by Rick Hautala
“Looks to me like it’s been burned or something,” Eric said.
Patty’s breath came in sharp, loud sips. Tears filled her eyes, blurring her vision as she watched Eric prod the dead thing. But even as she forced herself to look at it and try to figure out with him what it was, she couldn’t stop seeing it as anything other than the shriveled, purple dead thing her own body had expelled a little over four months ago.
“That’s no animal!” she said, her voice rasping like metal against metal. “Look at the arms...and those hands!”
Eric tried to wedge the stick under one of the arms so he could lift it, but it kept sliding off the stick and hitting against the sand with a soft crinkling sound, like tissue paper being crumpled into a ball. At last he got the right angle, lifted the arm, and held it suspended in the air for a moment while he studied it. The arm was surprisingly heavy for its size. Lean, almost stick-like, it ended in a hand that was broad and flat, like a shovel tipped with curved, black claws. Eric’s first impression was of a mole’s forelegs, but this thing was the size of no mole he had ever heard of. Its entire body was caked with cracked, leathery black skin that looked like the charred remains of a burned log. If it was any kind of animal, it looked like a mutated monkey or something.
Sighing deeply and shaking his head, Eric let the arm drop. Then, bracing his foot in the sand, he wiggled the stick under the creature’s neck. After a bit of effort, he managed to prop it up and roll the thing over onto its back. The thin arm flopped onto the sand, exposing a thin, compact chest, narrow hips, and long, knobby-jointed legs that ended in wide, flat feet that looked almost frog-like.
But it was the head—the head and the face that riveted Eric’s attention.
He had never seen anything like it before. It was narrow and pointed at the snout, like a rat’s with a sloping forehead and flared, pointed ears. Its eyes were closed, but Eric could tell by the bulges under both eyelids that they were large orbs—certainly not the narrow slits of an overgrown mole or shrew that he had been expecting. Beneath the wide, lipless mouth, a row of long, pointed white teeth protruded, again reinforcing the impression of a rat’s face. All in all, the creature looked to be about three feet tall. Eric knew damned well there were no rats that big in Maine—or anywhere else!
“Beats the shit out of me,” he said as he stood up and backed away from the creature. When he looked at Patty and saw how close she was to breaking down completely, he tossed the stick aside and went over to her. With a low whimper, she collapsed into his arms, her whole body stiffening.
“It looks like my baby!” she wailed, shaking violently as she buried her face in his chest and poured out her grief. “It looks just like my little boy...my little baby who didn’t live!”
2
“I think we should do something about it,” Eric said. “We have to!”
He and Patty had worked for nearly an hour, unloading the canoe, setting up the tent, spreading out their sleeping bags, and establishing a fireplace between the tent and the water’s edge. They were both too exhausted to get started right away on preparing supper, so they were sitting side-by-side in front of the tent. Eric was sipping on a cold beer, and Patty was nursing a wine cooler as they held hands and watched the sun touch the lowering clouds with vermilion fire on the horizon.
Patty’s grip on his hand tightened painfully, and she was silent as she kept her gaze fixed out across the rippling river. The next breath she took shuddered like faulty bellows and, as much as she tried not to let it happen, tears stung her eyes.
“I mean, we can’t just leave it here,” Eric went on, pressing his point. “We don’t even know what it is! We’ve got to do something about it! At least bring it to someone who can identify what it is.”
“I told you what I want you to do,” Patty said, her voice low, no more than a whisper. “I want you to bury it. I never want to see it again because of what it reminds me—” She fell silent and noisily sniffed back her tears.
“But it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen,” Eric said. He was trying to be sensitive to Patty, knowing that, in some twisted way, the dead thing did look a bit like a miscarried fetus, but the whatever that creature was, it intrigued him.
“It’s clearly some type of animal. As impossible as it may seem, I think it might be something scientists may not even know exists. What if it’s never even been discovered … until now?”
When Patty eased her head around and looked at him, there was a cold, flat distance in her gaze that disturbed him. He knew that as much as she might be sitting here talking to him, a good part of her mind was dwelling on when she lost her baby four months ago.
“And anyway, what difference is it going to make?” Eric asked, suddenly rankled with anger. “I mean, for Christ’s sake—I’ll wrap the damned thing up in a blanket or something. You won’t even have to look at it ever again, I promise!”
Patty’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.
“I just think someone ought to take a look at it, is all” Eric went on. “I know it’s all burned and deformed and all. And it’s probably just some dog or something—but... Hey! What if it’s, like, one of those U.F.O. Aliens? Maybe a flying saucer crashed nearby or something.”
Patty looked at him, her eyes betraying not even a trace of humor. “I said it before, and I’ll say it again,” she said, her voice steady and measured. “I want you to take the spade and bury the damned thing.” She shivered before wrapping her arms around herself. “God! I never want to see that thing—I don’t even want to think about it! I just know it’s going to give me nightmares tonight!”
“Well—” Eric said, stiffening his shoulders. “I’m sorry, honey, but I’m not going to do that.” He heaved himself to his feet, pausing to brush the sand off the seat of his pants. “I’m not about to leave something like this behind. It’s too unusual.” Looking down at her, he was stunned by the cold distance in her eyes. He turned and walked down to the canoe to get the square of canvas ground cloth he had been careful not to put under the tent when he pitched it. “I’ll wrap it up and stow it in the bow of the canoe. You can forget all about it. You won’t even know it’s there.”
3
Firelight flickered bright orange against the pressing night and underlit the draping branches of the nearby trees. A half moon rode low in a sky dusted with faint starlight. Blue light rippled on the water. The sheltered cove resounded with the snap and crackle of the campfire while, far off, the sounds of night birds, frogs, and crickets filled the darkness. Huddled in a sweater against the chill, Patty sat on the sand with her arms wrapped tightly around her legs.
“The trick of this,” Eric said, “is to get the bark to slide easily.” He was sitting cross-legged in the sand, a near-empty bottle of beer between his legs. He had a thin birch twig pressed between the palms of his hands and was rolling it gently back and forth. He paused repeatedly to check it and then, once he was satisfied, took his jack knife, cut a circle around one end of the twig, and slid the coat of bark down. After cutting an angled notch at one end of the twig, he held it between his thumb and forefinger and placed it on the edge of his lower lip.
“The other trick is that you have to blow very gently,” he said.
After taking a shallow breath, he blew into the notched end. At first, there was just the hissing sound of his breath through his pursed lips, but as he worked the bark collar up and down, he eventually found the correct position and produced a high, shrill whistle. As he adjusted the bark collar slightly, the sound went up the register until it disappeared. Smiling with satisfaction, he held out the birch whistle and inspected it by the firelight.
“Goddamn! I haven’t made one of these in years,” he said. “Not one that actually worked, anyway.”
“Man, that hurt my ears,” Patty said, rubbing the side of her head with the flat of her hand.
“Yeah, that was the thing about these birch whistles,” Eric said with a laugh. “When I was a kid, I always thought—yo
u know, like those silent dog whistles they sell, that I could use this to call my dog. But with every damned one I ever made, whenever I’d blow into it, my dog, Trixie, would start whining and yipping, and then run away from me.” He sighed softly as he took a swig of beer, stared into the flames of the campfire, and sadly shook his head with the memory. “Good old Trixie. I’ll tell you, she was one hell of a dog.”
Leaning forward, he held the birch whistle out to Patty. “Give it a try.”
Patty took the whistle from him and raised it to her mouth. While Eric coached her, she positioned the notched tip on her lower lip, slid the bark collar up and down, but after several tries she was still unable to produce any sound.
“It’s making me dizzy,” she said, shaking her head.
“You’re blowing too hard. Just the tiniest little breath will make the sound. You must’ve whistled using a blade of grass or piece of paper between your thumbs, right? It’s just like that. You have to control your breath.”
Patty tried it a few more times but still couldn’t get any sound out of the thing. Eric watched her as she worked at it, her face bright orange in the firelight. She seemed actually to be concentrating on it, giving it her best; but there was still a distant darkness like a glazing of deep ice in the depths of her brown eyes—a darkness he had never seen there before...at least not until four months ago. He also hadn’t missed how, when they sat down around the campfire, she had positioned herself so she was looking away from the river, as though just knowing that burned, shriveled, dead thing was wrapped up in the canoe was too much of a reminder of other things—things she’d just as soon forget but couldn’t.
Finally, in frustration, she handed the birch whistle back to Eric. He slipped it into his shirt pocket before tilting his head back and draining his beer. Glancing at his watch, he said, “Well, it’s almost nine-thirty. What do you say we tuck in for the night?”
“Isn’t it funny how it seems so much later,” Patty said. She twisted around and let her gaze shift past the dark silhouette of the beached canoe to the silvery river beyond.
“That’s how it is when you get back to a more natural sense of time. And speaking of time, we’ve got nothing but time, so maybe we could—you know, fool around a little.” Eric arched his eyebrows in a wicked, Jack Nicholson leer.
Patty scowled. Biting her lower lip, she shook her head and said, “Not tonight—” She hugged her shoulders and shivered. “I dunno...I just don’t feel—” Her voice dropped away as she looked back at her husband and saw the genuine concern in his eyes. She stood up, went over to him, and, bending down, kissed him firmly on the mouth. His hands reached up for her, grasped her by the waist, and pulled her down on top of him as he keeled backward onto the sand. They undressed each other slowly and made love on the sand with the campfire warming their skin with its soft, orange glow. Half an hour later, they slipped into their sleeping bags and, contented, drifted off to sleep.
3
“What was that?”
Patty’s voice hissed like tearing cloth in the dark confines of the tent as she reached out blindly and jiggled Eric’s shoulder.
“What was what—?”
“I heard something,” she whispered as she kicked aside her sleeping bag and, on hands and knees, leaned over the dark lump that was her husband. “Something’s down by river...near the canoe.”
Eric groaned and tried to sit up as his wife crawled over to the tent door. As quietly as possible, she started unzipping the fly screen.
“That zipper sounds like a mosquito farting,” Eric said, snorting with suppressed laughter as he rolled onto his belly and army-crawled up to the tent opening beside his wife.
“Shush! Look... Down by the river.”
Side by side, they lay on their stomachs, staring out at the night. The moon had set hours ago, and the campfire was nothing more than a small pile of glowing red coals. Above the jagged black of the trees, the sky practically vibrated with dusty blue starlight. The beach sand glowed with an eerie phosphorescence. A light breeze and the faint murmur of the river were all they could hear.
“Maybe you were having a dream,” Eric said but then he cut himself off when he caught a shifting of motion beside the black hulk of the canoe.
At first, he thought it was nothing more than a moving shadow, but he instantly wondered what could make a shadow shift in pitch darkness. A shiver danced lightly up his back between his shoulder blades as he peered toward the river. After a few seconds, he noticed more dark shapes moving around the canoe. Then they heard something scratching lightly against the metal side of the canoe.
“What the—”
“I told you,” Patty whispered. Her breath was hot against his ear. “Something’s trying to get into the canoe.”
“Probably just a couple of raccoons or something,” Eric whispered as he pulled himself up into a crouch. “They can smell the body of that thing we found and think it’s some kind of food.”
He looked at Patty but in the darkness couldn’t make out the expression on her face. When he looked back out at the canoe, he saw another one of the visitors move from the fringe of woods over to the canoe. As he tracked it, Eric could have sworn it looked like a small, deformed person. The chill tingling up his back got stronger.
“Wait a sec.,” he whispered. “I’ve got an idea.” He crawled to the back of the tent, rustled about in the darkness for a moment, and then, grunting with satisfaction, rejoined Patty at the front tent flap. Lying flat on his belly, he propped himself on his elbows and raised his hands to his mouth.
“You might wanna block your ears,” he said, and then, very gently, he started blowing into the birch whistle.
With the first, high-pitched note, the effect was instantaneous and surprising. The canoe seemed to explode with activity as loud, squealing sounds filled the night. Several animals leaped out of the canoe, hit the beach sand running, and disappeared into the shadows under the pine trees and behind the boulders. They moved too fast for Eric to see clearly what they were, but within seconds the night was silent, and the beach was once again deserted.
“There, you see—? I told you this thing was good for scaring away animals.”
“Yeah, sure,” Patty said, her voice a trembling whisper, “but what the hell were they?”
“I have no idea,” Eric said, shrugging even though he knew the motion was wasted in the darkness of the tent. “Must have been raccoons, but they sounded more like foxes, judging by the way they yelped. It’s too dark to tell. I couldn’t see squat.” He decided not to mention the one fleeting impression he’d had that at least one of them had looked—well, almost like a monkey or a dwarf as it shambled across the beach. “I’d better check out the canoe, though, just to make sure they didn’t—you know, ruin anything.” He purposely didn’t specifically mention the twisted black thing they had found, knowing how much it might upset her.
He handed the slim whistle to her and then felt around in the darkness until he found the flashlight. Without bothering to put on his jeans, he ran the fly screen zipper up the rest of the way and crawled out of the tent. The night air was cool on his skin, almost cold. His breath made tiny puffs of condensation that instantly dissolved into the darkness as he swung the light around the perimeter of the beach.
“What the fuck?” he muttered as he started slowly toward the canoe.
In the circled beam of light, he could see dozens—hundreds of tiny footprints criss-crossing the sand. Even to his untrained eye, he could see that they weren’t raccoon or fox tracks. Hell! They looked almost like human footprints
… tiny human footprints, as if a whole pack of kids had been out here playing after dark.
“What is it?” Patty called.
“Oh—nothing,” Eric replied. “Everything’s cool.”
He directed his flashlight into the bow of the canoe, shining it full on the canvas wrapped body of whatever the hell that thing was. To his relief, he saw that the animals hadn’t gotten to it
. The canvas was still intact. When he trained the flashlight downward, he grunted with surprise to see dozens of scratches on the side of the canoe. And these weren’t little digs and dings from paddling too close to the shore. Some of the marks were a foot long and longer—deep furrows that had removed the yellow paint right down to and actually scarring the shiny metal surface.
“What the shit is this?” Eric whispered.
He was concentrating so intently on the damage to his canoe that he didn’t hear the creatures approaching from behind. In an instant of blinding panic, once it was too late, he sensed something—many things, rushing at him from the surrounding darkness. He heard Patty’s shrill scream rip the night as he grabbed a canoe paddle and, crouching low, spun around just as small, compact bodies slammed into him from several directions at once. Low-throated, chittering noises mingled with the sound of clicking claws. The sound reminded Eric crazily of swarming insects. With a strangled cry, he swung the paddle once, smiling grimly when he felt it crack solidly against one of the creatures. Before he could swing again, though, he fell to the ground, crushed beneath their massed weight. Within seconds, long, curved talons sank into him and tore him to bloody shreds. The last sound he made was a long, wavering, bubbly howl.
4
Patty crouched inside the tent, trembling with terror as she watched the seething dark mass of creatures overwhelm her husband. A small corner of her mind was trying to convince herself that this wasn’t happening—that this couldn’t be happening. It all had to be in her imagination, a dream or something. But she couldn’t ignore for long the testimony of her own eyes and ears. Even after Eric’s screams had been cut off, she could hear raw, wet ripping sounds and a stomach-churning crunching that could only be—
“Oh, God!... No!”
