In the blasted wasteland we hold our heads, confounded. We lift our eyeless sockets to the incurious moon. On the high wind rides the voice that calls our name.
The golden light is warm. It rushes into my eyes and fills me, and I am no longer afraid.
The butt of the Winchester smashed into the base of Chanler’s skull. The spindly neck snapped back. Warthrop hit him again with all his force. He dropped the rifle, grabbed him by the shoulders, and hurled him off. Chanler leapt; the doctor met the lunge with his fist, slamming it into the side of his friend’s head. Chanler collapsed across my jerking legs, his face wearing an obscenely painted mask of mucus and blood.
The doctor knelt beside me; his dark eyes replaced the stars in my sight.
“Will Henry?” he murmured.
He bent to examine the wound. I heard him hiss sharply through his teeth.
“Deep, but not too deep,” he muttered. “The real danger is infection.”
“The real danger . . . ,” I echoed weakly.
With a thunderous wallop and a riot of riven canvas and shattered wood entangled with skeins of frozen rope, the tent blew apart, its remains hurtling into the trees, as if driven by a gale. The doctor fell over me—and a shadow fell over us. It blotted out the stars. Its stench engulfed the cosmos. Pale yellow shone its malevolent eye. I looked into that eye, and that eye looked back at me.
I have no memory of the next few moments. There was the yellow eye . . . and then trees, brambles, rotting logs, the perplexities of knotted vine and shallow half-frozen streams, the crackle of breaking snow, the dervish of the maddened stars, as we ran through the forest, I in my weakened state following in the footsteps stamped into the snow by the weight of two men—the doctor and the unconscious John Chanler, whom Warthrop had slung over his shoulder. We abandoned everything—rucksacks, canteens, medical kit—even the rifles. They were useless against the thing that pursued us.
Outiko is not hunted; Outiko hunts, the ogimaa had said. You do not call Outiko. Outiko calls you.
The wind no longer sang high in the trees. It screeched. It keened. It wailed. The ground shook beneath our feet. The forest echoed with a rhythmic pulse, an ear-shattering pounding, the primal beat of Gaia’s heart.
I fell farther and farther behind. I couldn’t see them anymore, just their footprints zigzagging through the primeval morass. Behind me, uprooted trees toppled with snow-muffled thunderclaps, the high-pitched snapping of their boughs pitiful accompaniment to the bawling wind and the teeth-rattling cannonade of the thing’s pursuit. My stride became the stumbling semi-falling of a drunk; I went to my knees. Then up for a few yards, only to fall again. Let it take me, I thought. You can’t outrun it. You can’t hide from it. Kneeling, I covered my head with my hands and waited for the Old One to take me.
“Get up! Get up, Will Henry, get up!”
The monstrumologist hauled me to my feet and shoved me forward.
“You fall again and I’ll kick you there,” he shouted. “Do you understand?”
I nodded—and collapsed anyway. With a howl of rage the doctor yanked me back up, wrapped his free arm around my waist, and pushed forward, Chanler dangling over one shoulder, his recalcitrant ward hanging beneath the other. Thus borne down on one side with the burden he’d chosen and on the other with the one he’d inherited, Pellinore Warthrop carried on through the desolation.
FOLIO V
Abundance
“MEN ARE PROBABLY NEARER THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH IN THEIR SUPERSTITIONS THAN IN THEIR SCIENCE.”
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
FOURTEEN
“The One Who Brought You Out ”
At first I thought I was dreaming. The room was at once foreign and familiar, as in a dream—the chipped bowl upon the washstand, the rickety dresser, the narrow window with the dingy white curtains, the lumpy mattress on which I lay. Either I’m dreaming or I’m dead, I thought, though I’d never pictured heaven as so depressingly shoddy. Still, it was the first bed I’d lain in for . . . how long? It seemed longer than a lifetime.
“Well, finally you’re up.” The old floorboards creaked; a tall shadow approached. Then the meager light fell upon his face. Gone were the grit and grime of the forest, the whiskers, the old duster and filthy breeches. His hair was freshly trimmed. I detected a hint of talcum.
“Dr. Warthrop,” I croaked. “Where am I?”
“Our old digs at the Russell House. I’m surprise you do not recognize the rustic charm.”
“How long have I . . .”
“This is the morning of the third day,” he said.
“Dr. Chanler . . . ?”
“He departs this afternoon for New York.”
“He’s alive?”
“I will forgive that question, Will Henry, as you’ve been out of sorts. But really.”
He was smiling. He dropped his hand casually upon my forehead, and quickly removed it.
“You’ve been running a bit of a fever, but it’s gone now.”
My hand went up to my chest. I felt the gauze of the bandage.
“You’ll have some scarring—something to impress the ladies when you’re older. Nothing more serious than that.”
I nodded, still unable to absorb all of it. It still felt dreamlike to me.
“We got out,” I said hesitantly, seeking reassurance.
He nodded. “Yes, Will Henry. We got out.”
The subject was dropped for the moment; he laid out my clothes and stood at the bedside impatiently while I struggled to dress. Every joint ached, every muscle quivered with fatigue, and my chest burned horribly with the slightest movement. When I sat up, the room spun around, and I gathered the sheets into my fists to ballast myself against the waves of nausea smashing against the brow of my enfeebled constitution. The shirt I managed to put on without aid, but when I lowered my head to slip on the pants, I toppled over—the doctor stepping forward to catch me before I smacked face-first onto the floor.
“Here, Will Henry,” he said gruffly. “Come now. Lean against me.”
He pulled up my pants, cinched the belt tight.
“There. Now, I trust you’ve too much pride to suffer the indignity of me carrying you downstairs. Here, hold on to my arm.”
Thus we proceeded to the lobby restaurant, where the doctor ordered a pot of tea and instructed our waiter (who also happened to be the bartender and the cook) to “unload the larder.” In good time I was stuffing my mouth with biscuits and venison gravy, pancakes glistening in maple syrup, fresh sausages and bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, hominy, and breaded trout filets. Warthrop cautioned me to slow down, but his warning went unheeded in the hurly-burly of my frontier bacchanal. It was as if I had never tasted food before, and the more I ate, the more exquisite became my appetite.