Figures of Fear: An anthology (18 page)

I looked back down at Bobby Ray. His left eye had closed, even though his right eye was staring at the ground. Even if he wasn’t dead yet, there was no chance that he would still be alive by the time I got back here with help.

I said, ‘Sorry, Bobby Ray.’ Then I picked up my rifle and started to run back through the forest.

By the time I reached the wooden bridge, I was sweating and gasping. It was snowing even more thickly, and my SUV was covered three inches deep. I swept my arm across the windshield to clear it as much as I could, and then I climbed in and started the engine.

I swerved away from the bridge and headed back toward town. As I drove, I tried the AmericInn again.

‘AmericInn Roseau, good evening.’

‘Mrs Ballard, please.’

‘Hold on, sir.’

I could hear the phone ringing and ringing. Marie, for Christ’s sake, pick up. Marie, for Christ’s sake, pick up.

The phone stopped ringing, and clicked.

‘Hallo? Marie? Is that you? Marie – can you hear me, Marie?’

There was a long pause, and then a soft voice said, ‘I did warn you, Jack Ballard’s brother. I did warn you of the consequences.’

‘Shooks? Shooks, you bastard, what are you doing there? I’m warning you now – you touch one hair of my family’s heads …’

‘Oh, they all say that, Jack Ballard’s brother. But when the Wendigo sweeps in, there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it.’

‘Shooks!’ I screamed at him, but he had put down the phone.

I slammed my foot down on the gas and the Ford swerved wildly from one side of the highway to the other. Luckily, there were no other vehicles in sight. I juggled with my cellphone, trying to dial 911, but then I dropped it on the floor, and no matter how much I groped around for it, I couldn’t find it.

The AmericInn Roseau was on Highway 11 West, a low two-story building with a snowy collection of RVs and SUVs lined up outside. I slid the Ford into the parking lot, climbed out, and ran across to the front doors. Inside, it was almost intolerably warm, and a bored-looking young man was sitting at the front desk playing with a hand-held computer game.

‘Ballard – which room?’ I demanded.

He looked up and blinked at me. He was pale and spotty with a high, gelled-up pompadour. ‘You’ll have to check that hunting-rifle, sir.’

‘Which fucking room?’

‘Erm, Ballard. That’ll be two-two-two. But you still have to—’

I couldn’t wait for the elevator. I ran for the stairs and leaped up them three at a time. I ran along the overheated corridor, counting the rooms as I went. Here it was, 222. I hurled myself up against it and it burst wide open.

The sight that met me made my skin shrink. Marie was standing in the centre of the room, wearing her pink-and-blue Chinese bathrobe. She was very small, and somehow she looked even smaller than ever, and completely defenceless. Her face was drained of colour and her braided brunette hair had partly come loose. One arm was wrapped protectively around Tabitha, who was twelve, wearing her pink starry nightshirt; and the other arm was wrapped around Conrad, who was eight, in blue striped pyjamas.

In the far corner stood John Shooks, in his long black mortician’s tailcoat, with his improbably white hair. In the gloomy light from the single bedside lamp, he looked even more cadaverous, and the shadow on the wall behind him looked like a hunchbacked monster.

‘Daddy!’ said Tabitha, as soon as she saw me.

‘Oh God!’ said Marie. ‘Oh God what’s happening? Who is this man? He just walked in here! I tried to stop him but I couldn’t!’

John Shooks turned to me with a smile that opened like a knife wound.

‘Well, well, Mr Ballard. I wasn’t expecting you so soon.’

‘Get the hell out of here, Shooks. Leave my family alone. Marie – pick up the phone and call the cops.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid it’s too late for that, Mr Ballard. Soon as I got your call, I whistled for the Wendigo, and it’s on its way here.’ He gave a loud, thumping sniff. ‘Pity you ran into that fool Bobby Ray. We could’ve gotten this done and dusted by now.’

‘Bobby Ray’s dead. Jack pine fell on him.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. The Wendigo protects the trees, but now and then the trees protect the Wendigo.’

‘So you never had the slightest intention of helping us?’

‘Of course not. I just wanted Bobby Ray out of the way. He could have been dangerous, with those mirrors of his, even though he was a fool.’

‘But what the hell is the point of killing innocent people? Children?’

‘You should have asked the U.S. Cavalry that question, before Wounded Knee. I told you before, Mr Ballard. We have to think of the spiritual value of these forests, before we consider their commercial value. My forebears owe the Ojibwa their lives, and that means I do, too.’

I lifted the Winchester and pointed it straight at his chest. ‘I’m giving you a count of three to get the hell out of here.’

‘Go ahead, shoot me. It won’t do you any good. The Wendigo has been whistled for, and there’s no way that you can stop it.’

I opened the door wider. ‘Marie – Tabitha – Conrad – run for it. Go down to the desk and ask the clerk to call the police.’

‘You can’t escape!’ John Shooks screamed at me, in such a shrill voice that I felt as if centipedes were pouring down my back. ‘You can run wherever you like, but you can’t escape!’

At that moment, the door slammed violently shut. I grabbed the handle with my left hand and tried to pull it open, but it felt as if it were locked and bolted.

‘Can’t escape,’ John Shooks repeated, smiling and shaking his head.

I stepped away from the door. I could hear a noise in the corridor outside like a high wind rising. There was a pause, and then a hollow, breathy sound like a slide whistle.

Through the crack at the side of the door a figure appeared, white and transparent and entirely two-dimensional, like a figure on a movie screen. It was so tall that it reached the ceiling. It was wearing robes made out of tattered sheets, like torn shrouds, and hung all over with white animal pelts. Its head was covered by a long drooping hood, but in the darkness underneath the hood I could see eyes like two grey stones, and a mouth that bristled with jagged teeth.

As the figure entered the room, it was followed by a screaming wind, even though its robes didn’t stir. Papers blew off the side table, one of the standard lamps fell over, and John Shooks’ hair was blown into a fright wig.

‘The Wendigo!’John Shooks yelled at me, with spit flying from his lips.

I took another step back, and then another, pushing Marie and the children behind me. I lifted the Winchester and aimed it. Instantly, the Wendigo turned edgewise and vanished.

I waved the rifle from side to side, frantically trying to see where the Wendigo had disappeared to. The wind was still blowing, and papers were still flying around the room. John Shooks was right in the far corner now, both arms held high above his head as if he were an evangelist preacher, his face grey with excitement.

Every now and then I caught a split-second glimpse of the Wendigo as it turned from one side to the other, but before I could take a shot at it, it was gone.

I thought: six shots at random … all spread out … one of them is bound to hit it. But as soon as I lifted the rifle I felt claws tear deep into my shoulder. I could actually hear my muscles crunch. I was lifted off my feet, and I dropped the rifle on to the floor. I was turned around, and then I was thrown through the air, right through the bathroom doorway, hitting my head against the basin. I tried to stand up, stunned and bleeding. Tabitha and Conrad were both screaming and Marie was waving one hand from side to side, trying to protect them from a creature that appeared only in tantalizing flickers, like a zoetrope.

With an explosive bang, the shower curtain suddenly billowed and the Wendigo tore into the bathroom, picking me up again and ripping at my clothes with its horny claws. I could feel my blood spraying everywhere and I was sure that I was going to die.

The Wendigo lifted me up. I felt as battered and helpless as a marionette with its strings cut. It looked down at me, and its eyes were totally unforgiving.
You have slaughtered my people. You have desecrated my holy places. You have cut down the trees that carry the souls of my ancestors. For that, you and your family will all be sacrificed.

It held me in its claws. It pulled me close, almost like a lover. I could feel every spiny, bony excrescence that came out of its chest. When it turned sideways to look back at Marie, it disappeared, but when it turned back to look down at me, I could see its face, and its jagged teeth, and I could tell that it was relishing this moment.

And then – like a ludicrous comedy – the door crashed open and Deputy Norman Sturgeon was standing there, holding his .45 automatic in both hands, his hat askew, his legs wide apart.

‘Freeze!’ he shouted.

John Shooks lifted him arm to cover his face, as if he were trying to pretend he wasn’t there.

‘Where’s the hunting rifle?’ Norman Sturgeon demanded.

The Wendigo slowly dragged me out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Marie and Tabitha and Conrad were staring at me in horror, and when I saw myself in the mirror, I could understand why.

I could see the Wendigo, because it was looking down at me face-on, but nobody else could. To everybody in the bedroom, it must have appeared that I was staggering out of the bathroom on my own. Blood was running in rivulets down my forehead, and my arms were held up because the Wendigo was carrying me.

‘Mr Ballard,’ said Norman Sturgeon. ‘Where’s the hunting rifle, Mr Ballard?’

I hesitated, and took a deep breath. This was going to be all or nothing. I opened my mouth wide and I screamed. I shoved myself forwards against the Wendigo’s bony chest so that it lost its balance, and together we lurched toward Norman Sturgeon like a pair of deranged ballroom dancers. I dragged the Wendigo in between me and Norman Sturgeon, then the Wendigo dragged me back again. At the last moment I turned him around one more time.

‘Hold it right there!’ shouted Norman Sturgeon. But Norman Sturgeon couldn’t see the Wendigo. He could only see me, with my mask of blood and my elbows cocked upward, and a grotesque look on my face like a Japanese horror mask.

Like the well-trained Roseau County deputy that he was, he shot at me three times, a tight group aimed at my heart. Except that I was shielded by the Wendigo.

With the first shot, the Wendigo gave a terrible flinch, and arched its spine backward. With the second, it tried to turn around. But then the third shot penetrated its internal organs. I felt its body ripple, if that’s anything to go by. Gradually, painfully, it released me. Then it twisted sideways and collapsed to the floor.

I picked up the Winchester.

Norman Sturgeon shouted, ‘Drop it! Drop it, Mr Ballard!’

But even if Norman Sturgeon couldn’t see it, I could see the Wendigo, lying on the rug, its white face staring up at me; and it had killed my brother Jack, and Alma Lindenmuth, and who knows how many other people who had disturbed its sacred trees. And this wasn’t the nineteenth century, this was today, and sacred trees didn’t count for anything any more.

I fired the Winchester three times and bits of carpet and concrete flooring flew up into the air, and the Wendigo was blown apart. Tattered robes, animal pelts, beads and bones.

I laid the rifle down on the bed. Norman Sturgeon came up to me cautiously, pointing his gun at me. ‘Keep your hands behind your head, Mr Ballard. No false moves or I swear to God I’ll drop you.’

He looked down at all the remnants lying around the room. The wind had dropped now, but a few white feathers where still falling down to the floor.

‘What the hell happened here?’ he demanded. ‘There wasn’t nobody else in the room, was there? Who’s this? And how come you didn’t get shot, Mr Ballard? I shot you three times but you ain’t even scratched.’

I couldn’t have cared less. I put my arms around Marie and Tabitha and Conrad and we held each other close.

As for John Shooks, he gave two catarrhal coughs and headed toward the door. But I turned around before he could go and called out, ‘John!’

He stopped. His lizard-like eyes wouldn’t even look at me.

‘It’s finished, John. It’s over. What we did, all those years ago, it might have been wrong, but it’s over.’

John Shooks said, ‘That’s what you think.’

Norman Sturgeon turned around but John Shooks had disappeared, and outside the windows in the town of Roseau it was still snowing, and beyond Roseau lay the forests and the lakes and it was snowing there, too, and who knows what spirits still sleep beneath that snow.

Author’s Note:
Night of the Wendigo
was originally titled
Edgewise
and appeared in
The Horror
Express
magazine in September 2005. It was the result of a contest in which I supplied the beginning of a story and readers were invited to submit a middle for it, whereupon I would furnish the ending. The winner was Tony Campbell, a prolific writer of computer articles, as well as dark fiction. I used the title
Edgewise
for my full-length novel about the Wendigo, which was published in 2006.

SPIRITS OF THE AGE

M
ichael was sitting in Prince Albert’s writing room when he thought that he could hear a woman sobbing. He sat up straight and listened. It was very faint, as if she had her face buried in a pillow, and after a few seconds it died away altogether, so that he couldn’t be sure that he had heard it at all.

Outside, it was a blustery day, and for all its opulence Osborne House was notoriously drafty, especially when there were North Easterlies blowing across the Solent.

It could have been nothing but the wind, whining down one of the chimneys. It could have been water, quietly gurgling through the miles of elaborate nineteenth-century plumbing. But he stayed quite still, listening, and in the gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace his reflection listened, too – pale-faced, his glass tilted and his hair sticking up at the back.

After a long pause he went back to tapping at his laptop. It didn’t take much to distract him. He was working as a research assistant for Buller & Haig, the art publishers, who were planning to bring out a lavish coffee-table book on all of Prince Albert’s gardens. It wasn’t the kind of job that Michael had ever wanted to do. He had left Middlesex University with a second-class English degree and ambitions of being a magazine journalist, the new Tom Wolfe, all coruscating adjectives and supercilious satire. But as one rejection followed another, it began to dawn on him that his entire university career had left him over-educated and out of touch. Magazines didn’t want literary wasps any more. They wanted New Lads who told it like it was, with F in every other sentence.