The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  The Indian thanked the Black Robes of the mission school. God was good, or at least encouraging. Now the only problem was to get up there. He could not exactly levitate straight up.

  He found a fallen tunnel beam down the tunnel. Moving it would have been sheerest agony under any other circumstances, but hope gave him strength. He rolled it down to beneath the hole and, with an effort that should have broken his back, propped it against the wall. It was separated from the ceiling by a good six feet.

  He wrestled another beam down and propped it next to the first. Then, carefully, nearly crushing his fingers in the process, the Indian moved it on top of the first. Wood against wood was slippery, and the walls were soft and gravelly. Using the first beam as a ramp for the second, the Indian braced his feet on the floor and slid the second beam’s blunt wooden end against the soft rock.

  The wall crumbled out a steady stream of muck and gravel. Then bits of the ceiling fell, widening the hole until finally it touched the wall.

  The Indian shimmied up the beam and found a weak foothold in the wall. With his aluminum bow he dug away at the rock, forming more weak niches to serve as handholds. Then he clutched at these irregularities like a fly ascending a wall. His fingers poked through the hole, touched squishy mud and grass, and he pulled himself up and out of the earth like a man rising from the dead.

  He was in a ghost town, dead center in a main street that petered out to rocky bluffs preceding more woods, everlastingly damned, lonesome woods. It was bitterly cold, although the snowfall had almost stopped and the wind had died. There were other sinkholes pocking the street, closer to Colby’s slopes, all but obscured by tons of rubble.

  The Indian crept through the dead town on delicate feet, careful not to force another sinkhole. Not until he was in the woods again, hemmed in by the whispering pines, did he really believe he had escaped.

  He prepared himself to die. Better to die on the earth than go mad beneath it. It would be a satisfactory death, if not a noble one. Killing that natliskeliguten was a barren honor, for it had done much murder before he even realized what it was. He had even helped it by sending it food, by keeping it alive.

  His spirit. His protector.

  He would have to die nameless.

  The Indian sat in the snow, feeling the cold. It would be a painless death, something like falling asleep, an endless, dreamless sleep. They would find him frozen, his face expressing no anguish.

  He closed his eyes and waited for death.

  The cold sank into his bones, but death did not come.

  Something irritated his mind, standing between him and death. A thought of some kind. Now that was interesting! A thought was trying to protect him from death.

  His protector.

  Somebody had protected him like a spirit all this time!

  Then, piece by piece, memories surged up from the well of his consciousness like a movie film of an exploding castle run backward, so that it re-­formed itself into a fortress. It glittered and shone with the pure fire of truth.

  The Indian opened his eyes. He knew what his spirit was!

  He covered his face and wept. He was still weeping as the storm passed on to ravage other mountains and the sun slowly rose over the diminished broken hulk of Mount Colby.

  THE SPIRIT

  17

  Drake had expected to find Jason within minutes after arriving at the glowing pile of embers that had once been Colby Lodge. He dispatched Taylor into the woods after him with instructions to bring him back, spitting and hissing if necessary. “Mr. Jason’s going to need himself a lawyer for this one.” Then to Martha he said, “Why in hell didn’t you tell me about this Indian!”

  “I was going to. We were going to. We thought he’d leave—”

  “Where is he now!”

  She pointed up the mountain. “Jason thinks he went up there after the Bigfoot.”

  “To the mine!”

  At which point Martha broke down into tears at the transformation of Drake from a Ranger into a very bad-tempered policeman. Drake informed the state police by radio that a fugitive from Canada was missing and presumed dead. “Unless he’s a mole,” Drake snarled. “It’ll save us all the trouble of burying him.” He passed out hot rolls and coffee and arranged to have Martha trucked to the Garrison hospital, where her injuries could be repaired.

  After half an hour, Taylor and Wallace came out of the woods, followed by the others. “We lost the trail after about a hundred yards and didn’t find it again. Do you want to start a real search?”

  “Damned right,” Drake replied. He called the state police back and told them a man was lost in the area around Colby. Last seen heading north over the slide area, wearing an orange snowmobile suit and carrying a gun and flashlight.

  By the end of the following day the countywide alert for Raymond Jason had become a statewide one. Drake spent a fruitless hour circling Mount Colby in a helicopter while several men poked around mine tunnels for some sign of John Moon. They found nothing. “There’s a lot of sinkholes, though,” said Taylor. “He might have been lucky. He might still be in there somewhere.”

  They would spend days at the mine, clearing away tunnels, tapping on walls, calling out Moon’s name. Perhaps they would hear rocks tapping in answer. Or perhaps they might find something else down there. But Drake did not think so. John Moon was gone.

  At four in the afternoon, he was sitting in his truck, watching the men clear debris away from the mine entrance, when the radio beeped. The hospital had called back about the blood. “Drake, it’s human all right, but we don’t know what type. I’m going to put it down as unclassified.”

  Lester Cole might have been a creep, but he was not the type to carve up people on his kitchen table. Whatever he had had in that trailer did not look human to him. Yet blood will tell. Drake had had enough of this business. It was time to consider a little bit of burying in the files. If there were other Bigfoots, leave them be. Leave the whole thing be.

  At five o’clock, a car bounced down the Oharaville road. Martha Lucus stepped out, walking carefully to avoid disturbing her taped ribs. Drake was eating cottage cheese from a cup. He rolled down his window.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  He chewed reflectively looking over her pale, wan face and shabby clothes. They had retrieved some of her luggage from the ruins of the lodge. “There’ll be an inquiry, so I wouldn’t go anywhere for a couple days. But you aren’t under arrest or anything like that.” He opened the door to the truck and let her inside. “You better get into bed or something before you catch pneumonia. Where’s Wood­ard?”

  “I saw him jogging past the motel. He says it calms him down.”

  Drake was scraping the last of the cottage cheese from the bottom of his cup. “This Indian might have come out okay if he’d turned himself in. You and Wood­ard could have backed him up. I don’t know about Jason, though. I don’t know.” He crumpled up the cottage-­cheese container and dropped it in the litter bag. “What does he want with these things, anyway?”

  She remembered Jason’s tight face, his self-­absorption, his congenital unease. “A trophy, I suppose. If anybody can get that female, he can. Have you found any sign of her at all?”

  “Nope,” said Drake. “Which doesn’t surprise me in the least. She’s real good at staying hidden. There’s been people who’ve hunted these things for years and never found a sign of one.”

  “Not like these. These are smarter.”

  Drake let it drop.

  “Do you think you’ll find Jason?” she asked after a moment.

  “Oh sure, we’ll find Jason.”

  “How long do these searches take?”

  “For a normal person, about four or five days. For a dead one, just a couple. But for Mr. Jason. Well, now, he could hide in those woods forever. Or he could head on south till he hits Californ
ia, living off the land like that Indian. And he could walk into a phone booth and call us up and say the hell with it, I’m tired of following this thing. Pick me up. Does that sound like Jason?”

  “No,” she replied. “He’ll never give up.”

  “That’s what I mean. We’ll find Mr. Jason when he wants us to find him.” He leaned forward to watch the heli­copter that still circled Mount Colby. “I wouldn’t spread this around, you know. I’d hate the taxpayers to think we were wasting their money looking for somebody who’s not going to be found.”

  All this for an animal that nobody ever heard of. Drake snorted in the truck cab. The whole bunch of them were made for each other.

  Raymond Jason leaned over the bank and looked into the mountain stream. A wild animal looked back at him, a forest creature, bearded, with fierce eyes. He sloshed cold water around in his mouth, then spat it out.

  He was on a little peninsula of sand jutting into a stream, a good twenty or thirty miles south of Colby, or so he calculated. The female was still on the run. He could not believe her stamina. He expected to find her body under every bush, but so far that had not happened. It was a spotty trail, but he knew where to look—hard ground, spongy grass, surfaces that did not retain prints—and always he found blood. She could not have that much blood left. Even elephants did not have that much blood.

  He placed another branch on his fire. It was banked and low so she could not see it. He polished his pistol. He did that a lot when he rested. Just sat on the ground and polished the gun with a carefully cleaned cloth. Minutes before he had shot a bird for dinner. He dropped the empty cartridge on the ground and replaced it with a good one.

  Yesterday he had almost been sighted by a helicopter. They were still looking for him. Let them look! He would return with a body or he would not return at all.

  Not return?

  He stopped polishing. Why did he say that?

  Not without a body, that’s what he said. He resumed polishing.

  He might have been wrong about her being the last one. She could be leading him to others somewhere. If so, Raymond Jason might find himself in a nasty predicament. They were good at ambushes, as he recalled from the male’s activity at the lake. And the bus. And the crash in Canada. All of them ambushes. They could lure you on . . .

  He should call for help. He should get to a phone and contact the Rangers.

  Except what if they took so long the trail got cold?

  Forget it.

  He didn’t want to face Drake. Fat Drake. The bile churned in Jason’s stomach at the memory of that fat, stolid face. He would like to put a fist through that face. The same held for the others, Martha of the gray eminent face, a mole living in papers, and Wood­ard. Even Kimberly played by the ridiculous rules. Christ! The dregs. Only a carcass of something incredible would shield him from their scoffing, their papers and depositions, their stupid questions. Look what I found! You did not believe in such things until I showed you!

  Jason stirred the fire. He was getting good in the woods. Tracking came naturally to him now. Once he had been a Boy Scout and liked it. They had taught him how to carve an atlatl, an Indian spear thrower. He should think about that; his ammo would not last forever. A man could do anything if he set his mind to it. Maybe he’d make a bow and arrow like that Indian . . .

  That Indian.

  What was his name again?

  Jason crushed his temples with his fists. Wait a minute here, calm down, it’ll come back. You’ve had your mind on this thing too much. You talked to that Indian only . . . when?

  Christ Jesus. How many days had he been doing this?

  One day. Two days. No, more, many more than that. When had he seen the helicopter? Yesterday. No. Not yesterday, longer. Much longer . . .

  Raymond Jason was scared. This was going too far now. Time to call it quits. Get to a phone and call somebody. Go on back to Kansas City. “Damn right,” he said out loud to the fire, slapping his hands on his knees. “To hell with her. To hell with the whole thing.”

  Suddenly she was with him.

  She had materialized from the forest, as massive as a mountain and light as a wraith. She stood on the peninsula between the fire and the trees, breathing with a slight wheeze, the flames congealed into two green stars where her eyes would be. He could not tell if she carried rocks or not.

  She did not know he had seen her. His fingers tightened on the pistol. He raised it to chest level.

  And then, as silently as she had arrived, she was gone. She made no sound on the gravel. No thrash of trees marked her movement. She was absorbed into the timbers as though she had never quite left them.

  With a curse Jason kicked out the fire. His exhaustion was dissolved, his hunger diminished, his fears gone. He sprang into the trees after her, hard on the trail once again, every nerve in his body tingling for conquest.

  Much later the Indian found the campfire.

  The ashes of the fire were scattered across the little sand spit. He noted with some relief that the bootprints led south. It was warmer that way.

  The Indian’s moccasined feet padded around the sand, his eyes raking it for a sign. Finally he found one. A shell casing from a .38-­caliber revolver.

  Gently the Indian picked it up, wiping off the sand. The smell of powder was cold. It had not been fired in hours.

  It was his talisman. The Indian smiled in satisfaction as he dropped it into the medicine bundle.

  He wept no longer about his own foolishness and the way he had treated Raymond Jason. He accounted himself luckier than most men. He had destroyed a devil and found his spirit. He knew it was a spirit, for it belonged to a mortal whom he had killed with a rifle butt in Canada. His memory had returned.

  Painted in hard pastel outlines in the center of his memory was a helicopter spinning downward in a swirl of lights to a shattering crash in the forest. Next to that memory was another one of a surprised white face looking up from behind a rifle as spruce branches were swept away, the mouth open in surprise just before the rifle butt hit.

  Sometimes the Indian wondered what the man was going to say just before dying. Beware of the giant. You are betrayed. Something on that order. And though the flesh had died, the ghost had dogged his footsteps. He had tried to kill the devil for him in a river. He had tried to make him remember him at the archery field. And he had spoken the truth on the floor of that little hut as the Indian debated whether to shoot him.

  Strange thought. You could not kill a ghost.

  Over and over the ghost had warned him about the giant and the Indian had not listened. His protector. His spirit.

  The Indian plunged his hands into the ashes of the campfire. The bottom was warm. The fire was about twelve hours old. He looked over at the woods, half hoping the apparition in the orange suit would appear to give him his name, but he knew it was not there. It was farther south. It was running, though he did not know why. One never knew why spirits did anything.

  When he met him, he would apologize to him. Perhaps they would apologize to each other. Both had much to forgive. They might meet tonight. If not, then tomorrow. Or the day after, whenever the spirit was ready.

  The Indian splashed cold water on his face and dried it with his sleeve. Night was falling again, and he should get moving, for that was when the spirit walked. Lovingly, patiently, and loyally, the Indian followed the bootprints into the woods, on the trail of the spirit of a mortal who had once been called Raymond Jason.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas Walker Page is the author of four novels: The Hephaestus Plague, Skyfire, The Man Who Would Not Die and The Spirit. The Hephaestus Plague was made into the movie Bug by William Castle. Page also has extensive work in advertising and technical writing. He resides in Santa Monica.

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