The Beast of Barcroft

by Bill Schweigart

  Chapter 22

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  Lindsay and Richard stared at each other for a moment until they heard small, quick footsteps piston down the stairs. Richard pushed Lindsay behind him and untied the bag with the white ash. Lindsay noticed his hands were shaking, but he poured what remained across the open doorway to the sunroom in an unbroken line. He backed up beside her and immediately stepped into a puddle of cat urine.

  “Jesus, cat, hold your water. These shoes cost more than—”

  The stairs groaned again, louder and longer this time. Every muscle in Lindsay’s body screamed for her to run out the back door. The cat meowed incessantly and threaded himself through their legs.

  Richard nudged her toward the back door. “Go.”

  “You said we wouldn’t make it.”

  “It won’t get past this,” he said, pointing to the fresh ash line, “and if it wants out it has to go back upstairs or find another exit. That’s a few seconds at least. And I’ll distract it.”

  Before she could tell him no, a change in light caught her eye.

  “Wait,” she said. “The living room.”

  They both peered back into the house from the sunroom, past the kitchen, down the hallway, toward the front of the house. The smell assaulted them first, a pungent musk, thick and cloying. Like a marsh at low tide, thought Lindsay. They could not see into the living room around the corner, but it had been brighter a moment ago. Now no light came from that part of the house.

  From the darkness of the living room, twenty feet from them, a hand passed over the fixture on the wall. It was large and hairy, but human, and despite herself, she screamed. Next to her, she heard an involuntary release, a noise of revulsion, escape from Richard’s mouth. The long hallway to them went dark then; the only light remaining in the house now came from the small sunroom.

  Richard shoved her again toward the back door, but they both stopped short when they heard the cracking. From the darkness, they heard the protestations of an animal in pain. Grunts and whines and wet sounds, punctuated with a high, sharp sound like branches snapping.

  “Bones,” said Lindsay.

  “My God,” whispered Richard.

  The pops tapered off, replaced by a low growl that vibrated through the small house. The hair on Lindsay’s neck rose and then two glowing eyes came into view, much lower than the light switch the hand had just passed over. Low to the ground. The beast remained outside the nimbus of light cast by the sunroom, but Lindsay thought she could make out its features. A low-slung head, crouched, hackles raised. The wolf that had attacked them in the car. It did not advance, but the growling became higher, rising to a whine, broken by the occasional yip.

  “It’s a werewolf,” said Lindsay.

  “It’s not.”

  “It was a man, now it’s a wolf. That’s a werewolf.”

  “It’s a shapeshifter. It’s a were-anything-it-wants-to-be.”

  “Can we argue on the move?” She reached for the doorknob.

  “Don’t move,” warned Richard.

  “Make up your damn mind.”

  “Whatever the hell it is, it’s a wolf now and wolves love it when you run. Stand your ground. Be confident.” He straightened to his full height and puffed up his chest. Lindsay did the same.

  “I’d be more confident if you had that silver bullet.”

  “I do. I just don’t have a gun.”

  “I’m never coming to work for you.”

  The wolf advanced.

  “It won’t cross the ash.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Let’s stick with confident.”

  The wolf padded out of the shadows and into the light. It was a uniform tawny color. Odd for a wolf, thought Lindsay, then she reminded herself what she was really looking at. Its hackles were up and its ears were pinned to its skull so as to be barely visible. The beast’s teeth were bared. The noises it emitted dropped back to a low, incessant growl, a vibration that filled the house and bounced off the walls and reverberated through their bodies until it was unbearable, broken only by even more horrible popping and clicking sounds that Lindsay realized was the creature’s jaws, its fangs gnashing against one another. One long tendril of spittle dangled from its jaw, swinging back and forth as it crept forward. The beast stopped short of the ash. It dropped its snout within two inches of the uniform line and sniffed without taking its eyes from them.

  “Terrible shame, but that’s far enough,” said Richard to the wolf.

  He held his phone in front of him.

  “Say cheese.”

  The camera in his phone flashed and caught the precise moment the beast dragged its forepaw over the ash line.

  Chapter 23

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  The men regarded each other in the firelight. The basement pressed in on them, the low ceiling, the piles of debris, the oppressive stench of urine, the coal-black darkness just beyond the small radius of light thrown off by the fire. Ben had only felt this claustrophobic once before, the last time he was here. At least, he told himself, I’m not alone this time. So when he heard the cough and Alex’s face did not move, it may as well have been a shotgun blast in the close quarters.

  They both spun their flashlights in the direction of the noise. It was blocked by a mountain of rotted-out appliances and an old bicycle.

  “Come out,” said Alex. “We know you’re there.”

  Another cough.

  They shared another look of mutual puzzlement, then Alex moved first. Ben followed. Once around the junk, their lights found her in the far corner. She was propped against the wall, legs splayed on an old mattress. She must have pulled it down from upstairs, Ben thought. She wore the same garb from the morning she had attacked him. Same embroidered poncho, same conical wooden helmet with lank, graying hair beneath it. Her chin was against her chest, as if dozing, and the brim of her strange headwear concealed her face. The fact that she did not attack them, did not even seem surprised by their entry, unnerved him even more. It was then that he wrested his gaze from her garments and saw her hands. They were covered in seeping sores.

  Not sores, Ben thought. Bites.

  “My God,” he said.

  The rats, plentiful throughout the basement, were especially brazen in this corner. They pressed in on her, and only the lights and the approach of the two men caused them to retreat, although only for a moment. The Ojibwe yelled then, lifted his heavy black boot, and slammed it on the ground, scattering the vermin. They retreated just out of the flashlight’s glare, ready to bedevil her again under cover of darkness.

  She looked up then and Ben caught her face with his full beam. He stepped back and suppressed a yell. She was ashen yet covered in dirt, giving her a mottled appearance beneath her lank hair. Her face was covered with the same oozing punctures. Her lips pulled back in a sneer at the sight of him. It took every ounce of willpower not to run screaming from the basement. Jesus Christ, he thought, she looks like a real-life zombie.

  “Jumpy boy,” she whispered.

  The medicine man knelt in front of her.

  “I can feel the heat coming off of her,” he said, turning to Ben. “She needs help.”

  “Help? Five minutes ago she was a monster. She killed my friends! She killed my dog.”

  “That’s what you said. That’s what Severance said. But something is…not right.” To her, he said softly, “Ma’am, you have a fever. You need help. Tell me your name.”

  “You brought a friend,” she said in a weak voice, ignoring Alex to look over his shoulder and grin at Ben beneath the brim of her hat. That smile again. Pure malice. “The more the merrier. My friend won’t mind.”

  “We have to get you out of here,” said Alex.

  “No!” she yelled suddenly. “I’m staying. It’s safer.”

  “Safer?”

  “I don’t think my friend…is my friend anymore. He comes to visit me every night. He circles the house, every night in a different skin. Some
times he comes as the cat and purrs in the window so sweetly. He compliments my carvings and wants me to come outside and show him. I almost went the first night. Sometimes he comes as the wolf and whispers that he is so hungry. He sniffs the window and fogs the glass with his breath. ‘Won’t you come out and bring me some food? Just a little?’ Sometimes it comes in skins I have never seen before. But when he came as my Madeleine I knew he wasn’t my friend anymore. He wore her skin and cried that she was so cold and alone outside. She cried and begged and tapped at the window, and I knew then that the limping man lied to me. I can’t control him forever. I can never leave this place.”

  “Who is the limping man?” asked Alex.

  “I promised the beast this one,” she said, cutting a hateful glare at Ben. “But he said he could not get close to you. You’re still here, damn you, and now he’s too hungry to bind anymore.”

  “Bind?” asked the Ojibwe. He looked back toward the fire, the ring of logs, the carved offerings. “Who are your people?”

  Her eyes gleamed with defiance in the firelight and locked onto the medicine man’s. “Tlingit,” she hissed.

  “Did she say Klingon?”

  “This is a potlatch then?”

  She nodded defiantly. Alex stood then and backed a step.

  “What you have done is an abomination.”

  “He,” she said, leveling a chewed finger at Ben, “is the abomination! He and his friends! For years, this entire neighborhood just sat back and watched my girl disintegrate. As if that wasn’t bad enough, but no, his little group had to kick her when she was down. They piled on!”

  “This is unspeakable,” Alex said, his voice quiet but full of steel. “No Tlingit would be so stupid.”

  The medicine man kicked over the circle of firewood surrounding the fire pit. He picked up the bags of food and threw them across the basement. The tiny lights of the rats’ eyes scattered in pairs in every direction like fireworks. The hag began to protest but she was either too weak or too frightened by the tall man’s fury and so remained in the corner. Even Ben was surprised at his companion’s sudden frenzy.

  Chest heaving, the Ojibwe whirled on her, his fists balled at his sides. “Why doesn’t it just come in for you?”

  “If you know what it is, you know it can’t abide this filth.”

  “What the hell is going on?” said Ben. “I thought she was the skinwalker.”

  “Skinwalker,” she cackled. “You wish, jumpy boy.”

  “She’s not yee naaldlooshii.”

  “Then who’s the skinwalker?”

  “There isn’t one,” said Alex. “It’s worse.”

  Chapter 24

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  Lindsay wondered if the flash of the camera triggered the attack, but it was the phone that probably saved Richard’s life, if only momentarily. In a single blurred motion, the beast lunged for his throat. Richard blocked with the arm holding the phone, already held in front of him, and the beast sank his fangs into that instead. Lindsay had opened the back door as the creature leapt. With his free hand, Richard shoved her out the door. She tumbled down the few concrete stairs to the ground as both man and beast crashed backward into the wall, Richard’s shrieking drowning out the revving growls of the animal.

  She got to her feet and saw Richard still on his feet but pinned against the wall. She wanted to run, but she looked around for a weapon. There was nothing. The animal’s forepaws slashed red ribbons out of Richard’s chest. It thrashed its head back and forth and by the noise and the impossible motion, she feared her friend’s arm would be torn from its socket.

  He was about to topple over. No man, let alone Richard, was a match for a full-size gray wolf, or whatever was taking the form of a gray wolf, and once Richard went down, she knew, it would be over. One strategic bite, maybe to draw his hands away, then the throat. In her heart, she knew it was over, anyway. She knew she should run now, warn the others at least, but she climbed halfway back up the steps. She could not bring herself to leave.

  Richard exploded forward, pushing off the wall. The beast, on its hind legs, lost its balance, and they both crashed to the ground. They landed in a newly minted puddle, courtesy of the cat. On the steps a few feet away, Lindsay felt a splatter of urine hit her face, and despite herself and the danger, she recoiled instantaneously, but the wolf’s reaction was more stark.

  It released Richard instantly and was on its legs again, spinning in a circle as if chasing its tail. Its whirling upended furniture and knocked over every plant and picture frame in the sunroom before it bolted directly at Lindsay, its feet barely touching the ground. Lindsay vaulted over the railing and off the steps as the beast shot out the door where she had stood. At the bottom of the steps, it banked left, but rather than attacking her it leapt over the chain-link fence into Ben’s front yard and banked again toward Madeleine’s.

  Lindsay was on her feet in an instant. She pounded up the steps to find Richard, curled on his side, his back to her.

  “No…fair” came a weak voice.

  It made little difference, but she slammed the door behind her, then knelt by him. She heard a small chuckle.

  “Lock it too…as long as we’re…rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

  She helped him to an upright position and propped him against the wall. His jacket was torn and his shirt was hanging free, revealing blood flowing from more lacerations than she could count. His arm was bleeding as well and hung at a sickening angle. Their eyes met and they saw the relief on each other’s faces.

  “Why did it stop?” he asked.

  “Honestly, I think it was the cat pee.”

  Richard rested his head against the wall and stared into space. His eyes snapped back into focus.

  “My phone.”

  They both scanned the room and saw it in the corner where it had been flung. Lindsay grabbed it, held it up. Smashed.

  “Use yours and call them,” said Richard. “I think I know what it really is now.”

  Chapter 25

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  “A kushtaka.”

  “A George Takei?”

  The medicine man gave Ben a look.

  “What? I’m terrified here.”

  “Kushtaka,” said Alex. “Sometimes called the land otter man.”

  “The water devil,” said the hag.

  Alex looked at her. In the flickering light of the small fire, Ben could not tell if it was in pity or disgust. “Tlingit legend has it,” said Alex, “that it can take the shape of anything, human or animal. It can mimic a baby’s cry or a woman screaming for help. It can even take the shape of a loved one to lure you to the river. It can play with your mind.”

  “It can play with something you fear,” said the witch.

  “What happens in the river?” asked Ben.

  “It tears you apart. Or worse, it turns you into one of them.”

  Ben thought of Manny Benavides in the drainpipe at Four Mile Run. Everyone else had been killed where they stood. “That’s not what it’s doing though.”

  “I know, and I don’t know why. But the kushtaka are malevolent creatures, cruel. And now this foolish woman has bound one to her somehow—who knows how this has altered its behavior.” He turned to the hag, and through gritted teeth said, “Woman, how on earth did you summon it?”

  “Who cares how she got it here? How do we stop it?” asked Ben.

  “You can’t stop what is unstoppable,” said the hag.

  “If it’s so unstoppable, why hasn’t it just pulled you out of this house? Why can’t it get close to you?”

  “It can’t abide this filth.”

  “Urine,” said the medicine man. “It is said to dislike urine.”

  “I don’t like where this conversation is going.”

  Ben recalled his first encounter then, the night it took Bucky, and what he had been doing. Then he remembered that pain-in-the-ass cat marking the house, his new territory. Always by the door or under a window. I
’ll be damned, he thought. If I survive, I’m giving that cat a name. “Please tell me this thing has more kryptonite than just…tinkle.”

  “Copper.” Alex gestured to the small blaze in the center of the room. “And fire.”

  It made sense. The stench of this house plus the hag’s constant tending of the fire had managed to keep the beast at bay, but now she was trapped.

  “They are also said to dislike dogs. That a dog’s bark can reveal its true form.”

  Ben thought of the ambush on Bucky. It may have wanted me, he thought, but it settled for removing another threat.

  “What’s its true form?”

  “They take the form of otters frequently,” said Alex. “There’s an account of a miner in Alaska seeing several kushtaka at once. They were large and apelike, with thick fur and long, sharp claws. They were covered in open sores and gave off a terrible stench. But those who encounter a kushtaka in its true form are not usually in any shape to report their findings. It could be anything for all we know.”

  Ben’s cellphone buzzed in his pocket. The screen flashed “Lindsay” and he walked to the basement’s small transom window.

  “Ben,” yelled Lindsay, “it was just here! It’s not a skinwalker. It’s—”

  “A kushtaka.”

  “How did you know?”

  “My lady friend told us,” he said, looking back at his companion standing over the woman with balled fists. “She was controlling it, but not so much anymore. There was a little altar and everything.”

  “Potlatch,” said Alex.

  “Listen,” said Lindsay, “it got into the house.”

  “What?”

  “Richard is hurt pretty badly.”

  Ben heard Richard’s protesting in the background.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Listen,” he said into the phone, “it hates fire, copper, and urine.”

  “It really doesn’t like urine…”

  “Just sit tight, we’re coming.” Ben turned to Alex. “We have to go. Richard was attacked.”