The church stood at the edge of town, surrounded by a fence that shouldn’t have been necessary in a place like this, where no one would even dream of desecrating holy ground. Only when they drew closer—close enough for the lantern’s watery light to chase back the shadows—did she realize what the fence was for: it was there to define the graveyard.
Annie gasped, her free hand going involuntarily to her mouth, trapping the sound inside. There were so many headstones standing in shaky, uneven rows. Many of them were cracked; all of them were coated in thick layers of stringy moss. Without them, there would have been nothing to mark the placement of the dead. There were no graves. There were only holes in the earth, deep pits from which unspeakable things had been dragged.
“You’re probably trying to tell yourself that they moved the dead when they left this place behind,” said Hal. His voice was gruff. “It would be the Christian thing to do, taking the dead with you. Don’t let yourself believe that lie. They didn’t move a damn thing. The wendigo did this.”
“Why…” Annie stopped herself, slow horror twisting and untwisting in the pit of her stomach. Why would the wendigo desecrate the graves?
Because they were hungry and the graves contained bodies, and to the wendigo, the bodies of the dead were more meat for the bellies of the beasts.
Slowly, almost as in a dream, Annie walked closer to the church. The gate had been broken off its hinges; the shattered remnants shifted with the breeze, making a soft creaking sound. She stepped through, onto what should have been holy ground, and felt no holiness there. Only cold, and the ever-impending threat of the winter yet to come. She walked to the edge of the first grave.
From this close, it was impossible to ignore the roughness of the edges, or the claw marks gouged into the dirt around the hole. Some great beast had dug this pit, delving ever downward to find the terrible meat concealed within. She had never really thought of humans in terms of meat before. Oh, she knew that man was made of flesh, and that there were plenty of creatures in the West who would be happy to devour the unwary—coyotes and buzzards, catamounts and nibblers. It was never safe to walk in the world. But she had considered places like this to be sacrosanct, so well defended that there was no need to be afraid.
“Families, transformed by the fruits of their own hunger, returned here to unearth their dead,” said Hal from behind her. “Mothers who had laid their children to rest not two winters prior scrabbled through the earth and clawed open their coffins, taking their babes back into their bodies.”
“Why are you showing me this?” whispered Annie.
“Because you didn’t believe me when I just told you about it. You thought me a mad old man, rambling about what he’d lost. A warning is only as good as the one who gives it.”
The grave smelled of wet fur and sour earth, instead of good, clean dirt. It was not the fact that someone had been buried here that had tainted the ground. It was the fact that the someone had been removed, ripped away from what should have been eternal peace.
“They just … what?” Annie shook her head. “I don’t understand how this is possible. I don’t understand how any of this is possible.”
Hal grasped her elbow, steering her gently away from the grave. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s more for you to see.”
Half sick with worry and with fear, Annie did not resist. She simply turned and allowed herself to be led down the narrow, hard-packed path to the church.
It was a simple structure, befitting a settlement of this size, but there was room around it for expansion, space that had been carefully carved out with lines of brick to keep the graveyard from creeping in too close. The people who raised this church had expected to stay, to keep worshipping and beating back the woods one tree at a time, until they had a good, clear land to call their own. Like the gate, the doors had been broken. Unlike the gate, they had been shattered on their hinges, rendering the steps treacherous with splinters and with the moss that fed on the decaying wood. Hal walked through it without hesitation, leaving Annie to pick her way through the mess, trying to keep herself firmly at his heels. She knew better than to let herself be left alone without her guide in this blasted place.
The pews were still in place, for the most part. A few had been knocked askew or broken, but the rest stood in their tidy rows, as if they were waiting for the return of a congregation that had long since gone on to greener pastures.
(The thought made her shudder. Oregon was nothing if not green, and all green things needed to feed. How many of the missing were fertilizing the trees or filling the bellies of the wendigo, not making new lives for themselves somewhere far away, under a kinder sky?)
They walked toward the front of the church. Seen up close, the pews were less intact than they had seemed, ripe with rot and swelling with the fleshy bodies of toadstools, blue-capped and slick-looking. Some of them seemed almost to glow in the dimness, lit from within by their own terrible poisons. Hal followed her gaze.
“I don’t know what those are,” he said. “They seem to sprout when stores are low, or just before a blizzard.”
“Are they poisonous?”
Hal’s laughter was a sharp, short bark. “You’d be dead before you had the chance to swallow. I’ve seen men risk it anyway, when they were hungry enough, when it was that or join the wendigo. They shit themselves to death, writhing like there was a noose around their necks. The flies wouldn’t even eat the bodies. The wendigo still would, though. Nothing kills them once the winter takes them. Nothing natural, anyway.”
“Wait.” Annie stopped walking, frowning at Hal. He stopped as well, turning to face her, the ruined church framing him like some terrible pagan god of the winter and the woods. “How many people here know about these things?”
“Most of them.” He shook his head. “You think anyone can live in a forest full of monsters and not know that the woods are watching them? There’s not a man or woman who’s lived in The Clearing for more than two spans of seasons who doesn’t know about the wendigo, and what they are to us. Some of the children may still be innocent. My Poppy was. My Marie was as well. They didn’t know what would happen to them when they filled their bellies. The mayor, now … he knows. He’s always been very careful.”
“Why do they stay?”
“Because some of them are like me, with friends and loved ones running in the deep woods, eating the world alive. Some of them are like the mayor. He’s powerful here. He’s in control here. You take him out of these woods, and what is he? Just an aging little man whose settlement failed—and if he tried to tell people why, well, he’d be lucky to avoid the nuthouse. There are men in this world who hunger for power the way a wendigo hungers for flesh. He’s one of them. He’ll never give up what he has.”
Annie said nothing, but thought of Michael, whose hunger had been so great that it had consumed almost everything it touched. She had escaped, and she’d moved Adeline well beyond his grasp, but it had cost her more than she had ever thought she’d be called upon to pay. It had cost her a daughter. It had cost her name. It had very nearly cost her life.
Hal nodded. “You’ve met that kind of man before. No one walks away from that sort of thing without scars, even if they don’t all show to the eye. He’ll never leave The Clearing.”
“He left it once,” said Annie.
“No. He left the shed skin of his town behind, and he built something better. The new town is bigger than this one ever was, stronger, more prepared to weather the winter. They’re learning to live with the land. Give them a hundred years and they’ll be the sort of nightmare that travelers warn each other about. Not the wendigo. The townsfolk.”
“Not a town of cannibals, but a town making sacrifices to cannibals for the sake of their own survival,” said Annie. The slow horror was back, twisting in her stomach until it felt like she had swallowed a worm, some dreadful thing that would eventually burst out of her in a shower of blood and bile. “We were told … we were told that The Clearing was a good place for a traveling show. That they paid well.” That wasn’t all that they’d been told, but it had been so loud, and so tempting, that the rest had been surprisingly easy to ignore.
“They do, for the shows that come and go during the summer. How the children love a circus! But if you could count the traveling shows scattered across the continent, I think you’d find that a surprising number of them have gone missing right after coming here.”
“I know,” interrupted Annie. “I talked—”
Hal continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “There were always reasons. The world is full of reasons for the things it does to us. There were blizzards, or roads had been washed out, or there were highwaymen in the area. I think you’d find that those reasons didn’t matter. That many of those people were gone, and that the ones who remain … well, the ones who remain aren’t anything that could be called human anymore.”
Annie didn’t say anything. She was starting to wonder whether Hal’s silence had been broken forever: whether he needed to talk, and talk, and talk until all the words he’d been hoarding had been spent, leaving him empty again, ready for another decade alone in the woods. She lifted her lantern, eyes fixed once more on the altar, and walked forward.
The claw marks were scored deep into the wood of the narrow steps leading up to the spot where the priest had once stood, making his speeches, delivering his sermons, trying to lead the people of his flock toward a brighter tomorrow. The churches of the heathen West were not much like the churches of the Holy City where she’d grown up, and she didn’t have much time or use for religion anyway, but it was still hard to look upon the desecration. This was meant to be a place of God. This sort of thing had no business here.
She stepped onto the dais. The podium was cracked straight through, as if struck a mighty blow by some unseen hand. She took another step, and stopped dead, all the blood in her body seeming to suddenly freeze, until she felt like a wendigo herself, cold from one end to the other, unable to even understand what was before her eyes.
They had left the body of the priest behind when they fled this place—or perhaps he had refused to leave his church, planting his feet on holy ground and declaring that this was as far as he could go; this was where the line must be drawn. Whatever the truth, the end result had been the same.
There was no flesh left on his bones. Even without the wendigo, time would have taken it from him, for the skeleton had clearly been here for quite some time, exposed enough to the elements—that damned broken door—to have become weathered and yellowed. There were bite marks on some of the bones, but not as many as she might have expected, given Hal’s description of the beasts.
The floor creaked behind her before Hal said, “Father Hines believed that there was still good in the beasts. He claimed to be able to minister to them. He said that he could go out into the woods and read to them from the Good Book, and that they responded—not as men did, not anymore, and yet, clearly enough that he continued in his efforts. When the choice was made to move The Clearing to its new home, he refused. He said the wendigo wouldn’t know where to find him. He wouldn’t go.”
“Did they kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
Annie turned. Hal looked at her gravely.
“I think they were toying with him. They had plenty of food—the woods were rich with deer, and even with the hard freeze, the people in the town had survived until spring. There was always someone else to slaughter. Perhaps the wendigo kept him as a pet. Or perhaps some among them still believed that they could find absolution if they only listened closely to the homilies and hymns, if they only believed that the Lord their God was still watching over the lost members of his flock, the sheep that had been transformed to wolves.”
The image of monsters trying to sing “Bringing in the Sheaves” or “This Little Light of Mine” was ridiculous enough to be faintly comic, even under these grim and unforgiving circumstances. Annie swallowed her laughter. It sat sourly in her stomach, joining the fear already prisoned there. She was going to burst soon, from an excess of foul humors.
“They ate him in the end, of course, whether they killed him or no,” said Hal. “But they left the body here. I suppose they thought it was funny.”
It was interesting, how he moved between humanizing the wendigo and dismissing them as nothing more than monsters, terrible beasts powered solely by their hunger. Annie said nothing. She knew that sort of emotional turmoil all too well. There had been times when Michael had been the best of men, and the best of husbands. He had bought her beautiful things, expensive things, some of which she had barely expressed an interest in before they had been gracing her home. He had been a surprisingly gentle lover, coaxing her through the things he wanted like the scientist he was, like sex was an experiment that could be brought to a successful and reproducible conclusion. He had been a good man.
He had also been a nightmare, jabbing needles into her spine and drawing out the golden fluid that pooled there, as clear as amber, as rare as diamonds. His temper had been legendary, and she supposed that it would only have grown worse since she’d left him; some days, she’d felt as if he’d married her as much to have someplace to direct his aggressions as for the appearance of propriety that she provided. He had been a monster who walked like a man and a man who walked like a monster, and to this day, she couldn’t have said which face had been the true one.
“Are they going to come back here?”
“No. There’s nothing left for them in this town. They ate its heart, and it died.” Hal sighed. “There have been times when I thought about leaving my cabin for one of the houses here. Some of them have held up surprisingly well, and I could pretend that I still had people around me to care about. That’s why I can’t do it. I’d break my heart every day, when I woke up and I was alone. And how would Poppy know how to find me? A girl needs her father.”
His girl seemed more likely to eat her father than to need him. Annie shoved the thought away. “My girl doesn’t need her father; she needs me,” she said gently. “You brought me here to make me understand. I still don’t. I need to find Adeline. She’s out here somewhere. Please. We need to find her.”
“I also brought you here to show you the graves,” said Hal. “The wendigo do have a sense of humor, or maybe just a sense of putting things where they belong, and they always make a mockery of laying the children to rest. If they’d already taken your daughter and devoured the soft parts of her, we would have found her body in the yard.”
Annie stopped dead, staring at Hal with wide, wounded eyes. He had brought her here, knowing full well that her daughter’s body might be waiting for her. If that had been the case, if Adeline had been in that churchyard …
Something inside her would have broken forever. She had fled the devil once, when she ran away from Deseret. She did not have it in her to flee the devil a second time.
“You monster,” she whispered.
“I never claimed to be anything else,” he replied. “I am not a wendigo. That’s the best that can be said for me. But take heart. If she is not here, they have not killed her.”
That didn’t mean she had survived. The wendigo were not the only monsters in these woods, nor were they the only things that could lead a scared young girl to her death. “We haven’t checked all the graves,” said Annie, and hated herself.
Hal, however, looked almost pleased. “No, we haven’t,” he said. “Come.”
They walked out of the church in silence. This time, Annie took the lead, pulling as far ahead of Hal as she dared. She didn’t want to lose him, didn’t want to be stranded alone in this terrible place, but neither did she want to look at him. He could have told her. He could have warned her. It would have been so easy to say “the monsters bring their kills to this churchyard, be aware of what you may see.” Or he could have told her to wait at the fence, calling her to join him only when he knew what she was going to find. There were so many things he could have done. He had chosen the sharpest, coldest of them.
He might not be a wendigo himself, but there was no question that he was already of their kind.
Annie and Hal moved through the graveyard like ghosts, peering into the open graves. Some of them contained bones, piles of them heaped in the bottoms of the holes, thrown together like there was no importance in what they had been in life. Annie shivered at the sight of a half-shattered skull, holes driven through the cranium like nails through a board. There was no question that they were tooth marks, and it terrified her to think that her little girl was out there somewhere with the monsters that had made those markings.
Other graves held scraps of cloth, faded remnants of older victims, ones so long gone that the smaller scavengers of the forest had carried away even their bones. There would be crows’ nests tucked in the high trees, built of teeth and hair and rib bones, like ghoulish testimonies to the cruelty of the Oregon woods.
They had traveled more than halfway around the exterior of the church when they came to the first occupied grave.
The boy it contained—and he was a boy, barely old enough for his whiskers to have started coming in, still years and miles away from his manhood—had been ripped open, his chest cracked and his belly sliced. One of his arms was missing, gnawed away, leaving only a bloody stump behind. The wendigo that killed him and dumped his body in the abandoned graveyard had been thoughtful enough to leave his face virtually untouched; Annie recognized him, her stomach twisting tighter and tighter, until it was wound so completely that she could no longer swallow.
“His name was Thomas,” she said, voice hollow and distant, even to her own ears. “He ran away with the circus five years ago, with his family’s permission, on his thirteenth birthday. He wanted to be a wainwright one day. He was apprenticed to the best of them. The last time my wagon broke an axle, he was the one who fixed it.”
She could still see him, bark-brown hair shining in the sun, eyes cast shyly downward when she came out to ask whether he wanted a drink of water. Everyone knew that he didn’t like to talk to women, be they his own age or older, for fear that they would expect him to carry his end of the conversation. He’d been possessed of a stutter since he was a child, severe enough that he’d learned some of the signs Adeline used, just to avoid the need for speaking. But he’d been a sweet boy, and smart as a whip, and he’d been carrying on a quiet affair with one of the boys who worked the trapeze.
What would Alonzo do now that Thomas was gone? Who would teach him to spell with his hands, or help him string the ropes for the big tent between shows?
No one died alone. Every death took a thousand potential lifetimes away, and consigned them to an unmarked, unsung grave.
“He was with the circus,” said Annie, and those five words were everything she had left to offer, and they were nothing at all; they could never have been enough. “We can’t leave him here.”
“We don’t have a choice,” said Hal. “The wendigo store their kills here, but there’s still meat on those bones. They’ll be back for it, when they get tired of hunting.”
“You mean when they get hungry again.”
“I don’t know what it’s going to take to get this through your head, girl: the wendigo are always hungry. They could eat the moon and be looking at the sun a second later, wondering what it would taste like. But they’re smart enough to know that sometimes they have to turn their back on a meal in the hand if they want to catch two more in the bush. So they store what they haven’t finished, and they go for more, and more, and more.”
Annie shuddered, straightening. “We have to hurry,” she said. “Adeline is out there somewhere.”
Hal said nothing.
They checked the rest of the graves before moving on; they were empty, each and every one. Wherever Adeline was, she was not here—not yet. Both of them knew that the girl’s time was short if she remained in the woods alone.
Annie still holding her lantern, Hal still holding his rifle, they walked out of the ghost town and back to the trail that would lead them out of the bowl. They climbed without looking back, Annie in the lead, Hal ready to steady her if she started to fall.
When they reached the top, they did look back, both of them. The shadows had already swept in, swallowing the town, until it seemed like they were looking into nothing but darkness, as deep and unfathomable as the sea.
“Will this place ever be laid to rest?” Annie asked.
“Someone may come along one day and burn it all to the ground,” said Hal. “Fire cleanses. Until that day … I don’t know that the people who died here will ever know peace. Come. We have to hurry.”
Annie nodded and followed him back into the woods.
Something rustled at the edge of the trees, something white-furred and terrible. Then it was gone, disappearing like it had never been there at all.