The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  “You mean now?”

  “Yeah. You’ll have to go through Oharaville. Helder said the bridge was out. Take some extra lights and a tow truck. And all the firepower you want, short of flame throwers.”

  “If I see one of those things, boss, I’ll kill it.”

  “You do that. Just don’t shoot somebody in a fur coat.”

  Drake poured coffee into a cup and stirred slowly. Wouldn’t you think Helder had batteries for that radio? Maybe he didn’t know where to put them. Drake would like to tell Helder where to stick his batteries.

  Wallace and Jones dressed in quilted jackets next to the tow truck in the garage. Both carried heavy .30.30 deer rifles with starlight scopes for night shooting.

  Wallace took down two snowmobile helmets and handed one to Jones.

  “You’re kidding,” said Jones.

  “I’m not kidding. They throw rocks, remember? That’s what Lester said the first time he saw one.”

  Jones sighed and took the helmet. They climbed into the truck cab and started the heater. As they drove out, Wallace lowered his window a bit and put out the gun muzzle. He was ready for anything. Jones hoped the grease in the rifle didn’t freeze up just when they needed it.

  15

  They barricaded the lounge as best they could.

  Duane reinforced the Grizzly Bar windows with chairs and propped tables, the loading entrance with a sofa, which he wedged against the corner, and the sliding wooden doors connecting the lounge to the gallery with coffee tables. The service-­entrance door to the kitchen was off its hinges, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Shortly after the fire was doused, the cold began sucking heat from the room. The lantern metal gave off warmth, so Martha kept her hands close to one.

  From the parking lot came the steady squeak of springs being compressed. The squeaking continued for a minute, getting louder and louder; then the wall of the shop split and burst inward.

  Blankets, paintings, archery equipment, sunglasses— all the paraphernalia in the shop tumbled off the walls. Duane Wood­ard opened the sliding lounge doors an inch or so and looked at the shop. He was just able to see the wall, which was seamed with cracks and bulged inward. Martha Lucas’s Volkswagen had been overturned and pushed against it.

  The car was pulled upright. Then it crunched against the wall again, knocking down wooden slats and buckling the ceiling.

  When the car was pulled back a second time, there was a hole in the wall through which snow blew. Duane aimed the rifle, expecting the beast.

  He kept waiting. He was at the door as a rock smashed against the metal sun-­deck shutters behind him. The glass collapsed in tinkling sheets, and a pimple of aluminum protruded inward. More rocks hit the shutters, tattooing their way down toward the shuttered dining-­room windows.

  “It’s trying to draw fire,” Duane whispered to Martha. “Keep me pinned down with this hole and raise hell everywhere else.” Smart son of a bitch. The open hole was a breach in their defenses which they could not cover yet could not leave. One of them always had to keep an eye on it.

  Again there came that tearing stillness, that violent silence that weighed more heavily than the bluntest attack. This time it dragged out into five full minutes. “Listen, do you think Helder kept batteries for the radio in his office?”

  “He’s very disorganized. If he does, I don’t know where they are.” She still spoke of him in the present tense, as though he were alive.

  “If you can find them, I can fix the radio and we’ll have some Rangers up here in five minutes. Check his office, and take a light with you.” Wood­ard edged back to the center of the lounge, where he could watch the shop and her in the office simultaneously.

  She went through his desk. No wonder he couldn’t find anything—his food bills were in the folder with heat and electricity, a bill for a cord of wood was stuffed back in a drawer. No batteries. They probably moldered in a box down in the basement somewhere.

  Alone for the first time all night, she tried to collect her thoughts. This thing was pure concentrated hatred. It or they were not merely wrecking the lodge, but trying to get at them. This was not patience living on a hill watching humans scurry about, this was a primal rage that broke all restraints, including that of self-­preservation. Martha sensed that some particular incident must have caused it. Maybe the male’s return. Maybe. Though the attacks hadn’t started until the incident with Lester Cole. Perhaps there was some connection.

  Glass tinkled from a bungalow down in the woods.

  “Duane!” she called softly. “It’s down at the bungalows.”

  “What’s it doing down there?”

  “Maybe it’s going away.” She put her ear to the shuttered window to listen.

  The shutters exploded on both sides of her. Two arms preceded by serpentine fingers broke through and closed around her chest like a vise, hugging her to the wall. “Duane—” she said weakly.

  The beast had thrown the rocks to the bungalows to lure her to the wall. The pressure around her chest was beyond belief. Her breath squeezed out, and a groan was all she managed before blacking out in a dim haze shot with blood.

  Duane Wood­ard smashed at those arms with his rifle. He pried at them with the muzzle and nearly sobbed in frustration as they crushed her with her feet off the floor like a bug banded against the wall with metal staples. There seemed nothing left of her body between breasts and hips.

  He shoved the rifle muzzle through a crack between Martha’s body and the arm and felt it hit flesh. He pulled the trigger. The hands unclasped, the arms snaked out of the wall, and Martha slid to the floor, a small trail of blood trickling from a corner of her mouth.

  He frantically searched out a pulse as the feet chuffed down the sun deck and around the corner, headed for the shop wall. Her pulse was strong and regular and her breathing deep although ragged. She had probably broken several ribs.

  He ran into the lounge as the beast crashed through the wall of the shop and into the gallery. He fired toward the partially open sliding doors. The Bigfoot paused, then pushed hard, scattering the furniture like toy boxes. It ducked back as he fired again.

  The door shuddered, then split, and the sliding rail tore loose from the ceiling. The doors fell inward with a final grunt of effort and seesawed over the piled furniture. Duane aimed and fired. He hit it. The thing howled. It picked up a sofa and threw it as Duane fired a third time and found himself out of ammunition.

  It was a female. The chest rippled with soft breast flesh, and it was smaller and lighter than the beast that had chased him across the meadow.

  He threw the puny rifle at her, and she caught it. She broke it in half and came for him, arms reaching out, the hands passing in and out of shadows from the feeble lantern light. The other one had walked fifty miles without a toe. Her fur was thick, her body massive and quick. She seemed almost unhampered by her wound.

  Duane backed up and stumbled over a sofa. She tried to close with him. He ducked away, nearly fainting from the musky stench, and grabbed a poker. He faked a move toward the gallery, trying to keep her away from Helder’s office. She moved to block him, and he jabbed her with the poker. He was rewarded with a screech that impelled him to try again. She flicked a huge arm, and he ducked and jabbed hard. This time the tip came back coated with blood.

  As they circled each other, Duane deliberately avoided looking at her face. Those hands that opened and closed spasmodically, those fingers—they were the real danger.

  Duane grabbed a lantern and flung it to the floor. It exploded in a sloppy pressurized burst of kerosene that flooded the floor and drizzled in rivulets on the walls. So much for animals being frightened by fire. She stepped, fur-­armored and untouched, right through the stuff and kept coming. He swung the poker at her head, felt it graze the thick skull. She grabbed the poker out of his hands and tosse
d into the fireplace.

  Her breath floated out in a steamy cloud, forming ice crystals over the fur on her chest and face. He heard a snowmobile buzz on the road.

  Abruptly, she rushed him. He swung his hand edge outward like an ax, but missed completely, for she bashed the furniture and went full length through the plate-­glass window of the shop. From the shop she ran through the hole to confront the returning snowmobile.

  In that moment of stalemate Duane managed to beat the fire out with a rug. He ran into the office to find Martha Lucas sitting up on the floor, her hand holding her chest.

  The lodge had disappeared. The lights were out. Jason crested the drive to the parking apron before realizing that the building was almost in front of him. He saw a burst of flame through chinks in the Grizzly Bar window, then furniture thumping around.

  He took out his pistol again as the female burst from the shop wall in a flying edge of broken planking and dashed down the parking lot. He gave chase, narrowly avoiding braining himself on the fallen power pole, swerving between Helder’s Cadillac and the overturned Volkswagen, but she was well into the woods behind the bungalows when he reached the corner.

  His pistol was empty, anyway. He crouched against the wall and reloaded it. He fired into the woods to light up the trees. Nothing moved. Nothing lived. But she was there.

  Jason stood guard at the little blood spot where Helder’s head had lain as Duane Wood­ard moved Martha Lucas into the lounge and laid her on the sofa.

  Jack Helder.

  A house whose owner has died is the loneliest place in the world. The lodge seemed permanently weakened by his absence, a sort of orphan without whose loving parents the walls would collapse as surely as a house of cards under the slightest pressure.

  It was not entirely a delusion. The lounge, kitchen, dining room, everything at ground level was hopelessly vulnerable. It was punctured by weak points which could no longer sustain any attack. The metal shutters would fall if Jason fired.

  “Raymond, where’s Moon?” asked Martha.

  “He went after the male.”

  “Why?”

  Jason knew he could not limn in words the details that would describe Moon’s change after seeing the bodies. “Let’s just say he saw the light.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “I couldn’t. He walked right past me. He gave me the toe, you see? And I lost it.”

  “That’s why you took your time coming back,” said Wood­ard.

  “I’m sorry. How could I know you two were alone? Look, this is no good. She could knock on doors and draw fire until we run out of bullets. Is there one solid room in this place?”

  “Maybe downstairs. The game room.” Martha coughed at the acrid smoke hanging in the air.

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s part of the foundation. The only way through is oak doors. There’s a corridor going in front of it to the furnace and generator room. Jack had to dynamite it out of rock.”

  Jason helped her sit up. Something was wrong with her ribs all right. She was in intense pain, both psychic and physical, and trying hard not to show it. Jason found himself admiring her a bit more than objectively.

  Something rattled the shutters, freezing them into statues before they realized it was a branch. “We better do something,” said Duane Wood­ard. “We’re all going to go nuts if we don’t do something.”

  “Martha, did Helder have a flare gun?”

  “No.”

  “What about those ski torches they use in the show? Where did he keep those?”

  “In the snowmobile shed. He was afraid of spontaneous combustion.”

  Jason kicked at a footstool. “Terrific! She’s boxed us up like a present. We can’t shoot flares, we can’t call anybody on the radio, we can’t do anything. All right. Load up, Wood­ard. Let’s take a look at the game room.”

  Cozy was the ideal Helder had aimed for with the game room. A quiet, secure place where people could wait out blizzards at pinball machines, card tables, and televisions, or lounge in artfully arranged corners filled with overstuffed furniture. It was a miniature of the lounge upstairs, less spacious, with a smaller fireplace, but a compact little standing bar, low ceiling, and exposed beams. Since they were below ground level, there were no windows. Jason lit the candleholders embedded in the beams and spaced the lanterns around.

  They moved pinball machines and sofas to the door. They lifted the machines off their casters. They were heavier than any furniture.

  The storm was muted by the plaster-­and-­stone wall to a distant roar. If she gets us in here, Jason thought, she’ll have earned her heads.

  Somewhere on a great golden plaque outlining the sins of Man, stupidity was underlined with heavenly forcefulness. Poor, poor humans. They should not depend on their gods so much, because their gods were too much like them. Well, his grandfather had warned him of that, too.

  The Indian ran over the snow, following the footprints of the giant, deliberately not using the word betrayal in his thoughts, for he would fall down and cry. All that was left was a chance to redeem himself, some tiny sliver of pride to polish as a shield against the monstrous humiliation he felt.

  Under the Indian’s running feet, the ground began a slow steady rise up a slope. The Indian paused only long enough to empty his medicine bundle of the accumulated garbage it contained—chicken foot, corn kernels, clay pipe, the worthless crucifix, even the medal—while following the plowed-­up snowdrifts the running giant had left. From time to time the wind shifted, bringing down the thing’s smell. It was frightened. Good.

  He lost the trail in the sparse, tangled trees and rocky ledges of the higher slope. He leaned against one of the pines pushing up through the tangle of broken rock terraces to catch his breath and plan his next move. The driving wind made his eyes water, and he rubbed away tears until the flesh was sore.

  Smoke.

  The Indian sniffed the freezing wind. Again he smelled the lightest delicate touch of wood smoke, coloring the blizzard as gossamer-­pink colors the air. There were no houses up here.

  The smell led him to a cave higher up on the slope. It was like a mouth concealed under shelves of rock. Mixed with it was the odor of the giant. The Indian pulled himself up to the entrance and strung an arrow onto the bow. He stepped just inside the cave, out of the wind, and listened.

  He was in a narrow passageway connecting to a mine shaft. Light shone in a faint smoky glow down this tunnel. The miners had broken into this cave.

  The Indian crept forward to the shaft entrance and looked down it. The light came from rudimentary candles made of animal fat poured into rock depressions on the walls. The wicks were pieces of brush that sputtered and hissed. These smoky flickering lights lined the walls all the way down to a corner. Mixed with the acrid smoke and giant smell was the overpowering one of spoiled meat.

  Lying by the opening between cave and tunnel was a neatly stacked, roughly human-­shaped pile of rocks. The smell came from it. The grave was surrounded by a circle of carefully arranged acorns. It was a small grave, signifying the death of a child.

  The spirits went when the world changed. The white man brought his own spirits. Let his spirits protect you, John, otherwise you’re as naked as a child.

  Don’t think about it. The Indian skirted the grave and stepped into the tunnel. In doing so, he walked into a horror that nearly made him faint.

  Several cubicles had been blasted out of the rock by miners and used for storage areas. Some were still in use. There was an ancient pile of pickaxes, pitons, and old candlelamp hats stacked in one, along with a fiberglass helmet stamped with the name Jameson. Some of the cubicles had also been used as graves, but of a different type from the one on the floor. Here the bodies had lain exposed. All that was left were bones, complete skeletons like none the Indian had ever seen in his life.


  The bones belonged to infants so deformed that they could not have survived a single hour after birth. He turned up one tiny skull with a single eyehole set on one side, a misaligned jaw with huge incisors and a thinned layer of bone where the other eye should be. He found spines looped in circles, legs that articulated backward, doglike crouching demons with little human heads, and one skull fused tightly to a breastbone without a neck. They were tiny, pitiable bones.

  His spirit was a monster. The white man had been right. The Indian had seen deformities before, mostly misbred dogs and horses, weak and sickly and crippled. Those were one-­shot accidents. This nightmare had taken generations to produce.

  The smoke thickened against the ceiling, flowing its silent way upward. There were cracks in the roof, through which it disappeared. The tunnel had careful, constant ventilation. The Indian followed the lights. He passed a cubicle whose roof had been chipped to a cone with a smoke hole in the center. Hickory branches smoldered on a rock shelf. Sides of meat—deer, bear, squirrel, even fish—were stacked and hung from branch crosspieces.

  Around a corner was a vaulted room with a light that painted the opposite room. Upon this wall the Indian saw the shadow of the giant, elongated and wavering with each flicker of flame. He drew back his arrow and stepped in front of the entrance.

  The giant was standing by a large candle. He had been waiting for the Indian.

  A small niche had been carved into the wall at floor level. Surrounding it was a pile of acorns. Within the niche was a human skull propped on a metal miner’s spike that had been rammed into the rock.

  For a moment the only sound was the crackle of the burning hickory branches and the beating of their own hearts. The Indian looked squarely into the giant’s face.

  “Natliskeliguten,” said the Indian.

  The red eyes went down to the bow and arrow. His breath wheezed out of the thin nostrils. Then the horned face looked up at the Indian again, and the mouth split in a grin revealing large yellowed molars.

  “You betrayed me,” the Indian said. “You kill people. You’re no spirit. You can’t give me a name.”