How many times have you hurt her, Garret?
His heart ripped. He tried. “She… she loves me.”
Say her name, Garret.
“I…”
Say it.
“Molly… she loves me.”
The creature’s response came quietly. Molly’s still a little girl, Garret. She’s sixteen years old. She doesn’t know why she feels like she does about you, any more than you know why you do the things you do. She’ll forget you in a year. She’ll marry someone who has money. Not a starving little beggar like you. Her love isn’t real.
Garret gasped, prying at the enormous hand, or paw, that was grinding his skull into the dirt.
Your mother’s hatred of you was the most real thing that ever happened to you. Do you know how I know?
Garret’s struggles slowed, and the pressure on his head lessened. The monster wasn’t trying to crush him, it was only trying to hold him. Trying to make him listen.
I know, Garret, because they did to me what they’re doing to you. I know because I’ve been where you are. I’ve felt what you’ve felt. I know your pain.
Garret awoke in a sweaty tangle of sheets. He’d flailed until he’d wrapped them around his head. A hand had his shoulder, shaking him firmly. “Brother, wake up!”
Garret pawed the hand away, but relaxed when he recognized Sarn’s voice.
“It was a dream?” Garret asked through a fuzzy mouth.
With Sarn’s help, Garret unwrapped his head.
Sarn was standing between their beds, Garret’s sheet in his hand, and his usually expressionless face bore plain fright and worry.
Garret blinked at him in the lamp light. “It’s okay, Sarn. I’m alright. It was…” Garret trailed off as he read his brother’s face. Oh Jesus.
Sarn leaned closer, sat on the edge of the bed. His lip trembled. It actually trembled. “Brother, you know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
Garret felt himself turn white. Oh Jesus. What did he see? He looked at the wadded, damp sheets around him. Did I change?
“Brother, you know I love you. I think you need to tell me something.”
Garret was up out of bed in an instant. He had never been frightened of what he was becoming until now. Now that Sarn had seen something. Garret was terrified. Sarn couldn’t know. Garret found himself backing towards the door. “I’m fine, brother. Really I am. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I need to go. I shouldn’t have come home tonight. I should have—”
Now he’d said way too much. Garret turned and ran out of the house in his long johns.
His most primal drives rose up inside him and roared. You left your brother, they accused. You left Sarn alone in that house—your Ma’s house!
Garret flung himself through the frosted yard, sparkling grass prickling his feet. He demanded the wolfstrap to come to him, but it didn’t. He ran, not stopping for anything. He tried to change, begged for the wolf form, but it didn’t come. Pleading with the night for relief from the insanity filling his life, he stumbled into the forest and willed himself to become wolf. But the strap was nowhere to be seen, and he knew why. It always obeyed him. It did what his heart truly wanted.
Garret stopped and looked back at the house, just a small shadow with a single prick of light at the top of the wooded hill. What do I do? If I don’t go back and tell him, then I’ll have to pretend like nothing’s wrong from here on. I have to keep Sarn out. Keep him away. That was unthinkable. But if I do go back, I have to tell him what’s happening to me. Garret wrung his hands in the dark and replayed the memory of his brother’s face. He saw something. Maybe just a bit of fur or a claw, but he saw something.
It was the look in Sarn’s eye that terrified Garret. It was as if Sarn wasn’t sure whether or not to trust him. No! That couldn’t have been it. Garret couldn’t have failed him too. Garret turned and ran, tripping over all the rocks and uneven ground he couldn’t see. Sarn was afraid of whatever he had seen. Garret was too.
On the way to Dr. Bentley’s, he’d been attacked. He knew not by what, but he knew it wasn’t human. It was far more than that, and it was following him. It was shadows behind rocks, it was dreams he didn’t understand, it was animals with their hearts ripped away. What’s happening to me?
Then there was Garret himself. Sarn was frightened because he had the sense to realize what Garret tried not to realize, that whatever was happening to him was horrifying. Am I the son of the Devil?
“What’s happening to me!?”Garret slapped his hand over his mouth and slumped against a tree. He’d yelled it aloud at the sky. Maybe close enough to the house for someone to hear.
“Somebody help me,” Garret whimpered, on his knees, hugging himself against the cold. “Please, please, somebody help me.”
An air current wafted up from the inky bottom of a nearby ravine. With it came the scent of vile death. Alive. Garret was on all fours in an instant, shredding his way out of his long johns. The goose pimples on the back of his neck fluffed into raised hackles as the wolfstrap fell onto him. His wolf body quelled his human shaking. He took two stealthy steps up beside a rock and faded into the scenery.
His wolf senses settled into place and he sniffed the air. The human reek of his tattered long johns momentarily overran everything else. It was a dead giveaway on his location. Garret slinked further down the hill and slipped behind another rock, closer to the mouth of the ravine. He sniffed again. The wind wasn’t blowing anymore, but he knew what he’d smelled. The monster was close. It was near to his den, to his brother and mother.
Garret waited, straining to smell, hear, or feel anything out of place. Minutes slipped away. The stars turned above in their imperceptible dance. Just when Garret dared to think it might have left, it spoke to him. A single sentence wafting out of the ravine. It was subtle, barely more than a modulation of the wind. Even with his wolf ears he barely heard it, but it was real this time, not a dream.
It was the voice of the creature, the thing that had haunted the edges of his life for weeks now. The grating malice in it made his blood run cold.
“They cannot help you, Garret, but I can.”
What? It had been so many minutes that Garret forgot he had blurted a question. He had asked the night for help, and the creature had been waiting to answer.
* * *
Garret stood stock still. As a teenager, he possessed everything except patience. But as a wolf, he possessed patience in boundless measure. Patience was comfort, patience brought sustenance. Patience was rest. The teenager and the wolf warred for a time, but in the end, the wolf got its way because Garret knew it had to win if he was going to stay between the monster and his brother. Time was always on the side of the predator. The night could become day, the seasons could change, but Garret the wolf could stand there, moving neither muscle nor hair, only smelling, hearing, and seeing, until the world came down, if need be.
Or so it had been. Time was surely on the side of the predator, but Garret was no longer the predator, was he? He was now the prey. He was the weak one, the one to be chased, and to run for his life with his eyes open wide in fear. He had never seen the creature in the clarity of his wolf eyes, neither did he know what it wanted, but it was a creature that hunted as he did, so he understood it in the same way he knew the moon and stars would always guide him home.
He knew it was older than the hills. He knew it was hungrier than any living thing should be. Only something dead for ages could have been deprived of sustenance for so long. He also knew it was very, very angry. All such things awaited their time. If it had spoken to him now, then the time was at hand.
Garret flattened his ears to his skull and whined. He inhaled deeply, hoping to catch the scent of his brother, Molly, his Pa, anyone who loved him, but there were only the scents of a sleeping forest, and beneath them, the whiff of death. He considered running, for all the good it would probably do. But he was the only thing standing between the monster and his brother. Another sentence
drifted out of the cold ravine.
“Let me help you, Garret. Let me show you why you are hurting so badly.”
At that, Garret raised his head, and a yip escaped him. It sounded human. Garret stared into the darkness below him, an inky pool of hanging air, deep in a ravine. It rattled him, the creature’s offer, more than anything in recent memory. It rattled him because he had no idea what the creature was talking about, and yet when he heard the words, some part of him awoke and begged for him to comply. As if it was begging for Garret’s own life.
I’m sad because Pa died, and I’m angry at Ma because she doesn’t care about me or Sarn, and I’m angry at Mr. Malvern because he took Molly away from me. I know what’s wrong.
His brain believed it, but his heart didn’t.
Neither did the creature. “Let me help you, please.”
It was asking? A long silence passed, and Garret did not sense building tension from the creature. It was waiting on him. And despite boiling needs and passions that radiated from it, it seemed content, or at least willing, to await his decision.
A sudden need, a desire to hear the truth, bloomed in him. In a way, it seemed to mirror the creature’s own hunger. Unconsciously, Garret took a step towards the ravine, then realized what he was doing and pulled his paw back as if the ground was red hot. He scurried behind the rock and lay down. The voice came again, much of the power gone from it. It sounded gentle. Almost human.
“No one can carry what you carry, Garret. Let me help you lay it down.”
Garret was confused. Nervous. He panted and sat down. He stood. Pranced.
Indeed the voice sounded very human now, as if peeking through the cloak of monster in which it was wrapped.
“I know you’re hurt. I know how tired you are. You’re strong and brave, but I know on the inside, you’re worn out, thin, like a frayed garment.” Then with a tinge of sadness, “I understand.”
A long while passed before it asked. “Don’t you want to be free?”
Garret stood beside the rock, staring hard into the ravine. I do want to be free. He wanted it as much as the creature wanted it, as though their desires were one. Then the sadness in the creature’s voice was gone so fully that Garret wasn’t sure he’d heard it.
“Please come talk to me. I won’t hurt you. You’ve been hurt enough. I know.”
You’ve been hurt enough. Sarn had said something similar. Perhaps that remark alone should have told Garret that his decision was a bad one. He slipped around the rock and made for the black crevice in the side of the hill. I’m coming, he thought.
He knew the creature heard.
* * *
All the light left Garret when he stepped down onto the cold stones of the ravine. The ravine itself was small, little more than a large crack in the ground, which led down to a small marsh where backwater from Sutter’s Creek collected in rainy season. He could smell the bog from where he was.
Where are you?
The words wafted to him. “I am here. Come closer.”
Garret picked his way downward between the tumble-down stone walls. He had to rely on his ears and instincts. There was so little light that even his wolf eyes were small help. He followed the mess of boulders downward for a minute or more until he began to wonder if the creature had left, or was waiting to pounce on him. Only when he reached the bog did he understand. The creature hadn’t been anywhere near as close as Garret had thought. It had used the ravine to focus and direct its mutterings to Garret from a distance.
Where are you?
No reply.
When Garret’s paw touched the spongy soil at the edge of the ravine, he felt the creature’s presence as suddenly as a bucket of icy water. It was here. It was there. It was all around him. The bog was low from autumn’s lack of rain, little more than a stretch of sodden ground covered with reeds and the corpses of fallen trees. Beyond the scrubs, struggling in the edges of the muck, the forest rose steeply away from the ravine. The bog was dim, the trees around it were black. Impassable. Though Garret could run almost any direction, he still felt uncomfortably boxed-in.
He hunkered. I’m here.
“And so am I.”
Up close, the voice made Garret’s stomach flop. It clicked on the consonants and dragged on the vowels, but in a wet sort of way, as if its speech resembled the sounds a rotten body would make if it climbed out of its grave and tried to move around on its dysfunctional joints.
Garret laid low, hackles bristled, every muscle tense. Suddenly, he felt the presence strongly to his left, buried in the shadow of the ravine wall. He shied and faced it. His bowels turned to water. Jesus it’s huge.
He couldn’t see much more than its form, but that was enough. It was standing on its hind legs, and though it appeared to have a crouched, weight-forward posture, it still stood more than ten feet tall. Even at that height, it was so musclebound that it looked stocky. Though the creature itself was still as the wall, something was moving behind it, fanning and coiling through the darkness.
“Garret, they will continue to eat at your soul until there is nothing left,” it said.
Garret didn’t know what to say, or if he wanted to say anything. He was quite sure he wanted to leave, but he felt that would be unwise.
“Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Garret?” The voice was more human that time, the tone softer. Then the creature was gone. One second, its presence filled the shadow like a pregnant demon, the next second it wasn’t there anymore. It reappeared to his right, in the shadow of a pair of scrub willows, seemingly without having crossed the space between. It stepped forward enough for Garret to catch part of its silhouette. Its head was large and misshapen, its bottom jaw looked more like a bear trap. At first he thought it had no neck, but he realized its great shoulder humps only made it appear that way.
It turned towards him, pressing him down with the weight of its gaze. It was staring at his heart. Garret suddenly remembered the deer he’d found by the road. Its guts ripped out. Its heart gone.
“Garret, I mean you no harm. My strength has been given to me for a particular purpose, and it has nothing to do with you or yours.” The voice was phlegmy that time. Fully powerful and dark, and even its syntax had changed.
“Then why did you want to talk to me?” Garret dared to ask.
“Because I do not want you to suffer what is coming.” The voice softened. “I don’t want you to see what I must do next. I wish I did not have to see it.”
For the last sentence, the tone became so regretful, so sad, that for a moment, Garret wondered if he was actually dealing with a lost child instead of the horrific thing his eyes and ears swore stood before him.
This time, Garret actually saw the creature move. For something so huge and hunched to move so quickly, it must have possessed terrible strength. It stepped back into the shadow of the willow, and sank into it, as if the shadow were a deep hole into somewhere else, instead of just a lack of light. At the same instant, the creature emerged from another shadow, this one of a boulder, immediately behind Garret. He yelped and scurried forwards into the muck, turned and faced it.
A weak shaft of moonlight revealed its shape. Its rear legs looked like Garret’s own, only much larger, and with oversized paws, that could both grip and run. Its forelimbs were long, heavily muscled and ended in paw-like hands with strangely long fingers. Its head was grotesquely wolf-like. Garret would have said his own head resembled it, but only to the extent that a fence lizard’s head resembles a dragon’s. It moved as if its huge body was weightless, as if physical space and effort were of no consequence against its strength.
Stronger still than its body, its emotions soaked the air and the ground and Garret’s own heart with their sickening turmoil. Though it spoke in words, Garret felt no thought within its mind, only needs. He felt its wants so strongly that they nauseated him, yet he could not understand what it wanted. It did not want sleep, nor food, nor family, nor rest. It wanted something that came fro
m another place, something that had existed since long before any of the good things of this world came to be. The creature was not from this world, and wherever it was from, Garret did not want to go there.
Garret, it said to his mind. Let me help you see what you’ve lost. Let me help you find the missing pieces. It took a step forward, beckoning. As it did so, its hands came fully into the light. The palms dwarfed pitchforks. They were thick and rough, with six fingers twice as long as they should have been. Each one ended in a long, retractable claw. Garret knew they were retractable because as it beckoned to him, the claws slide away, making lumps and lines as they crawled beneath the skin to hide themselves.
Garret shied back, but he wanted the knowledge the creature offered. His heart screamed for truth, and for better or worse, he did not doubt that the creature could give it to him.
“I won’t hurt you.” The voice was completely human. Soft. Pleading. It took a gentle step forward, the ground sinking under its weight. As it did so, Garret caught his first clear sight of the thing that was moving behind it. Though the creature was being quiet and slow, its tail was whipping and curling as if seeking something.
As Garret watched its body and its tail, he began to understand a small part of its nature. The creature said it wanted to release him, but what it really wanted was release for itself. It was looking for the freedom it could not find. So did it want to help him, or did it not? He had to know. He couldn’t go on without knowing.
Human shivers of fright rippled over him at the thought of shedding his only protection, but Garret had to talk, he had to hear his own voice say it, so he dug at the loose patch of fur at his shoulder and pulled it free. The strap released him, and he was human again, on his knees. He slowly pushed himself to his feet and dropped the strap.
His wolf senses were gone, so he could no longer smell the scent of power and deadly intent on the thing, but his human fears did at least as good a job. Naked in the dark, he faced the creature and asked, “If you want to help me, then why have you been hurting me in my dreams?”
The creature’s hands fell, its bull-like shoulders bowing. Its voice was human again. It was disconcerting to listen to, as if the creature was as much in conflict with itself as Garret was with himself. “I am so sorry, Garret.” It gestured to its huge, misshapen form. “Sometimes I forget what I am. I only wanted you to see what was holding you back.”
Brimstone Page 29
