Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(50)
Just as he said it would be good for them to visit the hot springs, to soak in them nude, along with the rest of this strange mix of hippies and tourist Europeans floating in the pools around them. She can’t tell if his eyes are open or closed, his glasses fogged over, when he sighs deeply and says, “That’s better. That’s the ticket.”
His contentedness will not last long, she knows. Soon he will go back to his sharp-voiced bullying, reminding her how fat she is, how dumb, how boring. She tries to enjoy the moment and leans her head back against the stone lip of the spring and takes in the view. The North Sister rises like a fang. The air is blurry with snow, none of it touching down on the springs, erased by the updraft of heat, and it is as if an invisible dome surrounds them.
Her face drips with sweat. Her heart thuds slowly in her chest. Her skin feels scorched by the heat of the water that she lowered herself into with a hiss. She can see, rising up the nearby hillside, a glacier-fed creek running through a glen fringed with browned ferns that give way to thickly clustered noble firs. Her eyes pause on a log or a boulder—it is hard to tell with snow fuzzing the air—maybe two hundred yards away. She’s drowsy from the heat, and her eyelids slip closed—and then snap open as the thing in the glen, whatever it is, a deer or a bear, rises and bounds off into the woods.
“Craig,” she says, standing up so quickly she makes a wave that crashes against his face. “Craig, I saw something.”
He licks his lips, tasting what splashed across his mouth. His glasses are spotted with water. He takes them off and streaks a thumb across their lenses and sets them on top of his pile of clothes. “You got water on me.”
“Up there. Like a wild animal. It was—”
“Shut up. Just shut up. Shut your mouth. Okay? I’m so sick of you. Your voice. It’s like a bird being strangled. God.”
She realizes her nakedness and sinks into the scalding spring.
She expects him to say something more, but his eyes are closed. It is a relief, not having his gaze on her. In the corner of their bedroom, he arranged a chair, a wooden chair they bought from the Saturday market, rough-hewn and whorled, and this is where he sits when he watches her on their bed. A stranger tearing open a foil packet or smearing oil across her back. Craig never masturbates. He only sits there, so still, his chin in his hand, watching, his eyes swimming behind his glasses.
She surveys the woods, and then this humped and jumbled acre of red rock, wondering if anybody else saw what she saw. An animal. Central Oregon is known for its outdoor recreation, but she can count on one hand the number of hikes she’s taken. All of her time is spent at her job, as an office manager for Grayson Insurance Company, or at home, making a hamburger hot dish or folding Craig’s underwear into white triangles. The closest she gets to wildlife is the occasional dead deer smeared across the side of the road.
She hears muted conversation, laughter that sounds a long way off. Then a splashing. From one of the springs crawls an old man. Saggy skin, egg-white belly. “My bones,” he says and sighs contentedly and stands there a moment, stretching, the water dripping and the steam rising off his skin. When he reaches for his towel, she spots the first lycan.
Though she doesn’t immediately recognize it as such. It is standing at the edge of the clearing, seen through churning steam, so still that it appears a part of the forest. A troll, she thinks, a troll like something out of the fairy-tale books she used to read as a child, something that lives in the woods, under bridges.
The old man has a towel over his head like a shroud. He does not see the lycan when it scrabbles across the rocks on all fours and then rises behind him and reaches a claw and pulls away his throat. The old man staggers. The towel remains over his head as a red beard of blood curls down his chest. His arms are outstretched as if to welcome someone into an embrace. But there is no one there to meet him. He falls into the spring from which he rose a minute ago—and the effect is that of a trapdoor. He vanishes from sight. A splash is followed by screams that sound, from a distance, a little like laughter.
Alice joins the noise, crying out. The woods come alive—three, four, five lycans exploding from the trees—clambering across the rocks to enclose the bathers. Water sloshes as people turn in panicked circles or clamber from the springs, running naked across the rocks, the rocks shredding their feet and making them stumble and fall.
She startles at a noise behind her, a clatter of displaced rocks, and spins around to see a lycan approaching them, a small one, the hair on its head the white-yellow of lightning. “Craig,” she says, and then again and again, in a rapid-fire string.
Her husband opens one eye to observe her. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” The eye closes.
She has never seen a lycan before, not outside of a magazine or television program, and what bothers her most are the teeth, too big for their mouths, arranged in bleeding grins. One look and you recognize evil. Unlike her husband—who might as well wear a mask—his ugliness hidden from the rest of the world. She wishes all danger was as obvious as this—a black cape, a third eye, a bleeding grin.
And she can’t help but smile back when the lycan moves forward another two steps, its grin seeming to widen as it balances at the opposite edge of the pool, as though considering a soak. Then its arms shoot down and latch hold of her husband and drag him out of the water by his head. He barely has a chance to respond, and then it is too late: the lycan has burrowed its snout into his neck as though to seek out the darkness inside him that is selfsame with its appearance.