Paskagankee (32 page)

By now it was almost upon him. He fired again and hit pay dirt as the body slammed back against another tree trunk. This time the tree held it up, preventing it from being thrown to the forest floor by the force of the projectile. Mike fired again and again, emptying his weapon into the thing, and the body tumbled face-first onto the ground, a slick, wet squishing sound emanating from it as it crashed down onto the wet leaves and pine needles.

Mike spotted a good-sized branch that had been knocked from a nearby tree during the recent ice storm and lifted it off the ground. It was heavy and shaped like a club; although if it
was
a club it would be more suited to the Jolly Green Giant than a normal sized man because Mike could barely heft it. The branch/club was maybe five feet long and six inches wide at its thickest point, tapering down to about an inch-and-a-half at one end. It felt solid and brutal in Mike's hands.

The Court–thing again rose silently off the ground and Mike approached it, wielding the wooden weapon like Ted Williams turning on a fastball. He swung from the heels and connected solidly with the human host's ribcage. He was rewarded with a sharp cracking sound and the thing went down again, before almost immediately beginning to rise.

Mike's arms were already tiring and he knew he could not continue beating the thing like a piñata much longer. Once he lost the strength to keep knocking the entity to the ground, it would be all over him. He smacked the makeshift club into the dead body and the thing fell again with a hollow thud. It had still not made a sound during the entire confrontation. The only noise came from Mike, his labored breathing sounding loud and harsh in his ears. He knew he was just about spent.

Again the thing started to rise and again Mike clubbed it and again it went down. His arms burned and felt heavy and rubbery. Tears streamed from his eyes as the stench of death assaulted him. He felt sick. He clubbed the thing again, and again he heard/felt ribs break, not that it made any damned difference. He tried to catch his breath and was unable to do so. His lungs burned.

The thing began to levitate again and Mike swung again and this time he missed. He immediately tried to reverse course with the big club, but it was now too heavy to control. He made contact with the thing's body but because he had been unable to get any torque behind the swing, it didn't fall over. It didn't react at all.

He was out of time; it was over. His arms felt as wooden as the club. He desperately reached back to swing again and the thing was upon him, pulling him high into the air with a cold, dead hand on his neck and flinging him against a tree, the same tree that had impaled the monster just a few short moments ago. The death-smell was so much worse when the thing actually touched him that Mike gagged, he couldn't breathe, and then he was flying through the air on a short but violent trip, crashing into the tree and falling in a heap on the ground.

Mike felt pain radiate through his back. His head snapped back and exploded in agony, and he felt warm blood running down the back of his neck. His knee was practically useless, bent at an odd angle. He coughed weakly, spitting up blood, and sensed the spirit moving silently behind him to finish him off. It wouldn't take long. He apologized in his mind to Sharon, the woman he had fallen in love with and the woman he had gotten killed.

Again the cold but inhumanly strong hand of the thing lifted him skyward. He wondered why the apparition wasn't ripping him apart and decided it must prefer to kill its victims first.
Small favors,
Mike thought, as he felt his body being lifted into the air like a rag doll. He tensed for the final toss, the one that would undoubtedly shatter his neck or smash his head against a tree or break his back and paralyze him.

For a long moment he hung suspended in the air, gagging from the smell and waiting for the inevitable. Then, to his amazement, the thing dropped him. He tumbled straight down from a distance of seven or eight feet onto the relative softness of the thick carpeting of leaves and pine needles and landed with a muted
thud.

For a moment utter stillness reigned and the thought flashed through Mike's brain that maybe he was already dead and had somehow missed the particulars. Then the monster's death-stench began to fade, and Mike realized the thing was moving away from him.

Mike turned his head gingerly, thankful he had somehow avoided paralysis and was still alive and kicking, more or less. He watched the retreating body of the spirit, then looked beyond it and his breath caught in his throat.

Thirty feet away, standing woozily where he had fallen a few minutes before, dried blood plastered over his face, was Professor Ken Dye. He was white as a ghost, an observation which struck Mike as strangely appropriate, all things considered, and he was once again standing upright with his arms spread in a gesture of supplication to the spirit. Mike could see him shaking like a guy getting juiced in the electric chair, even from thirty feet away and lying on his side, but the professor was not running or in any way attempting to defend himself. He simply offered himself to the thing.
This was your big plan?
Mike thought angrily.

The spirit reached the professor in seconds, and Mike heard the man whimper in abject terror. Still he stood motionless, inviting a certain and violent death. The monster lifted Ken up in one smooth motion and flung his body against the boulder, smashing it against the jagged surface. For the second time in minutes Ken Dye left a splash of blood on the huge rock, this one much bigger than the first.

The professor fell in a heap, and the thing lifted his motionless body again as Mike struggled to his feet. He still had his backup weapon, the one in his ankle holster; he could put the apparition down for a few seconds like he had done before, and then try to drag Professor Dye off into the safety of the woods while he figured out what to do next.

Mike felt his exhausted and aching body begin to move, slowly and painfully. He took a single step forward and immediately went down again as his right knee failed him. He watched from the ground helplessly as the spirit lifted Ken Dye and in one sickening motion ripped his arm off his body like a hungry restaurant patron pulling a wing off a roast chicken. The wet sounds of ripping and rending continued, and Mike threw up on the forest floor. He lay on the ground on his hands and knees, head hanging, tiny tendrils of steam rising from the yellowish gunk that had come from his gut and was now splattered on the forest floor, until the awful noises finally stopped. Mike knew he would live this moment in his nightmares forever.

Mike lifted his head and peered through the trees at the boulder where he had last seen Professor Dye in his curious pose of submission and surrender. Blood covered the area; it appeared to have been sprayed in a fine mist from a fire hose. There seemed to be too much of it, even to a man who had investigated plenty of accident scenes, some nearly as gruesome as this.

Mike knew he was next, that he was about to suffer the same fate as Professor Dye. There was nothing in the short, violent history of this destructive apparition to make him believe he would be spared. The only reason he was even alive right now was because the professor had awakened and somehow managed to stagger to his feet and offer himself to the monster instead. Mike wondered why he would do that instead of trying to get away—all he accomplished with his foolish act was to reverse the order of death and destruction so that Mike got to live for a few extra minutes while Ken Dye perished a couple of minutes sooner. What was the point?

Right then and there he resolved to somehow make the professor's death matter. The man who had been ridiculed and excommunicated from academia, who had been quiet and afraid but steadfast, had heroically given his life to save Mike's. Even if he only spared Mike for a few minutes, it was still a valiant act; one which most people would not ever have considered, much less acted on.

Mike reached down to his ankle for his backup weapon, already formulating a plan. He would draw the thing as far away as possible while radioing the location of the cabin to his officers. While he lured the monster in the other direction, the officers could make their way to the cabin and with any luck find Sharon alive, rescuing her and salvaging something from this disaster.

As plans went, Mike knew it was pretty thin, but he also knew he had to try. He unsnapped the leather restraining strap on his ankle holster and lifted the pistol. He thought about calling for help now but decided to wait until he could at least get the monster moving away from the cabin. He hefted his weapon and looked toward the boulder at the blood and the devastation.

Pieces of the professor's body were scattered in a ragged circle around the figure of the Chief Court-thing. An arm, more or less intact, lay close to Mike on the ground, where the thing had tossed it. A lower leg, surrounded by blood and trailing muscles and tendons, lay in the same general vicinity. It had been ripped off at the knee along with a portion of the professor's trouser leg, the blue khaki pants torn as neatly as if they had been sliced with fabric shears. The damage was so extensive, Mike couldn't tell whether it was a left or a right leg.

Mike couldn't see Ken Dye's head anywhere—maybe the thing had thrown it behind the boulder. He thought about Harvey Crosker's head, tossed casually into a tree, and shuddered.

He forced himself to concentrate on the problem at hand. Professor Dye was gone now and wasn't coming back. He began to stand—his body fighting him, screaming in agonized protest—and prepared to start moving, to draw the monster away from the cabin and presumably away from Sharon. The apparition seemed entirely unaware of his presence. It seemed preoccupied, if that was possible.

Mike took one shuffling step forward, favoring his right knee, the one which had let him down the last time he tried to move. Shooting pain ripped through his leg, radiating from the knee outward in both directions. His knee was on fire, a bright white agony attacking him from ankle to hip. He bit his lip to keep from screaming and took another step, stumbling and catching himself on a tree bent nearly to the ground, perhaps beaten down by the storm. Mike knew how it felt.

Sweat poured down his face even in the cold northern Maine woods, more from pain than from exertion. He gasped as he took another step, struggling to stay on his feet and almost falling again. The thing still hadn't paid the slightest attention to him. He worked his way closer, and now the apparition began to move but not in the manner Mike expected. As he watched in stunned surprise, the emaciated figure of the man who had once been Police Chief Wally Court and was now some demon from another world crumbled slowly and silently to the ground.

One moment the body was standing over the forest floor—hovering, actually, in that strange and eerie way it had of moving silently over the land without actually touching it—and the next it was dropping, seeming to fold up into itself and falling to the cold, wet surface of leaves and pine needles.

Mike watched in disbelief as the thing fell in the center of the wide swath of destruction and was still. The tattered remnants of Chief Court's clothing fluttered to the ground into a ragged pile not much bigger than the size of a basketball.

Mike waited and watched, leaning against a tree for support, horrified by the events of the last few minutes but also overcome by curiosity, needing to see what would happen next. Nothing did. He kept his weapon trained on the inert pile of clothing lying on the ground. Nothing happened.

Minutes passed and still the body lay motionless where it had fallen. Mike wondered if it was a trick to get him to approach, but why would the thing attempt to trick him when he was injured and nearly defenseless? The silence was absolute. Mike's knee throbbed and burned. The body lay unmoving.

Mike took a deep breath and struggled forward. Standing in the middle of the woods, injured and nearly immobile, with night falling and potential rescue still hours away, was no kind of a plan. It was time to figure out just what the hell was happening.

He limped and stumbled to the spot where the apparition had fallen and with the barrel of his gun, poked warily at the filthy, unmoving pile. Chief Court's body, broken and ruined beyond belief, lay inside the tattered clothing. The awful stench of death and rotting flesh rose off the corpse and Mike gagged, but the body didn't rise off the ground and hover, didn't do anything, in fact. It just lay on the cold ground inside the ruined mess of clothing.

Minutes more passed as Mike waited for something to happen, but he began to realize nothing was going to. For whatever reason, the spirit was gone. Where it had gone and whether it would return, Mike had no idea, but he decided he had better check the cabin for survivors while he had the opportunity.

The lonely log cabin seemed miles away. The sky had darkened to the point where Mike could barely see a vague suggestion of the home off in the distance through the trees. He picked up the stout tree branch he had used as a club just a few minutes and a lifetime before and examined it, deciding it would make a passable walking stick. He leaned on it heavily and began moving slowly and laboriously toward the little house, wondering what horrifying revelations he would find when he entered.

Every few steps, he turned and checked the area around the big boulder, expecting at any moment to see the apparition gliding smoothly toward him again, preparing to kill him and tear his body apart. But with each glance he saw the same thing: the awful visual evidence of slaughter, but nothing else. No movement.