by Shane Staley
He didn’t see Leigh until two days later. He was shoveling shit out of the horse run after some Boy Scouts had come up for some roping practice. It was summertime and plenty hot. He’d stripped off his shirt and paused to wipe sweat from his brow when he saw her leaning against the three-rail gate. Leigh had her long hair loose in the sun, a shining smile, a Western shirt tied up between her breasts, and short Daisy Duke cut-offs that showed him the most lovely set of legs he’d seen since Miss July.
Sadly, old Jim Bourne must have been answering some divine call from the Lord when he hired Clay, because six months later the old man had a stroke from which he never fully recovered. He gave his blessing to their marriage before he passed away right here in the ranch house in front of the fire because he refused to stay at “that goddamn icebox they call a hospital.”
Clay smiled at the memories. Leigh told him later that she’d only worn that stuff to get his attention, and she’d hoped he wasn’t disappointed once she got it, because there wasn’t a damn thing practical about those clothes for a girl rearing horses and working in hay. He promised her that was fine with him, because he got to see plenty more than that these days, which made up for her long pants, in which he had to admit she also looked pretty damn good.
The year after Mr. Bourne died had been tough for Leigh, and they’d toiled together to bring the ranch along. They struggled while others in the area flourished, but neither one of them talked about it aloud, each sensing the other had some morbid thoughts about it. Instead, they spent those evenings together, aching from the work, smiling weary smiles, taking refuge in their love, which bloomed even as the ranch’s business flagged.
Clay’s smile turned into a grimace as a lance of pain shot through his leg and hip, dispelling the remnants of his reverie. A knot had formed in his throat, thinking about Leigh, and he realized he’d completely checked-out there for a minute. And while that felt good, it made him feel soft and achy inside, and that was a bad thing. He needed his anger, his edge. He needed to be ready to explode, to fire, to kill.
That thing, that devil he’d seen, would be back. He was waiting, and he had a hunch. Months of research brought him to this point, and now as the solstice neared, the time had come to act on his suspicions, to exact his vengeance on whatever evil lurked in these woods. He ought not to have let his guard down with the drinks.
The fireplace was ablaze with flame, logs crackling, just like the last night he and Leigh had shared similar warmth in a world gone the way of the grave. The flames were hot on his flushed face. The alcohol burned in his cheeks, spread like divine fire from his gut to his nerves. A little more might ease the pain—the physical pain at least—and he needed that. What he didn’t need was to slip further into that soft remembrance of his wife’s touch, her laugh, the broken promises and dead dreams.
Maybe just let it all go tonight, he thought. Just drink as much as my guts will take and drift in a bleary-eyed delirium into that blessed black…
But no. It wasn’t a blessing, and the alcohol didn’t feel that damn good. Truth be told, he’d rather freeze in the woods with a gun in his hands, sighting that abomination in his crosshairs than give in to drunkenness. At this point he knew it wasn’t just the unknown he had to fear, not just the creature that he’d glimpsed that year ago—the beast with backward legs, devil’s head, and black furred arms that had carried away the love of his life, never to be seen again.
A snap-flash memory of Deputy Dale Barr and Sheriff Wilbur Hornsby came back to him, the men knee-deep in snow at the sight of the crash. Yellow and red and blue lights swept across the scene as Clay was loaded into the back of the ambulance. And then came the report. The next day in Bozeman, where Clay was experiencing first-hand Jim Bourne’s “goddamn icebox they called a hospital,” the Sheriff gravely told him they hadn’t found any evidence suggesting Leigh had been carried away by anything, but she was—and forever remained—missing.
Clay was the focus of investigation for a time. It was a fact that she had inherited the ranch from her father, which might have fetched a lot of money if someone was willing to buy it, but there weren’t any eager buyers. Neither did her insurance policies or bank accounts present a compelling case for murder. Clay sneered into the fire at the memory of Deputy Dale’s face when the Sheriff finally called off the monkeys and admitted he was no longer a suspect in The Case, as he’d come to refer to it. Like it was the biggest thing to happen in years, maybe his whole sorry career, and it had ended with a question mark instead of an exclamation point like he’d hoped. Sure would have been nice to have an article from the Helena Independent Record to frame above his desk, but hey, no need to call the reporters and tell them we’re a bunch of clowns, so let’s just let things cool and see if anything turns up, all right?
Like Leigh’s corpse, Sheriff? Is that what we’re hoping will just turn up? That the snow will melt, and her flesh will thaw, and the scavengers will drag her out into the open? Then we’ll find her chewed up and dead and then…what?
Shortly after that, Clay began to look at the people in Big Sky a little differently. And that’s when he started to notice The Look—the one he’d seen in Mac and the reverend just days ago at the country store. The Look that said the men themselves were shut down, their brains just dead blackened husks, and something else was running the body.
Something else was in all of them.
Wood crackled in the fire. One of the logs snapped, spitting an ember onto the rug. Clay snatched up the ember, tossing it into the flames.
Something caught his attention through the window.
Clay squinted. He stepped closer to the window and leaned against the pane. The cold emanated from the glass as he scanned that mountain slope, the one he and Leigh had been staring out of the night they’d last been happy, the night she’d last been alive.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
And he felt damned indeed—a cold black feeling that spread in his guts and sobered him right away.
The lights were there again, just as they’d been one year ago. Purple, green, and yellow. A multi-colored shimmer that flashed through the trees from a point above the Jeep trail, maybe a mile or more away from the ranch house. The emanating glow rose like mist above the treetops.
Clay went for the Winchester. He double-checked that it was loaded, quickly bundled up, filled his pockets with bullets, and went outside, hastily locking the door behind him. He limped down a small rise. The moon above shone coppery red, casting amber hues across the snow. He fetched a horse, saddled it quickly, and yanked its reins toward the Jeep trail above the ranch.
He rode the galloping animal into a canyon of black pines, that strange light filtering through their sharp silhouettes like the glow from another world. Bitter winds rose from snow-dusted slopes, stirring moans and whispers. The horse’s hooves beat the path in a heavy rhythm. Its gallop sent jarring pain into his hip, but he ground his teeth and gripped the rifle.
The Jeep trail dropped off at a slight angle where their accident had happened two years ago. His chest tightened near the location, and he pulled the reins to drive the horse higher to avoid the treacherous lay. Past the site, he urged the horse on, its breath a curling mist in the night. The trail sloped through a clearing, and then cut a shelf into the side of the mountain as it led again deep into towering pillars of pines.
The weird glow shimmered through the pines no more than thirty yards away, brilliant and awesome.
The source of light came from the center of a circular grove. Around the grove were odd-shaped boulders, upended, some rounded, some squared. Two arrangements of slab-like stones formed tabular structures like pagan altars. In the center of the arrangement was a massive flame, blasting like some infernal energy from a cylindrical stone well. The heart of the flame was purple, the middle zone a luminous yellow, and the outer layer of the aberrant flame deepening into a green that not only composed a shell for the energy pod, but threw off twirling wisps of crackling gr
een tendrils that wound like phantoms amongst the glade’s evergreens. But the thing that really shook Clay’s core was the sight of the awful beings that surrounded the preternatural blaze.
Upon recognizing the shapes, all anger within him cooled, sent him back to that frozen drift, broken and bleeding a year ago, the horror of the horned creature that emerged from the darkness coming over him with all its power refreshed.
This time it wasn’t alone.
There were twelve of them. Their dark fur absorbed the night like soot, so that from this distance he could make out no certain details, only the black cut-outs of their cocked legs, humanoid torsos and hunched backs, their terrible heads with hellhound snouts and racks of wicked antlers. The beings seemed to sway, entranced by the hellish emissions. That was when he recognized something else upon the altar-like arrangements—stalks of grain, bushels of greenery, and piles of pink-fleshed, fur-covered meat.
Revulsion overcame his horror. Was it fur, or hair? Fear rekindled rage at the thought that those could be human parts on the altars. Someone they’d torn apart, just as they must have torn apart Leigh…
Clay raised the rifle stock to his shoulder, unlatched the safety, and sighted the gun. When his eye focused through the sight lenses, blood iced in his veins at the sight of the demonic thing magnified there. He chose the one farthest across the glade first, the one that was facing him. While the night and strange nature of the “flame” revealed no details of the beings to his naked eye, looking through the scope revealed the details of that awful face, those beastly eyes in that ghastly head—
It saw him. Its eyes caught the satanic flame’s light and flashed at him through the scope.
Clay fired.
The shot bucked against his shoulder. He watched the beast fall backward onto the snow.
The rifle’s recoil racked Clay with pain, but he slid back the bolt, adrenalin surging through him, and reloaded the chamber, setting the stock to his shoulder for another shot.
The creatures turned. They made lowing howls like deep notes of mourning from some forbidden netherworld, a twisted place of strange things and stranger horrors, a place from which no doors to this world should ever exist. And yet they were here. And they had spotted him.
He fired off another shot. The rifle report cracked through the woods. The bullet caught a second being in its meaty thigh. It emitted an inhuman scream.
The horned gathering scattered, but one of the things came loping toward him with the grace and speed of an elk.
Clay’s horse reared and whinnied in fright. He felt his rear come up off the saddle, the momentum of the horse almost tossing him, but he quickly threw himself forward to shift his weight on the horse and send her forelegs back to Earth. His feet tightened in the stirrups, gripping the horse’s sides. In his panic to keep from falling off the mount, he dropped the rifle into the snow. He used the reins to pull forward and grip her neck with both arms. She came back down, hooves firmly on the ground, but he didn’t get control of her in time. The being was already there.
His first impression of it this close, in the night, was indeed of some demonic beast come to claim his wicked soul. The creature was tall—at least eight feet. It snorted like a raging bull, mist pluming from its nostrils, spraying a foul scent. Its eyes gleamed with eldritch power as it lowered its head. A final lope carried it headlong toward Clay and his steed. He saw what was coming too late—
The creature’s antlers flayed the side of his horse’s neck, goring its throat, tearing the soft skin and flesh, ripping it open in a gush of hot blood. It spattered across Clay’s face and splashed steaming to the snow as he careened to the ground. The horse made a gurgling sound, suffocating in its own blood, thrashing on top of Clay’s bad leg. He screamed in pain and terror as the shape of the demonic thing turned back to finish him.
Clay desperately swatted the ground. He flailed around where he’d dropped the rifle, and by God there it was, cold and lethal in his hands again. The stock slipped from his fingers at first. The beast was coming for him. He knew he’d probably die at its hands just like Leigh and he’d go to be with her, but, damn it, he wouldn’t go without a fight…
He gripped the rifle. He raised it just as the shape loomed over him, the stink of its froth, the terrible glow of its eyes, horse blood dripping from its rack. It bared its teeth and gnashed at him.
Clay pulled the rifle’s trigger.
The creature’s head exploded. Its left antler came loose along with a hunk of its skull. Its carcass fell heavily into the snow beside him.
Pain surged through Clay. Breath rasped in his lungs. He could hear the sounds of his horse suffering, thrashing in the snow. Still, he lay there and listened. Nothing else came for him, but they were out there somewhere.
He scanned the forest depths. Cold pressed against his wide eyes and threatened to freeze them open.
The weird fire from the well had waned but had not yet entirely disappeared. The unholy gathering was gone.
Clay gripped the rifle to his chest and closed his eyes, trying to breathe, but feeling panic instead. He had to fight it off. Had to calm himself, push himself to walk back through the forbidding darkness to the ranch house. To make it alive.
With effort, he stood using the butt of the rifle in the snow and pushing himself up on it like a walking stick. He shot the horse to end its suffering. The animal was still.
It felt like his leg was broken again, or maybe it just reminded him of how much it really fucking hurt to be utterly frigid and cold to the bone. The horse had landed on him…but right now all that mattered was getting back.
He sensed the countless miles of open wilderness all around him, and it filled him with dread. The walk back to that moonlit clearing would be long. In the meantime, he was surrounded by devils in the dark.
* * *
The walk was as agonizing as he knew it would be. Each step was a rite of torture, and each step after that a triumph that gave him the will to go on. In the time it took him to get back to the ranch, the cold set in deep enough to convince him it would be easy to just give himself to it, to succumb to the wilderness once and for all and it wouldn’t hurt anymore—nothing would hurt anymore—not the memories and not the old brokenness of human frailty. Just deep, blessed sleep.
An inner voice reminded him this was a trick. He couldn’t feel his toes, or his fingers, and the rest of what he could feel didn’t feel all that great. Still, he forged on. He clutched the rifle and watched every perceived shift of shadow. As he traversed the Jeep trail over that deadly slope and came within view of the lights of the ranch house, his energy surged anew. He hurried the final distance by swinging his shattered limb and lumbering like Frankenstein’s monster across the eerie, amber-lit snow.
When he crossed the last of the clearing, the end of his driveway came into view. Four vehicles were parked at the bottom of the ranch house’s driveway, their lights dark. All of the vehicles were empty.
Even as cold as he was, Clay stopped. He processed what he was seeing as a threat, and potential solutions to the whole goddamn awful mystery suggested themselves, even as the horror of those potential truths grew like poison roots in his gut.
He went cautiously closer to the house. He’d left the lights on. Yellow squares from the windows shone on the snow. He’d cleared snow from the stairs so he couldn’t tell from tracks who, or what, might have made itself at home inside.
Clay struggled to climb the stairs quietly, but his leg was like a plank of wood, and he was too cold. The rifle in his hand jarred from his grip. He slipped and banged it against the railing.
He caught his breath through clenched teeth. He studied the thin-curtained window of the front door just three steps above. No movement within.
He made the last few steps carefully, painfully, until he finally stood in front of the door, staring at the handle as if it promised death. Ultimately there wasn’t anything left to do but go in. He would have kicked in the door and charged in wi
th the rifle blazing if he’d been able to dislodge the lock with a kick. As things were, he was low on strength, low on energy, and dull with the sense of being near frozen to death.
Clay grasped the door handle, turned the knob. It came loose from the jamb and swung open. No one stood in the entry way. He limped clumsily inside and closed the door.
He felt their eyes upon him before he turned around.
They stood in the living room. Ten men, their eyes fully black. Their arms were at their sides. Their faces pale and expressionless.
Something surged through Clay. It pushed short breaths from his lungs. Rushed in his head. His pulse, he realized. The throbbing inside of him was the racing of his heart.
The men stood deathly still in his living room. They were men he knew from town, among them Reverend Fleming, Sheriff Wilbur Hornsby, Deputy Dale, and Mac Weller—the Sky Valley Regulars.
Dread gathered in Clay. That sense he’d gotten from all of them at one time or another was a chilling truth—the sense that something else was living in each of them, looking out from behind their eyes. And now those things were in control of these men, standing here before him, wearing their skins. From the fireplace, the dying light of his fire painted the figures in flickering hues.
The Reverend Fleming-thing opened its mouth. It raised one arm toward him.
“Clayton James,” it said. And the voice was Fleming’s but not Fleming’s, a monotone drone that seemed just one-beat off, like a bad dub that didn’t quite sync with the movement of the lips. “The lunar eclipse opens the fold. Join us on this winter solstice, become one of us and live.”