The Curse of the Wendigo (13 page)

The sergeant broke the next day. We had stopped to rest, and no sooner had we eased our aching bodies down than he was up again and traipsing through the brush; I could see his hat, shimmering with dew, darting between the glistening ebony bodies of the trees.

“All right, damn you, all right!” he bellowed. “I hear you over there!
You might as well come out where I can see you!”

I started to get up, and the doctor waved me back down. He picked up his rifle.

“I’ll shoot you. Do you want that?” yelled Hawk toward the vacant trees. “I’ll drop you like the miserable dog you are. Do you hear me?”

I jerked reflexively as the gunshot reverberated throughout the forest. Again I began to get up and the doctor pushed me gently down.

At that moment Hawk let loose with a banshee scream and raced away, crashing pell-mell through the undergrowth, firing wildly as he ran, his screams more like the high-pitched yelps of a wounded animal than those of a man.

“Stay with Chanler, Will Henry!”

With that the monstrumologist raced into the bush after him. I scooted closer to John Chanler, clutching the revolver in both hands, unsure what I should be more afraid of—the thing that might be following us or our deranged guide. Presently the snap and pop of the pursuit, the explosions of gunfire, and the hysterical screams faded. The quiet of the primeval forest returned, a preternatural stillness that was, if possible, even more unnerving than the noise.

I felt something stir beside me. I heard something moan. I smelled the breath of something foul. Then I looked down and saw that something looking back at me.

“In My Rising, I Fell”

The skeletal hand grabbed my arm. The bulbous head lifted a few inches from the carpet of pine needles, the eyes wide open and swimming in a noisome yellow soup, the lips crimson with fresh blood framing the yawning mouth from which issued the foul stench of corruption and decay, and John Chanler spoke to me in a guttural gibberish, words I did not understand. With a viselike grip he pulled with surprising strength upon my arm. I think I screamed the doctor’s name; I cannot remember. I saw the thick scum-covered tongue push angrily against the front teeth, and I watched those teeth slip loose of their moorings and fall straight back into the stygian blackness of his throat. He gagged; his body heaved. Without thinking, I dropped the gun into my lap and rammed my fingers into his mouth to dislodge the
broken teeth. Instantly his mouth snapped shut and he bit down hard. The pain was explosive. I am sure I screamed then, though I have no clear memory of it. My mind was overcome by the pain and the horrible, vacant look in those yellow eyes, the animal panic replaced by cool, detached alertness, at once bestial and human, when his tongue was kissed by my blood.

I slammed my free hand into his hollow chest and yanked my other hand with all my might, stripping off the skin from my knuckles down to my nails. My hand popped free, coated in gore and yellow sputum. I could hear my blood bubbling in his throat, and then he swallowed, his grotesquely large Adam’s apple jerking madly.

He reached for me. I scrambled away, my wounded hand tucked under my arm, the other clutching the doctor’s revolver, though even in my panic I could not bring myself to point it at him.

He fell back; his back arched; he lifted his cadaverous face to the indifferent heavens. His bony hands clawed impotently at the air.

“Will Henry?” I heard behind me.

The doctor rushed past and threw himself beside Chanler. He cupped the man’s face in his hands, called loudly his name, but the eyes had fluttered closed again, the sound had died on his suppurating lips. I turned and saw Hawk standing a few feet away, his face flushed, bits of twig and moss hanging from his hair.

There wasn’t
anything, it seemed, that could bring Hawk relief. To ward off the dark he built a roaring fire, feeding its rapacious gut with branch after branch until the heat scorched his face and singed the hair of his beard. The fire was against the cold, but he shivered nevertheless. It was against the faceless thing following us, though that thing already gripped him.

He could not turn to his remedy of choice. The doctor had used the last bit of the sergeant’s whiskey to wash my wounds—a necessitous act, Warthrop tried to reassure him, to no avail. Hawk exploded into a tantrum worthy of the most infuriated two-year-old, stomping about the littered detritus of rotting leaves and dry crumbs of the earth’s ancient bones, boxing the air with red-knuckled fists, spittle flying from his chapped lips.

“You had no right!” he shouted in the doctor’s face, waving the empty flask. “This is mine! Mine! A man has a right to what belongs to him!”

“I had no choice, Sergeant,” said Warthrop in the tone of a parent to a child. “I will buy you a whole case of it once we reach civilization.”

“Civilization? Civilization!” Hawk laughed hysterically. “What is
that
?”

The forest returned his words in a mocking echo:
Civilization . . . What is that?

“Can you show it to me, Warthrop? Can you point it out for me, because I’m having some trouble seeing it! There is nothing left—nothing, nothing, nothing.”

“I can’t show it to you,” replied the monstrumologist calmly. “I am not the guide.”

“What does that mean? What are you saying? Are you suggesting something, Warthrop?”

“I’m merely pointing out a fact, Sergeant.”

“That I’ve gotten us lost in these damnable woods.”

“I never said that, Jonathan. I wasn’t even suggesting it.”

“It isn’t my fault.
That
isn’t my fault.” He gestured wildly at the still form of John Chanler inside the tent. “That was
your
doing, and this is where it’s brought us!”

The doctor was nodding thoughtfully; I’d seen the expression a hundred times before, the same look of intense concentration as when he was studying some singular specimen of his bizarre discipline.

“How far is it to Rat Portage?” he asked quietly. “How many more days, Jonathan?”

“Do you think I’m going to fall for that? You must think I’m a complete idiot, Warthrop. I know what you’re up to. I know what this is. I am doing the best I can.
None of this is my fault!
”

He kicked a burning stick, launching it into the undergrowth. Flame licked and spat in the dry tinder, and I raced
to the spot to stamp it out. Behind me Sergeant Hawk laughed derisively.

“Let it burn, Will! Let the whole thing burn, and then let’s see where it hides! Can’t hide from me then, can you, you son of a bitch!”

“Sergeant,” Warthrop said, “there is nothing hiding—”

“What are you,
dead
? I hear it every hour of the day and smell it every hour of the night. I smell it now—the stench of rot, the smell of putrefying filth! It’s all over us; it’s soaked into our clothes; we’ve bathed in it till it’s in our
skin
; it comes out when we
breathe
.”

He pointed a crooked finger toward the tent.

“You think any of this is new to me? I’ve been a hundred times in the bush after a lost tenderfoot looking for a trophy, some rich bastard without the good sense God gave him to not go where he don’t belong! I know, I know . . .” He gave his mouth a hard swipe with the back of his hand, and his bottom lip split open. He turned his head and spat blood into the fire.

“Couple years ago I brought one out, and he went home without a face. A big grizzly hooked him in the eye sockets, punched out both his eyes with his claws, and
ripped
his whole face off. Just tore it completely off, the stupid blind bastard. I hiked back to Rat Portage with his God damn face in my pocket! How’s
that
for your trophy, you rich, stupid, blind, faceless bastard!”

He laughed again, spat again. Glimmering specks of
blood and spittle clung to his whiskers. He threw his wide shoulders back and flexed his powerful chest toward the doctor.

“I’ll get you out, Dr. Monstrumologist. One way or the other—even if it means I point the way with my cold, dead finger—I’ll get you out.”

Later I joined the doctor inside the tent, balancing my elbow on my upraised knee to elevate my hand; the wound throbbed horribly. We could see Hawk’s hunkered silhouette through the open flap.

“Are we lost?” I whispered. My uninjured hand slowly caressed my aching belly. Hunger had become a knotted, twisting fist buried deep in my core.

The doctor did not answer at first.

“If we lose him, we are,” he said. He meant “lose” in every sense of the word.

His hand reached out in the darkness. I felt his warmth against my cheek. I flinched: I was not used to the doctor touching me.

“No fever,” he said quickly, removing his hand. “Good.”

Exhausted, I fell into a doze. I awakened to find him curled against me, Chanler against him, and Pellinore Warthrop’s hand was wrapped around my arm. He had reached for me in his sleep—me the buoy to keep him afloat, or he the weight to keep me from flying away.

When I opened my eyes, his were looking back at me—not the doctor’s, Chanler’s—and those eyes were a curious polished yellow, like marbles, splintered by arterial red fissures, as if some great force had squeezed them until they cracked. I lay close enough to see my reflection in the sightless pupils. For an instant I was certain he had passed away during the night. Then I heard his breath rattling, deep in his narrow chest, and I let out my own breath in relief. What a terrible thing it would have been, to have traveled so far and endured so much, only to have him die so close to deliverance! Remembering the last time our eyes had met, I scooted backward to place some distance between us, and when I did, the eyes did not follow but remained fixed upon the spot I had occupied. The cadaverous mouth moved; no sound emerged. Perhaps he was beyond breath for words.

I rolled out of the tent and stood blinking stupidly, for my mind rebelled against the sight. The camp was deserted. The smoke of the expired campfire lingered lazily in the cold morning air. That was the only movement I saw. Gone were the doctor and Hawk, and gone were their rifles.

Softly I called their names. My voice sounded small and muffled, like the cry of a wounded forest animal, and so I called out in a loud voice, “Dr. Warthrop! Sergeant Hawk! Hello! Hello!” My calls seemed to travel no farther than a foot from my mouth, slapped down by the malicious hand of the brooding trees, the syllables smashed to bits by the
oppressive atmosphere. I shut my mouth, heart rocketing in my chest, abashed, thinking,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
for I had offended something; my cries were an affront to the malignant animus of the wilderness.

I heard someone speak directly behind me. I turned. Guttural and gurgling with phlegm, Chanler’s voice floated in the frigid air, as ephemeral as the smoke rising from the smoldering brands. Not words belonging to any human tongue, nor mindless blather, more like the gibbering of a toddler mimicking speech, struggling to make concrete the abstract, the thoughts we think before we have words to think them.

I poked my head into the tent opening. The man had not moved. He lay curled upon his side, hands drawn to his chest, lips shining with spittle, the thick, yellowish tongue wrestling with words he knew but could not enunciate.

“Gudsnuth nesht! Gebgung grojpech chrishunct. Cankah!”

I flopped onto the ground with my back to the tent, fighting the mindless terror that now threatened to overwhelm me. Where had they gone? And why had they left without telling me? Surely the doctor at least would have awakened me before he left.

Unless he couldn’t. Unless something had snatched him in the night, seized both him and Hawk. Unless . . . I recalled the hysterical laughter of our distressed guide, the red flush of his unshaven cheek, the blood flying from his lips. . . . What if his mind had finally given way and he had
done something to the doctor, and was now disposing of his body, in this gray land that never gives up its secrets?

I patted my pockets, unable to remember if I had returned the doctor’s revolver. Evidently I had.

What should I do? Should I go looking for my missing companions?
What if they were not missing at all but had decided to investigate something one had seen or heard—or had merely gone out to hunt for game, to return at any moment? And what would the doctor say if and when I ever stumbled back into camp—what measure of wrath would come down upon my foolish head for wandering off alone into the bush, abandoning the sole reason we had come here? So I wondered, trying to arrange the deck chairs of my pitching and yawing faculties, buffeted by the maddening nonsense inside the tent and the panic bubbling up inside me.

He could be hurt,
I thought.
Lying out there, unable to call for help. I might be able to save him, but who will save me?

Any action at all is better than paralyzed dread, so I forced myself up with a
Snap to, Will Henry!
and quickly surveyed the ground, looking for footprints or any other sign that might shed light on what had happened. I detected no scuff marks or wounded soil, nothing to indicate a struggle. I did not know whether to be relieved or further perturbed. While I was thus employed, I heard something coming toward me, the crunch and snap of undergrowth announcing its approach. I turned on my heel and raced back to camp, to what real purpose I cannot say, for I was just as vulnerable
there as here, with no means of defending myself, except the steaming broken branch I plucked from the ashes of the fire and swung before me as I backed toward the tent.

“Watch out!” I cried. “I have a weapon!”

“Will Henry, what the devil are you doing?”

He stepped into the clearing, the rifle resting in the crook of his arm, his clothes speckled with moisture, his dark eyes ringed in black and sunk deep in his pale whiskered face. I dropped my “weapon” and ran to him, overcome with relief. My first instinct was to throw my arms around his waist in thanksgiving, but something in his expression stopped me. With the acute intuition possessed by all children, I knew what that expression meant.