Hal fell silent again. Annie shivered. The air in the cabin felt colder somehow, like he was pulling all the heat out of it with his words.
“I climbed out of the bowl. I went into the woods. The darkness there seemed solid, almost. It pooled around the trees. It grabbed at me. You know what it was like. There’s no need to look so surprised. The darkness was like that tonight. Sometimes, when it sees something it wants, it does its best to keep them. I was a fool. Not even a young fool like your friend,” Hal nodded toward Martin. “That might have forgiven some of my mistakes. I was just a fool, and as I walked through those trees, I sealed my family’s fate. I fell, you see. I found this clearing when I stepped wrong and tumbled down into the trees. I didn’t break my ankle, but I sprained it badly enough that I couldn’t walk on it. I thought I was a dead man. Then my eyes caught a cave on the other side of the clearing. I crawled all the way, through the snow. There had been bears living there once. Lucky me, they were already gone, victims of the winter that was killing my family, but there were signs of their presence left behind, roots and nuts and other scraps from whatever constitutes a bear’s larder. It wasn’t enough to make me fat again. It was enough to keep body and soul together while I shivered in the back of their den for three days, waiting for the snow outside to stop, waiting for my ankle to heal enough to hold me.
“After three days, the sun rose on a clear sky. I crawled out of the den. I found my rifle in the snow. I used it as a crutch to walk myself back to The Clearing. I had a pocket full of acorns, and while I walked, I saw a rabbit run. I shot it down. It was like the winter was rewarding me for surviving the worst it could throw my way. My family would live. Not well, perhaps, but who needs living well? Living at all is blessing enough. Spring would come, and we would rebuild. Perhaps we’d go back to Montana, live under that big sky, far from the clinging dark between the trees. We’d have choices.”
Hal’s face twisted, crumpling inward on itself, becoming a mask of sorrows. “But when I got back to The Clearing, it was to find an empty house, with the door shattered outward on its hinges, like something had burst from the inside. It was to find blood on the porch steps, and no sign of my wife or daughter. They were gone, both of them, along with half the town. I thought a monster had come and carried them away.”
“Wendigo,” said Annie softly.
“Yes, and no.” Hal turned to look at her. “It was the wendigo that had them from me: of that there is and can be no question. It was the wendigo that took them to the woods and will never give them back again.”
“They killed them?” asked Martin.
Hal laughed. It was a bitter sound, as bleak as the wind that howled outside. “No. That would have been too kind. The wendigo has no form until we give it form; the wendigo has no teeth until we give it teeth. The wendigo has only hunger. It enters the hearts of men when the cold wind blows out of the mountains, and it festers there like a black seed, until we do the unthinkable and eat the flesh of our own kind. Then it bursts forth. It changes them. It changed my Poppy, and my sweet Marie. It made them into monsters.”
“What?” The question was Annie’s, but that didn’t matter: it could have come from either one of them.
Hal looked at her levelly. “They were starving. I had left them, promising to return with food, and then I hadn’t returned. Can they be blamed for thinking that I’d died in the woods—or worse, that I’d deserted them? That’s what haunts me more than anything else. Did they do what they did believing that I’d left them behind, striking out for some better life? As if there could ever have been a better life without them.”
“What did they do?” asked Martin.
“They ate human flesh, boy,” said Hal. The statement seemed oddly hollow, after the way he’d talked around the point for so long: it was like he had found himself backed into a corner, unable to shy away from it anymore. “They joined in with the others, and they ate our unburied dead. My little girl with a man’s arm in her hands, her teeth gone black with blood…” He stopped and shuddered. “They did what was forbidden, and the woods claimed their own.”
Annie stared at him. “Surely not.”
“You’re a desert girl, aren’t you? You come from someplace high and hot.”
“Deseret,” she admitted.
“Lots of ways to die in Deseret,” said Hal. “More ways than a body really needs, if you ask me. Poison and exposure and falling and things that come up from beneath and gulp you down. It’s the sort of place it’s good to be from but not so great to be.”
“I don’t disagree,” she said stiffly. “There are many reasons I left that land behind me.”
“Deserts aren’t kind, but they’re honest about their dangers. A good, green place like this, it hides what’s rotten and wrong about it. It creeps. It put that hunger in my girls, and when the hunger bloomed, it took them.”
“I’m sorry,” said Martin. “I don’t … I mean, I’m not trying to … the way you talk about them, it’s like you don’t think they’re dead.”
“Because I know they’re not,” said Hal. “I’ve seen them. Many times. Eight feet tall, with mouths full of teeth and hands made of claws. They’re huge and hulking and hairy as any beast of the field, but they’re my girls. A man always knows what’s his. The wendigo took them. They are the wendigo now, and they’re never going to be human again, because they can’t take back what they did, even if they had it left in their hearts to want to. But I know my Poppy’s eyes, and I know the shape of my Marie’s shoulders. They walk as monsters. They still walk. I still mourn them.”
“Can they be returned to human form?” asked Annie. “Perhaps a cleansing, or—”
“They ate human flesh,” said Hal. “They sank their teeth into the body of a man like you or I. They filled their stomachs. They satiated their human hunger and exchanged it for something that burned a thousand times brighter. There’s no undoing what’s been done. Maybe God could save them, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in these last fifteen years, it’s that God doesn’t give a damn about Oregon. He has turned His eyes away from us and left us to our own devices.”
“Then why are you still here?” asked Annie.
“Because my girls still walk these woods, awash in their own terrible hunger, and because I was the one who failed them,” said Hal. “If I had been a better father—a better husband—I might have been able to save them before the ice sank its teeth into their bones. I won’t fail them a second time. I’m going to find the way to kill them, and I’m going to free them from the cold torment that their lives have become.”
Annie stood. “My daughter has not yet been lost,” she said. “The winter isn’t here yet; her belly is full. The fate that took your family has yet to steal mine, or Martin’s. Our loved ones are still out there to be saved. You say you’re sorry. You say you feel you failed them. Do something about it. Help us bring our people home. Will you help us?”
Hal looked at her, expression bleak. The wind howled outside. Finally, he looked back toward the fire, and he sighed.
“All right,” he said. “If you insist on going out there, I’ll go with you. But I won’t give you false hope. They are likely already gone.”
“If they are, that’s on us,” said Annie. “We’ll save them all the same.”
Hal nodded, and said nothing, and the wind howled on.
Chapter Thirteen
Martin couldn’t walk.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to: the spirit was more than willing, but the flesh, as has so often been the trouble with man, was weak. He could stand for short periods, as long as he braced himself against the table or had something to lean upon, but taking even so much as a step meant dealing with excruciating pain and the risk of bleeding. Hal watched from the far side of the cabin as Annie eased Martin back into his chair for the third time.
“He can’t come with us,” he said. “You know he can’t come with us. The smell of his wounds will attract the wendigo before we’v
e made it back to the trees.”
“It didn’t attract the wendigo before, and it’s not as if he injured himself,” she snapped. “You were the one setting mantraps in the damned woods, like they’re your own private hunting ground. Did you even consider that you could catch an innocent?”
“A man has a right to defend himself,” said Hal.
“Sir—Miss Annie—please, stop,” said Martin. They turned to look at him. The young roustabout was leaning back in his chair, face pale from the attempt to walk. He shook his head. “He’s right, ma’am. I can’t walk yet. Maybe come morning, when the scabs have set, but for right now? Maybe if I were being chased, I could run. Anything short of that, I’d just be slowing you down. Sophia doesn’t deserve that. Your Adeline doesn’t deserve that. I’ll stay here and keep the fire going. That much I can do.”
“I hate the thought of leaving you alone,” Annie said reluctantly. “Are you sure…?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Martin nodded firmly. “Getting me back to the circus, well. That’s up one hill, and through a forest filled with monsters and such, and then down another hill to something that might well still be burning. Staying here seems the better choice for everyone, don’t you think?”
“You are a brave boy,” said Annie. Impulsively, she leaned in and kissed his forehead, leaving him scarlet cheeked and staring when she straightened up again. “We’ll find your Sophia, and we’ll bring her back to you.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, girl,” Hal said brusquely. “Are you ready?”
No, thought Annie, who suspected that she might never be ready to go back out into that night, where the darkness crept and crawled like a living thing. She retrieved her lantern from the table and turned to face the woodsman, who was standing by the door, impatience sketched into every line of him.
“I was waiting for you,” she said.
He snorted, faint amusement in his eyes—he knew that she was lying—and opened the door. Darkness seemed to flood into the cabin, going against the normal laws of light and shadow; it beat back the glow of Annie’s lantern and even the brighter, fiercer shine of the fire, pooling on the floor in great puddles of gray. Hal stepped out.
After one glance back at Martin, Annie followed.
The stars gleamed overhead, cold and cruel and immutable. They had seen worse nights than this, and worse days; they had seen everything that Oregon had to offer, and while they might not judge, they also did not forgive.
The moon was less understanding. It seemed to leer down on them, its light less a beacon and more a signal flare to whatever might be hunting through the trees, looking for manflesh to devour. Hal scowled at the moon before turning his attention on Annie’s lantern.
“The light’s going to attract all manner of damned thing,” he said.
“I can’t see without it,” she replied.
“I’m not asking you to. It took me years to learn to navigate these trees without a light to hand. If not for the fact that I can still fill my belly on rabbit and roots, I’d think I was half a wendigo myself.” His smile was bitter, wry, the twisted mouth of a man who had nothing left to serve as refuge from his life. “I just want you to be warned. You walk these woods lit up like that, you’re going to lure a lot more than moths to come and pay attention to your passage.”
“That’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
“That’s a risk I’m glad you’re taking.” Hal descended the narrow porch steps, leaving Annie with no choice but to follow him if she wanted to know where the traps were. He navigated the clearing like a dancer, stepping over one patch of ground, treading with absolute confidence upon the next.
Annie frowned as she did her best to emulate him. “I’m afraid I miss your meaning, sir.”
“If you attract the wendigo, there’s a chance you’ll attract my Poppy or my Marie,” he said, pausing at the edge of the trees, giving her time to catch up with him. “Fifteen years I’ve been seeking to lure them close enough to let me grant them peace. Fifteen years they’ve been avoiding me. I don’t know whether wendigo remember who they were before the hunger took them. They might be nothing more than beasts who used to be good, honest men and women, led astray by winter. But I think…”
He hesitated, long enough for Annie to wonder whether the seemingly limitless well of words that had opened when he’d found her and Martin wandering in his woods had finally run out. She’d met his like before, men who had resigned themselves to silence while making no pledges to that effect. They could talk the stars out of the sky, once they realized that someone in the world was willing to listen. Dangerous men, every one of them. It took something to shock a tongue to silence without a vow of same to keep it lying fallow.
Finally, he said, “I think they know. What they are; what’s become of them; what they’ve lost. I think they know, and that they mourn, in their own cold ways, because anything that has understanding of itself has understanding of right and wrong. They damned themselves in an instant. They can never be redeemed in this world. I think they avoid me because they are ashamed. True evil can’t exist without knowing what it is to be ashamed.”
Annie said nothing. There seemed to be nothing she could say. Instead, she followed the old man into the woods and waited for the wendigo.
The darkness here was the more familiar sort, the kind of shadow she had grown up with and was long accustomed to. If it still clung a bit more closely than was the norm, well, she had almost come to expect that in her short time in Oregon. This was not a state that yielded easily to the light.
Hal moved through the woods like he had been born to them, slipping easily through the space between trees, seemingly confident that she could keep up, despite her ignorance of the terrain. The silence fell into an easy rhythm, him leading, her following, neither one of them speaking, for fear that any intentional noise might bring the night down on their heads. The lantern was dim enough that Annie gave serious thought to throwing it aside, letting it light some other path. The wendigo might go after the light and leave her alone, if they thought that she was just another deer.
Another deer … “There was a man before,” she said abruptly, and flinched away from the sound of her own voice, which seemed to expand into a shout in the confined space beneath the trees.
Hal stopped walking. His shoulders tensed. He did not turn. “What man?” he asked.
“It was another clearing, like the one Martin and I were in when we met you. Not the same one.” She couldn’t imagine that it had been the same one. Even as dark as it was, there was no way she could have missed the poor man’s body if she’d come so close to it a second time.
(The alternative—that it had been the same clearing, but that the wendigo had come and carted him away while she’d been making her return trip to the circus—was not worth consideration. If they manipulated these woods so easily, first setting and then concealing the site of a slaughter, then there was no point in continuing their quest. Humanity had already lost the day, and would soon lose the night as well.)
“Go on,” said Hal.
“There was a dead man lying in the open, with his … his chest cracked open like an eggshell. I didn’t know him, either from the circus I travel with or from the town.”
“And have you been in town long enough to know every soul who lives there?”
Annie didn’t answer.
“I thought not. Let me tell you something about life in The Clearing, miss, something I wish had been said to me when I was young and innocent and still believed that Oregon was capable of kindness: it’s never fair.” Hal started walking again, forcing Annie to follow or be left behind. “The mayor’s not a wendigo—hard to run a settlement when you’re seven feet tall and made of starvation—but he might as well be. He’s a tick, feeding on the blood of those around him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No? The first year in a new land, it’s understandable that there might not be enough. No one’s had time to learn th
e land. Crops won’t grow right. Nothing seems to go the way it did back in Montana, or Maine, or whatever territory you’re from. Livestock is still struggling to get established. It’s reasonable, expected even, that you’ll lose half your people in your first winter. It’s almost suspect when you don’t.”
Annie, who had grown up hearing the stories of the settlement of Salt Lake, and the bodies her paradise had been built atop, said nothing.
“First few years, it’s still understandable. A new settlement is an uneasy thing. You’re always teetering on the edge of ‘enough.’ Is there enough grain to see you through the winter? Is there enough space to keep your people from going stir-crazy and tearing each other to pieces during the first big freeze? Is there, God help you, enough open land behind the church to bury the bodies properly, before the starving start to have the sort of thoughts that led to our current situation? It’s so damned delicate when it’s all new like that. It’s delicate, and it’s difficult, and it falls apart if you give it half a chance.”
“A circus is very similar,” said Annie.
Hal snorted. “A circus moves. That’s part of what makes it a circus. If you keep losing people, it’s because you never get the chance to know the land. You’re always at the mercy of the towns around you, and half of them will be new, or teetering, or already falling. A settlement should find its feet at some point. It should learn to be dependable. But The Clearing never has.”
“Never?”
Hal stepped over a protruding root, motioning for her to do the same, and shook his head. “Never. The mayor, he says every year that this year will be the year that things turn around, and to his credit, sometimes he keeps his word—they’ve had good years down there. Good harvests. Times when things went the way they were expected to. Marriages and babies and all the other things that come with being a healthy place.”