“Up jumped the devil,” I
muttered under my breath.
The gun was empty. I hadn’t
reloaded it after I’d fallen and clogged its barrel with dirt.
The brooding beast hadn’t
moved. There under a pale patch of moonlight, it stood as still as a tarn
rabbit and watched me with its large black eyes. I kept my gun up, the sights
trained on its wide chest.
Despite the darkness and fog,
I saw the beast clearly in the moonlight. Its shoulders and arms were thick
with corded muscle, and its massive orc-like head sat on a short hint of neck. He
held what looked like an archaic tomahawk in one of his massive, barbaric fists.
At first, I thought the beast
was wearing red socks, but a closer look told me I was wrong. He was barefooted,
but his feet and ankles were bemired in clay as red as arterial blood. A school
day memory about how the ancient Piache Indians were called the “Red Feet” shot
through my mind like a flaming arrow.
At its full height, the beast
was about six feet tall, and it wore a ragged garment that reminded me of a
sniper’s ghillie suit. It was made of coyote skins, and the beast’s slightest
movement caused a deceptive shimmer of furs that made him hard to see in the forsaken
fog. A fetid polecat odor emanated from the creature so strongly that it made
my eyes water.
I watched the thing tip its
chin to sniff the air like a rabbit. He caught my scent and flexed his legs for
a leaping charge. He was inside my reactionary gap. There was no time to reload
the gun.
His gray lips parted to reveal
large white canine teeth. He threw his head back and let out a demoniac roar
that froze my boots to the ground. I imagined all the dogs of Claiborne’s
sleeping neighborhoods, miles away, howling in response to the banshee roar of
the beast. My skin shrank against my bones as I braced for its terrible charge.
“Kolowa!”
It was a female voice. A
heartbeat later, a woman stepped out of the gloomy fog and into the haunting moonlight.
The fearsome beast dropped to one knee.
With the supple grace
of a she-panther, the woman came into full view. She had long black hair and
the tanned skin of an Indian princess. As she moved through the milky moonlight,
she looked like a druid, a vampire, a succubus, like some beautiful haint
version of fabled Jenny Greenteeth.
She drew near
to the beast and placed a hand on its shoulder. A thin-lipped, motherly smile
spread across her vulpine face. She wore a hooded, deerskin cloak streaked with
cobwebs. A black widow spider crawled in her raven black hair, its red-on-red
hourglass framed clearly by its shiny, bloated abdomen.
With preternatural quickness,
the weird woman closed the gloomy gap between us. Adrenaline dumped into my
veins, and before I could so much as flinch, she held out her left hand, palm
up. With her right, she pointed at my shirt pocket with one fairy-thin finger.
Her eyes were the luminous goblin-green of ancient lichen.
“Get behind me, devil,” I
growled.
Before I could blink, her bony
fingers were inside my shirt pocket. As deft as the quickest pickpocket in the
Narrows of Old Claiborne, she removed the only object inside, a tight-rolled
pouch of raw pipe tobacco. Again, a bloodless, enigmatic smile crossed her
inscrutable face.
Without a word, she turned about-face
and disappeared like an apparition, silently into the fog, with the atavistic beast
close on her heels. Somewhere, unseen high up in the trees, a lone whippoorwill
began its somber song. A faint stir of brimstone wafted over the currents of
the night air. I began to run.
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