“Not evil,” Tíwé replied. “Not good, either. At least not in our stories.”
“How could he not be evil?” I argued, baffled by his response. “You said it yourself. He kills people. Children!”
“Is the wolf not evil in the eyes of the deer?” he asked. “or the hawk, in the ears of the rabbit? We don’t believe in good and evil spirits. At least not like the big religions do. In our tradition, there is no Heaven or Hell, no duality. It’s more complicated.”
“So we’re just dinner,” I said, perhaps a bit too harsh. Tíwé didn’t acknowledge the statement. Instead he grabbed my shoulder with a gentle hand.
“How long will you be here?” he asked me.
I shrugged.
“One more night. Maybe two, tops. I need to find Faye’s ring. Then I’m gone.”
“I do think you’re in danger,” Tíwé replied, “Both of you. I’d tell you to come with us, but it doesn’t seem to matter where you go.”
I nodded. If the creature could follow us back to California, he certainly could track me a few miles away to Tíwé’s community.
“Nathan and I need to ask for help,” he continued, “because there’s little we can do on our own. But we will come back tomorrow. I promise.”
I was surprised to learn that the ranger wasn’t going to pick Tíwé and Nathan up. They had apparently hiked to the cabin and met him here, and now planned to hike back down the mountain. Nathan dismissed my concerns about the dropping temperature, insisting that they walked this road almost every day. “Keeps his veins clear,” he said about his father. They zipped up their coats and bade me farewell. As I saw them off, Tíwé whirled around and tossed me a small neck pouch he’d produced from beneath his shirt.
“My dad made it,” he said, smiling. “Always makes me feel safer. I’ll pick it up when I get back.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just a bit of sage. I change it out every so often. Might not ward off the devil, but it’ll protect you from the smell of your bad cooking.”
“You really crack yourself up, eh?” I shot back. Tíwé’s ill-concealed snickers broke to open laughter.
I waved goodbye to my new friends and retreated into the cabin. The sun edged closer to the distant mountains, and a bitter wind whipped across the field. Thick clouds approached from the East and collected above my tiny prison, promising a new blanket of snow in the morning. I had flown to Colorado and spent half a day with the only person I believed could help me and Faye, and yet I had little to show for it. I didn’t feel any closer to ridding us of the toxic presence that hungered for my fiancée.
The dues of sleep deprivation caught up with me just after sundown. Too exhausted to stay up any longer, I crawled into bed and vanished into a near-coma. I woke before midnight to the nagging of a full bladder, and dragged myself to the bathroom. The entire cabin was freezing; I must have forgotten to set the thermostat. Instead of waiting for the heater to slowly warm the place up, I drew a boiling hot bath and slid into it like a sedated eel. As I lay there, floating at the precipice of sleep, Faye’s voice drifted into my mind – her laughter, her jabs, her flirtatious coos. I hoped Tyler and Colin were keeping her happy and distracted. I missed her.
My eyes rolled around in my head, dragging my blurry gaze across the room. They landed on the steamy window just above the tub. There was something on it, something written. I stood up, splashing water all over the floor.
It was another ‘5’, written backwards on the glass from inside. The writing didn’t look fresh; it seemed faded and poorly defined compared to the reference ‘5’ I drew beside it with my own finger. Faye must have done this when we visited.
And then it hit me: she was signaling the Impostor long before we returned to California. How long had she been communicating with him?
I leaped out of the tub and wrapped a towel around myself, ignoring the sting of my freezing feet and the pools of water they tracked everywhere. I marched around, fogging every window in the cabin with a few breaths, searching for more hidden messages. Each breath revealed the number five, always written backwards so that a person outside could read it. They varied in size, and the bedroom window had ten or eleven of them scribbled all over it.
As I examined this window, there came a knock at the front door.
My breath caught in my throat. I poked my head out into the hall, gazing down the long darkness of it.
Knock-knock-knock.
“Hello?” my voice called out. It came not from my own mouth, but from outside. “Hello? Are you there?”
I held still, considering whether it was smarter to pretend I wasn’t home, or to argue with the dreadful visitor as I had the night before. Would he come inside if he thought I wasn’t here? Then, I remembered the missing lampshade, and the ranger’s observation that someone had searched the cabin and rifled through our clothes. The thought of this creature climbing in through a window raised every hair on my neck.
Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock.
“This is dark,” he mumbled. “Dark, dark. Acada…acadack…acaddada…emic…aca…demic.”
Please go away, I prayed. In that moment I had never so dearly missed Faye. Her image swirled in my mind; my brain conjured her because it believed I was about to die. I was going to die a thousand miles away from the only person who loved me.
The creature outside suddenly drew fast, raspy breaths. It was as if the thought of my fiancée provoked him.
“Is that…is that a fucking dreamcatcher?” he said. He tapped something against the door, maybe a claw, then walked slowly across the porch. The tapping became a scraping sound, and it grew louder as the creature made his way around the house toward the bedroom. Toward me.
I flicked off the light and darted over to the window,
yanking the curtain shut just before a large form moved behind it.
Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic.
The figure tapped on the glass and issued a deep gurgling sound from his throat. The guttural noises took shape and became my voice once again, and out came sentences he must have overheard me saying weeks ago. He had been here all along. He was listening to us all the time, crouching beneath the windows and memorizing how we spoke.
“What is your name?” he asked.
My stomach leaped into my throat. I couldn’t risk letting him think I wasn’t around.
“M…my name is David,” I muttered.
The Impostor hesitated, as if surprised to hear me respond at all.
“What is your name?” he asked again, making wet smacking noises. I imagined a gruesome being sliding its tongue all over its lips and jagged teeth. “Feeeelix…Fffffffeeelissssk…”
“My name is David,” I said, raising my voice to nearly a yell.
He hesitated once more, then tapped the glass again.
Tic-tic-tic.
“Felix…” he said, then drew another raspy breath. “Faye. Faye.”
Hearing her name spoken by the very thing that wanted to harm her filled me with rage. The fire inside me burned away my fear. It scorched my reason, and ignited in me fantasies of leaping through the window and beating the son of a bitch to death with my bare hands. It became a death wish that I could barely control.
“Monkeytoes,” he taunted.
A strange thought occurred to me, momentarily decoupling my mind from the hatred that plagued it. If this thing was learning to communicate by parroting me, perhaps I could confuse him. I began to recite a poem I’d memorized for German class in high school: Die Frauen von Ravenna Tragen.
The creature paused to consider the noises I made. He had probably never heard them before. I listened as he tried to mouth the syllables. He failed to reproduce much of what he heard.
“May I come in?” he said, speaking through gnashing teeth. He was frustrated.
“Ich heiße Hermann,” I continued, trying to recall other German phrases I’d learned. “Ich komme aus Kalifornien. Ich schreibe gern. Mein Klavierspiel ist sc
hrecklich. Ich möchte ein Lehrer werden.”
Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic. The creature rolled his nails across the glass. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t punch through it and drag me off into the woods. I still couldn’t understand what he wanted, or why he didn’t just kill me.
The figure lurched over to the back door, a few feet away from where I stood. The knob rattled. I carried on with my silly recitations, and he became more and more upset. He growled and rasped and wheezed and tapped on the door, until finally he let loose an ear-splitting howl and stomped away from the cabin. I threw the curtain open and caught sight of a dark shape moving toward the woods. It looked like a man, except all the limbs were slightly elongated. No two of them were the same length, and so his movements were eerily off-balance. He howled one last time, provoking a thousand mournful voices to cry out in horror, and then silence washed over the snowy landscape. On the window before me was a ‘5’, smudged across the glass with mud. The Impostor had written it backwards, so that I could read it from inside.
That night, I lay in bed with the gun, reflecting upon the encounter. I did not feel safe. I did not feel free of the
monster that haunted my life. But for the first time in weeks, I felt something other than hopelessness in the wake of the monster’s presence. After pondering everything that had transpired over the past few weeks, I concluded that the Impostor was stuck. He desperately wanted something from Faye, something only she knew, perhaps something secret. He tried to ask her directly – and she refused. He tried to trick her into following him into the woods, and failed.
I now believed that the Impostor was rehearsing my voice with the intention of convincing Faye that he was me. Perhaps this wouldn’t work on a normal person, but Faye is highly suggestible when she is unconscious. The creature whispered to her at night, speaking to her through dreams. He wanted entry not only to our home, but to Faye’s soul – and yet he seemed to need her permission.
Chapter 26
A brilliant glow enveloped me as I awoke. The sun blazed against a blanket of new-fallen snow, and the forest shivered at the rush of a strong breeze. I’d forgotten to shut the curtain last night, and so the morning light dragged me to consciousness far earlier than I’d planned.
My head throbbed. I’d gotten half my average amount of sleep in the past several days, and now a faint dizziness always clung to me. I used the satellite phone to call Faye, and as it rang, I sat there on the bed, staring at the ugly ‘5’ scraped across the window. The creature had probably taken the opportunity to stand there all night, gazing down at me as I slept with a grin smeared across his face.
“Hello?” a meek voice answered, snapping my attention away from the muddy inscription.
“Hey you!” I said. It felt so good to hear her voice.
“Hi.”
“How are you? How’s Colin and everybody?”
“Fine.”
Her voice was empty and distant. She must not have recovered as much as I’d hoped.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Didn’t sleep too good,” she replied, “but I’m alright. I
miss you.”
The words tore at my soul.
“I miss you too, Monkeytoes. You have no idea.”
“Did you find my ring?” Faye asked. “I had a dream you found it. Didn’t make much sense though.”
My heart sank at the reminder. I feared I’d never find it.
“Not yet,” I said, trying to reassure her. “But I will. If I don’t find it here, I’m going to ask your folks to look around their place. It’s around here somewhere. Don’t worry.”
“It’s not important,” she replied. She paused for a long moment and then said, “Keep looking. Need more sleep. Keep looking.”
The phone clicked and she was gone.
“Hello? Faye?”
Even in the serenity of daylight, I felt afraid. I reminded myself of why I had come to the mountain, and what I had to do: find the ring, and wait for Tíwé. I planned to search the driveway, the outside perimeter of the house, and the path we’d taken into the forest.
In an effort to feign some semblance of a normal life, I made myself breakfast and sat at the little table with my laptop. The WiFi slowed to a drip, but I was able to read a bit of the news and skim through emails from students demanding their midterm grades. As I scrolled through my inbox, my eyes stopped at a message sent at 11 P.M. last night. The subject line read: FELIX, OPEN THIS NOW. RE FAYE.
The message was from Tyler. It was long and frantic, obviously written in great haste, and detailed the events of the past few days of my absence. He explained that he’d left several voicemails, but knew that I was unlikely to get any reception to check them on the mountain.
Tyler described how Faye had been alert and cheerful
the day I dropped her off at his house, but the next morning, she had become more and more lethargic. At some point she told Allison, Tyler’s fiancée, that she felt sick, and wanted to go home. Tyler resisted for a while but eventually caved, on the stipulation that he and Allison stay at our place with her. Faye obliged and set them up in the guest room.
Things seemed to be going well until Tyler got the bright idea to test his superstitions. Faye keeps a photograph of her grandfather Alfred on a shelf in the living room, with a little crucifix and some old rosaries. There is also a vial of holy water from her family’s priest, which Tyler stole and dumped into Faye’s shampoo bottle – “just to see what would happen.”
That day after her shower, Faye inexplicably threw a tantrum and locked herself in the bathroom. She claimed she felt like “hurting someone” and wanted to be alone, and only came out after much prodding from Allison. Eventually she calmed down enough to rejoin everyone downstairs, but she refused to eat anything for the rest of the day. Instead she sat quietly, gnashing her teeth in rage. She seemed to return to normal after several hours.
Colin showed up that evening and camped out downstairs. Faye was kind enough to set him up on the couch, and they even had a brief conversation about Carrot, so he was under the impression that Tyler had been exaggerating her strange behavior. Colin is a web designer who tends to stay up late working on commissions, so at 2 A.M., he witnessed Faye rushing down the stairs. She dashed into the kitchen and started lapping water from the faucet like an animal. When Colin turned on the light, he saw that her eyes were closed, but she stood up and “stared” at him for a while without moving. Then she spoke the word “Felix,” to which Colin answered, “He’s in Colorado, remember?”
Faye’s response to this was, “We sent him there to die.” She resumed slurping water from the faucet.
In the middle of the night, Allison and Tyler had an argument, which ended with Allison storming out of the house. Allegedly, Faye had spent hours singing and talking to herself in our bedroom, which prompted Allison to investigate. Faye told her that she was afraid to be alone, and begged Allison to stay with her through the night. Allison slept on the floor, but woke up at one point to Faye leaning off the side of the bed, whispering that there was a man without a face wandering around in the dark downstairs. She said, “he keeps asking about you,” then reached out and combed her fingers through Allison’s hair.
Tyler spent the last paragraph of the email reassuring me that he was committed to protecting Faye no matter how weirdly she acted, and that he would call the police or take her to the hospital if she did anything dangerous. At the bottom, the final line read:
There’s something else you need to know, but I’ll let Colin tell you himself. Call us as soon as you can.
This new development crushed me. Not only had I failed to draw the creature away from my fiancée by returning to Pale Peak, I’d put my friends in danger and abandoned Faye. The more I learned about the Impostor, the less he made sense. Could it be that more than one of these things was following us around? Or could one of them simply move across great distances at will?
Colin’s phone was off, so I left a messag
e requesting that he call me immediately. Then I headed outside with a paper towel to see if I could clean the muddy ‘5’ off the window.
The moment I opened the front door, my eyes remained glued on the tree line in the distance. I half-expected a grotesque monster to come barreling out of it on all fours, and in my dark reverie I missed a patch of ice on the porch and fell hard on my side. One of the steps bashed into my ribcage and knocked the wind out of me.
Cursing, I picked myself up and limped around the side of the cabin. As I rounded the corner, my breath rushed out of me again. The big stack of firewood that sat near the bedroom window was now a scattered mess. Snow had been scraped away from the place where it once stood. As I moved closer, a heavy cellar door came into view. Thick chains ran across its face, and two fist-sized padlocks joined them. All of it was conquered by years of rust, and it appeared that someone had tried frantically to get inside.
“The hell you got here?” I said aloud, kicking a log out of the way. Greg, or perhaps Tom before him, had a secret, and had hidden it well. By the looks of it, nobody had tried to open it in a decade. The place was long-forgotten by all but the Impostor himself.
An icy breeze kicked up and the bruise on my side gnawed at my ribs, both sensations working in concert to force me back into the cabin. As I limped back, the satellite phone rang in the kitchen. The sound of branches snapping in the woods behind me hastened my walk.
Chapter 27
“Where the hell have you been?” Colin demanded. His voice came through distorted, making him sound like an angry robot.
“Tell you when I get home,” I replied, peering out the kitchen window. “What’s the news out there?”
“Honestly, I thought Faye was mentally ill,” he said. “My mom’s sister developed schizophrenia in her twenties, and she started hearing voices. Talking to God and the devil and all that. Wandered around the house at night. I assumed that’s what was happening to Faye when you told me all this…I had to see it for myself.”
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