by David Haynes
The baby cried for more, opening her cavernous mouth and flicking her gray tongue over her bloody lips. The last rabbit. This was the last of the food. Once it was gone there was no more and she did not have the means to hunt for more. She was not him.
She shivered herself to sleep, listening to the greedy child feed on the final rabbit. Perhaps they would find the trees tomorrow, perhaps they would find her father and the village, and mother would make her a bowl of the mushroom broth she loved so much.
*
She woke herself with a violent, heaving intake of breath. Her bones were frozen. Blood no longer flowed freely through her veins but inched around her body like a slug. The snow had fallen deep all around the little cave she’d built. It had fallen on her, covering her with a blanket, so deep and thick it felt almost warm.
She expected pain. She waited for it to come, just as she’d waited for the demon’s beatings, but it didn’t arrive. Instead she felt a curious warmth spreading through her body. Was she dead?
And then the baby coughed, choking up a fragment of powdery bone onto her chest. She touched it, felt the bone snow, and then pushed it at the baby. The child latched onto it immediately and flicked an insatiable gray tongue at it. There was no more food. The meat was gone.
She was tired. She had eaten nothing since the small bone the day before, and the sustenance that provided had long been exhausted.
She must move. The village was below, food was below, and the child would be safe and taken care of.
She tried to lift her legs but they did not respond. She peered down at them. Her toes were black and leathery, and spidery black veins crept along her shin bones. She could not move her feet.
“Move!” she commanded but they did not listen.
It was then she realized that it was not warmth she felt in her body but an absence of cold. An absence of sensation. Her arms and hands were still able to move, her fingers to wiggle. She could hold her baby and keep her warm.
The child cried, taking little nips at her breast where grains of bone snow must have remained. Her teeth were sharp and pointed, but without flesh they were useless.
“Hush, my tenshi. Soon they will come for us and we will be safe. There will be plenty of meat for us to eat. You will learn how to play in the forest as I did, you will swim in the rivers and dry your clothes in the warm summer sun. The whole world is not covered in snow. There are trees, and deer, and fish, and flowers with petals all the colors of the rainbow.”
But the baby would not be calmed. The crying grew harsher and louder and more pained as the dawn broke over their hiding place. They had wandered off the track, deeper into the mountains, farther from the village than they had ever been.
Just a few steps away, the earth ended. A precipice, which she had been lucky to avoid, dropped steeply into an abyss. She could not see where the earth started again, for the drop was so deep and dark not even the dawn could penetrate.
She wanted to sleep. She wanted for the rest of her body to feel the same warmth as her legs did. She wished the child would stop screaming and crying. There was no food, there was no hope. The only happiness she clung to was the sight of the demon as he’d fallen to the ground beside her, his head swollen and disfigured by her blows and bites. She had beaten him, she had won. She should have dragged him along and eaten him bit by bit, fed him to the baby. That would have been justice.
She closed her eyes, the baby’s cries at one with the screaming wind.
“Hush,” she whispered. “Soon all will be well.”
The child grew silent, gurgling and wriggling at her breast. She smiled. They would always be together. Always.
As she succumbed to the spreading warmth, she longed to see her father’s face again, to hear his voice and feel his touch on her cheek.
A crunching groan dragged her from her happiness and pushed her into the haze of the storm.
“Father?” she asked.
A gray, shrouded figure climbed up and over the precipice. He had found her. He had come to rescue her and take her home. He stood, head bowed against the wind.
“Father!” she repeated. “I have a child, a baby girl. My own angel.”
He did not move. Could he not see her, did he not recognize her? She wanted to stand, to run to him and jump into his arms as she had done as a little girl, but she couldn’t.
She put all her strength into her arms and lifted the baby upward, toward him.
“My baby,” she said. “Help us, take us home.”
Her father lifted his head and stared into her eyes.
She did not see her father’s eyes; she saw only his. It was not her father. It was the demon.
She recoiled, pulling the crying baby to her chest. “No!” she screamed. “It cannot be! You are dead. I killed you.”
But he was not dead. His face was more disfigured than ever; his scabrous skin hung ever looser from his scarred body, flapping in the wind.
She screamed as he pulled her legs toward the precipice. Did he mean to take her back to the cave? He picked her up, slinging her body over his shoulders as if she were one of the small animals he caught. He would have to carry them both all the way back to the cave. No matter the beating, she could not walk another step.
She clung to the baby as he reached the precipice, looking down over the edge. It seemed to reach down into the very bowels of the earth. She could see no bottom to it, no end to the abysmal darkness beneath his feet.
His intention became clear. He did not wish to take her back to the cave; he did not wish to save her or the baby. He was going to hurl them both into the abyss where they would perish in the eternal and hellish darkness of his making.
“My baby,” she whispered. “Help my baby!”
He lifted her high above his head and, with a cacophony of growled declarations, he tossed her down into the hole.
She tumbled on and on into the darkness and as she did, she repeated the same words over and over again.
“My baby, help my baby.”
5
And now she was here. In this time and place but with the same desires that clung to her through the centuries. She would keep her baby safe. They would remain together forever. The demon had cursed her; his words as she tumbled into the abyss kept her tethered to the earth, restrained her as he had done in life. She was no longer his servant, his plaything, but instead condemned to be forever hungry. To carry a child whose hunger could never be sated.
When she awoke from an eternity of falling through the darkness she was once again imprisoned in the snow and ice, with a storm that blew about her body, raging constantly. She walked for days and days trying to find the food she craved, the bones and the meat that they both needed to endure.
The pine trees had smelled so alive and vibrant when she walked among them as a child, but now they smelled of nothing. The wind high in the canopy had once been like a lullaby, coddling her to sleep. The sound was now bitter and angry, carrying only ice and the harsh biting hunger that gnawed at her bones.
When the snow retreated from the forest, so did she, for the sunlight burned her skin, scorching her child through the demon’s blanket. She was cursed to live in the ice and the snow forever.
One late afternoon, she wandered through the trees at the foot of the great mountain. She stood only on the freshly fallen snow. The darkness would soon come, a darkness in which she had once slept. There was no rest now, no sleep. Her body did not crave or allow it. All she could do was meander through the desolate landscape in search of nourishment.
She waited for a while, pressing her back against a rock, listening to the perpetual storm that raged in her head and bones. In her soul. She had seen no sign of humanity, of the village, of life. Bitterness festered in her heart. What wrongs had she committed to be cursed so? She could think of nothing, and yet here she was. She roared into the storm, matching its wrath to her own.
She did not hear the heavy breathing of the man as he stepped through the
deep snow toward her. She did not lift her head until he paused and looked down at her.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
She lifted her head, expecting to see the demon, but it was not. It was a man, a young man with eyes that were as clear and dark as the night sky.
For a moment she could not speak; her tongue had forgotten how to twist the words and push them out.
“Woman?”
Woman? Is that what she was? It seemed only yesterday that she had been a girl.
“You should not be out here with a child,” he said.
She lifted the child from beneath the blanket. “My baby,” she said. “Help my baby.” Her voice did not sound as she remembered it, but it had been so long.
He frowned and crouched beside her, gazing at her tenshi.
“The child…the child is…” His face filled with horror. He tried to recoil but she reached out a hand and touched his cheek.
“Help me,” she said.
And then she felt it. She felt the storm rise through her chest and spread into her hands, into her mouth and eyes. She felt it flow into him, running fast through his veins and arteries, freezing everything it touched.
His eyes turned gray. His skin hardened. She heard his bones fracturing, splintering, as he fell dead beside her. The baby mewed like a hungry kitten, clawing for the fallen man.
“You are hungry, my angel.”
The child whimpered again.
“Eat then,” she said and held the baby above the man.
She watched for a moment, listening to her child bite through the frozen flesh as if it were one of the demon’s hares. She felt a great and painful yearning within her own body as the baby fed.
She could resist no longer, falling onto the body with a frenzy that she knew was shameful. Yet she needed this, they needed food if they were to live on. None had helped her when the demon took her away from the village. Her father, uncles and brothers had forsaken her. The men had given her to the demon without thought for what she would become. She loathed them. She despised the demon who had dominated her with his manhood.
Together they fed, devouring the man, chewing through his bones, inhaling their richness, tasting it, feeling it furnish their withered bodies.
When they were done and the man nothing more than a bundle of tattered rags in the snow, she sat back and allowed the warmth of his soul to flood over and through her. It did not last long and when it ended, she felt her stomach lurch and turn and twist itself into a ball.
All at once, she let forth a storm of her own. It was not snow she spewed out but fine particles of the man’s bones. They flew from her mouth like a blizzard, coating the ground in his powdery remains. The hunger returned with a vengeance. Now she had tasted the man, felt his warmth flood her body, she wanted more. Always more.
For centuries she fed this way, driven by anger and resentment as much as hunger for herself and her child. And with each passing year, both factors grew stronger. They grew strong enough to warp her body, to twist a face that had once been as pretty as the flowers in the meadow. She did not know what a reflection was but beneath her fingers she could feel the fissures, cracks and ragged flaps of skin that grew on her face.
The child did not age or grow, despite the gluttonous way it fed on the bodies and souls of men. It carried much of the demon’s hideous mien yet she loved her, treating her as any mother would treat her newborn baby. She would do anything for her little tenshi.
She never saw the demon again. He belonged to a different place and had forsaken her as easily had her father had done. He created her and cursed her, but he did not want her.
In the souls of the men she consumed, she witnessed the fear they held for her; the disbelief that she was real. They told stories about her, about the Yuki-onna, the Snow Woman, the Snow Hag, but they did not think she was real. They believed their wanderings through the forest would be safe, would be without a visit from the Yuki-onna. They were wrong.
The women she met did not interest her. She saw in them a vision of what she would have been. Instead of resentment, she felt only a sense of protection almost as strong as the one she held for her baby.
She saw their pain, heard their silent screams in the night, felt the blows that their husbands, brothers or fathers rained down on them. The abuse they suffered bit into her like the hunger she perpetually felt. It would not lessen no matter what she did.
Some women carried her with them. She lived in their hearts. They believed that the cruel men would be punished by her, that she would take revenge for all the vile acts they committed.
She lived in them as much as she lived in the snowy wilderness of the mountains. And as long as they believed in her, held her close, she would always be a part of them. They could bring her to them; with their cries they could summon her to aid them. To destroy and consume the men that bound them.
The woman who called her from the wilderness was young, had been pretty until they took her soul and forced her to do as they said. The girl had screamed, wailed in agony and spoke of the devil that brought her to these streets and forced drugs into her veins, made her the object of lust from men who would beat and kick her just as the demon had done to her.
She heard her cries and she came. She came here to find the devil that lived not in a cave in the great mountain but in a city, in a house. The snow would come, the storm would confine him and she would consume him. In her mind she saw only the demon that had cursed her. Now she would curse him and take his soul for her own.
She waited and she watched. The baby cried.
“Hush,” she said. “Soon we will feed on the bones of the great demon.”
Part Four
1
Leo left Kim upstairs to keep an eye on Sam. As much as he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Ookami or Kenta, the desire to make sure they didn’t steal from him or damage the shop was keener.
He reached the foot of the stairs and stopped, peering toward the basement. He could hear the wind blowing, gusting and rattling the building. He took a step and then paused. Was the wind outside or inside? A freezing blast of air that screamed out of the basement answered his question.
Flakes of powdery snow drifted up the stairwell, settling just inside the storeroom. He watched them, transfixed by the way they grouped together, forming a thin carpet on the concrete base. He recoiled, remembering how the snow felt beneath his feet.
He snapped his head around, peering toward the store. Kenta and Ookami were actually laughing. What the hell? He turned away from the snow, marching to the storefront.
“What the hell are you two laughing about?” he shouted.
“Nothing,” Ookami replied.
Kenta said something in Japanese and they both laughed again.
“Assholes,” Leo hissed. He was trying to keep his anger in check but it was close to the surface. He sat down and slumped against the wall, closing his eyes for a second.
He saw the woman and the child’s faces. He saw them feeding on what was left of Sota. Worst of all, he saw her as she turned toward him.
He opened his eyes. Anything was better than seeing that again; even the sight of Kenta was less horrific. He looked a mess. He’d been beaten and had his fingers cut off. The pain must be bad. He smiled.
“I bet that hurts, huh?” Leo called across.
He got to his feet and walked behind the counter, reaching up for a bottle of whiskey. “I bet this would help,” he said, unscrewing the cap. “It would really deaden that pain.”
Kenta looked up at him but said nothing.
Leo took a drink. He just wanted to get under Kenta’s skin, irritate the pair of them. If he couldn’t challenge Ookami – and Kim was right about that, this wasn’t the time or place – then he wanted to really annoy the guy.
“That’s good. Takes the chill off,” he said, wiping his mouth. He swilled some around his mouth and exhaled loudly. “How you going to hold your gun, Kenta? Won’t be easy with a
couple of missing fingers.” He paused. “Never know, it might improve your aim.”
Kenta was staring at him. “You might want to ask that girl downstairs how good my aim is…. oh wait, you can’t, she’s dead. I shot her in the fucking head.”
Leo bit his lip, drummed his fingers on the counter. He wanted to take the guy’s head off, but he held onto Kim’s advice. He shouldn’t have engaged them. He started walking back to his mattress with the bottle in his hand.
“Wolf got your tongue?” Kenta shouted.
He stopped in his tracks.
“That’s the right phrase, isn’t it?”
Leo turned slowly. His stomach was in knots. Ookami had stood and was jabbering on in Japanese. He looked livid.
Kenta didn’t turn to his uncle; he kept his eyes on Leo. “Wolf, I’m sure that’s right. Wolf got your tongue.” He smiled and then got to his feet, turning to Ookami.
“Isn’t that right, Uncle.” His tone was not of reverence but of something else. The pounding in Leo’s ears didn’t drown it out. He heard it clearly, and in other circumstances it would have made him smile.
“You ever wonder what my uncle’s name means?” Kenta took a few steps away from Ookami but his attention was focused on him. It was as if he were not addressing Leo at all. “It means…”
“Wolf,” Leo finished.
Neither Kenta nor Ookami looked in his direction. They were staring at each other. Kenta was smiling, or at least trying to with his swollen and disfigured face. Ookami just looked plain mad. He wasn’t trying to disguise it.
“Silence!” Ookami roared. “You will be quiet, Kenta!”
*
Kenta wouldn’t be silenced. Not now. He had been through enough. He had seen how his so-called uncle operated and he wouldn’t take it anymore.
If he played this just right, he wouldn’t have to get his own hands dirty, he could walk away without a mark. Any further marks, anyway. All he had to do was throw a few carefully chosen words into the air and watch them land. With any luck, they would explode and take the boxer and his uncle with them. And if that didn’t work, he had a plan for his new friend, the Yuki-onna. After that, there was only the cop, Michael and his crazy-ass bitch of a wife to take care of. Easy. One way or another, he was going to walk out of this and take his place at the head of the organization. Exactly where he should be.