The Curse of the Wendigo

TWENTY-EIGHT

“I Have Found Him”

My name was in the wind, and the wind was high above the snowbound city. There was no difference between the sound of my name and the sound of the wind. I was in the wind and the wind was in me, and beneath us were the crystalline haloes of golden light wrapped about the streetlamps, and the muffled plops of snow falling from eaves, and the dry rattles of the dead leaves clinging to the indifferent boughs.

It is beautiful here on the high wind. From here our suffering shrinks to insignificance; the wind drowns out the human cry. The city in snow glitters like a diamond, its streets laid out in mathematical precision, the rooftops identical blank canvases. There is perfection in the emptiness. They say God looks down upon us, like the buteos that soar above the blasted landscape of the gray land. There is God in the distance. Humanity’s stench cannot waft this high. Our betrayals, our jealousies, our fears, they rise no higher than the tops of our heads.

In a lightless cellar flooded with human waste, a starving infant is held under until it drowns, its tiny lungs filled with the effluvia of six hundred of its fellow human beings, and then its face is peeled off, as one takes off the skin of an apple, peeled off, and cast into Dante’s river. . . .

In the name of all that’s holy, tell me why God felt the need to make a hell. It seems so redundant.

I woke in the arms of the beast.

I smelled it first—the cloyingly sweet odor of putrefying flesh. Then the powerful arms locked around me, hugging me from behind, like Dobrogeanu had embraced Gravois on the tenement stairs. The floor upon which we sprawled was hard and cold; the air was musty and basement-damp. I had a sense of gaping space, like a subterranean cave deep in the belly of the earth.

Ambient light surrounded us; I could not discern its source. Then I thought, Its eyes. The light is coming from its eyes. I could hear my breath and I could hear its breath, and its breath was as foul as the grave. Its mouth must have been very close to my ear; I could hear every swipe of its tongue across its chapped and bleeding lips. When it spoke, thick spittle dripped from its swollen, blubbery tongue, landed on my exposed neck and soaked into my collar. The tongue fumbled clumsily the simplest words, as if the thinking part of its brain had atrophied from disuse.

“What is our name?”

“You’re . . . you’re Dr. Chanler.”

“What . . . is . . . our . . .name?”

My legs were jerking uncontrollably. In a moment my bladder would let go. My bowels would empty.

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know your name.”

“Gudsnuth neshk. . . . That’s a good boy.”

Something very cold and very sharp pressed into the soft flesh beneath my ear. I felt my skin split open and the heat of my blood as it welled over the lip of the wound.

“It won’t hurt much,” it blubbered. “Not very muh-uch. But the blood; there’ll be a lot of bluh-duh. . . . We have been inter-eshted in the eyes. . . .” It paused, hiccupping for breath. Talking taxed it. A starving animal has no energy to waste.

“You are study-aying to be a shy-ent-tish, Will. Do you want to purr-form a shy-ent-tish-ist experiment-ed? Here ish our idea. We will pull your eye-shh out and turn them round so you can look at yourself. We never see ourselves the way we truly are, do we, Will? The mirror lies to us.”

Its arm was like an iron bar across my chest. My eyes had adjusted to the light, and now I could see its spindly naked legs splayed on either side of mine. The skin was jet black, as black as charcoal, the skin peeling off in thin curling sheets.

“Hold out your hah-and.”

“Please.” I started to sob. “Please.”

I held out my hand. Its gift to me was small—it fit perfectly in my palm—around the size of a plum, the surface rubbery and slightly sticky.

“Thish one’s yours . . .”

My body convulsed with revulsion—it was the heart of the baby I’d left in the tenement hall. I flung it away with a strangled cry.

“Repul . . . repuh-puh . . . repushiv child. Wayshful.”

It pressed its drooling mouth against my ear. “What have we given?” Its arm tightened around my chest, constricting my lungs; I could not breathe. “What have we given?”

I couldn’t speak. I had no air with which to speak. I could no nothing but rock my head an inch from side to side.

“What . . . what ish . . .” It seemed to be having as much trouble breathing as I. “What ish the greatesh love? What dush it look like?”

The arm relaxed a bit. I gulped air choked in the swill of the beast’s decay. My head lolled forward. The beast yanked it back by a fistful of my hair; its sharp, jagged nails cut into my scalp.

“Do you want to shee its faysh, Will? Then, look at ush. Look at ush.”

It dug its claw into my chin and rotated my face around until my neck popped. The proximity of its face skewed my perspective; there was a moment before my mind could absorb what I was seeing. I perceived it in fragmented strobelike images. The first image was of the huge eyes burning a sickly amber, then the slobbering mouth, the bloodstained chin. Most striking was the flatness of its features, as if all underlying bone had receded into its head. It was the lack of contours that kept me from recognizing it at first; so much of our looks are ordained by our bones.

But I had seen this face many times—by the gentle caresses of a fire’s glow, by the cool winter light of a November afternoon, by the shimmering brightness of a chandelier in a ballroom where she had danced with me, her emerald eyes—now smoldering fiendish orange—filled with promise, overflowing with abundance.

The beast had taken her face. On top of the steaming pile of human and animal wreckage, he had shaved it off and had somehow affixed it over the decimated remnants of his own.

“See ush, Will? Thish is the faysh of love.”

I whipped my head from its grasp; its nails tore open the soft flesh beneath my chin. I heard it sucking my blood from its fingers.

“You have promish, Will. Good, good apprentish. We think we’ll make you ours. Would you like to be our apprentish? Such a good start with that baby . . .”

Something was tugging on my shirtfront. I felt a button pop loose, then another, and then the cold of steel against my bare skin—or was it steel? Did the beast press a knife into the scar that had been made by its teeth in the wilderness, or was it its nails, grown as sharp as a hawk’s talon? I could not bring myself to look.

“Ish so indesh-sker-ibal,” it whimpered. “You wayshful lil’ shit, you threw it away, our gift. You don’t know. But ish delyshful. You bite it when ish still beating, and it pumpsh the blood, woosh, woosh, into your mouth. . . .”

I could feel the skin parting, the warm trickle of blood, and then a fingertip worming its way into the wound. My heart thundered inches away from its probing digit.

“Indesh-sker-ibal . . . ,” it blubbered hungrily into my ear. “Like sucking on your per-esh-sish muf-ther’s teat—”

It stopped. Its breath huffed in my ear. Its body became stock still. It had heard him calling to me: “Will Henry! Will Henreeeee!”

It was the doctor.

The beast flung me away as if I weighed no more than a ragdoll, and it fled the chamber with inconceivable speed. I slammed into a wall and crumpled to the floor, where I lay for a moment, too stunned from the force of the impact to move. I sobbed aloud, unable to speak above a tiny choking whisper.

“Dr. . . . Dr. Warthrop . . . it’s coming. . . . It’s coming.”

I crawled across the floor, groping blindly in the dark. I found a wall and used it to push myself up. I stumbled forward, but it was as if the tenebrous air pushed back; I moved with all the speed of a bather wading in heavy surf. A feeble glow had appeared before me, enough that I could see the outline of the chamber doorway. I lunged through it. I found myself in a narrow hall. Lining the walls were stacks of boxes and wooden crates embossed with the words “SASM—New York.”

It had carried me to the spiritual home of Warthrop’s mistress. It had brought me to the Monstrumarium.

The glow came from the lamps of my would-be rescuers, beacons that beckoned me out of the darkness, and now I ran, if a lurching stagger could be called that, careening off the slick walls and slamming into the listing towers of boxes, which toppled to the floor behind me. I could raise my voice only to the level of a hoarse whisper. “It’s coming. . . . It’s coming. . . .”

My toe caught on the edge of a crate. I pitched forward, meeting the concrete with my forehead. The ground seemed to open up beneath me and I was falling, falling, crying his name, or perhaps only screaming it in my head.

It’s coming. It’s coming!

I felt someone’s hand upon my shoulder. Brilliant light brighter than a thousand suns rushed up to blind me, and I wasn’t falling anymore. The doctor was pulling me up.

He gathered me into his arms and whispered my name fiercely. I tried to warn him. I tried. I knew the words. I heard them in my head. It’s coming. But the ability to speak was lost.

“Where is he, Will Henry? Where is John?”

When I didn’t answer, he raised his head and called out, “Here! I have found him! Over here!”

He turned back to me. “Is he here, Will Henry? Is John here?”

I looked over his shoulder and saw, through the face of his beloved, the yellow eye looking back down at me. The beast towered behind the doctor; the top of its head brushed the ceiling. Like an angry child flinging a broken toy, it reached down with its enormous claw, seized my master by the nape of the neck, and hurled him down the corridor.

Warthrop landed on his back with a startled grunt. He brought up his revolver, but did not fire. As to why he didn’t, I can only conjecture. Out of the wilderness he had borne his friend; through unimaginable suffering and sacrifice he had carried John Chanler home. How could he now end that life he had given so much to save? Would not pulling that trigger negate everything the doctor believed in? Indeed, would it not prove von Helrung correct in the most fundamental sense—prove that love itself is the beast that devours all mankind?

The blackened wreckage that was John Chanler smacked the gun from the doctor’s hand with such velocity that the act painted an afterimage upon my eyes. It yanked him close so that he might see clearly what both Muriel and John had given him and what he had given them in return. This is the face of love.

Then it pressed their mouths to his.

In the next second I was upon it, the silver-plated knife in my hand. I thrust the blade to the hilt into the thin neck. The beast shrugged me off its back as easily as a man flicks off a bit of lint from his coat. The doctor thrashed beneath it; one ebony claw was clamped over the doctor’s nose and eyes while it pressed its mouth tightly against the doctor’s mouth. The beast was smothering him with its kiss.

I leapt again onto the thing’s back, von Helrung’s words echoing in my ears: Silver—by bullet or knife—to the heart. Only the heart!

I swung my arms around in a ludicrous parody of its earlier embrace of me, and plunged the silver blade again and again into its heaving chest.

Its skeletal form jerked; behind Muriel’s lips the bloody mouth came open in an animal squeal of pain. The beast rose, throwing me free, and then fell away. It rose again, collapsed, and curled into a mewling fetal ball.

Welling with pain and yearning, the yellow eyes sought out mine. I brought the blade high over my head, and beneath the human mask something inside the beast remembered, and John Chanler smiled. His heart rose up to meet the orgasmic thrust.

“God damn it!” The doctor’s voice thundered in my ears. “God damn it, why?”

He shoved me aside and gathered his attacker into his lap, and now the thing appeared pitifully small and frail, nothing like the giant wraith of just a moment before. With one hand the monstrumologist compressed the wound; the blood, as black as tar in the weak light, pulsed between his fingers with each beat of the dying man’s heart. Then Warthrop gently peeled off the overlaid face of the one they both had loved, and stared into the unseeing eyes of the one he thought he had brought out of the desolation. But he hadn’t brought him out. The desolation was within him.

“No, no, no,” Pellinore Warthrop protested, the impotent human cry.