Primal Fear (28 page)

And just as it touched down, John hurled the remaining powder straight up into the air in front of him.  It mushroomed out above him in a slowly widening circle, hanging there as if the laws of gravity had no bearing on it.

Its shape began to shift, moving into a roughly vertical line and then spreading outward to either side, taking on the size and shape of a human form.  Harry watched incredulously as the form became more and more detailed with each passing moment.  Its features seemed vaguely familiar, but it was several seconds before identification came to him.

He finally recognized the cloudy shape for what it was: a life-sized embodiment of the wooden carving that John had just used in the ritual against the demon.  It was the figure that John had called the Earth Mother, somehow brought to life to battle the darkest of nature’s demons, wavering in the air before them like the ripple of heat above a fire.

The figure moved towards John for a moment, as if eager to peer upon the face of the one who’d summoned it, hovering slowly beside him in a gesture of acceptance.  Harry stared at it, dazed.  Even without detailed features or a clearly defined figure, he felt this creation was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, or would ever see.  It sparkled with untainted perfection, a living embodiment of all that was good and pure in the world. 

And John was about to set it loose.  He raised the wooden figure of the Earth Mother to his lips and kissed it firmly on the top of its head.  Next he held it at arm’s length, turning it to face the advancing tupilaq.

Its purpose clear, the Earth Mother’s effigy moved swiftly towards the tupilaq, a million glittering grains of powder converging within its form to lead its attack on the demon.

The tupilaq tried to back away, tried to avoid the contact of this new apparition upon its wooden flesh, but its movements were too lethargic to yield any sort of success.  The cloud of sand exploded around it, each tiny grain seeming to drive itself into the solid wood and bone of the tupilaq’s body.

The demon howled in fury, a sound like reality itself being torn to pieces, a sound unlike any Harry had ever known.  And yet it pleased him to hear it.  It was the first encouraging sign he’d seen since the beast had begun to rise, the first indication that John’s ritual was really working.

Once more, while the deadly sands of the Earth Mother worked on the tupilaq’s form, John began to recite the words that had conjured the magic of his forefathers.  He shouted them now, his voice rising above the demon’s howls of pain and fury, his words ringing with triumph.

“Kaja suh n’hola!  Koja bohl malaqua jhe t’e!”

The power of the Earth Mother ignited within the tupilaq, eating away at it from the inside.  A flicker of white light began to burn from each of the millions of holes the magical powder had bored into the creature’s body, growing steadily brighter.

The tupilaq’s thrashing grew wilder, its huge arms raised in a fury of movement, its head twisting from side to side in agony.  Its bellowing became almost unbearable, a din that echoed eerily within the enclosed space of the cavern.

Harry clamped his hands over his ears, trying to shut out at least a small measure of the sound, but it seemed the dying creature only screamed louder, clearly in the grip of powers beyond its own.  He fell to his knees, on the verge of collapse, the ground shaking beneath his feet.  The tupilaq’s body was almost completely engulfed in flames now, the Earth Mother’s magic overwhelming the solidity of its body.

And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun.  The beast disappeared from view, tumbling into the mist that still filled the pit from which it had come.  It vanished into the fog with a resounding crash of snapping bones and splintering wood, its own weight driving it downward to its death.

There was a long moment of utter silence, a span of time in which Harry imagined even his own heartbeat had fallen still.  The smoke hung in the air before them, hovering in the stillness, concealing even the smallest of movements from the pit.

The flickering of the Earth Mother’s flames had already flickered out.  Harry could no longer hear the hiss of the fire or the popping of wood as the hungry flames consumed it.

“Is it dead?” he asked, climbing to his feet and dusting himself off.

John didn’t respond for a full minute, gauging the silence, his eyes searching the depths of the pit.  For a moment it seemed he was about to nod, to reward Harry’s patience with news of their success.  But then his ears must have detected something that disturbed him, something Harry couldn’t perceive.

A moment later he was laying a strong hand on Harry’s arm, pulling him back from the edge.  “Get back,” he muttered.  “We’re too late.”

“What are you talking about?  I just saw you kill it.  It’s got to be dead.”

John shook his head, still tugging on Harry’s arm.  “It’s not dead.  We’ve only destroyed its body.”

He barely had time to finish the warning when a sudden gust of frigid wind began to build from the bottom of the pit.  It rose swiftly, howling out of the darkness with no apparent natural source.  Harry moved back on his own now, feeling the bite of the wind on his exposed face.

“I don’t understand,” he shouted.  “What the hell is going on?”

John turned to him, his eyes filled with fear.  “I told you,” he screamed back, his voice barely audible over the wind, “we’re too late!”

An odd chattering began to rise from the tupilaq’s grave, softly at first but then intensifying as the seconds passed.  Soon it was as loud as the sound of the wind itself.

Harry recognized it first.

“The ice,” he whispered to himself.  “It’s all that ice.”

He leaped at John, tackling him to the floor just as a sudden blizzard of ice swept upwards from the pit.  It swirled around them, thousands of tiny shards of ice, sharp as the edges of a razor, the shattered remains of the layers that had held the tupilaq’s body frozen in place for two hundred years.

Harry covered his eyes, feeling the sting upon the backs of his hands and across his bare forehead as the whirling ice bit into his flesh.  A hundred tiny lacerations burned into his skin as the wind swept past and Harry screamed as loud as he could, trying to chase away the fear, trying to conquer the pain.  In his thoughts there was but one firm certainly, and that was the cold, hard fact that he was about to die, that he couldn’t withstand this deadly assault much longer.

But the wind began to subside a moment later, the storm of ice swept along with it.  He raised his head carefully to watch its passing.  And there, in the flickering light of the dying lantern, he saw a writhing shape within the center of the gale, a living form fashioned from the shards of ice moving steadily away from them, towards the opening in the cavern floor.

It twisted in upon itself, pausing only for an instant before finding the means of its escape, as if casting a final menacing glance back at the two men that had dared challenge it.

John saw it, too, judging by the stark fear Harry could see upon his face.  They watched together in helpless dread as it vanished towards the hole, sweeping itself downward into the cavern’s lower chambers.

It left only silence in its wake, a quiet so stifling that Harry wanted to scream again, just to fight the stillness settling upon them like dust in the grave.

“What was it?” he asked at last.

John swallowed, as if incapable of forming an answer.  “That was Wyh-heah Qui Waq,” he said at last, his voice heavy with defeat.  “We’ve only managed to destroy its physical form.  Without it, the demon can only gather the natural elements as its form.  The ice, the snow, the wind.”

“I don’t understand.  It was dead.”

John shook his head.  “We only destroyed the tupilaq.  The ritual was too late to banish the demon.”

He turned to Harry, his voice scarcely more than a whisper.  “And now we’ve set it free.”

Chapter Twenty Four

They made their way out of the cave as quickly as they could, leaving behind anything that wasn’t immediately necessary. 

Harry wasn’t able to reach Charlie on the radio, getting nothing but static every time he tried, and by the time he and John reached the mouth of the cave, he’d resigned himself to the fact that one of them would have to climb up the slippery cable.  It was still hanging there from the top of the cliff, but there was no sign of Charlie; whether he’d made it out of the tunnels or not, Harry had no idea.

He gripped the cable and turned to John, shouting to be heard over the howling wind.  “I’ll go up first and try to find Charlie.  We’ll winch you up.”

John shook his head.  “Let me do it.  You don’t have to—”

“You’re in no shape to do this, John.  Jesus, you could barely stand up in there.  Mahuk took too much out of you when he died.”

John seemed as though he was about to argue further, but at last he relented and released the cable.  “Okay.  Just be careful.”

“Yeah, that was part of my plan.”  Harry managed a weak grin and then took a deep breath and set to work.

  The climb back up the quarry’s rock face was even more difficult than Harry had anticipated, taking twice as long as he’d estimated.  The weather had steadily worsened, the winds reaching speeds he couldn’t even guess at, the snow falling faster than it had all the previous night and morning.  By the time he reached the top he was fighting exhaustion, the bitter cold sapping what little strength he had left.

He staggered to his feet, relieved to see that Charlie was waiting in the Jeep, its engine idling beneath a thick blanket of snow.  His deputy leaped out when he saw Harry coming, approaching with an oddly distant look on his face.  Harry realized the young man must still be in shock after what he’d seen, and he felt a heavy pang of guilt as he reached Charlie’s side, a sense of remorse he simply couldn’t shake.  Not only had he led Charlie blindly into the tunnels, he’d also been forced to mislead his deputy about their real reasons for going there in the first place.

“Harry, what happened?  What’s going on down there?”

“Look, I’m sorry.  I wasn’t straight with you about any of this.  I should have been.  I’m glad you’re okay, really, but it’s my fault you got hurt in the—”

“I couldn’t raise anybody on the radio, and I was going to give you another half hour.  I didn’t know what to do . . .”  His hands were shaking violently again, the stress of the day too much for him to cope with.

“Don’t worry about it, you did fine.  You did the right thing by waiting, believe me.”

“Those things, Chief.  What the hell—”

“Hold on.  John is still down there, we need to winch him up.”

Charlie blinked at him, as if Harry’s words were barely registering.  Harry gripped him by the shoulders and gave him a couple of shakes.  “Focus, buddy, I need your help.  I need you here.”

“John . . .”

“John is still down there, at the mouth of the cave.  We need to run the winch so he can get up the face of the cliff.”

Charlie nodded, his eyes starting to clear.  Having something to do, anything that might help, seemed to be bringing him back around.  “Got it.  Okay.”  He moved to the front bumper of the Jeep and brushed the snow off of the winch controls.  “Go over and shake the cable.  Make sure he sees it and he’s holding on.”

Harry nodded and fought his way through the snow, back to the edge of the quarry.  He laid down on his belly, reaching along the cable’s length and swinging it back and forth as violently as he could.  A moment later, its swing was stopped from below; John must have seen it and pushed his foot through the loop, ready to be pulled up.

Harry rose to his knees and waved his arm toward Charlie, who immediately started the winch motor.  The cable began to snake its way over the edge of the cliff, moving slowly past Harry toward the Jeep.  Within a minute or two, the top of John’s head appeared over the edge, and then his hands, gripping the cable as tightly as he could. 

Once he was clear of the edge, Harry waved his arm again and Charlie killed the winch long enough for John to slip free of the loop and climb back to his feet.

“You okay?”

John nodded.  “Remind me to never do anything like this, ever again.”

“Yeah, you and me both.  You got your bag?”

John turned, just enough so Harry could see the pack slung across his back.

“Good.  Let’s get the hell out of here.”  He walked back to the Jeep, where Charlie had just finished reeling in the rest of the cable and securing it to the winch.

“Can you drive, Charlie?”

“Huh?”

“Are you okay?  Do you think you can drive?”

Charlie just blinked at him for a moment and Harry finally shrugged and gave him a pat on the shoulder.  “I didn’t think so,” he said.  “I’ll drive.”

John moved to the Jeep and helped Charlie into the back seat.  “We have to stop this thing,” he said.  “But now we have to find it first.  If we can’t, then all of this—everything we went through—it’ll all be meaningless.”

“So where do we start?” Harry asked.

“I’m guessing it’ll go into hiding somewhere,” John said, climbing into the Jeep and brushing the snow out of his hair.  “At least for the time being.  Long enough to gather its strength, to prepare itself for vengeance.”

“And how long is that?”

“I have no idea.  It could be done already for all I know.  But I have the feeling it was very weak when it escaped.  Otherwise it would have killed us both.”

Harry threw the Jeep into reverse, backing carefully away from the quarry’s edge.  The deep snow around them made for difficult maneuverability, but the wide tires and four-wheel drive managed to keep them from getting stuck.  “So where does that leave us?  How do we find it?  And once we find it, how do we stop it?”

“You’re going to have to give me some time on all these questions.  Our first priority should be to . . .” 

John trailed off, staring blankly out at the falling snow.

“What?” Harry urged.  “What’s the matter?”

“I know where it’s going,” he whispered.  “Oh, lord . . . I think I know where it’s going.”

“Where?  Tell me.”

John turned to peer at him, his expression unreadable.  He seemed to be holding something back, as if what he had to say was the last thing on earth Harry wanted to hear.

“It’s going to go looking for the last piece of the tupilaq.  If it finds that piece in time, it can regain its full physical form.”  He swallowed hard, turning to gaze once more out the window.  “It’s going for the P’oh Tarhei, Harry.  It’s going to your house.”

Laurie stared out into the falling snow, wishing there was more she could do than stand around and wait for Harry to come back.  She felt useless, and terribly on edge, as though some unnamable danger lurked just around the corner, waiting to pounce.

It was the story John had told that had gotten under her skin.  Of that she was certain.  And yet she normally wasn’t the type to let things get to her that way.  It wasn’t so much the story itself, she supposed, but the look of complete conviction on John’s face as he’d unraveled it for her.  His expression had spoken of a belief that was unwavering, one that made even the most bizarre details of his tale seem real.

Those details had come back to taunt her imagination several times in the past few hours, coming to a head almost forty minutes before, when the electricity had finally given out under the storm’s wrath.  It would have been worse in the dead of night, of course, but even now, at the height of the storm, the house was still exceptionally dark.

And cold.

She’d been too startled by the sudden blackout to think to start a fire, and had only done so ten minutes before.  Now, standing in front of the sliding glass door, peering out into the blizzard, she said a silent prayer for Harry’s safe return. 

A fresh gust of wind shook the house, sweeping a blinding wall of snow straight past the door, cutting off her visibility completely.  She jerked back a step as the door shivered in its frame.

She had to get a grip on herself.  She felt as though she was jumping out of her skin at every little sound. 

She narrowed her eyes, suddenly positive she could see something out in the field behind the house, something glimpsed only for an instant through a break in the falling snow.  But the wind picked up again and concealed it from view, whatever it was.  Stepping back up to the glass, she stared hard into the storm, hoping for another gap in the snow fall.

The house shuddered again, but this time she didn’t move, too intent on what she’d seen moving through the yard.  It had been huge, at least that was the impression she’d had after the quick flash of it she’d seen.  It had been moving, too, or— 

No, not moving, not exactly.  It had been more of a flurry of activity than an actual movement, something that looked more natural than physical.

But now there was nothing.

She turned away from the glass, taking a single step towards the kitchen.

A soft thumping sound came from behind her, from precisely the same spot where she’d just been standing.  It came again, louder this time, and even a third time before she turned completely to peer out onto the back deck.

There was no one there, and yet the sound continued, like the soft drumming of fingers upon the glass, fingers that she couldn’t see, that—

She dropped her eyes, spying a sudden movement further down the door, and found the source of the sound.

It was the ghostly image of a hand, its fingers grotesquely long, its entire shape inhuman.  But it was unmistakably a hand, formed entirely from the swirling snow.  The individual flakes were still in motion—she could see them dancing wildly about within the shape of the hand—and yet they were somehow maintaining enough solidity to retain the form they’d been fashioned into.

The tips of the fingers danced across the glass, this time more forcefully, as if testing its resilience.  Laurie took a quick step backward, her breath catching in her throat.

And even while her mind insisted that what she was seeing was clearly impossible, just a freak whirl of snow in the cross winds of the back yard, a voice in her memory told her what it was.

The demon of the wind, John had said.  That was what he and Harry had gone out to look for, and that was surely what was coming to call on her right now.

“No,” she whispered.  “Oh, please, no . . .”

Because if the demon had found its way here, if it was roaming free, that meant Harry and John had failed.  And if they’d failed, that meant they were dead.

The hand pulled slowly away from the door, vanishing into the white sea of wind-driven snow.  It moved with a terrible grace, like something alive, like something capable of more speed and more strength than it had demonstrated thus far. 

Something was wrong.  She could feel it, could feel the tension building up in the air, like a bomb waiting to go off.

Like a snake ready to strike.

She moved as quickly as she could, taking three steps away from the door. 

The motion saved her life.

No sooner had she moved away than the hand streaked out of the storm, smashing through the sliding glass door as if the barrier was scarcely a match for its strength.  The wind found the hole, sweeping into it, forcing the rest of the glass inward.

Laurie dove toward the kitchen, falling hard onto the floor just beyond the spray of glass.  She felt the sting as a dozen tiny shards of the window tore into her legs, felt the rush of wind from outside as it invaded her home.

She turned and peered over her shoulder, pulling herself further away from the gaping door on her hands and knees.

The hand was gone, or at least the physical shape of it.  She was certain the beast was still raging around outside, perhaps only seconds from finding its way in completely.  Why wouldn’t it, now that such a reliable access had already been opened?

Only the wind rushed into the room, however, pushing aside anything it could lift, upending anything it could get its fingers under.  A blizzard of icy snow came with it, stinging Laurie’s eyes, cutting the visibility in half.

She heard the crash of a table lamp as it was flung to the floor, and glass shattering as an antique lantern was hurled from the mantle.  A bright flare of light drew her attention: the fire in the hearth roaring back to life, the flames fueled by the eager wind, pushed in every direction.  A wash of glowing embers was swept outward through the fire screen, coming to rest only when the wind had had its fill of them.  Tiny fires sprang to life on the rug and curtains, spreading quickly as the wind fed their hunger.

Through it all, her eyes searched the gloom for any sign of the demon.  There was nothing that even hinted at its presence, no half-hidden shape moving within the spiraling snow.

She climbed to her feet, clutching the wall for support.  To her left, the shattered door frame shivered in the wind, the heavy drapes flapping from their rods.  But nothing else was coming through; just the fury of the storm.