by E A Comiskey
“Okay,” Stanley said.
His total non-resistance completely took the wind out of Richard’s sails. “Darn right, it’s okay. It’s what I want to do,” he said in a much softer voice.
“That’s fine.” The Englishman shrugged. “I thought you wanted to avenge your wife’s death, help make things right in the world, have a grand adventure before you shrivel up and die, but you just go right on back to watching the Weather Channel and eating boiled oats for breakfast every morning. I’m certainly not going to be the one to stop you.”
Hot anger rushed to Richard’s face. “Fine!” he exclaimed. “I’ll go to the stupid canyon with you, but I’m sitting in the car. I’m too dang old for hiking.”
Stanley smiled. “Have it your way, then, Dick.”
***
For almost an hour, they drove vaguely southward down the steep grade into the canyon until they reached a point where one side of the road was a sheer rock wall rising into the night and the other side was a short, treacherous drop toward the relentless little river that had done its slow work of erosion there.
Just enough space existed on the edge of the road for tourists to pull over and stare at the waterfalls in the distance.
Stanley turned off the car and took a deep, fortifying breath. “Smell the night air, Richard! Come on, old chap. Walk a ways with me. The stars are bright in the sky.”
Richard sat with his arms crossed. He refused to admit out loud that it was probably the most beautiful spring night he could remember. “Fine. I’ll walk along the road with you, but I ain’t doing no hiking nowhere.”
As he followed Stanley across the road, Richard listed his woes, lest he get too complacent in going along with the madman’s wild schemes. He was cold and his feet hurt. His stomach ached with gas. He’d bought a case of prune juice at the Walmart, but he’d forgotten to drink it and now the juice was locked in the trunk of the car and he was thirsty and tied in knots. He longed for a hot meal of easily digestible foods and a soft bed with a heated mattress. Obviously, he wasn’t going to confess any of this to Stanley, who was strolling along at a jaunty clip. Anyone watching the Englishman in his fancy shoes and leather jacket would have assumed he was out for his evening constitutional.
Stanley strolled a few feet alongside the road, stopping every so often to examine a broken twig or some markings in the dust at their feet. Finally, three hundred yards from the car, he stopped and pointed at a meadow on the other side of the river. Two dozen sheep slept in the shrubby grass, enormous cotton puffs in a field of dry stalks.
“It’s been working its way toward this meadow since I first heard of it. It will strike here after midnight.”
“Somethin’s wrong with you. You’re a lunatic.”
Stanley grinned. “Such a skeptic. Come on.” He crossed the road and began picking his way carefully down the steep incline.
Richard stood on the gravel shoulder, clinging to his walker, and whispered as loudly as he dared, “I told you, I ain’t hikin’. You’ll break your neck out there in the dark.” Speaking in his normal voice seemed obscene, like shouting at a funeral. The night was hushed and still.
“Stay there, then, if you’re afraid,” Stanley said. “It’s nearly twelve already. It shouldn’t be long.”
“Fine! I will stay here,” Richard whisper-shouted. “Not because I’m afraid. Just because I think you’re an idiot.”
“Very well.”
Stanley appeared supremely unaffected by Richard’s choice, which only served to heat Richard’s blood to a near boiling point.
Richard found a boulder jutting out among the trees and plopped down on it. The stone hurt his bony butt. That ache was just another discomfort on top of the myriad of woes already plaguing him. He muttered as he watched Stanley cross the river by going heel-to-toe over a failed tree. “Unnatural.”
Once across, he hopped down onto the rocky bank and squatted to examine something there before disappearing into the shadows.
The boulder was cold as well as rough, and Richard shifted in an attempt to find a more comfortable perch. He shivered. A crawling sensation started in his belly and radiated outward. He ignored it, shifted again, and grumbled incoherently. In his head, the muttering took on form.
If a car comes along I will flag it down and ask for a ride. Once I’m back in civilization, I’ll call Burke to come and get me. I’m done with this fool’s errand. Running all over God’s green Earth with that blunderbuss, Stan Kapcheck. Stan friggin’ Kapcheck! Bah! Why’d I ever listen to that danged fop anyway? I’m too old for this. The kid was right. I belong in an old folk's home, eating unsweetened applesauce and sugar-free chocolate pudding.
Overcome by thoughts of chocolate pudding, it took him a moment to hear Stanley calling to him across the water.
“Whadayawant?” he shouted back. His words echoed in the chilly night air and bounced back to him. He immediately regretted being so loud.
“What time is it?”
Blast Stan Kapcheck. That fancy diamond watch of his had probably stopped. Richard glanced at his sturdy Timex with the luminescent face and shouted back, “Twelve oh six.” The weird echo wrapped all around him. Dang it! He’d forgotten to be quiet again.
The sheep stirred, probably disturbed by the ruckus.
A twig snapped behind him.
He froze. Maybe, if he didn’t move or draw attention to himself in any way, whatever was there would leave.
A low growl, more felt than heard, vibrated in his bones.
Slowly, he turned to glance over his shoulder.
The beast stood twenty feet away, near the edge of the road. It appeared to be snakelike, as wide and solid as an adolescent black bear. Its two tiny arms lifted the weight of its head and shoulders off the ground as if it were doing a push-up with bad form. Muscles rippled beneath the scales that glittered in the moon’s bright luminescence. It bared fangs as long as butcher knives. Red eyes glowed in the dark.
Richard had no idea what to do. He tried to think back to his days in the Boy Scouts, three-quarters of a century ago. How was a man supposed to remember such things? Some animals were frightened away by shouting. Some you were supposed to submit yourself to. Sometimes you were supposed to meet their eye, but often you shouldn’t.
The thing swayed from side to side. It seemed to regard him with curiosity.
He raised his arms out to the sides and shouted at the top of his voice.
In response, the beast loosed an horrific shriek that shattered the tranquility of the night.
Richard left his seat and took off toward the bottom of the slope, leaving the walker behind, his aches and pains forgotten in light of this new emergency.
The cracking sticks, the rustle of leaves and the clatter of rocks dislodged by a heavy, slithering body followed him.
He splashed into the stream. The icy water soaked his pants up to his thighs and the current, fast with springtime snow melt, pushed him, slowing his progress. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the creature slip into the water behind him.
Stan was running toward him, but he slipped and fell hard. A loud snap was audible, even over the beating of Richard’s poor old heart.
“Cut the head off!” Stanley cried. Lifting his right hand, he expertly threw a machete that stuck into the soft soil at the river’s edge.
The beast bumped hard into Richard’s back, pitching him forward. He landed in the shallow water, sputtering, only inches from the blade that shimmered in the moonlight.
“The head! You have to cut off the head!” Stanley shouted again.
Richard grabbed the blade, flipped onto his butt and, sitting upright with his legs akimbo, swung at the thing’s head as it launched itself toward him. The head flew into the water and was swept away by the current, but momentum carried the heavy body forward and the bloody neck slammed into Richard’s chest, knocking him backward and pinning him to the rocky riverbed.
Stanley crawled forward, grunting with effort and pai
n, and managed to pull the thing off him.
He sat up again, covered in blood and soaked with near-freezing water. Already, he shivered from the extreme cold. Panting, he looked at Stanley. Perfect, always-well-groomed Stan Kapcheck sat covered in mud and red-faced with exertion.
A laugh built low in Richard’s belly. It bubbled up, coming out first as a little chuckle, then a loud guffaw, and finally culminating in wheezing, gasping, tear-wrenching hysteria.
The sheep ambled to the other side of the pasture and went back to sleep.
Stanley’s laughter joined Richard’s. “You should have seen your face!” He gasped.
“Me?” Richard said, panting for air. “The head! The head!” He waved his arms over his head in mock panic and then he was overcome again, unable to talk between the terrible shivering and the uncontrollable glee.
“Well, well, well.” A voice like rich melted chocolate reached out of the darkness, carried to them on the scent of roses. “Here I thought you might need a hand, and I find you having the time of your lives.” The woman from the Minneapolis diner stepped out of the shadows. She stopped at the river’s edge and regarded them, hands on her lovely rounded hips, bright smile shining in the dark. “I do love to see boys having fun.”
The laughter died a sudden, violent death in Richard’s throat. He could actually feel the tension radiating from Stanley. Her lovely, floral aroma roused his senses.
“I don’t believe we’ve been officially introduced, Richard Bell. I’m Ashley DeVille.”
“Ha!” Stan barked out an indignant sound. “Ashley DeVille? That’s what you’re using these days? Sounds like a stripper from Ohio.”
“Stanley, I was hurt when you ran away from me in Minneapolis.” She stretched one desirable leg out before her and took a step onto the water.
Not into it.
Onto it.
Richard’s shivering rose to a whole new level.
Ashley, or whatever her name was, walked across the surface of the water. Her eyes flicked toward Richard. “Don’t look so surprised, dear. Jesus wasn’t the only one who knew a good parlor trick.” She squatted down next to Stanley and lay one hand gently on the leg that was bent at a bizarre angle in front of him.
Stanley winced, sharp breath drawing in between his teeth.
“Why did you run away, Stan? We’ve had some good times, haven’t we?” Her hand slid upward along his leg, toward his inner thigh.
“Get thee behind me,” Stanley grunted through clenched jaws.
“You need help, Stanley. You can’t walk. Your friend is hypothermic. Even if he weren’t, he’d never be able to carry you out. No one will find you until sometime tomorrow. By then, your friend will be dead and you’ll wish you were.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” Stanley stated in firm, steely tones.
“Stan?” Richard managed through his clacking teeth.
They both ignored him.
“Tell me why you ran, Stanley,” she insisted.
“Go back to Hell,” he growled.
She shifted, placing one palm against his cheek. “I know you miss me, Stanley. I can see it in your eyes.” A soft sound, far too complex to be called a giggle, emanated from her slender, elegant throat. “I can see it in your soul. We’re good together, Stanley. What did I ever do but care for you, cater to your every desire?”
He swallowed hard.
“Tell me you didn’t love every minute of it.”
“I…”
“Tell me to go and I’ll leave right now.”
“Excuse me,” Richard said.
No one looked at him.
“I want you back, Stanley. I want you back and,” another soft, lovely laugh, “I admit it. I just plain want you.”
Richard had had enough. He was freezing and hurting, terrified, and frankly disgusted. More than all of that, he was sick and tired of being so blasted passive about everything that happened to him. With lightning reflexes that he’d thought died with Reaganomics, his hand shot out and snatched the cell phone from the girl’s belt. He tapped a few buttons and heard the sweetest sound in the world.
“Nine one one, what’s your emergency?”
He clenched his eyes shut and spoke as fast as he could, waiting for the searing pain of a pretty, demonic fist ripping into his chest to crush his heart. “I’m in Spearfish Canyon, maybe a quarter mile east of Bride Veil Falls. My friend and I, we’re elderly. We toppled down the hill. I think he broke his leg. I’m soaked through, freezing to death. We need help right away.”
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Richard. Richard Bell.”
“Help is on the way, Mr. Bell.”
Richard wasn’t sure if he could make his muscles obey him and turn off the phone. He dared a peek in Stanley's direction.
The Brit sat there, mud covered and tattered, grinning like an idiot in the moonlight. “Well done, old chap. Well done.”
Already, sirens wailed in the distance. They would die, to be sure, and probably not too far in the future, but it wasn’t going to be tonight.
***
Richard and Stanley lay side-by-side in the emergency room of Spearfish Regional Hospital.
Stanley’s right leg was encased in a medieval looking device of plastic and metal. He had refused pain medication and the sounds he made while they were setting his leg made Richard’s stomach turn. Now that it was over, he lay quiet, his hands folded across his stomach. He’d asked a nurse for a cup of hot tea. Of course, she had brought it to him right away.
Richard couldn’t bring himself to complain, though. The heated blankets wrapped around his practically naked body were a sample of the pleasures of heaven. Plus, he was alive. Just a few hours ago, he hadn’t been so sure that would be the case. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that he still wanted to live.
Neither of them had spoken about the woman, or the beast that Richard had pushed into the river to be washed downstream. Now, a doctor with bags under his eyes the size of steamer trunks sat on a tiny wheeled stool between the two beds, a stern, parental look on his face.
“You boys could have died out there. It was a very close thing. What you did was foolish. Beyond foolish.”
They took the scolding in silence.
Then, the doctor dropped the bomb—the thing he’d obviously been building up to. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police,” the doctor said. “I’d bet my last dollar someone’s looking for you two.”
Richard glanced at Stanley out of the corner of his eye. Stan’s face was a mask of serenity. His lips turned up the slightest bit at the corners.
Apparently, Richard’s core was all warmed up, because heat flooded his face. “Just where do—”
“Tell me why you would call the police, doctor,” Stanley interrupted.
The doctor narrowed his gaze on Stanley. “I’m sure your families are worried.”
“I have no family, sir. My friend’s daughter had him admitted to Everest after a routine surgery. Clearly, neither of us are senile or medically incapacitated to the point of not being able to tend to our own basic needs. Would you have a man answer to the rule of his children, simply because he is of a certain age? To my knowledge, there is no law prohibiting licensed senior citizens from taking a vacation. No rules dictate our need to ask permission of anyone.”
His words had an obvious softening effect. The doctor sighed. His shoulders sagged. “Fine. I would like to keep you both overnight for observation. I won’t call the police, but I ask you, as a man with a father in a nursing home”—he looked to Richard—“call home. Let them know you’re safe.” He stood and slipped the clipboards he held into the little pockets at the bottom of the beds. “Transport will be here in a few minutes. If you’re feeling well enough tomorrow morning, you’ll be free to go on your way.”
“Thank you,” Stanley said.
The doctor nodded toward him, looked at Richard one more time, and then disappeared into the bright, sterile hallway.
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Once they lay in their private room with the door tightly shut behind them, the words that had been burning Richard’s tongue burst out of him, “Will you tell me what in the name of Sam Hill happened back there?”
“Evidently, I was wrong about el chupacabra.”
Richard snorted. “Yeah, okay. Let’s start there. What in tarnation was that blasted thing?”
“A bowrow.”
“There weren’t no bowrow in that book.”
“No, neither I nor my mentor ever encountered one. I’ll have to make a note. They’re not common in the Great Plains.”
“Make a note. Ha! Yeah. You do that.”
“You seem angry, Dick.”
Richard fought the urge to pick up the ugly pink water pitcher on the table next to him and throw it at the man. “You lied again.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You…you…” Richard sputtered. “You told me that woman was The Devil.”
Stanley nodded. A little sigh fluttered out of him.
“So, you’ll deny you were shaking the sheets with her?”
Stanley rubbed his eyes. “Have you never made a poor choice, Dick?”
“You admit it!” He sat straight up in bed.
“Did I ever imply I was a saint?”
Richard fell back against the raised bed and stared at the black rectangle of the silent television screen.
After a long moment, Stanley said, “I won’t hold it against you if you want to quit.”
More silence.
“The skinwalker will be a thousand times worse than the bowrow.”
It took a moment for Richard to process what he’d said. He hadn’t been thinking about the bowrow much, at all. He’d once shot a rabid dog. The two experiences didn’t seem terribly different. “She’s following you,” he finally said.
“It would seem so,” Stanley agreed.
“Why?”
“She was right. We were good together. I’ve never in my whole life felt more vibrant and alive than when I was with her.”
“You’re just a man, right? What was in it for the big, bad Queen of the Damned?”
