught a legend out there. Poor Buck. Poor, poor dog. No second chances for him.

  It was a long way to the Ranger station. The girl accelerated, glancing with concern at him.

  Jason tried to disassemble that thing’s face and put it back together more sensibly. He made it from the hair to the eyes before, retching, he passed out.

  The Indian watched the slow-­moving waters for some sign of the demon that had attacked his spirit. A porcupine rustled the foliage down the bank. The Indian killed it with an arrow and carefully plucked out the quills. He led the dog across the river, then handed the limp, denuded animal to him. “Take this to him. I’ll find more.”

  When the dog returned, the Indian had two squirrels and a chipmunk ready. The spirit was walking steadily southward, toward the mountains. At sunrise they left the dark woods and moved into a meadow at the base of the foothills.

  The spirit left blood everywhere, on boulder tops, mossy patches of ground, and green grass. He was no longer hiding his trail. Nor did he stop to rest as the sun continued rising. He walked with steady, sure steps, setting a grueling pace.

  The Indian realized that the spirit was on familiar ground. It knew every trail, every log, every blade of grass. They were coming to the end of their journey. Their goal was somewhere in the mountains.

  For two days and another night, the Indian lived only for his spirit. He butchered everything that walked, flew, or swam, shoveling bodies into the dog’s mouth to be delivered to the spirit like sacrifices on a conveyor belt.

  They crossed mountain foothills and climbed upward, the trees changing from lush thickness to lean, well-­spaced suppleness suitable for resisting blizzard winds.

  Patches of snow appeared on foggy trails and at night the wind, sharpened by mountain heights, was laden with icy grains. The Indian clutched his coat more tightly about him as they climbed, and wondered if they would climb so high they would step off the earth into ethereal transparency. The rational half of his mind realized the spirit was trying to get somewhere before his strength gave out entirely.

  “He ain’t a man,” he gasped to the dog. “Where’s his clothes? How come he don’t talk? You seen him—what kind of man looks like that? Grandaddy’s was a man. Grandaddy’s was a carpenter. Big Foot was just a short little guy. He can’t be Big Foot’s ghost. What is he? What is he?”

  The Indian gave out completely in a mountain meadow puddled with water and ringed by tall, mournful pines. With the dregs of his strength he managed to kill a rabbit. He skinned it, planning to give it to the dog. Instead, his hand delivered it to his own mouth. He sat on the ground, knowing it was a fatal mistake, because he would be unable to get up again. “I’m okay,” he muttered to the dog. “But I got to sleep. I’m okay. Tell him I’m sorry . . .” He fell backward into a reclining position and dropped off, the rabbit carcass still in his hand.

  The Indian did not know how long he had slept. The dog did not awaken him this time. He cracked his eyelids and saw moonlight gleaming off the glaciers of a mountain in the west. He sat slowly up. His blood seemed to have thickened to glue clogging his joints.

  Much to his relief, the dog was not gone. It was sitting placidly on the ground, finishing off what was left of the rabbit. The Indian tottered to his feet and that got the blood moving. “Where is he?”

  The dog yawned. The Indian whistled. His shriek broke up against many cliffs and returned to him in pieces.

  An owl hooted in a tree, then glided away across the moon. The dog cheerfully followed him around the clearing as he searched for prints.

  “I don’t get it. Go find him. Tell him I’m awake.”

  You don’t understand, the dog barked, wagging its tail. Listen.

  The Indian realized that a song had been playing for some moments. It came out of the sky and through the trees and up from the ground. The song faded to a distant smattering of applause, punctuated by an amplified voice congratulating skiers.

  The Indian pushed away foliage from bushes and caught his breath. The forest plunged downward to a valley, where it became flat meadow. A mile away, the land washed up again, like a frozen explosion, to another mountain. Midway up the mountain was a cluster of buildings with lighted windows and spotlights, like a l
uxurious ocean liner plunked down in the wilderness.

  Two separate groups of flickering colored lights descended ski trails that flanked the large central building. They crossed and intertwined, red over yellow, blue over green, in intricate patterns, a coiling jeweled necklace writhing in the velvet night.

  On the Indian’s side of the valley, a river cut through a deep canyon. A high steel-­braced bridge spanned a deep gorge that channeled the water into boiling foam. The road ribboned along the meadow, then ascended to the buildings.

  The colored ski torches congealed at the bottom of the slope to another ripple of applause. The stentorian voice boomed, “Aren’t they something, ladies and gentlemen?” His words were drowned out by whistles and shouted appreciation. “. . . back for the second show in one hour.”

  Journey’s end. The Indian rubbed the dog’s fur and played with its ears. “He has to let his foot get well. Will we spend the winter here?”

  No, we will just rest. The spirit led you here. He cares about you. There are soft beds and lights and music in those buildings. You can rest here, too, and sleep. See how warm it is over there?

  Again the Indian wondered how the dog spoke to him, as he had often wondered over the past months. His snout did not move, words did not come from his mouth, yet the Indian heard these replies in his own head. The voice sounded exactly like his own. “Hallucination,” the Army doctors would have called it. The Indian wished he could forget the words of the doctors and remember his grandfather’s instead.

  Gently the Indian grasped the dog’s muzzle in his hand. It was his friend, his bond to the spirit. He was not sick, as the doctors said; he was not imagining this. “Let’s go down,” he said to the dog.

  He led it down the slope into the meadow. He talked aloud to himself, getting his voice back in shape and practicing words. He would need many more words than he had used with this animal to speak to human beings.

  The valley road connected to the side of Colby Lodge, where passengers were unloaded. It widened into a parking lot behind the main building, where the service entrance was located.

  Lester Cole, who was working overtime that night, finished his dishes at eleven, climbed into his pickup truck with the jackrabbit racing suspension and hood blister under which was housed a supercharger, tuned into a country-­music station, and hurried down the road to his poker game.

  He rattled over the bridge and honked at the Volks­wagen van going up. The van was emblazoned with a cartoon of a bear on skis, wearing a peaked cap and scarf, under which were the words COLBY LODGE. Skis and luggage were tied to the roof rack. Lester thought it was high time Jack Helder, Colby’s owner, bought a proper bus for the place.

  The radio hissed when the woods closed around him. He watched the white road dividers slide from the headlight beams under his truck like thrown spears. He was changing stations when a man stepped out of an old logging road near the bridge, right in the middle of a white line.

  “Jesus!”

  Lester hit the horn and brake. The man was covered with hair from head to foot. He flung up an arm to ward off the light.

  Lester swerved to a stop on the road shoulder in a shower of gravel. He slipped the rifle from the rack behind him and climbed out of the truck.

  His ragged breath made crystalline little puffs in the frosty air. His father had told him about a Bigfoot that came up to his camp one night while he slept. His biggest mistake was in not shooting it and bringing home a hunk of the body to sell.

  Lester heard leaves stir in the trees. He selected a black square of forest and fired four shots into it. The shot echoes rolled around the hills like billiard balls.

  A rock flew out with such speed that its trajectory was perfectly flat for a hundred feet and punched a dent in the truck fender. The second and third rocks smashed respectively the side mirror and the windshield. The fourth rock nearly hit him in the head.

  Lester’s nerve broke, as it always did when he was challenged. He jumped into his truck and roared hell for leather down the road toward the Augusta County Ranger Station.

  OBJECTIVE

  6

  Simon Helder’s third and final heart attack occurred as he sat in the Denver office of his land-­development firm eating an egg-­salad sandwich in defiance of his doctor’s orders. At the time of his death, his son Jack was skiing in Vail, Colorado. As per his father’s instructions, Jack had packed a black suit in case Daddy croaked while the boy was out of town and had to fly to the funeral. “Daddy said he had no intention of lying around a house full of machinery to keep him going,” said Jack to one of a number of women who passed through his bed that winter. “He said he’s had it and I better take a long vacation because his probate is going to be expensive. Daddy always was a practical man.”

  After Daddy’s death armies of lawyers clashed with the tax authorities over a piece of land—an entire valley, actually—the old man had bought in a secluded area of Washington State. The valley was called Colby, after the mountain that dominated it.

  Jack Helder flew out to look at the place. He promptly fell in love with its isolation, its purity, its delicious shape. The whole area was too high in elevation for a planned community unless it was planned for Eskimos. Maybe his father had dreamed of retiring to a hunting lodge there. Maybe he liked to tell his friends he owned a gold mine, for the north face of the mountain was littered with the crumbled remains of a ghost town called Ohara­ville and a played-­out mine. Whatever his reasons, the government would chew Jack to pieces over taxes unless something was done to prove that the valley was a business venture. Jack loved the valley so much that he would have gone to bed with it if possible. Failing that, he decided to ravish it with his supreme expression of love for the land: a ski lodge.

  They cleared trees on Colby’s east face. They built a giant central lodge with them and surrounded it with bungalows. Jack Helder put in plumbing, a modern kitchen and dining room, landscaped two ski trails out of the mountain, mounted artificial snow machines on the slopes, laid the foundation for a swimming pool, and ran out of money. Running out of money was a new and novel experience for Jack Helder.

  He moved from Denver to the lodge. He opened months earlier than planned. His office had a smashing view of the area. His desk was polished, fitted pine trunks. He had booked forty percent of capacity for the next five months, and reservations were still coming in. Life was good. He enjoyed roughing it, so long as he had electricity.

  Outside his office door came the jarring sounds of a waiter’s angry voice. He looked up from his bills. His office door banged open, and in stepped the most bizarre human apparition he had ever seen. An Indian, accompanied by a dog which left tracks on the carpet, shook off restraining hands and loomed over Helder’s desk with eyes so dark and deep that the lodge owner felt he could dive into them and swim downward forever without hitting bottom.

  He slid his chair a respectful distance back from the desk. The Indian meant business, and he had all kinds of advantages, particularly surprise.

  “Hello. May I help you?”

  A waiter answered, “He sneaked in the service entrance, Jack.”

  Helder waved the waiters back. They hovered at the doorway.

  “I want a job,” said the Indian, in a surprisingly high and soft voice. “That’s all. This is your place, ain’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Helder, pleased, favoring the Indian with a glazed smile. “How did you guess?”

  “I saw your office. I came in the back, and they jumped me.” The Indian looked at the waiters.

  Helder’s eyes traveled from the Indian’s clothes, which were so tattered they barely made it as drapery strips, to the knobby knuckles clutching a homemade bow, to the face, which was largely cheekbone. He took in his matted hair and odorous presence. “What kind of a job did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t give a shit. Clean the crappers. Swe
ep the floors.”

  “I see. And what kind of salary?”

  “I don’t want no money. I just want a job.”

  Now that was intriguing! “I don’t get it. What do you want a job for if not money?”

  “I’m going to be camping around here. I just thought I’d ask.” Abruptly, the Indian walked to Helder’s picture window. He stood so close to it that his breath fogged the glass. Helder saw his eyes, button-­bright and black, spot the valley features still visible: the line of forest, the silver thread of the river, and the dark meadow. His eyes flicked like an animal’s. For an instant Helder had the odd feeling the Indian was not quite human.

  Helder shrugged at the waiters. Common sense notwithstanding, Helder was a gregarious man, and intrigued by the stranger. He was an honest-­to-­God schoolboy’s Indian. He was all the distilled fantasies about Natural Man, the Wild West, and the Noble Savage in one. Thinking of Apache movies, Helder found himself blurting, “Can you ride a horse?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t know why I asked that. We don’t have stables yet.” He felt the full weight of the waiters’ astonished attention on him. “That’s about all I can think of. We’re underfinanced right now, and pretty well full up. You can fill out a résumé, though. Sorry.”

  The Indian shrugged and walked to the door, where the waiters parted for him.

  “Just a second! The bow and arrow.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you any good with it?”

  A gently mischievous smile illuminated the sharp face. The Indian’s eyes rested on the long-­stemmed wineglass from which Helder had just drunk his post-­dinner port. The lodge owner wondered if he was not making the biggest mistake of his life. “I was just asking. Oh no . . .”

  The Indian held the glass out to him. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Oh, I realize that, but I wasn’t serious. I mean this kind of William Tell stuff . . .” Helder flapped his hands in embarrassment.