The Frank Peretti Collection: The Oath, the Visitation, and Monster

by Frank E. Peretti

  She heard a voice from somewhere, and in a few more moments and a few more painful pulse beats, she remembered whose voice it was.

  Thorne. She recalled the last image she saw before her awareness came to a shattering halt: Steve Thorne, eyes as cold as a shark’s, aiming his pistol at her. As near as she could determine from the pattern of the pain and the state of her body, the bullet had struck her in the head. Where the bullet was now she cringed to imagine, but she was still alive and beginning to think again, which astounded her.

  “No, he’s got it switched off,” came Thorne’s voice. He paused as if listening to someone and then answered, “I know, but just keep moving, keep the pressure on.

  She sensed from the direction of his voice that he was behind her. Carefully, she worked one eye open. The floor of the motor home wavered and then came into focus.

  The first thing she saw was a pool of blood. How she’d managed to regain consciousness she had no idea, but one thing was certain: whatever consciousness she had would be temporary at best.

  Just a few more moments, she thought. If I can gather my strength for just a few more moments . . .

  Reed rolled over a log, sank into the cover of some willows, and lay still, listening, thinking.

  Encouraging thoughts were in short supply. For all he knew, there hadn’t been anything wrong with Wiley Kane’s rifle, which would mean Kane was dead and maybe Sing as well, both at the hand of Steve Thorne. That left him no friends and three hunters trying to track him down. If he could turn on his GPS and pick up their locations—

  That was the problem. If he turned his unit on, the others would be able to see him just as he would be able to see them. He could guess that he was in the middle of a triangle with Max to the north, Sam to the south, and Thorne downhill to the west. They were no doubt closing in on him right now.

  He wriggled through the willows and ran for a stand of firs—

  A chip of bark flew from a trunk and nearly hit him in the cheek.

  Pow!

  Well, at least he was maintaining some distance.

  Jacob halted again, turned in place, sniffed, and searched as he grunted at his females, yanking them to keep them close together. They were still working their way north, but in zigzags, quick sprints, silent hidings. The woman was silent, unseen, but Beck trusted Jacob’s senses and understood why he was keeping the group together: predators went for the stragglers, the strays, those left alone. If they stayed together, maybe, just maybe . . .

  Beck had heard more gunshots behind them. She couldn’t make any sense of it except to guess the hunters were trying to signal her.

  She felt the GPS in her shirt pocket. For now, surrounded by the frightened, fleeing family, she left it off.

  “Okay,” Thorne was saying, “try to keep pace with him and don’t let him flank you. I’m all set to torch this place as soon as you’re done.”

  Torch. Fire. Now Sing recognized a particular smell that didn’t belong: gasoline.

  She concentrated, then raised her head a hair’s breadth, gritting her teeth against the pain. I must be a stone. Lord, help me not to feel; help me not to hurt. She raised her head higher. She tested the fingers on her right hand. From somewhere, she found strength.

  She couldn’t see Thorne but could paint a picture in her mind from what she could hear: four feet away . . . sitting at the computer . . . facing maybe a quarter turn away from her . . . looking down at the screen, and—Dear Lord, please—his weight on the forward half of the chair.

  She wouldn’t be able to test her strength or her ability to move. She would have only one chance to move at all.

  She envisioned where the knife rack must be: very close, above the cutting board, near the bedroom door. One quick leap would get her there—if she was able. She envisioned the carving knife in her right hand, the one with the sharpest point. She reviewed her memory of the various knifing victims she had examined, which wounds had killed in the shortest amount of time.

  “Is she dead?” Thorne was saying. “Are you kidding? I blew her brains out. You want me to do it again?”

  I am a stone.

  She pulled in a long, steady breath, then let it out slowly, silently. She pulled in a second breath, then let it out. Without motion, she tested her muscles.

  Thorne was listening again, drumming his fingers on the counter. Hopefully, he would talk again; his ears would be filled with the sound of his own voice.

  “Adam, come on, now. You’re in this neck deep with the rest of us. Let’s get it done—”

  With every reserve of strength, of body, and of spirit, Sing flipped from her belly to her back and then to her side, closing the distance to the computer chair. Thorne’s head was turning toward the sound and he was saying, “. . . and go home,” just as her hands gripped the wheeled base of the chair, yanked, and upset it from under him. He fell away from her, grabbing the counter, trying to recover as the chair clattered on its side to the floor.

  She pushed to her feet, reached with her right hand, grasped the knife from the rack—

  Her head emptied of blood and she sank to her knees, head down, vision clouded, pain raging through her skull. Her hair and scalp were sodden and dripping. She held the knife in both hands.

  Thorne was on his feet immediately. He came at her.

  She raised her head and saw her target: the femoral artery near the top of his thigh. Her head was swimming, her strength departing.

  He put his hands on her, tried to grab her arms.

  With both hands, she plunged the knife into his thigh near the groin.

  He screamed in pain and horror, releasing his grip, backing off. The knife slipped from the wound with a spurt of blood. His leg collapsed under him and he staggered backwards, tumbling over the fallen chair.

  He was distracted, disoriented, on his back.

  Her chance would never come again. Unable to rise to her feet, she lunged forward on her knees, screaming like a cougar, pouncing like a bear.

  Just above the belly, just below the breastbone, at just the right angle—

  With both hands and all her weight, she put the knife through his heart. He stared at her in disbelief, gasping, trembling, until his eyes went blank, his pupils dilated, and his head clunked against the floor. His arms, then his whole body, went limp. Near his head were the mobile lab’s auxilary gasoline cans. He wouldn’t be using them.

  Sing rolled to the floor beside the man she had just killed, her scream becoming a loud sobbing from pain, fear, and horror.

  Jacob and the females were moving swiftly, their articulated feet padding silently over deep humus and soft green moss, weaving up and down, under and around immense, ancient pillars of old-growth forest with seeming indifference.

  But Beck was sure she knew this place. Hadn’t she once compared it to a Tolkien or Lewis fantasy, a wondrous, otherworldly place where hobbits and elves, fairies and princesses, knights and ogres had their adventures and intrigues?

  She’d been here with Reed only a week ago!

  Hadn’t she?

  Painfully clinging to Rachel’s shoulders, she looked for a trail, a ravine, a creek with a log bridge, an old cabin torn apart by a savage beast—frightening memories to be sure, but it was the nearest boundary of her world, the last place she’d ever been as a human being.

  Rachel slowed, faltered, then turned downhill.

  “Wha—?” Beck started to say.

  Rachel kept going, loping down the slope even after Jacob stopped, turned around, and grunted a question at her; even after Leah barked in alarm and Reuben whimpered.

  Beck pushed herself higher up on Rachel’s back and scanned the forest on every side, wondering where Rachel was going, and why, and feeling anxious about being separated from the group. “Rachel! Hello? W-what are you doing?”

  Beck looked over her shoulder. Jacob, Leah, and Reuben were huddling together, fidgeting and grunting. Rachel’s side trip was not in their plans.

  Rachel was snif
fing, on the trail of something. Beck had never seen this behavior before, a Sasquatch sniffing after something rather than running from something it happened to smell. “What is it, girl?”

  They came to an immense log that had once been a majestic cedar unnumbered years before. A web of tangled roots clawed the air at one end; the other end disappeared in the forest, cov- ered over with young firs and cedars that had taken root along its surface.

  Rachel sniffed the air again as if trying to be sure of something, then circled around the roots to the other side.

  A loud fluttering startled Beck; she ducked behind Rachel’s head as a gathering of birds scattered into the air: ravens, an osprey, two bald eagles. Recovering, and peering over Rachel’s shoulder, Beck saw that the birds had been here awhile—the surrounding thickets, branches, and windfall were spattered with white droppings.

  Rachel straightened in that certain way that let Beck know she could slide to the ground. Beck released her grip around Rachel’s shoulders and slid clumsily onto a mound of red crumbles, the remains of a fallen tree. Her legs were weak; she collapsed to the ground.

  Rachel took a furtive step, then another, looking at something amid the broken, dropping-spattered branches of serviceberry, until, with a mournful sigh, she sank to her haunches, her head hanging.

  Beck struggled to her feet, eased closer, and caught a scent she’d come to know: raw meat and peeled animal hide, this time with a reek of decay. From behind Rachel’s slumped back, she peered into the broken bushes and saw a rib cage almost picked clean by the birds, the blackening meat showing red where it had been freshly torn by their beaks. Eyes widening with horror, Beck saw an arm, half eaten, half covered with reddish-brown fur, with an ape’s hand—five fingers and a thumb.

  Beck moved from Rachel’s right shoulder to her left for a better look.

  The innards were almost completely gone. The spine was visible through the empty chest cavity, and Beck saw that the neck had been violently twisted and broken. Lying crookedly, almost separate from the body, was the rotting head of a Sasquatch child, one eye closed, one eye gone, the face pecked and gouged.

  The little female was Beck’s size. The mouth was smeared with huckleberries, and the hair—the long, magnificent hair— was reddish brown, the same color as Rachel’s.

  “Sh-she was yours, wasn’t she?”

  Rachel’s body began to quake as air rushed in and out of her nostrils like . . . sobs? Beck, already in a state of shock, was further astonished. Was Rachel . . . crying? Was it possible?

  Tears flooded Rachel’s eyes, overflowed, and ran down her face, something Beck had never seen or imagined in the great ape.

  “Rachel . . . sweetheart . . .”

  Beck touched her, patted her.

  Rachel threw back her head and howled, a loud sound that rippled through the forest and carried for miles.

  From above, Leah began howling and Jacob barked a warning. The forest was filled with the noise.

  Beck covered an ear with one hand, stroked Rachel’s shoulder with the other—

  She recalled the bite marks on that shoulder, the patch of blood that had soiled Beck’s leather coat, the howls she and Reed heard that night—not vicious howls of predation and threat as they’d thought, but howls of struggle and loss, pain and remorse, the same as she was hearing now.

  Then, like a loathsome reminder, a third voice joined Leah and Rachel’s from out there. The wailing woman, the demon of Lost Creek, began to answer the howls with her own eerie cry, matching them volume for volume.

  The ghostly chorus from that night on Lost Creek was complete.

  Beck had been in this place before.

  Reed was not terrified when the howling voices floated his way through the forest, layer upon echoed layer. For him, it was an awakening of hope. He knew those voices well, and judging from the sound, the beasts were still within reach—if he could only live that long. He took a measured risk and raised his head from his hiding place between two moss-covered logs, scanning the forest all around. He saw no telltale movement behind the trunks of trees and the tangled stalks of bushes; he heard no snapping of twigs or crunching of leaves to indicate his enemies had found him.

  Not that it mattered. They were hunters. They would be doing all they could to remain unseen and unheard. The last two bullets had whizzed by his head before he’d seen or heard anything else.

  But he’d heard the beasts, and if they were nearby, Beck could be nearby, and if, on the outside chance that she’d decided to send a signal . . .

  He turned on his GPS and the screen lit up. He could see Sam almost straight uphill from him—and knew Sam could see him. Max was still to the north and moving farther that way, not interested in Reed at all but going after the beasts—and maybe Beck. He last saw Steve Thorne’s blip approaching Sing’s motor home near the end of Service Road 221, but it was off the screen now, which could be the worst of news. Only Sing could update him on Blip Number 6, if Beck’s unit was turned on and if he could raise Sing on the radio, and only if Sing were still alive—

  A weak and faltering voice came through his earpiece, “Reed, I see you on my screen. Can you hear me?”

  Reed felt as though he’d reconnected a lifeline! “Sing! I was afraid you were dead!”

  “Almost. Steve Thorne shot me in the head.”

  He couldn’t have heard that correctly. “Say again?”

  Sing was slumped over in her computer chair, pressing a bloodied towel to her head, trying to view the screen sideways and work the keyboard with one free hand. Sometimes she could think clearly, and sometimes she felt she was dreaming. “It was a glancing blow.” She touched the wound and winced. “It feels like a shallow depressed fracture, nonpenetrating.” She looked at the bloodied towel. “The bullet missed the temporal artery, but there’s still a mess.”

  “Have you called the medics?”

  “Thorne smashed my cell phone and I can’t find the police radio.”

  “Where is Thorne now?”

  “Steve Thorne is dead.”

  “Did you say Thorne is dead?”

  She looked at the corpse on the floor for a moment, her focus wavering. “I’m pretty sure. I severed his femoral artery and stabbed him through the heart. He isn’t moving.”

  “Sing, Pete’s dead too. Sam killed him. Do you copy?” She heard the anguish in Reed’s voice, as if he were hearing the news himself for the first time.

  Her wound pulsed out fresh pain in a faster rhythm. “Did you say Pete is dead?”

  “Yes. Sam shot him, and now Sam’s trying to kill me.”

  She rested her head on the counter, weak with shock and grief. Maybe she was dreaming, and this was a bad dream. It felt like one.

  “Sing? Are you there?”

  “The cover-up,” came to her mind and out her mouth.

  “We need to find Beck. Can you see her on your screen?”

  Sing blinked and forced her eyes to focus on the screen. “Reed . . . Sam is coming down the hill, coming close to you.” Sam’s blip winked out. “Oh no, he’s not—”

  Ping!

  Reed had just turned to scramble out of the logs when the bullet hit and chips flew only inches away. He ducked, rolled, plowed into some bushes, found a tree to protect him.

  “Sam?” Reed called into his GPS radio. “Sam, you don’t want to do this.”

  No answer. Reed looked at his screen. That’s what Sing meant: Sam had turned off his unit. He’d gone invisible.

  Well, it could work both ways. Reed switched off his unit. He knew Sam was heading down the hill from the south. Hoping to flank him, Reed started up the hill toward the north.

  Beck heard the shot and searched that direction but saw no movement, no camouflage jackets or caps. She thought of shouting, but no, not here, not where they would find Rachel.

  As if Rachel were not giving them plenty of noise already. She was still howling inconsolably, her head thrown back, her right hand beating her chest.

/>   Beck tried to calm her, quiet her down. “Shhh, now! Shhh! Rachel, don’t do this! The hunters will find you!”

  Rachel shrugged her hand away, and Beck shied back a step, stricken by the tableau of a grieving mother and her dead, mangled child, incredulous at the revelation in the child’s reddish-brown hair: “I was her! You thought I was her! No wonder you wanted my hair the way it was.”

  Ka-wump! As if he’d dropped from the sky, Jacob came leaping over the log and thudded like a falling timber right next to them. Beck jumped with a yelp, but Jacob paid her no mind. Growling and scolding, he yanked Rachel to her feet and shoved her against the log, trying to knock some sense into her. She quit howling but kept crying. He pushed her from behind, herded her, swatted her, got her moving around the log.

  Rachel did not look back to find Beck. She just went around the log, still whimpering, with Jacob huffing at her to be quiet.

  Beck stood there. Alone. Amazed. Nonplussed.

  Rachel didn’t look back.

  When they reappeared on the hill above the log, Jacob was hurrying her along, pushing and grunting. She obeyed and climbed the slope in front of him, her soft feet taking hold of the ground with sure steps, her head hanging as she wiped her tearstained face. They disappeared behind a tree, reemerged, passed behind another tree, then two, and then the forest shrouded them like a closing curtain and Beck saw them no more.

  Somewhere in the deep forest, out of sight, Rachel quit whimpering and Jacob fell silent.

  Beck backed up a step, and noticed that she could. She looked over her shoulder, down the hill, and realized she could go there. She looked up the hill. No Jacob. No Rachel. No group.

  What about the woman? Beck listened carefully, rotating a full circle. The woman was silent, which could mean she was gone, or lurking, or stalking, or trailing the Sasquatches . . .

  There was no time to fret about it. There was no option but to get moving, to find a landmark or trail, to get that GPS turned on and make sure the hunters found only her.