Night had fully embraced Interstate-90 as I crossed the threshold into the Badlands. The weather felt raw, truly raw for October. Snow, a ghostly dusting, coated the asphalt and the forlorn picnic tables of the deserted rest area. The scene was pristine, untouched, virginal as death itself. A silent Death Song played in the desolate air.
I steered the Chevy beneath one of the lamp posts that cast a lonely glow at either end of the parking lot. A metal building, its roof subtly slanted, hunkered low and sleek in the center island, most of its windows dark and vacant. Against the inky black backdrop, it struck me as a crypt, or perhaps a monument erected for the countless travelers and pioneers swallowed by the years. Placards, obscured by the deep shadows, might have declared warnings or whispered curses; they could have spoken volumes in any forgotten tongue. Reality itself felt pliable, yielding, tonight. Periodically, a semi-truck groaned along the freeway, its running lights mere pinpricks in the vast darkness. Other than that mechanical sigh, this could have been the surface of the Moon.
I released Minerva from the confines of the car and watched as she trotted cautiously around the perimeter of the sodium-lit circle. She lifted her grizzled snout, a low growl rumbling in her chest, directed at the immense void that surrounded, that seemed to emanate from us. Her paw prints in the fresh snow, and the sporadic, fleeting sparks of headlights on the distant road, were the sole declarations of life for miles in any direction. The snow fell thicker now, and even these faint signs would soon be erased, swallowed by the accumulating white. It felt like a return to a primordial ice age, the final curtain for our kind. A part of me, a strange, detached part, almost welcomed the idea that this could be the end, save for the unwavering presence of sweet, loyal Minerva, who had asked for none of this encroaching oblivion. And then there was my nature – my atavistic shadow – as ever, a belligerent, defiant force. My shadow possessed the kind of temperament that drives men to burden themselves with stones before leaping into the midnight blue depths, compels them to mix poison with pills, to trade a pistol bullet to the brain for the brutal intimacy of a shotgun barrel in the mouth, just to be absolutely certain of finality. My shadow cared nothing for odds, or eventualities, or pain, or even the certainty of death. It simply yearned to persist, to keep shining in its dark, twisted way.
So, Minerva marked her territory in the snow, and I began ticking off the seconds until the ultimate, inevitable showdown.
My ear throbbed with a relentless, dull ache tonight, crackling like a broken radio speaker and ringing with the familiar, unwelcome song of tinnitus. The sensation was akin to an auger relentlessly boring through membrane and flesh. My back and knee joined in the chorus of complaint, throbbing in unison. I had lost the ear to a virus, a souvenir from a bout of pneumonia contracted in Alaska during a long-ago Iditarod race. The spine and knee were casualties of a reckless fall off a cliff into the unforgiving Bering Sea, an incident that left just about every bone in my body fractured or shattered. Resilience had always been my dubious gift, and I had recovered enough to limp through the wasted years of youth, to feign a hale and hearty demeanor for the benefit of the world. But that carefully constructed façade was surely crumbling now, at the precipice of the miserable slide into middle age. All those forgotten or ignored wounds, blooming in a spectral chorus of pain, constant reminders of long-standing debts, whispering the grim truth that a man cannot always outrun his own provenance. Sometimes, it outpaces him.
I glanced at my watch, the numbers blurring in my fatigued vision. I hadn’t slept properly in far too long, or I never would have pulled over in this godforsaken no-man’s-land between Bumfuck, Egypt, and Timbuktu. Since passive suicide by exhaustion was off the table, this stop was likely an expression of stubbornness, pure and simple. Grim defiance against the encroaching darkness, or perhaps a desperate, fleeting need to reassert my faith in the logical, predictable operations of the universe, if only for a fleeting moment.
What a cruel joke, faith. What a hollow sham, logic.
Then, carried on the frigid wind, a hunting horn sounded, far out there in the profound darkness beyond the humps, swales, and treeless drumlins that stretched onward, seemingly forever, past the vast, hungry prairies that had swallowed countless wagon trains whole.
Oh, yes. The horn of the Hunt.
Not simply a horn, but one that could easily be conjured as the hollowed relic from a monstrous, perverted ram, its muzzle flecked with blood-tinged foam, hellfire gleaming in its eyes. A ram that crunched Saxon bones for breakfast and brandished a phallus the girth of a wagon axle; the kind of brute to which desperate tribes sacrificed infants when crops failed, and to which they mated unfortunate maidens when the chieftain required potent juju on the eve of war. Its horn was the sort of artifact that stood on end in a petrified coil and would demand the strength of a brawny Viking raider, or perhaps a demon, to even lift.
That mournful wail, echoing across the frozen landscape, made the hair on the back of my neck stand rigid, slapped me fully awake. It rolled towards the desolate parking lot, swelling like some medieval air raid klaxon. Snowflakes no longer melted on my cheeks because all the heat – all the blood – had retreated inward, pooling around my heart. That erstwhile, fragile faith in the natural universe, the rational order of reality, wouldn’t be troubling me again anytime soon. Nope.
I whistled sharply for Minerva, and she leaped back into the truck, taking her usual position riding shotgun. Her hackles were raised in a bristling ridge along her spine. She barked, a furious, terrified sound, directed at the encroaching night. Sleep, oh blessed sleep, how desperately I longed for thee. But there was no time for such luxuries. We had to get moving, to flee. The Devil himself would be arriving soon.
Years ago, during my brief, ill-fated career racing sled dogs for a living, I knew a fellow named Steven Graham, a disgraced literature professor exiled from the hallowed halls of the University of Colorado. He’d been unceremoniously shit-canned for reasons that remained opaque to my blue-collar sensibilities – something vaguely to do with prioritizing contemporary zombie stories over the revered works of the Russian masters. His past was shrouded in a deliberate mystery, and like so many others seeking to shed their skin, he’d fled to the untamed wilderness of Alaska to reinvent himself.
Nobody on the racing circuit cared much about any of that academic baggage. Graham was undeniably charming and charismatic in spades. He could drink and swear with the best of us, yet he was just as likely to get three sheets to the wind and launch into a recitation of Beowulf in guttural Olde English. He possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of husky bloodlines, tracing them back to the legendary Balto and beyond. Strap a pair of snowshoes to that lanky greenhorn bastard, and he’d leave even the most hardened backcountry trapper choking in his proverbial dust. The women adored him, and the ever-present cameras seemed to follow his every move. Like Cummings so succinctly put it, he was a hell of a handsome man.
Too good to be true, of course.
Steven Graham was claimed by the Hunt while running the grueling 1992 Iditarod. That legendary, punishing winter event where men and women harness teams of huskies to sleds and race twelve hundred unforgiving miles across the frozen expanse of Alaska, from Anchorage to Nome. There’s not much to romanticize about it – it’s an exercise in endurance, isolation, and sheer grit. You’re perpetually traversing a frozen swamp, battling your way up an ice-choked river, or trudging over a seemingly endless mountain range. It’s a landscape of perpetual darkness and biting cold, largely devoid of sound or movement save for the ragged rhythm of your own breath and the muted panting of the huskies, the constant jingle and clink of their harnesses.
Official records, sanitized and palatable for public consumption, state that Graham, the young ex-professor and dilettante adventurer, took a fatal wrong turn out on Norton Sound, somewhere between Koyuk and Elim, and plunged through the treacherous ice into the frigid sea. Ka-sploosh. No trace of him, or of his team of dogs, was ever recovered. The Lieutenant Governor himself attended the somber, well-publicized funeral. CNN even covered it live, a brief moment of arctic tragedy interrupting the relentless news cycle.
The official report was, of course, carefully crafted bullshit. I saw what truly happened out there on the ice. And because I witnessed the unvarnished reality – because I foolishly meddled in the affairs of the Hunt – there would be a hellish price to pay.
Broad daylight, or what passed for it in the arctic expanse, maybe an hour before sunset, mid-March of 1992.
All twelve dogs in my harness trotted along with a steady, rhythmic gait. The finish line in Nome, the promise of warmth and rest, was a mere two days away. The race itself hadn’t gone particularly well; I was resigned to a middle-of-the-pack finish and the prospect of a long, destitute summer spent begging corporate sponsors not to drop my underperforming ass from their rosters. But damn, what a breathtakingly gorgeous day in the arctic wilderness: the pristine snowpack curving around me in a seamless, unbroken expanse to the distant horizon, the sky frozen in a palette of ethereal apple-green and steely blue, the incandescent orange orb of the sun slowly dipping below the curvature of the Earth. The visual effect was something lifted directly from the animated frames of Fantasia. After days of inadequate, snatched sleep, I was lulled into a near-trance by the gentle hiss of the sled runners gliding across the snow, the rhythmic scrape and slap of dog paws against the frozen surface. I drifted, dozed at the handlebars, my mind wandering to Sharon, the longed-for warmth of our home, the simple luxury of a cup of real coffee, a scalding hot shower, and the enveloping comfort of the down comforter on our bed.
As my team passed through a narrow gap in a mile-long pressure ridge, a chaotic upheaval that had thrust the Bering ice into an eight-foot-tall parapet, the Hunt had cornered and taken down Graham on the other side, maybe twenty yards off the main, marked trail. I stumbled upon this gruesome tableau when one of Graham’s huskies, a spectral figure in the stark white landscape, loped unsteadily towards me, free of its traces yet still dragging its harness. The poor creature’s head had been brutally severed at mid-neck, a clean, horrifying cut, and it zig-zagged drunkenly for several strides before collapsing in a heap on the pristine snow of the trail. You might expect my own dogs to have spooked, panicked at the sight of such carnage. Instead, something primal, atavistic, a switch flipped deep within their doggy brains, and they surged forward with renewed vigor, yapping and howling, eager to join in whatever feeding frenzy lay ahead.
Several yards to my right, so much blood had been spilled onto the snow that for a disoriented moment, I genuinely believed I was hallucinating a sunset, a crimson tide dripping onto the frozen expanse of ice. The scene was utterly disorienting, my brain locking down, spinning uselessly in place, struggling to process the sheer, brutal carnage.
The killing ground was a fucking abattoir, a scene of unimaginable butchery, as if a mass walrus slaughter had been inexplicably committed on that very spot. Dead huskies were scattered haphazardly, flung about like discarded toys, their intestines looped grotesquely over ice berms and piled in loose, steaming coils. Graham himself lay spread-eagled across a blue-white slab of ice, repurposed as an impromptu, chillingly appropriate sacrificial altar. He had been split wide open, his eyes staring blankly at the indifferent arctic sky.
The Huntsman, the architect of this horror, had already begun the gruesome work of skinning Graham, tacking his hide alongside the mutilated carcass, much like one stretches the pelt of a beaver or a bear. Clad in a traditional deerstalker hat surmounted by a grotesque rack of antlers, a blood-drenched mackinaw coat, coarse canvas breeches, and crude sealskin boots, the Huntsman stood taller than most men, even as he hunched over his gruesome task, meticulously slicing at Graham’s flesh with a large, wickedly sharp knife fashioned from flint or obsidian – I wasn’t quite close enough, thankfully, to discern which.
Meanwhile, the Huntsman’s wolf pack, the hounds of hell, ranged amongst the butchered huskies, scavenging the scraps. These wolves were unnaturally black, gaunt as cadavers, their narrow eyes glinting with an unnatural light, reflecting the snow, the mutable, indifferent heavens. When several of them reared up on their hind legs to study me, their gaze unsettlingly intelligent, I realized with a chilling certainty that they weren’t wolves at all. Some wore fragments of ancient, moldering leather and tattered caps adorned with splintered nubs of horn; others were grotesquely garbed in the decaying remnants of military fatigues and camouflage jackets of various styles, gore encrusted and seemingly ingrown to the creatures’ very hides. They grinned at me, a chilling, predatory display, and their mouths were… disturbingly, impossibly wide.
There was nothing remotely brave in what I did next, or at least in what I feebly attempted to do. My befuddled intellect was still struggling to process the sheer, unadulterated carnage when I instinctively sank the hook of the sled into the snow and tethered the team, leaving them baying and frantic in the middle of the trail. I wasn’t consciously thinking of a damned thing as I walked, stiff-legged and numb, towards the Hunt and the ongoing, horrific evisceration of my comrade. Most mushers, seasoned veterans of the trail, carried firearms as essential equipment. There were always the unpredictable moose to contend with, and frankly, a gun is just basic, pragmatic equipment in that unforgiving wilderness. We toted rifles or pistols as casually as folks in the lower forty-eight carry cell phones and wallets. Mine was a reliable .357 revolver, tucked securely inside my anorak to prevent the cylinder from freezing into a solid, useless lump. The revolver was suddenly in my numb hand, and it bucked twice in rapid succession. I don’t consciously recall the booms, the sharp reports echoing across the frozen wasteland. No sound registered in my shock-numbed brain, only the flash of fire, the recoil against my palm. The closest pair of dog-men, the wolf-creatures, flipped over backward, collapsing onto the blood-soaked snow, and a small, detached part of my mind registered a sliver of grim satisfaction that at least the fuckers could be hurt, that they weren’t invulnerable. It wasn’t like the legends, or the fantastical tropes of the movies; no mythical silver bullets required. Ordinary lead worked just fine.
The Huntsman whirled around, alerted by the gunfire, just as I was nearly upon him, and Jesus help me, I glimpsed his face, truly saw it for a fleeting, horrifying instant. That brief, soul-searing glimpse is likely the reason my hair inexplicably turned stark white that year, seemingly overnight. I squeezed the trigger three more times, emptying the cylinder of the revolver, and even as the bullets impacted him, impacting something, I had the overwhelming sense of shooting into an abyss – absolute, soul-draining futility. The Huntsman swayed, momentarily staggered, but remained standing, his humungous, gore-slicked knife still raised menacingly. The blade was flint, I confirmed in that instant, a primal weapon in the hands of an ancient terror.
The worst, most sickening part was, Graham blinked, his lifeless eyes flickering with a spark of impossible awareness, and he looked directly at me, recognizing me. And I distinctly saw his flayed hand twitch, a grotesque, involuntary movement. How he could possibly be alive, or even aware, in that utterly ravaged condition was no more or less fantastical than anything else I’d witnessed in those horrific moments, I suppose. Even so, even now, I still experience a wave of nauseous dread churning in my gut whenever I recall that single, horrifying image.
Apparently, the capricious gods of the frozen north had witnessed enough, had deemed the spectacle complete. A sudden, violent wind roared around us, a deafening crescendo, and everything dissolved into blinding, swirling white. And then, just as abruptly, I was alone. Hurricane-force gusts slammed into me, knocking me off my feet, and I barely managed to crawl back to the frantically baying team, almost missed them entirely in the whiteout conditions, in fact. Visibility was reduced to maybe six feet, an impenetrable curtain of snow. Easily, so easily, I could have kept blindly stumbling forward into the featureless maelstrom until I found the unseen lip at the edge of a bottomless gulf of open water and joined Graham in whatever unholy realm he had been dragged to.
That sudden, ferocious storm pinned the dogs and me to Norton Sound for three agonizing days. Sustained gusts of seventy knots. Wind chill in excess of negative one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. You wouldn’t truly understand how profoundly, agonizingly cold that is. I certainly can’t adequately describe it. It’s akin to trying to explain the incomprehensible distance of Alpha Centauri from Earth in simple highway miles. The human brain simply isn’t equipped to grasp such extremes. The brutal cold irrevocably froze my right hand and foot. Froze my face so that it hardened into a black and blue mask, a grotesque parody of life. Froze my dick, for Christ’s sake. Miraculously, I didn’t lose anything vital, but man, there are few agonies in this world equal to the excruciating, drawn-out thawing of a frostbitten extremity.
Against all odds, I actually managed to limp across the finish line in Nome. But in the torturous aftermath of physical therapy and relentless counseling sessions, the horrific memory of what I’d witnessed out there on the ice was inexplicably wiped clean from my conscious mind, with the casual, effortless efficacy of a child tipping an Etch A Sketch and giving it a shake. Seven or eight years agonizingly passed before the unspeakable event clawed its way back into my waking consciousness, back to haunt my dreams, and by then it was far too late to say anything, too late to be certain whether it had actually happened, or if I’d simply succumbed to the crushing isolation and gone irrevocably round the bend.
Snow drifted across both lanes of the interstate, and the relentless wind buffeted the aging Chevy, and goddamn it all, but I was reliving that soul-crushing blizzard of ‘92, the arctic nightmare clinging to me like a shroud. The fuel gauge needle dipped ominously into the red zone, yet I stubbornly drove on for another half hour, creeping along cautiously in four-wheel hi. Radio reception was abysmal, and I’d reluctantly settled for a static-filled broadcast of 80s rock, a nostalgic, unwelcome soundtrack to my descent. Hall & Oates, The Police, a block of insipid Sade and the inexplicably enduring Blue Oyster Cult, all that saccharine music our parents had vehemently hated when we were mindlessly bopping along in our youthful mullets.
“Godzilla” crackled in and out during the iconic drum solo, and then, inexplicably, a distorted, guttural animal growl, utterly unrelated to heavy metal, issued from the speakers. My own name, snarled over and over, punctuated by the rhythmic swish of the windshield wipers.
A truck stop, a beacon of flickering neon in the oppressive darkness, glittered faintly on the horizon of the next off ramp. Utterly exhausted, emotionally frazzled, profoundly pissed off, and genuinely afraid, I pulled alongside the brightly lit pumps and filled the tank with precious fuel. Then, I hooked Minerva to a sturdy leash and brought her inside the relative warmth and fluorescent glare of the truck stop diner with me. She curled up obediently at my boots while I consumed a quart of truly awful coffee and attacked a New York steak, ordered with all the greasy, cholesterol-laden trimmings. The weary waitress didn’t even bat an eye at my bringing a pit bull to the table. Maybe the stoic folks in Dakota were simply accustomed to such unconventional companions. Didn’t really matter; I possessed the small, laminated card that officially certified Minerva as a service dog, of vital importance should I experience an “episode” of debilitating depression or unhinged mania.
Depression had been a relentless shadow haunting me since my forced retirement from mushing, and a well-meaning friend who worked as a counselor at the University of Anchorage had suggested that I adopt a shelter puppy and train it as a companion animal, a furry anchor in my turbulent emotional seas. The local police had recently busted a brutal dog-fighting ring, and one of the rescued females was pregnant, so Sharon and I had eventually picked Minerva from a litter of eleven squirming pups. A decade later, after my carefully constructed world had burned to the ground – my career reduced to ashes, my wife gone, friends dwindling and few – Minerva remained steadfastly by my side, a furry, loyal sentinel in the face of encroaching darkness. A man and his dog versus the Outer Dark itself.
I absently patted her head as we exited the diner door, wishing with a profound ache that I possessed even a fraction of her canine equanimity in the face of the vast, unknowable unknown that lay ahead.
The diner was doing brisk business despite the late hour and the worsening weather. Two burly truckers in matching company jumpsuits occupied the booth next to mine, but most of the customers were clustered at the counter, their eyes glued to the flickering weather reports on the muted television screen. The reports offered nothing heartening, no respite from the encroaching storm. The blizzard would undoubtedly delay my already precarious journey by at least half a day, possibly more. My fervent, desperate hope was that I could somehow bull through the heart of it and emerge into clear skies by the time I crossed into Wyoming tomorrow. I also offered a silent, fervent prayer that the aging pickup truck would somehow hold together, mechanically at least, all the way to Lamprey Isle, New York, my intended destination at the far end of this increasingly surreal yellow brick road. My desperate plan was to reach the secluded home of an old friend, the eminent crime novelist, Jack Fort. Jack also happened to be a retired English professor, a man steeped in arcane knowledge and literary lore. Jack had claimed, with an unsettling certainty, that he could help. I harbored deep, gnawing doubts. The pack and its relentless leader were eternal, primordial, unstoppable. A man might manage to wound a few, sure, but in the end, they simply reformed, regrouped, and relentlessly continued their pursuit. The Devil’s own smoke demons, forever on the hunt.
Be that as it may, I’d made the grim, defiant decision to go down swinging, and that translated into a hell-bent-for-leather ride eastward, towards whatever uncertain future awaited. Currently, my immediate worries centered on the rapidly deteriorating weather and the increasingly unreliable equipment. The arduous drive from Alaska via the Alcan Highway had been brutally rough on the aging Chevy, and I strongly suspected the engine was on the verge of giving up the ghost entirely. I could readily apply the same grim prognosis to my own faltering heart, my teetering sanity, my rapidly diminishing luck.
Sure enough, as if summoned by my darkest premonitions, Minerva suddenly snarled, a low, guttural warning, and bolted from her secure spot beneath the table. She crouched beside me, her entire body trembling violently. A string of frothy foam dribbled from her taut jaw, and her usually calm, intelligent eyes bulged with primal fear.
Graham strolled into the brightly lit diner, taller, somehow healthier, and unsettlingly happier than I remembered him from our shared Alaskan days. Death, it seemed, agreed with certain people, granting them a perverse vibrancy. He loomed in hyper-realistic Technicolor while the mundane reality of the diner seemed to leach of color, fading into a drab monochrome around him. Snowflakes, incongruously, feathered his long black hair, and the harsh fluorescent lights struck it at precisely the right angle, so he appeared almost angelic, a fallen angel perhaps, a movie star pausing dramatically for his inevitable close-up. In his right hand, he casually carried the distinctive ivory hunting horn (undeniably a ram’s horn, albeit considerably more modest in size than its terrifying report); in his left, he nonchalantly twirled a faded cowboy hat with a crimson and black patch emblazoned on the crown. He wore the Huntsman’s unmistakable iceberg-white mackinaw, the ceremonial flint knife tucked securely into his belt, the bone handle jutting out in a disturbingly phallic statement. He ambled over to my booth and slid in across from me, his movements fluid and unnervingly graceful. I noticed his crude sealskin boots left faint maroon smears on the linoleum tiles. I also distinctly noticed puffs of steam escaping our mouths as the booth inexplicably cooled, the air temperature plummeting as if we had suddenly been sealed inside a walk-in meat locker.
Instinctively, I cocked the hammer of the .357 revolver and braced it discreetly across my thigh, hidden beneath the tablecloth. “You must not be heralding the great zombie invasion. Lookin’ great, Steve. Not chalk white or anything. The rot must be strictly on the inside.”
He casually flipped his long black hair back over his shoulder and smirked, a familiar, unsettlingly charming expression. His macabre trophy necklace, a gruesome collection of wedding rings, tarnished key fobs, dog tags, driver licenses, and milky glass eyes, clinked and rattled softly with the movement. “Likewise, amigo. You’ve lost weight? Dyed your hair? What?”
“This and that – diet, exercise. Fleeing in abject terror has the unexpected bonus effect of getting a man back in shape. Divorce, too, surprisingly effective. My wife used to fatten me up pretty good. Since she split… you know. TV dinners and copious amounts of Johnnie Walker. I got it going on, huh?” I gripped Minerva’s collar tightly with my free hand, reassuring myself of her solid, comforting presence. Her low growls were deepening, becoming increasingly ferocious. She strained against the leash, desperate to lunge over the table, an eighty-pound bowling ball of rippling muscle and bone-crushing jaws, currently radiating pure, unadulterated bad intentions. My arm was already tiring from the strain. Tempting, so tempting, to simply release my girl and let her fly, but I loved her too damn much to unleash her into this nightmare.
“I’m yanking your chain, pal. You look like absolute crap. When’s the last time you actually slept? There’s a motel a piece up the trail. Why not get yourself a room, order some overpriced room service, watch a cheesy porno, drink yourself into oblivion, and fall into a peaceful, dreamless slumber? You won’t even notice when I quietly slip in there and slice your fucking throat ear to ear.” Graham’s unnervingly charming smile widened, revealing those perfect, predatory teeth. It was still him, undeniably, recognizably him. The same guy I’d drunkenly shared stories and laughter with in smoky Nome saloons. Same perfect teeth, same easy, disarming manner, seemingly sincere in his chillingly casual malevolence. He’d not even subtly intimated any personal malice regarding his stated intent to skin me alive and devour my still-beating heart. This was simply business, mostly. He inclined his head slightly, as if intercepting my unspoken thought. “Not so much business as tradition, really. The Hunt is a sacred rite, after all. I generously gave you a twenty-year head start as a courtesy.”
He was telling the chilling truth, as I understood it from my obsessive, terrified research into the arcane legends. To witness the Hunt, to foolishly interfere with the Hunt, was to irrevocably become the prey. I’d often wondered, in the intervening years, why the emissaries of the Horned One had waited so agonizingly long to come after me, especially considering the sheer magnitude of my transgression that day on the ice. “Well, I reckon that was sporting of you. Twenty years is a generous head start. Plenty of time for Odysseus to screw his meandering way home from the Trojan War front.”
“Yep, and you’re almost there, too,” Graham said, his voice laced with a chillingly jovial tone. “Crazy ass scene on the ice back then, huh? Sergio Leone meets John Landis, and they do it up right with razor blades and butchered huskies. Man, you were totally Eastwood out there, six-gun blazing. Wounded the Huntsman in a seriously impressive way. Didn’t kill the fucker, though. Don’t flatter yourself on that particular score. You might be able to smoke the hounds with regular bullets, sure. But that shit just doesn’t work so well on the Huntsman himself. We’re of a slightly… higher order of being. Nah, when that sudden storm hit, some kind of raw, primal force went surging through me, electrified me to my very core. I tore free of that makeshift altar and impulsively jumped on the bastard’s back, instinctively stuck a hunting knife right into his kidney. Still wouldn’t have worked, wouldn’t have been enough, except the capricious forces of darkness were apparently smiling on me that day. Grooved on my style, maybe. The Boss promptly demoted him, awarded me the mantle, the blade, the hounds, more screaming bitches in Hell than you can shake a stick at. I’ve been watching you for a while now, bro. Watching you systematically lose your woman, your career, your health, your very will to live. You’re an old, grizzled bull, worn down by life. No money, no family to speak of, no friends left worth mentioning, no discernible future. It’s culling time, baby.”
“Shit, you’re actually doing me a favor then! Thanks, pal! I appreciate it more than you know.”
“Come on, don’t be so sarcastic. We’re still buds, right? This is going to be undeniably super-duper painful, granted, but there’s absolutely no reason to make it personal. Your pathetic hide will be but one more carelessly tossed atop a mountainous pile beside a chthonic lagoon of congealed blood and the Horned One’s grotesque bone throne. The endless muster roll of the damned is, well, endless, and the next name on the list eagerly awaits my… attentions.”
“Okay, nothing personal, duly noted. Here’s a counter-offer deal for you, Steve, since I’m the one currently armed with the hand cannon here. You just hold perfectly still for a moment, and I’ll blow your goddamn head clean off your shoulders. Take my admittedly slim chances with whomever they decide to send next. No hard feelings, right?” I silently debated whether to attempt to shoot him point-blank under the relative concealment of the table or risk raising the gun into a proper aiming position, exposing my intentions to the entire diner.
Graham threw back his head and laughed, a chillingly mirthless sound that echoed through the suddenly silent diner. “Whoa, chief. This really isn’t the appropriate venue for this kind of… performance. All these hapless, innocent customers, the perpetually overworked dishwasher, the weary waitress, the fry cooks sweating over their greasy grills. That undeniably sexy waitress over there. If we suddenly turn this mundane truck stop diner into the goddamn O-K Corral, the Boss himself will be personally on the case before you can blink. And trust me, the Horned One isn’t exactly known for his kindly, forgiving soul. If he actually personally comes around, everybody in this place, yourself included, unequivocally gets it in the neck. Them’s the rules, I’m afraid.”
A horrifying, visceral vision splashed unbidden across the sudden home cinema of my terrified imagination: every single person in the diner, patrons and staff alike, strung grotesquely from the exposed rafters by their still-living guts, the slavering hounds of the Hunt using the dangling corpses for demonic piñatas, and the massive, shadowy bulk of the Horned God himself flickering with infernal fire in the parking lot outside as he gazed upon the carnage with undisguised, infernal joy. Like as not, this graphic, unwelcome image was deliberately projected into my mind by Graham himself, a subtle psychological intimidation tactic. I nervously glanced out the window, my gaze drawn to the shadowy figures flitting in the periphery, and spotted one of the pack, a cadaverous brute draped in a threadbare parka and snow-stained pants, casually pissing against the icy tire of a semi-truck. In another, tragically mundane life, he might have been Bukowski or Waits, or perhaps a forgotten serial killer who rode the rails and shanked fellow hobos in darkened boxcars, a strangler of vulnerable college coeds, a disgruntled postal worker driven to madness. I knew him, recognized him for a fleeting, terrifying second, and then just as quickly, I didn’t. Other hounds, spectral and swift, leaped effortlessly from trailer to trailer, frolicking in the snow-dusted darkness. Too dark to discern precise details, except that the figures moved with an unsettling, fluid grace, flitting and fluttering with the lithe, rubbery agility of seasoned acrobats.
I said, my voice barely a hoarse whisper, “Tell me something honestly, Steve. What would have actually happened to you if I hadn’t foolishly interrupted your little party out there on the ice all those years ago? Where would you be tonight, if not here, across from me?”
He shrugged, a gesture of indifferent dismissal, and his movie star teeth suddenly dulled, fading to a disturbing shade of rotten ivory. “Ah, those are precisely the sort of existential questions I actively try to let lie, amigo. The Boss explicitly frowns on us lowly minions worrying our limited intellects about stuff that’s demonstrably above our meager pay grade.”
“Would you have… become a hound?” The chilling question hung in the suddenly frigid air between us.
“Sometimes a particularly damned soul gets… dragged over to join the ranks of the Hunt itself. Only the select few, the proud, the truly wicked. It’s actually considered a rare and dubious honor in certain circles.”
A cold, visceral clamp tightened on the back of my neck, sending a shiver of premonition down my spine. “And the rest of the unfortunate slobs who get taken by the Hunt? Where do they ultimately go after you’re finished… processing them?”
“Not a goddamn clue, amigo. Truly and ineffable mystery, even to me.” His predatory grin brightened again, unsettlingly white, disturbingly frigid. He deliberately put on the faded cowboy hat, settling it jauntily on his head. The logo, a crudely stitched red patch with a set of stark black antlers prominently displayed in the foreground, was now clearly visible. The unmistakable sign of the Horned God, Graham’s new, infernal master on the Other Side.
Minerva’s low snarls and guttural growls abruptly escalated to full-throated barks, a furious canine crescendo, as she bristled and lunged against the leash, desperate to attack. She’d apparently had her fill of Mr. Death and his unsettling shark smirk. One of the remaining truckers, his earlier bravado seemingly evaporated, tentatively set down his half-empty coffee cup, pointed a thick, trembling finger directly at me, and said in a shaky voice, “Hey, asshole. Shut that goddamn dog up before I call the cops.”
Graham’s eyes went suddenly dark, depthless, like twin monitors tuned to the cold, uncaring void of deep space. A spreading stain, dark and viscous, ominously formed on the pristine breast of his lily-white mackinaw. Blood, undeniably blood, dripped steadily from his sleeve, and the unmistakable, nauseating stink of carrion, of slowly decaying flesh, wafted from his open mouth. He slowly rose from the booth, his movements now subtly distorted, and turned to face the hapless trucker, his shoulders seeming to broaden, to expand unnaturally as he moved. I caught his distorted profile reflected in the diner window, and something was fundamentally, disturbingly wrong with it, although I couldn’t quite articulate what exactly. He spoke, his voice now a distorted, buzzing rasp, utterly devoid of human warmth, “No, you shut your mouth, you ignorant mortal. Or I’ll personally eat your pathetic tongue like a greasy piece of Teriyaki.”
The trucker paled visibly, his face draining of color, and scrambled abruptly from his seat, fleeing the diner without uttering another word. His equally terrified buddy followed suit, hot on his heels. Neither of them bothered to grab their coats or pay the tab or anything remotely practical. Other patrons, sensing the palpable shift in atmosphere, had twisted in their seats to view the sudden commotion, their initial curiosity quickly morphing into open-mouthed fear. None of them spoke, not a single word. The weary waitress, her ticket book now clutched defensively outthrust like a makeshift crucifix, stood frozen behind the counter, her face ashen.
Graham turned back to them, his distorted features momentarily softening, almost… reassuring. “Hush now, folks. Nothing to see here. Just a minor… misunderstanding.” And everyone, without exception, took the chilling hint and nervously went back to their lukewarm coffee and congealed plates of eggs. He nodded curtly and faced me again, the familiar, disarming smile somehow re-affixed to his unnaturally pale features, his eyes almost, but not quite, normal again. “I better get along now, li’l doggie. Just wanted to stop by and say a quick hi. So, hi and goodbye, for now at least. Gonna keep trucking east, are we? Wait, forget I asked. Don’t want to spoil all the fun of the chase. See you soon, wherever that inevitably is.” Yeah, he grinned, but the wintry night outside suddenly felt like a considerably warmer, more welcoming place.
“Wait,” I blurted out, a desperate, last-minute thought. “You mentioned rules earlier. Might be nice to actually know what they are, for future… reference.”
“Sure, there are indeed lots and lots of intricate rules, amigo. However, you personally only really need to worry about mastering one of them, at this point in the game: run, motherfucker, run like your very soul depends on it.”
I never fully recovered from the horrific incident on Norton Sound back in ‘92; not down deep, not in the way that truly counts, in the quiet chambers of my soul. Nightmares, vivid and relentless, plagued my sleep, oblique, fragmented horror-show recreations of the arctic carnage, as seen through the deliberately obfuscating mist of a subconscious in perpetual denial. Neither me nor the succession of well-meaning shrinks could make any coherent sense of them. They put me on a rotating carousel of prescription pills, and that didn’t help to meaningfully alleviate the encroaching darkness, not in any lasting or significant way.
I sold the remaining sled dog team to a wealthy Japanese millionaire, a transaction that felt like selling off a part of my own soul, and moved to the sterile, predictable suburbs of Anchorage with Sharon, my then-wife. I drifted through a series of crummy, soul-numbing labor jobs, and desperately worked on the Great American horror novel in the stolen hours of the evenings, a flickering candle in the encroaching gloom. Sharon, ever pragmatic, finally finished grad school and landed a stable position teaching elementary grade art, a world away from my descent into darkness. Ever fascinated with lurid pulp classics, when the novel stubbornly refused to coalesce into anything resembling coherence, I tentatively tried my hand at genre short fiction, and immediately, inexplicably, landed a few small sales. By the early aughts, I was actually doing well enough, financially at least, to justify quitting the backbreaking construction gig and staying home to work on my increasingly bleak and unsettling stories full-time.
These were predominantly supernatural horror stories, fueled by the persistent, inexplicable nightmares I still didn’t remotely understand, until it all came crashing down around me one innocuous afternoon during a casual game of winter golf with some equally lost and adrift buddies down at the frozen beach. I inexplicably keeled over on the icy sand, my breath ragged, and was momentarily, terrifyingly transported back to that blood-soaked killing ground on Norton Sound, while my concerned friends stood awkwardly around me, wringing their helpless hands. Normal folks, bless them, simply don’t know what to do when confronted with a lunatic writhing on the frozen ground and babbling incoherently in gibberish tongues.
A week of enforced confinement on the living room couch, wrapped in a constantly overheating electric blanket and shaking with uncontrollable, primal terror, immediately followed. I didn’t level with anyone, not honestly, not truly – not the increasingly frustrated shrink, not Sharon or my concerned parents, not my dwindling circle of friends or writer colleagues. I stumbled across a scholarly piece on the Wild Hunt in a dense, academic article concerning world mythology and comparative folklore, and it felt like getting brutally socked in the gut, winded and disoriented. I finally, with a chilling certainty, knew exactly what had happened to me out there on the ice, if not precisely why. All that remained was to brood, to obsess, to descend further into the encroaching darkness.
Life, in its relentlessly mundane way, went stubbornly on, regardless of my internal turmoil. We tried, half-heartedly, for children, without any discernible success. I have a nagging, unsubstantiated hunch Sharon eventually left me because I was, in some fundamental way, shooting blanks, both literally and figuratively. Who the fuck really knows, though? Much like the enigmatic nature of the Wild Hunt itself, the elusive Meaning of Life, and the infuriatingly persistent mystery of where matching socks vanish to in the laundry, her true motivations remained stubbornly shrouded in mystery. Things had always seemed superficially cozy, comfortable, between us; she’d always been patiently sympathetic to my myriad tics and twitches, and I’d genuinely tried to be a good and loving husband in return, in my own flawed, damaged way. Obviously, living with a perpetually half-crazed horror author took a far greater emotional toll than I’d ever estimated, than either of us had consciously acknowledged. Add the increasingly frequent screams in the night and my generally paranoid, unsettling behavior to the already strained equation…
Then, one bleak, unremarkable day, she simply came home early from school, calmly packed her bags with practiced efficiency, and abruptly headed for Italy with a smooth-talking music teacher from her school, a man with a perpetually vacant smile and disturbingly perfect teeth. Not a single, solitary tear in her unblinking eye when she uttered a perfunctory “adios” to me at the front door, either. That same soul-crushing week, my longtime literary agent, a lewd, crude, chain-smoking alcoholic expat Brit named Stanley Jones, was unexpectedly indicted on numerous federal charges including embezzlement, wire fraud, and, almost comically, illegal alien residence. He and his equally obscure and morally bankrupt lover, the marginally published English horror writer Samson Marks, absconded to sunny Mexico with my rapidly dwindling life savings, as well as the meticulously hoarded nest eggs of several other equally trusting authors. The tawdry scandal made all the industry trade rags for a fleeting week, but the jaded cops didn’t seem overly concerned with actively chasing the absconded duo across international borders.
I had become increasingly dependent on those increasingly meager royalty checks to keep my head above water, especially as my own physical condition was steadily deteriorating with the relentless march of time and accumulated injuries. Cold weather, even the relatively mild Alaskan winters, made my bones ache with a deep, persistent throb. Some mornings, my lower lumbar seized up completely, and it took a torturous twenty minutes of agonizing contortions to simply crawl painfully out of bed. I stubbornly hung on for a couple of increasingly lean years, but my precarious financial situation continued to relentlessly decline. The publishing climate, never exactly sunny, was particularly unfriendly during the ongoing recession and the general societal shift away from printed books. Foreclosure notices, stark and impersonal, soon began arriving with depressing regularity in the overflowing mailbox.
Then, last week, as if things couldn’t possibly get any worse, Graham inexplicably reappeared, a spectral harbinger of doom, to put my already profound misery into some sort of cosmic perspective.
Prior to this latter, undeniably supernatural event, Jack Fort, ever the pragmatic voice of cynical reason, theorized that Sharon hadn’t simply run off to Italy on a whim because she was suddenly, inexplicably dissatisfied with the mundane trajectory of our shared life. Nor was it merely a coincidental misfortune that Stanley Jones had so thoroughly robbed me blind and left me teetering on the precipice of the poorhouse. (Jack, I later learned, had also unwisely employed the same morally bankrupt crook as his literary agent, and from what I could gather, the substantial loss of funds had significantly contributed to his own messy, acrimonious divorce.) My increasingly paranoid friend had become convinced that genuinely dark, malevolent forces had somehow deliberately aligned against me, targeting me specifically in both matters of grand cosmic significance and the mundane, petty annoyances of daily life.
Later, after Graham’s spectral reappearance, I finally confided in Jack, spilling the entire, unbelievable story of the Hunt and what I’d actually witnessed out there on the ice in 1992, how that particular long-dormant chicken had finally, inevitably come home to roost, pecking at my increasingly fragile sanity. He wasn’t the least bit surprised by my outlandish tale. Unflappable Jack Fort; the original drink-boiling-water-and-piss-ice-cubes guy, as unflappable as they came.
The night I finally called him, seeking some semblance of rational advice in the encroaching madness, we were both, predictably, already drunk, and when I haltingly spilled the unbelievable story of how Graham had inexplicably returned from the icy grave and now apparently wanted to mount my head on a grotesque trophy room wall in hell, instead of expressing any discernible bewilderment or outright fear for my rapidly deteriorating sanity, Jack had just calmly said, “Right. Yeah, that actually sounds about right. I figured it was probably something vaguely like this. From grad school onward, Graham was always inevitably headed for serious trouble, pure and simple. He was always asshole buddies with precisely the wrong type of people, the kind who dabble in things best left undisturbed. Occultism is absolutely nothing to casually fuck with, believe me. Anyway, you’re absolutely sure it’s definitively the Wild Hunt pursuing you?”
“Graham explicitly referred to himself as the Huntsman, Jack. So, yeah, I’m pretty damn sure. And it all happened almost exactly like the arcane legends describe. Granted, there are always minor variations on the core, terrifying theme. Each culture inevitably has its own peculiar nuances and so naturally focuses on slightly different aspects of the overarching mythos. Some versions of the Hunt mythology, for example, prominently feature Odin calling the tune, leading the frenzied chase. Under Odin’s capricious yoke, the Hunt is portrayed as a chaotic expression of raw exuberance and feral joy, a primal, unrestrained celebration of the untamed forces of nature. Odin’s spectral pack is often described as traveling a couple of feet off the cold ground, a terrifying aerial procession. Any unfortunate fool who unwisely stands directly in their path inevitably gets mowed down like so much insignificant grass. See Odin and his spectral horde coming, you’re supposed to instinctively grab a handful of dirt and pray fervently that the terrifying procession passes harmlessly overhead and keeps relentlessly moving on in pursuit of its designated quarry.
The spectral gang from Alaska, however, seemed demonstrably darker, infinitely crueler, undeniably dirtier than the somewhat romanticized storybook versions I’d obsessively researched; Graham and his gruesome troops reeked of a palpable sadism and a soul-chilling madness that seemed to leach from them, infecting me, gathering in an effluvial dankness in the back of my throat, lying heavily on my tongue like a foul, lingering taint. But the important, terrifying details were nonetheless consistently present – slavering, otherworldly hounds, a feral, unstoppable Huntsman, a shadowy, malevolent horned deity overseeing the entire chaotic chase, inevitable death and eternal damnation for the designated prey.
Jack asked for more specific details, and I reluctantly gave him the abbreviated scoop: “I was hiking alone along Hatcher Pass, attempting to photograph the majestic mountain peaks for some half-hearted research for a new story idea. Heard a god-awful racket echoing from a nearby canyon. Unearthly howling, genuinely psycho laughter, bloodcurdling screams. Some kind of ancient, echoing Viking horn. I instinctively knew what was happening, Jack, knew it with a chilling certainty deep in my bones, even before I actually saw the spectral pack cresting the distant summit. The arcane legends, of course, inevitably vary in the peripheral details. Still, the terrifying basics are undeniably clear whether you’re reading the ancient Norse, German, or Inuit versions of the grim tale. The spectral pack wasn’t in full chase mode at that particular moment, thankfully, or that would have undoubtedly been curtains for me right there on the frozen mountainside. They merely wanted to scare me, to toy with their prey a bit; makes the eventual kill, I suppose, all the more deliciously sweeter for them. Anyway, I immediately beat feet, Jack, ran like hell. Somehow managed to make it back to the relative safety of the truck and burned rubber all the way back to the house. Graham showed up at my front door later that same night in a greasy, sulfurous puff of smoke, casually chatted with me through the peephole. He politely informed me that I had precisely three days to get my pathetic shit in some semblance of order, and then he and his spectral boys would be coming after me for real, no more playful games, no more empty threats.”
Jack remained uncharacteristically quiet for a long, pregnant pause, save for a horrible, phlegmy cough that rattled deep within his chest – it sounded disturbingly wet and entrenched, like advanced bronchitis or rapidly progressing pneumonia. Finally, he slowly said, his voice rough and gravelly, “Well, listen, head east, kid. Get your ass out here to Lamprey Isle. I might actually be able to help you, believe it or not. Graham and me knew each other pretty damn well once upon a time, back when he was still teaching, and I’ve actually got some vague ideas about what he was really up to after he inexplicably left Boulder and vanished into the frozen north. He always presented himself as a restless adventurer, sure, but I personally seriously doubt he actually spent all that time up there in the frozen wilderness just for the fleeting thrill of dog sled racing. Nah, my gut instinct tells me he was actively searching for the legendary Wild Hunt, and it tragically, inevitably, found him first. Poor, foolish, silly bastard.”
“Thanks, man. Although, I genuinely hate to bring this unholy mess to your doorstep, Jack. Interfere in the affairs of the Hunt, and it’s undoubtedly you who ends up on the spectral skinning board next, not me.”
“Shut up, kid. You just tend to your own goddamn knitting, and I’ll personally see to mine, alright?”
Big Jack Fort’s oddly nonchalant reaction to my impending doom should have startled me, and under slightly different, less dire circumstances, I might have actually paused to ponder just how deep the tentacles of this particular unholy conspiracy actually went. His unsolicited advice, however, pragmatically appealed to my increasingly desperate situation. Sure, the malevolent Huntsman undoubtedly wanted me to take to my heels, to flee eastward in abject terror; the prolonged, desperate chase, I surmised, probably gave him a supernatural boner. Nonetheless, I’d decidedly rather present a constantly moving target than passively hang around my empty, increasingly haunted house, pathetically waiting to get abruptly snuffed on the toilet or in my restless sleep. Graham’s flayed, eviscerated body, glistening obscenely in the arctic twilight, was indelibly branded into my psyche, a constant, unwelcome reminder of my precarious mortality.
“You better step lively, kid,” Jack warned me, his voice even more gravelly than usual, that instantly recognizable voice of his that always sounded exactly the same whether he was stone-cold sober or three sheets to the wind. A physically imposing dude, built like a brick shithouse, square and solid, the unlikely offspring of Raymond Burr and a grand piano. Likely he was currently sprawled out across his worn leather couch in a stained tee shirt and faded boxers, a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark clutched loosely in one massive paw. “Got some serious complications on my end, kid. Can’t really talk about them right now, not over the phone. Just haul your sorry ass eastward and get yourself out here to Lamprey Isle as fast as humanly possible.”
I genuinely didn’t like the ominous sound of that vaguely worded warning, nor the persistent, rattling sound of his increasingly labored coughing. Despite his well-documented weakness for fine Kentucky bourbon, Jack had always been, without a doubt, one of the more reliably stable guys in my increasingly unstable professional orbit. However, he was undeniably a bit older than me, and currently playing the unenviable role of a recently estranged husband, a role that was clearly taking a heavy emotional toll. Then there was the messy crap with Stanley Jones and the generally dismal state of dwindling book sales in a rapidly changing literary landscape. I nervously thought maybe Jack was finally, inexplicably cracking under the accumulated pressure. I fearfully thought maybe we were both irrevocably cracking, teetering on the very edge of sanity.
Later that same night, fueled by cheap whiskey and adrenaline, I hastily loaded the aging truck with a bare minimum of essentials, including my dog-eared wedding album and a haphazard handful of dog-eared paperbacks I’d inexplicably acquired at various long-forgotten literary conventions. I methodically locked up the empty house, a final, lingering look back at a life that was no longer recognizably mine, and then lit the hell out of there, tires squealing in protest.
In the rearview mirror, as I sped away into the encroaching darkness, I distinctly saw Graham and three of his spectral hounds silhouetted against the snow-dusted garage roof, their pinprick eyes blazing an unnerving crimson red in the inky darkness. It was, as the increasingly jaded kids succinctly say these days, game on.
Rocketing mindlessly through the featureless flatness of Indiana, “Slippery People” incongruously blaring from the aging radio, darkness all around, and an even deeper, more profound darkness inexplicably growing inside me. The cheap radio suddenly crackled with static interference, and the Talking Heads abruptly faded out, replaced by Graham’s unnervingly familiar voice, as clear and distinct as if he were riding shotgun in the passenger seat, “Everybody on the lam from the relentless Hunt inevitably feels profoundly sorry for himself, amigo. Thing of it is, you’re currently tuned to precisely the wrong goddamn tune, kid. You should really be asking yourself a much more pertinent question, How in the hell did I actually get here, to this godforsaken pass? What have I done in my miserable life to deserve this?”
The spectral pack, unnervingly swift and silent, raced effortlessly alongside the aging truck, keeping perfect pace despite the speedometer needle steadily creeping past ninety. Hounds and master shimmered faintly like distant starlight against the velvet backdrop of the endless night, twisted and shifted like ephemeral funnels of smoke in the frigid wind. The Huntsman casually blew me a mocking, dismissive kiss, and I instinctively tromped down harder on the accelerator, the engine groaning in protest, and they momentarily fell off the breakneck pace, fading back into the darkness. One of the gaunt hounds, however, inexplicably leaped the embankment rail and loped after me with renewed, unnerving vigor, its spectral snout pressed firmly to the painted centerline of the highway. It darted fleetingly into the deep shadows along the shoulder of the road an instant before being overtaken and grotesquely smooshed by the relentless, uncaring wheels of an oncoming tractor trailer, its spectral form dissolving into a fleeting wisp of smoke.
I stubbornly pushed myself beyond the readily definable limits of mere exhaustion, forcing myself well into the surreal, disorienting realm of near-total zombification. The endless highway, stretching out ahead into the darkness, had somehow morphed into a disorienting wormhole between dimensions, and Graham inexplicably whispered to me intermittently through the cheap radio even though I had consciously hit the kill switch hours ago, plunging the dashboard into blessed silence. And what he’d chillingly said to me earlier in the desolate truck stop diner really started to work on me, gnawing at the edges of my already frayed sanity. What, indeed, had I actually done in my wasted life to come to this sorry pass? Maybe Sharon had indeed left me because I was, at my core, a fundamentally selfish sonofabitch. Maybe Stanley Jones screwing me over financially was simply inevitable karma, the universe belatedly settling some long-standing karmic score. The relentless Wild Hunt itself might even be a perverse case of the universe coldly, impersonally getting Even-Steven (pardon the morbid pun) with me, finally collecting on some long-forgotten debt. Thank the indifferent gods that I didn’t actually have a bottle of readily accessible liquor handy in the cab of the truck, or else I undoubtedly would have spent the remainder of the interminably long night completely blitzed and pathetically sobbing like a helpless baby over a litany of misdeeds, both real and imagined, both petty and profound. Instead, fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, I frantically popped the plastic cap on a fresh bottle of NoDoz and stubbornly put the metaphorical hammer down, pushing eastward into the encroaching darkness.
I nervously parked and actually slept, fitfully at best, once in a deserted roadside turnout for a couple of stolen hours during the middle of the following day, carefully choosing a location where traffic ran thickest, a thin shield against the encroaching darkness. I risked no more than that precious stolen time. The Hunt, I desperately hoped, still adhered to its own vaguely defined rules regarding the overt taking of designated prey in front of too many inconvenient witnesses, but I honestly didn’t possess the necessary balls, or even the lingering will to live, to actively challenge those arcane traditions, not at this late stage of the increasingly surreal game.
The aging Chevy finally, predictably, died a wheezing, mechanical death just outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, as if on cue, its metal soul finally giving up the ghost. Every gauge on the dashboard abruptly went crazy, needles spinning wildly, and ominous plumes of scalding steam violently boiled from beneath the battered hood, escaping the ruptured radiator. I glumly got the dying rig towed to a sprawling salvage yard, a vehicular graveyard, and reluctantly transferred Minerva and my meager, increasingly pathetic belongings to a generic compact rental car, another soulless metal box. We were back on the increasingly surreal road before breakfast, and late the following afternoon found us grudgingly aboard the aging ferry from Port Sanger, New York, to Lamprey Isle, a whispered promise of temporary refuge in the face of the encroaching storm.
What to actually say about LI West (as Jack dismissively referred to it in his cryptic phone call)? Nineteen miles north to south and roughly half that at its widest point, the whole island curved into a vaguely recognizable malformed crescent, the Man in the Moon’s familiar visage inexplicably peeled from Luna and then carelessly, partially submerged in the cold, uncaring Atlantic. Its rocky shore was relentlessly sculpted by the endless clash of wind and ceaseless sea; a dense, primordial forest of gnarled pine, aging maple, and sturdy oak stubbornly spanned the island’s interior. A refuge for solitary hoot owls and skittish red squirrels; reputedly good deer hunting along the network of secret, winding trails, or so I’d vaguely heard. Ancient Native burial mounds and vaguely mysterious megaliths inexplicably dotted the brooding landscape, or so the local legends whispered.
The island’s main population center, the quaintly named Lamprey Township (official population: 2201 souls), nestled somewhat precariously in a sheltered cove on the southwestern tip of the island, clinging to the rugged coastline. Jack had vaguely mentioned in his cryptic message that the isolated town had been established as a hardscrabble fishing village sometime in the early nineteenth century; prior to that, local lore darkly hinted, opportunistic smugglers and ruthless slavers had reputedly utilized the remote island as a convenient, largely lawless refuge from both prying privateers and increasingly persistent local authorities. A reputed den of illicit gambling and unspeakable sodomy, or so the more lurid local legends whispered in hushed tones. Allegedly, the island’s unsettling name arose from a particularly vicious, bloodthirsty species of parasitic eels that infested the murky local waters. Long as a man’s arm, the locals still claimed with a shudder, their voices hushed with a lingering unease.
Lamprey Township was a perpetually fog-shrouded settlement, hemmed in precariously by the sheltered cove and treacherous spearhead shoals, a silent picket of brooding evergreens forever watching from the high ground. A gloomy, cathedral-like fortress, reputedly a long-abandoned lighthouse, ominously reared atop a sheer cliff face streaked with generations of seagull shit and ominously pocked by dark, gaping cave entrances. Lovers Leap, a local sign ominously proclaimed. In town, everyone instinctively wore practical flannel and well-worn rain slickers, sturdy boots and simple sock caps, utilitarian clothing for a hardscrabble life. A practical folding knife and a reliable mackinaw seemed to be essential elements of the local uniform. Everything was perpetually coated in a fine layer of gritty salt rime, everything tasted faintly of brine and impending storms. Piloting the rented compact car slowly down the town’s deserted Main Street between weathered boardwalks, the dimly lit compartment of the car flushed with soft blue-red lights reflecting off the churning ocean, I inexplicably thought this wouldn’t actually be such a bad, desolate place to finally die. To simply release my increasingly weary essential salts back into the primordial cradle of the indifferent sea.
Jack’s secluded cabin lay further inland, at the far, isolated end of a rutted dirt spur. Built in the same vaguely defined era as the initial founding of Lamprey Township, he’d inexplicably bought the aging property from Katarina Veniti, a locally infamous paranormal romance author who had apparently become thoroughly jaded with all of the relentless tourists and invading yuppies inexplicably moving onto “her” once-private island during the last deep recession. A sturdy stone and timber longhouse with weathered, ye old-fashioned shingles and a thick carpet of moss stubbornly clinging to the aging roof, the cabin was haphazardly surrounded by a largely overgrown acre of sloping yard, choked with tall, dead grass swaying in the restless wind. A massive oak tree had inexplicably uprooted during a recent, particularly violent windstorm and toppled directly across the narrow, rutted driveway, blocking vehicular access.
Minerva and I reluctantly hoofed it the final quarter of a mile, the tires of the rental car spitting gravel as I parked haphazardly at the base of the drive. The faceless moon, partially obscured by scudding clouds, dripped and shone intermittently through the restless branches. The secluded house sat in near-total darkness, save for a single, welcoming light shining faintly from the kitchen window, a fragile beacon in the encroaching gloom.
“Welcome to Kat’s island, kid,” Jack said, his voice a low, rasping whisper, punctuated by a wet, hacking cough. He reclined in the shadows of the porch swing, a spectral figure in the encroaching darkness. Moonlight glinted faintly from the familiar bottle clutched loosely in his trembling hand, the cold, metallic barrel of a pump-action shotgun resting casually across his bony knees. He wore a heavy wool coat, a worn dock-worker’s cap pulled snugly down over his graying brow, thick wool pants, and sturdy, practical lace-up hiking boots. When he laboriously stood to shakily shake my outstretched hand, his grip surprisingly firm despite his apparent frailty, I immediately realized with a jolt of genuine shock just how dramatically his physical condition had deteriorated in the intervening years. His clothes hung loosely on his frame, flapping in the restless wind like tattered sails, and he was undeniably frail and alarmingly shaky. He appeared more of a spectral apparition than the bona fide spirit relentlessly pursuing me across the continent. I finally understood, with a chilling certainty, why he didn’t seem to particularly mind the unwelcome idea of the Wild Hunt imminently invading his happy home. The poor man was so alarmingly emaciated he should have been hanging near the dusty blackboard in a forgotten high school science class; a hundred pounds lighter since I’d last seen him, easy, his frame reduced to skin and bones. He’d inexplicably shaved his head and beard down to a sparse gray stubble; his pallid flesh was disturbingly dry and unnaturally hot to the touch, and his feverish eyes sparkled with an unsettling intensity, like scattered bits of quartz catching the faint moonlight. He inexplicably stank of gun oil and stale cigarette smoke and overripe, rotting fruit, a disturbing, incongruous combination of scents.
“Jesus, Jack, man,” I said, genuinely shaken at the gaunt, spectral sight of him. He appeared more of an apparition than the actual bona fide spirit pursuing me relentlessly across the frozen landscape. I finally fully understood why he didn’t seem to mind the unwelcome idea of the Wild Hunt imminently invading his happy home. The man was so profoundly emaciated he should have been hanging near the dusty blackboard in a forgotten high school science class; a hundred pounds lighter since I’d last seen him, easy. He’d inexplicably shaved his head and beard down to a sparse gray stubble; his pallid flesh was disturbingly dry and unnaturally hot to the touch, and his feverish eyes sparkled with an unsettling intensity, like scattered bits of quartz catching the faint moonlight. He inexplicably stank of gun oil and stale cigarette smoke and overripe, rotting fruit, a disturbing, incongruous combination of scents.
“Yeah, kid. The big C. Doc hit me with the bad news this past spring. Deathwatch around Fort’s increasingly desolate homestead. I reluctantly sent the remaining pets to live with my sister out on the mainland, didn’t want them to witness my slow decline.” He managed a weak smile and gestured vaguely at the encroaching woods surrounding the cabin. “Just you, me, and the restless trees for company now. I got absolutely nothing demonstrably better to do with my dwindling time than help an old pal out in his decidedly dark hour of inevitable need.” He led the way stiffly inside. The dimly lit kitchen was surprisingly cheerily illuminated, and we instinctively took up residence at the sturdy dining table where he generously poured me a much-needed glass of strong whiskey and patiently listened to my increasingly surreal recap of the desperate, cross-country trip from Alaska.
“I sincerely hope you’ve actually got some sort of coherent plan, Jack,” I said, my voice hoarse with exhaustion and lingering dread.
“Besides blasting those spectral bastards with grandma’s trusty twelve gauge?” He patted the worn wooden stock of his shotgun where it lay casually on the table, a meager reassurance in the face of the encroaching darkness. “We’re going out like a pair of goddamn Vikings, kid, if we’re actually going out at all.”
“I’d be demonstrably more excited by that vaguely comforting prospect if you actually had a functional flamethrower handy, or at least a crate of frag grenades.”
“Me too, kid. Me fucking too. I do actually have a few dusty sticks of ancient dynamite stashed away in the cellar for some long-forgotten fishing expedition, and thankfully, plenty of double-aught buckshot for the shotgun.”
“Dynamite is demonstrably good, Jack. This is actually going to be full-on Hollywood then, right? Fast cars, scantily clad women, gratuitous explosions…”
“Man, I honestly don’t even know if the goddamn dynamite will reliably detonate at this late date. The potentially unstable shit’s been haphazardly stashed in a leaky cardboard box in the damp cellar for approximately a hundred years now, kid. Honestly, my increasingly grim estimation is, we’re demonstrably hosed. Totally up shit creek without a reliable paddle. Our sole, tenuous advantage is that the designated prey in these particular supernatural scenarios doesn’t usually actively fight back, not in any meaningful way. Graham’s undeniably powerful now, I’ll grant you that, he’s a genuine spirit of the hunt, or a malevolent monster, whatever arcane designation you personally prefer. But he’s still relatively new on the job, right? That may be our sole, flickering ray of sunshine in this encroaching darkness. That, and according to my admittedly limited research of the increasingly arcane literature, the spectral Pack doesn’t particularly fancy, or even possess the inherent ability, to actively cross large bodies of open, salt water. These inherently terrestrial haunts demonstrably prefer frozen ice and windswept snow to choppy waves and open ocean.” Jack abruptly coughed into a crumpled handkerchief, a deep, belly-ripping, Doc Holliday kind of cough that rattled his frail frame. He wiped his mouth with a shaky hand and took a long, fortifying belt of strong whiskey straight from the bottle. His gaunt cheeks were now visibly blotched with feverish red. “Anyway, I also brought you out here to this godforsaken island for another, equally compelling reason, kid. This aging house demonstrably belonged to a genuine sorcerer once upon a dark time, or so the local legends whisper. The precise type they used to gleefully burn at the proverbial stake in the town square. An undeniably unsavory guy named Ewers Welloc, a name still whispered with a lingering unease in Lamprey Township. The Welloc family still inexplicably own most of this desolate island, even now, and there’s a genuinely dark and unsettling story in that local history, I assure you. For now, let me just cryptically say that Ewers Welloc was demonstrably the blackest sheep in a demonstrably black family of inherently wicked black sheep. The superstitious villagers, even generations later, were still genuinely scared shitless of him, genuinely convinced he actively practiced unspeakable necromancy and other demonstrably dark arts right here on this very property. Considering the increasingly disturbing stories Kat inexplicably told me about this place, and some of the genuinely funky, unholy stuff I’ve personally found inexplicably stashed around here since I moved in, it’s becoming increasingly hard to casually dismiss the villagers’ persistent claims as mere superstitious local folklore.”
I could only nervously wonder what exactly he’d mysteriously unearthed in the shadows of this increasingly unsettling place, or what Kat had inexplicably discovered before him. Jack had inexplicably bought the aging property for a mere dollar, a suspiciously low price, and suddenly that seemingly insignificant factoid assumed a decidedly ominous significance in the encroaching darkness. “What were you guys actually up to back then, Jack? You, Kat, and Graham all inexplicably attended college together, right? Did you guys secretly form some sort of clandestine club back in your misspent youth?”
“A clandestine witch coven, kid. I kid, I obviously kid. Wasn’t actually college, not technically… We all actually met, believe it or not, at the vaguely prestigious Sugar Tree Hill writers’ retreat, back in the relatively carefree early nineties. Five surreal days of fleeting sunshine, cheap booze, and surprisingly plentiful hand jobs, believe it or not. There were actually quite a few genuinely young and promising authors inexplicably there who actually went on to become marginally quasi-prominent in the increasingly niche genre of horror fiction. Many a fleeting friendship and lingering professional enmity are demonstrably formed in the fleeting crucible of Sugar Tree Hill, kid. The three of us, inexplicably, really demonstrably clicked, right from the start. Me and Kat were undeniably wild back then, kid, genuinely wild. Nothing demonstrably on Graham’s increasingly disturbing scale, though, not in retrospect. He demonstrably took it demonstrably way farther than either of us ever demonstrably dared to, as you can demonstrably see, in retrospect.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice barely a hoarse whisper. I nervously sipped my increasingly potent drink, the raw whiskey burning a welcome path down my parched throat.
“Me and Graham were actually pretty demonstrably tight back then, kid, genuinely close friends, until he inexplicably schlepped off to the frozen wilderness of Alaska and inexplicably started in with the whole dog sled racing thing. Communication demonstrably tapered off precipitously after that, and after a relatively short while we just demonstrably fell completely out of touch. I sporadically received a few cryptic letters from him over the intervening years, sure. The guy inexplicably had the world’s shittiest penmanship, though; would’ve demonstrably taken a trained cryptologist to have actually deciphered most of the increasingly illegible missives. I honestly just vaguely thought he’d simply succumbed to a bad case of cabin fever up there in the frozen wilderness.”
“Seemed demonstrably okay to me back then,” I said, my voice still hoarse. “Gregarious, outgoing, demonstrably popular, undeniably handsome in a brooding, Byronic way. He was demonstrably well-regarded by pretty much everyone.”
“Yeah, yeah… The rot was demonstrably always on the inside, kid,” Jack said, his voice distant and distracted, and I almost inexplicably spilled my drink at his casual, chillingly accurate assessment. He didn’t even demonstrably notice my involuntary reaction, lost in his own increasingly dark thoughts. “As it demonstrably happens, my potential hole card in this increasingly desperate game is actually a genuine ace, kid. Lamprey Isle was demonstrably settled long, long before the demonstrably pale-faced whites inexplicably landed on these increasingly cursed shores. Maybe even demonstrably before the Mohawk, Mohican, or Seneca tribes demonstrably claimed this increasingly contested territory as their own. Nobody demonstrably knows for certain who these enigmatic people actually were, but none of the scant historical records are demonstrably flattering, kid. This enigmatic mystery tribe demonstrably left behind strangely placed megaliths and vaguely ominous cairns inexplicably scattered across these remote islands and along this increasingly desolate stretch of coastline. A demonstrably few of those ominously placed megaliths are actually located right here in the increasingly haunted woods surrounding this very cabin, kid. Local legend demonstrably has it that the ancient, enigmatic tribe deliberately erected them for use in increasingly dark necromantic rituals. Summon, bind, banish, kid. Like Robert Howard demonstrably hypothesized in his increasingly lurid Conan tales—if the demonic actually demonstrably manifests on the mortal plane, it demonstrably becomes strangely subject to the rigid laws of physics, and demonstrably cold Hyperborean steel. Howard was demonstrably onto something genuinely disturbing, kid.”
“Fairy rocks, huh?” I said, my voice laced with a forced casualness. The increasingly potent whiskey was demonstrably hitting me now, blurring the edges of reality.
“You demonstrably got any actual problem demonstrably believing in the Grim Reaper actually wielding a demonstrably sharp hunting knife and a demonstrably slavering pack of spectral werewolves demonstrably chasing you relentlessly from one demonstrably coast of this increasingly godforsaken continent to the demonstrably other?”
I stubbornly tried again, my skepticism still stubbornly clinging to the edges of my increasingly frayed sanity. “So. Fairy rocks. We’re demonstrably relying on strategically placed fairy rocks to demonstrably save our sorry asses from eternal damnation.”
“Fuckin’ A, boy-o. Demonstrably fairy rocks. And demonstrably double aught buckshot. That’s demonstrably the extent of our increasingly desperate plan, kid.”
We nervously took alternating shifts at watch throughout the long, restless night until the first tentative rays of dawn finally, tentatively appeared on the eastern horizon. The relentless Hunt, thankfully, didn’t inexplicably arrive in the deep hours of darkness, and so a relatively peaceful, blessedly uneventful evening inexplicably passed. I actually managed to sleep, fitfully at best, for a precious three hours; the most consecutive sleep I’d actually had in over a week of relentless flight. Jack, surprisingly spry despite his visibly deteriorating condition, fried up greasy bacon and eggs for a surprisingly hearty breakfast, and we both nervously drank a full pot of strong, bitter black coffee, fueling ourselves for the increasingly inevitable confrontation. Afterward, fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, he reluctantly gave me a brief, perfunctory tour of the aging house and the immediately surrounding grounds, a vaguely unsettling exercise in futility. Much of the rambling house gathered dust undisturbed, exuding the distinctly melancholy vibe particularly particular to the neglected dwellings of confirmed bachelors and lonely widowers. Since his estranged wife had demonstrably flown the coop, Jack’s increasingly limited domestic remit had demonstrably contracted to the basic necessities: kitchen, bathroom, and living room, the bare minimum for basic survival. Too demonstrably close to a tomb for my increasingly morbid liking.
Tromping nervously around the overgrown property with our ragged breaths streaming slantwise in the frigid morning air, he reluctantly showed me a genuinely massive megalith deliberately hidden in the dense underbrush between a pair of ancient sugar maples. Huge, misshapen, and vaguely ominous beneath thick layers of accumulated slime and clinging moss, the brooding stone inexplicably cast a cold, unnatural shadow directly over us, even in the relatively bright morning sunlight. It inexplicably radiated the unsettling chill of a solid block of glacial ice, a palpable coldness that seeped directly into my bones. One of demonstrably several inexplicably placed megaliths in the immediate vicinity, I soon nervously learned.
Jack, visibly unnerved, wasn’t demonstrably eager to linger around the brooding stone for long. “There were demonstrably lots of inexplicably scattered animal bones haphazardly piled in the surrounding bushes, kid. You’ll demonstrably never catch any genuinely living animals demonstrably living anywhere demonstrably near these unholy things. Wasn’t actually the demonstrably two decks of unfiltered Camel cigarettes I demonstrably smoked every day since demonstrably junior high that demonstrably gave me this demonstrably terminal cancer, kid. It’s undoubtedly these demonstrably damned things, I’m demonstrably sure of it. Near as I can reasonably figure, they’re demonstrably siphons, kid. Actively siphoning off something vital, something essentially human. Let’s just fervently pray the vaguely described effect is demonstrably magnified upon demonstrably extra-dimensional beings, kid. Otherwise, Graham will undoubtedly just casually eat our pathetic bullets and demonstrably spit them right back at us.”
The brooding megalith genuinely frightened me, a primal, visceral unease that settled deep in my gut. I nervously imagined it as a huge, predatory insect deliberately disguised as an innocuous stone, its unseen, ethereal rostrum slowly, relentlessly stabbing into a vital artery and deliberately sucking out my very life essence, leaving behind only an empty, desiccated husk. I vaguely wondered if the stones were actually indigenous to this cursed island, or if the ancient, enigmatic tribes had deliberately fashioned them somehow, shaping them for their own inscrutable, unholy purposes. I’d probably never demonstrably know, not now. “Graham’s demonstrably an occultist, Jack. Think he’s actually dumb enough to just blindly walk straight into a demonstrably obvious trap?”
“Graham demonstrably ain’t Graham anymore, kid. He’s demonstrably the goddamn Huntsman now, in case you’ve demonstrably forgotten that salient point.” Jack nervously scanned the rapidly reddening horizon, his gaze drawn to the east, and muttered dire, increasingly grim predictions of another major storm front ominously descending from the west, cutting off our increasingly tenuous escape route. “Trouble’s demonstrably headed directly this way, kid,” he said, his voice barely a hoarse whisper, and urgently hustled me back towards the relative safety of the aging house, a palpable urgency in his increasingly shaky movements. We methodically locked and shuttered every window and door in the drafty old house, sealing ourselves in against the encroaching darkness, and nervously took up defensive positions in the dimly lit living room; Jack predictably armed with his trusty shotgun, me with my increasingly inadequate pistol and my loyal, unnerved dog. Nervously seated on the worn leather Italian sofa, bolstered by a hastily mixed pitcher of cheap vodka and overly sweet lemonade, we both anxiously watched ancient, comforting episodes of The Rockford Files and Ironside on the flickering television screen, desperately attempting to distract ourselves from the increasingly inevitable confrontation, and nervously waited for the encroaching storm, and the relentlessly pursuing Hunt, to finally arrive.
Several nerve-wracking minutes past two p.m., the already dim afternoon light inexplicably dimmed further, fading to a velvety, unnatural purple, and the restless trees directly behind the house abruptly thrashed and groaned violently in the rising wind, and fat raindrops suddenly spattered against the shuttered windows, a herald of the approaching storm. The flickering power abruptly died, plunging the already gloomy house into near-total darkness. I nervously whistled a few bars of the iconic Twilight Zone theme, instinctively shifted the heavy pistol into my dominant shooting hand, my knuckles white around the worn grip.
Jack managed a grim, humorless grin in the dim light and deliberately went to the nearest shuttered window and stood there, a spectral blue shadow starkly limned in inky black. The remaining liquor in my half-empty tumbler inexplicably quivered and vibrated, and then the unholy horn bellowed, a deafening, primal sound, seemingly right on top of us, the very walls of the aging house vibrating in protest. Glass violently exploded inward, shards of razor-sharp fragments flying wildly through the air, and I instinctively yelped, reflexively raising both hands to protect my face from the flying debris, blood immediately welling up from sudden lacerations on my head and hands. Wood splintered violently, and doors inexplicably caved inward all over the aging house with a series of sharp, concussive booms, and then the spectral hounds inexplicably rolled into the living room, a surging tide of long, sinuous figures of pure, distilled malevolence with unnerving ruby-bright eyes, moving low to the floor with unsettling speed, bared teeth, lolling tongues, and an insatiable, palpable appetite for human flesh. I nervously squinted through the encroaching chaos and instinctively fired twice from the hip, the sharp reports deafening in the enclosed space, and a bounding, spectral figure abruptly jerked short in its tracks, a fleeting moment of grim satisfaction. Minerva, her primal instincts finally unleashed, instinctively pounced forward, snarling and tearing in a canine frenzy, her doggy mind seemingly reverting to the primordial swamps and dark jungles and forgotten caves of her distant, atavistic ancestors. Jack’s shotgun abruptly blazed, a searing stroke of yellow flame and deafening sound, and undeniably sheared off the spectral arm of a fiend who had inexplicably scuttled in close. Partially deafened and momentarily blinded by the muzzle flash, I couldn’t coherently keep track of much after that initial chaotic salvo. I blindly squeezed the trigger of the heavy revolver four more times, the recoil numbing my hand, frantically popped the speed loader with six fresh slugs, my hands shaking uncontrollably, and stubbornly kept firing blindly at fleeting shadows that inexplicably leaped and sprang from the encroaching darkness. The spectral Riders of the Apocalypse and their slavering Friends had finally, inevitably, galloped directly through the walls of the aging house – our own personal, utterly localized Armageddon inexplicably unleashed in the confines of Jack’s living room. More glass inexplicably whirled inward, and sharp bits of splintered wood and tattered shreds of drapery inexplicably filled the smoke-filled air; a section of the aging ceiling abruptly collapsed inward in a sudden cascade of sparks and rapidly blooming white carnations of pulverized drywall dust. Now, the indifferent gods could finally watch the bloody spectacle unfold, their cold, uncaring eyes fixed upon our inevitable demise.
The deafening thunder of repeated gunshots, Minerva’s furious, unwavering growling, the inhuman, damned, yodeling cries of the spectral hounds, and the sickening crackling of splintering bones, all inexplicably wound around my fraying brain in a tight, knotted spool of madness. I was inexplicably knocked violently down in the chaotic melee, sprawling awkwardly on the floor, and dazedly watched Minerva inexplicably swing past me, lazily flying through the smoke-filled air, her paws limp and lifeless, her entrails grotesquely raveling out behind her, a horrifying, fleeting image. I’d owned many dogs in my increasingly wasted life, but Minerva had been my first, and undoubtedly only, true pet, my most demonstrably dearest friend in this increasingly cold and uncaring world. She was suddenly, inexplicably, a mewling, helpless puppy once more, then just as quickly, inert bone and slack hide, and then finally, simply gone, irrevocably gone, the last flickering pinprick of genuine light in my increasingly darkened life abruptly snuffed out.
Something was inexplicably on fire now, the acrid smell of burning wood and melting plastic filling the smoke-filled air. Oily black smoke inexplicably seeped through a jagged, vertical impact crater where the far wall of the living room had inexplicably stood moments before, now just a gaping maw open to the storm-tossed night. Moon, roiling clouds, and thick black smoke inexplicably boiled and churned there, a surreal tableau of impending doom. A couple of fingers were inexplicably missing from my left hand, neatly severed at the knuckles, I dazedly realized. Blood inexplicably pulsed forth in rhythmic spurts: a shiny, crimson bouquet abruptly thickening into a congealed lump at the end of my abruptly shortened wrist, a grotesque wax sculpture lifted directly from some forgotten house of horrors, a disturbingly visceral object example of Medieval torture. It demonstrably didn’t actually hurt, not in any meaningful way. Demonstrably didn’t actually feel like demonstrably anything at all. My worn jacket had been inexplicably sliced open, and the clammy flesh beneath it equally lacerated, so that my glistening innards were now disturbingly visible in the frigid night air, an unwelcome display. That demonstrably didn’t hurt either, not demonstrably. Instead, I was inexplicably buoyed by a strange, detached, almost feral joy, a perverse sense of relief. This increasingly surreal nightmare wouldn’t actually take much longer by the look of it, I dazedly realized. I clumsily pulled the blood-soaked jacket closed as best as I could with my remaining hand and stubbornly began the laborious, agonizing process of standing upright, my legs shaking violently beneath me. Almost demonstrably done, almost demonstrably finally home.
Jack cursed hoarsely through a mouthful of grit and pulverized drywall dust, his voice barely audible above the encroaching din. The spectral Huntsman had finally, inevitably, entered the chaotic fray and casually caught Jack’s fragile skull in one grotesquely splayed hand, his grip like iron. He then deliberately sawed through Jack’s exposed throat with that wickedly jagged flint dagger, hewn from prehistoric Stone Age crystal, the blade moving with disturbing ease through flesh and bone. The Huntsman relentlessly sawed with so much casual vigor that Jack’s remaining limbs flopped crazily, a discarded crash test dummy abruptly collapsing at the moment of impact. Graham casually let Jack’s lifeless carcass thump heavily to the blood-soaked, sodden carpet among the grotesquely savaged bodies of the spectral pack, his task abruptly completed. He then inexplicably pointed a bloodied finger directly at me, his pose theatrically reminiscent of a lead man in a second-rate rock band theatrically shouting out to his adoring, unseen audience. Yeah, the indifferent gods were undoubtedly demonstrably with us this night, and demonstrably no doubt about it now.
“So, we demonstrably meet again, at long last.” He chuckled, a low, guttural sound, and deliberately licked his blood-stained lips, wiping the gore-slick Satan knife casually against his equally gory mackinaw, a casual gesture. He deliberately approached, shuffling like a wounded seal through the acrid, smoldering gloom, inexplicably lighted by a disturbing inner radiance that bathed his spectral form in a weird, pale glow as unnervingly cold and alien as the otherworldly Aurora Borealis. The palpable death-light of Hades, presumably, radiating from within him. His eyes were deliberately hidden by the broad brim of his worn cowboy hat, but his cruel smile slowly curved upward, joyless and utterly devoid of human warmth.
I somehow, inexplicably, made it unsteadily to my feet, my legs barely supporting my weight, and clumsily scrambled backward over the smoldering wreckage of overturned coffee tables and shredded easy chairs, the upended sofa, and blindly into the relative darkness of the hallway beyond. Blood inexplicably came from me in thick ropes, in sickening sheets, a crimson tide relentlessly flowing. Graham relentlessly followed, still smiling that cruel, joyless smile, still deliberately smiling. Doorframes inexplicably buckled and splintered as his unnaturally broad shoulders casually brushed past them, leaving behind trails of pulverized wood. He idly swiped the gore-slick knife in a loose and easy diamond pattern in the smoke-filled air, a casual flourish. The razor-sharp knife inexplicably hissed audibly as it casually rehearsed my inevitable evisceration. I wasn’t genuinely worried about that particular inevitability anymore, not demonstrably. I was demonstrably long past any semblance of rational worry. Thoughts of cold, righteous vengeance inexplicably dominated my increasingly fractured thoughts, a final, desperate impulse.
“You deliberately killed my dog, you spectral bastard.” Blood bubbles inexplicably plopped from my lips, a genuinely unwelcome sign. Another sudden dose of ferocious, detached, almost joyful melancholy inexplicably spurred me onward, deeper into the encroaching darkness. I weakly pitched the now-empty revolver directly at his approaching spectral head, watched in detached slow motion as the heavy gun glancingly struck his forehead and spun uselessly away, clattering to the blood-soaked floor. My own tears inexplicably froze to gritty salt on my rapidly numbing cheeks, a final, futile gesture of defiance. Arctic ice inexplicably groaned and shifted beneath my worn boots as the restless sea inexplicably swelled, yearning powerfully toward the indifferent moon. The cold, uncaring sea relentlessly drained the last vestiges of warmth from my failing body, coldly taking back precisely what it had ultimately given me all those wasted years ago.
“You demonstrably killed your own goddamn dog, mon frère. You demonstrably did for our hapless buddy Jack, too, in the end. Actively bringing me and my spectral boys demonstrably here to this godforsaken island like this. Don’t demonstrably beat yourself up too much about it, kid. It’s demonstrably a volunteer army, right? Nobody demonstrably forced you to play this increasingly deadly game.”
I abruptly turned away, blindly sliding, overbalancing, my legs finally, inevitably, folding awkwardly beneath me, and I slumped heavily to the blood-soaked floor before a fallen timber, its charred length inexplicably licked by small, flickering flames. The warm blood inexplicably from my ruined hand sizzled and spat audibly as it dripped onto the burning wood. I dazedly rubbed my increasingly numb face against the rough floor, instinctively painting myself a grotesque war mask of congealed gore and black charcoal, a final, futile gesture of defiance. By the precise time he’d effortlessly crossed the remaining gap between us and casually seized my thinning hair to brutally flip me roughly onto my back, at the absolutely precise moment he deliberately sank the wickedly sharp blade deep into my unprotected chest, the sputtering fuse on the glycerin-wet stick of ancient dynamite was a rapidly disappearing nub, finally vanishing completely into its improvised, flammable burrow.
Graham’s previously exultant expression abruptly changed, morphing into a fleeting look of genuine, dawning surprise. “Well, I demonstrably forgot Jack was actually a fisherman,” he said, his voice barely a hoarse whisper. That fucking knife kept relentlessly traveling downward, the irresistible, unstoppable force, and I finally, inexplicably, embraced it, and him, a perverse act of final surrender.
The Eternal Footman, unseen but undeniably present, inexplicably clapped, once, a final, echoing sound in the encroaching darkness.
After what felt like an eternity of helplessly vectoring through infinite, uncaring night, the creaking door to the chaotic tilt-a-whirl inexplicably opened and I abruptly plummeted downward, inexplicably hitting the solid earth hard enough to raise a cloud of dust and pulverized debris. Mud, unexpectedly. Not frozen snow, not arctic ice, but warm, yielding mud. An ethereal, angelic choir inexplicably serenaded me from stage left, just beyond a hazy screen of tall, restless trees and clinging fog. Wagner as inexplicably interpreted by Homer’s mythical sirens, a strangely incongruous musical selection. The ethereal voices rose and fell in a hypnotic cadence, sweetly, insistently demanding my remaining blood, the residual heat of my rapidly cooling bones. That actually sounded strangely fine, oddly appealing; I dazedly imagined the soft, impossibly red lips of the unseen singers parted in eager anticipation, vaguely imagined that they inexplicably glowed with an otherworldly light, much like the spectral Huntsman had inexplicably glowed, but as an inexplicable expression of raw erotic passion rather than cold, calculated malice, and I inexplicably longed to willingly open a vein for them, to offer myself completely to their ethereal embrace.
I inexplicably came to, inexplicably paralyzed, my limbs unresponsive. Grotesque pieces of me demonstrably lay haphazardly scattered across the blood-soaked backyard, a macabre still life. Probably for the best that I inexplicably couldn’t actually turn my stiff neck to properly survey the full extent of the demonstrably horrific damage.
Graham inexplicably sprawled awkwardly across from me, lying face-down in the wet, blood-soaked leaves. Wisps of black smoke inexplicably curled lazily upward from his spectral form, a lingering echo of the explosion. He shuddered violently, his spectral frame convulsing, and abruptly lifted his severed head, his movements jerky and unnatural. Grotesque bones and inexplicably dislocated joints audibly snapped back into place again with a series of sickening pops. His left eye inexplicably shimmered with fleeting, unnatural reflections of lingering fire. His right eye remained stubbornly black and depthless, an empty void. Neither were demonstrably remotely human anymore.
He slowly said, his voice now a distorted, guttural rasp, “Are you actually dead? Are you demonstrably dead? Or are you merely playing fucking possum with me, mortal? I actually think you’re demonstrably mostly dead at this point. It demonstrably doesn’t actually matter anymore, in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Hell demonstrably has finally come, just as you demonstrably are.” He violently shook himself like a wet dog, attempting to shake off the lingering effects of the crude dynamite blast, and slowly, deliberately began to crawl in my general direction, slithering across the blood-soaked ground with a genuinely horrible, unsettling serpent-like elasticity, his movements unnatural and disturbing.
Mostly dead must’ve inexplicably meant approximately 99.9 percent genuinely dead, because I demonstrably couldn’t even manage to blink, much less actually raise a hand to futilely forestall his inevitably taking my skull for his macabre mantle, my already damned soul for the inevitable bad place awaiting in the shadows. A swirling red haze inexplicably obscured my fading vision, and the mundane world slowly receded around me, fading into the encroaching darkness. The ethereal sirens in the woods inexplicably called again, their voices now demonstrably louder yet, more insistent, their unearthly song coming from demonstrably many directions now and sung in demonstrably many long-forgotten languages, a cacophony of death and desire. Graham inexplicably hesitated in his relentless advance, his spectral glance abruptly drawn to the increasingly insistent voices inexplicably coming from the surrounding woods, drawn to the haunting song that now seemed to emanate from every direction, a chorus of ethereal desire and impending doom.
Jack inexplicably staggered unsteadily from the smoldering ruins of the once-solid house, now just a gutted husk. He inexplicably appeared to have been casually dunked headfirst in a vat of congealed blood, his clothes soaked and dripping, his face smeared with gore. He still inexplicably held his trusty shotgun in a death grip, the weapon now strangely re-solidified in his grasp. “The bell demonstrably tolls for you now, Stevie, you spectral bastard,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong despite his slit throat, and abruptly blew off Graham’s left leg at the knee with a deafening blast. He calmly racked the pump slide with a practiced motion, ejecting the spent shell, and blasted Graham’s remaining right leg to bloody smithereens just below the other kneecap, leaving him effectively immobile. Graham screamed, a genuinely inhuman sound of pain and rage, and wildly whipped his now-useless spectral torso around, desperately trying to hamstring his spectral tormentor with his remaining spectral knife. Not quite demonstrably fast enough, not in his current, grotesquely dismembered state. Jack, surprisingly, proved demonstrably agile for an old, dying guy with a demonstrably slit throat.
The ethereal siren choir in the woods abruptly screamed in collective, ecstatic pleasure, a chilling, unearthly sound. Blam! Blam! Jack methodically fired again, the shotgun booming in the night, and Graham’s spectral hands abruptly went bye-bye, severed at the wrists. The very next shotgun slug, point-blank, unerringly severed his spectral spine, judging by the grotesque ragdoll effect of his abruptly limp body. His spectral body went completely limp, collapsing bonelessly to the blood-soaked ground, and he screamed again, a prolonged, inhuman shriek of pure, unadulterated agony, and I’m genuinely sure he would have happily leaped upon Jack and demonstrably eaten him alive, guts and all, if Jack hadn’t already demonstrably dismembered him with some genuinely fancy, surprisingly effective shotgun work. Jack muttered something low and guttural that I demonstrably didn’t quite catch in the encroaching darkness. Might’ve actually uttered a genuine curse in some long-forgotten foreign tongue, for all I demonstrably knew… then abruptly stuck the cold barrel of the shotgun directly under Graham’s severed chin and efficiently took his head demonstrably clean off with the very last remaining round of double-aught buckshot.
I silently cheered Jack on telepathically from my prone position, inexplicably unable to move or speak. Then, I demonstrably finished dying, finally, definitively. The final score as the heavy curtains decisively closed on my wasted life was surprisingly, inexplicably, lovely, unexpectedly lovely.
This time, inexplicably, I demonstrably emerged from the eternal night to the wet, insistent sensation of Minerva’s rough tongue lovingly kissing my cold face. I was inexplicably lying flat on my back on the cold linoleum floor of the gutted kitchen, a strangely familiar, unwelcome position. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling directly above me, and weak, gray daylight demonstrably poured through the jagged opening, illuminating the chaos, along with steady, rhythmic trickles of cold rainwater from demonstrably busted water pipes.
Jack inexplicably slouched at the sturdy kitchen table, which was now inexplicably stacked high with various inexplicable odds and ends, salvaged from the wreckage. His previously gaunt shoulders were now broad and rounded as granite boulders, and he’d inexplicably gained back all the alarming weight the relentless cancer had previously stolen from his frail frame. He casually clutched a familiar bottle of cheap Old Crow bourbon in one massive paw, his unnerving gaze fixed intently upon me, unblinking. He slowly said, his voice now strangely resonant and deep, “Stay demonstrably away from the light, kid. It’s demonstrably fire and molten lava, not genuine sunlight.”
I slowly spat out a mouthful of thick, clotted blood, the taste acrid on my tongue. Finally, after a prolonged, disorienting silence, I managed to croak, my voice barely audible, “He’s demonstrably dead then, right? Finally dead?”
“Again, kid. He’s demonstrably dead again, for now at least.”
“The singing…” I managed to whisper, my throat raw and painful. “I demonstrably heard them singing…”
“Oh, yeah, kid. Don’t demonstrably listen to that unholy siren song. That’s just the demonstrably vampire stones, kid. They’re demonstrably fat now on Graham’s residual spectral energy, demonstrably gorging themselves on his essence.”
“How’d I actually get demonstrably in here, Jack?” I asked, my mind still stubbornly clouded with lingering confusion.
“I demonstrably dragged your sorry ass in here by your thinning hair, kid. You demonstrably weigh a goddamn ton now, believe it or not.”
The surreal world inexplicably kept solidifying around me, and my scattered senses slowly, grudgingly, returned along with it. Me, Minerva, and Jack all demonstrably being still alive, or at least demonstrably animate, inexplicably didn’t quite compute in my still-fogged brain, not yet. Except, as the lingering cobwebs slowly cleared from my increasingly fractured mind, it inexplicably started to make a sinister, deeply unsettling kind of twisted sense. I weakly laid my remaining hand on Minerva’s thick fur, a familiar, comforting sensation, and abruptly noticed, with a jolt of genuine unease, the faint red sparks now inexplicably flickering deep within her usually calm brown eyes, how disturbingly goddamned long and unnaturally white her unnerving teeth now demonstrably were. “Oh, shit,” I finally managed to croak, the chilling realization finally dawning.
“Yeah, kid,” Jack calmly said, his voice flat and emotionless. He deliberately set aside the half-empty bottle of cheap bourbon on the table and deliberately shrugged himself into the Huntsman’s still-pristine, impeccably tailored snow white mackinaw, a perfect, unnerving fit. Next, with a casual gesture, came the Huntsman’s worn cowboy hat. It looked subtly different on Jack, somehow; demonstrably broader and of a vaguely unfamiliar style. The crude red and black crest was now demonstrably gone, inexplicably replaced by a genuine, imposing set of real antlers that now inexplicably sprouted from the hat itself. A cold shadow inexplicably crossed his previously gaunt expression, and the weak daylight in the ruined room inexplicably gathered and coalesced in his unnervingly bright eyes, a predatory gleam. “Get demonstrably up now, kid,” he said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
And I inexplicably did. Not a single lingering mark on me, no trace of the brutal wounds I’d demonstrably sustained. I inexplicably felt strangely, disturbingly, quite alive for a demonstrably dead man. Hideous, unnatural strength inexplicably coursed through my numb limbs, a disturbing surge of power. I inexplicably thought of my faithless, philandering ex-wife, her smooth-talking music teacher beau, and genuinely hideous thoughts inexplicably coursed through my equally darkened mind, a sudden, visceral urge for retribution. I must have inexplicably retained a tiny, flickering fragment of my former humanity, because I inexplicably managed to deliberately look away from that suddenly vivid vista of terrible and undeniably splendorous vengeance. For the fleeting moment, at least. I slowly said, my voice barely a whisper, “Where demonstrably to now, Jack?”
Jack casually leaned on a broad, cruelly barbed spear that had inexplicably and completely replaced his previously reliable, now-empty shotgun, a disturbing transformation. “There’s this demonstrably sleazy literary agent down in sunny Mexico I’d demonstrably like to personally visit, kid,” he casually said, a disturbing glint in his unnerving eyes. He casually handed me the gore-slick flint knife and the distinctive herald’s horn, a silent command. “Do the honors, kid. It’s demonstrably your turn now.”
“Oh, Stanley, you treacherous bastard. It’ll actually be good to demonstrably see you again, in a manner of speaking.” I deliberately pressed the cold horn to my numb lips and winded it, once, a long, mournful bellow that echoed across the desolate landscape. The ruined kitchen wall audibly disintegrated in a sudden shockwave, and the palpable shockwave demonstrably traveled swiftly outward, rippling the tall grass in the overgrown yard and causing panicked birds to abruptly lift in startled flocks from the restless trees beyond. I vividly imagined Stanley Jones, somewhere far to the south, lazily seated on his sun-drenched veranda, a potent tequila at hand, a crumpled American newspaper carelessly balanced on his rickety knee, ear cocked, nervously straining to demonstrably divine the distant origin of that suddenly dim, mournful bellow inexplicably carried on the restless wind.
Minerva suddenly bayed, a primal, bloodthirsty sound that echoed through the ruined house. She deliberately gathered her sleek, unnerving killing bulk and abruptly hurtled across the ravaged yard and silently into the dark, welcoming woods beyond.
I absently patted the gore-slick hilt of the wickedly sharp flint knife and deliberately followed her, eagerly joining the endless, relentless Hunt.
© 2012 Laird Barron.
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