Winter.
“Son of a bitch.” Caleb panted and pushed his hand into the bundle of rags across his midriff. His lips parted horridly over red-stained, loose teeth. He wailed.
A long, shaven fang slopped into his palm, soaked in the life-blood which should have been inside of him, pumping on its marathon circuit around his heart.
The night broke with the snuffling, raw bellow of the Wendigo’s hunting call. Caleb shut his lips and pushed his knee fruitlessly at the mossy ground. Black grew in his periphery. He smelled the moss in the sidewalk, a pelting rain dousing away marigolds and roses for their nightly repast. Had he fallen into a meadow? Had he taken that last door?
Elysium would feel as pleasant as the warmth flowing from his stomach onto his fingers. Too bad he’d confessed and been baptized a Lutheran. Heaven wouldn’t be so bad, the music should be glorious…
“You didn’t take the door.” The Night said.
Caleb stuck his forehead in the moss and bent his neck until his eyes coasted between his shoulder and the contours of his knees. Padded in the moss, their warm thrum was besotted by the cold winter ground. Rain pelted his back. He sunk into the sod.
“You want to die lying in mud? What kind of Viking are you? Die fighting, at least then I can call you one of mine with a straight face.” The Night shone nebulous and obsidian beyond him, thrumming in the chords of a watchful woman’s aria to the body harmonic, the only body who would hear her. He was the only one bred to do so, but for a single girl-child curled in her bed leagues away. Caleb’s lips twitched. He spat at the ground, a glop of fluids streaming from his swollen lips to the moss.
“You’d love it. Have me a party in Valhalla, hmm? ‘Welcome home, brat-bastard’. Up yours, you old cunt.” Caleb hissed. If anything in the universe could rouse Caleb Mauthisen from near death, it was the idea that his family had been right since the day he was born.
Echoing down the boulevard, the snuffling, cursing, howling madness scratched and heaved at the trees.
‘Thank God for the rain’, Caleb thought. He heaved onto his side and cursed, inching his elbow against the squishing mud of Vancouver’s perpetual February weather. Storm drains washed bloody water away from the Wendigo’s scent trail. Limping down a city thoroughfare at three in the morning felt safer than stumbling through peoples’ yards. Not like he’d make it over their fences with half his torso in one hand.
Caleb heaved his elbow on the far side of a root and grit his teeth as he pulled his body over it. Red-rimmed eyes of glacial ice peered up 12th Avenue for the nearest cross street. Granville might be close enough for people. Heck, he’d take a booze hound on a bender at this point. No way he’d make it to Oak. No way. Not with the slick trail of precious bodily fluids pouring out of his colander-like puncture holes. He wouldn’t be lucky enough to reach Vancouver General Hospital’s ER. Health made altruists of people, wellness brought with it a tawny grace and vegetal mercy to many a skeleton and bone. Purchased by the Wendigo’s maw and claws, Caleb had no grace left in his belly-crawling pursuit of another human being. Anyone. God, please.
The snuffling.
The sniffing and clacking of teeth against a wet tongue.
The sound.
Good God it was getting closer.
Caleb rolled his head to the side and peered down the avenue to see an approximate fog tinted in the densely lidded night. Arrogance had left him bare-chested and divorced from caution, when he’d picked up the Wendigo’s trail. How much could a myth hurt him? The Wendigo was a crazed cannibal, just a person who sloughed off their soul for the devil’s bargain of a full belly. He should have put more stock in what the Indigenous wise woman had woven into his ears.
“Die a runner. We could put ‘coward’ on your tombstone. Maybe ‘Judas’ would be a better epitaph. You might relate to that one.” The Night said. The stars held in their hushed scorn flickers of the aches in his knee. Caleb clung to the ache, spilling his failing mind into the thrum-thrum-throb of its’ wandering kneecap against cartilage which used to be fine enough for a man his age. Ligaments threaded and strung tight playing discordant vibrato against his femur. Against his leg-bones and fleeting conscience.
The Wendigo.
My God.
Its’ snuffling hissed putrid and aching into his ears.
“Shut up. Shut. Up. I’m. Working.” Caleb grunted, pushing his body up the trunk of a cherry blossom tree planted who knew when by aldermen who couldn’t conceive that their tiny, beautiful row of forest would hinder the motor-cars of later generations. His back against the tree bark, Caleb rubbed his eyes with the back of a hand, still holding his midriff together with the other numb, lifeless limb.
“Good a time as any.” He grunted and pulled a diminutive flask from a thick cord of leather bound around his neck. Unwinding its top was a near Sisyphean feat, each rivet cranked by his creaking, numbing knuckles until the top flicked, flopped and settled in the roadway.
Pity it made so much noise.
The snuffling stopped.
Caleb squinted down the road, seeing in the red blotches and foggy shadows a mass of green, gangrenous flesh.
“Here’s to you, poor unfortunate bastard.” Caleb raised his flask and let its’ liquid pour down his throat. Sunlight burst in his esophagus, trailing down to his pitted, bleeding stomach with an inward bath of radiant, comforting springtime. He licked his lips and ran his tongue across teeth which no longer tasted of copper, bile and what Charisma had cobbled together for dinner.
Damn but his daughter needed to take Home Ec. At least she could take up watching the Food Network or maybe he’d download Epicurious on her iPad as a hint. Caleb blinked and rubbed his eyes. The aura of green flesh had congealed into a throbbing collective of maws, limbs and bobbing, matted hair. The green which had looked like moss to his blood-lost eyes now appeared as it was: putrid, rotting flesh. Leaning against the tree bark, Caleb felt his stomach roil and pitch even as the Monks’ elixir had begun the labour of knitting him back together.
“Don’t throw up, Caleb. You’re dead if you hurl.” The Night said, stars puckering and flickering into a myriad of watching eyes. Caleb rubbed his thumb in his ear, shaking his head sideways to dislodge the whispering voice from his head.
A Wendigo was a terrible abomination, less spiritual than desperate. It was the most grievous sin the Algonquins could fathom, a man or woman so hungry they turned their mouths on their kith and kin. The taint was a slow mange growing on the surface of an irregular mind driven by winter, or uncountable chills until the frothing mind let go to a broken, ill-fated instinct.
Hunger.
Nothing remained but the hunger.
A Wendigo ate until it burst. A Wendigo never slept, never stopped snuffling at the ground for the nearest piece of human meat, the slowest in the trail, the sickly, the foolhardy, the young. The cloak of rotting, gangrenous flesh shivered, as the pale and shaking beast inside bundled the pieces of its’ kills around its’ fretful body like a larder or winter coat.
Read the whole story in The Wendigo and Fox Wives, Sapha Burnell’s short story collection due on store shelves in 2018.
About Sapha Burnell
www.saphaburnell.com
Born in the 80’s, Sapha teethed on images of the Berlin Wall falling down. The product of a Polish Catholic father and Norwegian-Canadian mother, she was steeped in divergent cultures & religions. Sapha studied English Lit, Film, Chemistry & Comparative Religions in University, beginning a lifelong inspection of culture, gender roles and the tension between religion & science. Taking a hiatus from the written word to volunteer in West Africa, Sapha discovered a global perspective and came back to the written word motivated to shift the global role of women & marginalized communities.
After becoming a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada in 2014, Sapha was elected to the National Council of The Writers’ Union of Canada as an Advocate at the 2016 AGM. Her poetry collection Usurper Kings as 5 star ratings and has been cal
led ‘a work of jaw-droppingly beautiful discovery’, by Kevin Hogan, author of My Rìstrad. Sapha talks to her readers & fans from social media platforms Twitter @UsurperKings, Goodreads, Tumblr and her website: Sapha Burnell: Vakker Maskiner / Beautiful Machines.
Son of Abel (The Judge of Mystics Book 1) Page 13