The Spirit

“Wait a minute.” She ran into the kitchenette and returned with a bag of dried tea, telling him it was full of medicinal properties and could cure diseases that had not even been discovered, even snakebite. She told him how to prepare it. Eventually Jason managed to get out of her room without seeming too abrupt.

“I don’t know nothing about no Bigfoots or nothing.” Lester Cole tried to scurry past Jason to his pickup truck. “I didn’t see nothing, I made it up.”

Jason inserted himself between Lester and the kitchen door. He summed up Lester Cole as a man covered with little pressure points of fear subject to minute applications of force. “Why would you do that?”

“Cause I wanted to. I wanted to get in the papers.”

Jason followed Lester out of the kitchen into the parking lot, then cut in front of him again before he could open the door to his truck.

“That’s my truck, mister.”

“What are you going to do, shoot me?”

Lester’s jaw muscles bunched up. “Get away.”

“Sure. Soon as you tell me the truth, Lester. I can tell when somebody isn’t telling me the truth, you know.”

“You can, huh?”

“I mean, if you really wanted your name in the papers you wouldn’t have admitted a hoax. People would come here to interview you, reporters from television and everything. No, you’re just not telling me the truth, Lester.”

The parking-­lot lights made Jason’s face a cold series of slabs of the same texture as the granite walls of the lot. His arm bandage glittered whitely under the lights. Lester noticed that Jason was a big man and sprung tight.

“I never could keep my mouth shut.” He laughed.

“Oh, that’s okay, Lester. Look, I’m not going to bite you, I just want to know what it looked like.”

“Fucker’s long gone by now, so if you come here looking for it, you’re wasting your time. You might as well go home. What’s your name, anyhow?” Lester became jovial to hide his craftiness. His rifle was still in the truck cab.

“Jason.”

“And you want to know what it looked like.”

“There you go.”

“And that’s all you want.”

Jason held up both hands, palms facing Lester Cole. “Swear to God, Lester, my friend. After tonight you’ll never see me again.”

Jason had big hands, Lester noted. “I only saw him for a minute, Mr. Jason. He didn’t look like much. He was about six feet tall but real heavy. He had gray fur and a big belly and these long arms with hands turned in like this.” Lester dangled his arms, palms turned facing his body. “And that’s about it.”

“What about his head, Lester?”

“Just a head. Just a lot of hair on it.”

“Nothing unusual about its head?”

“I told you! It was just a head. Kind of like a monkey has, that’s all.”

By the way Jason’s rocky face seemed to turn inward Lester realized he had said something important. Finally Jason took out his billfold and stuffed a five into Lester’s shirt pocket.

“You’ve been a big help, Lester. Sorry to corner you like this.” With a pat on the shoulder, Jason walked away toward the kitchen.

“If I remember anything else I’ll let you know, Mr. Jason.”

The kitchen door closed behind Jason as though dismissing Lester Cole from existence.

There were two of them in the valley!

Jason’s feet seemed to float over Jack Helder’s lounge carpet. Robotlike, he walked to the desk and reserved a room for three days, his mind in turmoil.

The one Lester had seen was not the one he had fought in the river. Every eyewitness had noticed a misshapen head except Lester. The footprint cast in Drake’s office was of the hourglass type, not Moon’s beast. And one had stayed here ever since the lodge was erected and had killed a plumber.

Kimberly had warned him that it took more than one to keep up a population. He had said a cave or cave system would be the ideal home. Somewhere around Mount Colby there had to be a cave. He would go to the Ranger office tomorrow and get a chart.

Dangling the key in his hand, Jason was walking across the lounge when a terrain map showing in relief the features of Mount Colby and the valley caught his attention. A road crossed the north face of the mountain to a town called Oharaville. The town buildings were small black squares.

On the mountain’s base at the edge of town was a large black cross symbolizing an old mine.

A gold mine! In more ways than one.

The key fell from Jason’s fingers to the carpet.

8

Guests at Colby Lodge were discouraged from going to Oharaville. The mine area was thin earth pocked with sinkholes. People had fallen into the ground at Oharaville and vanished. Children had been trapped there with broken limbs. The Forest Service would run you out if they caught you there.

The road around the north face had been built when muscle and dynamite smoothed the earth and transportation was by horsedrawn buckboard. It followed a rusted railroad line used for transferring ore from the Limerick mine to the town of Garrison.