by SA Sidor
“Stay away from me!” he yelled.
The Beast smashed Billy against the wall. The Kid’s body left a man-sized red print. Then the Beast flung him to the floor. Wu and I were under the wagon. Billy’s faceless head slammed down right in front of us. His bad eye popped out of the socket. His teeth chattered together incessantly. The Beast stepped on his denuded skull. Billy’s good eye bulged only briefly. Bone shattered. The Beast’s hoof pressed flat. It was making a gurgling noise deep in its throat. It took me a moment to realize that the sound was laughter. The Beast found this amusing.
“No, no, no! Get back, you monster,” Pops said. His legs staggered in hasty retreat.
Pops slipped on the spilled rum and landed on his back. Moving quicker than I imagined him capable, the surgeon flipped onto his stomach and spidered underneath the wagon.
The Beast used a claw-nail to scrape up Billy’s cranial leftovers. We could not see it, but we heard licking and the soft musical humming of the creature’s delight. It ate the rest of the Kid.
Pops said, “Maybe it’ll attack the horses next and leave us alone.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that. Raton has plenty of livestock. The Beast prefers humans.”
Pops considered this. His weak, grizzled chin bobbing as he tried to outthink the eater. He was drenched in fearful body sweat and to say he smelled worse than a goat is insulting to goats.
He pushed his scalpel at me.
“You’re going next,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Get out from under my wagon. I’ll take your eye if you don’t.”
I had my cane blade inches from his torso but I supposed he was too afraid to notice. We had no time to debate which of us might grievously harm the other in a battle to see who might be consumed first. The decision had already been made.
A claw skewered Pops’ ankle. The Beast dragged him out from under the wagon. He tried to dig himself into the floor. But stone doesn’t yield. He left scratches though, ten little white lines etched into the rock. Not that it would’ve made any difference but he forgot to take his scalpel with him. In the final tussle he wrapped an arm through one of the wagon wheels. The Beast yanked and a spoke snapped. So did Pops’ forearm. It wasn’t any quieter after that. They might’ve been flying. We heard windy noises. Blunt impacts. Sucking liquid crunches like a man shoveling mud into a washtub. Pops’ voice echoing, bouncing around the alcove. The horses were shrieking, kicking at their corral. The Beast’s high-pitched whistle covered it up – mostly.
Mostly. But not all of it. Pops talked to God for perhaps the only time in his life.
“OPLEASEHELPMEOGODPUUUHLEEEZZZZZZ!”
God didn’t help.
I put my arm around Wu’s shoulders. I was surprised to feel the rum barrel at his side.
“Wu, my young friend, we’re going to make a run for it. Out the front end of the wagon, right there. It’s only a short distance and we’re clear of this niche. I bet you can jump that skimpy gate. It’s a blizzard out there. Easy to hide. Hard for the Beast to follow. And a fast runner like you…? You keep the mountain wall on your right. Around that first bend is the door to Nightfall. Run. Leave the barrel with me. Keep your head down. Don’t stop until you’re inside the doors. Scream until everyone comes to see what you’re yelling about. Don’t let Miss Evangeline come out here. I don’t want her to see this. Now I’m right behind you. When I slap you on the back, you move. Ready?”
Wu nodded.
I gave his shoulder a squeeze and then I slapped him hard on the back.
“Get moving! Run!”
Wu shot out from under that wagon like a cannonball.
Well, I’d lied to the boy. It wasn’t easy to hide. The Beast was faster than any boy.
I wasn’t following him either. At least not yet I wasn’t.
On all fours I wriggled out from my hiding spot. Cane sword in hand I looked around, waiting to be swept up in claws, thrashed and skinned alive. But I would slow the Beast down and give Yong Wu a chance to make it back safely. My heart was a hammer in my chest. I was breathing like I was the one running for my life. I circled around to the rear of the wagon.
Nothing.
I looked high into the rocky dome of the alcove.
Shadows, yes. But none loomed so large as the Beast. I thought about what I had seen since Billy was taken. This was the Beast from my night with Orcus watching at Nightfall’s windows. Not the clumsy, moaning, bovine-headed creature lurching through snowdrifts on the trail. Here was the slaughterer of Raton’s hunters. A thing that felt no fear of any man that walked the earth.
But where had it gone? And where was Pops?
I did my best not to step in the bloodstains of resurrected Billy. But it was impossible. The soles of my boots were sticky. There was a single bone in the corner, tossed away against a wall. It was a long bone, likely one of Billy’s legs. It might have belonged to Pops though. I did not let myself be distracted by the grisly spectacle. My gaze I kept up high, swiveling my head like an owl’s. The horses appeared terrified but physically unharmed. Their corral remained intact. No, the Beast was not interested in killing animals. Except for one: man.
I had no doubt that Pops was dead. But where had the Beast fled with him?
I circumnavigated the wagon. Ready to fight. Prepared to die.
The Beast was not here.
At first, I felt better. I squirmed under the wagon one last time and retrieved the barrel. As I backed out it occurred to me that if the Beast was not here it might be just outside the niche. I might have sent Yong Wu running into a deathtrap.
I hoisted the barrel under my arm. I marched out into the blizzard. Before I could leave I had to open the gate I had advised Wu to jump over. I saw his sliding boot marks in the snow on the other side. He’d made it this far. Good. Maybe we had gotten lucky. Or Wu had.
I stepped through the gate. Dragging it shut behind me, I heard the voice.
A husky, wet voice it was. Slow-talking, enunciating every syllable. Like language was something it had learned quite recently, and the acquisition was a point of great pride.
“I let the boy go,” It said.
I expected to see the red eyes, the slavering jaw of killing teeth.
I saw only snow. Snow falling in a thick curtain just outside the edge of the stone shelter.
“Who goes there? Who speaks to me?”
“You know who I am,” It said.
“You are the Beast.”
“Some call me that. I do what beasts do and cannot reject the name given to me.”
The voice seemed to come at me from more than one direction. It was to the right of me. But also to the left and farther off. I felt it in my head and filling my senses. It buzzed my bones.
“Show yourself,” I said. My eyes darted, looking for any sudden movement. I wished I had a lantern or a torch. The palpable dark was like a monster itself.
“Do you really want that, Doc-tor? Isn’t it easier to talk this way?”
Snow masked the darkness of the mountain. I saw only what was directly in front of me. Snow clinging to me, to my face. Air changing to fog as it left my lips. My words, my breath disappearing. I pointed my blade at snow.
“I- I don’t know what I want,” I said.
“That’s better,” It said.
“No, I do know. I want you leave this place.”
“I was called here. I go where I am called – if I want to. When I want to leave, I’ll leave.”
“Who called you here? I don’t believe it. No one desires… something as dreadful as you.”
“Tsk…tsk, Doc-tor, you’re going to hurt me talking like that. I’m acting friendly to you. When I might have, oh, pulled out your guts and peeled your skin off like a dirty white glove.”
“How can you speak if you are a beast?”
“Do you talk to dogs, Doc-tor? Or, rather, might I ask if they talk to you… hmm?”
>
So the Beast knew of Orcus too. How long had it been watching us? Did it spy on us within the interior of the Adderlys’ mansion? I had thought we were safe inside, at least.
“You seem to know me well,” I said.
“I wish to know you even better. These dark mountains are a lonely place. But I live across dimensions. The woods are my home. Where you find remoteness, you’ll find me. Would you like to travel, Doc-tor? Do you want to see things no man has seen? I can take you from this dull rock. I’m tired of it. And so bored. Let’s go, you and I, and have new adventures together.”
I dared to step closer to the rim of the alcove.
“Why choose me, Beast?”
“That’s close enough, Doc-tor.”
I froze mid-step, and then gently let the toe of my boot touch the ground. The wind howled. The red eyes glowed ahead of me. Not up high where I expected the head of the Beast to be, but lower, level with me. The ruby-bright eyes were lit from within. I could not look away. I did not chance to shift my body. Or step forward or back. The Beast was so close. It might sweep out a long-clawed hand and open my throat. My breath was stuck in me. I felt as if I might faint.
“Why are you killing men?” I asked, finally.
But the eyes were gone. I walked to the edge of the mountain. I gazed into the snow churning clockwise in the abyss like foamy, black ice-waters flowing into a deadly whirlpool. I was suddenly shivering. I clutched my coat tight, tucked my chin, and returned to the lodge.
19
One of Us
Before I made it back to the lodge doors, two things happened to change the course of the evening and subsequently our investigation into the Beast of Nightfall Lodge. I have always believed that life is chaotic as a rule and serendipitous on rare occasions. Hindsight provides the only indication of which type of event one is experiencing at any moment. In a shorter formula: things only make sense when they are finished. Often they never make sense. I do not intend to say that life has no meaning. But meaning is imposed rather than implicit. We must question everything, always; we are thinking creatures for a reason. It is what we do best. I am forever on the search for patterns and clues from which I can deduce facts. Despite my thudding heart and the watery, boneless way my legs wished to buckle under me as I rushed from the scene of my encounter with the Beast, I could not ignore the appearance of evidence. I saw clues – there were several of them just outside the niche. I left the path twice.
It was, as I have stated, quite dark.
The moon had been stuffed away behind a cloudbank. The stars too.
I had my cane-sword in my right hand. The rum barrel rested in the crook of my other arm. I was trying to follow the path. Snow blew over it, but it was still recognizably the smoothest, flattest portion of ground. I suppose a blind man might have wandered too far to the outer border and walked off the mountain. I didn’t. But I was surprised to see someone nearly had. Rather, they appeared in the process of doing so as I approached. First, I worried it was the Beast. But it was too small, too stooped over, and it seemed to be holding its head in its hands.
“Ho, there! Get back from the precipice!”
The figure spun on me. I saw it was not holding its head but a pair of binoculars. The figure had been looking out into the storm, at the opposite ridgeline, despite the fact that visibility was nearly impenetrable.
“What are you doing?” I brandished my blade.
The figure came toward me but did not answer.
“Answer me, or I will run you through.” I might have done just that; my nerves being frayed as they were. I held up the blade, hoping the figure might see I was not making idle threats. Still, I received no answer. The figure wore a furry hood and a thick coat of the same animal skin. He pulled off his hood and I saw why he had not answered.
“Smoke Eel, is that you?”
The guide nodded. He opened his mouth as if to speak (which I found rather strange in a mute), but then he fumbled inside his coat and removed the notebook he wore on a string around his neck. He used his teeth to pull off his mitten. He had a pencil stub in his pocket. He began to scribble in the notebook. He flipped it around so I might read it.
“It’s too dark. I can’t see,” I said. “Look, let’s get inside. There are dangers afoot.”
He shook his head. Then from under his coat he produced a lantern. He struck a match and lit the wick. You could tell he had some experience lighting things in the wind. When the lantern glowed, he held it out with the notebook for me to read.
DID YOU SEE THE BEAST?
“Yes, I did. At least two men are dead. Well, Billy the Kid is dead. Really, really dead this time. Pops Spooner is missing and very likely dead. Did you see the Chinese boy run this way?”
Smoke Eel wrote. He turned the notebook around.
NO. NOBODY BUT YOU.
“Got it. I need to check on the boy. He was going to the lodge.” I started off, but Smoke Eel grabbed my sleeve. He tipped the lantern back along the path, casting a patch of light closer to the mountain than where I had passed. He pointed with his pencil and tried to pull me along.
Back to the niche.
“No, you don’t want to go back there. I’m not going either.”
He pointed and clamped onto my elbow.
“You want to show me something?”
He nodded.
“I’ll go. But not where the wagon and horses are. Do you understand me?”
He nodded again.
I let him lead me over to what I’d call a significant piece of evidence. Between two rows of snow-covered boulders was a second path, hidden from the main one. It was narrow enough for only one person to pass at a time, and going that way required a bit of climbing. No trouble in the daylight under more normal circumstances, but not something I was going to do on this night.
“I’m not going there,” I said. “I thought you said you didn’t see anyone?”
He wrote on his pad.
I DID NOT SEE. I HEARD. MOANING. I THOUGHT SOMEBODY WAS HURT.
Here I worried that the “somebody” involved might be Yong Wu. That the Beast had attacked him along this second pathway, parallel to the one we’d walked together. I snatched the lantern from Smoke Eel and entered the path. I couldn’t let go of the sword or the rum barrel, so I hung the handle over my sword grip. There it swung. Flashes of lamplight made the landscape seem to tilt like the deck of a ship. Growing dizzy, I slipped over loose stones and lost my footing, tumbling sideways, before a pair of boulders caught me. A vise-like pain struck through my pelvis. Panicking, I nearly dropped the rum barrel. The last thing I needed was a severed head covered in iridescent green slime gushing out and making a proper mess.
Smoke Eel hauled me onto my feet again.
Bruised, if not broken, I pressed onward.
“I need to see if the boy’s body is here. Help me look,” I said, limping ahead.
He scratched out a message.
I LOOKED. NOBODY HERE. BUT YOU NEED TO SEE.
“See what?”
He took the lantern and swung it low.
Footprints, a neat track of them. A man’s boots. I bent and inspected them. They went toward the niche and back out again. I’d smeared some of the tracks when I tripped but the rest were preserved. They were fresh enough to still be visible. But the storm would soon erase them. The “going in” prints had more snow filling than the “going out” tracks did. I didn’t understand why they bothered Smoke Eel so much. He indicated that we had a bit farther to go. I wanted nothing more to do with the niche on this particular night. But I supposed if the Beast wanted me in its belly, that’s where I’d already be. As it turned out, Smoke Eel only wanted to walk a few feet farther. He stopped and nudged my arm. Then he pointed.
The tracks ended well short of the place where the horses and wagon were.
They didn’t go off in another direction. But they changed. There were signs of a great commotion in the snow.
The boot tracks spread apart, as if a man were standing, waiting for someone to pass, or for something to happen. All around those last prints the snow pushed against the rocks. Smoke Eel brought the lantern to one side. Scratch marks. Deep ones. They were not made by human hands. Five claws dragging against the stones. Frozen dirt dug up and flung around. Great chunks of icy, hard ground pried up and overturned. I couldn’t have done more to deface the earth with a shovel and a pickaxe. The ground was too hard, you see.
And there was some blood. Not much. But a single mark like a brushstroke from a clumsy housepainter. The color leaped out very red in that sandy lane of whites and tans.
“I see,” I said. “You followed the moans you heard, and found this?”
Smoke Eel nudged me again and smiled to show I’d gotten things correct. Then he raised his lantern a little higher. The light was not so strong but it cast farther. He stretched his arm but didn’t want to walk over the disturbed ground. I saw what he wanted me to see. There on the other side of the scratched up snow and dirt lay a pile of clothes. I went straight to it and picked up a pair of men’s long johns, a wool shirt, and a pair of riding trousers. Men’s clothing. High quality. Torn to shreds, so their size was difficult to judge. The undergarments had animal hairs stuck to them. The shirt and trousers too, though not as much.
Dark gray-black hairs like the Beast’s.
Smoke Eel wrote in his book furiously.
IT CHANGED. FROM A MAN.
“You think the Beast is a man?”
Smoke Eel wrote.
YES. ONE OF US.
I nodded as I unbuttoned my coat and stuffed the clothing inside.
“We’ll go and tell the others.” I started backing out of the narrow passageway. I had no room to turn around with the barrel. My blade clanged against the rocks. I was feeling claustrophobic jammed in this narrow crag. Death chute is more like it, I thought.