by P. T. Phronk
Paul wiped away a tear, then got moving. If it was Wilcox sinking his furry tendrils into the town—into his wife—then finding him was even more urgent. He grabbed his shotgun, duty belt, some extra flashlights, and an antique spoon that he thought was silver-plated, but wasn’t really sure. The fog was thick as he drove off of the highway, past the winding road to the lodge, and down a little-used path into the woods. When he got to the railing indicating the road’s dead end, he saw Annie and Stan sitting on it, swinging their legs like a couple of kids killing time. Mike Blackwood was nearby, staring off into the woods.
It felt good to see them. “You all holding up okay?” Paul asked.
“I got a job,” Annie said.
Paul smiled. “Yeah! Florence told me you went looking for work. Congrats, kid.”
Annie blushed and swatted away a tuft of gray-streaked hair. “Well, one thing is that I did get fired just now. Kimmy said I couldn’t take the afternoon off on my first day, and also couldn’t take ham off the shelves and share it with my friends without paying for it. Bullshit if ya ask me.”
Paul couldn’t keep himself from laughing. “There’s plenty of work around if you’re staying. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll probably be unemployed soon too.”
Stan looked up. “The meeting with your lawyer didn’t go well?”
“Went fine. Great, actually. I get to keep this uniform for now, and he said my chances are good for avoiding enough legal trouble that I can keep my house, as long as I resign in a timely manner.”
“Fuck!” Stan said. “Paul, I didn’t want this to happen. You didn’t have to risk your job just to help me. This is my fault. Crap.”
“Buddy, once again, it’s not all about you. These wheels were in motion long before you arrived in town. If you need to blame someone, blame Joey, whose whims affect this town more than any decisions of mine. How’s your smashed-up face?”
“Healing quickly thanks to Nurse Annie’s help. What stings more is that Joey will shoot me dead if I ever set foot in town again, and it sounds like he’ll get away with it.”
Paul laughed again. That uncomfortable slick of sweat still cooled his forehead. “So, Annie’s fired from the grocery store, I’m forced to step down as sheriff, Stan has a death sentence, and, well …” he waved vaguely at Mike, who was inching closer as they talked.
“They’d throw me out if they could,” Mike said.
They took turns sighing sadly. “But we’ve got each other, right?” Paul asked.
“Together by night,” Stan muttered.
“We do,” Annie said, putting her hand on Mike’s bare shoulder and nudging him in closer with the rest of them. “And soon Linda will be too. I can’t wait to meet her.”
Stan’s eyes immediately filled with tears. “Paul, Mike says she’s alive. And he knows where the fog is coming from.”
“I’ve missed her,” Paul said. He dramatically hoisted his shotgun over his shoulder. “Let’s go get ‘er.”
Once again, they entered the woods. They probably weren’t far from where they did this the first time, which ended up with Paul covered in moose shit and Stan cowering with Bloody under a pile of sticks.
This time they had Mike guiding them, to some cave that he’d seen the fog coming from, the mention of which triggered Annie’s memory—Wilcox had mentioned a cave just before he tried to kill her. The fog got thicker as they went, but Mike was able to pick out landmarks and keep them on a path only he could see.
Paul dropped back and got Stan’s attention. “We’ll need to be careful. Someone let Miriam out. Someone’s been watching us.”
“You think I’ve forgotten? I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. We’re missing details here. Nobody knew about Miriam except us, and even operating under the fucked up logic of monsters, tracking anyone down in this fog is impossible.”
Paul searched his mind like he’d search the police database, trying to remember if anyone had followed him to or from the lodge, or if he’d told anybody about the woman he’d locked in a basement. Nothing. Stan fell silent as he seemed to come to the same conclusion.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” Paul said.
Stan shrugged. “I’ve been a hermit. Me neither.”
Annie cocked her head, listening.
The sound of water drew closer, until they reached a river. Mike headed upstream, and the rest of them followed. Annie stayed close to him, and she seemed in her element, watching their flanks while Mike charged forward, effortlessly ducking branches and hopping over fallen logs. In town, she seemed to squirm with a hidden tension, like she was dressed in ratty jeans at a formal wedding. Here, that tension was gone, replaced with a useful determination.
Perhaps the tension had been transferred to Paul. With the fog so thick, anybody could have been hiding just steps away without being spotted, and he had a strong feeling of being watched.
They hiked beside the river, but the sound of water managed to grow louder still. “Taquanemon Falls,” said Paul, just before the natural wonder came into view. It emerged from the fog like some Cthulhic being, frozen tendrils surrounding the liquid veil covering its mouth, shouting its indecipherable roar. It was only visible through the fog because of the world-famous brown water, stained by the cedar swamps further upriver. A wooden platform on the other side would normally be dotted with tourists, but they were probably kept away by the recent increase in bad weather and missing persons.
Annie stopped and told Mike to wait. Stan caught up to her and they stood shoulder to shoulder gawking at the falls.
“I took them for granted when I was a kid, but it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Stan asked.
Annie nodded. “Yes. But something smells funny.”
“The brown water looks like crap, but it usually doesn’t smell like it,” Paul said.
“Christ, you guys, I was trying to have a moment of tranquility here,” Stan said.
“Seriously,” Annie said. “Do you smell anything?”
Stan shook his head. Paul and Mike did the same. Annie rubbed at her nose like other people would rub their eyes after seeing something impossible.
Mike twitched his head in the direction of the falls, urging them on. The feeling of being watched got stronger, and Paul felt lost, unable to pick out any details in the white noise of the falls and the white sheet of the fog, and his imagination fed him tricks. He thought he heard something crashing through the brush ahead. He thought he saw a shambling shadow cross their path from the water to the woods.
Annie brushed her hair back from her ears and angled her head to listen. She heard something too. Maybe it wasn’t all Paul’s imagination.
Something was tickling Annie’s nose way deep in its tunnels, like a dried booger so far back it poked at her brain. She once saw on TV that smell was the sense most tied to emotion, and from the moment she’d become a dog, that became not so much an interesting anecdote as a core building block of life on Earth.
The booger poking at her brain was fear. Pain. A faint smell in the air triggered the same fear and pain she’d felt when Wilcox gouged her eyes out. But it wasn’t Wilcox’s scent; it was the scent that had been on Wilcox, only detectable when his dirty hands were in her face.
That scent was already familiar at the time, though she still couldn’t put a name to it.
She flashed back to shivering in the woods with Stan. She flashed back to her vision of hunting animals—the one she dreamed up after Wilcox scrambled her brain. Shape shift. She brushed her hair back and listened. Something was moving, but her stupid, useless human ears couldn’t tell if it was just the irregular roar of the water.
Mike pointed at a path that became a ledge beside the water, leading to the bottom of the falls. The woods rose sharply to the top of the falls, forming a cliff to one side of the path.
Something in the woods shifted. Damn her stiff little ears! Damn her dry little nose! Neither could penetrate the noise and the fog and the trees enough to identify the presence she could feel
more than anything.
Then the woods came to life, and her eyes finally did their job. A shadow taller than the bushes around it shot from the top of the falls. It was heavy enough to shake the trees as it charged down the embankment, down toward her.
“Go!” she shouted to Stan and Paul. They looked at her with dumb human expressions. They hadn’t seen it yet. “Something’s coming. Go! Follow Mike and find your mother.”
Mike galloped toward the path at the bottom of the falls. Stan hesitated and tried to grab Annie’s arm, but she shook him off and flared her nostrils at him. “Will you go already?”
He grumbled, then followed Mike.
Paul pointed his gun toward the woods, where the sound of crushing branches was now obvious, and footsteps shook the ground beneath them. “What is it?” Paul asked.
“I recognize its smell,” Annie said, and before it emerged from the woods, a waft of it was powerful enough to cut through the mist.
It was the moose she’d met in the woods last time they wandered around here looking for Linda. Except he wasn’t a moose anymore. He still had his antlers, as wide as Annie was tall, but the tip of each sharpened point was stained red. Missing fur formed pale gouges, but there were no corresponding scars in his skin. He was leaner than before. His muscles writhing as he charged at Stan.
Mike and Stan got halfway to the bottom of the falls. The moose stopped at the cliff directly above them, then let out a honking cry that cut over the roar of the waterfall. He took a few steps back and dug in his back legs.
“Shoot him!” Annie shouted.
Paul pulled the trigger. From this distance, the buckshot wouldn’t do much damage to a regular moose, and this was no regular moose. But the peppering blasted off some remaining fur, and it was enough to distract him from leaping onto Stan and Mike, and instead focus his attention on Paul.
It cried out again, before charging with unusual speed.
“Go!” Paul shouted.
“No. We need to get to the cave. Get some cover,” Annie said.
“It’s too fast. We won’t all make it. And they’ll need your nose to find Linda.”
Damn his logic. It was almost as infuriating as Stan’s. With a guttural sigh, she left Paul in the path of the charging creature.
Stan watched Mike scamper into a crack in the wet rocks beside the waterfall. Mike shouted something from the darkness, but the rushing water drowned him out. Annie split off from Paul, who pointed his gun at something on the cliff above.
“Paul! Get over here! Annie, Paul is still there!” Stan shouted, twirling his arms in a turn around gesture, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice.
An inhuman roar somehow did get through. A moment later, the churning water downriver gained even more life. Thrashing limbs and bobbing heads surfaced through the foam. Shaggs.
Paul backed away. His gun recoiled. A dark shape the size of a truck closed in on him, but he leapt and rolled to the side.
Annie reached Stan. He pointed toward Paul and raised his palms in the air. Annie shook her head sadly and urged Stan toward the cave, where Mike was gesturing for them to hurry.
The massive shape—a bulging, spiked thing—missed Paul, but immediately pivoted. Behind it, shaggs sprung from the water. Their fanged mouths opened and they let out oddly-toned screeches that cut through the low roar of the water. The spiked creature honked back. They were communicating.
The thing charged again. Annie and Mike grabbed Stan’s arms to drag him into the cave, but he barely noticed, barely registered that he was screaming Paul’s name. The thing lowered its head and jerked it as it collided with Paul.
The last horrible thing that Stan saw before collapsing into the darkness of the cave was Paul’s ragdoll body, flying through the air with a trail of blood behind it, his head at an odd angle because it was partially detached from his body. He landed in a heap on the riverbank.
A dozen pale arms dragged Paul into the water, turning it red.
Annie held Stan in her arms as he wept, but only for a moment. The moose had surely seen them enter the cave.
Sure enough, hoofbeats shook the packed earth. Annie tried to drag Stan back from the cave’s entrance, squeezing her eyes shut, wishing this was all just a nightmare. A deep grunt came from just a few feet in front of her.
Annie opened her eyes. The moose had stopped short of the cave entrance. His antlers, dripping strings of Paul’s blood, were too wide to get through. She eased herself away from Stan, who tried to grab her arm when he realized she meant to approach the moose.
“It’s okay,” she said to Stan. Then, to the moose: “It’s okay.”
Stan scrambled around the ground, sorting through rocks, trying to find one big enough to kill with. “No!” Annie said to him. “Sit.”
The moose’s eyes were a slightly lighter color than before. His face had pinched inward, his snout a bit shorter, his overbite less pronounced. He sneered as Annie approached, revealing fangs that had replaced some of his dull herbivore teeth.
The moose lunged; his antlers hit the stone hard enough to chip it.
“It’s okay,” Annie said again. She got close enough to look into his wild eyes. “Don’t you remember me? We met before.”
Recognition flashed in his eyes for a moment, before being replaced with rage again. His breathing was ragged and wheezy, and his breath smelled like seaweed.
“He turned you into something else. He made you into one of those things in the river, didn’t he? It’s not your fault. You don’t have to listen to him.”
He took a step back from the crack in the rock. Surely he wasn’t understanding what Annie said, but he did seem surprised by her gentle tone.
“Go now,” Annie continued. “Get in the water. You’ll be able to breathe better there. Please don’t tell the other creatures out there where we are. Distract them if you can. Then get far away from here.”
No, he wouldn’t understand her, but she could see his eyes looking her up and down as he thought. She could imagine him taking in her tone, getting her intentions, in the same way she understood people when she was dog even if she didn’t catch every word. He turned away, shaking his massive head, frustrated more than anything.
“What the fuck just happened?” Stan shouted through sobs.
“He’s been turned by Wilcox, but I think he will leave us alone. I think he will draw the shaggs away too. We’ve got a few minutes.”
They followed Mike deeper into the cave, which twisted enough that the sound of the water was muffled. Carved symbols—some ancient, some newer, some familiar—lined the cave walls. Then the path twisted again, and they found themselves in a chamber where the stone had been chipped away enough to form what could reasonably be called a room. A gouge ran through the room, filled with a stream of shallow water. In the middle of the water, there sat a table with a cherry cheesecake on top of it.
18. Versatile Toppings
ANNIE TRIED TO SNIFF THE air to get an idea of what she was looking at, but puffs of mist rose up from the water and blocked her from smelling anything.
“Is … is that a cheesecake?” she asked.
“Cherry, by the looks of it,” Mike said.
Despite everything, Annie’s mouth watered. She approached the cake. It looked like it had been sitting out too long, because it sagged to one side, and the cherry was dripping from the top, mixing with liquefied cheese. In fact, the whole thing was oozing, with little stalactites of creamy cheese poking through the wire-mesh table.
Except it wasn’t really cheese, was it? As she got closer, she saw movement under the translucent cherry topping. Maggots wriggled within the half-melted dessert. And it wasn’t really cherry either, because it gathered in coagulated clots around the edges, and when she got close enough, Annie could smell blood.
A blob of the creamy stuff dripped through the table. When it hit the water, a geyser of fog puffed up, then formed a line as the drop rode atop the stream and out to the river.
&nbs
p; “We found it,” she said. “This is where the fog comes from. You did good, Mike.”
Mike nodded and looked away. Stan sat on the ground, head in hands, trying to suppress sobs.
Annie put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s hurry. The shaggs could be checking in here any minute. We need to figure this out, quick.”
Stan didn’t look up.
“Paul would have wanted us to keep going.”
Stan nodded. He stood, his legs shaking, and began circling the room, searching, gathering details like he’d always been good at. “There are symbols carved in the walls here, and in the floor there. Remember when Dalla carved symbols in the hotel room? They’re meant to keep something out. Obviously not us, though.” He approached some wooden cartons by the wall. “Full of the white stuff. It’s wax, not cheese. Some kind of oil here too, with more symbols on the bottles. And…” He held his fist to his mouth, biting down on it.
“What? Stan, what is it?”
He shook his head and closed his eyes, squeezing a tear out. Annie approached the crate. Inside was a transparent Tupperware container that looked like it was full of leftover soup. Except this soup was dark red, and had the tip of a human finger floating at the top.
“Please tell me it’s not her. I can’t take any more of this shit, Annie, I really can’t.”
Annie cracked the lid open and took a deep sniff. “It’s not her. It’s the blob—whoever or whatever we found in the woods, that Paul got the sample from. Smells the same. Not Linda.”
Stan relaxed just a bit, backing away from the edge of panic.
Mike pointed at what looked like a moldy aquarium nearby. “This?”
Little white things wriggled near the bottom. A while ago, Annie had half-listened while Stan watched a documentary about cheese, and there was one kind that had insect eggs in it, so that the larvae would help with the fermentation process. “The bugs make it go,” Annie said. “It’s just a fucked up recipe. Put the right ingredients together and it stinks up the town so bad that nobody can smell anything else. Blocks the sun too.”