by SA Sidor
“No one is safe,” Oscar said. “That rule applies in every land. But I agree with my wife. What good is it to bring the girl here? The Beast will come for us if it comes at all.”
“What about Hodgson?” I asked.
“Hodgson?” Oscar looked surprised.
“Where does he live?”
“Hodgson lives in Raton. At the Ram Hotel,” Viv said. “He manages the books as well as our stables.”
“But the night of the storm, he was here,” I said.
“There’s a spare room for the servants to sleep. More of a closet, with a cot,” Oscar said.
“Where is it?”
“Down at the end of the bedroom hall. Past Viv’s room. All the way at the end.”
“And is Hodgson there now? Did he ignore this commotion?” Evangeline asked.
Oscar shrugged. “After he returned with the carriage I told him he could go. I assume he went back to Raton with his horse. I didn’t see it in the stables. What is your concern with the dwarf?”
“Everyone is a suspect,” I said. “What if Hodgson is the Beast?”
“Then the Beast would be four feet tall,” Oscar said, smirking.
Viv wheeled her chair away, rolling into the gallery.
“She has a soft heart for the little deformity. He’s a good bookkeeper from what she tells me. And he has a way with animals. But he is not the Beast.” Oscar stared into the fog.
“I think I hear something,” LaFarque said.
“I heard it too,” Oscar agreed.
“A moaning.” The con man took up the spear and shield and ventured to the doorstep.
He hoisted the spear the way warriors do in paintings. The shield hooked to his arm.
“Do you see anything? McTroy and Earl?” Oscar called out.
“No. Only this pea soup fog.” He walked out farther. Wisps of fog slid around him.
“And the moaning,” I said. “Is there any more of that?”
LaFarque stood up straight. “I hear nothing. I see nothing. I am coming bac–”
He was gone.
“LaFarque?” I said.
Oscar shouted, “LaFarque! LaFarque!”
But there was no reply.
“Look! There in the fog. Some movement,” I said.
“LaFarque! Can you hear us?”
Oscar’s question was answered by the spinning shield that flew out of the fog. Then we heard a high-pitched screaming. The whistle of the Beast – moving left to right, right to left. Up high into the tops of the pines it went, from the bottom of the canyon it shrieked, then above us. I would have said it was riding in the clouds.
“I am burning! Burning!”
“That’s LaFarque,” Oscar said. “The Beast has him in its claws. It runs him through the woods as it said it would. He is killed. The man is as good as dead. Taken from right there. I still see where he stood when it snatched him.”
“Burninggggggggg…”
We listened as the Beast played with LaFarque like a cat does with a wounded mouse.
I asked Evangeline to take Wu back to the trophy room with Viv. But Wu insisted that he stay. The boy could make his own decisions. He was old enough. But I would have left if I felt I could. We saw LaFarque’s face once, popping out of the fog too high to be standing on his own feet. More than fifteen feet off the ground. He looked sunburned, but it was too dark to tell much.
The broken Maasai spear fell from the sky, landing with a clatter on the doorstep.
We never saw LaFarque again.
“It’s been more than an hour,” I said. “What should we do? Go after them?”
“That’s a mistake,” Oscar insisted. “It’s luring us out there. You saw what happened to the Frenchman.”
“Canadian,” I said.
“They’re dead. The same as LaFarque. This Beast is really something. Horrible, yes. But you have to admit, there’s something to be admired in a predator that can pick hunters off like sheep standing in a field.”
We had moved into the cage. Even Orcus joined us. He slept on a large pillow at Viv’s feet. Wu tapped on the bars with his fingertip. We didn’t bother to try and block the doors. The fireplace was dark and the lodge was freezing now. We had our coats on. The cage door was open a few inches. I still had the keys in my pocket. If I shut the door it would lock. Unlocking it required a bit of contortion involving my wrist, but it was possible. I left the door open just in case. What if McTroy returned and needed to get inside quickly? I sat next to the door and watched the gallery hallway, waiting for any sign.
“Rom?”
It wasn’t anyone in the cage saying my name.
“Rom? Are you here?”
It was Cassi. I saw her walking slowly, barefoot. Her arm bled. She had taken off the bandages and the tourniquet was loose. She bled on the floor and her face was pale as the fog.
“Cassi, we are in the trophy room,” Oscar called out.
I exited the cage.
“Where is everyone? Where is Rom?”
“I’m here. Right here.” I went to her. She was cold as a corpse, as if she’d come in from outside. Had she been sleepwalking again? She was dressed in different clothes than when I had left her asleep. The nightgown she now wore, a simple shift, was splashed with red. She’d absently touched her hair and that too had become encrimsoned. Holding her I quickly became covered in blood. “We need to fix your bandages. You are badly wounded. Let me take you to the cage and you can rest there safely with us.”
She collapsed in my arms. I picked her up and carried her.
Wu swung the cage door wide and I put her on the pillows. Orcus moved off and went to guard the hallway. I pulled the cage door shut and felt the heavy lock engage.
“You are safe,” I said.
“You love my daughter,” Viv said.
“I– I do not know what love is, I think… but… I think I may love her, yes…”
“She is like Claude,” Viv went on. “You know what I mean?”
“Yes, we saw her. We saw… saw her when she was like Claude,” I said.
“Twins are all alike,” Oscar said. “But she’s better than Claude was. Stronger.”
Viv refused to look at her husband. The cage seemed very small, and cold.
Footsteps. Footsteps in the hallway.
“Someone or something is coming,” Wu whispered.
Oscar propped his elephant gun on the crossbars of the cage. He aimed for the gallery.
“Should we call out?” Wu asked.
“I think Cassi could be happy with a man like you, Rom Hardy. The right man can make a sad woman less so. He can transform her life from grays and blacks to color. We never know where love is until it finds us. Do you think she is beautiful? I do. She was the most beautiful baby. Her brother fussed and cried. But Cassi was the quiet one. Always watching. You could see her thinking. Her soul is old. She is less impetuous than her brother was. But you will have to watch her, Dr Hardy. She has moods like all sensitive people do. Then she is unpredictable…”
I wanted to hush Viv, but it didn’t seem to me that she would listen.
I looked over her shoulder at the gallery.
“Look at her poor arm. Maybe the changing will heal her. It does sometimes you know. Wasn’t it worse before? They said her arm was almost gone when they found her. I see a deep wound. But the flesh repairs itself in time. She will have scars. This family has scars.”
“Who is in my gallery? Name yourself,” Oscar said.
I glanced from the gallery to Cassi’s arm. I expected Viv to be wrong, but the arm did look improved. There was still a chunk of flesh missing. A semi-circular incision where the teeth went in took something away. I had Cassi’s head in my lap. Her head felt warm, almost feverish. As I looked at her wound, I saw her arm bone lengthening. Her face stretched forward into a feline snout. Next the black hair. It did not grow gradually, but all at once, in a flash. She grew claws, an
d a tail curled out from the pillows.
I was fascinated, horrified, but most of all heartbroken. Cassi was no monster to me.
“Ho, in the trophy room! It’s us. McTroy and Earl.”
The pair of gunmen stepped out of the gallery.
Oscar lowered his rifle. Wu took the keys from me and unlocked the cage door.
“McTroy, we thought you might be dead.” He ran to the bounty man.
The trophy room was dark. We had one lamp in the cage and we’d left the red candle burning on the table. Gavin Earl picked up the candle and brought it to McTroy.
“We’ll eat the boy first and make them watch,” Earl said.
McTroy twisted the keys from Wu’s hand. They fell clattering to the floor. “I get to pick the next one,” he said.
When he bared his teeth, it was a terrible thing to see. The gold tooth he had sparkled in the candlelight. His grizzled jaw opened wide. Glinting eyes from under the brim of his hat showed no remorse for anything he had done or ever would do. Wu screamed. But McTroy had him fast by the arm. He wrestled the boy over to the round séance table. And flung him on top with such force that the air left Wu, and I worried his back might be broken.
“Not much meat,” Earl said.
“We’ll have more courses, friend. Grab the whiskey and bring me a bottle.”
“A bottle for you and one for me,” Earl said.
“Or more, or more, whatever the cabinet provides is ours. I am dry and empty.”
“Dry as the desert where I lay blind and motionless,” McTroy said.
Earl frowned, and then laughed.
Evangeline reloaded the shotgun. “Do not let that door shut, Oscar. Or we are trapped.”
Oscar put himself in the door. His elephant gun lay over his arm.
“Shall I shoot them?”
“That is what I am planning on doing,” she said. “Save your shot for the Beast.”
“Where is it?”
“I’m sure it will appear soon.”
Cassi’s transformation did not proceed all the way to full panther. She was half-woman still, and half-cat. Her eyes fluttered open. I felt her purring in my lap.
“You see how she likes you, Doctor,” Viv said.
“Evangeline? Cassi is turning into a panther. What do you suggest?”
Oscar gaped. This was all too much for the great hunter to bear. He staggered from the cage, avoiding the table where McTroy and Earl struggled with a kicking Wu. Keeping to the wall, he found his way into the gallery opening. And he left.
“One’s getting’ away, pard,” Earl said.
“We got plenty more. And where’s he going to anyway? If we don’t catch ‘im here, we’ll nab ‘im on the road.”
Earl pulled a knife from his boot. “What’s the best way to skin a boy this size?”
“I’d say hang him by the head and pull down.”
“But where we gonna hang this one? By the damn chandelier?”
Cassi rolled off my lap. She stood on two legs, but hardly like any person I’d ever seen before. Her motion was silky. Her dark furry legs crept toward the bars. Evangeline snapped the shotgun closed and pulled back the hammers.
“Don’t shoot Cassi,” I said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Why not?”
“I think she will fight those men better than we can.”
“Excellent point.” I pried open the rum barrel and, using my mittens, I lifted out McTroy’s rum-soaked telepathic contact. “Sorry for this.” I took the head and rammed it into the bars.
McTroy let go of Wu and grabbed his skull.
I banged his contact’s head repeatedly into a crossbar, and I ran the forehead along the bars like a mallet along a xylophone. McTroy fell to the floor, writhing.
Cassi left the cage, crouching into a pocket of shadows. She darted under the table. Earl screamed and leaped away, grabbing a bloody slash in his groin. Wu seized the opportunity to flee back into the cage. Unfortunately, in his fright, he pulled the door closed, locking four of us inside.
“Wu, the keys,” I said.
He understood now his mistake.
“See if you can reach them,” I said as I continued to bash the severed head into the floor of the cage with alternating side blows to the bars. McTroy had gone from thrashing about in agony to curling up in a protective fetal ball.
I looked up in time to see Cassi bolt into the gallery.
Wu’s arm was too short to reach the keys which McTroy had torn from his hand. Being a resourceful and adaptive youngster, he stripped off his boot and sock and attempted to clutch the key ring with his toes. But he lacked both length and dexterity. However, Evangeline did not. Her toes clasped the keyring and she recovered them. She was about to unlock the door when a scream from the gallery caused me to ask her to suspend our liberation until more facts came to light.
Oscar’s elephant gun fired.
Another scream, like the first, began but was abruptly cut off – giving way to a sloshy wet gurgling like rain traveling out a noisy gutter spout.
McTroy lay still. Gavin Earl leaned against the wall with his back to us, self-judging the severity of his very private wound, while striking match after match and swearing quietly.
Oscar walked in from the gallery.
His lower jaw was missing.
We knew where it was because the Beast followed him into the room and placed its bloody prize on the table beside the red candle, which had burned down but still provided enough illumination that everything was appallingly, dreadfully, and almost clinically clear.
34
Wounds
Red ice eyes. The antlers looked even bigger indoors than they had by the window that night. Saliva dripped from the teeth. But what I noticed was the chunk of flesh missing from the Beast’s left forearm. She’d bitten herself. I don’t know if Cassi did it when she was sleepwalking, like she said, or if it was a devious trick by the Beast to throw us off her trail until she could get us where she wanted us for a final feeding. Either way, it worked on me. Maybe my mind couldn’t comprehend how a woman who might change into a werecat might also change again, or keep changing, into a hungry, insatiable, cosmic creature far more powerful than I had ever been or ever wished to be. Cassi was cursed from the start. Doubly cursed to be the victim of her father’s lust for fame and her mother’s craving for occult knowledge. Oscar was more to blame than anyone. He’d started it. He’d pushed it. He tried to control it, cage it, and finally to kill it.
She took his elephant gun and snapped it in two.
We found the pieces in the gallery afterward.
He’d fired at her after she changed into her Beast form. Snuck up from behind and blasted her at her back. But she wasn’t hit. No harm done. Oscar left a mighty hole in the stone wall of his castle. The Beast didn’t follow Oscar’s rules. She turned on him and grabbed his chin. Stuck her thumb in his mouth. Then she flicked her wrist.
Oscar, in a daze, pulled out a chair and sat at the séance table gargling blood.
Cassi – I don’t want to call her the Beast anymore, because, despite her second transformation, part of her was still a young woman who laughed and loved… who loved me… I wished that we could go back in time before all this happened, before Oscar asked his wife to call a demon into their home. Before his daughter became that demon’s host. It wasn’t possible, but I wanted to meet Cassi when she was only Cassi.
But she was never only Cassi.
She spotted Gavin Earl mumbling in the corner and put her antlers in his back and lifted him, shaking him with his head caught up in the chandelier. He was dead when she wrenched him from her prongs.
She threw him in the cold fireplace.
Her breath made long plumes of smoke in the frigid room.
The Algonquin people say their Wendigo smells like decay, like dead bodies. Their story is a warning against cannibalism in hard winter seasons, a frightful tale t
o keep the children close to home and prevent wandering too deeply into a dark wood. In general, it teaches people not to prey on each other. Not to consume your neighbors or yourself just because you’ve gotten a taste for something that’s not on the menu. That’s probably overly simplistic and wrong on my part. Like LaFarque, I am no Indian. But what I’m saying is that this advice is good. But it does not apply to my story of what happened at Nightfall Lodge. Because Cassi did not smell like death or decay. She smelled like nothing. Like the cold wind, like ice, like a Beast That Has No Name.
There was no lesson for me.
I learned nothing.
Cassi started for McTroy. He was coming awake. The evil spirit influence wasn’t on him anymore. I don’t know if I knocked it out when I battered the green moldy head, or if Cassi stopped what she was doing to him. I don’t even know if she could stop it. Or if it just arrived with the entity that took up residence in her and spread itself over the mountain like a plague.
But it was with killing in mind that she bent over my friend. Her claw snapped off his buttons. She checked his flesh the way a grandmother thumps a gourd in the fruit market. He was going to die in front of us. I couldn’t stay silent.
“Cassi, please don’t hurt him.”
The Beast… Cassi stood to her full height and approached the bars of the cage.
“Doc-tor, are you speaking to me? I thought I heard you.”
“Yes, I’m asking you to let my friends go. Stop what you’re doing here.”
“Why?”
“I am at your mercy. We are all at your mercy. There is nothing for you here. Is it possible for you to move on? You told me you are a traveler.”
“I cross dimensions. Time is not the same for me.”
“Can you leave, and can Cassi stay?”
“No, we are one now.”
“I am begging you please not to kill us. You told me that you can go where you please when you want. If this is true, then I ask you to choose to leave now.”
The Beast shook its head. There were pieces of clothing and moss in its antlers. Its fur stuck together in clumps because blood had dried there.
“What if I go with you? You told me it is lonely where you are. I will keep you company. If you are bored, like you say, I will listen to all you have to teach me. I am always talking, so conversation is not an issue. I am interested in old things, wise things. And you are the oldest, wisest intelligence I have ever encountered. Leave my friends and take me.”