“My name is Hal, and until some fifteen years ago, I lived in The Clearing,” said the stranger. There was no second chair in his tiny cabin; instead, he moved to stand by the fire, gesturing for Annie to be seated on the bed.
It seemed improper, sitting on a strange man’s bed, but she was tired from the passage through the wood, and she knew Martin would not judge her. She sat gingerly on the edge of the pine-stuffed mattress, the smell of the woods puffing up and surrounding her. Even here, the trees made their presence known.
“My family and I had come to settle in Oregon looking for a new life—a better life, if there’s such a thing to be found in this world, where it seems like God is looking to kick a man in the teeth as soon as look at him. We had started our married lives in Montana, where a fever had claimed our two elder children, leaving us haunted by ghosts we could never truly repudiate, for fear that they would leave us. My wife begged me to find us something else, something better, or at least something different enough as to make the world seem new again. Brighter. Our Poppy was still little more than a babe in arms. She deserved something more than to grow up in the graveyard.” Hal chuckled mirthlessly. “If only I had guessed at the future. I would have told my wife that our daughter was lucky to have a home with history, and raised her in the shadow of her older brothers’ graves, and seen her to her wedding day.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” said Annie.
“Everyone’s lost someone here,” said Hal. “We traveled weeks, going from caravan to caravan, wagon train to wagon train, buying, begging, and bartering our way from group to group, until we heard tell of an expedition heading into Oregon. Everything was green there, they said; no more desert wastes, no more rattlesnakes or pit wasps, no more taste of ghost rock in the air. Everything grew. They spoke of a bright and verdant land, and we were so enthralled by their stories that we never stopped to ask ourselves how such a paradise could exist in this world. We spent our last few dollars buying ourselves a place in that train, and we rode with them out of the desert, into the green glory of the West.”
Annie said nothing. Neither did Martin. They were listening now, caught up in the story of a man and his family. There was no question of a happy ending. Even had the stranger been bright of eye and sunny of disposition, no one whose family was living happily in town would be tucking himself away in a cabin in the woods. It did not fit with the world as either of them understood it. There was no way it could be so.
“The Clearing was a new town then, smaller than it is even now—but not as small as it should have been, to accommodate the number of us who came in on that wagon train. That should have been the first clue that something was wrong. Too many houses sat empty, waiting to receive us. For each of them there was a story, something sad and believable. We heard tales of sickness, of accidents in the wood, of natural death from old age or in childbirth. Even then, we might have questioned them more, but Poppy had fallen in love with our new home the moment she saw it. To be a father, to see my child so overjoyed with the prospect of her new life in a new place … it warmed my heart. It stopped my senses. I told my wife that we were finally home, and she dutifully agreed with me. To this day, I don’t know whether she shared my initial misgivings. I never asked her. Time ran out before I could.”
Silence fell in the cabin, broken only by the distant crackle of the fire. Hal took a deep breath.
“I won’t lie to you: I won’t tell you that it was a nightmare. We had good years in The Clearing. That’s part of how this place gets you. If it were cruel from the get-go, there’d be no one for it to betray. People understand cruelty in the West. We know how to endure. We’re a nation of people who know how to endure. Oregon doesn’t want you to be able to endure. It’s kind before it’s cruel, so that you’ll never see the cruelty coming.”
He paused for a moment, looking pensively at nothing. He didn’t even seem to realize that they were still there. The story had become its own reward, something he could only cleanse through the telling of it.
“Three years we lived there. I hunted and did repairs for others in town. I’ve always been good with my hands. My wife mended clothing and did the laundry for those few with money to spare, who were too good to wash their own dainties. She had a way with a needle that couldn’t be bought for all the money in the world. I still wear some of the clothes she made for me, and they’re as good as the day that they were finished. Our Poppy grew up fast and strong, blooming like the flower that she was, and I thought, this is good. This is what a man is meant to do. He’s meant to find fertile ground and plant his roots deep, so that he can feed his family from the land. It was always about hunger. We hungered for a better life. We hungered for a future. We thought that we had managed to find those things. We thought that we were going to bloom in Oregon. We thought the promise of the golden West was finally ours to claim.”
Hal’s scowl was sudden. “We had never been so wrong. I failed my family by bringing them here. You’ve done the same to yours. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave this place come morning and never let yourself see what’s become of your loved ones. You can still walk away.”
“No.” Martin stood, or tried to—as soon as he put his full weight on his injured leg he hissed and collapsed back into the seat. He glared at Hal. “We’re not walking anywhere.”
“You’re certainly not,” said Annie. She stood and walked to stand behind Martin, resting her hands on his shoulders. To an outsider, it would have looked like a comforting gesture, friends drawing strength from each other. In reality, she was holding him down. He lacked the strength or the leverage to push her off.
Eyes on Hal, Annie asked, “What are you dancing around telling us, sir? There’s a secret here, one big enough to swallow us all whole. You need to tell us the truth.”
“Funny that you should say ‘swallow,’” said Hal. “Maybe you have half of it sorted out already, and simply don’t want to admit what’s going on. That happens, sometimes. We don’t want to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s too terrible. It can’t be allowed in a rational world. So we don’t let it.”
“Sir, if you don’t stop speaking rubbish and start speaking reality, I’m going to slap you across the face,” said Annie. “My daughter is out there. I have little time to waste on nonsense.”
“But you’re not moving toward the door,” said Hal. “You know something is wrong with the woods. You want to be brave. You want to save your child. Those are admirable things. And somehow, you can’t find it in yourself to move alone. You know that if you do, you won’t save her. You won’t even save yourself.”
Annie hesitated before grimacing, a pained, poignant expression. She said nothing.
“Have either of you heard of the wendigo?” Hal paused, giving them time to respond. When neither of them did, he shook his head and said, “I thought not. There are two kinds of legend in this world. The ones we share, and the ones we hoard, keeping them close to our hearts. Not because they’re good things, no—we share the cities made of gold and the fountains of eternal youth, we tell everyone we meet about the good green land over yonder, even when we’d be better off keeping it all for ourselves. And the little bad things we brag about, like they make us stronger somehow. We talk about bears and biting fish and how dangerous it is to live where we live, and we pretend that makes us strong. We pretend that makes us better.”
His eyes were far away. “The second type of legend, that’s what we conceal. We don’t want anyone to know, because if they knew what it cost us to live where we do, to do what we do, they might think less of us. They might think, ‘If those fools had the sense God gave the little green apples, they never would have stayed.’ They might think we brought this on ourselves. And, God help us, they might not have the opportunity to suffer the way we did. We want other people to suffer like we did. No matter how often we say we’d rather save the world that pain, that’s not true of the human heart. Misery loves company. Misery revels in company. Misery needs company to tell us that it’s not our fault.”
“Sir…” Annie began, and stopped. This was a man lost in his own private reverie, sinking deeper with every word he spoke. If she shook him loose, he might need to start over from the beginning. That would save them no time. That might lose enough to condemn them.
“The wendigo is hunger. The wendigo is cold. The wendigo is the starving winter given physical form and forced into the world to torment those of us who have not yet succumbed. I don’t know where it came from—but perhaps there is a reason that this is such a good, green land, yet so empty. Even the natives did not settle here before The Clearing was established, and even the settlers have never come to question why the town survives when it loses half its population every other winter. It’s like we’re all blind until it’s too late, and then, once our eyes are opened, we can no longer look away. The wendigo cannot be satiated. It will eat, and eat, and eat until everything is gone except for the wendigo itself—and when that happens, the wendigo will begin to devour its own heart, one bite at a time.”
“I am well-equipped for monsters, sir,” said Annie. “I have served them and been served by them. Saying that there are monsters in these woods is not enough to turn my course aside.”
“These monsters used to be men.”
Annie stopped. So did Martin, both of them staring at Hal. The fire crackled. The wind whistled outside. All else was silence.
Hal nodded, apparently satisfied. “You begin to understand,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a curse or a punishment laid down by the land itself, and I don’t suppose it matters; the end is the same, and I’m not one to go fight with God to make things other than they are. Maybe if I’d been a younger man when all of this had happened … but if it were possible to wrestle something like this back into the ground, I’d like to think someone would have done it before me. Some things are too terrible to let stand. Whatever the cause of them, if there were a cure, it would have been provided eons ago, because no one deserves this.”
He stopped then, staring silently into the fire for several seconds. Annie tightened her hands on Martin’s shoulders. She wanted to scream at the old man to get on with it, to finish his story and free her back into the night … but she also wanted him to keep talking, to keep metering out his story a drop at a time, and spare her the freedom to leave. Because the darkness was like treacle syrup, catching and clinging, and something was out there, something so terrible that it could punch through her mother’s love and straight down into the raw red heart of her, where her own instinct for self-preservation still lingered, coiled and ready to strike. She didn’t want to go back out there, not even for Adeline, and knowing that was almost enough to kill her.
“We’ve all heard the stories,” Hal said finally. “A farm that got snowed in, the provisions exhausted, the roads blocked off. Someone goes out to chop wood and doesn’t make it back alive, and the family finds themselves with a terrible choice in their laps. Eat the dead and make it to spring, or save their immortal souls and starve. It’s funny. We forget that we’re all made of meat. We want to make it like our bodies are somehow sacred, when they’re just meat after we go to meet our maker. In the stories, some traveler finds the farm after the thaw, and they’re all dead inside, half with their mouths stuffed full of Uncle Edgar, who would have wanted to save them. That’s what we forget. We want to save them. If some god or devil had come to me and told me that by giving my body to my wife and daughter, they could have seen the end of the winter, I would have given it gladly. I would have been happy to die for the sake of their survival. Any real man would be.”
“I’d die for my Sophia,” said Martin.
Hal flinched a little, like he had forgotten anyone else was there. Annie had a sudden image of him telling this story over and over again to the empty cabin, trying to exorcise his demons by talking about them.
“Winter came on hard,” he said. “Worst we’d seen since we’d come to Oregon. We were hungry. Not just hungry—starving. I didn’t know what hunger was until that winter. The children chewed on pine needles, drank the sap like it was mother’s milk. People licked the ice off windowpanes to still the gnawing in their stomachs. My wife brewed old napkins in the kettle to make soup, and we drank every drop, not caring how old it was, or how bad it tasted. We needed to make it to spring. If we could make it to spring …
“Then people started dying. A body can only go so long without putting real food into itself. When the napkins and the needles ran out, well. There were a few suicides. The mayor’s brother hanged himself in the stable—didn’t scare the horses, though. We’d already eaten the horses. Tasted like failure. Tasted like survival. And surviving was all we were about. My Poppy, she was a skeleton draped in skin, eyes big as saucers, folding in on herself, fading away. Broke my heart every time I saw her. It was like she was eating herself from the inside out, and when she ran out of meat, she was going to begin on the bones. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t watch her die. So I took my gun, and I kissed my wife, and I said I’d be back soon with food. I promised her salvation. She believed me.”
Hal fell silent again. Annie shivered. The air in the cabin felt colder somehow, like he was pulling all the heat out of it with his words.
“I climbed out of the bowl. I went into the woods. The darkness there seemed solid, almost. It pooled around the trees. It grabbed at me. You know what it was like. There’s no need to look so surprised. The darkness was like that tonight. Sometimes, when it sees something it wants, it does its best to keep them. I was a fool. Not even a young fool like your friend,” Hal nodded toward Martin. “That might have forgiven some of my mistakes. I was just a fool, and as I walked through those trees, I sealed my family’s fate. I fell, you see. I found this clearing when I stepped wrong and tumbled down into the trees. I didn’t break my ankle, but I sprained it badly enough that I couldn’t walk on it. I thought I was a dead man. Then my eyes caught a cave on the other side of the clearing. I crawled all the way, through the snow. There had been bears living there once. Lucky me, they were already gone, victims of the winter that was killing my family, but there were signs of their presence left behind, roots and nuts and other scraps from whatever constitutes a bear’s larder. It wasn’t enough to make me fat again. It was enough to keep body and soul together while I shivered in the back of their den for three days, waiting for the snow outside to stop, waiting for my ankle to heal enough to hold me.
“After three days, the sun rose on a clear sky. I crawled out of the den. I found my rifle in the snow. I used it as a crutch to walk myself back to The Clearing. I had a pocket full of acorns, and while I walked, I saw a rabbit run. I shot it down. It was like the winter was rewarding me for surviving the worst it could throw my way. My family would live. Not well, perhaps, but who needs living well? Living at all is blessing enough. Spring would come, and we would rebuild. Perhaps we’d go back to Montana, live under that big sky, far from the clinging dark between the trees. We’d have choices.”
Hal’s face twisted, crumpling inward on itself, becoming a mask of sorrows. “But when I got back to The Clearing, it was to find an empty house, with the door shattered outward on its hinges, like something had burst from the inside. It was to find blood on the porch steps, and no sign of my wife or daughter. They were gone, both of them, along with half the town. I thought a monster had come and carried them away.”
“Wendigo,” said Annie softly.
“Yes, and no.” Hal turned to look at her. “It was the wendigo that had them from me: of that there is and can be no question. It was the wendigo that took them to the woods and will never give them back again.”
“They killed them?” asked Martin.
Hal laughed. It was a bitter sound, as bleak as the wind that howled outside. “No. That would have been too kind. The wendigo has no form until we give it form; the wendigo has no teeth until we give it teeth. The wendigo has only hunger. It enters the hearts of men when the cold wind blows out of the mountains, and it festers there like a black seed, until we do the unthinkable and eat the flesh of our own kind. Then it bursts forth. It changes them. It changed my Poppy, and my sweet Marie. It made them into monsters.”
“What?” The question was Annie’s, but that didn’t matter: it could have come from either one of them.
Hal looked at her levelly. “They were starving. I had left them, promising to return with food, and then I hadn’t returned. Can they be blamed for thinking that I’d died in the woods—or worse, that I’d deserted them? That’s what haunts me more than anything else. Did they do what they did believing that I’d left them behind, striking out for some better life? As if there could ever have been a better life without them.”
“What did they do?” asked Martin.
“They ate human flesh, boy,” said Hal. The statement seemed oddly hollow, after the way he’d talked around the point for so long: it was like he had found himself backed into a corner, unable to shy away from it anymore. “They joined in with the others, and they ate our unburied dead. My little girl with a man’s arm in her hands, her teeth gone black with blood…” He stopped and shuddered. “They did what was forbidden, and the woods claimed their own.”
Annie stared at him. “Surely not.”
“You’re a desert girl, aren’t you? You come from someplace high and hot.”
“Deseret,” she admitted.
“Lots of ways to die in Deseret,” said Hal. “More ways than a body really needs, if you ask me. Poison and exposure and falling and things that come up from beneath and gulp you down. It’s the sort of place it’s good to be from but not so great to be.”
“I don’t disagree,” she said stiffly. “There are many reasons I left that land behind me.”
“Deserts aren’t kind, but they’re honest about their dangers. A good, green place like this, it hides what’s rotten and wrong about it. It creeps. It put that hunger in my girls, and when the hunger bloomed, it took them.”
“I’m sorry,” said Martin. “I don’t … I mean, I’m not trying to … the way you talk about them, it’s like you don’t think they’re dead.”
“Because I know they’re not,” said Hal. “I’ve seen them. Many times. Eight feet tall, with mouths full of teeth and hands made of claws. They’re huge and hulking and hairy as any beast of the field, but they’re my girls. A man always knows what’s his. The wendigo took them. They are the wendigo now, and they’re never going to be human again, because they can’t take back what they did, even if they had it left in their hearts to want to. But I know my Poppy’s eyes, and I know the shape of my Marie’s shoulders. They walk as monsters. They still walk. I still mourn them.”
“Can they be returned to human form?” asked Annie. “Perhaps a cleansing, or—”
“They ate human flesh,” said Hal. “They sank their teeth into the body of a man like you or I. They filled their stomachs. They satiated their human hunger and exchanged it for something that burned a thousand times brighter. There’s no undoing what’s been done. Maybe God could save them, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in these last fifteen years, it’s that God doesn’t give a damn about Oregon. He has turned His eyes away from us and left us to our own devices.”
“Then why are you still here?” asked Annie.
“Because my girls still walk these woods, awash in their own terrible hunger, and because I was the one who failed them,” said Hal. “If I had been a better father—a better husband—I might have been able to save them before the ice sank its teeth into their bones. I won’t fail them a second time. I’m going to find the way to kill them, and I’m going to free them from the cold torment that their lives have become.”
Annie stood. “My daughter has not yet been lost,” she said. “The winter isn’t here yet; her belly is full. The fate that took your family has yet to steal mine, or Martin’s. Our loved ones are still out there to be saved. You say you’re sorry. You say you feel you failed them. Do something about it. Help us bring our people home. Will you help us?”
Hal looked at her, expression bleak. The wind howled outside. Finally, he looked back toward the fire, and he sighed.
“All right,” he said. “If you insist on going out there, I’ll go with you. But I won’t give you false hope. They are likely already gone.”
“If they are, that’s on us,” said Annie. “We’ll save them all the same.”
Hal nodded, and said nothing, and the wind howled on.