The Spirit

“It sounds like this thing is deformed all right. Only I’m wondering if it’s a deformed human instead of a deformed ape. Giantism is a well-­known glandular disorder, and so is excessive body hair. And when you think about it, seven feet isn’t all that tall. Basketball players reach that height all the time. So that might leave us not only with a human but a modern one, some poor, retarded wretch who escaped from an institution somewhere and has been running around the woods.”

“Kimberly, he weighs a good eight hundred pounds! He’s got to be smart enough to fuel all that weight!” Jason roared. “A human that messed up wouldn’t survive an hour in the woods.”

Kimberly was silent for a moment. A heavy professorial silence, during which Jason could almost hear him clambering through dusty mental detritus of his past learning.

“Well, Mr. Jason, that leaves us with Paranthropus or some other predecessor of Homo sapiens. I don’t know. It doesn’t fit any fossil I’ve ever heard of in the human line, but we have only scratched the surface of that study anyway. It does sound to me like it’s deformed. And if he has a chin, he’s a Homo sapiens. Period. I’m sorry, Mr. Jason, but that’s the bottom line.”

A man.

Some pitiful rejected soul wandering through the wilderness? Or an ancient manlike thing, part of a whole species, a primordial shape that walked the mists of prehistory, whose face stamped terror on man’s memory for ages to come. He was a headhunter. He threw stones. Even his prints were manlike.

A prehistoric human would be a find indeed, something bigger than a dumb gorilla. A living relic of human evolution, an ape man. Or a man ape.

Did the Indian sense this somehow? Was it just curiosity like Jason’s that kept the Indian on the thing’s trail for hundreds of miles? Was there some kind of bond between them, some mutual—there was no other word for it—friendship? It would explain why the Indian had conked Jason with his rifle. The Indian had seemed to be protecting it.

“Protecting it,” Jason muttered, looking out the window. That was exactly what the Indian was doing; that was why he had attacked Frank Stone at the trailer park, too.

That his quarry was deformed was inescapable, Jason realized. Man or ape, the head did not fit the body. Well, he would figure that out when the time came. More than ever the central enigma of the thing filled Jason’s head, to the bursting point. He ate, slept, and drank that creature. Every moment in the hospital room, snakebite or not, meant the thing was getting away from him.

The nurse at the reception desk was astonished to see him walk down the hall fully dressed. “Mr. Jason, where do you think you’re going!”

“I’m checking out, thank you.” Jason unsteadily filled out a check for a thousand dollars. “That should cover expenses, time, ambulance service, plus contributions to a new wing or whatever you want, plus any mental anguish caused by my temper.”

“You cannot leave until the doctor’s seen you.”

“I am leaving now, madam.”

“You need at least four days of rest—”

“I never felt better in my life. I need fresh air and sunshine.” Jason tore out the check and handed it to her. He sniffed his hand, realizing he still smelled of disinfectant.

“Mr. Jason . . .”

“No, madam.”

“At least let someone change your bandage.”

In a rack in the reception room were copies of a local newspaper called the Garrison Tribune. As a nurse angrily wrapped a new bandage around his forearm, Jason opened the paper to the second page and felt adrenaline rush through him.

The paper was a day old. On page two was a photo of a fat man pointing at a section of woods where he said a Bigfoot had thrown rocks at him. Next to it was a photo of James Drake, the chief of the Augusta County Ranger Station. He was propping up two plaster casts of footprints on his desk.

James Drake was the Ranger who had slit Jason’s snakebite and drained poison from it.

“When did this happen?” He held up the paper.

“Night before last. And don’t get any ideas of hunting for it like the rest of the county, Mr. Jason,” said the nurse. “Unless you want to die of exhaustion.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” beamed Jason. “I never felt better in my life.”

“Well, how do, Mr. Jason.” Drake put down a sheaf of papers and extended his hand. “Thought you’d be in that place the rest of the week.”

“I got tired of bedsores. I thought I’d drop by and thank you for saving my life.” Jason declined a beer poured from Drake’s thermos into a paper cup. James Drake looked like a slightly melted bear whose heavy strength was still formidable but had sloped a bit farther down his body. He worked hard at giving the impression that he liked outdoors work better than running a desk. He leaned back in his chair, scratching both elbows with his fingers as though he were hugging a pillow.

“I didn’t do nothing but cut you up a little. Glad you stopped by. I was going to call on you.”

“What for?”

“Oh, a bunch of paperwork. Stuff for reports.”

“I’ll do what I can.”