The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  Lester had plenty of time to get to Murphy’s funeral. But for the rest of the night he was not even going to go home. He did not have to get up early in the morning, and he had his Remington pump on the rack over the rear window. He shut the radio and checked the rifle chamber. Then he settled back into his seat and waited.

  Fucking cold.

  Sometime around ten, Lester fell asleep.

  From time to time the Indian blew hot breath into his hands to warm them. He paced the little clearing with restless steps, whistling into the trees.

  The dog had deserted him. Even the plastic sack was gone. The Indian had looked for it, afraid he would find the animal whimpering and vomiting under some bush from the unusually heavy food he had given it to share with the spirit last night.

  The Indian lay on the ground, head propped on a tree root, and tried to calm down. He kept pushing down the thought of betrayal which surfaced in his mind, keeping him from slumber. His spirit had left him alone at this place after leading him hundreds of miles from home.

  The Indian turned over on the ground, pushing away that thought. It subsided, but its stirrings tilted the great weight of faith he had constructed particle by particle over the past months.

  His grandfather tried to speak to him. The dry, cracked lips opened and whispered.

  Something about his spirit.

  The Indian’s hand slid over the ground to where he wished the dog’s warm body lay. There was nothing but dirt and pine needles.

  Why did his spirit not give him a name or at least a sign? Had he taken the dog?

  Steamy jungle heat drenched his body in sweat. Ah! His grandfather’s voice. He heard it clearly as he lay in the Asian bush with an arrow drawn back. A Russian rifle clicked down the path somewhere. They knew he was here, but they couldn’t see him. Good. They were frightened. The Indian smelled blood as he drew the arrow taut toward the chest. A quick, quiet exhalation, the hiss of air, then the strangled cry and he was running, stooped under the leaves, as rifle fire split the night . . .

  A shudder whipcracked the Indian’s body. He grunted in fear as icy wetness coated his chest, his fingers, and caressed his neck, soft as cotton. His chest was covered with snowflakes.

  Snow whispered through the hissing trees, branch to branch, causing the timbers to groan, whitening the ground into a pale, ghostly hue.

  Helder’s voice boomed over the hills: “Ladies and gentlemen, one free drink on the house, courtesy of the great god Snow.”

  The Indian whistled desperately for his dog. Winter or not, he wanted to get out of this place. He wanted his spirit back.

  “Mountain weather” was Martha Lucas’s only comment about the falling snow dusting her hair. “Looks like it woke Moon up.”

  She passed the binoculars to Jason, who observed Moon whistling into the woods. They were sharp, piercing, sad whistles, like a marmot’s. “That’s what the Bigfoot sounds like, too. The same whistle. That’s how they both summon the dog.”

  “What do you think will happen to Moon when he learns the truth?” The Indian’s distress apparently affected Martha.

  Jason pushed the glasses tight to his eyes. “Him? He’ll never learn the truth, not him. People like him always find a truth they want. He’ll make his spirit into a devil if he can’t have it as a god.”

  Jason was depressed, and when he became depressed he became mad. If only he’d burned out that food in the mine and gone after them. If only he’d searched the slope instead of wasting time with Drake. If only this girl had not become entangled with everything. Dammit, dammit to hell and gone! Jason was so damned mad about this business that even his arm did not bother him any more, as if the poison had somehow moved from his body to his psyche.

  When Lester awoke at midnight, he screeched in shock. He was surrounded by pitch-­blackness as tight as a box-sized jail cell. Then he realized he was seated in his truck with the radio off and the windows coated with snow.

  Snow.

  “Shit,” he said, opening the door. He stepped out of the truck and promptly slipped on the ground.

  The snowfall had stopped, leaving a coating that edged over his shoes. The trees were frosted in bony white. Although moonlight was gone, the snow crystals glittered from some light source he could not fathom.

  More to the point, snow covered the trail down to the road. How in hell was he going to get home? His snow tires were down in his trailer, and that was a seven percent grade all the way.

  “Shit,” he repeated.

  He was answered by a snarl ahead of the truck.

  The next three seconds were the bravest in Lester’s life. He slowly looked around into the trees while reaching through the window to the light switch on the dashboard.

  Moon’s dog stood in the snow, growling at him, the light exploding in its eyes. A dead beaver’s head was clutched in its teeth.

  “Hey, pooch. Pooch, pooch, pooch! You sorry sack of fleas, what are you doing out here?”

  The dog slipped into the woods, a burst of sparkling snow marking its departure. Lester followed with his rifle. The dog ran up to a thick spruce, halted, and faced Lester again. It dropped the head and yowled in anger at him. The closer Lester got, the meaner the howls became. Now that was damned weird. That dog was real quiet around the Indian. What was it doing with that head? Where was the rest of the thing?

  “I’m not going to do anything to you, boy. I just—”

  A blood-­freezing screech sailed out from the branches over Lester’s head. Lester did not have brains, but his reflexes were a source of pride. He jumped backward as the thing dive-­bombed straight down with a squeal like chalk on a blackboard and killed itself in a sickening crunch of bone. The small, misshapen body thrashed holes in the snow.

  Lester stepped clear and put three bullets into its back.

  The dog howled and rushed into the woods, its barks transmuted into howls of terror.

  Lester knew he was rich. This little thing here was some kind of baboon with a tiny tail and small fingers. It was about four feet long. There was a pelt there, not much, and kind of ratty-­looking with ugly scabs and bare patches, but a pelt.

  Well, Bigfeet had babies too, and this was good enough. He rolled it over with his foot. And looked at its face.

  It was some seconds before Lester gained sufficient control of himself to grab its ankles and drag it to the truck. He swung it into the bed, where it landed like a feather, then climbed behind the wheel. Oblivious to his tires and the dangerously slippery road, he roared out onto the highway. As he left the forest he could still hear the barking dog.

  He was kind of worried that his trailer on Hulcher Road was so isolated. It was all backed up in the trees on Colby’s south face. The Petrie family, next door, had gone off for the weekend.

  He turned on the lights in his trailer and cleared dishes from a small Formica table that served as a dining area. His walls were papered with motorcycle photos in full color. His refrigerator was well stocked with beer and nothing but.

  Only then did he return to the truck, clang down the tailgate, and look at the thing huddled on the metal.

  Lester pulled it out by the ankles again. Its head bumped over the ground and up the cinder-­block steps. He dragged it into the kitchen, leaving a trail of blood on the linoleum, then hoisted it up to the table under the cold fluorescent light.

  Well, that was not so bad. Nothing like that hellacious scare its face caused when dimly seen. Lester cracked open a beer and searched for a butcher knife in the drawer. He was uncertain about how or even whether to skin it.

  He had shot a child. Except if Lester ever had a kid like that he would be tempted to shoot himself. It changed from human to gorilla depending on how you looked at it. The head was flat, with scraggly lank hair that peaked in the center of the forehead. One cheek had tufts of hair on it, the other was smooth as a ba
by’s. The mouth was open, revealing half a set of yellow, crooked, pretty goddamned big teeth. The jaw was narrow and kind of pointed. The eyes were rolled back and white, with red laces in them, just like anybody’s, only two heavy brows sat over them, the ends curled into horns.

  Lester closed his eyes and opened them again. Still there. The fur was blistered and patchy, and the arms and legs didn’t match. It looked to Lester as though the little bastard would have died on his own soon anyway.

  Lester shook his head, the barking dog’s voice reverberating in his ears. He opened another beer and drank it down. Then another. He sank into a leisurely stupor made sweet by the anticipation of the money he would get for the pelt. Maybe he’d better call some lawyer in the morning to do what was legal to get possession of it.

  Lester socked away beer after beer, mooning over money. The outline of the thing shimmered with his doubling vision. Keep on drinking like this and it might just sit up and say hi.

  He’d better get started now, before he was too smash-blinded to cut right. This was going to be nasty. He spread newspapers on the floor around the table and set to work on the carcass, trying to think it was just like dressing a deer.

  Sometime later, as he labored over the table, Lester realized that the dog’s barking was not in his head. Claws scraped on the screen door. Lester pondered that. The little prick must have followed him somehow.

  The suspension springs creaked on his truck. Then, with a crunch of collapsing metal and a clash of glass, he heard the truck roll over. He must have left the brake on. Piece of junk anyhow; he’d buy himself a Peterbilt with his money and run his own truck. Nice CB on the dash, TV back there in the sleeping cube, and loads of road whores bouncing around in the trailer . . .

  Brakes. Dog. Shit!

  Lester finally caught on when the trailer began to rock. Simultaneously, a rock blew in his living-­room window, rolled off the unmade bed, and thumped to the floor. He looked across the kitchen to the crank-­handled window. A face was looking in.

  Lester could not take his eyes off it. It was horned and hairy, with narrow eyes rimmed in red, and it swallowed up more window than any human’s would.

  The window behind his neck smashed to pieces, and the draft brought in a sudden stench. He looked into a second face not ten inches from his own.

  It was a knowing face, like the other one. The red eyes looked into Lester’s, then at the shapeless mess on the table.

  The face writhed into a contorted mass as though snakes were jumping under the skin, all the features going against each other. Lester flung his beer at it.

  An arm the size of a tree trunk rammed through the window frame, grabbed Lester’s entire head in a hand so enormous it swallowed it up, and squeezed convulsively.

  The last thing Lester heard was the howling dog and the wall caving in as the other beast hooted into the kitchen to the child’s body. Lester did not blame them. Lester did not blame them one damned bit.

  NEMESIS

  11

  On Saturday morning, Jack Helder joyfully shut off the snow guns and serviced the five snowmobiles in the shed. The place was packed for the weekend. He told his staff Colby would stand or fall on the weekend business, so he was releasing half of them during the weekdays. They’d make more money on Saturday and Sunday. The worse the weather, the better for him. Naturally, the airport would be closed for the storm, but he could send the van to Clayton, where the diverted planes would be landing.

  Saturday afternoon, he shivered on his sun deck, watching the sun lance feeble rays over the valley. Tomorrow the sun deck would be shielded behind heavy metal shutters. The storm would seize the valley as a dog seizes prey in its teeth and yanks it about. They would all move to the game room at night, where there were pinball machines and billiard tables. The colder it was, the more liquor he would sell. He could make it on the bar alone.

  On Saturday afternoon, Martha Lucas and Raymond Jason visited a weary James Drake at Ranger headquarters.

  “No, no, we haven’t found anything. We did the north face most of the morning and found a lot of stripped foliage, but nothing recent.”

  Nor had they found any more entrances to the Limerick, but it could be a cave hidden somewhere. “Those charts will be here by Thursday, and we should really be cracking then.”

  Martha asked if she could tell Jack Helder yet. Drake yawned. “If you ask me, they’ve cleared out of here. Go ahead and tell him, but also make damned certain he doesn’t let anyone run around that mine.”

  And she would have if it were not for John Moon. Helder would land on the Indian like the Gestapo, pumping him for every bit of information, wheedling, cajoling, demanding, offering more pay, perhaps driving that fragile sensibility beyond endurance. Judging by Moon’s dark-ringed eyes and recent poor performance on the archery field, he was not far from there now.

  “Cool it,” Jason told her. “If they’re really gone, he’ll catch on before long.”

  That night Raymond Jason lay on his bungalow bed in a state of profound melancholy, watching cigarette smoke curl up to the ceiling. He dwelled on that medi­cine bundle at Moon’s waist. The bag smelled like the beast, no doubt about it. There could very well be a piece of it in there, probably taken from the trap it had sprung. If so, Jason was going to take it.

  It was either that or get out of this impasse the way he had come in. With nothing. For Jason was convinced that the beasts were gone for good, leaving him and Moon in the lurch.

  Him and Moon.

  Jason was a hair’s-­breadth away from hating that laconic redskin, that weirdo with his silly, savage superstitions. His psychiatrist would have said it was because Moon reminded him of himself. But Jason’s hatred for Moon was tinged with contempt. Put a Raggedy Ann doll before him and he’d follow you anywhere.

  And so would Jason. Two peas in a pod.

  Jason angrily squashed out the cigarette and lit another one. Think about something else. Think about what they both had missed.

  So far Kimberly had called the shots beautifully. He had suggested that some kind of genetic damage had decimated the population of Bigfeet over the past hundred years. And it had been confirmed when Jason saw its face in the river. A damaged mismatched face with a human chin on the superstructure of a monstrous primate. Parts that did not mesh. Kimberly had stated that the chin was irrefutable proof that it was human.

  Jason believed that.

  Almost.

  The trouble was, primitive humans were small, not giants. Twinkletoes, not Bigfeet. Kimberly had suggested that giantism, some glandular disorder, accounted for its size and hair. Yet giantism was a crippling disease that weakened bones. This thing was built huge. He could walk and run for distances of up to a thousand miles. Nature had designed it that way, using the basic superstructure of the ape.

  Dammit, it was a missing link. It was both ape and human. Had to be! Even Paranthropus had not been that big a hominid. This was a gorilla-­scaled apparition no matter what kind of face it had.

  Genetic damage.

  Jason watched the smoke curl. Genetic damage? Now just a bloody minute here, there’s a third possibility. It was so far out of imagination, he even had trouble pinning it down.

  Jason slowly sat upright on the bed. Until now his plight paralleled the Indian’s, in that he was not quite sure what he was chasing. To Moon it was a spirit, to Jason an equally unlikely creature.

  A third possibility. A third Sasquatch. Kimberly had neglected to speculate what could have caused a genetic upset in the animals. Bad water, air pollution, all that stuff was the assumption.

  The trouble was, genetic damage was fatal too. Oh, you could make it through two or three generations, but still, the timing was off. They’d be extinct by the mid-sixties.

  So maybe genetic damage was the wrong word, too. A genetic change! Plain Darwinian evolution. The things were
changing from ape to human. How in the hell could that happen?

  It took something of a struggle for Jason to face that question squarely. There was only one way it could have happened, absurd as it was . . . as incredibly far out and unbelievable as it was, that had to be it.

  From the drawer he pulled out a Gideon Bible. Religious fanatics! They were everywhere. He had not looked in the Bible since he was a child, but after half an hour of searching, it was there in front of his eyes.

  Yes! He knew what the things were! Jason knew exactly what he was chasing.

  Jack Helder was alone in the Grizzly Bar, with the color television flickering lines across the screen. He had been counting receipts and sipping Scotch. Sip. Count. Sip. Count. He fell asleep with his head on the counter as the rising wind shuddered the lodge.

  When he heard the crash of crockery from the kitchen, he awoke thinking it was morning and the cook had arrived to fix breakfast. Nice of him to get an early start.

  Except it was three fifteen in the morning, according to the watch, which would not stay in focus.

  The second crash was louder than the first and was accompanied by plaster tearing out of the wall and water gurgling onto the floor. It brought Helder to his feet, wide awake and hung over. He went into the lounge and listened.

  The fire was low. Shadows consumed the corners, trying to possess the room as the flames dwindled. Feet shuffled around in the kitchen. Heavy, soft feet, as though someone were wearing rubber soles.

  The third crash was the deep freeze being upended and spilling frozen meats. Helder shouted, “Hey!”

  The sounds stopped. The intruder was listening.

  Helder ran into his office, opened the standing gun cabinet, and took out his rifle. As he walked rapidly to the kitchen, he heard the service-­entrance door screech from hinges which pinged onto the floor.

  He banged open the swinging doors and beheld pure savagery. The wind whistled through the splintered doorway over a glutinous freezing mess of eggs, lettuce, milk, steaks, all the varied foods for varied appetites he had stocked for the week, scattered across the floor in an indescribable scramble. Steak blood was smeared across the walls. The sinks had been pulled from their pipes and water sloshed over congealing bread and salad dressing.