CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  Chip was the kind of child that ordinarily felt fine when he was alone. He was a quiet, intense boy at school, and while he had friends, he was almost as happy playing in the sandbox alone. It was just a part of his fiber to not be afraid of being alone, but standing there in the middle of the campsite, his mother nowhere to be seen, Chip began to worry.

  “Maybe she’s taking a shower,” he said to himself.

  And he considered a walk across the campground, up to the bathhouse to see. It was dark and he didn’t have a flashlight, but he thought there was one inside the camper.

  He walked back over to the camper door, opened it, and stepped up inside. He grabbed a red flashlight, hit the switch and saw the beam come on. His breath steamed in the cool mountain air. He pivoted around and found a pair of sandals, slipped his feet into them, and then stepped back outside of the camper. He closed the door behind him.

  The air was cool, but Chip was worried and he was alone, and he was a resourceful young boy, so he started across the campground. He held the flashlight beam on the ground in front of him, and he walked down toward the bridge. The water glistened in the moonlight that reached through the treetops.

  Chip saw something large and sleek move across the path on the other side of the bridge, and he froze in his tracks. Whatever it was, it moved across the path very quickly and back down under the bridge. Chip stood there five feet from the bridge.

  He shined his flashlight across the bridge and its wooden railing. He saw dirt on the wooden planks of the bridge. He saw car tracks through the dirt. The bridge was about twenty feet across, and the wood was painted an aged, rust-red color. There were dead leaves scattered on the bridge.

  Chip shined his flashlight on either side of the bridge, but he couldn’t shine it down under the bridge where there were shadows. His breath steamed out into the cold night air.

  “Hello?” he said.

  There was no answer, but he was certain something had gone down under the bridge, and he was afraid to cross over it. It might reach up and grab him around his legs and pull him down into the shadows. He would go screaming and kicking. His flashlight would fall and hit the floor of the bridge, and that would be all anyone would ever find of little Chip Eiser.

  “Momma!” Chip called out.

  He stood there at the foot of the bridge and looked up at the bathhouse. He saw the light inside shining through the screen door, and he was certain he heard the shower on inside now, but the rushing water of the creek was loud, too, and there didn’t appear to be any movement inside the bathhouse.

  The fear that gripped him was unlike anything he’d ever felt in his life. He was just frozen, frozen between moving and running and staying perfectly still. His mind flooded with panic and the horrible realization that no one was here to protect him. His dad had “gone to heaven.” His mom was not answering him, and he was all alone in the middle of a campground five days away from home, and there was no one here to help him.

  “Momma,” he whimpered, and tears began to form in his eyes.

  He took one step, then another. His left foot came down onto the wooden planks of the bridge. He tried to straighten himself up to see over the sides of the bridge. Something was down there; he just knew it. Some kind of monster. It looked like a cat, a big giant cat, and it was going to reach up and grab him by his ankles and pull him down into the shadows under the bridge and do horrible things to him.

  He took another step across the bridge. The light from the flashlight shook, as much from the cold as from the icy fear that trickled down his spine. He held the flashlight up and shined it into the trees. The trees seemed to stand over him with branches like spindly arms.

  He was midway across the bridge.

  “Chip?” The voice sounded weak and tentative.

  Chip looked up toward the bathhouse. “Momma?” he said.

  And then he saw shadows moving inside the bathhouse. He shined the flashlight up the path on the far side of the bridge, and his mother stepped into the doorway of the bathhouse.

  Chip was not prepared for how she looked—she wore a bloody white towel wrapped around her thigh, and her bathrobe was soaked with water and spotted with blood. She staggered forward like something from a nightmare. He ran to her, ran up from the bridge, up the hill.

  “Chip!” she cried.

  Nine

  The big cat came often to the pool in the early morning hours between three A.M. and four A.M., but tonight there was something down there. He was high up on the rocks, and he stepped onto a rocky outcropping and looked out at all the twinkling lights.

  To the cat, the city smelled alien and foul. It was like some legion of locusts surrounding his home, and he was at once fearful and ready to fight.

  He heard water splashing at his regular watering hole.

  Without a sound, the big cat leapt down from the rock and walked silently down the hill.

  • •

  Jenny stood ten feet from shore, the water up to her abdomen. The bottom of the pond was smooth, sandy, and clean, and she ducked her head back, wetting her hair, then shook her head and swept her hair back with her fingertips.

  “Come on, Nick,” she called up to him.

  Nick was asleep on the blanket. He’d pulled one side of the blanket up over him and was rolled up inside its warmth dreaming of pistons and roller coasters and a clown that became himself then Jenny looking at herself in a bathroom mirror.

  “Stop licking me,” he mumbled.

  Out in the middle of the pond, Jenny turned and dove underwater. She started swimming for the waterfall on the far side of the pool.

  The big male cat stood over Nick, purring. Its head came up at the sound from the middle of the pond. It watched the figure swimming across the moonlit water, and then it returned its gaze to the sleeping human. It tilted its head toward him, sniffed, and then winced backward, shook its head and licked its nose.

  “Leave me alone,” Nick mumbled from the depths of sleep.

  The cat leaned in toward Nick’s face again. It was not accustomed to prey that showed no sign of awareness and lay there so completely vulnerable. The big cat was used to chasing its prey, but this creature just swatted at its head dumbly.

  The big cat started pawing at the blanket around Nick, trying to cover him up. It scraped up the leaves of the eucalyptus tree and piled them on and around Nick. It grabbed twigs in its mouth and placed them on him.

  “I said go away,” Nick mumbled.

  The cat raised a paw up and licked it, then placed the paw on the left side of Nick’s head. The paw covered his head from the back of his skull all the way around to the bridge of his nose. The paw was almost twice the size of an average human hand.

  Nick felt the paw on him and slowly opened his eyes.

  All at once, he tried to scream, scramble away, and bat at the mountain lion’s right forelimb. Claws emerged from the paw sinking deep into his skin.

  The big cat’s mouth came down and clamped powerfully around Nick’s neck, silencing him.

  Jenny was under the waterfall, feeling the water pouring all around her, its sound roaring. At the waterfall, the surface of the pond was thigh high, and Jenny stood there taking a natural shower.

  She thought she heard something over the noise of the waterfall, and so she stepped out away from it.

  “Nick?” she called across the pond.

  There was no answer.

  Sleeping, she thought. The lightweight.

  She craned her head to see up to the blanket. It was in the shadows and too far away to see very well, but she didn’t see a lump where his body should have been. She started toward the shore.

  “Fell asleep on me, huh?” she said.

  And she came up out of the water.

  Nick was not there. The blanket was bare where she’d left him just a couple minutes earlier. Her chest immediately seized up with adrenaline. She stood in the moonlight, looking around wildly in every direction.

  “Nick,” her voice
cracked. “This isn’t funny.”

  She glanced beyond the blanket and saw his jeans, socks, tennis shoes, and pullover shirt.

  She was getting cold, goose bumps rising up on her bare wet skin.

  “Nick?”

  Her first fear was that some nut had taken him, some stalker, but then she said to herself that Nick was just screwing with her.

  “Nick,” she said with urgency.

  Her pulse was doing one-forty, and her hands shook. Suddenly, she was surrounded by shadows. There were shadows on either side of the putting green. She hadn’t really noticed them before, but they were all around her. She’d heard stories her whole life about serial killers who did just this kind of thing, and suddenly she was racked with red hot shame, vulnerability, and fear.

  But he was just playing a prank on her, right?

  “Are you taking a leak or something?” she said.

  Silence.

  Her bare feet took a few steps out toward the putting green. The shadows from the eucalyptus tree stretched midway out onto the green, and she walked to just beyond their edge. She was cold and so held her arms close to her chest. Water still trickled down her face and back, and she could smell the fresh algae scent on her skin and in her hair. She started shivering.

  She wanted the police. At this moment, she didn’t care if she got caught for trespassing, for underage drinking, for the marijuana, for any of it, she just wanted safety. She wanted someone who would carry her safely out of this situation.

  But there was no one.

  She thought of running down the course to one of the million-dollar homes and banging on a door. But there were too many unknowns, and all of her courage seemed to vaporize into a wicked butterfly feeling of nervousness gnawing her stomach.

  “Come on, Nick,” she said, more to herself than to Nick.

  And then she remembered the cell phone.

  Nick had a cell phone in his front jeans pocket.

  She felt safer standing out in the middle of the putting green under the moonlight as far away from the shadows as possible, so she ran quickly over to the pile of clothes and just grabbed Nick’s jeans and ran quickly back out into the moonlight in the middle of the green. She held his jeans in her hands.

  She felt around the loose denim for the cell phone, and she immediately felt it inside the front right pocket. She reached inside and pulled the cell out and let his jeans drop to the ground.

  “Nick?” she said one last time.

  There was no response, only the sound of the waterfall and the wind rustling through the tree branches behind the green.

  She knew Nick’s cell pretty well and punched 9-1-1 and hit send. She raised the cell to her right ear and glanced around her quickly watching the shadows. And she waited for a ring.

  Five seconds passed.

  “Come on,” she said.

  She held the phone in front of her and tried to see what kind of signal she was getting. The L.C.D. indicated the signal strength was at its lowest, and she realized she was too far up inside the canyon. She stepped out toward the front of the green, holding the phone out in front of her trying to get a better signal.

  Suddenly, she heard something very much like a domestic cat’s caterwauling, only about five times louder and deeper and held out longer, for nearly seven full seconds.

  “What in the world,” she said.

  The sound came from the shadows to the right of the putting green. It was no more than twenty-five meters away from her, and it was the unmistakable sound of a very large, wild animal.

  Her first impulse was to stand her ground, to stand tall and erect, and to make herself look as large and calm as she could. To not seem threatening and to not seem threatened: her mind found that balance, and she stood there in the middle of the fourteenth green.

  The big cat emerged from the shadows, looked at her, and then turned its head and started walking toward the pond. It stopped ten feet farther on, turned, and looked at her again.

  Jenny remained perfectly calm: do or die calm.

  The cat just stood there, twenty feet away, its body pointed toward the pond, its head turned over its left shoulder staring at her. Jenny slowly raised her arms up over her head.

  The big cat licked its lips and sniffed at the air. It seemed utterly unafraid of her, even nonchalant and disinterested.

  With her hands raised up above her head like that, Jenny slowly walked backward.

  She spoke firmly, slowly, and clearly, “Hey, big fellow. We’re both just gonna take it real easy.”

  The cat looked large enough that it would not have been able to stand in her dorm room without curling its tail, but she wasn’t thinking about anything like that. She was standing there looking at a very large wild animal that could kill her, and her instinct kicked in: she was remaining calm, alert, and non-threatening.

  “This is your watering hole,” she said calmly and clearly, taking two slow steps back away from the pond. She kept her hands up above her head. “Ain’t nobody gonna mess with your watering hole.”

  She took another two steps backward.

  The cat looked at the pond, as though considering it, took two steps toward the water, and then turned around and started coming toward Jenny.

  Jenny immediately wanted to turn and run, but some part of her mind knew that that would trigger an attack. So, she shot her hands up as high as she could, and she shouted firmly at the cat: “No! Back away!”

  The big cat veered over to her left, standing on the fringe of the green. Suddenly, it let go a stream of urine, and then it continued around the left side of the fourteenth green.

  The cat seemed somewhat confused that this creature didn’t turn and start running, and it veered again—this time to the right—and it crossed over the putting green to the right. It seemed to be measuring her up.

  Jenny continued backing slowly away, while facing the cat. She spoke firmly and clearly, and she reached the fringe at the front of the green.

  She glanced over her right shoulder to see what was behind her. At the exact moment that her head turned, the mountain lion quit zigzagging and came straight toward her. Jenny’s head came back around, and she saw the giant cat coming at her.

  It was ten feet away, and Jenny turned and ran. She sprinted hard down the fairway, but the chase didn’t last two seconds.

  The cat lunged onto her back, its weight staggering, its claws searing into her flesh, and Jenny immediately hit the ground. The cat flipped over in front of her, skidded around, and then regained its balance.

  Jenny popped up in a push-up position, the cat five feet in front of her. She thrust herself backward, and the cat leapt.

  She screamed and swung her arms at it, and the cat didn’t have a good balance on her. Jenny managed to swing both hands at the cat’s head like a double-gripped forehand, and she knocked it off of her momentarily, its claws tearing over her chest.

  She screamed and got to her feet and just started yelling at the giant cat. The cat backed away a moment.

  And then in one fluid movement, it coiled down and leapt up at her from ten feet away. The weight and force of the forward attack knocked Jenny backward, and she hit the ground very hard. It was like being tackled at full speed by a professional defensive end with claws and incredibly dexterous agility.

  The cat was on top of her, and it suddenly lunged forward at her face. Jenny had no time to think, no deep realizations at the moment of death, no life flashing before her eyes or long white tunnels. She had perhaps a quarter of a second to exhale a partial scream, and then was quickly silenced.

  Ten

  Angie Rippard’s black Porsche raced up the mountain. Her boyfriend John Crandall sat in the passenger seat, the lights from the dash illuminated his face. He looked worried. Angie glanced down at the speedometer in front of her, saw that she was doing one-forty, and pressed the accelerator a little harder.

  “How far is it past Oracle?”

  “It’s only about ten miles,” John
said. “But you’re not going to be able to do one-forty.”

  Angie’s eyes were ice blue, like the eyes of a Siberian husky. They were mesmerizing in their utter clarity, and her straight brown hair fell back over her shoulders. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, and she felt irritated that her boyfriend lacked the necessary courage and conviction to arouse her. John was thin and had a large nose, and theirs was a relationship which caused people to ask themselves: What does she see in that guy?