by SA Sidor
“The Wendigo,” LaFarque said.
“No, not a Wendigo,” Viv said. “Just wickedness. Pure evil greed and hunger. The Beast with No Name.”
I was outraged. They had invited the Beast to Nightfall! It was all for Oscar’s sport. A reckless experiment to augment Oscar’s self-regard. He wanted to catch a myth and in doing so to make himself a legend among men. The carelessness of these people appalled me. Viv clearly felt guilt. I could forgive her. Perhaps she acted out of love for her husband.
But Oscar! He had invited us here because he provoked a fight with a force he could not conquer alone. We were expendable hired guns.
I felt a violence growing in me, a desire to attack.
As Vivienne named the unnameable Beast I grew numb from the soles of my feet, up my legs and trunk, until like a man slowly dipped into a tank of gelid slush, I sank beneath the surface and froze. My ears filled with a cold burning. My eyes refused to blink.
I was too cold to think. All I could do was watch. Paralyzed – utterly immobile, I thought with an onrushing panic. But no, my lips still moved. I did not move them. But something did. An invading intelligence played a tune upon my vocal cords and formed my mouth around its forced words.
“If I wanted a name I would give myself one,” It said.
32
From Time to Time
“Are you in Rom Hardy?” Evangeline asked, to my escalating horror.
I – The Beast – laughed such a vile, corrupt snigger that I was repulsed by my own sound-making. Yet what could I do but sit there, mute in my private expressions, the puppet of a more powerful entity which occupied me as if I were solitary room in a cheap boarding house.
“Rom and I are together,” It said.
“Is Rom the killer we have sought?”
“No!” Wu shouted. “I saw the Beast when it took Billy and Pops by the wagon. Dr Hardy was with me underneath the wagon. He was in New York when those hunters died.”
“The boy speaks the truth, though rudely out of turn.” It, not me, began to crush Wu’s hand in our grip. I wanted to yell STOP! But nothing happened. Wu squirmed, wincing in pain.
The Beast released him. Wu clutched his bruised hand and slid his chair away.
“Respect is important. I am your elder by several thousand thousand millennia.”
“What do you want?” Evangeline asked.
“Only to eat. I am hungry. When I am full, I will go. Is that not fair?”
Oscar shifted in his seat. I could see – so I am sure the Beast could as well – that the clockwork of his mind was pondering ways to lure or impel me into his cage.
“If Rom is locked up, I will seize your wife’s body. The physical is only one way I manifest my power. I could go into you too, Oscar. Would you like that? I might stuff you like you stuff those poor exotics in your collection. I collect things too. In my belly. Ah-ha-ha-ha…”
There was a loud pounding on the front doors. It sounded like a fist, then two fists beating against the wood. The percussive sound echoed in the halls like the shuddering, banging chambers of a large, irregular, sick heart.
“Who could that be, I wonder?” It said.
The demon spirit infected my perceptions. I ached with hunger. Hunger for raw meat, the bloodier the better. If I could bite something made of flesh and sink my teeth into it and rip, then I would feel better. My mind suggested this to me. Suckling a fresh wound would slake my thirst.
“Why are you here?” Evangeline asked.
“I was invited, as the mistress of the house told you. Oscar needed company.”
“What would make you leave, Wendigo? Do you demand a sacrifice?” LaFarque asked.
“This clown needs more time to bake,” It said. “He looks a mite pale at the top.”
LaFarque slumped at the jibe. He touched the pate of his head and wiped the sweat.
“You will see me in my glory, clown. Then tell me if I look like a buffalo perched on the head of an oaf. I will lift you on my antlers and take you high in the sky. I will burn you with cold and heat. We will speed together through the pines. Then I will crack your bones and suck the marrow. I will shit you out, LaFarque. Flies will lay eggs in the waste your mother birthed.”
“That is quite an insult, Frenchy,” Earl said.
He turned toward the Canadian con man, but his move was merely an act of distraction, hoping to divert the attention of the Beast. Because the next thing he did was swiftly pivot, bringing his revolver up over the edge of the table.
He shot me in the face.
Or he would have if the Beast’s reflexes did not take over from mine.
I dodged to the side. The bullet plugged the wall behind me. I smelled the gunpowder. My ears rang like bells. The pummeling on the door grew louder, more insistent. The wood cracked and splintered. But to me it sounded a long way off. A dull thumping that traveled to my ears through waves of fluid. The Beast spirit was in me, but I felt sunken in it. Down at the bottom of a gloomy, murky tank.
The red candle flickered.
I saw the stains. Black smudges like the ones I spotted on McTroy before Earl attacked him in the woods. But these new marks were more numerous. I saw them on everyone seated around the séance table. Wu’s face was a smear of charcoal. Evangeline looked as though she wore a black ribbon around her throat. Oscar’s face stopped below his upper lip. Inky splotches wrapped around all the others’ bodies like the soft limbs of an enormous cephalopod.
I was the only one clear of the markings.
Like a man who has held his breath under water well past the point where his consciousness functioned properly, I teetered on the brink of lucidity. And like that same man, once he is dredged up from the depths into the thinner element of air, I gasped and filled my lungs again, and again. The spirit had vacated me. The cold was gone. My possessor had fled.
“Hardy?” Evangeline asked. “Are you…?”
“I am me.”
“Where did it go?” Oscar asked. “It didn’t leave, did it? I mean, not entirely. I am so close to winning this game.”
I wanted to throttle the man.
“Do you hear that crashing on your door like an elephant butting its head? I expect that is where you might locate your Beast manifesting. Open the door and stand there, Oscar. See if you can drive it into your cage. Maybe if you ask it will enter. When you requested its presence on this mountain it showed up. You have a knack for invitation. That’s why we’re here after all.”
McTroy and Earl approached the front door. The boards held. But we could hear the hacking of wood and the feral grunts that followed each tremendous blow. Claws, I thought.
Claws.
“Save your bullets until you see it,” Oscar said. He had dragged his favorite wingback chair from the trophy room to the entryway. With one knee planted deep in the seat cushion, he balanced his elephant gun on the top back rail, bracing his other leg on the floor. “Let me try for a hobbling wound first. A clean shot to the leg with this should do it. I will cripple the thing. But I want it taken alive.”
“Who cares what you want,” Earl said.
He and McTroy took up positions in the corridors on either side of the entrance.
“Doc, you get that coach gun. Wait in the trophy room with Wu and the women.”
“I can stay here with the men,” I said to McTroy.
“I know you can, but if the Beast rips us in no time, where would you rather be?”
Oscar tossed me the keys to his cage.
“If the creature dispatches us, lock yourselves in the cage. It is Beast-proof.”
Nightfall’s entry shook with every new assaultive strike. Nails shrieked as the creature outside rammed the doors.
“Go, before it is too late,” LaFarque said. He followed me into the diorama gallery. From the lion’s exhibit he removed a long Maasai spear and a red and black shield made from stitched water buffalo hide. “The old ways are sometimes the
best, eh, Monsieur Har-dee?”
“If you know how to use it,” I said.
LaFarque hefted the spear. “Throw it, no?” He smiled. But I saw only doom in him.
I felt better with the shotgun. Yet I was as much a gunfighter as LaFarque was a Maasai warrior. How does one kill something that is not of this world? I knew no strategy for dispensing with demons or cosmic travelers who hunger insatiably for the meat of humankind. Did anyone? If we killed the main spirit, would we be rid of it? This was no Wendigo. But did the same rules apply?
“Evangeline, what do you think about getting inside that cage?”
“I think not,” she said.
“Oscar says it is Beast-proof. We are to secure ourselves in there.”
Wu pushed Viv’s wheelchair to the cage’s door. I unlocked the cage. They went inside.
“I will fetch some pillows and blankets. A pitcher of water. We might be in there for a while if things do not go our way.” I passed the provisions to Wu through the bars.
“Dr Hardy? If the Beast gets in the house, what will stop it?” Wu said.
“We will find out. But for now, we make ourselves hard to eat. Hiding can be noble too. Let the Beast worry about getting us out of the cage, rather than us worrying about it getting in.”
“But can’t it just wait?” he asked.
I considered the smart boy’s conundrum.
Stepping around to the cage’s door, I handed over the rum barrel with the green head inside. Wu took it from me and placed it in a far corner of the cage. He used it as a makeshift stool, sitting down to further philosophize about our deteriorating situation. I stepped inside the iron cube and crouched beside him, putting my arm around his shoulders.
“Wu, you ask very good questions. That is half the battle in life,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I tried giving him a comforting squeeze.
“You can’t answer my question, can you?” he said.
“No, I cannot.”
Viv lifted her head. “Listen. The pounding has stopped. Did the Beast break in?”
I sprinted to the hall and peered around the corner.
“The door is intact. But the siege has, for the moment, ceased. Perhaps the creature tires.”
A loud crash sounded, not from the entry, but from behind the cage. Glass shattering. Then again, another explosion of breakage. The steady clawing of the boards over the windows commenced with urgency. The Beast was huffing and grunting with exertion.
“It is trying to enter through the windows!”
These last boards we had taken from the alcove were not as thick as the first Oscar used. The wood was dry, splintery. After only a couple of sharp blows I saw gray light spill from between the cracks. It was still light outside. I had forgotten what time it was. Evening twilight. The cool, damp air of the foggy mountain flowed through the crevices in these flimsier boards. Each cleaving strike created a gap, another gray slit, like ghostly eyes opening to observe us in our misery. The rush of cool air was nothing short of panic-inducing. Was that a knifing claw prying apart the boards? A hooked fang inserted and pulling back, cracking a long board in two and flipping the broken board fragment out over the ledge and down the mountain.
We have but moments, I thought. Moments to live before the ripping starts and the stains I saw in black are spouting red blood. My premonitions would not come true if I could help it. We had to kill this thing.
I saw the shotgun on the floor.
I am no murderer. No man of violence. But I cocked back those twin hammers and inserted both barrels of the coach gun into the gap where the newest hole appeared. With no further consideration, I pulled both triggers. The barrels issued a mighty roar. The shotgun recoiled hard into my shoulder. I stumbled back.
No scream from outside. Only the quiet fog. And an echo of the blast I caused.
A heavy body lay upon the ledge. I could not look at it.
Turning away, I watched the men from the front door defense rushing in.
“I have slain the Beast,” I said. “I had no choice.”
McTroy was at my shoulder. Laying a hand there and urging me aside. He surveyed my damage. I sat heavily upon the floor, sliding the emptied gun away from me as far as it would go.
“Is it over?” I asked, knowing the answer, for I had glimpsed the hideously hairy form.
“I think not,” McTroy said.
“What do you mean?” I got up and joined him at the aperture. “Look at this beast.”
“Doc, you have slewn Dirty Dan.”
“No, that’s wrong.”
“He’s slewn all right. I know slewn when I see it.”
“The word is slain. Are you sure it’s Dirty Dan?”
“He is both slewn and slain. And, yes, it is Dirty Dan, as far as I can tell. Though you did remove a majority of his face.”
“Good God.”
“The blast tossed his brain out on them rocks. There’s no head to him, really. Looks like something went over there. Teeth? If you squint, you can picture how he looked when he had a head, which wasn’t that great. But that’s the bulk of him. Dropped him where he stood. He was using his tommy hawk to chop at the windows. Crazy fella. Probably still mad about his bear.”
“Please, say no more. I’m feeling unwell. Was it quick?”
Earl, Oscar, and LaFarque took turns peeking through the fissure at the trapper’s corpse.
“You shot him not even a minute ago. Here he lies, deader than Caesar. I’d say that’s damn quick,” Earl said.
“He was an ugly bugger, and this did not improve his looks,” LaFarque added.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Hell, Doc,” McTroy replied. “You can’t be blamed for how ugly a feller is. He lived with it his whole life, I imagine – well, his whole life up to the point where you shot him in the face. At least you spared Dirty Dan the Hatchet Man having to go another day with that mug.” He spied through a gray rift, wrinkling his nose. “He smells bad too – as bad on the inside as on the out.”
I dry-heaved.
“We all murder people from time to time,” Gavin Earl said. “Dan was among the worst there is. Don’t let it get to you. Lots of folks are safer because he’s buzzard meat and red snow.”
“Gavin is a true bastard who murdered me. But, Doc, when he’s right, he’s right.”
Earl acknowledged McTroy’s compliment.
“Doesn’t make up for Sully’s Fork,” Earl said.
McTroy held up his crab-like crippled hand. “If killing me didn’t do it, nothing will.”
Earl walked away from us.
Despite the words of encouragement I felt no ease in my conscience.
Evangeline said, “Dan might have been Beast-influenced. His rage was either murderous, or both murderous and cannibalistic. You did the right thing, Hardy. For all the best reasons. That is what heroes do. Take your time with your feelings of grief. But never regret saving your friends from harm. Do not allow self-reflection to derail you from our task. The Beast lives.”
“Can we kill it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s our only chance at surviving.”
She was right, of course. Her assessment of the sanguinary event with Dan helped to quell my turmoil. I might’ve spent the rest of the waning hours of the day probing the depths of my guilt, but we had work to do. The Beast had to be stopped.
We re-boarded the windows with the scraps we had. Oscar allowed us to sacrifice his dining room table for our fortifications. When the trophy room was sealed, we talked of inspecting the destruction Dan had done to the doors, but the matter proved irrelevant.
For no sooner had we finished the windows than the doors were breached.
The Beast entered Nightfall Lodge.
33
The Beast’s Kitchen
But we could not find the Beast. You would think something of that size and ferocious demeano
r would be obvious from the start. We had evidence of its passing. The doors were gone. Exploded out into the night. Hardly a shred of wood left on the doorstep. Daylight left the mountainous ridge bleak, desolate, and stark, but the fog stayed. It smelled of musk and iron blood. The cloven hoof prints of the Beast dappled the slush on the path. It was hard to read them, impossible for me. But McTroy and Earl conferred about their meaning. LaFarque lingered in the doorway with his spear and shield. Oscar kept his elephant gun at the ready. But he was impatient. It was wet outside. The anteroom showed watery prints and scratches where the Beast had walked, but the steps went no farther into the home.
“It took the doors off and then left? Is that what you’re saying,” I asked.
McTroy said, “That’s how it looks. Dan made a damn mess of the snow when he was out there chopping things. The rocks aren’t holding much for us to read. But it didn’t come past here.” McTroy pointed to the gallery that led to the trophy room where we all had been.
“Maybe it sensed a possible trap,” Evangeline said.
“Or maybe it plays with our minds,” LaFarque said. “An attack on our psychology.”
“For whatever reason, it has chosen to remain outside. In its familiar habitat. It lures us,” Oscar said. “You talk about my invitation to the monster. Well, it repays me with an offer to visit. But I for one will not accept. Let it come here. Out there in the dark we are more vulnerable.”
“We should at least check the perimeter. It might smell Dan’s body. As impossible as it sounds, that may be scrumptious bait for this eater,” Earl said. “McTroy and I will go.”
“You will?” I turned to my partner.
McTroy nodded. “Earl and I can do it. It won’t take long. Just a little scouting mission.”
The former partners stepped out in the fog.
Within a minute we could neither see them, nor hear their footsteps.
“Separation seems a bad idea,” I said. “We should all be together.” I had a horrible thought. “Cassi! My God, we have forgotten about her in her bedroom.”
Viv said, “She should be kept out of this. The Beast did not go down that hall. So she is safe. Safer there than with us if the Beast returns.”