Ancient Enemy

by Michael McBride

  It bared its teeth and pounced up the stairs on all fours, like an animal.

  I stood my ground. There was only one way this could end. For what it had done to Yanaba, I would make sure it died the worst death I could imagine.

  It raised its face to the sky and flared its nostrils. Turned from one side to the other. Sniffing. Its head snapped back down when it found me. The muscles in its legs flexed. I could see its nails, flat on the deck. Not the claws I’d originally thought, but long shards of some kind of crystal or gemstone healed beneath its cuticles. Held in place and thickened by what looked like tree resin.

  It crawled forward. Sniffed again. Rose to its full height. Maybe three feet directly in front of me. I could smell its filth, its rank breath.

  Whoomph…

  …whoomph…

  …whoomph…

  Yanaba made a gurgling sound. Scraped at the frozen ground with the hoof of her right back leg.

  I pushed myself away from the rail. Stood with my back to the door. The banging resumed. I heard the door clatter in its frame. She’d taken it off its hinges.

  The beast stretched its arms out to either side, its fingers splayed. Yanaba’s blood dripped from them like syrup. It bared its teeth. Lowered its head. Turned to align its one good horn with my chest.

  I had nothing left. The mere act of standing took every last ounce of my strength.

  “Just…get it…over with,” I said.

  It made a sound startlingly similar to the one I’d made before it charged.

  Everything happened so fast, and yet, simultaneously, time seemed to slow to a crawl.

  Its horn hit my chest and launched me back against the door at the same instant its foot came down on the loose plank. The wire sang. The creature screamed as the cord bit into its ankle.

  I bounced from the door, collapsed to my knees.

  Its face struck the ground right in front of me, knocking out several teeth, as its legs raced up toward the roof. It flipped over in midair in a vain attempt to grab anything to stop its sudden ascent. Its claws slashed at my face as it rocketed skyward—

  Thuck.

  Blood poured down onto me. Pattered the frozen deck like rain overflowing from the gutter. I looked up to see its mouth opening and closing. Its trembling hands pawing at the row of kitchen knives embedded in its abdomen. They cut even deeper as the branch continued to pull. Its face. So human-like. So much like mine. And then, with a tearing sound, it was gone.

  I heard it whistle through the air. The crashing of bare branches. The snapping of bone. And, several seconds later, a distant thud I barely heard over the sound of the door breaking and my own desperate sobs as I crawled across the deck, tumbled down the stairs, and pulled myself on top of my horse.

  I bellowed at the top of my lungs and wrapped my arms around her in an attempt to stanch the bleeding with the pressure from my body.

  All around me, the snow continued to blow.

  NOVEMBER 12TH

  TWENTY-NINE

  I awakened in the hospital in Cortez, two days later, with absolutely no memory of anything that had transpired in the interim. The doctor said that wasn’t uncommon. I’d lost a lot of blood and they’d kept me pretty well sedated while the sutures healed. A peek at my legs beneath the covers confirmed I wasn’t going to win any swimsuit contests, but at the moment, I simply didn’t care. All I wanted was to know if Yanaba had survived. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be able to give me a straight answer.

  Her injuries had been grievous, as I’d seen with my own eyes, and she was receiving the best medical care possible. Blah, blah, blah. I wanted a prognosis that no one was willing to provide. I could read it on their faces, though. If she’d stood between me and the mountain lion that carved up my legs, they didn’t hold out very much hope.

  I didn’t correct them about the mountain lion. There was no point. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Not without seeing the bodies. Maybe not even then. I simply asked for the number of the emergency vet treating her and called the moment I got it, against the advice of my doctor, who appeared to be trying to spare me news that might set back my recovery, whether because he genuinely cared about me or he feared he wasn’t going to get paid for the additional treatment of an indigent injun I couldn’t be sure.

  The vet’s name was Monroe and he told me not to worry about the tab. Any animal that would stand between her owner and something capable of tearing her up to such an extent deserved to be treated like any other hero. By the time they’d gotten her loaded into their trailer, she’d lost a staggering amount of blood. I’d had a lot of doctors say the same thing about me, though, and the hell if I wasn’t walking out of here the first chance I got. I begged him to do everything within his power to save her and offered to repay him every cent of the expense with my hard work and sweat, even if it took the rest of my life.

  They released me into my mother’s care a full two days later. By then I’d heard how she carried me into the emergency room and bowled over everyone in her way. She’d required more than a hundred and fifty stitches between both hands from breaking through the door and had driven with them like she was drying her nails. The bandages made it difficult for her to steer the old pickup and I was surprised we didn’t blow a tire for as often as we rode up onto the shoulder, but I didn’t complain. My mother was sober and couldn’t manipulate her fingers well enough to strike a lighter or hold a cigarette. What more could any kid want? Besides, I had a newfound appreciation for our relationship. Hers was a harder job than I gave her credit for. Were our roles reversed, I couldn’t honestly say I would be able to do it any better.

  There’d been a mutton roast in the oven when we arrived at our trailer, one so rare it would still baa if you stuck it with a fork. It might not have been much, but it was cause for cautious optimism. As was the fact that it almost looked like someone had made an effort, no matter how small, to actually tidy up the place.

  I wanted to go see my grandfather, but I wasn’t ready. Not yet. There were things I needed to do first, questions I needed to answer.

  My mother seemed genuinely hurt when I told her I’d be leaving for a while. That was about the last thing I wanted to do since she was obviously trying her best, so I figured I should at least do the same. I gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek for the first time in what had to be years and left her standing in the kitchen with an expression on her face of surprise and confusion, and maybe a little happiness, as I closed the door behind me. Kind of closed, anyway. I was going to have to invest some serious time into making it fit like it was supposed to again.

  It had continued to snow in my absence and close to six inches sparkled under the morning sun. With the way it was shining, the accumulation would be nothing more than a memory by tomorrow. I donned the sunglasses I’d brought from my room in hopes of staving off the inevitable migraine.

  I sifted through the snow on the deck until I found what I was looking for, chiseled them out of the ice, and stuck them in my pocket. Limped around the trailer in my cast boot to make sure all of the booby traps near the windows had been disarmed. Trying to explain to my mother how to do so over the phone had been a maddening experience and a part of me was convinced that with her physical proportions and lack of dexterity, I’d have to hitch a ride back home from the hospital just to extricate her mangled corpse from one of the snares. She did an admirable job, though, and to her credit hadn’t grilled me about why I’d set them in the first place. I had a pretty good idea that she already knew. Bits and pieces, anyway. She’d lived with my grandfather long enough to learn his secrets, or to at least recognize which secrets she wanted to learn.

  I crossed the white, windswept mat to the stables, where I gave Paa a hug and an apology before saddling her. There was no accusation in her eyes, only the worry of a mother whose lone child was inexplicably absent. I did my best to reassure her that Yanaba would be coming home soon, but I don’t know how well I sold it. I was beginning to wonder where th
e line was drawn between positive and wishful thinking.

  We rode south, back behind the trailer. The broken branches that had fallen from the massive cottonwood stood from the accumulation near the bent remains of the old TV antenna. The baling wire hung straight down into the snow. The body was about two hundred feet away. It took nearly twenty minutes of concerted searching to find it in a thicket of scrub oak, buried under the snow. I could only imagine what would have happened if the vet had arrived to find it alongside my injured horse. There was no way on the planet I would have been able to explain it. Fortunately, I would never have to.

  I stared down it at for several minutes. Its skin was whitish-blue and crisp with a layer of frost, its lashes clotted with ice. Its face was crisscrossed with lacerations from hurtling through the branches and the horns were no longer attached to its misshapen skull. Without them, it looked every bit as human as I did.

  He. He looked every bit as human as I did.

  He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than I was. What I had mistaken for bare skin in the darkness was actually a form-fitting suit of stretched hide, although from which species I was reluctant to speculate. After all, I’d seen his cocoon, or whatever the hell that thing was. It was hard to maintain the moral high ground while standing over the body of the man I’d slain, though.

  I felt a soul-deep sadness as I unburied him and dragged him out of the shrubs, careful not to look at the mess I’d made of his abdomen or his face, which looked far too similar to my own. I rolled him into a horse blanket and hefted him up behind the saddle.

  Paa huffed and swung her flank around. Eventually, she calmed enough that I could tie down the bundle and grudgingly accepted me into the saddle once more.

  I wasn’t entirely certain what I was going to do with the body. I couldn’t just leave it out here to rot, though.

  My feelings were conflicted. A part of me wanted to drag the remains down the road behind the truck until there was nothing left of it for what this creature had done to Yanaba, but the rest of me was still so confused that I didn’t know what to think, let alone how I was supposed to feel.

  * * *

  We rode through the morning, until the sun was nearing its zenith and the clumps of melting snow sloughed from the branches of the pines. It took me longer than I thought it would to find where the pit house had been with the heavy snow hiding the circular indentation in the earth and accumulated on the barren branches of the birches, which steamed as they thawed. I was soaked and shivering by the time I found the hatch. I rigged Paa’s rope as I had her daughter’s and lowered myself into the cold darkness, a task made infinitely more difficult by the blasted cast boot.

  I knew what I was going to find back there in the trophy room. I hadn’t recognized what I was supposed to see the first time I was down there, but, in retrospect, everything seemed so clear.

  I flicked on the flashlight and gathered my bearings. The boot made tapping sounds that echoed in the confines as I rounded the smoke deflector, passed the skeletal remains, and dropped to my hands and knees in front of the tunnel, stirring the settled dust. I stared into the cold blackness for a long moment before following my beam inside.

  I had to know for sure.

  The cavern was just as I remembered it, only colder and darker. I didn’t bother following the history of the monkey-men and the sarcophagus-men and headed straight for the most recent entries in the timeline. I saw my grandfather as a young man with his father and his brothers, and the fate that had befallen them at their homestead. The photographs of the faces of my dead aunts and their children. I saw the fear in my grandfather’s eyes and the utter terror in my father’s as they posed in the back of the pickup truck with their kills leaning against the tailgate. I studied the face of my father, from his eyes to his broad cheekbones and his thin lips to his weak chin. And then I looked at the face of the man with the ram’s horns, whose head was propped against the tailgate between the feet of my father, who did his very best to get them as far away from the monster as he could. I looked at the ram’s narrow, half-lidded eyes. At his strong cheekbones and thick lips and solid chin and I understood.

  I understood everything.

  I stepped to my right and found his head on the wall. Stared at his desiccated skin and sunken eyes. I reached up and touched his cheek with my fingertips. Traced the dry skin to the corners of his mouth, where his lips had receded from his bared teeth. I pressed on one of the canines, felt just the slightest wiggle. Wedged my thumb into his mouth. Gripped the tooth as tightly as I could. Pulled it straight down. Twisted it. Pulled harder. Harder still.

  It came out with a snap. I held it in my right palm while I fished the others I had collected from beneath the snow on my front porch out of my pocket and laid them side-by-side. The front teeth were broken at the roots, but the nubs were still plainly visible. The canines were different, though. Their upper surfaces had been carved so that they fit like plugs into the sockets in the jaw.

  I tucked them all into my pocket again. Then, with a glance back at the face of the man with the ram’s horns, I headed toward the surface. This was where I would display the body of the man in the blanket, beside the head of his father. He would be my contribution to the saga.

  It was time to write the end of the story.

  THIRTY

  I sat in the chair beside my grandfather’s bed, with the light from around the board bisecting his bony frame, for a long time before I finally looked into his eyes. There was so much I wanted to say; I just couldn’t find the words. So I did the only thing I could think to do.

  I held out the handful of teeth so he could see them. There was so much sadness in his eyes that it nearly broke my heart. What he had done for me…my feelings were more complicated than I’d be able to resolve in a dozen lifetimes.

  “My mother doesn’t know, does she?”

  My grandfather blinked his affirmation, releasing the tears to roll down his cheeks.

  I looked at the portraits on the wall above the head of his bed. There was a good reason there were no pictures of me with my parents when I was a baby, and it wasn’t because my mother chose not to relive those moments. There simply weren’t any to relive.

  “That’s why you brought us here. It was your fault my father left and you wanted to try to make things right.”

  He deliberately blinked again and looked away. Not in an effort to direct me to anything on his shelf, but out of shame.

  I’d always wondered how my father could live his life without ever growing curious enough about how I was doing to come looking for me. I mean, if I’d had a son, I would have wanted to know he was safe and that he was being properly cared for, if nothing else. And yet mine had made no effort to do so. I guess now I knew the reason why.

  “I never would have suspected you were anything other than my grandfather by blood. You taught me everything I know. You were there for me when no one else was. You were like both my mom and my dad put together. You were my best friend.”

  He looked back at me and I could see how badly he wanted to tell me what happened, but he no longer possessed the ability. And never would again.

  “You should have told me the truth. Instead, you trained me to kill them. All of those hunting trips. They’d been designed to give me the skills I would need to murder…to murder my own…”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud.

  I didn’t want to think about how similar the two warring bloodlines were. Or how I’d been the one to end that war.

  I took his hand and rested my forehead against it. There were so many things I wanted to know. Where did he find me? Why did he take me instead of just killing me? But I knew those were answers he would never be able to tell me and the only man who potentially could would probably take them to his grave rather than share space with a boy he thought of as a monster. I wondered if he’d known all along when he agreed to help raise me or if he’d bought whatever fabrication my grandfather
concocted, until he eventually figured it out and took off, of course.

  I imagined my grandfather inside of that mountain with a trowel and buckets full of concrete, scraping the gray sludge onto the cavern wall and smoothing it flat.

  Scrape, smooth.

  Scrape, smooth.

  He hears a sound from deep within the earth and at first tries to ignore it, but it grows more and more insistent. Against his better judgment he sets aside the concrete and crawls into the orifice he’d been sealing. Listens. He recognizes the sound and grabs his trowel. Crawls into the darkness. The sound becomes louder with each step, distorted by the strange acoustics and echoing from the honeycomb of passages. He follows it to where he finds a small child. Naked and alone. Starving. Dehydrated. Crying for his mother.

  My grandfather raises his trowel, the sharp tip pointed straight down at the child’s unfused fontanels. And he sees the child’s skull is not yet artificially deformed, nor have horns been grafted to his head. His canine teeth are still years away from being replaced by those of a mountain lion. His fingernails are as dainty as his tiny hands.

  My grandfather slowly lowers the trowel and stares at this filthy child, and does the only thing he can think to do, the one thing that comes naturally to him. Because, at heart, he is a good man. He is the kind of man who would bring home the innocent child of his enemy rather than leave him to die. And he thinks his son-in-law is a good man, too. He’s too old to suddenly have a young child. There would be questions. Questions for which there would have to be answers. Questions that would never even be asked of the young couple whose marriage he had inadvertently destroyed.