Primal Fear

by Boucher, Brad

  Harry lined up the second creature and fired. The bullet punched a vicious hole through its right shoulder, flinging its squat body onto the floor. A furious howl escaped its twisted mouth, an encouraging sign that the Jhe-rhatta could indeed be hurt. And what could be hurt could also be killed.

  It picked itself up slowly, in obvious pain, its slanted eyes regarding Harry with a newly discovered rage. He shot it again, this time shearing off one of its legs in a shower of translucent white flesh. The thing went down again, writhing in agony, apparently incapable of changing its form with such extreme injuries.

  One more bullet would do the job. He lined up the shot, his finger tense over the trigger.

  The first creature scrambled across his back, free now and trying to claw at his exposed throat. He hunched his shoulders, trying to limit its access. He felt one of its claws digging into his chin, opening up a long gash along his jaw.

  A moment later and it was off of him, gone in a sudden rush of movement. He looked up to see John looming over him.

  He’d kicked the creature onto the floor, placing one boot firmly in the side of its unprotected head. Five feet away, it picked itself up, its hands closing into angry fists as it prepared to lunge. Harry could see his own blood glistening on its claws.

  He watched it come, knowing he would never be able to move in time, that it would surely reach him before he could lift his gun in its direction. He watched its transformation in a sort of numb slow-motion, every detail etching itself into his thoughts.

  It seemed to melt, its body giving way to smoke even as it moved, its limbs stretching into a blur of pale mist. Form became formlessness in the time it took to draw a breath, and it came at him even more swiftly than that.

  He was half aware of John crouching down beside him, his hands busily clutching for something, some kind of weapon. Whatever it was, it would hardly matter; in this form, the creature was beyond harm.

  His muscles tightened involuntarily, his body reflexively bracing for the impact. The white smudge was scarcely two feet away now and closing fast.

  A glittering spray of powder shot past him as John hurled a handful of the sand from the leather bag straight at the charging creature. The cloud of dust and the Jhe-rhatta’s glowing essence merged in a sudden flash of sparkling light, a furious crackling sound rising from the collision. The air was filled with a horrible stench, a foul, cloying odor that reminded Harry of rotting meat.

  The creature shrieked, a high pitched squeal that pierced Harry’s eardrums, and tore through his mind like a steel drill. He scrambled backwards, climbing to his feet in an attempt to distance himself from the horrible sound.

  And then he watched in disgust as the creature burned to death.

  Its flesh took on solid form once again, a metamorphosis the Jhe-rhatta tried to fight. But despite its greatest efforts, it could not retain its ethereal state, and as swiftly as its body gained substance, it began to melt within the cloud of powder settling around it. Its flesh coursed off of its body in rivulets, dripping like melted wax onto the cavern floor.

  Within seconds it was dead, leaving behind a steaming pile of flesh that looked as though it couldn’t possibly have come from anything that had once been living. Harry approached it carefully and prodded it with the tip of his boot. There was no response. This time, it was certainly dead.

  “I thought you didn’t know how to kill them,” Harry whispered.

  “I didn’t,” John answered. “I took a chance, and we got lucky.”

  “Jesus.”

  Ten feet away, the second creature writhed on the floor, still pulling its mutilated body towards Harry, still bent on attack. Harry leveled his gun. Without so much as a single moment’s regret, he pumped two bullets into its skull, silencing it forever.

  He turned back toward John, one hand rising to trace the fresh wound along his jaw. His fingers came away wet, sticky with his own blood. The wound was deep, but it would have to wait. At the moment, they had much more pressing matters to contend with.

  John snapped back into action, picking up the ritual where he’d left off. The ancient words spilled from his mouth, his voice trembling, his entire body shaking as he swept his arms up in a gesture of defiance.

  Harry watched expectantly, eager to see whether John’s efforts were having any effect on the stirring demon. John’s language was little more than gibberish to him, words and phrases that were well beyond his understanding.

  John lowered his hands, squatting to retrieve the wooden figurine. It seemed to vibrate under his touch, as if its magic, long dormant, had now been rekindled.

  “Earth Mother, help me,” he whispered. “K’ja she lata li ch’adi.”

  He raised the carved figure to his face, pressing it tight to his forehead and then repeating the same mysterious incantation once again. The entire process went on three more times before he deposited the Earth Mother back onto the cavern floor.

  “Something’s happening,” Harry whispered.

  John nodded, not turning around. “It’s starting to work.”

  A thick mist had begun to form in the pit, concealing the tupilaq’s movements. Harry stared intently into the fog, trying to pick out any sign of motion, any sign that the demon had completed its resurrection. But he couldn’t see a thing, and finally gave up, concentrating instead on John.

  The young man’s hands and arms were moving swiftly through a bizarre series of patterns, creating shapes and rhythms unlike any Harry had ever seen. They were certainly nothing like the ones he’d performed in the grip of the trance the night before. Instead, these motions were more violent, evoking a sense of destruction, of ejection, of forcing something away.

  But the expression on John’s face was what truly held Harry’s attention. John’s brow was furled into a tight line of concentration, his eyes fixed straight ahead, filled with determination. His jaw squared, he mouthed the words that would hold the demon in place. And beneath it all, underneath the strength and ambition, there seemed to be an enigmatic hint of detachment.

  Clearly, the ritual itself held some unknown power over the one who performed it, as if the words, once begun, set themselves into motion. Hopefully, they would not be stopped until the rite had been completed.

  John retrieved the bag of gray powder, one hand curled over it as if its power could be physically manipulated. He closed his eyes, a new litany rising from his lips.

  From the pit, the beast began to emerge. Its huge head rose into view first, its sunken eyes glaring at its enemies. Its face was even more horrifying than Harry had feared, its features etched into the ancient wood like the image from his darkest nightmare.

  Harry took a step back, his blood suddenly running cold, his breath freezing in his throat. John seemed unaware of the tupilaq’s advance, his eyes still tightly closed. He remained perfectly still, the bag of powder held reverently to his chest.

  One of the beast’s huge hands rose out of the mist, its claws tearing at the frozen earth at the edge of the pit, digging deep furrows into the cavern floor as it tried to pull itself up, out of its grave.

  John’s eyes opened, his gaze hard and unwavering. He let the top of the bag fall open in his palm, digging into it with his free hand. He withdrew a tight fistful of the glittering sand and held it out before him like a weapon.

  “Kaja suh n’hola,” he muttered, his eyes rising to meet the fierce gaze of the reanimated tupilaq. “Koja bolh malaqua jhe t’e.”

  He raised his arm and flung the handful of powder towards the tupilaq, unleashing it in a blue-gray swirl of dust that seemed terribly inadequate in the shadow of Jha-Laman’s creation.

  Harry took a second step backward, suddenly sure the handful of dust was going to fall far short of the tupilaq’s body. He’d seen what the sand had done to the Jhe-rhatta; he couldn’t deny that its magic was real. But if it didn’t reach the beast, what good could it do?

  He was about to put voice to his fear, to tell John to try again, but the clo
ud of powder began to spread out upon the air, riding an unseen current directly towards the rising demon. It whirled in the air like a living thing, settling over the tupilaq’s head and shoulders like the finest of snows.

  And just as it touched down, John hurled the remaining powder straight up into the air in front of him. It mushroomed out above him in a slowly widening circle, hanging there as if the laws of gravity had no bearing on it.

  Its shape began to shift, moving into a roughly vertical line and then spreading outward to either side, taking on the size and shape of a human form. Harry watched incredulously as the form became more and more detailed with each passing moment. Its features seemed vaguely familiar, but it was several seconds before identification came to him.

  He finally recognized the cloudy shape for what it was: a life-sized embodiment of the wooden carving that John had just used in the ritual against the demon. It was the figure that John had called the Earth Mother, somehow brought to life to battle the darkest of nature’s demons, wavering in the air before them like the ripple of heat above a fire.

  The figure moved towards John for a moment, as if eager to peer upon the face of the one who’d summoned it, hovering slowly beside him in a gesture of acceptance. Harry stared at it, dazed. Even without detailed features or a clearly defined figure, he felt this creation was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, or would ever see. It sparkled with untainted perfection, a living embodiment of all that was good and pure in the world.

  And John was about to set it loose. He raised the wooden figure of the Earth Mother to his lips and kissed it firmly on the top of its head. Next he held it at arm’s length, turning it to face the advancing tupilaq.

  Its purpose clear, the Earth Mother’s effigy moved swiftly towards the tupilaq, a million glittering grains of powder converging within its form to lead its attack on the demon.

  The tupilaq tried to back away, tried to avoid the contact of this new apparition upon its wooden flesh, but its movements were too lethargic to yield any sort of success. The cloud of sand exploded around it, each tiny grain seeming to drive itself into the solid wood and bone of the tupilaq’s body.

  The demon howled in fury, a sound like reality itself being torn to pieces, a sound unlike any Harry had ever known. And yet it pleased him to hear it. It was the first encouraging sign he’d seen since the beast had begun to rise, the first indication that John’s ritual was really working.

  Once more, while the deadly sands of the Earth Mother worked on the tupilaq’s form, John began to recite the words that had conjured the magic of his forefathers. He shouted them now, his voice rising above the demon’s howls of pain and fury, his words ringing with triumph.

  “Kaja suh n’hola! Koja bohl malaqua jhe t’e!”

  The power of the Earth Mother ignited within the tupilaq, eating away at it from the inside. A flicker of white light began to burn from each of the millions of holes the magical powder had bored into the creature’s body, growing steadily brighter.

  The tupilaq’s thrashing grew wilder, its huge arms raised in a fury of movement, its head twisting from side to side in agony. Its bellowing became almost unbearable, a din that echoed eerily within the enclosed space of the cavern.

  Harry clamped his hands over his ears, trying to shut out at least a small measure of the sound, but it seemed the dying creature only screamed louder, clearly in the grip of powers beyond its own. He fell to his knees, on the verge of collapse, the ground shaking beneath his feet. The tupilaq’s body was almost completely engulfed in flames now, the Earth Mother’s magic overwhelming the solidity of its body.

  And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. The beast disappeared from view, tumbling into the mist that still filled the pit from which it had come. It vanished into the fog with a resounding crash of snapping bones and splintering wood, its own weight driving it downward to its death.

  There was a long moment of utter silence, a span of time in which Harry imagined even his own heartbeat had fallen still. The smoke hung in the air before them, hovering in the stillness, concealing even the smallest of movements from the pit.

  The flickering of the Earth Mother’s flames had already flickered out. Harry could no longer hear the hiss of the fire or the popping of wood as the hungry flames consumed it.

  “Is it dead?” he asked, climbing to his feet and dusting himself off.

  John didn’t respond for a full minute, gauging the silence, his eyes searching the depths of the pit. For a moment it seemed he was about to nod, to reward Harry’s patience with news of their success. But then his ears must have detected something that disturbed him, something Harry couldn’t perceive.

  A moment later he was laying a strong hand on Harry’s arm, pulling him back from the edge. “Get back,” he muttered. “We’re too late.”

  “What are you talking about? I just saw you kill it. It’s got to be dead.”

  John shook his head, still tugging on Harry’s arm. “It’s not dead. We’ve only destroyed its body.”

  He barely had time to finish the warning when a sudden gust of frigid wind began to build from the bottom of the pit. It rose swiftly, howling out of the darkness with no apparent natural source. Harry moved back on his own now, feeling the bite of the wind on his exposed face.

  “I don’t understand,” he shouted. “What the hell is going on?”

  John turned to him, his eyes filled with fear. “I told you,” he screamed back, his voice barely audible over the wind, “we’re too late!”

  An odd chattering began to rise from the tupilaq’s grave, softly at first but then intensifying as the seconds passed. Soon it was as loud as the sound of the wind itself.

  Harry recognized it first.

  “The ice,” he whispered to himself. “It’s all that ice.”

  He leaped at John, tackling him to the floor just as a sudden blizzard of ice swept upwards from the pit. It swirled around them, thousands of tiny shards of ice, sharp as the edges of a razor, the shattered remains of the layers that had held the tupilaq’s body frozen in place for two hundred years.

  Harry covered his eyes, feeling the sting upon the backs of his hands and across his bare forehead as the whirling ice bit into his flesh. A hundred tiny lacerations burned into his skin as the wind swept past and Harry screamed as loud as he could, trying to chase away the fear, trying to conquer the pain. In his thoughts there was but one firm certainly, and that was the cold, hard fact that he was about to die, that he couldn’t withstand this deadly assault much longer.

  But the wind began to subside a moment later, the storm of ice swept along with it. He raised his head carefully to watch its passing. And there, in the flickering light of the dying lantern, he saw a writhing shape within the center of the gale, a living form fashioned from the shards of ice moving steadily away from them, towards the opening in the cavern floor.

  It twisted in upon itself, pausing only for an instant before finding the means of its escape, as if casting a final menacing glance back at the two men that had dared challenge it.

  John saw it, too, judging by the stark fear Harry could see upon his face. They watched together in helpless dread as it vanished towards the hole, sweeping itself downward into the cavern’s lower chambers.

  It left only silence in its wake, a quiet so stifling that Harry wanted to scream again, just to fight the stillness settling upon them like dust in the grave.

  “What was it?” he asked at last.

  John swallowed, as if incapable of forming an answer. “That was Wyh-heah Qui Waq,” he said at last, his voice heavy with defeat. “We’ve only managed to destroy its physical form. Without it, the demon can only gather the natural elements as its form. The ice, the snow, the wind.”

  “I don’t understand. It was dead.”

  John shook his head. “We only destroyed the tupilaq. The ritual was too late to banish the demon.”

  He turned to Harry, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “And now we’ve
set it free.”

  Chapter Twenty Four

  They made their way out of the cave as quickly as they could, leaving behind anything that wasn’t immediately necessary.

  Harry wasn’t able to reach Charlie on the radio, getting nothing but static every time he tried, and by the time he and John reached the mouth of the cave, he’d resigned himself to the fact that one of them would have to climb up the slippery cable. It was still hanging there from the top of the cliff, but there was no sign of Charlie; whether he’d made it out of the tunnels or not, Harry had no idea.

  He gripped the cable and turned to John, shouting to be heard over the howling wind. “I’ll go up first and try to find Charlie. We’ll winch you up.”

  John shook his head. “Let me do it. You don’t have to—”

  “You’re in no shape to do this, John. Jesus, you could barely stand up in there. Mahuk took too much out of you when he died.”

  John seemed as though he was about to argue further, but at last he relented and released the cable. “Okay. Just be careful.”

  “Yeah, that was part of my plan.” Harry managed a weak grin and then took a deep breath and set to work.

  The climb back up the quarry’s rock face was even more difficult than Harry had anticipated, taking twice as long as he’d estimated. The weather had steadily worsened, the winds reaching speeds he couldn’t even guess at, the snow falling faster than it had all the previous night and morning. By the time he reached the top he was fighting exhaustion, the bitter cold sapping what little strength he had left.

  He staggered to his feet, relieved to see that Charlie was waiting in the Jeep, its engine idling beneath a thick blanket of snow. His deputy leaped out when he saw Harry coming, approaching with an oddly distant look on his face. Harry realized the young man must still be in shock after what he’d seen, and he felt a heavy pang of guilt as he reached Charlie’s side, a sense of remorse he simply couldn’t shake. Not only had he led Charlie blindly into the tunnels, he’d also been forced to mislead his deputy about their real reasons for going there in the first place.