‘Fuck that,’ said the singing one. ‘I’ve never heard of a mountain lion that big.’
‘Had to have been two hundred pounds,’ the fat man said, his tone matching the grim awe Reggie felt.
There was one last scream from far off. It sounded strangely like it bordered on laughter. A sound of pain and the breaking of sanity. A cry from hell.
They all stood silently, listening to it fade.
The two men dug out their own flashlights and switched them on.
The trio of beams cut through the night, trying to eye all directions at once. Reggie saw the third shotgun on the ground where the small man had been. He wanted to go to it and was afraid to move at the same time. As if his very motion might stir the suddenly silent world to chaos once again.
‘We have to go after him,’ said the fat one, though his voice said he wanted to do no such thing.
‘He’s dead,’ said the singer, as if they hadn’t heard the scream seconds ago.
The flashlight beams searched the woods. Oaks and elms and cedars and ashes and pines; gnarled trunks and twisting branches seeming to mock them; deep impenetrable shadows hiding things. This world wasn’t theirs. Man didn’t belong here. They were intruders in a territory not their own; trespassers. All of them knew it.
And unless they departed, they’d pay a similar price as their absent companion.
The men started to break down the camp in a frantic scramble, rolling up the sleeping bags and dismantling the tent. Occasionally, one or both of them pulled out cell phones, held them up, cussed loudly when there was no signal. Reggie picked up the dropped shotgun, and no one stopped him. He stood silent vigil and guard with his flashlight and the shotgun. All three of them cast frequent glances at where the third man had been. Trails in the ground marked where he’d been dragged off into the woods. When everything was packed the singing man said, ‘Let’s go’ and took a step east, where Reggie had come from, towards home.
Reggie didn’t move.
West was where he was going.
‘We’ve got to go,’ said the man, looking back at Reggie. ‘It could come back at any time,’ he added, still whispering as if they were someplace sacred. Made sacred by the spilling of blood.
‘I can’t,’ Reggie said, shaking his head.
‘Forget about the reward,’ said the man. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘It’s not that,’ Reggie said. But he couldn’t tell these two strangers exactly what it was. Ivan’s words came back to him: We have a deal. That was the short and sweet of it, and yet it was something much more.
Then language he remembered from his dad’s sermons came to him, and Reggie knew what it was that tugged him in the direction of the killer. Not merely a deal, it was a covenant. He and Ivan were bound by something irrevocable, as powerful as anything between Yahweh and the Israelites in millennia past. Likewise, as between the chosen tribe and their god, it was a covenant of blood and sacrifice.
Reggie’s own blood, and that of the deputy cast down the cliff face, flagging the living with his death wave.
West was where he had to go. West was where things would be revealed.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ the man said, angry now. ‘We have to go!’
Reggie didn’t know what he was going to say next, because he never got the chance to say it. The fat man had drifted some yards from his friend as he and Reggie had been talking. Reggie saw the eyes in the darkness. He saw the large hulking shadow. But still shaken and confused by what had already occurred, he hadn’t the wherewithal to shout a warning.
The singer must have seen some change in his expression, though, because he turned in the direction Reggie was looking. The fat man began to scream as a flash of movement in the air before him streaked through the night.
His torn throat spewed blood like a faucet. His flashlight fell, hit the ground, winked out. Reggie and the singer pointed their beams in that direction simultaneously.
But there was nothing there, only the fat man’s flashlight on the ground.
Yet they could hear them in the nearby brush. Man and beast. The friction of the man being pulled along the forest floor. The roar of the monster cat. There was a thunderclap and a brief flash as the fat man fired a shot. The singer raised his shotgun and fired in the general direction. The sound of the dragging faded and was gone. There were no screams this time.
Just the absence of the man. The existence of him scrubbed out.
Leaving only the two of them. Singing man and frightened boy.
They waited, trembling. They bore no illusions that there’d be a walk back to civilization. There was no safety. It was them and the beast. Their breath puffed in little clouds. Flashlights in one hand; shotguns in the other.
Together, they stood back to back, man and boy, turning, guarding each other, watching everywhere at once. The woods pressed against them, closing in around them, keeping them snug and tight. There was a little circle of existence at the centre of the clearing they occupied; outside this ring of light, stark blackness.
And they waited.
‘You know how to use that?’ the man asked.
‘Yeah,’ the boy answered, gripping the weapon tighter.
‘You’ll probably only get one shot, if that,’ the singing man said. ‘Make it count.’
The boy nodded though the man couldn’t see him, facing as he was the other direction. The world was silent about them. The night birds and cicadas mute, as if aware of death about them. Showing respect or dread or both.
Movement from his right. A shadow among shadows.
Reggie swivelled and fired into the night. The recoil sent the shotgun’s butt stock into his right shoulder in a hard, fast punch. The flash lit a glimpse of torn, mangy hide as tall as he. But the spread pockmarked only tree bark. The creature drew away.
The singing man turned about their shared axis, saw something, fired. The blue flash was seen in Reggie’s peripheral, but he didn’t take his eyes off the woods.
Branches swayed a few yards ahead of him. Twigs snapped like brittle bones.
Reggie fired again, leaning into the kickback this time, the butt stock set firmly against the small hollow between shoulder and collarbone. Something roared and bounded away. He tried to track it, ready to pull the trigger again, but it moved too fast.
Then it was there again, out of the shadows, charging.
It leapt from a distance, such a monstrous thing seemingly flying, sailing through the air.
Reggie tried to raise the shotgun, but he knew he was too slow. He wouldn’t have it in his sights in time. So he could only duck, drop, and roll away …
… leaving the singing man in the big cat’s path.
The man sensed something. He turned, raising his shotgun. Saw the thing coming down on him. He fired wildly. The creature landed on him, crushing him beneath its weight. Claws slashed and teeth ripped. The man’s screams were as torturous as the small man’s minutes – an eternity – ago. They weren’t mere cries of pain but shrieks of agony. Unbearable suffering.
As the mountain lion bore down on the man beneath him, chewing, tearing, ripping, it spared Reggie a brief glance. Then, the singing man’s face in its jaws like a wet hanging rag, it turned fully to face him.
Reggie, still on his backside on the ground, pointed both flashlight and shotgun at the feline thing. It walked lazily towards him. Scars adorned it and rippled with the muscled flesh like a living map, a topography of its past kills. It had one ear; where the other should have been just a hole into its head. It came at him slowly, the muzzle stained crimson.
Reggie heard the singing man’s words.
One shot. Make it count.
He’d already fired a few times, but it was the second part of that advice that mattered. He’d make this one be the one that counted. Or he’d do nothing ever again.
The monster stepped slow, almost tiredly, as if the smallest of its prey was of no consequence. Reggie thought of a house cat toying with a
dying bird or mouse, batting it about. Delaying the inevitable death for fun and amusement. Enjoying the leaching of the life from the weaker being.
He thought of the parishioner who’d shot his father, and he thought of Johnny Witte the condom bandit. He thought of Deputy Collins.
They know you’re weak.
He could almost hear Ivan’s voice. It pissed him off.
His hands tightened on the shotgun. He drew it up and aimed.
‘Come get me you big pussy,’ he said, and the demon-cat leapt, high and then coming down.
Reggie fired.
A spray of blood and fur blossomed in the cool air.
The beast roared and landed heavily beside him, the thump of the impact shaking the ground. It rolled once and was still.
Reggie stood uncertainly on trembling legs. Prodded the creature with one foot.
It didn’t move.
For a time, neither did Reggie.
He surveyed the dead. Considered them and spoke wordless prayers for them. Then he went to the fallen singer, searched the man’s pockets, found the cell phone. Although Reggie wasn’t done tonight, he could at least call the police, let them know what had just happened. These men who’d invited him into their camp for the night deserved better than to serve as scraps for forest scavengers.
Holding the cell phone up, pressing the ‘Call’ button, the LED glow showed only one bar. Pressing it to his ear, Reggie heard only a dead line.
Ivan’s voice whispered silently again to him:
Some things lived. Some things died.
For a time he considered both the dead lion and the dead man. He focused more on the big cat. The red meat of the now faceless man was more than Reggie could handle. But he found it in himself to take a sleeping bag, unroll it again, and lay it over the man. Makeshift shroud in place, he lowered his head, closed his eyes for a moment, and murmured something like a prayer again.
Directed at no particular god, but a prayer, nonetheless.
Then Reggie turned and continued west. The tower of stone beckoned.
***
Every so often, Reggie pulled the cell phone out of his pocket, tried 911 or the operator. Each time, he received only the dull tones of a dead line.
He thought of the dead men behind him. He thought of his dad dead in a lifeless heap in a parking lot.
None of it was fair. And at the same time it didn’t matter. Or all of it mattered, but there was nothing to be done about it.
You could turn around, he thought. Go home, tell Mom what happened. Call the police, tell them everything. Let them deal with it.
But, again, he knew that really wasn’t an option at all. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he had to see it through to the end.
So Reggie kept walking. And the crooked stone finger waved him onward.
2.
The dog was a mutt and a stray, ugly really. Skinny and mangy, it was a pathetic sight. It stepped into Reggie’s path, froze as if surprised to find another wanderer this far out, and stared at him for a time. Stunned in the beam of his light, like a frightened stage actor considering the audience before him. Reggie knelt, slowly set the shotgun down, unslung his backpack, and pulled out the crackers. He dumped a few into his hand and held them out palm up for the dog.
It sniffed the air between them, cautious yet interested.
But it also seemed preoccupied, fidgety, as if it needed to move on.
There was something familiar about the mutt that Reggie couldn’t immediately place. He wondered if it was a neighbour’s, and tried to remember the canine residents of his street. Urging the dog nearer, he stretched his arm out further, enticing the mutt with the proffered food.
The dog inched closer to Reggie, stretching its muzzle towards his outstretched hand. It nosed the crackers in his palm, licked one experimentally, then drew it into its mouth and started to chew. It ate a second and a third, until Reggie’s hand was empty.
Reggie took out a bottle of water next, uncapped it, and poured a little into the same palm. Holding it out to the mutt, the dog was quicker to accept this time, lapping the water up quickly. Reggie refilled his palm half a dozen times before the dog had enough and turned away.
He had wanted to pet the dog, but it drew away, moving back towards the trees from which it had emerged. It didn’t immediately leave, though, but looked back at Reggie, then back towards the trees, then at him again. The way it carried itself, tail tucked between its legs, head lowered, made it seem troubled, uneasy, and though it had taken the food and water, it seemed as if there was somewhere else it had to be.
It looked again from the woods to Reggie.
Reggie looked from the stone tower, nearer yet still a distance to be travelled, then back to the dog. It wasn’t as if he’d lose sight of the stony structure, great and soaring as it was.
‘Okay,’ he said, getting up, putting on the backpack again, picking up the shotgun. ‘Lead on.’
The dog gave one weak swish of its tail, not one of joy or excitement, but something akin to a human nodding, something of acknowledgement and appreciation maybe. The downcast angle of its gaze, the slump of its posture, assured Reggie that he wasn’t in for something altogether pleasant, but he followed the mutt regardless, remembering the waving corpse, the swinging hound, the singing, the dancing lights, the beast, and how it all seemed a part of something larger, something looming over him, like a great wave rolling in. This had the same feeling: this sad dog that had stepped from the shadows into his path.
Seeing it had his attention, the dog turned and walked into the trees and darkness beyond them, and lighting the way with his flashlight, Reggie followed.
***
The bodies were small and pale in the grass. There were five of them, still and lifeless. Reggie leaned in close to make sure, looking for the rise and fall of breathing. Nothing. He turned from them back to the mutt, the bitch, the mother.
He remembered the pregnant stray along the highway, on the way back from the theatre with his mom. Before she’d pulled off the road to the cemetery. Before he’d cussed at her, and she’d slapped him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the dog, a deep shame coming upon him. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
But there was, a voice whispered to him in his head, indicting him. Then, there was something you could have done.
The dirty, fur-entangled mutt made a small sound that died quickly, like a whimper starting but she was too tired to finish it. She moved forward and nudged one of the dead puppies with her muzzle, as if to test this prognosis. She did so weakly, though, as if aware of the cold facts before her. She lay down heavily, almost a collapse, beside them. Set her head on her forepaws and let out a long, deep breath.
Reggie looked about himself, thinking.
He knelt and tested the ground with his fingers. It was soft and rich and yielding. He took off his pack again, unzipped it and took out the knife. Kneeling, he stabbed the ground and lifted at an angle. The soil came loose easily. He started to work more earnestly, pushing the blade in deep and lifting. As the hole grew deeper, he used his hands to widen and shape it. When he was done the grave was a couple feet in diameter and a foot or so deep and he was breathing heavily from the effort.
He then piled the small bodies in one by one. He thought the mutt might lunge or snap at him in an instinctive maternal rage, and he tensed, ready to fend her off. But she did nothing, just watched him with tired resignation in her eyes. When the last dead puppy was in the small grave, he pushed the dirt back in with his hands and feet and patted it smooth. He found some rocks nearby and made a small cairn atop the grave.
Then he sat beside the mutt and gently set a hand on her shoulders. She flinched at the first touch, then slowly relaxed under his strokes.
‘I know how it feels,’ he said, not feeling the least bit foolish talking to a dog. ‘I’m sorry.’
He thought of his dad’s gravesite upon the hill at the cemetery. The cold plaque bearing his name. The gen
eral silence of the place.
Some things lived. Some things died.
The words came to him again, at first with what he took to be a taunting note to them. But as he listened to them repeating in the quietude of his mind, Reggie reassessed this judgement.
No, they weren’t so much taunting as they were insistent. As if what they had to impart was of utmost importance. Reggie’s understanding was necessary, and the voiceless words must continue until he apprehended them.
And, God help him, Reggie thought he was beginning to.
The two of them remained like that for a time, dog and boy, sitting vigil over the dead, the small cemetery lit by artificial light and moonlight, the darkness about them seemingly extending over all the world.
3.
The climb up to the great finger of stone was steep and slow-going. Regretfully, Reggie left the mangy dog at the bottom, setting the shotgun down as well. I’ll be back, he’d told the dog, not knowing if he would be or not, but feeling like the option should be put forth. Then he started up, grasping at craggy handholds, pulling himself, pushing up with his legs at carefully plotted places. At times the going was nearly vertical. At others, the hill levelled out into little recesses, and Reggie could stand, stretch, and looking up, plan his further ascent. Then he was at the rim, reaching up, rolling over, and coming up to a crouch, catching his breath.
And there Ivan was, sitting, leaning against a backrest of stone, waiting.
‘I found your note,’ Reggie said, pulling the paper out of his jeans. His hand was jittery from the strain of the climb or something else, and the wind snatched the note out of his fingers. They watched the piece of paper sailing out into the sky, carried aloft like a lazy bird. It twirled and whirled and danced an airborne ballet, graceful in its descent.
‘I knew you would,’ Ivan said. ‘I knew you were too stubborn to let things go.’
Reggie slung the backpack down and dug a bottle of water out of it. He stepped closer to Ivan and passed it over. The man took it, uncapped it clumsily, and brought it to his lips. When he’d taken a few swallows, he nodded his appreciation and set the bottle down between his legs. Reggie saw what else was there.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 13