Still looking down at the ring, my brain screamed at me to not move or make a sound. I held perfectly still like a surprised rabbit as the figure rolled his arms and head around. His limbs were horribly mangled, as if he’d been dragged out of a car wreck and dangled from puppet strings.
“Feeeeeeliiiiiiix…” he gurgled, tilting his head so far back that I could see his face upside-down. “I knoooow youuuuu…”
My breath rushed in and out of me so fast I thought I’d pass out. In response, my brain scolded me with images of the creature flaying my body and hanging it up in the trees. A muddy cackle issued from his mouth, and then he quickly turned around so that his body faced me. I couldn’t help but look.
I could not begin to process the abomination that stood before me. He held the rough shape of a person, but even in the gloom it was obvious that this thing was never human. His form looked composed of different body parts, a patchwork mockery of the species he so desperately wanted to resemble. The head snapped back to its upright position, and a gray ponytail whipped through the air behind it. Deep in their sunken pits, a pair of black eyes widened in glee as they met with mine. He opened his hideous arms as if to embrace me, and took a heavy step forward.
“Feeeeee-lik-k-k-k-k-ssssss…”
A shotgun blast of panic exploded through me, propelling me into a full sprint. My screams echoed all across the mountain, summoning a choir of evil voices to join in. A thousand cries rang out all around me, stoked by my fiery terror. Their maddening gibberish and the Impostor’s croaks compelled me to move faster than ever before in my life, and I was back at the cabin in a matter of seconds.
I slammed the door against the wails and wind and darkness outside. My tear ducts ruptured and a deluge of fright and sorrow poured down my face. I tried to recite a prayer I’d learned as a child, but all that came out of my mouth was “Oh Jesus, I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die.”
I grabbed the satellite phone and held it to my ear, sobbing as I did. No one picked up at the ranger station. William didn’t answer his cell. No one was coming to save me. My heart ached with the truth my brain dared not comprehend:
The face I just saw was Tíwé’s.
Chapter 30
One night when I was a little boy, I had trouble falling asleep. Sensing that other people were awake in the house, I got out of bed and walked to my older brother’s room. He and his friends were watching a horror movie and eating pizza. When I pushed the door open, the room was illuminated only by television’s glare. On the screen was a teenager napping on his bed. Unbeknownst to him, a living skeleton crept in through the window and loomed over him. The scene horrified me so much that it short-circuited my brain. I blacked out right there in the hallway. My brother carried me back to my own room, where I had no further trouble sleeping. When presented with incomprehensible terror, the mind will defend itself in strange ways.
The same thing must have been happening to me now. My heart slowed to a hypnotic rhythm. My lungs didn’t burn for air. My guts didn’t churn and wrench inside me. My body was making peace with the reality of its imminent destruction. I struggled to maintain consciousness.
Satisfied with the barricade I’d hastily constructed out of furniture against the front door, I used my last ounce of strength to crawl to the bedroom. Halfway down the hall I blacked out, and the ancient memory of that skeleton on the TV was my last conscious thought.
I don’t know how long I slept.
I woke up in bed. The sheets were tucked gingerly around my body, and a full glass of water rested just beside me on the night stand. I glanced around the dark room, supposing that I had climbed into bed and simply couldn’t remember doing it. My wits slowly returned to me, but it took a long time to realize…there was an arm draped across my chest.
The physical sensation of it was natural; Faye almost always fell asleep against me, or at least kicked and elbowed me as she argued with her dreams. Confused, I tried to recall where exactly I had gone to sleep. Was I back home? Was I in Avonwood?
I gently rolled away from the person lying next to me and reached for the bedside lamp. It wouldn’t give any light. I squinted through the darkness, trying to discern the black shape on the bed. It felt familiar — its warmth, its texture. I was fairly certain that this was Faye, but I still couldn’t remember if she was really with me up here. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d talked to her.
Then she spoke.
“What’s wrong, Poptart?”
A cold hand stroked my cheek.
It was not so much fear, but confusion, that overwhelmed me in that moment. Faye’s voice and touch were familiar, but something about them didn’t fit together with the bed I sat in. Or the layout of the room.
“Where are we?” I asked. “Why’s the light off?”
Faye cleared her throat.
“Power’s out,” she said. “It’s done this before.”
I got up out of bed. As soon as the sheets came off my body, I felt a blistering cold – colder than it’s ever been in our bedroom. The heat must have been off for hours. A feeling of dread came over me, growing heavier and heavier the more awake I became.
“Jesus,” I said, “did you screw with the heat? It’s fuckin’ freezing in here!”
Faye tried to get me to come back to bed. Her voice was clear and lively, as it had been when we’d first arrived at Pale Peak.
Are we still here? I wondered.
A gust of frigid air nipped at me from behind. Perplexed, I left the bedroom and felt my way down the hall. A strong draft pushed against me as I did, and Faye’s voice called out from behind me.
“Felix, where are you going?”
The kitchen window sat wide open. Snow blew in from outside. My jaw dropped. More of my senses returned. I spun around, saying “Faye? Why the hell did you—” but the words tangled in my mouth.
Faye stepped out of the bedroom and stood there in the hall. I recognized the outline of her figure, but her posture was different.
“You alright?” she asked. “Did you have a bad dream?”
The feeling that this was not Faye crept over me. I instantly regretted leaving the magnum somewhere in the bedroom.
“Who are you?” I whispered, taking a step back. The kitchen knives were a few yards behind me to the left. The front door was the same distance to the right. I couldn’t remember where my shoes were.
Faye didn’t move a muscle. Her hair glowed faintly in the starlight that came from the bathroom window behind her, but her face was entirely black. Even though I couldn’t see them, I could feel her eyes burning into me – just as Tíwé’s had when I found the ring. It felt like we stood in the eye of a hurricane; a calmness fell over the cabin, but it portended certain doom. Not a single noise came from outside. No branches snapped, no snow crunched, no voices moaned. It was as if time had stopped.
Faye didn’t move. Even when she spoke, she held herself perfectly still with the rigidity of death. She hissed my name.
“Felix.”
It wasn’t to get my attention. It wasn’t to convince me she was really my fiancée. It was a threat. She was reminding me that she knew my name. In that moment, I still didn’t fully understand the power in names that Tíwé and Nathan had discussed. But when Faye said mine, I felt smaller than her – even though I stood almost a foot over her head.
“What makes five?” she whispered, cocking her head sideways. Her neck crackled as she did.
“Huh?”
“I can’t remember,” she said. “Not in this place.”
She took a menacing step toward me. She cleared her throat again, and then her voice dropped lower than Faye’s ever could.
“What makes five? Tell…me…”
And that’s when I knew. I remembered where I was, what day it was, and exactly what had happened up until this moment. My dark visitor had finally come to call, and he no longer needed to be invited in. I deeply regretted breaking that dreamcatcher. Perhaps it was protecting
me after all, and perhaps by destroying it I had unleashed him. My hand instinctively slid over my pocket, and to my relief, the little shape of Faye’s engagement ring pushed back against my fingers.
A strange feeling came over me then. It was the knowledge that I was about to die. It felt different from all the times I feared I might die. In prior instances of mortal danger, terror completely overwhelmed my senses and compelled me to flee. To fight. To save myself. But now I had passed the point where death becomes a certainty. I was convinced that my life was about to end, and so fear became useless. There was nothing left to do now. My time had come. I decided to throw down the gauntlet.
“You’re not Faye,” I said.
The creature twitched, tilting his head further. A slew of crackles issued from it. He took another step.
“Five,” he gurgled, “what makes. What makes.”
“I have no idea what it means,” I continued. “No matter what you do to me, it won’t change that.”
The creature shook with rage. He reached a clawed finger to the wall beside him and dragged a talon across it. His breathing grew raspy and shallow.
A peculiar revelation struck me in that moment.
This being, whatever he was, had been invading Faye’s sleeping mind for God knows how long, perhaps many years. Maybe even since she first visited the cabin as a child. He had asked her hundreds of questions. Watched her all night. Listened to her dreams. And in all that time, he still hadn’t discovered what he sought from her. Faye kept some things buried so deep within herself that not even he could find them. Whatever the number five means to Faye, that deep place is where she hid the secret, and the creature seemed to have no power to access it.
“You’re the one who followed us home,” I said.
He nodded.
“You’ve asked her many times,” I said. “Each time, she tells you nothing. I’m her future husband and she’s never told me. You’ll never get your answer. Not in a hundred years. And if you ever talk to her again, I’ll beat your ugly ass to death with my bare hands.”
I squared off with the creature, ready to get mauled. I was satisfied in the knowledge that I had not given him what he wanted, and had thereby blocked him from using that information as a weapon against Faye. Whatever the number five meant, this thing seemed to need it to take full possession of my fiancée. And that wasn’t going to happen – not even over my dead body.
The creature let out a growl so deep I felt it more than heard it. There in the dark hallway, he twitched violently, then began to change. The likeness of Faye stretched wider and higher. Limbs popped and bent into new positions. The neck rose. The head tilted up toward the ceiling, revealing a different face beneath the chin. The shoulders rolled backward and folded like a butterfly’s wings, then returned, broader than before. The fingers uncurled into longer, clawed digits, and now my visitor towered over me by several inches.
He sucked in a huge, rasping breath, then mumbled through clenched teeth. The words all came from different voices; he didn’t even try to mimic my fiancée this time.
“Then…we don’t…need you…anymore.”
My courage dissolved. The Impostor was on me like lightning. In a single lunge, he covered fifteen feet and knocked the wind right out of me with a brutal head-butt. I toppled backward and crash-landed on the floor near the front door, my neck and shoulders bearing most of the impact. He was on me in an instant, unleashing a barrage of blows to my head. He raked my chest with razor-like claws. I tried my best to defend myself, but it was so dark in the house that I couldn’t see where the strikes came from.
As the shadowy figure beat down on me, I freed a hand and clawed at his face, searching for eyes to gouge out. A row of teeth caught my fingers and bit down hard on them, and then I felt a mixture of blood and saliva drip down my forearm. I screamed and threw a wild elbow, rallying my strength as it collided with a wet smack against the creature’s jaw. He howled in pain and relented just long enough for me to get to my feet.
I hoisted myself up by grabbing the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. As my hands moved over it, they brushed against a familiar object – Tíwé’s neck pouch. I don’t know what compelled me to do it, but I snatched up the pouch and ripped it open, palming a handful of the crunchy substance inside. The creature yanked me back by the neck with the strength of a linebacker. I whirled around and jammed my palm into his face, twisting the heel of my hand against his eyes and shouting “Leave my family alone, you son of a bitch!”
I wrapped my other arm around his head for leverage. Faye’s curly locks tangled between my fingers. Hours before, I had seen the gruesome remnants of my friend, stretched over the creature like an ill-fitted Halloween mask. Now he donned human features I’d known far longer. I prayed that Faye was still alive, and that the Impostor had not taken this hair from her head. He shrieked and growled in some inhuman language, trying to push me away, but I held on as hard as I could and kept driving the sage into his eyes. As my hands slid over the misshapen lumps of his face, I felt his bones shift and slide. I felt a mouth too wide to be human, and wet, sticky lips that draped across a hundred jagged fangs.
And then it was over. The bastard had had enough. He took off on all fours, shrieking like a banshee in five different voices. He barreled up the kitchen wall and out the window, disappearing into the night.
Chapter 31
I cried long and hard in the empty living room. Never had I felt so utterly, miserably alone. I only managed to stop when the power came back on about twenty minutes later, and the sound of the heater kicking on felt like the greeting of an old friend. The entryway was decorated in my own blood. The satellite phone was gone. The gun was gone. My shoes were gone. Everything was probably outside in the snow, or up in a tree. Or down in the hole. But at least I still had the ring. The Impostor could have taken it while I slept, but for some reason, he did not.
I vowed to myself that at daybreak, no matter the conditions, I would take Greg’s truck and get down the mountain – or die trying. I didn’t care if I slid off the cliff face; I’d never watch the sun go down in Colorado ever again.
It took about an hour for the adrenaline to wear off, at which point the beating I had taken began to register across my body. My bruised side now quivered with fresh agony, and my face sported two big welts. Ragged lacerations crisscrossed my torso, burning like fire with each movement. As I patched myself up with trembling hands in the bathroom, the voices returned.
They arose from far off in the woods, several of them at once, groaning and screaming their dark elegies to the night. It was all the same evil gibberish I’d heard a thousand times before, but now they made their way into the open field, and eventually, to just outside the cabin. Soon, a dozen voices, maybe more, babbled and shouted and cackled all around me. It was still too dark outside to see anything, but tiny pink and purple bands streaked the rim of the sky. It would be morning soon.
Fearing another confrontation, I limped around the house, ensuring that every window and door was locked. Not knowing what else I could do, I picked up the remainder of Tíwé’s sage and set fire to it, wafting the smoke around in each room until my fingers burned.
I imagined the shattered dreamcatcher, and my crumpled corpse beside it. It may well have been warding off the Impostor all this time, and now there was nothing left of it to protect me.
The voices moved in circles around the cabin, whispering and wailing and weeping as they did. I imagined a Seussian procession of corpses marching around the perimeter, ritually celebrating the demise of another fool who had come to Pale Peak. Grim shadows moved across the curtains all around me. The pitter-patter of little feet echoed across the roof, layered with the sounds of children giggling.
Outside the front door, my own voice called out, “Faye! It’s me! Let me in!” Seconds later, it called from near the bedroom door, “I’m so cold, Monkeytoes. Please, please help me.” The Impostor was making his victory lap through my mi
nd, allowing me a preview of what was to be Faye’s ultimate fate shortly after he killed me. He wanted to terrorize me before the end, to make certain that I knew he had plans for her.
Windows shattered across the cabin. First in the bedroom, then the bathroom. The kitchen window burst behind me, showering me with flakes of glass and snow. The howling winds blew in, deafening me to all other sounds and granting cover to anything that crawled inside.
And then, as if heaven-sent, a blinding white light illuminated the entire building. All the window curtains at the front of the house lit up, and the sound of motors roared over the screaming wind. A hellish cry rang out in defiance somewhere down the hall. Someone had driven up to the cabin.
The wind ceased altogether as if banished by my fearful prayers, and I heard car doors opening and men calling out to each other. The footsteps on the roof thundered overhead to the back of the cabin, and the screams of children drifted off into the woods out back, reverberating across the mountain as they withdrew. The ranger bashed on the front door.
“Felix! Felix, are you there? Open up! It’s William!”
I ripped a curtain open and saw five men. Four of them were rangers, and Nathan was the other. Behind them sat a humongous off-road snow plow, two snowmobiles, and a pickup truck. The men gathered on the porch and shined their flashlights all over the cabin. They had come to save my life.
I rushed outside and threw my arms around William. Snot and tears caked my face, and I did nothing to hide my childish comportment. I didn’t even grab my winter jacket. He informed me loudly that they were getting everyone off the mountain because of a problem with the power grid, but when I looked up at him, he gave me a subtle wink. William glanced over to Nathan, who nodded back. The compassion of my friends overwhelmed me – not just the ones here, but also the ones looking after Faye back home. As we loaded into the plow, I took one last look at the shredded tires of Greg’s truck. Without my saviors, there wasn’t even a dream of escape.
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