by SA Sidor
Orcus peered at the road. His tongue lolled from the side of his jaws. Ears sharply alert.
“I brought the rum we found,” Wu said. He kicked lightly at the side of the barrel between his feet and winked at me.
“Excellent, Wu. You are as resourceful as you are brave. I hope my feverish antics did not distress you too much. It has been a long day after all. But I am feeling much better.”
Evangeline clicked her tongue at the horse and shook the reins.
With a jolt we took off down the hill. The sledge’s blades sliced through the snow.
“It’s like a big sled,” Wu said. “I have never been sledding before.”
“Then you are in for a treat,” I said.
The tall pines and scrubby white-wigged trees flew past us in a blur.
“Can you see Claude’s tracks?” I shouted.
McTroy pointed. “He’s dead center on the road. Heading into town like we guessed.”
“Then we should have him in our company soon,” I said.
I saw the moon appear. Like a snowball impaled on the jagged gray fence of the ridgeline. A ragged scrap of cloud soon blindfolded it. The road grew darker, curving deeper into the bottom of the canyon. The Morgan knew the way to town. He moved with confidence. His harness bells jangled merrily. I looked back and saw a smudge of shadow streak across the road and into the trees. It vanished so quickly that I wasn’t sure it had been there at all. But a puff of icy crystals sparkled, dancing in the air, floating down from where they had been kicked up, like dust. We were gliding too swiftly for me to register any tracks, only the grooves we left in our wake. The hairs on my neck began to prickle. A scaly, snaking fear slithered against my spine.
“Dr Hardy, do you see something?” Wu asked. His voice carried a note of anxiety.
I smiled. “Looks like a fairytale. The woods are filled with ice magic.”
Wu seemed happy with my answer. He settled back into his seat.
Orcus tilted his head at me.
“Did you see anything?” the brutish mastiff asked.
None of the others heard him. But I did.
“A dark something-or-other sprinting out there. I can’t be sure,” I whispered.
The dog looked over his brawny shoulder.
The horse brought us round a longer curve. Sword-like the sledge cut through high drifts.
Whump. Whump. Whump.
I used the excuse of wrapping my arm around Orcus to glance back again.
“There! To the right. See how it goes?” I said, nudging him.
A bounding shadow, like a river of darkness, flowed just beyond the spaced-out pines. I saw it pouring over rocks. Disappearing. Then dodging deeper into the woods. An erasure of the snowy whiteness more than anything else. An absence where one shouldn’t be, where a moment later I spied the clear outline of boulders, but for an instant earlier, something flashed in front of the rocks. Formless shadow. So fast. How could anything be so fast? We were outpacing it still.
Orcus stared off, following the direction of my outstretched arm.
“I missed it. Might it have been a deer?” he said.
“That was no deer,” I said.
“A deer?” Wu asked, twisting in his seat. “Where is it?”
I thought I spotted antlers. An elk? But it did not run like an elk or a deer.
It was gaining on us.
I felt as if it could overtake us at any time if it chose to do so.
Orcus turned his nose up and sniffed. I grabbed hold of Wu’s jacket collar.
“You’re choking me,” Wu said, making a face.
“Sorry there, Wu. Midnight is such a chilly hour. Come closer to the dog. Get warm.”
“But it’s after midnight,” he said. “It is very, very late.”
I said, “Soon the sun will climb those peaks. In the daylight, nightmares look foolish. That’s why they come in the bedtime hours when our attention slackens and we are most vulnerable to suggestion. Oh, how they creep like poison ink. As our minds sleep, we soak up their permanent stain… our unknowing bodies relax… and their dinner bell rings. Bite, bite, bite.”
I snapped my teeth together without thinking.
“Hey, Doc, what’re you telling that boy?” McTroy asked. “Ghost stories?”
I looked at Wu whose mouth dropped open in an approaching wave of panic.
“Don’t listen to what I say,” I said. “My imagination always gets the better of me.”
Orcus adjusted his position. The weight of him crushed my knee. He was keen on something he’d caught the scent of, ahead of the sledge in a flat treeless area where water must collect in the warmer seasons. A big rock sat there like an altar. Blanketed in white. There was a black flag staked out on the rock, by the side nearest the road. Orcus’s jowls quivered. I thought he might leap out of his seat.
A torch rose from behind the rock.
The black flag turned red.
It was no flag.
It was blood… splashed blood that had melted the snow ran red over the rock. It steamed.
The torch moved around the rock. A big man was holding the flame. He studied the blood. Evangeline pulled on the Morgan’s reins to halt the sledge. There was no fast stopping on this icy road. The sledge slowed and we headed for the rock where the blood and the man met.
McTroy shot his Marlin rifle once into the sky.
Then he levered it and aimed it at the man.
“Stop right there. Keep your hands high.”
The big – no, he was huge – man was bundled for walking in the cold. I don’t know if he heard what McTroy said. But he didn’t listen. He cocked the arm carrying the torch back and hurled it at our horse. The torch pinwheeled through the air. The Morgan pulled us off the road trying to keep the fire out of its eyes. The blades of the sledge clashed with boulders. I heard the sledge cracking apart. We were turning over. I reached for Wu and found that he and Orcus were gone. The rum barrel banged against my ankle as it rolled out of the bench footwell and spilled over the side into the road. A whiteout wave of snow broke over the top of us, temporarily blinding me. I held fast to the sledge.
The vehicle abruptly stopped; I did not.
I was catapulted into a field of alternating blacks and whites. I hoped, against the odds, for a gentle landing. Pine branches reached for me greedily until they gobbled me up. I shut my eyes.
Flying–
Until I wasn’t.
Cold crunching and evergreen smells: the sound of my battered body being slugged with cudgels and mangled by prickly jabby, tar-sticky pines. I tasted soft green needles on my tongue. I came to a stop, alone in a stand of pines.
Out of the corner of my vision I saw the huge man by the rock.
The blood inspector. Our torch-thrower. He looked like a giant.
A jaguar had him in its mouth and, with great effort, was dragging him away.
23
Giants & Jaguars
When I say giant I do not mean a fabulous creature that hates beanstalks and grinds men’s bones to make his bread. What I mean is a circus giant: a man of extraordinary height and proportions that boggle the mind. That is who I saw struggling with the jaguar. Now I noticed something about this jaguar. It was all black, not spotted. Its figure was leaner and suppler than the first jaguar we had encountered on our return along the Copper Trail. This was not the same cat that had knocked Evangeline from her horse.
The predator took hold of the big man’s neck and shook him, dislodging his wooly hat and unraveling the scarf that covered his outsized head. The man looked rather grisly at that moment. His face dripped with blood; an ear the size of my palm dangled by a thread and he grimaced in the manner you might expect of someone who was being throttled to death. The giant had colossal hands and he used them to pummel the jaguar’s head. This did not faze the creature, who bit down harder on the poor fellow and gave him a twist that caused the man to moan in a low, bellowin
g voice. It was a pitiful noise.
The wildcat pulled the giant through the snow, actually lifting the upper half of his lanky, though wide-bodied, opponent. Victim would be a truer term. The giant slugged his fists into the cat’s fur. The cat blinked and looked annoyed. The man wore round glasses. The lenses were cracked now, and the wire frames bent all to hell. They slipped from his beakish nose. The giant tried to reach them as they were tumbling down his chest but the cat dragged him another few yards closer to the woods. It was a sad sight to see: this wounded man raking the snow for his shattered spectacles. His lengthy legs flailed. I once saw a man electrocuted accidently in a lab experiment back in Chicago during my college days. It’s the sort of thing one never forgets. Convulsions and gritting teeth. A constant uncontrollable tremor racking the body. The giant writhed like that student.
I spied the edge of the woods up a short hill. The jaguar couldn’t reach the summit with its quarry, although not for lack of trying. The giant had given up or fainted. Either way, the flapping of his elongated limbs ceased. He grew still as felled timber. His unfocused eyes remained open but his face relaxed. It was smooth and blank, the color of river clay. He had a heavy simian brow and a lantern jaw; his profile would’ve been difficult to hide behind a shovel blade. Saliva bubbles ran pinkly down the corner of his mouth into his collar. The jaguar struggled with the weight of him, easily in excess of four hundred pounds. In a fit of vexation the jaguar twitched its jaws, snapping the giant’s neck.
Only then did it let him go.
The cat circled. From the cage of pine branches I watched the coal-black feline panting. Muscles rippling, tense, ready to pounce. The torch the giant had thrown still sputtered. Cat’s eyes matched the flames. If it turned into a warlock I would not have been too surprised. Such was the ritualistic atmosphere in the canyon bottom during this peculiar pre-dawn sacrifice.
No fog formed above the giant’s lips.
The cat and I reached our conclusions at the same instant: the giant was dead.
And if it could dispatch a giant, what would it do to my friends and me?
I shivered at the thought.
The jet fur of this black jaguar carried an oily sheen. Despite the terror it inspired, it was quite beautiful. I only wished there were bars between us.
So, I had spied a nocturnal stalker running behind the sledge on our way down the road from Nightfall. The panther had looked rather like the Beast out there lurking in the snowy cage of trees. I wasn’t wrong to think a hunter was pursuing us.
Two jaguars. I hadn’t expected that. This had to be the work of Oscar. I wondered if he had caught these cats in a South American jungle and released them up on the mountain. He had to know they were here, living in the shadows of Nightfall Lodge. Maybe he hoped to spread their species in the Southwestern territories. Maybe they were his mistake.
The black cat slunk across the icy road. It padded along in an urgent jog. Smoky amber eyes agleam, head bowing down and mouth open, its thick black tail trailing like a hook.
I looked at the overturned sledge. My head was only now clearing enough for me to put aside my panic and wonder about the health of my friends. I dared not call to them. My shout would bring the jaguar right to me. Or, worse, perhaps the creature might shift into a frenzy of killing, tearing apart the sledge riders, the Morgan horse, and any living thing in its sight. I kept quiet.
The horse began to blow and squeal at the approaching cat. He was down on his side, not off in the ditch with the sledge but on the edge of the road. His traces were twisted tight, and there was no way for him to escape his straps. He craned his neck to keep an eye on the cat.
But the cat was not interested in him.
I crawled on my belly out from under the pine branches.
When I propped myself up to see if I might locate the cat amid the nearby rocks I ended up sliding down the embankment and ramming into the sledge. It made quite a racket. The Morgan yelped and snorted at me.
“Easy there, boy. I am friend, not foe.”
I scrambled onto my feet. The sledge tipped onto its right side, and when I poked my head into the seats I found no one. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. If they had been thrown in the crash they might be dashed upon the rocks. Maybe they fell out before the impact.
I peered over the top of the sledge.
In the ditch the black jaguar sniffed at a body. It was not a woman, nor did it seem short enough to be Yong Wu. The cat was licking it. I saw blood in the snow. Red arches.
It has to be McTroy, I thought.
Desperately I searched for a weapon to save him. What did I have? A pocketknife? I opened the small blade. It was nothing. At least I could cut the horse’s straps while I thought of a better way to help McTroy. Freeing the horse might fluster the cat and scare it off. Buy me some time. I started sawing at the leather. I worked by feel.
The horse sighed, looking back at me.
“Loose soon,” I said. “You’re on your own to run for it after that.”
“Hardy,” a voice whispered to me. “Get out of there. There’s a panther about.”
I looked for Evangeline. I knew it was her voice calling my name. “Where are you?” I said to the dark.
“In the rocks, behind you,” she said.
“I’m saving McTroy,” I said. “First the horse, then I’ll help him.”
“What?”
“I must save McTroy. The cat is about to feast upon his flesh. Do you have a weapon?”
“Hardy, you don’t need a weapon. Crawl back here.”
“I’m not about to fight a jaguar with a penknife,” I said. “McTroy is unconscious.”
She said, “McTroy is crouched right beside me. So is Wu.”
McTroy said, “That’s right, pard. I got a rifle. But you won’t use it, I know. Just tell me where that cat is. It creeped into the ditch, but I ain’t seen it since.”
He waved the rifle to show me where they were hidden.
I was cold and bruised but alive and sawing the last piece of leather keeping the horse attached to the sledge, and thinking: if Evangeline, McTroy, and Wu were behind the rocks, and the giant lay dead on the other side of the road, then… who was in the ditch?
Bloody and tongue-bathed by a murderous black panther?
I’d cut about halfway through the strap when I felt it snap apart.
The Morgan rolled and bolted toward Raton. Hoof beats echoed in the canyon. I listened to them recede and my heartbeat took over as the loudest thing in my ears. I duck-walked to the back of the sledge and popped up to glance over the bent runners into the ditch.
I had seen many odd things in my adventures. Mummies revivified after millennia in a tomb, train-robbing ghouls, hopping vampires, and worms as big as silos. But never had I seen what lay in that ditch bleeding in the Sangre de Cristos.
I might say it was a man.
It had two arms and two legs. The general shape of a man, and surely it was no woman because it shivered in the snow: naked, gray in the cloudy moonlight, half-yellow by the dying fire of the giant’s torch.
I might also say it was a cat.
All over its body it was covered in thick fur. The pattern of the fur matched the first jaguar we had seen on the mountain. This jaguar-man had more than fur to aid his classification. His arms ended in paws and claws rather than five fingers. But it was his head most of all that filled me with fright. The bones of the skull retained a jaguar shape, but they were moving, collapsing, closing like a furry fist, and the pain of the transformation was obvious. Despite my terror, I felt sympathy for the creature who was both cat and human. His fangs stuck out well below his chin. (The lower half of his face was shrinking faster than the top.) I watched as his teeth retracted into his gums. His long, pink tongue withered.
He saw me now. Which of us was more afraid I cannot say. He could not move while in the transformative state. It was paralyzing to the victim. His wide, flat, black
nose pinched and turned pale; whiskers receded. Every hair quivered. His facial structure rearranged. I detected the faint grinding of cartilage and bone. He was thin enough that I might’ve counted his ribs. The sharp contours of his hipbones weren’t very different from the rocks on either side of the ditch. His gold eyes were the last to change. They dimmed and dimmed. His teeth were chattering. He must’ve gained some control over his movement at this point because he drew his knees to his chest and rolled onto his left side.
Deep lacerations gouged his back. The wounds oozed blood. Red pooled under him.
“Go, Dr Hardy! Leave me!” Claude said.
“My God, what can I do for you?” I said. I leaped over the sledge, not thinking about my own safety or the whereabouts of the other jaguar. “That black cat has shredded you, old boy.”
Claude laughed.
“I need to get you a blanket. We must return to Nightfall.”
“No!” he screamed.
“You will die,” I said. I shouted for Evangeline, McTroy, and Wu.
“I should die,” he said. “Death would be better.”
“Where are your clothes?” I asked.
He said nothing.
Evangeline gasped when she saw the state of him.
McTroy found a blanket in the sledge. He wrapped him up and lifted him. McTroy swiveled around. “Where’s that damned black cat?”
“Cross the road,” Claude said. “A cave… through those trees… I keep things there.”
“But the panther…?” Evangeline said, hesitating.
“Is gone,” Claude said. “Ran off. Hardy scared it.”
Had I?
McTroy hoisted Claude over his shoulder. The four of us walked up the hill, passing the dead giant, and found the cave entrance.
I lit a match and we went inside. The cave was a jagged gap between two conjoined volcanic outcroppings. At first it was no wider than a pantry door but after twelve steps the passage expanded like the inside of an Esquimau igloo. I lit more matches. Claude had used the domed space for some time. He’d put down an old army cot. Covered it with cigarette ashes and a waterlogged copy of The Wolf Leader by Alexandre Dumas. Milky starlight and snowflakes shifted in from the fractured ceiling. A battered upright traveling trunk stood at the foot of the bunk. There was a drawstring bag on top of the cot’s thin blanket. Jackets and capes hung from railroad spikes hammered into the gray walls. An overturned crate functioned as a table. I fired up the lantern sitting on it. Broken bits of glass glittered at the far perimeter of the rotunda floor. Shards and bottlenecks. Despite the frigid temperature the room stank of whiskey and stale tobacco smoke. It smelled inhuman too: an ammoniac stench of cat piss, rotting meat, and blood.