Wait—what?
The drifter paused, as perplexed as I was, and in that split second Crowley turned around and lashed out with his ungloved hand—longer now, somehow, and darker, his fingernails lengthening impossibly into sharp ivory claws. The first swipe knocked the knife from the startled man's hand, spinning it straight past my stand of trees, and the second backhanded the stranger across the face, knocking him down into the cushion of snow. The drifter struggled to his feet, but Crowley dropped his cooler and pole and leapt on the man, roaring like a beast. Another claw tore its way out of Crowley's other glove, shredding it as it grew, and both claws raked across the stranger's upraised arm, slicing flesh from bone. The man was hidden from my view now, deep in the snow, but I heard him cry out—a formless cry of pain and shock. Crowley roared back with a mouth full of gleaming, needlelike teeth. Two vicious strikes later, and all was silent.
Mr. Crowley crouched over the body in a cloud of steam, his arms too long, and his unearthly talons bright with blood. His head had grown bulbous and dark, his ears were pointed like blades. His jaw was unnaturally low, and bristled with teeth. He panted heavily, and as I watched he slowly coalesced back into the form I knew—his arms and hands shortened, his claws shrank back to become regular fingernails, and his head deflated and reformed. A moment later, it was plain old Mr.
Crowley again, as normal as could be. If not for the blood stains on his clothes, no one would have ever guessed what he had bell come, or what he had done. He coughed and pulled the tattered glove from his left hand, dropping it wearily on the ground.
I sat in shock, my face bitten by the wind and my legs warm with my own urine. I didn't even remember peeing.
Mr. Crowley was a monster.
Mr. Crowley was the monster.
I was too scared to think about hiding—I simply sat and watched, freezing and nauseated. Crowley extended his right hand once more into a claw and began cutting away the stranger's layers of clothing.
"Try to kill me," he muttered. "I bought you a hat." He reached down with both hands and grimaced, and I heard hideous cracking—one, two, three, four-five-six—a string of, shattered ribs. He stooped lower, out of my sight, and stood up a moment later clutching a pair of shapeless, bloody bags, Lungs.
Slowly, Mr. Crowley began unbuttoning his coat. . . then his first flannel shirt.. . then his second . . . then his third.
Soon his chest was bared to the cold and he gritted his teeth, breathing heavily and closing his eyes. He switched the ragged lungs into his human left hand, brought his demonic claw up to his belly, and sliced himself open just below the ribs. I gasped, just as a faint grunt escaped between Crowley's clenched teeth; it didn't look like he'd heard me. Blood poured from his open belly and he staggered one step, but quickly righted himself.
I felt past shock now—too numbed by what I had seen to do anything but stare.
Mr. Crowley coughed again, wracked with pain, and shoved the lungs desperately into the gash in his abdomen. He fell to his knees, his face wrenched with pain, and I watched as the ' last bit of lung disappeared into him, as if drawn up by something inside. His eyes opened suddenly wide, wider than I thought possible, and his mouth moved fearfully in a futile, noiseless gasp for air. Something dark oozed out of his wound and he reached for it quickly, pulling out another pair of lungs—similar to the first but black and sickly, like the lungs in a cancer commercial. The black lungs hissed as they slid from his open wound, and he dropped them on the stranger's dead body below. He paused there a moment, suspended in the utter silence of asphyxiation, motionless and airless, then gasped loudly and abruptly, like a diver emerging from a pool, desperate for air. He took three more breaths like that, huge and hungry, then began to breathe at a calmer, more measured pace. His right hand shrank back to normal, shifting somehow from monster to human, and he clutched his open wound with both hands. The hole sealed up, closing itself like a zipper.
Half a minute later, his chest was whole again, scarless and white.