The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(31)

He fell back; his back arched; he lifted his cadaverous face to the indifferent heavens. His bony hands clawed impotently at the air.

“Will Henry?” I heard behind me.

The doctor rushed past and threw himself beside Chanler. He cupped the man’s face in his hands, called loudly his name, but the eyes had fluttered closed again, the sound had died on his suppurating lips. I turned and saw Hawk standing a few feet away, his face flushed, bits of twig and moss hanging from his hair.

“Are you all right?” he asked me.

I nodded. “What was it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

He did not sound relieved.

There wasn’t anything, it seemed, that could bring Hawk relief. To ward off the dark he built a roaring fire, feeding its rapacious gut with branch after branch until the heat scorched his face and singed the hair of his beard. The fire was against the cold, but he shivered nevertheless. It was against the faceless thing following us, though that thing already gripped him.

He could not turn to his remedy of choice. The doctor had used the last bit of the sergeant’s whiskey to wash my wounds—a necessitous act, Warthrop tried to reassure him, to no avail. Hawk exploded into a tantrum worthy of the most infuriated two-year-old, stomping about the littered detritus of rotting leaves and dry crumbs of the earth’s ancient bones, boxing the air with red-knuckled fists, spittle flying from his chapped lips.

“You had no right!” he shouted in the doctor’s face, waving the empty flask. “This is mine! Mine! A man has a right to what belongs to him!”

“I had no choice, Sergeant,” said Warthrop in the tone of a parent to a child. “I will buy you a whole case of it once we reach civilization.”

“Civilization? Civilization!” Hawk laughed hysterically. “What is that?”

The forest returned his words in a mocking echo: Civilization . . . What is that?

“Can you show it to me, Warthrop? Can you point it out for me, because I’m having some trouble seeing it! There is nothing left—nothing, nothing, nothing.”

“I can’t show it to you,” replied the monstrumologist calmly. “I am not the guide.”

“What does that mean? What are you saying? Are you suggesting something, Warthrop?”

“I’m merely pointing out a fact, Sergeant.”

“That I’ve gotten us lost in these damnable woods.”

“I never said that, Jonathan. I wasn’t even suggesting it.”

“It isn’t my fault. That isn’t my fault.” He gestured wildly at the still form of John Chanler inside the tent. “That was your doing, and this is where it’s brought us!”

The doctor was nodding thoughtfully; I’d seen the expression a hundred times before, the same look of intense concentration as when he was studying some singular specimen of his bizarre discipline.

“How far is it to Rat Portage?” he asked quietly. “How many more days, Jonathan?”

“Do you think I’m going to fall for that? You must think I’m a complete idiot, Warthrop. I know what you’re up to. I know what this is. I am doing the best I can. None of this is my fault!”

He kicked a burning stick, launching it into the undergrowth. Flame licked and spat in the dry tinder, and I raced to the spot to stamp it out. Behind me Sergeant Hawk laughed derisively.

“Let it burn, Will! Let the whole thing burn, and then let’s see where it hides! Can’t hide from me then, can you, you son of a bitch!”

“Sergeant,” Warthrop said, “there is nothing hiding—”

“What are you, dead? I hear it every hour of the day and smell it every hour of the night. I smell it now—the stench of rot, the smell of putrefying filth! It’s all over us; it’s soaked into our clothes; we’ve bathed in it till it’s in our skin; it comes out when we breathe.”

He pointed a crooked finger toward the tent.

“You think any of this is new to me? I’ve been a hundred times in the bush after a lost tenderfoot looking for a trophy, some rich bastard without the good sense God gave him to not go where he don’t belong! I know, I know . . .” He gave his mouth a hard swipe with the back of his hand, and his bottom lip split open. He turned his head and spat blood into the fire.

“Couple years ago I brought one out, and he went home without a face. A big grizzly hooked him in the eye sockets, punched out both his eyes with his claws, and ripped his whole face off. Just tore it completely off, the stupid blind bastard. I hiked back to Rat Portage with his God damn face in my pocket! How’s that for your trophy, you rich, stupid, blind, faceless bastard!”

He laughed again, spat again. Glimmering specks of blood and spittle clung to his whiskers. He threw his wide shoulders back and flexed his powerful chest toward the doctor.

“I’ll get you out, Dr. Monstrumologist. One way or the other—even if it means I point the way with my cold, dead finger—I’ll get you out.”

Later I joined the doctor inside the tent, balancing my elbow on my upraised knee to elevate my hand; the wound throbbed horribly. We could see Hawk’s hunkered silhouette through the open flap.

“Are we lost?” I whispered. My uninjured hand slowly caressed my aching belly. Hunger had become a knotted, twisting fist buried deep in my core.