by Josh Kent
But those wolves had dragged him around, ripped him up and whipped him around, taken part of his hand and his fingers. Maybe Bill Hill was right, what Bill Hill said. Maybe all Jim really knew was tricks after all; maybe he was a kind of trickster who had eventually tricked himself into believing that his tricks were not tricks, that they were real. Maybe there was something in that. Not directly, but indirectly, like a message, a message that he should leave Sparrow. What was he to do? Anything more than Spencer Barnhouse was able to do up in Hopestill? Barnhouse was one man who knew something and only something of the truth, and he stood against all those who were bought and controlled by some other mysterious man named Varney Mull. Varney Mull was supposed to be in league with the Evil One. If that were true, as he well expected it was, and as he suspected that this Doc Pritham suspected it was, and as he suspected that the preacher man, Vernon Mosely also suspected it was . . . if it were true that Varney Mull was in fact in league, what would any of them be able to do? The Evil One? Surely this was a power that was beyond him to rid out, maybe even beyond them all. On the other hand, he had just regenerated the arm of a preacher through the craft he had been taught by his father and Old Magic Woman. He wondered if he would ever see her again—if any of it was possible, or if he had only the bitterest hope of a child’s dream.
He was leaning against a tree and thinking such thoughts as this when he saw the thing. He looked and he looked again and then he squeezed his hurt hand under the bandage. He did that because it would hurt and he needed the pain to tell him that he wasn’t having some deep dream memory because of the doctor’s medicine. It wasn’t a dream or a memory.
It was tall and thin, and dead-looking antlers went out from either side of its head, which was like a cat’s with no skin, but its body was as if someone had taken a man’s body and beat all the innards out and stretched it upwards and fixed terrible claws on the end of the too-long arms. This looked not like the spook that he’d seen up in the woods behind the Hills’, but he did recognize it. Yes, this was something other entirely, but not unknown to him. Its cat eyes beamed back and forth, stiff black hairs bristled on its body like quills. Its mouth was full of yellowish daggers, and what looked like tiny black snakes or worms wriggled and peered this way and that from its open mouth.
He remembered the old songs of the River People, the songs and singing that frightened him as a boy. The songs about Kitaman, who came from under the earth to eat the flesh of Eyabe’s people, to eat the River People. These were the Katakayish people, the tribe which Old Magic Woman had come from. Could this be Kitaman in front of him now? Was this the earth demon of the tales of the people of this land, or was this something else, something older, more evil? Was this a creature sent by the Evil One? A true demon? Perhaps both.
It was creeping itself down into Sparrow, along the creek and down toward town where the doctor’s house was. It stopped and seemed to hear or smell something. Its wicked head turned. It looked straight at him. He did the trick to make his mind go blank again. If he trained in on it with the jitters now, it would see him for sure. He blanked out his mind. He swerved his mind this way and that and brought up a bright memory of a field full of sunshine, then a snowfall, then a lightning storm.
It was just far enough off that he wasn’t sure it could see him, but too he was sure that it looked at him and took notice of him there, but it did not seem to mind him there. Like an animal sizing him up to see if he was a threat or not and then deciding that he wasn’t. The yellow eyes on him sent a cold and buzzing fear through his whole body. What would any of them be able to do if these were beasts the Evil One had sent along?
He watched it go by, its weird horns disappearing into the morning woods. He looked at his hand wrapped in the bandages and thought of his father. He thought of the doctor. He thought of Violet and he thought of May Marbo. He watched the woods growing dim as storm clouds gathered. He started moving at a distance, following that thing, allowing his thoughts to wander and go blank, the way his father had taught him.
The doctor was sitting there with his head in his hands when she slammed the door behind her. He popped up out of his chair and drew his pistol and pointed it at her face.
John and Ruth Mosely were sitting at the table with him, looking angry and suspicious with their arms crossed and their eyebrows squinted in the same way.
When she looked into the doctor’s eyes, she saw that he did not mean to shoot her, but she did see that he was frightened, very frightened.
“It’s coming!” Violet said. “It followed me down from on top of the hill. I don’t know if it’s behind me or not, but it was coming behind me.”
“What’s coming?” John Mosely said and stood up. Ruth looked around and took a deep breath.
The doctor didn’t ask any questions or answer any questions. Violet’s face told him everything. He went to the wall and pulled a box off of the shelf. From inside the box he pulled another pistol and loaded it with special lode and gave it to Violet.
“You know how to use it,” he said with a kind of matter-of-fact tone. “The special lode will make it stunned. It might even drop it to the ground, but it won’t kill it exactly. You will have to use all the rounds and get them in it, and it will fall. Then we’ll have to take off the head and burn it.”
“Burn it? Burn it?” John asked again. “Burn what?”
Ruth looked at him and said, “Shut your mouth, John. Can’t you be of any help?”
The doctor turned to them both and said, “Despite what the two of you believe or don’t believe about me or about the outlander, you’d better get in the back room.”
“Why is she staying out here?” Ruth pointed at Violet.
“Because she knows how to shoot,” the doctor said. “Now get back in the room with your brother!”
The two obeyed, though Ruth was making a sour face the whole time.
“Is the preacher here too?” Violet asked.
“I think we’ve got most of Sparrow back there at this point,” the doctor said. “You aim straight for its head, the silver lode will do the rest, and then we’ll have to take off the head and burn it.”
Violet was looking at the big, weird pistol in her hand and back up at the doctor.
“You’re talking about the spook, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I don’t know what I mean. The outlander gave me these weapons and those instructions.”
“Jim Falk?” she asked.
“Yes,” the doctor replied and moved to the window to look out into the growing darkness. The clouds had made a black swirl in the afternoon sky so that all appeared twilight.
“Where is Jim Falk?” Violet asked, coming up behind the doctor and looking over his shoulder out of the little window into the darkening afternoon.
“Now that I think of it, he might be out looking for you. He left,” the doctor said. “Is he following you here?”
“No. It’s not Falk, there is something evil out there,” Violet said.
“The woods of Sparrow are no place to be out in,” the doctor said.
“No, Doctor, you’re right. The woods of Sparrow are no place to be out in night or day,” Violet said.
They stood there as the sky grew darker.
They listened.
They could hear John and Vernon and Ruth whispering and grumbling about things in the other room.
They waited then together in the doctor’s little house. The doctor and Violet. They waited for the thing to come running out the woods.
When Violet’s hands started to tremble, the doctor felt bad for her. This pretty lady with so much trouble. Without taking his eyes off the window he backed up toward the table and, undoing the clasp on his bag, and reached in and plucked a blue bottle and lifted it out. He brought it to her and said, “Keep your eyes on the edge of the wood and open your mouth.”
He gave her some heavy medicine to calm her, but she stayed awake, her eyes fixed on the edge of the woods thro
ugh the window. She felt the medicine flow through her.
In her mind, Violet was sure that she could feel the force of the thing coming upon them now like a slow wind across a stream. The woods themselves appeared suddenly crisp, the lines of the crooked trees deep-etched against a smoky background of browning leaves. The sun, when it pierced through the black clouds, somehow seemed purposefully to cast longer, blacker shadows.
Violet was perched at the doc’s window, one hand on the sill, the other holding the heavy silver gun in a trembling white hand. She felt cold, but she was not afraid.
The doctor looked her over from the side and glanced at her shaking hand.
No, he thought. That is not a tremor caused by fear. Her left hand is so relaxed. Her lips are a little blue, but they are not trembling. This is some kind of reaction in her muscles because of something her system needs that she does not have. This is caused by her not receiving the dose of whatever those powders are that she carries in her necklace. The stilling altha I gave her is not even enough; it must be something potent. I wonder where she got it.
The doctor glanced back at his bag again and wondered if he too should take something to calm him. The conversation with the Moselys had been almost as disturbing as the outlander telling him that there was a demon lurking about.
The whisky he had been sipping left a burn in his belly. There was that other feeling there too, the dismal worming around of fear. What was this thing? How could it be true? And when the only possible answer came to him, he said a prayer in the back of his mind that it might not be so.
Violet’s eyes darted about and then stopped on a spot, her black pupils quivered in her green irises. Her mouth dropped open wide as she drew in a sharp, rattling gasp.
She whispered so carefully each word, “I see it, Doctor.”
The doctor, who’d had his attention focused on Violet’s face, snapped to and looked where she was looking out to the edge of the wood. Without a doubt, as if it had stepped out of a terrible painting, the thing came, sticking its twisted face out into a shaft of light and then recoiling quickly back. Seeing the rawness of the thing in the dim afternoon was somehow obscene; both the doctor and Violet felt as though they were watching some despicable act.
Its face had a jagged mouth and black, rolling eyes. There was an emptiness that ran in it deep. It was hollow and false, like some horrible mask. The light of humanity was not in its eyes, yet it did not seem animal either. It was something else entirely. Long, sharpened horns twisted out from either side of its bulbous head, and shiny black tubes stretched from its mouth like reaching worms.
The doctor said, “Save us.”
Violet stood up and took a step back from the window. “That’s not it,” she said, raising her silver gun to the window. “That’s not what I saw at night, or in the winter. That’s not what attacked my . . .” She suddenly stopped speaking and her body deflated in her dress. She sobbed in great whelps and finally managed to whisper, “. . . husband.” She never took her eyes off the monster.
The beast recoiled slowly into the darker woods, stepping backwards on its curving legs.
They waited with the heavy feeling that at any moment it might crash through the window.
“What’s going on?” Ruth whispered harshly from the backroom.
Violet shushed her.
With a shaking arm, the doctor slowly creaked the window open and put his gun through, still pointed at the place in the woods where it had disappeared. Violet peered out, breathing shallow and quiet as she could. The woods and the clouds stood still so that the sunlight broke downward through the gray and dark clouds in white shafts.
And then the thing did come, marching straight out of the woods toward them as a cloud bank rolling overhead, dimming the scene to a dull purple. It came toward them. When its hulking form passed through shafts of light, a thin mist rose from its exposed flesh.
It was quick and all its movements were sharp and jerking.
Violet took a stance a few feet back from the open window. The thing’s eyes were pinned on her. They were not like the spook’s eyes, they were black with sparking yellow pupils in the center like little cracks with fire behind. They were fixed on Violet.
She raised her pistol at it and her hand did not shake.
“What is it?” the doctor asked and looked up to the ceiling. Then he raised, with both hands, his heavy revolver at the thing.
The thing made the distance faster than expected, and the two, Violet and the doctor, opened fire—the pistols cracking into the morning, both of them going deaf from the reports, the smoke stinging their nostrils.
Violet could see the thing slow down, its body jerking where the shots were landing, its face distorted, and it made a noise like a dry heave, but the volleys only worked to irritate the thing.
The doctor was yelling now and pulling his trigger again and again. He missed the mark, and he missed again, but Violet had a good eye and she landed three shots across the thing’s shiny, black chest.
It was close enough now that she could see the sparkling quality of the coarse hair on the thing, and beneath its crooked collarbones another darker, glistening color that grew and spread downward as it lurched. “Yes,” Violet whispered, “yes, you bleed.”
The doctor’s pistol was clicking empty. The thing staggered momentarily and then, with impossible speed, it was at the window, shrieking at them and reaching inside with its spade and spider hands. Violet snapped another round into its chest before one of its gripping claws dug deep into her left shoulder.
The doctor had taken a few steps and turned, rummaging for his ammo, when he felt his head jerk backward too quickly and the unmistakable force of the thing’s claw on his head, the sting and gouge of the ragged nails in his temple. His left eye was blinded by his own blood. His revolver clacked onto the floor as he was raised up in the air.
He heard Violet scream. She wasn’t screaming as if she was scared, though. She was screaming curses at the thing that had her. Both of them were dragged out through the broken window, and Violet was hurled against the house. Her back hit the wood hard and the back of her head smacked and she went out cold.
Now the thing gripped the doctor with both arms and raised the doctor all the way up over its head.
Violet’s eyes fluttered open and she could see, dimly, the thing’s jaw unlatching like a snake’s, its maw growing ever wider and darker until the whole mouth seemed to overtake the thing, and it looked like nothing but a darkness surrounded by sharp, broken teeth. The tubes that were once worms whipped and curled about the doctor, thick and thorny. More arms came now, sticking up from behind like an insect’s legs, ready to pack the doctor into its mouth and swallow him whole, once and for all.
The thing held the doctor up in the air a little higher to get a good angle on him for the swallow. His legs kicked weakly. The doc’s eyes were wide with fear, but he couldn’t make a noise. Suddenly, the thing shuddered in an odd way and a plume of black and purple smoke rose up from behind it and its arms lost their strength and it dropped Doc Pritham onto the green grass in front of it. There was another noise then, like a whistling and then a loud pop and a crackle, and Violet saw a bright yellow fire leap out of the beast’s right flank and smoke and dark liquid sprayed out its side.
It fell on its other side as another whistle and explosion burst out of it, this time in its leg. The explosion sent the right leg whirling in three pieces across the grass. The mouth had collapsed like a bag; its eyes were rolling and rolling in pain.
Behind it, Violet saw a gray shadow dart from the woods and move across the hill toward them. The gray shadow was that of a man and the face in the middle was Jim Falk’s.
He was on the thing. Straddling it, he used some kind of brace with his left hand, forcing its bellowing mouth closed. He had fastened a long, shining blade to his wounded right hand still wrapped in the bandages. He sliced at the thing’s neck until the whole head was completely removed from the twitching,
flailing body.
He stood up and for a moment held the hideous face with the horns twisting out at either side and the black tubes drooping. Then he walked a few paces from the body and dropped the head on a big rock. He made quick with a flagon from his pouch and began dousing the head.
Violet tried to stand, but she was too dizzy.
The thing’s head was soon engulfed in a green ball of flames pouring oily smoke into the air, its eyes rolling.
The doctor was reeling, but he moved to his duties and, pulling a container from his own pouch, began dousing the separate body. The outlander joined him and in no time the sky was dark with the burning of the monster. Noises came from the thing’s diminishing corpse, ugly sounds like the whispering of many people in pain and sorrow. As the burning continued, the whispering began to sound like faraway cries.
They all looked at one another.
Violet made an effort and was able to get up on her feet and soon found herself standing with the two men watching the flames. The strange, sad cries at once grew more desperate and terrible than before, so that standing there, the three of them felt that maybe they should put the flames out. The sounds of suffering were unbearable and now they could hear distinctly individual cries, voices, women, boys, men . . . so that as the smoke continued, any sense of comfort or victory or accomplishment in bringing the thing to its demise was completely removed from them. Only left with the three was the stark, empty feeling that they were powerless, and that thousands were suffering at the will of something impossibly terrible.