Figures of Fear: An anthology (17 page)

‘What can I do?’ I said, voice breaking in the growing darkness.

‘It can be killed,’ said Bobby Ray, ‘but you’ll need help.’

‘Will you help me?’ I implored.

‘I can guide you, but I cannot kill it. Only you, whom it seeks, can kill the Wendigo. It was summoned against you, and only you can send it back to the spirit world.’

I must have looked scared out of my wits. ‘What … what do I need to do?’

Bobby Ray pointed to the trees where the last frontier of dark-grey daylight blipped out and night took us, and the fear came rushing at me like a steam train running with a full head. ‘We’ve got quite a trek ahead. It’s a two-mile hike to Timber Wolf Crag. We must be there by one.’

‘One?’ I asked.

‘We must begin preparations at least a half-hour before the ritual.’

‘Ritual?’

‘John Shooks will explain when we get to Timber Wolf Crag,’ Bobby Ray said. ‘Come.’ He beckoned to me to follow. ‘We must collect a package from my trailer.’

‘We’ll die of exposure if we’re up there all night,’ I said. I hadn’t lost all threads of logic just yet.

‘Unless we die at the hands of the Wendigo, we’ll be fine,’ Bobby Ray said. ‘Hurry, we can afford no time for chatter.’

We climbed into my rented Ford Explorer and drove to the edge of town where we entered the forest. After a short walk we came to the river bounding the town from the wild borders of the hills. Bobby Ray trudged over the wooden bridge then turned sharp right down the riverbank into the darkness. ‘Hurry,’ he called.

The gap between us increased with every stride. I picked up the pace, then without thinking I began to run. As I rounded a corner, I stopped dead in my tracks. A massive shape loomed out of the darkness in front of me. The thing was thirty feet long, black and menacing with a silhouetted horn on top, and it smelled sweet, yet somehow fetid.

I let out an audible screech as its single illuminated eye lit up the night. Then as fast as I’d panicked, I felt stupid and ridiculous. This was no beast: it was Bobby Ray’s trailer. The big man had ducked inside and switched on the kitchen light, illuminating the satellite dish on top of the roof, and casting a laser beam of light on to the split bin bag on the ground in front of me. I chuckled to myself, commanded myself to get a grip. Jesus, this whole affair really had me spooked.

Bobby Ray emerged from the caravan with a black carry case under one arm. It was flat, five feet long and looked heavy even for him.

‘What’s in the case?’ I asked.

‘To kill the beast, you must first see that which you intend to kill.’

I must have looked confused. Bobby Ray smiled. ‘John Shooks told you the beast is only visible when viewed face-on.’

I was still baffled. What did he mean? ‘I know what John Shooks said, but I don’t see how …’

‘Look,’ said Bobby Ray. ‘To see the Wendigo, you must see all of it at once.’ He began to unzip the canvas shroud. When he’d exposed no more than three inches of the contents, everything snapped into place. The light from the caravan window glinted off the mirrored surface and I counted the number of flat polished panels.

‘With these twelve mirrors,’ said Bobby Ray, ‘we encircle the site of the ritual. Shooks’ magic will summon the creature to the site …’

‘Then it’s my job to kill it,’ I said.

Bobby Ray smiled and refastened the zip. ‘Where you will kill it,’ he confirmed.

‘You had these mirrors made specially? I asked him.

‘Them’s as don’t make no inquiries don’t have to listen to no evasions,’ said Bobby Ray. ‘Come on now, the night’s running out and it’s time we hauled ass.’

‘Wait up a minute,’ I told him. ‘Why would anybody have twelve custom-made mirrors in a case, except for the specific purpose of trapping a Wendigo?’

Bobby Ray stopped, and looked around, as if he was sure that he had heard somebody asking a stupid question, but couldn’t think who it was.

‘Well?’ I persisted. I was shaking with cold, and I was terrified of trapping the Wendigo, but this was one of those situations where you need to know who your friends are, and what their motivation is. From years and years of liability law, I can absolutely assure you that no two people ever have the same agenda.

Bobby Ray came back toward me, and loomed over me. He smelled of body odour, and tobacco, and something else which I couldn’t identify but I didn’t like.

‘All you need to know, Mr Ballard, is that I am your enemy’s worst enemy.’

‘So what are you telling me?’ I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so cold. ‘You’re a professional Wendigo-hunter?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘How serious do you want me to be? I was called in by the Lost River Logging Corporation, round about April-time. Ever since they started cutting down the trees in the forests north-east of here, they started to lose their loggers – six or seven men a day sometimes. Heads torn off, guts ripped out. Naturally they thought it was bear, to start with, but as soon as I saw those cadavers I knew what’d done for them.

‘I advised the company to keep their men out of the forests after sundown, and to bivouac them twenty miles away, in Wannaska. They gripe about the commute but at least it keeps their heads on their shoulders. I patrol the logging operations during the day, but that’s mainly for show. The Wendigo, that son of a bitch only comes at night.’

I listened. The forest was unnaturally silent. Even in the dead of winter, as this was, you could usually hear owls hooting, and small creatures scurrying through the underbush. Not tonight, though.

Bobby Ray said, ‘You may as well ask why the company called me in. Well let me tell you this, Mr Ballard, I know more about the Wendigo than most, having lived here in Roseau all of my life, and I’ve made it my business to know. When I was away in the service, my father came out here to the forest to cut down some trees. Three nights later our family home was torn apart and my father was killed and my mother was killed and my three little sisters were reduced to rags.

‘That’s when I first got to know John Shooks, because John Shooks made a point of coming up to me after the funeral and explaining what had happened. First of all, I didn’t believe him, any more than you did, I’ll bet. I was only twenty-four, and I thought I knew everything about everything, in them days. But Roseau is a pretty small town and I saw him a few years later and asked him to tell me more.

‘I talked to him again in April, after I was given the job of hunting down that Wendigo and coming home with its hide. He told me that you couldn’t set a trap for the Wendigo, not like you can with a bear. The Wendigo only appears when it’s getting its vengeance for the spirits that live in the trees, and that means you have to go out looking for it with somebody it’s hell-bent on killing. You have to have bait.’

‘Bait?’ I hesitated for a moment, and then said, ‘Bait? You mean that’s what I am? Bait?’

Bobby Ray gave me a nonchalant shrug. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ballard. You were determined to stay here in Roseau and you probably would’ve gotten yourself killed anyhow, so I thought I’d kind of make the most of the situation.’

‘And John Shooks? What about him?’

‘I called him and he’s supposed to meet us here round about one thirty a.m.

‘For the ritual, right?’

‘Well, it’s kind of a ritual. John Shooks will whistle for the Wendigo and once that thing has caught the smell of you, it won’t need any further encouragement, any more than it did with your brother, or Alma Lindenmuth.’

‘So once the Wendigo has caught the smell of me, then what?’

‘It’ll come rushing in, determined to take your head off. But you don’t have to sweat it none. John Shooks isn’t Ojibwa himself, of course, but he knows all of their magical hocus pocus, and he can do that shaman whistling stuff. I’ll have set up my mirrors, John Shooks can whistle north, and he can whistle east, and that should keep the Wendigo turning around and around in front of my mirrors so that he can never turn edgewise on to you, and vanish. That’s when you do the necessary business with that .388 rifle you’re carrying there.’

I hefted up the Winchester and dubiously tucked it into my shoulder. It must have weighed nearly ten pounds, and after a few seconds my hand started to tremble and I had to lower it.

‘I just hope this does the job, that’s all.’

Bobby Ray grinned. ‘You don’t want to worry about that particular piece of ordinance, Mr Ballard. That’s what we call a North Forty, because south of the fortieth parallel there’s no indigenous animals big enough to shoot at with a sucker like that. That sucker can drop a bull elk at four hundred yards.’

‘OK, then,’ I said. ‘We’d better go do it. I just wish you’d told me all this stuff sooner.’

‘You can’t say that I didn’t warn you to go, Mr Ballard.’

‘I’m a lawyer, Bobby Ray. I can recognize when a warning is a veiled encouragement.’

‘Last veiled encouragement I ever saw was my Betsy, the day that I married her.’ We made our way down a steep, dark slope, with ferns almost up to our shoulders. The shadows from Bobby Ray’s flashlight jumped and danced through the forest like attenuated devils. The forest was still holding its breath. The only sound was our boots sliding down the loose pebbles, and the crackling of twigs, and Bobby Ray occasionally saying, ‘Shee-it!’

At last we reached the edge of a steep, craggy, eighty-foot precipice, overlooking the Lost River itself. As we emerged from under the pines, we could see that it had started snowing again, and occasional gusts of wind made the snowflakes twirl into ghostly shapes. Below us I could see the dim, silvery curve of the river, with three oxbows, and a thin tributary that meandered all the way to Foxville and Etheridge and Skeleton Head.

‘Used to bring Betsy up here in the summer,’ said Bobby Ray, kneeling down and tugging open the zipper of his carrying case. ‘As a matter of record, I used to bring all my girlfriends up here in the summer. Should have renamed it Busted Cherry Crag.’

He arranged his mirrors in a circle about twenty yards across, keeping each of them upright with four metal spikes. They looked like a circle of reflected headstones. ‘There … no matter which way the Wendigo spins itself around, you’re going to be able to see where it is. Don’t worry where you hit it so long as you hit it. That North Forty of yours has a two-fifty-grain bullet which travels at two thousand feet per second.’

I checked my watch. It was 1.20 a.m. My nose was running and my throat was sore from breathing through my mouth. I took out my cellphone and tried to call Marie at the AmericInn, but there was no signal out here in the forest. I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I couldn’t even tell her goodbye.

Bobby Ray knocked in the last of his spikes and then came over to me, his breath smoking. ‘John Shooks should be here in five. You ready for this?’

‘I don’t think I have a whole lot of choice, do you?’

‘You realize, don’t you, that if you bring down this Wendigo here tonight, I’m going to be looking for a new job?’

We waited and waited. Eventually I sat down on a rock. Bobby Ray lit a cigarette and paced up and down, whistling between his teeth.

At 1.51, I said, ‘Do you think he’s going to show?’

‘Let’s give him ten more minutes, OK? He’s coming through Foxville but it’s still pretty slow going, especially in this weather.’

We waited ten more minutes, then another ten. At last, I said, ‘He’s not coming, is he?’

‘No, sir. I guess he ain’t. I reckon I’d better take down all of these mirrors and call it a night.’

‘I don’t think he had any intention of coming. The way he talks, anybody who cuts down one of these sacred trees deserves to be ripped to pieces by the Wendigo.’

Bobby Ray was struggling to pull out one of his metal spikes. ‘He swore blind that he’d show. He said he had some family business to take care of, but after that he was going to be here for sure. He said he wanted to finish things off for good and all.’

He was furiously working the spike from side to side, trying to get it free. ‘Damn ornery thing,’ he said; but even as he said it, I heard an extraordinary crackling noise, followed by a loud groan.

I lifted up my Winchester and released the safety. There was a moment’s silence, but then the crackling started again, and then a sharp splitting sound, and a rush like a hundred people running down a corridor. A huge jack pine came tilting out of the forest and fell down on top of Bobby Ray with a thunderous crash.

‘Bobby Ray!’ I scrambled through the branches and picked up his flashlight. He was lying face down in the undergrowth with the tree resting right on top of him. He was still alive, although his face was badly lacerated and his right eye was hanging out of his cheek.

‘Bobby Ray! Can you hear me! I’m going to get you out of there!’

Bobby Ray coughed up a gout of bright-red blood. ‘I’m crushed,’ he said, in a thick, bubbly voice.

‘Just hold on. I’ll get you out of there!’

I took hold of two of the larger branches and tried to roll the tree sideways. But as it was over a hundred feet high, and where the trunk was resting on top of Bobby Ray it was over four feet in diameter, I couldn’t budge it an inch.

‘I’ll have to get help!’ I shouted. ‘It’s going to take a chainsaw to get you out of there!’

Bobby Ray coughed more blood. ‘Don’t worry about me. Go find Shooks.’

‘What?’

‘Go find John Shooks. If he ain’t here, where is he, and what’s he getting up to?’ I stood up. The snow blew steadily against my back and the trees swayed against each other as if they were getting ready to shuffle toward me. I thought I could hear voices, and somebody close behind me talking in a fast, sibilant whisper, but it was probably nothing more than the wind beginning to rise.

Bobby Ray let out another cough. ‘Go find Shooks,’ he repeated.

It was then that I remembered what John Shooks was supposed to have said to him. ‘He had some family business to take care of. He said he wanted to finish things off for good and all.’

Maybe the family that he had been talking about wasn’t his family, but my family. ‘
You cut down one of those trees and you’ve started a blood feud. They’ll come after you and yours, all of your kith and kin, all of your lovers and all of your friends, until they’ve wiped out anybody who ever had a good memory of you
.’