“If it was eyes you saw, Will here saw them too—last night,” Hawk said. He slung his rifle around; he kept it on his person at all times, even when he slept.
“Look!” I said, raising my voice in excitement. “There they are again—over there!”
And gone again in the time it took Sergeant Hawk to whip the barrel round. He kept the stock against his shoulder and swung the weapon slowly back and forth.
“A bear?” wondered the doctor.
“A bear, could be,” breathed Hawk. “If he’s strolling about on his hind legs. Those eyes were near ten feet off the ground, Doctor.”
The seconds spun out, turned to minutes. A strange gurgling sound commenced behind us, and the sergeant whirled around to face the tent. Warthrop pushed down the barrel of the rifle and snapped, “It’s Chanler,” and rushed through the opening. “Will Henry!” he called. “Bring me some light!”
Within, the doctor was leaning over his patient, while the man’s mouth opened and closed spasmodically, like a landed fish’s, with burbling deep in his throat. Warthrop rolled him onto his side and lightly patted him in the small of the back. The body convulsed, and greenish-yellow bile erupted from his open mouth, soaking the doctor’s shirt and trousers and filling the tent with an unearthly noxious odor. I pinched shut my nose and fought the urge to vomit. Warthrop wiped Chanler’s mouth with his filthy handkerchief, and then looked up at me.
“Some water, Will Henry.”
Chanler moaned, and Warthrop reacted as if he had sat up and said his name. The doctor’s face fairly glowed with elation.
“Is he waking up?” I asked.
“John!” Warthrop shouted. “John Chanler! Can you hear me?”
If he could, he gave no reply. He went limp. We waited, but he had left again. Wherever he had been, he had gone back.
We did not see the yellow eyes for several nights thereafter, but their absence did little to relieve our unease. Hawk in particular seemed affected. He often lagged behind even the doctor, who was not walking so much as sliding, shuffling mechanically along the trail slick with the damp, dead leaves of autumn. Hawk would stop and turn around, rifle at the ready, and stare down the boreal tunnel in which we marched, every muscle tense, every sinew and nerve stretched, his head cocked to one side, listening. Listening to what, I cannot say, for neither the doctor nor I heard anything but our own ragged breath and the scratch-scratch of our boots along the ground. When we rested, the sergeant roamed the woods in all directions, and his angry muttering carried in the thin air like shards of conversations from splintered memory, bereft of meaning.
He grew sullen and taciturn, obsessively wiping his raw lips, sleeping for only a few minutes at a time and then starting awake with a growl, throwing more wood onto the fire or cursing when there was none left to throw. The fire could never be big enough for him. I think he would have burnt the entire forest if he could have. This man who had spent his entire life in these woods now seemed wholly at odds with them, distrusting and hating them with all the fury of a lover betrayed. What he loved did not love him. Indeed, it seemed bent on killing him.
Distracted though the doctor was by the condition of his patient, our guide’s condition did not go unnoticed. The monstrumologist drew me aside and said, “I’m concerned about the sergeant, Will Henry. God help us if my concern is well founded! Here, take this; put it in your pocket.” He pressed the revolver into my hand.
He must have noticed the question contained in my stunned expression.
“It can break a man’s mind in half,” he said. He did not define “it.” I do not think he felt it was necessary. “I have seen it.”
The sergeant broke the next day. We had stopped to rest, and no sooner had we eased our aching bodies down than he was up again and traipsing through the brush; I could see his hat, shimmering with dew, darting between the glistening ebony bodies of the trees.
“All right, damn you, all right!” he bellowed. “I hear you over there! You might as well come out where I can see you!”
I started to get up, and the doctor waved me back down. He picked up his rifle.
“I’ll shoot you. Do you want that?” yelled Hawk toward the vacant trees. “I’ll drop you like the miserable dog you are. Do you hear me?”
I jerked reflexively as the gunshot reverberated throughout the forest. Again I began to get up and the doctor pushed me gently down.
At that moment Hawk let loose with a banshee scream and raced away, crashing pell-mell through the undergrowth, firing wildly as he ran, his screams more like the high-pitched yelps of a wounded animal than those of a man.
“Stay with Chanler, Will Henry!”
With that the monstrumologist raced into the bush after him. I scooted closer to John Chanler, clutching the revolver in both hands, unsure what I should be more afraid of—the thing that might be following us or our deranged guide. Presently the snap and pop of the pursuit, the explosions of gunfire, and the hysterical screams faded. The quiet of the primeval forest returned, a preternatural stillness that was, if possible, even more unnerving than the noise.
I felt something stir beside me. I heard something moan. I smelled the breath of something foul. Then I looked down and saw that something looking back at me.
ELEVEN
“In My Rising, I Fell”
The skeletal hand grabbed my arm. The bulbous head lifted a few inches from the carpet of pine needles, the eyes wide open and swimming in a noisome yellow soup, the lips crimson with fresh blood framing the yawning mouth from which issued the foul stench of corruption and decay, and John Chanler spoke to me in a guttural gibberish, words I did not understand. With a viselike grip he pulled with surprising strength upon my arm. I think I screamed the doctor’s name; I cannot remember. I saw the thick scum-covered tongue push angrily against the front teeth, and I watched those teeth slip loose of their moorings and fall straight back into the stygian blackness of his throat. He gagged; his body heaved. Without thinking, I dropped the gun into my lap and rammed my fingers into his mouth to dislodge the broken teeth. Instantly his mouth snapped shut and he bit down hard. The pain was explosive. I am sure I screamed then, though I have no clear memory of it. My mind was overcome by the pain and the horrible, vacant look in those yellow eyes, the animal panic replaced by cool, detached alertness, at once bestial and human, when his tongue was kissed by my blood.