The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(29)

“Ah, come on now, Doc,” Hawk urged him. “It’s not as bad as all that.” He stepped toward him, and the doctor leveled his revolver at Hawk’s forehead.

“You could have prevented this!” he cried. “You were here a month ago. He was a stone’s throw from you and you left him. You left him!”

“Now, Doc, I told you what Fiddler said. . . .”

“The same thing he said to me, and did I listen? Did I take him at his word? Did I allow him to take me for a fool?”

“Well,” answered Hawk tensely, “maybe you’re just smarter than I am.”

“That is no compliment.”

With those words all passion drained from the doctor; his eyes glazed over; the hand holding the gun dropped to his side. His listlessness returned, the same curious apathy that had infected Hawk and me as well. Desolation’s progeny—the lifeless living, every word pointless, every gesture useless, every hope vain.

I cannot say what day it was—it may have been the tenth or eleventh since our escape from the Sucker camp—when Hawk pulled my master aside, telling me, “Stay with Chanler, Will. I need a word with your boss.” They walked several yards up the path, and I followed—which is completely understandable, I’m sure. I eased up behind them to eavesdrop on their hurried and anxious conversation.

“Are you certain?” the doctor was saying. He sounded worried but dubious.

Hawk nodded, wetting his lips. “At first I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. It happens in the bush. So I didn’t say anything, but there’s no mistaking it, Doctor. I’m sure of it.”

“Since . . . ?”

“First heard it yesterday morning. Nothing on the watch last night, then off and on today.”

“The Iyiniwok?”

Hawk shrugged. He wet his lips. “Something. I suppose it could be a wolf, though not a bear, nothing that big. It’s . . . strange.”

“If Fiddler’s men were responsible for Larose . . . ,” Warthrop began.

“Then it could be whoever filleted him,” Hawk finished, nodding. Again, his tongue swiped across his chapped lips. “Thought you should know.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” the doctor said. “Perhaps we should force a confrontation?”

Hawk shook his head. “Just two of us—and God knows how many of them. Plus, there’s Chanler and Will to think about.”

I returned to Chanler, my mind racing. Beneath the blackened lids Chanler’s eyes roamed the darkness. Encompassing us, the mute forest brooded, shrouded in winter white.

The gray land was deceptively still. It kept its secrets.

Something was following us.

That night I saw the yellow eyes for the first time. I attributed it to my fevered imagination, overheated by the conversation earlier in the day—a trick of the firelight, I thought. Perhaps the reflection off a moth’s wing or some shiny bit of fungus. The trees were festooned with all types of it. No sooner had I noticed them than they were gone. A moment later they returned, deep in the woods and this time farther to my left, hovering several feet above the ground, almond-shaped, glowing like twin beacons.

I grabbed Sergeant Hawk’s forearm—the doctor had already crawled into the tent to lie with Chanler—and pointed. By the time he turned to look, the eyes had vanished again.

“What is it, Will?” he whispered.

“Eyes,” I whispered back. “Over there.”

For an eternity we waited, barely drawing breath, scanning the dark, but they did not reappear.

The eyes returned the following night. Warthrop saw them first, and rose silently to his feet, staring into the bush with a look of almost comical astonishment.

“Did you see that?” he asked us. “My eyes are probably playing tricks on me, but—”

“If it was eyes you saw, Will here saw them too—last night,” Hawk said. He slung his rifle around; he kept it on his person at all times, even when he slept.

“Look!” I said, raising my voice in excitement. “There they are again—over there!”

And gone again in the time it took Sergeant Hawk to whip the barrel round. He kept the stock against his shoulder and swung the weapon slowly back and forth.

“A bear?” wondered the doctor.

“A bear, could be,” breathed Hawk. “If he’s strolling about on his hind legs. Those eyes were near ten feet off the ground, Doctor.”

The seconds spun out, turned to minutes. A strange gurgling sound commenced behind us, and the sergeant whirled around to face the tent. Warthrop pushed down the barrel of the rifle and snapped, “It’s Chanler,” and rushed through the opening. “Will Henry!” he called. “Bring me some light!”

Within, the doctor was leaning over his patient, while the man’s mouth opened and closed spasmodically, like a landed fish’s, with burbling deep in his throat. Warthrop rolled him onto his side and lightly patted him in the small of the back. The body convulsed, and greenish-yellow bile erupted from his open mouth, soaking the doctor’s shirt and trousers and filling the tent with an unearthly noxious odor. I pinched shut my nose and fought the urge to vomit. Warthrop wiped Chanler’s mouth with his filthy handkerchief, and then looked up at me.

“Some water, Will Henry.”