Hal’s fingers clamped down tighter on Annie’s shoulder as two wendigo emerged, closer together than most of the others. One was of a size with the rest. The other …
It was difficult to call something taller than an adult man “short,” but everything was a matter of scale. Compared to the rest of the wendigo, the second was short, almost dainty. A child monster.
Poppy.
Annie glanced to Hal. Tears were standing in the old forester’s eyes, which were fixed on that diminutive monster. He watched her all the way to the edge of the clearing, where she followed the rest of the wendigo into the trees and disappeared.
His eyes flicked to Annie. He gave a little shake of his head, indicating that she shouldn’t ask. She didn’t. She already knew what his answer would be, and in that moment, the greatest cruelty she could have committed would have been forcing him to say it out loud.
“Come,” he whispered instead, voice barely louder than a sigh, and started across the open ground toward the cave. Annie followed on his heels, hurrying to keep up, not looking back. The wendigo and the woods were one. If anything was coming from behind them, they were already dead.
The land between the wood’s edge and the mountain was blasted and dead, the soft loam of the forest giving way to hard-packed dirt that could never have nurtured so much as a weed. There was no life. There was no cover. Whatever approached the wendigo did so in the open, with neither shade nor shelter to protect them.
The mouth of the cave loomed like the maw of a great beast, ready to swallow them down and consume them whole. Hal stopped a few feet from the entrance, putting one arm out to signal for Annie to do the same.
“Once inside, any sound will echo back out onto the woods,” he said. “If the wendigo are close, they will hear, and they will return. Be as silent as you claim your child is. Do you understand me?”
Annie nodded. “Yes.”
“Good. May God have mercy on both our souls.” He started forward once more, leaving Annie with little choice but to follow him.
She raised her lantern high as they stepped past the edge of the cave, into the deeper dark contained within.
It was immediately clear that the wendigo had gone, all of them, for the shadows inside the cave they called home—if such things could ever truly be said to have a home—were only shadows, thin and natural and no more clinging than shadows had ever been. The thick darkness of the woods was absent here. Annie felt sick as she realized how pervasive the presence of the wendigo was. They had been with her in the trees all night, thickening the shadows, filling the air with dread, and she had pressed on, because there had been no other choice.
The stone was worn so smooth that Annie’s feet found little purchase. She walked slowly, setting her feet down with exaggerated care, to stop herself from making any sound. That was another thing: the cave was silent. Soundless. Nothing breathed; nothing stirred. Her heart gave a lurch as she realized what that must mean.
Then they stepped around the bend in the cave, and Hal reached back to press a hand over her mouth, gently stopping the scream he must have felt building there. Annie’s eyes bulged under the sudden pressure of her horror and dismay.
The wendigo had eaten well this night. The central chamber of the mountain—for it must have been the center; it was so large, and the entrances to other tunnels gaped from every wall like dead black eyes—was awash in blood, fresh and red, drying and brown. Annie’s eyes skipped over it, refusing to fix on any detail, unable to stop seeing.
There: a severed leg, muscle gleaming wetly red, skin still intact from the ankle down, covering the meat in creamy brown.
There: a ribcage, cracked open, so devoid of flesh that she couldn’t say whether it had belonged to a man or a woman.
There: a woman’s head, long, golden hair matted with blood, eyes open and staring at nothingness forevermore.
There were at least ten dead among the carnage, all of them rent and sundered from themselves, until the feasting hall became a mass grave, an abattoir of blood and bone and viscera. The people had become puzzles in their dying, the pieces that remained so jumbled together that they could never be separated or reassembled properly.
There was no white gown—or perhaps there had been, and it was so soaked through with blood that it was no longer white. But Annie’s eyes searched the killing floor, tracing limb and bone and viscera, and found no child-sized limbs, no trace of white-blonde hair or gauzy gown. She let out a shuddering breath, struggling to keep it as quiet as possible, no longer able to quite care. Adeline wasn’t here.
“Hello?”
Annie and Hal both stiffened, turning to each other before turning toward the sound. The voice had come from one of the tunnels on the other side of the chamber. It was female, weak with fear and shaking with exhaustion. The thought of someone being held captive here, being kept alive through the feast that must have destroyed the rest of the taken …
It was horrifying.
The voice spoke again. “Hello, please? I can see your light. I know you’re not the things that took me. They don’t need light.” The speaker had a faint Spanish accent, as if English was not her first language. “Please, help me, before they come back.”
Annie started forward. Hal grabbed her arm, pulling her to an abrupt halt. She turned to look at him, and he shook his head in a firm “no.”
Annie’s eyes narrowed. Not for the first time, she wished that everyone spoke Adeline’s language, which was silent and subtle and needed no ears; had Adeline been here, she could have told her daughter what to do without attracting the attention of the wendigo. She jerked her arm free, shaking her head in reply. No. No, she would not walk away from someone in need—someone whose accent marked her as from elsewhere, and hence almost certainly a part of the circus.
If I walk away from Sophia, Martin will never forgive me, she thought. That, alone, was enough to move her feet forward, stepping between the pools of blood, moving onward, into the dark.
Chapter Seventeen
The shadows were deeper in the tunnel, with its narrow walls and low ceiling. The chamber had diluted them somehow, making them easier to bear. Here, even though they lacked the viscosity they had possessed in the wood, they clung and clutched, seeming to blank out the world. Annie pressed on, until her light illuminated the dirty, huge-eyed face of Sophia.
The girl’s eyes widened even farther, until it seemed they must fall out of her skull, no longer anchored by the shape of her skin. “Miss Pearl!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I knew someone would come for me!”
Annie shook her head exaggeratedly and pressed a finger to her lips, trying to signal the girl into silence.
“It hurts, it hurts,” moaned Sophia, either missing or ignoring the cue. “Please, can’t you do something?”
Annie shushed her again, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder. If the wendigo were returning, it was already too late to run. This time, at least, Sophia seemed to take her meaning; the girl quieted, settling down against the wall.
The wendigo lacked the patience or humanity for ropes or cages: they had trapped Sophia by wedging her foot between two stones. Both were large—too large for Annie to shift on her own. She stepped closer, leaning toward Sophia until her lantern illuminated every bruise and scrape on the terrified girl’s face. She pressed her lips against the filthy tangle of Sophia’s hair, praying that she was close enough to speak without the sound being carried by the cave.
“I have a friend waiting in the chamber,” she said. “I need to get him, so he can help me move these stones. You must be utterly silent. Make no noise, or the beasts may return. Do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
Sophia nodded haltingly, tears cutting new trails through the mess on her face. She didn’t make a sound.
Annie nodded back, trying to convey her approval, as she straightened and walked back to the chamber. The light from her lantern hit a waiting figure, and for one terrible moment her heart seemed to stop at the si
ght of him. Then his features became clear: it was Hal, not one of the wendigo. She beckoned him forward.
He shook his head in fierce negation.
She beckoned again, more pleadingly this time. Without his help, she would never be able to move the stone from Sophia’s leg; she could stay with the girl until the wendigo returned, she could sacrifice both of them so that Sophia wouldn’t need to die alone, but she could never save her.
Hal was too far away, too shrouded in shadows, for her to see his expression. But his shoulders slumped and he started forward, stepping over broken body parts until he joined her at the mouth of the tunnel.
“Thank you,” she mouthed, and turned to lead him to Sophia.
When the light struck Sophia’s face again, the girl looked from Annie to Hal, something like hope blooming in her eyes. She indicated her trapped foot. Hal, scowling, went to kneel in front of her, beginning to work at the rocks. They scraped against each other as he moved them, sending up little grinding noises.
Annie glanced nervously over her shoulder, looking for signs of movement. There were none. She looked back to Hal and Sophia, holding up her lantern to light their efforts—
And froze as the shadows, which had previously been beaten back by the light from her lantern, stubbornly refused to yield. They were thickening, strengthening, growing as solid as any flesh. The wendigo were coming back.
Hal, working at Sophia’s leg, didn’t appear to have noticed. Either the shadows were gelling slowly, like pudding setting, or he had been in these woods for so long that he no longer noticed such little dangers. As for Sophia, she was frozen in her fear, unable to register anything but her own dilemma.
Until her eyes widened, fixing on some point behind Annie, and she screamed.
It was a high, ringing sound, amplified by the shape of the tunnel until it became something akin to a weapon. Annie whirled, raising and swinging her lantern like a club, and smashed it against the face of the wendigo that had come up behind her, claws extended, ready for the kill. It howled, and that sound, too, was amplified by the shape of the tunnel.
“Hal!” shouted Annie, as she swung the lantern again. There was no further need for silence: they had been discovered. “Get her free!”
This close, the wendigo smelled rank, like something dead that had been rotting in the sun for days on end. It opened its mouth and snarled, lunging for her. In the tight space of the tunnel, there was nowhere for her to go—but there was no way for the wendigo to press the advantage of its size, either. One massive paw caught her in the shoulder, slamming her against the wall, claws biting deep into the muscle of her arm. Annie cried out, as much in rage as in pain. The wendigo opened its mouth wider, lashing forward to rip out her throat.
She shoved the lantern into its jaws.
The wendigo, already mid-motion, bit down before it realized what it was doing. There was a shattering sound, and Annie had time to see the startled look on the wendigo’s face before the last of the tallow drained from the lantern’s reservoir and down the creature’s throat. The wendigo slumped forward, driving its claws deeper into her shoulder before it fell, the weight of its body pulling them free. The light went out. Darkness slammed down upon them.
Annie stumbled a few feet to the side, shocked, clamping a hand over her bleeding shoulder. “Hal?” she said, voice a querulous gasp.
He was silent for several seconds—long enough that she began to think the wendigo had not returned alone, that he was dead, and Sophia as well, leaving her alone.
Finally, Hal said, “Tallow.”
“What?”
There was a loud clatter as the rock finally yielded to his efforts, and moved. A moment later, Annie heard the distinctive sound of flint scraping against stone, and a spark lit up the darkness. Hal held up a small torch, no longer than her forearm, slim enough that it would burn down quickly. He must have had it inside his coat the entire time, allowing her to light the way.
Sophia was clutching her leg, knee drawn up against her chest. As Annie watched, Hal offered her his hand and gently coaxed Sophia to her feet, allowing the injured girl to lean against him. Sophia’s head barely came up to the level of his shoulder. It was difficult not to look at them and see him as he must have been with his own daughter.
“It kills them,” said Hal. “Pour tallow down a wendigo’s throat and they die. I don’t know why. To be honest, I’ve never given a damn. It happens.”
“Then I…”
“You killed it.” Hal looked at the wendigo, fallen so as to almost block the tunnel, and the sorrow in his face was deep and cold. “You killed her.”
Annie didn’t say another word. She stepped over the wendigo’s arm, with its long and curving claws, and moved to stand on Sophia’s other side, offering the woman her free hand. Sophia took it.
Together, the three of them left the tunnel where Poppy’s body lay, so long removed from the little girl who had hungered in the endless wintertime, now finally at rest. They crossed the cavern of carnal terrors, stepping around puddles of blood and the bodies of those who had been taken. Sophia closed her eyes for that part of the journey, relying on Annie and Hal to hold her up, to keep her from falling. She was limping, but not so badly that she couldn’t walk. She would make it.
No other wendigo came to confront them on their way out of the mountain. Poppy, who had been the last to leave, had been the only one close enough to hear the noises they had made. Had she still been a human child, she might have brought her mother when she went to investigate an unexpected sound. But even the thin memories of her human life hadn’t been enough to override a wendigo’s hunger. If she went alone, she could fill her belly alone. So she had come back by herself, and had filled her belly with tallow, and now her dreadful jaws were finally closed.
Annie stole glances at Hal as they walked, trying to read the expression on his grizzled face. If he was angry, he wasn’t showing it. He stared straight ahead, stoic as ever, and never once looked back at the narrow hole that would be his daughter’s final resting place.
The air outside was almost painfully fresh. Annie breathed in, trying to let it chase away the terrors of the mountain. Sophia leaned a little harder on her arm.
“We need to keep moving,” whispered Hal. “The wendigo will come back, and they’ll be angry when they see what we’ve done.”
“They won’t fear us? We killed one of their own.”
“They won’t care about that. It’s the stolen meal that will enrage them. We need to get back to my cabin.”
The cabin, where Sophia could rest: where Martin was waiting, terrified that she was already lost. It was the best solution, and more, it would put walls between them and the wood.
It would put walls between them and Adeline.
“We can’t stay there,” said Annie.
Hal scowled at her. “I don’t know where else your daughter could be.”
“Adeline?” Sophia looked between the two of them. “Adeline is missing?”
“Yes,” said Annie. “Was she…”
“No.” Sophia shook her head. “She was never there. I would have seen her.”
Annie found that she could suddenly breathe again. She pulled in a great gasp of air, letting it re-inflate her lungs, trying to feel her way back to solid footing. Adeline hadn’t been taken by the wendigo. Adeline might still be alive. Out there somewhere alone and frightened, but alive. That was more than she had been daring to hope for.
They moved through the woods as quietly and quickly as they could, Hal holding up his makeshift torch to light their way, Annie offering Sophia a steadying hand whenever necessary. The shadows thinned, making it easier to breathe, making it clear that the wendigo were elsewhere, maybe harvesting the settlement for more prey, maybe doing whatever it was that monsters did when not filling their bellies. It seemed an unwise topic of conversation.
“Not far now,” said Hal. “We’ll help you down the hill.”
“Martin is there,” said An
nie.
Sophia straightened, eyes going wide with sudden hope. “Martin? My Martin? He lives?”
“He does, and he’s been searching for you,” said Annie. “He’ll be the happiest man alive when he sees you well.”
“I never thought to see him again,” said Sophia. Her tone was wondering. “I thought this was where our stories ended.”
“Oregon has ended a great many things, but not that,” said Hal.
They continued on in silence, Sophia now attempting to urge them on, walking as quickly as her injured foot would allow. Annie began to hope that they might make it.
Something moved in the trees ahead of them.
Hal stopped instantly, motioning for the others to do the same. Annie halted, putting an arm around Sophia, keeping her from running, and a white wolf melted out of the woods, pacing toward them.
It was vast, as wolves went, as large as the well-fed dogs of the traders in Montana and the Badlands. It walked with its head low and its ears flat, and Annie fancied she could feel its growl all the way down to the soles of her feet, vibrating up from the earth, pulling her downward.
“Wolfling,” spat Hal. “Stay back.” He dropped his torch to the ground, where it sputtered and struggled to catch among the damp needles, and raised his rifle.
Four more wolflings melted out of the wood, forming a loose semicircle in front of them. They did nothing, only stood there. That was enough. They menaced with their very presence, presenting a terrifying wall of teeth and fur and incipient swiftness.
Something rustled behind them. Annie knew without turning that it was the rest of the pack, hemming them in as neatly as taking a breath.
“What are they?” whispered Sophia.
“Wolflings,” said Hal again. “Not real wolves. Cousins. Or the damned souls of real wolves, condemned to walk these woods for their sins.”
One of the wolflings barked, sharp and cold. The others flattened their ears and growled.
“They seem to understand you,” said Annie. It was a struggle to keep her voice level. It seemed worth the effort. The last thing she wanted to do was trigger some sort of an attack. “Perhaps stop insulting them.”