The Chimera Secret (2 page)

Coltz, his pistol still aimed at them, looked to his left through the forest. Jesse looked at the ranger for a brief moment and then suddenly something tugged at his stomach, a primal terror so
deep it must have been buried for a thousand generations. The strength seemed to go out of his knees as the terrible odor of decay, sweat and rancid flesh swept on the air around them and, with an
almost supernatural horror, Jesse watched as the forest came alive before his eyes.

From the treeline a huge form surged into view, half lost in the shadows as it rushed far faster than any man could run. Coltz whirled as heavy footfalls thundered toward him, and Jesse saw the
ranger try to swing his pistol to meet the unexpected attack.

‘Bear!’ Cletus yelled. ‘Get your gun, Jesse!’

The huge form crashed through the treeline in a mass of red-brown fur, a colossal creature far larger than any bear Jesse had ever seen. He was about to turn for his rifle when the animal
suddenly reared up, and he realized that it was running not on four legs but two. In a terrible instant Jesse saw immense arms and muscular legs and a tall crested skull, the entire form covered in
thick hair.

Gavin Coltz fired a single, deafening gunshot at point-blank range and then staggered backward as one immense shaggy arm smashed into the ranger’s head with a crunch like boots on gravel.
Jesse felt bile swell in his throat as the ranger’s head was ripped from his neck in a spray of dark blood and splintered bone to spin in a gruesome arc over their heads and bounce with a
dull crunch upon the rocks behind them.

The beast turned its gaze down the hillside and fixed upon Jesse, who felt as if he were staring into the eyes of Satan himself.

‘Jesse!’ Cletus yelled as he dashed past. ‘The guns!’

Jesse whirled on unsteady legs as they rushed for the two rifles lying in the bushes barely ten feet away. All at once Jesse heard a low growl and he turned, looking at the beast as it spread
its arms wide. Its chest shuddered as from deep within its lungs burst a cry like nothing he’d ever heard before, rising from a guttural growl to a high-pitched wail that sent bolts of pain
through his ears and soared out across the valley like the howl of a thousand wolves.

Jesse staggered backward as Cletus reached his Winchester and yanked the weapon into his shoulder, snapping the safety catch off in one fluid motion as he swung the barrel around to aim at the
creature.

The gunshot burst out with a blast of smoke and flame in the half-light and Jesse felt the shockwave from the blast hammer his ears. The shot hit the creature low in the belly, and the immense
beast bowed over at the waist as its thunderous cry mutated into a wail of pain.

‘Jesse!’ Cletus shouted as he fumbled in his pocket for another round. ‘Get behind me!’

Jesse stumbled backward down the hillside as Cletus shoved a second bullet into his rifle. He grabbed the Browning and then crouched down behind his brother and looked back up the hillside at
the creature.

The beast’s wail of pain mutated again. Jesse heard the animal suck in air and let out a roar of fury as it charged down the hillside at them.

‘It’s coming right at us, Cleet!’

Cletus cocked the Winchester as Jesse threw his hands over his head and crouched down lower in the bushes. He heard the beast’s heavy footfalls thundering toward them as Cletus hefted the
Winchester into his shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

Too late.

The beast plowed into Cletus and hurled him backward. The gunshot blasted out as Cletus’s finger snapped inside the trigger guard and fired the weapon’s final round uselessly into
the sky above. Jesse smelled a blast of foul air and saw a huge mass of rippling fur plunge past him as Cletus let out a scream.

Cletus span through the air with his limbs outstretched, and then his body crashed down the hillside toward the rocks far below, one arm flailing at an impossible angle. Jesse gazed in horror as
his brother tumbled to a halt near the bottom of the hillside and tried to pull himself away with his remaining good arm.

‘Shoot it, Jesse!’ he screamed up the hillside.

Jesse didn’t move. Couldn’t move. His legs trembled beneath him, the neurons in his brain frozen in a paralysis of horror as the beast lifted his brother’s screaming body off
the hillside and hurled it down into the creek. Jesse saw his brother’s head smash like an eggshell against a rock and saw his neck snap like a twig. The creature crashed into the water in
pursuit, snarling and wailing its terrible cries as it picked up the limp corpse and lifted it high above its head before smashing it down again across the rocks. Cletus’s bones crunched and
his flesh ripped until the icy waters of the creek were stained with crimson ribbons that snaked between the rocks.

Jesse vomited into the bushes, his vision blurred with tears and his throat burning as he stumbled to his feet by automatic reflex and began running up the hillside as fast as he could, the
Browning falling from his grasp.

He hit the treeline and glanced back over his shoulder. Far below lay Cletus’s mutilated, twisted body. Standing over the remains, the beast’s head turned and two blood-red eyes
locked onto Jesse’s.

Nausea overwhelmed Jesse once again as he plunged into the dense forests, chased by his own keening cry of fear. The deepening night made the woods seem darker and more threatening, the mist
obscuring the distant trees. Jesse ran but he could no longer feel his legs, driven now by the adrenaline seething through his veins. Raw terror, pure and undiluted. His mind was empty, devoid of
anything other than the most basic of instincts. Run. Keep running.

Because it’s following you.

A tingling fear like icy fingers against the nape of his neck spread rapidly down his spine as he crashed through the forest, his hands batting foliage from his path and not feeling the thorns
slicing into his skin. His legs powered him over fallen logs and tree stumps, his breath sawed in his throat and his heart hammered against the cage of his chest. He plunged from the dense tangles
of trees onto a winding animal trail, his hunter’s eye catching a glimpse of flattened grass stems and churned earth where countless creatures had made their way through the woods. A tiny
voice flickered like a phantasm through the freezing fog of terror clouding his mind:
Stay off the easy trail, keep to the forest
.

Jesse ran straight across the trail, darting left and right between trees and hurdling dense tangles of foliage.
Don’t look back.
Jesse’s legs began to falter, his vision
blurring and twinkling with tiny pinpricks of light as his body began crashing. His labored breathing fluttered as he stumbled desperately through the darkening forest, and in a moment of hope he
glanced over his shoulder.

Straight into a pair of fearsome red eyes that towered over him.

The creature was moving with incredible speed as though it were gliding through the dense woods, its huge legs adapting to the terrain with each stride.

Jesse’s cry caught in his throat and he gagged. Something huge and heavy swiped across his legs and hurled him off of his feet. He span in midair and slammed down hard onto the ground amid
a flurry of fallen leaves and twigs. Jesse rolled onto his back, his arms held out defensively as he looked up into the darkened sky and saw it loom into view.

The immense bulk of the creature filled the sky above him and Jesse felt his bowels loosen and spill beneath him to soak the ground. Those terrible red eyes glared down at him and blinked once.
In a moment terror seared through every fiber in his body and he saw there the face of a man upon the body of a beast.

And then Jesse’s consciousness slipped away from him into darkness.

‘We’ve had a
what
?’

Earl Carpenter’s eyes widened as he looked across his cluttered desk to where his assistant, a primly dressed spinster named Marjorie Bird, clasped one hand over the telephone. As the
Riggins Police Department Sheriff, Earl was used to hearing bad news, but this was unusual.

‘A suicide,’ she repeated. ‘One of the MacCarthy kids.’

Earl puffed out his cheeks and blew a gale of air across his office as he glanced up at the official notices board in the lobby outside. The station was tiny, harbouring a handful of cells that
hadn’t held a serious convict in thirty years. In a town of barely five hundred people, there weren’t many crimes a man could commit in the morning that wouldn’t be common
knowledge before the sun went down.

Earl dragged himself out of his seat and picked up his hat.

‘Who found him, and where?’

‘His mother found him in the garage,’ Marjorie said, relaying what she was hearing down the line. ‘Strung himself up from the rafters in the dead of the night. No
witnesses.’

Earl glanced around the office. Nothing moved fast in Riggins, not even law enforcement, so he did not immediately leave. Filing cabinets that hadn’t been opened in months stood beside a
board to which were tacked images of local felons wanted for minor crimes. A couple of big fish wanted by the FBI stood out, supposedly seen hiding out in the woods up near Crooked Creek by a
couple of rafters, but that was the extent of the excitement. An acoustic country number spilled lazily from a radio on Marjorie’s desk.

‘Suppose I’d better have me a look, then,’ he said finally.

‘Suppose you should,’ Marjorie replied, her eyes fixed back on the well-worn pages of a romance novel.

Earl waddled out of the office, grabbed the keys to the Ford Ranger parked outside and opened the front door. The bright morning sunshine blazed down from a perfect blue sky, soaring hills and
ragged canyons forming a dramatic backdrop to the tiny town. Nestled deep in a valley just south of Hell’s Canyon, Riggins had been built along the banks of the Salmon River and its
tributary, where the mountains formed the confluence of the rivers. The nearest major towns were twenty miles in either direction on the only access road to Riggins, the US-95, and with only a
couple of full-time officers available for duty, the department came under the jurisdiction of Idaho County Sheriff’s Department.

Earl pulled out of the station lot and drove north down Main Street past the diner and gas station. The nearby river glittered brightly in the sunlight between the trees that hugged its banks.
He didn’t have to drive far. The MacCarthy family lived just off the 95 where a dead-end sign gave way to a small collection of sun-bleached clapperboard single-stories. The truck kicked up
clouds of dust as Earl mounted the ramp and cruised slowly up to where Sally MacCarthy stood on the porch of her house, her face devoid of emotion, her eyes dark orbs that didn’t reflect the
bright sunlight. Earl killed the truck’s engine and climbed out just in time for Sally to fall into his arms as the grief finally hit her.

‘Jesus, Earl.’

Earl wrapped his arms around her waif-like shoulders and held her for a long time.

He’d known the MacCarthys since he’d been knee-high to an elk. Old man MacCarthy had been a former prospector who’d thrown what little he’d made from the beds of
countless rivers into a small diner on the southern edge of town. Three kids, all sons. Old Tom had gone to his maker six years previously, an early visit courtesy of smoking sixty Luckies a day
for the better part of forty years. All Sally had left was her three boys: Cletus, Jesse and Randy.

Earl eased himself free of Sally’s embrace and looked down at her.

‘Tell me what happened, right from the start.’

Sally wiped away the tears from her face, her skin aged beyond her years like rocks weathered by decades of exposure, and spoke in a voice that sounded tiny to Earl’s ears.

‘He went out last night with some friends,’ she said. ‘I went to bed early but I din’ hear him come home. He wasn’t in his bed this morning but that ain’t
unusual, so I just got ready for work. I found him when I came round to the garage for the truck.’

Earl looked across to the right of the tired-looking house to where the open car shelter stood. Little more than some timber beams surfaced with opaque corrugated plastic, stained with the dust
of years. He could see an aged flat-bed parked out front.

‘Is he still there?’ Earl asked as gently as he could.

Sally nodded once, struggling to hold back more tears.

‘I left him in case your people wanted to do all those forensic tests on him, like I’ve seen on the TV. There’s no doubt he’s gone. Besides, I couldn’t have got him
down even if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t bear to.’

Earl stepped away from Sally and approached the car shelter. As he rounded the corner he saw the body of Randy MacCarthy hanging from the central crossbeam. Beneath him, an old wooden stool lay
on its side.

His hands hung limp by his sides, his boots a good three feet above the dusty floor of the shelter. Randy was twenty-three years old, best as Earl could recall. His two older brothers were
well-known local woodsmen who often supplemented their meager incomes by taking tourists out into the wilderness on hiking trips. Randy had no criminal record, just a few minors for possession of
marijuana, and worked at the hardware store.

Randy’s jaw was pitched steeply by the tight rope, but Earl could see that his neck was not broken. Asphyxiation then, from the noose. Inch-thick hemp cordage, double-looped over the
crossbeam above. Earl looked up at the roof of the shelter, then at the parked flat-bed, and then at the dusty floor of the shelter. He unclipped his radio from his belt and keyed open a
channel.

‘Marjorie, you there?’

‘I gotcha, Earl, what’s the story?’

Earl scanned the scene before him one last time.

‘You’d better get Grangeville down here with forensics,’ he said. ‘Randy’s definitely dead. I’ll photograph the scene here and get it cordoned off.’

‘
Oh Jesus
,’ Marjorie replied, ‘
that’s not good news for Sally MacCarthy
.’

‘A death in the family’s not good news for anybody, Marjorie.’

‘
I mean that Randy’s not the only one of her boys in trouble. One of the others, Jesse, just turned up at Old Meister’s lodge. The old man’s sayin’
Jesse’s brother’s been killed
.’