The Spirit

Lester socked away beer after beer, mooning over money. The outline of the thing shimmered with his doubling vision. Keep on drinking like this and it might just sit up and say hi.

He’d better get started now, before he was too smash-blinded to cut right. This was going to be nasty. He spread newspapers on the floor around the table and set to work on the carcass, trying to think it was just like dressing a deer.

Sometime later, as he labored over the table, Lester realized that the dog’s barking was not in his head. Claws scraped on the screen door. Lester pondered that. The little prick must have followed him somehow.

The suspension springs creaked on his truck. Then, with a crunch of collapsing metal and a clash of glass, he heard the truck roll over. He must have left the brake on. Piece of junk anyhow; he’d buy himself a Peterbilt with his money and run his own truck. Nice CB on the dash, TV back there in the sleeping cube, and loads of road whores bouncing around in the trailer . . .

Brakes. Dog. Shit!

Lester finally caught on when the trailer began to rock. Simultaneously, a rock blew in his living-­room window, rolled off the unmade bed, and thumped to the floor. He looked across the kitchen to the crank-­handled window. A face was looking in.

Lester could not take his eyes off it. It was horned and hairy, with narrow eyes rimmed in red, and it swallowed up more window than any human’s would.

The window behind his neck smashed to pieces, and the draft brought in a sudden stench. He looked into a second face not ten inches from his own.

It was a knowing face, like the other one. The red eyes looked into Lester’s, then at the shapeless mess on the table.

The face writhed into a contorted mass as though snakes were jumping under the skin, all the features going against each other. Lester flung his beer at it.

An arm the size of a tree trunk rammed through the window frame, grabbed Lester’s entire head in a hand so enormous it swallowed it up, and squeezed convulsively.

The last thing Lester heard was the howling dog and the wall caving in as the other beast hooted into the kitchen to the child’s body. Lester did not blame them. Lester did not blame them one damned bit.

NEMESIS

11

On Saturday morning, Jack Helder joyfully shut off the snow guns and serviced the five snowmobiles in the shed. The place was packed for the weekend. He told his staff Colby would stand or fall on the weekend business, so he was releasing half of them during the weekdays. They’d make more money on Saturday and Sunday. The worse the weather, the better for him. Naturally, the airport would be closed for the storm, but he could send the van to Clayton, where the diverted planes would be landing.

Saturday afternoon, he shivered on his sun deck, watching the sun lance feeble rays over the valley. Tomorrow the sun deck would be shielded behind heavy metal shutters. The storm would seize the valley as a dog seizes prey in its teeth and yanks it about. They would all move to the game room at night, where there were pinball machines and billiard tables. The colder it was, the more liquor he would sell. He could make it on the bar alone.

On Saturday afternoon, Martha Lucas and Raymond Jason visited a weary James Drake at Ranger headquarters.

“No, no, we haven’t found anything. We did the north face most of the morning and found a lot of stripped foliage, but nothing recent.”

Nor had they found any more entrances to the Limerick, but it could be a cave hidden somewhere. “Those charts will be here by Thursday, and we should really be cracking then.”

Martha asked if she could tell Jack Helder yet. Drake yawned. “If you ask me, they’ve cleared out of here. Go ahead and tell him, but also make damned certain he doesn’t let anyone run around that mine.”

And she would have if it were not for John Moon. Helder would land on the Indian like the Gestapo, pumping him for every bit of information, wheedling, cajoling, demanding, offering more pay, perhaps driving that fragile sensibility beyond endurance. Judging by Moon’s dark-ringed eyes and recent poor performance on the archery field, he was not far from there now.

“Cool it,” Jason told her. “If they’re really gone, he’ll catch on before long.”

That night Raymond Jason lay on his bungalow bed in a state of profound melancholy, watching cigarette smoke curl up to the ceiling. He dwelled on that medi­cine bundle at Moon’s waist. The bag smelled like the beast, no doubt about it. There could very well be a piece of it in there, probably taken from the trap it had sprung. If so, Jason was going to take it.

It was either that or get out of this impasse the way he had come in. With nothing. For Jason was convinced that the beasts were gone for good, leaving him and Moon in the lurch.

Him and Moon.