Of all the things he had ever disliked—and there had been plenty of ’em, from his parents to Sophia’s cornbread, which was made with more love and enthusiasm than skill or flavor—Martin thought that sitting alone in a tiny cabin in the middle of a forest filled with monsters was probably going to be top of the list for the rest of his life. That was almost pleasant, really. Nothing that happened to him after this was ever going to be quite as bad, short of whatever actually killed him. Even then, dying would probably be quick and easy and over with before he had time to really hate it. This, though …
He couldn’t say how long he’d been sitting there alone. It felt like hours. It probably hadn’t been. It had been long enough that he was just about sure the others were gone, climbing out of the bowl and heading off to find Adeline and Sophia. He surely hoped Annie would remember that it wasn’t just her daughter she was hunting for, that his lover and maybe his own child were also lost out there. He hoped Annie would bring Sophia home.
(The deep, dark, terrible part of him that had been truly listening when Hal spoke knew how vanishingly small the chances of that were, and how much smaller they were getting with every second that passed. Adeline had run off on her own. The wendigo might not even have her. She could just be lost, or down a hole, or trapped in one of Hal’s twice-damned bear traps, unable to call for help, what with her poor broken throat. But Sophia … he’d seen her carried away by something out of a nightmare, something his mind still refused to let him remember clearly, and if she was still alive, it was a miracle, and if she was dead, he could only hope that it had happened quickly. There was a third option now, according to Hal, a thing that wasn’t life and wasn’t death, and he prayed to God he never looked at a nightmare and saw Sophia’s eyes looking back.)
An owl hooted outside, soft and low, the sound carrying through the heavy walls. If the owls were coming back, that meant there wasn’t anything in the clearing, didn’t it? No monsters, no wendigo, just the forest and the night. Just Sophia out there somewhere, waiting for him to come and save her.
Cautiously, he tried to stand again. The scabs had begun to set over the wounds made by Hal’s bear trap, and no fresh blood ran down his leg. There was still pain, enough to make him hiss a long breath out between his teeth, but it was a bearable sort of agony. The trap’s teeth hadn’t bitten deep enough to hit bone or sever muscle. He’d gotten off lightly, if such a thing could be said about this sort of injury. There were bear traps that could take a man’s leg clean off, designed for grizzly and worse. This one …
If Hal were really hunting wendigo, wouldn’t he have set bigger traps? This one wouldn’t have done much more than slow a brown bear down and make it angry, and the things that had attacked the circus had been well bigger than a brown bear. One of those would have just pulled the trap off like it was nothing.
Maybe there were bears in these woods. Maybe there were other things for a man to be afraid of. Other things that would come with claws and teeth and hunger to devour a man living on his own, with no one to help him hold the dark at bay. Maybe it only made sense to set traps of different shapes and sizes, and Martin was borrowing trouble for nothing.
But Hal had been eager as all get-out to share his story, hadn’t he? At first he’d seemed like some sort of hermit, as ready to shoot them as look at them, and then he’d gotten a good look at Annie and he’d started sharing. He’d told them more than they’d asked at every turn. He’d told them how his story wasn’t so far off from theirs. He’d … he’d … Martin struggled to find the right word. He’d empathized, that was it. Hal had found all the reasons that their stories were the same, and he’d spread them out on the table like he was playing follow-the-lady with the townies.
Martin didn’t run any of the rigged card games himself. His hands were fast enough, and his tongue was slick enough, but he thought it was cheating, a bit, to take wide-eyed townies just looking for a bit of fun and use their own innocence against them, taking their money again and again just because they didn’t realize they were playing against a professional. Keep their eyes on the cards and their ears full of patter, and they’d never realize that this was a game they had no possible chance of winning.
Had Hal been playing follow-the-lady with them? Had he been painting the sort of picture he knew couldn’t be resisted by a frightened mother—a woman with no gun, with no reason to know how to defend herself, whose protector had been conveniently injured?
Martin stood again, testing his ankle. It held him up. The bindings were tight: he might already smell of blood, but he wouldn’t be leaving a trail behind himself as he walked. That would have to do. Suddenly, he wasn’t so comfortable with the idea that Annie was out there, alone with Hal. Monsters didn’t always come with claws and teeth and such. Sometimes they came with friendly faces, helping hands outstretched to grab and yank and shove.
“I’m coming, ma’am,” he said, and cast around the cabin, looking for something he could burn. There: a barrel next to the stove, filled with premade pine torches. Hal must have used them when he was hunting, or when he was trying to attract the wendigo. Martin pulled one out, studied the pitch-coated tip for a moment, and walked back to the fire, still testing his ankle.
There was no question now of whether he was going outside. He needed to. Once he’d started thinking about Hal, about why he had told them all those things about the wendigo, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Annie needed him. Sophia needed him. By extension, Adeline needed him, too, because what was going to happen to that little girl if something happened to her mother? Nothing good, that was what.
He thrust the end of the torch into the fire. The pitch caught with a crackling whoosh. It wouldn’t burn forever, but it would burn long enough to get him across the clearing, and after that, he’d be in the forest, where there was no end to things that he could potentially burn. Torch in one hand, rifle in the other, he walked to the door. It wasn’t locked. It opened easily.
Outside, the night seemed to have returned to a normal degree of darkness. The trees were spikes set against the starry sky, and the moon cast enough light that he figured he could see the ground well enough to avoid any traps, at least for a little while. If he got his leg caught again—or worse, if he got his other leg caught, his good leg—he’d probably die in the trap, unable to free himself before the smell of blood attracted something from out of the trees. That was a risk he was going to have to take. Turning his back on his troubles wasn’t going to make them go away.
Martin took a shaky breath, filling his lungs with the taste of pine and loam, and started across the clearing toward the trees. He thought he was going in the right direction. It was hard to know for sure: the curdled moonlight wasn’t bright enough to show him whether there were footprints to follow, and he didn’t dare lean down. Getting his torch too close to the layer of dead pine needles that covered the ground would end with him setting the whole damned clearing on fire, and while that might provide a bit more light, it would be a lot more likely to provide him with an unmarked grave.
He realized, maybe for the first time, that he didn’t want to die out here. He wanted to save Sophia, and he wanted to find Annie before Hal could do something terrible to her, but he didn’t want to die out here. Not in the woods. Not in Oregon. Martin had always considered himself something of a man without a country, a citizen of the circus rather than a citizen of America, or Deseret, or wherever else might have wanted to claim him; every place was his home, which meant that no place was his home. Where he lived, where he died, where his children were born, none of that mattered as long as the wagons kept rolling and the road kept on welcoming him back for more.
Only now he knew one thing about his citizenship: wherever it was rooted, it wasn’t here. This place was not for him, and he was not for it, and assuming he survived, he couldn’t think that Oregon would be sad to see him go.
Shuffling his feet in the needles as he walked, he kicked the chains attached to two more traps, but not the traps themselves. He briefly considered tracking them down and using fallen branches to trigger them, rendering them useless until they were reset. He decided it would be a waste of time. Hal might be what he claimed to be or he might be a villain: either way, he didn’t deserve the effort it would take to dismantle everything he’d made.
(And if he was a good man—if he was talking too much out of the pure relief of having someone to talk to—it wouldn’t be kind to leave him defenseless and thinking himself protected. There were some things that would be a march too far, if only because they would put Martin on the level of the man he feared Hal to be.)
Climbing the hillside was a lot harder than he remembered, probably because he was injured and alone, instead of hale and matching his steps to Annie’s. He tried to picture her beside him—or better, Sophia—and metered his stride accordingly, accounting for the phantom woman. It got a little easier after that. His ankle complained less, and the slope seemed less extreme. Soon he was standing at the top of the rise.
He looked back once, frowning down on the clearing where Hal’s cabin stood and fighting the urge to throw his torch behind him. Let the place burn. Let all of Oregon burn.
It was an uncharitable thought. He stopped cold, still frowning, but now frowning at himself. Thoughts like that weren’t normal for him. He’d lived his whole life by the charity of others. Hal might be good and might be bad, but if he hadn’t been willing to ruin Hal’s traps, why would he be willing to destroy his home? It didn’t make sense.
“This place gets in your head,” he muttered, and turned back toward the wood. The space between the trees was black and cold. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the trees had been waiting for him somehow, aware that he would come back to them if they just waited long enough.
Oregon was a cold place. He couldn’t imagine that anything growing here would be anything else. Shuddering, he started forward.
It was a little easier going with the torch than it had been with the lantern. The fire cast a brighter, more aggressive light, beating the shadows back enough for him to see where he was putting his feet. He still shuffled, wary of more traps. The last thing he wanted was to be caught here.
The ground remained placid under his feet. Nothing snapped closed on him; nothing tore his flesh or attacked. Martin continued walking, until the trees dropped away and he was stepping into a clearing.
It was hard to say whether this was the clearing he and Annie had fled across when the monster had followed them through the trees. If it was, there was a chance that he would find Tranquility’s body somewhere on the other side, broken and bloody, the only monument to the brave beast that had saved their lives. He didn’t think he wanted to. Annie would take no peace from the confirmation that her pet and companion had died to save them. It was better to let her hope that maybe Tranquility had survived and gone back to the wild, choosing a life lived in the growing green, far away from the concerns of humanity.
Martin, never a very religious man, crossed himself before setting out across the clearing. It might not be enough to keep the monsters away, but then again, it might help. Anything that might help was worth trying, here, in this cruel green world.
He had gone no more than halfway when something growled from the trees ahead of him.
It was a low, dangerous sound, and it sent a bolt of ice racing down his spine, freezing him on the spot. His torch still burned bright, and he realized with some dismay that he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t fire his rifle without putting the torch down. If he put the torch down, he might set the entire damn forest on fire, and himself still solidly in the middle of it all, with no clear hope of escaping. What was the point in getting off a shot if he burned immediately after? He wouldn’t save himself that way. He would only consign himself to an even more terrible demise. Better teeth and claws than fire.
Something else growled, this time off to the side. One by one, more voices chimed in, until he knew that he was surrounded. Dropping the torch and raising his rifle wouldn’t save him even long enough for the fire to have him: fell one of the growling beasts and the rest would converge, ripping him to pieces even before he could turn to run.
“Might as well come out,” he called. “No point in playing with me.”
I’m sorry, Sophia, he thought. I’m sorry I didn’t save you. I’m sorry I won’t get to marry you. I’m sorry I won’t get to see the baby. I’m sorry about just about everything. Never had a man gone to the grave more filled with cold regret for all the things he’d never had a chance to change.
The growling grew closer. It was definitely coming from all sides now, and from at least ten different throats, a choir of terrors singing to him out of the darkened woods. Martin tensed, his hands clenching tighter around torch and rifle. This was it. This was where he died.
Wolves padded out of the woods. No, not wolves: he had seen wolves before, and these weren’t them. Wolves were like big, wild-looking dogs. They were thick in the shoulders and long in the jaw, and they weren’t something that should be taken lightly—wolves were the monsters in half the fairy tales he knew for a reason, no question about that—but they were still close kin to the beasts that slept by the fire and farted without raising their heads. Wolves were to dogs as men were to apes. There was kinship there. These things …
They had the shape of wolves, roughly, with canine jaws and broad foreheads over amber eyes. They had tails like wolves and ears like wolves, currently swiveled back and pressed flat against their skulls, giving them the appearance of snakes preparing to strike. And he was sure that white wolves existed somewhere in the world, adapted to hunt in snowy climates. He just couldn’t imagine an entire pack of white wolves, especially not here, where they stood out against the trees like paper cutouts.
(Maybe that was why the shadows were so deep here. They had an agreement with these things that weren’t wolves, and they worked twice as hard as shadows should to keep them hidden, tying up the whole world in a fight that wouldn’t have existed if the wolves had just been sensibly brindle, gray, and brown, like they were everywhere else.)
They were too big to be wolves. The largest wolf he’d ever seen had been maybe half the size of one of these things, each of which looked to be as large as or larger than a full-grown man. There was something wrong with their paws. They almost looked like knuckled-under hands, nails curled against their palms, fingers bearing the bulk of their weight. Apes had hands like those. Wolves didn’t. Wolves walked on honest paws, and they were barely removed from being dogs, and they weren’t these things.
“What are you?” he breathed, too terrified to move—too terrified even to piss, although he thought that might change soon, given the weight in his bladder and the way it pressed against his trousers. The thought that one of them might get a face full of urine when it tried to take him down was soothing, but not enough to make him feel any better about his own impending demise.
The wolf-things stopped. One of them sniffed the air, ears swiveling forward again, so that they were pointed straight at him. The others looked to it as if they were waiting for guidance. Martin held himself very still, not wanting to do anything that might disrupt this inexplicable stay of execution. They were going to kill him one way or another. There was nothing wrong with wanting to put it off for as long as he possibly could.
The lead wolf-thing sniffed the air again before barking. The sound was short, sharp, and again, somehow wrong, like it was more the idea of what a wolf should sound like than the real thing. The others took a step backward.
Martin decided he didn’t care how wrong the one in control was, it was still going to be his favorite.
The lead wolf-thing turned and trotted away. Some of the others followed it. The rest resumed advancing toward Martin, closing the gap between him and them, until they were only a few feet away—close enough to leap, close enough to bring him down like a deer if that was what they wanted to do. Even with their numbers cut in half, there were still too many of them for him to shoot before his throat was on the ground, and so he stood very still, waiting to see what would happen next.
One of them walked forward, nudging the back of his knees with its nose. Even that soft impact was enough to knock him forward by a half-step, nearly losing his balance. The wolf-thing whined.
Martin looked back. They were watching him, and while he didn’t see anything he could read as friendliness in their pumpkin-colored eyes, he didn’t see malice, either. They watched him coldly, as wild things so often would, but they didn’t look as if they were preparing to make a meal of him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
The wolf-thing nudged him again, harder this time. The message was clear: go. They wanted him walking, and with them outnumbering him the way that they did, he couldn’t see a clear or easy way out of it.
“Should’ve stayed in the cabin,” he said, and turned, looking toward the edge of the wood, where the white bodies of the wolf-things that had gone ahead stood out against the dark trees like burning brands. They wanted him to follow. If he hadn’t been sure of that before, he was sure of it now: nothing waited like that unless it wanted a person to follow.
They might just want to kill him somewhere more convenient for them, some den or dark hollow where they wouldn’t have to fight the wendigo for his body. But in this green new land, where starvation could make monsters out of men in every sense of the word, who was to say that the cold hadn’t found a way to make men out of monsters?
“I’m going,” Martin said, and began to walk.
The wolf-things stayed close at his heels, nudging him with their muzzles or growling when he didn’t move fast enough. He didn’t look back, not wanting to see the teeth that their drawn-back lips revealed. He was a smart man. He knew full well that any one of the beasts could kill him in an instant if that was what they wanted to do. That didn’t mean he wanted to be reminded of how precarious his position was.
They walked back into the trees, the wolf-things herding him, keeping him from the need to search for traps on the needle-strewn ground. Even if they knew what the traps were, they wouldn’t be going too close to them with their prey, and he was already close enough to helpless that they didn’t need to incapacitate him; if there’d been any chance for him to run, it had come and gone while they were in that clearing. Better or worse, he was in this until the end.
It was easier to walk through the woods now that someone else was setting the direction; with the wolf-things guiding him, Martin could let his mind wander, drifting back to the good days with Sophia, the days after they had passed the early, uncomfortable parts of their courtship and settled into long afternoons lounging in fields behind the circus, their duties done for the day, with nothing left for them to worry about but each other. He remembered all the times he’d made Sophia laugh, all the times she’d smiled at him, run her fingers through his hair, held his hand. He’d never felt particularly handsome before he’d had her, but the way she could look at a man—hoo, the way she could look at a man had made him feel like the handsomest man in the world.
He would have called himself a boy before her, said that he was barely more than a stripling, not ready to claim a man’s duties or estate. Sophia had made him want to be a man, for her, and for the family they were going to make between them.
If all that was over, if Oregon had been the end of every good dream and the birth of a thousand bad ones, at least the good times had been there. At least he’d had her. For a little while, he’d had her, and she’d had him, and life had seemed so good. So much better than he’d ever hoped it would be.
The trees dropped away as they emerged into another clearing. His torch was burning down, but it was still bright enough to show him the mountain looming up in front of them, all granite crags and green moss. A cave had been worn into the face of it. More of the white wolf-things were gathered there, some lounging, others standing sentry. In the midst of them was something that was not a wolf-thing, although it was just as pale, just as impossible—
Martin dropped his torch. It landed on damp mud, narrowly missing a pile of pine needles, and burned nothing.
The pale-haired little girl in the dirty white dress rose from where she had been sitting among the wolf-things and ran to him. She stopped a few feet away, her bare toes digging into the earth, a bright smile on her face. She looked utterly relaxed, at peace with the world and with her place in it.
“Hello, Adeline,” said Martin.