The Curse of the Wendigo

NINE

“I Shall Carry Him”

I was awakened by someone roughly shaking my leg.

“Will Henry!” the doctor urgently whispered. “Snap to, Will Henry!”

I jerked upright, catching him unawares. Our foreheads smacked against each other in the dark, and he gave a soft involuntary cry of pain.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I muttered, but he had already turned away to roust Hawk, who lay snoring lustily beside me.

“Hawk! Sergeant! Get up!” Over his shoulder he growled, “Grab that rucksack, Will Henry, and the rifle. Hurry!”

“What happened?” I wondered aloud, but received no answer. Warthrop was busy trying to rouse our groggy companion. Through the doorway I saw a sliver of violet sky and the insubstantial gray landscape of dawn.

The doctor shoved a rifle into Hawk’s chest.

“What you are doing?” Hawk murmured.

“Clutching at straws, Sergeant. You said you wanted to leave at first light. I suggest you do so if you wish to remain in one piece,” Warthrop returned grimly. He threw Hawk’s rucksack at him and ducked out of the wigwam.

We scrambled outside. The doctor was already several feet ahead, trotting toward the water’s edge. A row of canoes lined the bank. Warthrop pulled the heavy rucksack from my hands and tossed it into the middle of a canoe, where it landed beside the prone body of a man, wrapped up in one of the clan’s blankets. Warthrop snatched the rifle from my hand and jabbed a finger toward the forward seat—Get in! Then he gave Hawk an impatient jab between the shoulders.

“Quickly, Sergeant!”

He waited until Hawk had plopped down before he pushed off, splashing for several lunging strides through the icy water before heaving himself on board. He dug in with his paddle. Hawk quickly followed suit, and soon we were sliding through the water with barely a sound. A loon exploded before the bow with an angry cry and took off across the lake, its wing tips caressing the glassy surface.

I looked down at the man whose head lay at my feet. Even in the dim light, I saw a face deathly pale and painfully thin. His eyes jerked beneath the closed lids, as if he were gripped by a feverish dream. I looked up at the doctor, who was looking past me toward our destination, the southern shore of Sandy Lake.

We had not reached the halfway point when our theft was discovered. Several men carrying what appeared to be rifles rushed to the water’s edge and leapt into canoes to give chase. Warthrop called for Hawk to quicken the pace, but the man needed no urging. He paddled furiously, glancing occasionally over his shoulder at our pursuers, who seemed to gain upon us with every expert stroke of their oars, their boats slicing through the water with the speed of downhill skaters, ghostlike in the thick morning mist. The doctor yanked the revolver from the pocket of his duster and tossed it into my lap, with the admonition that if I was forced to defend myself, I should make every effort not to shoot him in the head.

“We won’t make it,” gasped Hawk after a few frantic minutes. “Let’s turn here and make our stand.”

“I’d rather make it on a more substantial surface, Sergeant,” returned the doctor, pulling hard for air.

“They won’t dare hurt me. I’m a police officer, a duly deputized representative of the province! The whole village would hang.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’ll point that out to them right before they sink your bullet-ridden corpse to the bottom of the lake!”

The fog swirled around us, a gray shroud draped over the world, obliterating the canoes in our wake. To our left the rising sun was the palest of washed-out yellows. With no point of reference it was impossible to tell our speed or how far we had to go. The effect was unnerving to say the least—worse than hell, for even the souls in Charon’s boat could see the opposite shore!

“Please drop the barrel of that gun, Will Henry,” the doctor admonished. It was pointed directly at his chest. “And try to keep in mind that if we can’t see them, they cannot see us. They’re as blind in this soup as we are.”

“No, I’m a bit blinder, Doctor,” puffed Hawk. “They know what you’re up to.”

Warthrop did not respond. His gaze remained fixed over my shoulder, as if by virtue of the intensity of his stare he could part the mist and sight his goal.

We reached that goal finally—not touching the bank but slamming into it with enough force to send me flying backward over the edge of the canoe and into the shallow water. Warthrop yanked me to my feet and hurled my sopping wet carcass onto the muddy shore. Coughing and spitting, I sat up in time to see Hawk and the doctor pulling our unconscious cargo from the boat’s belly. They carried him several feet into the trees before easing him to the ground and returning for our gear. At that moment three canoes bearing six armed men emerged from the fog, the men’s black eyes glittering dangerously under their dark brows. Warthrop raised his hand, and Hawk raised his rifle.

“Tell them we intend no harm,” the doctor instructed him.

Hawk barked a little laugh. “I’m more worried about their intent, Doctor!” Then he said something in their tongue. The tallest of the six, a young man close to Hawk’s age, spoke quietly and without inflection, and pointed at Warthrop.

“He wants you to return what you’ve taken,” Hawk said.

“Tell him I am merely recovering what they have taken.”

Their leader spoke again, his manner one of utter earnestness laced with a touch of condescension; clearly Warthrop did not understand the consequences of his actions.

“Well?” the doctor snapped. “What does he say?”

“He says if you insist on taking him, you must kill him. The Outiko is with him.”

“With him?”

“Or in him, it means the same thing.”

“If he wants him dead, he’ll have to kill me,” Warthrop said, his eyes flashing dangerously. “All of us. The boy, too. Is he willing to do that? Ask him!”

Hardly were the words out of Hawk’s mouth when six rifles rose as one. Instinctively I brought up the revolver. Warthrop, however, made no move with his weapon.

“No need to translate, Hawk,” the doctor said.

“He is Outiko’s now,” the brave said in English. “We take him.”

“Dear God, how much of this superstitious folderol must I bear?” Warthrop cried. He flung his rifle to the ground, grabbed the gun from my hand, and slung it toward the trees. Then, before Hawk could react, Warthrop ripped his rifle away and threw that down too. He opened his long arms wide and thrust out his chest, offering himself to their bullets.

“Go on and do it, then, damn you! Shoot us all in cold blood and take your precious Outiko!”

For an agonized moment I believed they would do just that. Their rifles remained unwaveringly upon us. I heard Hawk mutter, “Warthrop, I would have liked to have been included in this decision.” Otherwise, all was quiet—that awful pregnant stillness before the clang and clatter of battle.

Their leader spoke, and his men slowly lowered their weapons. He said something to Warthrop.

“Well?” the doctor asked Hawk.

“He said, ‘You are a fool.’” The sergeant took a deep breath. “And I think I agree with him.”

Hawk’s opinion mattered to the doctor as much as anyone else’s—that is, hardly at all. He waited until our pursuers had turned their boats around and the mist had swallowed them up, before he hurried to the side of his fallen friend, snapping his fingers at me to grab his rucksack and join him. The sergeant lingered between the line of trees and the shore, standing watch in case the Iyiniwok changed their minds.

Warthrop knelt beside the unconscious victim and pulled back his eyelids to examine his eyes. They were bloodshot and slightly yellow, restless in their sockets, the pupils contracting and expanding in a pulsating rhythm, like tiny black hearts. In the gray forest light his face seemed devoid of all pigmentation, as white as paper and just as thin, stretched taut over his cheeks and forehead, the bones of his jaw protruding like large knuckles pushing insistently against the flesh. The lips were swollen and bright red, an obscenely comical juxtaposition against his pale skin, and they were laced with hairline cracks that oozed milky yellow pus.

The doctor ran his fingers through the thick sandy-blond hair. Fluffy tufts of it pulled free at his touch. The breeze caught some errant strands and sent them twirling like dandelion seeds into the deep forest gloom.

Grunting with effort, the monstrumologist freed the man from the cocoon of the old blanket. He had been stripped to his underclothes; they hung limply about his emaciated frame, but I could clearly see the ribs poking into the material. Warthrop lifted one bony arm and pressed his fingers against the wrist. The impressions from the pressure remained after the doctor removed his fingers, like footprints in wet sand.

“Severe dehydration,” he observed quietly. “Fetch the canteen—but first I’ll take the stethoscope.”

He pushed the thin undershirt to the man’s chin and listened for several minutes to the heartbeat. I could actually see its exhilarated pumping beneath the attenuated skin. When I returned with the water, the doctor was running his hands up and down the man’s bony-kneed stork-thin legs, and then up to the torso, where he pressed gently. Everywhere he touched, his fingers left indentations in the pale skin.

He pressed the mouth of the canteen to the bloated lips, and rivulets of that life-giving liquid rolled out from either side of the gurgling mouth. Warthrop heaved the man’s head onto his lap and bent low, cradling him like a child, one hand cupping his chin while he poured a thin stream through the half-opened lips. His oversize Adam’s apple jerked as each swallow was forced down. The doctor breathed a sigh, and said softly, “John. John.”

And then louder, his voice ringing in the trees, “John! John Chanler! Can you hear me?”

Sergeant Hawk appeared, his rifle resting in the crook of his arm. He regarded this tableau for a moment, and said, “So, this is Chanler?”

“No, Sergeant, this is Grover Cleveland,” the doctor answered sardonically. With uncharacteristic gentleness the monstrumologist pulled the blanket back over Chanler.

“He’s severely dehydrated and malnourished,” Warthrop told Hawk. “And jaundiced; his liver may be shutting down. I can’t find any external injuries beyond bedsores, which is to be expected, and internally there are no abnormalities or injuries, though it’s difficult under these conditions to tell for certain. He has a mild fever but doesn’t seem to be suffering from dysentery or anything else that might kill him before we can get him back.”

Hawk glanced nervously around us, stroking the rifle’s trigger, as if he expected marauders to burst from the bush at any second.

“Well, I’m all for that now that we’ve got him!”

“Me too, Sergeant. We’ve only to wait until he’s ambulatory—”

“What do you mean ‘ambulatory’? You mean wait till he can walk?” He squinted down at the comatose man at his feet. “How long?”

“Hard to say. His muscles are atrophied, his vigor sapped by the ordeal. It could be as long as a week or two.”

“A week or two! No. No.” Hawk was shaking his head violently. “That won’t do, Doctor. We can’t spend two weeks in the bush. There’s our supplies, and then there’s the weather. We’ll get the first real snow of the season before two weeks are out.”

“I am open to suggestions, Sergeant. You have eyes as well as I. You can observe the poor man’s condition for yourself.”

“We’ll carry him out. Good God, he can’t weigh more than Will here.”

“To do so over this terrain could prove fatal.”

“Walking across the street on a Sunday afternoon could prove fatal, Warthrop. If Will can take my rifle and rucksack, I could carry him.”

He bent to scoop Chanler from the forest floor and was stopped by Warthrop’s hand against his chest.

“I am willing to risk the elements, Sergeant,” the doctor said stiffly.

“Well, guess what? I’m not. I don’t know what it is about you and this monstrumology business, but it’s like bear shit on your boots—follows you every step and is as hard as hell to get rid of.”

He jabbed a finger into my master’s chest.

“I’m getting the hell out of here, Doc. You’re welcome to come with me, or you can try your luck finding the way out yourself.”

For a moment neither man moved, locked in a test of wills—a test that Warthrop failed. He ran a hand through his thick hair and sighed loudly. He looked at Chanler; he looked at me. He considered the sliver of gray sky sliced off by the canopy.

“Very well,” he said, “but it is my burden.”

He slid his arms beneath the fragile form, and rose unsteadily with the wasted body. Chanler’s forehead pressed against the base of Warthrop’s neck.

“I shall carry him,” the doctor said.