Part 5: Finale
In the still quietness of morning, when the stirrings of mice, chitterings of insects and critters, and even the slow churn of the Earth were all muted under a blanket of cool dew, a languid drag across the forest floor could be heard. Aching knuckles, crusted with blood, wrapped themselves ever tightly around the aged wood furniture of a lever action rifle, swaying back and forth over Heston’s arrhythmic footsteps. The other hung lazily behind, clutching at the frayed and splintered end of a shorthandled pickaxe. His chest tweaked and stabbed more pain into his chest with every wheezing step. He wasn’t even cognisant of his own movement. His legs were like two machine pistons numbly pushing his body forward down the packed dirt trail. His eyes were barely open beyond minor slits as they detected the stabbing glints of the sun’s piercing brightness as they bounced from dew glazed bark. His feet, now clodding along in drunken steps, had nearly failed to register the transition from the untamed forest floor from the wiry brush to the beaten dirt path that he’d been searching all night for.
While Heston’s body worked in thoughtless autonomy, his mind was as though it was fortified within itself. Divorced from the world and lost in questions both plain and abstract. Heston wondered as he thought on the noiselessness of his left ear, the blood that once ran warm and fearsome down the side of his face, the jagged bones that now pinned the top of his trousers to the skin of his waist, now and again if he stepped too wide, the chips and splinters would grate inward against his hipbone. He traced the night backward as he trudged on retracing the last few hours as if they would flee screaming from his mind if he didn’t recount them, if he didn’t hold them tight and true.
He remembered the fire, how he ripped his pickaxe through the throat of one, shattered the knee of another before caving his head in with a heavy bindle of stone. He remembered the sick joy of setting a third aflame and jabbing his rifle into a fourth before putting two bullets into a shadow body as he howled at the moon. It was after he retook his pickaxe and set out into the morbid and treacherous misery that were these woods that he slowly pieced the rest together in his tired memory.
After he’d left the smouldering remnants of his little fire, engulfed in darkness, he could hear them scurrying around him. Stalking predators beneath the grim moonlight, undoubtedly wounded from losing four of their own in mere minutes, they waited on every side as Heston stomped heartily through the wood. Heston whistled a low note, chilling and ominous as he reflected fear back into his enemies. They would scurry and whisper, sometimes they would knock across the trees to be answered in replying knocks from somewhere farther out in the dark. Heston continued his march. Whispers turned to chesty grunts and growls, some sounding as if the person who made the noise was walking only feet behind him. He’d hear the throaty rumble of one to his left be immediately answered by a shrill cat-like screech from far on his right. A heavy thud just in front of him once got the response of a shrill cackle from above him, circling within the trees. They kept at this for hours. The night grew to feel endless as shadows moaned and squealed and coughed and screamed all around him. Undeterred, and absolute in his unwillingness to show any sign of the fear welling in his chest, Heston pressed on. He was determined to escape, determined to survive.
His foot slid at one point over what felt like smooth rock or maybe sand. Hopes of having found the road flooded his mind, even with the sounds of these devils around him, to know he was still going in the right direction made his heart feel lighter. He bent his knees in a slow squat, rested his pickaxe against the tree trunk and creeped his hand away to feel the ground. He winced in pain as he singed his fingers on a coal. He patted the ground in what felt like warm powder. He sniffed at the air and detected the brightest tinge of alcohol still burnt and bitter into the trees. Heston dropped his head in defeat. Hours of screams, moans, cackles, and knocks had led him back to the smoking ashpile of his fire.
As he raised his head he gritted his teeth, fighting to summon up what resolve could be left in his spirit. He could hear quickening foot beats behind him, approaching fast. On an instinctive whim Heston braced himself against a tree, listening to the footfalls grow louder as they approached, a shimmering glass sound swishing in waves to his opposite side. As he felt the running figure closing onto his position, he jutted the butt of his rifle into the air behind him. He caught the stomach of his attacker, knocking a wheezing moan from them as he shoved the rifle stock up and under the attackers ribcage doubling them over and onto the ground. Heston reset his rifle in his hands and drove the stock down again to stave in the skull of his enemy. As he raised the gun back up to his chest, flipping it over to place the bloody stock into his shoulder, heard a jingling swish through the air to his left, he wheeled his body around, but he was too slow. A stinging pain wrapped itself around Heston’s waist. Heston barked in pain as he felt a pinch like nails driving into his side and lower back. Heston cried out again when he felt it tug at him. Whatever had been latched into his side was all connected to a handle. Heston pictured in his mind the multi-tailed whip, peppered with broken glass and wood splinters that had now burrowed into his right side, pulling him over the still warm coals of his fire. He could feel blood slowly crawling down his side and pant leg as he took forced steps through the dark. He reached his right hand back in a desperate wave to grab his pick from the tree trunk and snatched it up, but he felt the clasp of another hand at the same time, pulling him in the opposite direction.
The whip tore itself from his hip, crackling and twisting as it went. Heston bellowed a sour mix of rage and pain. He turned behind him, still holding tight to the pickaxe. He set his right foot in the ground and raised his left to drive it hard in front of him, catching an unseen body in the sternum. He felt the jerk of his pickaxe as they fell before they released it back to him, but Heston didn’t have time to turn around when he felt the whip wrap itself around his head, burying the needle pricks of glass, bone, and splinter across his face and neck. He felt it pull again, a massive searing torque across his face as he felt his skin tear and his ear shred from his head. The scent of iron filled his nose as he felt the warm wave of blood wash down the side of his head. Heston dropped to his knees, his stomach lurching from pain as he fought back an urge to vomit. He heard scuffling in front of him. The figure he’d kicked was now regaining their footing. He raised his rifle off the ground, lifted his body up and straightened his back. He raised the gun out into the air and blindly fired into the night, answered by a shocked grunt followed by a thud in the leaves.
As Heston’s blood pulsed hard and hot over his neck and face, he could hear again the swishing jingle of the bone whip behind him, rearing up for another tear at his flesh. He ground his teeth hard in anticipation and shifted into a kneeling position, his left foot placed beneath him. Heston blew a stout huff as he sprung himself backwards to collide with the whipbearer. They both clattered to the forest floor with the whip shimmering away from its owner. Heston cast aside his rifle and pickaxe, climbing over the top of his attacker and wrenching a fistful of hair into his left hand as he pummeled with his right. After seven blows the body went limp beneath Heston, but he continued to crash his fist down into the crater that was once a face. When his lungs burned and his hand was numb with cracked knuckles marred with the shards of cheek bone, Heston finally relented.
He sat back onto his heels and raised a trembling hand up to his head feeling the spot his ear once was. He squeezed his eyes shut in a wince when he accidentally touched the piece of frayed skin at the side of his head. When they reopened he looked up at the sky. The first soft indigo lights flew across the forest canopy as Heston whispered a silent prayer to himself to push on until his body had at last stopped. He had killed seven of them. Seven of the monsters that had tormented him for days.
He slowly stood from the bludgeoned corpse beneath him, knees buckling and straining as he raised himself. He lazily grabbed the gun, tilted the broken pickaxe handle up and dragged it behind him as he slowly limped again through the forest.
Heston didn’t hear any more howling or knocking or cackling. No more scuffles in the shrouded brush as he forced himself along, the sun slowly illuminating the treetops over him. Time was no longer something Heston bothered to measure. He knew he wouldn’t make it out. He could only hear from one ear, could barely see through the blood crusted around his eyes. He had only grunted a low rumble to himself when he happened upon the dirt road. It was meaningless to have hope now, to measure anything other than defiant steps until his life had finally left him.
In the muted air of the dew blanketed morning, Heston dragged his pickaxe behind him, recounting the nights of horror, but as the sun streamed its first yellow spears through the tree branches, Heston’s heart once again jolted to panic. As he walked and dragged along the dirt road, unknown hours, unknown miles. He heard again that low and steady whistle. Heston stopped in his tracks Time to finish this off he thought as he pried his eyes wider. He heard calm footsteps approaching from the woods to his left. He slowly turned his head, grimacing in pain as he moved to see a cloaked figure emerge onto the road.
It stopped in the middle of the road ten feet ahead, towering over him and cloaked in a black fur draped across its frame. Atop its shoulders sat a human skull with four antlers reaching high like clamoring branches. Heston closed his eyes and agreed to accept what happened next. He neither had the strength to swing the pickaxe, nor aim the rifle. No speed left in his exhausted legs or fight in his shattered knuckles. He closed his eyes and slowed his breath, not knowing what anguish to expect as he heard the creature step toward. He could hear its heavy fur cloak sweep across the ground as it glided its way to him, he could feel it drawing nearer until he sensed it only inches away. Heston heard the soft chitter of a rattle before he felt the soft fur graze across either side of his face. Something cold and light had been placed around his neck. He waited. He waited for death to take him, but all he received was the slow retreating sound of the black cloak sweeping away and back into the forest.
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The sweet smell of sizzling bacon and eggs perfumed the air of the small trading town. Watson’s Spring it was called, and the work started early as feed bags moved on and off of trucks, pelts were counted and traded, cured meats were sold and packed to be shipped away to hunting grounds. It was a depot town at the edge of the northern frontier. It had barely grown enough to justify a small saloon and a monthly visit from a regional apothecary, but small as it was, Watson’s Spring was a vital resupply point for fur traders, miners, farmers and contractors. Life was quiet for the few families that had made a home of Watson’s Spring. Quiet, dull even, but pleasant in its routines. The trading post had no real need of a Sheriff throughout most of the year, but had elected one just as well to handle those seldom occasions where a drifting trader may make themselves a touch too comfortable in their quaint saloon. A small jail was erected for just such wayward wanderers to sleep off their mistakes before being allowed to leave town.
Sheriff Gerry Taylor had no formal history in law enforcement, but was seen as a wise and steady hand over the smattering of families and tradesfolk that called Watson’s Spring home. Sheriff Taylor sat at the desk of his office this morning, as he did most, enjoying a steaming cup of coffee and a puff of his briar pipe. On the table in front of him he had splayed out playing cards in a serene game of solitaire as the warm morning sun glowed through his window.
He dropped his cup of coffee, shattering it on the floor as he jumped in fright from a horrific scream outside. Sheriff Taylor burst through the door and leaped over the three steps of the porch of his office as the screams continued. Bloodcurdling shrieks in one breath after the other steeping the air in terror. It only took seconds for Sheriff Taylor to find a woman frozen in the street, her entire body seizing in horrified quakes, her eyes fixed on one direction.
“Hey! Whoa ma’am what’s the matter here?” Sheriff Taylor yelled as he jogged towards her. The woman didn’t answer save for ragged breaths as she raised a quivering hand and pointed down the northbound road. Sheriff Taylor twisted his neck to see what had scared the woman, and felt his own blood run cold at the sight.
Hobbling down the road towards him was a figure, six feet tall by Sheriff Taylor’s estimation, painted in blood red and splattered with mud. The figure looked like something that had crawled from hell itself as it lumbered towards the town. Its eyes were black, face torn to ribbons with a massive gouge in the side of its head and something shined from its neck. It carried a rifle in one hand, and drew a line in the dirt behind it with a broken pickaxe.
Sheriff Gerry moved his hand to his holster as he took slow, contemplative steps towards the thing. When he’d gotten within ten meters of it, he finally noticed this was a man clinging to life, wheezing his way into Watson’s Spring.
“S-Sir?” Sheriff Taylor squeaked. “What’s happened to you?”
“Help. . .Help me.” The man choked back. As the stranger moved closer, the Sheriff noticed that what shined from him was a necklace of teeth, bones, black feathers and gold. Pieces of rock and splinter were embedded in the man’s face and side, his right ear was completely missing, and his eyes, crusted with dried blood, were black as hell. “Help me please.” The man whispered as he drew ever closer to the sheriff, dropping is pickaxe and gun as he came near.
“Sir? Sir, what happened? Sir, what's your name?” The sheriff reached a hand out to steady the stranger as he came to arms length, grabbing him at the shoulder. The moment the Sheriff’s hand touched him the man recoiled, losing his balance on the way and toppling over onto the ground.
“Help! I need some help here!” Cried Sheriff Taylor as he tried to shake the man awake.
The woman who screamed in fear at the stranger was sitting in the street now sobbing into her hands while three others who’d risen to the commotion bustled to find the nearest thing to a doctor that Watson’s Spring had to offer. Within several minutes a litter was brought and the man was loaded up and taken to the bunkhouse, the Sheriff following at the litter’s side for every step.
