Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 4

  “Think the storm will hit before evening?” he asked out of his thoughts, not caring much either way. Pete glanced at the sky.

  “Yes!” he agreed matter-of-factly. “Hit the lake in half an hour maybe. I know two guys,” he added, “who are going to get awful wet. Not meaning us—”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah. Know that little bay back where the Indian outfit used to live? There’s two of the drunkest buggers I seen on Thursday Lake this summer—fishing there off from a little duck boat! They come across the lake somewheres.”

  “Think we ought to warn ’em?”

  “Not me!” said Jeffries. “They made some kinda crack when I passed there. I like to have rammed ’em.” He looked at Hogan with puzzled benevolence, “Seems there was something I was gonna tell you . . . well, guess it was a lie!” He sighed. “How’s the walleyes hitting?”

  “Pretty good.” Hogan had picked up a stringerful trolling along the lake bars.

  “I got it now!” Pete spluttered excitedly. “Whitey told me last night: Julia’s got herself engaged up with a guy in the city—place she’s working at! They’re going to get married real quick.”

  Hogan bent over the side of his boat and began to unknot the fish-stringer. He hadn’t seen Julia since the night he last met Greenface. A week or so later he heard she’d left town and taken a job in the city.

  “Seemed to me I oughta tell you,” Pete continued with remorseless neighborliness. “Didn’t you and she used to to go around some?”

  “Yeah, some,” Hogan agreed desperately. He held up the walleyes. “Want to take these home for the missis, Pete? I was just fishing for the fun of it.”

  “Sure will!” Pete was delighted. “If you don’t want ’em. Nothing beats walleyes for eatin’, ’less it’s whitefish. But I’m going to smoke these. Say, how about me bringing you a ham of buck, smoked, for the walleyes?”

  “O.K.,” Hogan smiled.

  “Have to be next week,” Pete admitted regretfully. “I went shooting the north side of the lake three nights back, and there wasn’t a deer around. Something’s scared ’em all out over there.”

  “O.K.,” Hogan said again, not listening at all. He got the motor going and cut away from Pete with a wave of his hand. “Be seeing you, Pete!”

  Two miles down the lake he got his mind off Julia long enough to find a possible unpleasant significance in Pete’s last words.

  He cut the motor to idling speed and then shut it off entirely, trying to get his thoughts into some kind of order.

  Since that chunk of pine rapped him over the head and robbed him of his chance of finishing off Greenface, he’d seen no more of the thing and heard nothing to justify his suspicion that it was still alive somewhere, maybe still growing. But from Thursday Lake northward to the border of Canada stretched two hundred miles of bush, tree and water, with only the barest scattering of towns and tiny farms. Hogan often pictured Greenface prowling about back there, safe from human detection and a ghastly new enemy for the harried small life of the bush, while it nourished its hatred for the man who had so nearly killed it.

  It wasn’t a pretty picture. It made him take the signs indicating MASTERS FISHING CAMP from the roads, and made him turn away the occasional would-be guest who still found his way to the camp in spite of Whitey Allison’s unrelenting vigilance in town. It also made it impossible for him even to try to get in touch with Julia and explain what couldn’t have been explained anyhow.

  A rumble of thunder broke through Hogan’s thoughts. The sky in the east hung black with clouds; and the boat was beating in steadily toward shore with the wind and waves behind it. Hogan started the motor and came around in a curve to take a direct line toward camp. As he did so, a white object rose sluggishly on the waves not a hundred yards ahead of him and sank again. With a start of dismay he realized it was the upturned bottom of a small flat boat, and remembered the two fishermen he’d intended warning against the approach of the storm.

  The little bay Jeffries had mentioned, lay a half-mile in back of him; he’d come past it without being aware of the fact. There was no immediate reason to think the drunks had met with an accident; more likely they’d simply landed and neglected to draw the boat high enough out of the water, so that it drifted off into the lake on the first puff of wind.

  Circling the derelict to make sure it was really empty, Hogan turned back to pick up the two sportsmen and take them to his camp until the storm was over.

  On reaching the comparatively smooth water of the tree-ringed bay, Hogan throttled the motor and came in slowly because the bay was shallow and choked with pickerel grass and reeds. There was little breeze here; the air seemed even oppressively hot and still after the free race of wind on the outer lake. It was also darkening rapidly.

  He stood up in the boat and stared along the shoreline over the tops of the reeds, wondering where the two had gone—and whether they mightn’t have been in the boat anyway when it overturned.

  “Hey, there!” he yelled uncertainly.

  His voice echoed back out of the creaking shore pines. From somewhere near the end of the bay sounded a series of loud splashes—probably a big fish flopping about in the reeds. When that stopped, the stillness became almost tangible; and Hogan drew a quick, deep breath as if he found breathing difficult.

  Again the splashing in the shallows, much closer now. Hogan faced the sound frowning; his frown became a puzzled stare. That was certainly no fish but some big animal, a deer, a bear, possibly a moose—the odd thing was that it should be coming toward him. Craning his neck, he saw the reed tops bend and shake about a hundred yards away, as if a slow, heavy wave of air were passing through them in his direction. There was nothing else to be seen.

  Then the truth flashed on him—a rush of horrified comprehension.

  Hogan tumbled back into the stern and threw the motor on full power. As the boat drove forward, he swung it around to avoid an impenetrable wall of reeds ahead, and straightened out toward the mouth of the bay. Over the roar of the motor and the splash and hissing of water, he was aware of one other sensation; that shrilling vibration of the nerves, too high to be a sound, that had haunted his dreams all summer! How near the thing came to catching him as he raced the boat through the weedy traps of the bay, he never knew; but once past the first broad patch of open water he risked darting a glance back over his shoulder—

  And then, through a daze of incredulous shock, Hogan heard himself scream—raw, hoarse yells of sheer animal terror.

  He wasn’t in any immediate danger for Greenface had given up the pursuit. It stood, fully visible among the reeds, a hundred yards or so back. The smiling, jade-green face was turned toward Hogan, lit up by strange reflections from the stormy sky and mottled with red streaks and patches he didn’t remember having seen there before. The glistening, flowing mass beneath it writhed like a cloak of translucent pythons. It towered in the bay, dwarfing even the trees behind it in its unearthly menace. It had grown again! It was all of thirty feet high.

  The storm, breaking before Hogan reached camp, raged on through the night and throughout the next day. Since he would never be able to find the thing in that torrential downpour, he didn’t have to decide whether he must try to hunt Greenface down or not. In any case, he wouldn’t have to go looking for it, Hogan told himself, staring out of the lodge windows at the tormented chaos of water and wind without—it had come back for him, and presently it would find its way to the familiar neighborhood of the camp!

  There was a certain justice in that. He’d been the nemesis of the monster as much as it had been his. It was simply time to bring the matter to an end before anyone else got killed.

  Someone had told him—now he thought of it, it must have been Pete Jeffries, plodding up faithfully through the endless storm one morning with supplies for Hogan—that the two lost sportsmen were considered drowned; their boat had been discovered, and as soon as the weather made it possible, the lake would be searched for their bodie
s. Hogan nodded, saying nothing and keeping his face expressionless. Pete was looking at him in a worried way.

  “You shouldn’t drink so much, Hogan!” Pete blurted out suddenly. “It ain’t doing you no good. The missis was telling me you was really keen on that Julia—maybe I shoulda kept my trap shut. But you’d have found out anyhow.”

  “Sure I would,” Hogan said quickly. It hadn’t dawned on him before that Pete believed he’d shut himself up here to mourn for Julia.

  “Me,” Pete told him confidentially, “I didn’t marry the girl I was after, neither. But don’t you never tell that to the missis, Hogan! Well, anyhow, it got me just like it got you . . . you gotta snap outta it, see?”

  Something was moving, off in the grass back of the machine shed. Hogan watched it from the corner of his eye till he made sure it was only a bush shaking itself in the sleety wind.

  “Eh?” he said. “Oh, sure. I’ll snap out of it, Pete. Don’t you worry.”

  “That’s right.” Pete sounded hearty but not quite convinced. “Come around see us some evening, Hogan. It don’t do a guy no good to be sittin’ off here by himself alia time.”

  Hogan gave his promise. Maybe he was thinking of Julia a good deal; but mostly, it seemed to him, he was thinking of Greenface. As for drinking too much, he was certainly far too smart even to look at the whiskey. There was no telling when the crisis would come, and he intended to be ready for it. At night he slept well enough.

  Meanwhile, the storm continued, day and night. Hogan couldn’t quite remember finally how long it had been going on, but it was as bad a wet blow as he’d ever got stuck in. The lake water rolled over the dock with every wave, and the little dock down near the end cabins had been taken clean away. At least three trees were down within the confines of the camp, the ground littered with branches. There were times when Hogan got to wondering why Greenface didn’t come—and whether he hadn’t possibly made the whole thing up.

  But then he would always remember that on cold wet days it didn’t like to move about. It was hiding up, waiting for the storm to subside. It would be hard for so huge a thing to find shelter anywhere, of course; but after a little thinking, he knew exactly where it must be—at the cut-off above the lake, about three miles west of the camp and a mile or so from the bay where he had seen it last.

  On the eighth morning the storm ebbed out. In mid-afternoon the wind veered around to the south; shortly before sunset the cloud banks began to dissolve while mists steamed from the lake surface. Hogan went out with a hand ax and brought in a few dead birches from a windfall over the hill to the south of the lodge. His firewood was running low; he felt chilled and heavy all through, unwilling to exert himself. He had left the gun in the lodge, and as he came downhill dragging the last of the birches, he was frightened into a sweat by a pale, featureless face that stared at him out of the evening sky between the trees. The moon had grown nearly full in the week it was hidden from sight; and Hogan remembered that Greenface was able to walk in the light of the full moon.

  He cast an anxious look overhead. The clouds were melting toward the horizon in every direction; it threatened to be an exceptionally clear night. He stacked the birch logs beside the fireplace in the lodge’s main room. Then he brewed up the last of his coffee and drank it black. A degree of alertness returned to him.

  Afterward he went about, closing the shutters over every window except those facing the south meadow. The tall cottonwoods on the other three sides of the house should afford a protective screen, but the meadow would be flooded with moonlight. He tried to remember at what time the moonset came—no matter, he’d watch till then and afterward sleep! The effect of the coffee was wearing off, and he had no more.

  He pulled an armchair up to an open window from where, across the still, he controlled the whole expanse of open ground over which Greenface could approach. Since a rifle couldn’t have much effect on a creature that lacked both vital parts and sufficient solidity to stop a bullet, he had the loaded shotgun across his knees. The flashlight and the contents of five more shell boxes lay on the small table beside him.

  With the coming of night, all but the brightest of stars were dimmed in the gray gleaming sky. The moon itself stood out of Hogan’s sight above the lodge roof, but he could look across the meadows as far as the machine shed and the icehouse.

  He got up twice to replenish the fire which made a warm, heartening glow on his left side; and the second time he considered replacing the armchair with something less comfortable. He was becoming thoroughly drowsy. Occasionally a ripple of apprehension brought him bolt upright, pulse hammering; but the meadow always appeared quiet and unchanged, and the night alive only with familiar, heartening sounds: the crickets, a single whippoorwill, and the occasional dark wad of a loon from the outer lake.

  Each time fear wore itself out again, and then, even thinking of Julia, it was hard to keep awake. But she remained in his mind tonight with almost physical clearness—sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, raking back her unruly hair while she leafed slowly through the mail-order catalogues; or diving off the float, he’d anchored beyond the dock, a bathing cap tight around her head and the chin strap framing her beautiful, stubborn little face like a picture.

  Beautiful but terribly stubborn, Hogan thought, frowning drowsily. Like one evening, when they’d quarreled again and she hid among the empty cabins at the north end of the camp. She wouldn’t answer when Hogan began looking for her, and by the time he discovered her, he was worried and angry. So he came walking slowly toward her through the half-dark, without a word—and that was one time Julia did get a little scared of him. “Hogan!” she cried breathlessly. “Now wait! Listen, Hogan—”

  He sat up with a jerky start, her voice still ringing in his mind.

  The empty moonlit meadow lay like a vast silver carpet below him, infinitely peaceful; even the shrilling of the tireless crickets was withdrawn in the distance. He must have slept for some while, for the shadow of the house formed an inky black square on the ground immediately below the window. The moon was sinking.

  Hogan sighed, shifted the gun on his knees, and immediately grew still again. There’d been something—and then he heard it clearly: a faint scratching on the outside of the bolted door behind hint, and afterward a long breathless whimper like the gasp of a creature that has no strength to cry out.

  Hogan moistened his lips and sat very quiet. In the next instant, the hair at the back of his neck rose hideously of its own accord.

  “Hogan . . . Hogan . . . oh, please! . . . Hogan!”

  The toneless cry might have come out of the shadowy room behind him, or over miles of space, but there was no mistaking that voice. Hogan tried to say something, and his lips wouldn’t move. His hands lay cold and paralyzed on the shotgun.

  “Hogan . . . please! Listen . . . Hogan—”

  He heard the chair go over with a dim crash behind him. He was moving toward the door in a blundering, dreamlike rush, and then struggling with numb fingers against the stubborn resistance of the bolt.

  “That awful thing! That awful thing! Standing there in the meadow! I thought it was a . . . a TREE! I . . . I’m not CRAZY, am I, Hogan?”

  The jerky, panicky whispering went on and on, until lie stopped it with his mouth on hers and felt her relax in his arms. He’d bolted the door behind them before carrying her to the fireplace couch—Greenface must be standing somewhere around the edge of the cottonwood patch if she’d seen it coming across the meadow from the road. Her hand tightened on his shoulder, and he looked down. Julia’s eyes were wide and dark, but incredibly she was smiling—well, he’d always known Julia was wonderful!

  “I came back, Hogan. I had to find out—was that it, Hogan? Was that what—”

  He nodded hastily; there was no time to wonder, hardly any time left to explain. Now she was here, he realized he’d never have stopped Greenface with any amount of buckshot—but they could get away if only they kept to the shadows.

 
The look of nightmare came back into Julia’s eyes as she listened; her fingers dug painfully into his shoulder. “But, Hogan,” she whispered, “it’s so big . . . big as the trees, a lot of them!”

  Hogan frowned at her uncomprehendingly until, watching him, Julia’s expression began to change. He knew it mirrored the change in his own face, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

  “It could come right through them—” she whispered.

  Hogan still wasn’t able to talk.

  “It could be right outside the house!” Julia’s voice wasn’t a whisper any more, and he put his hand over her mouth, gently enough, until her breathing-steadied.

  “Don’t you smell it?” he murmured, close to her ear.

  It was Greenface all right; the familiar oily odor was seeping into the air they breathed, growing stronger moment by moment until it became the smell of some foul tropical swamp, a wet, rank rottenness. Hogan was amazed to find he’d stopped shaking. He felt quick and strong and reckless—he knew he couldn’t afford to be reckless. He thought frantically.

  “Look, Julia,” he whispered, “it’s dark in the cellar. No moonlight; nothing. Make it there alone?”

  She nodded doubtfully.

  “I’ll put the fire out first,” he explained in hasty answer to her look. “Be down right after you!”

  “I’ll help you,” she gasped. All Julia’s stubbornness was concentrated in the three words.

  Hogan fought down an urgent impulse to slap her face hard, right and left. Like a magnified echo of that impulse was the vast soggy blow that smashed immediately against the outer lodge wall, above the door.

  They stared stupidly. The whole house was shaking. The wall logs were strong, but a prolonged tinkling of broken glass announced that each of the shuttered windows on that side had been broken simultaneously. “The damn thing!” Hogan thought. “The damn thing! It’s really come for me! If it hits the door—”