“Tim! Come here!”
Andy surveyed their environs, breathing hard, assessing the situation. On the bright side, maybe their island of visibility wasn’t that narrow; she could make out the first line of trees behind the tent, some ten yards ahead. For the first time, she heard a familiar sound: the hollow knock of the rowboat against the dock pole.
On the not so bright side, Tim’s barking had turned to growling. The threatening kind.
“Tim!” Kerri called, stepping forward. Andy grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back.
“Go to the car.”
Kerri spun 360 degrees, her hair too agitated to swing gracefully. “Which way is the car?!”
A new sound was slowly rising over Tim’s growls, taking shape like an underground train or the murmurings of an angry mob. A hateful, familiar sound. Although “familiar” could hardly refer to something so alien. It resembled breathing, but it was distorted, tortured, broken. It had qualities that should not be associated with breathing. It was viscous, and jagged, and swarming.
Tim recoiled into view, resolute to defend the girls, snarling in a portentous pretension of viciousness. Andy read the confirmation in Kerri’s eyes: they both knew that breathing. They’d heard it before.
She scanned the camp for a potential weapon. A pool cue. Any kind of stick. A medium-sized stone. Only the frying pan was red enough to call her attention. She crouched to grab it, and both her knees gave out and hit the ground. She had to sarge them up, gritting her teeth: Get up, ladies.
And then came the most unexpected roar. Mostly because, she was sure, it had come from Tim.
The dog leaped forward into the fog again, and they heard a crunch, and Tim’s unbelievable snarling, and the sound of flesh being torn, and the wheezing breath segued into the sound of a radial saw cleaving through metal. It took a long while for the mind to accept that that must have been a scream of pain.
More loud, ill-boding barks were heard. And steps that sounded too close together, and something plumping into the water.
Kerri managed to push words out of her throat. “Tim! Come!”
The answer was the wheezing again, only different. Raspier, hollower, astoundingly clear. Perhaps because, as the girls understood in a synchronized, heart-stopping realization, it was only about six feet away. Behind them.
It staggered out of the mist onto their island of visibility; they saw it instantly. But they didn’t react at once. It took some time for the human brain to comprehend. A few things could be established without ambiguity. It stood, or slouched, on two legs. And the upper limbs, overjointed as they were, might have been called arms. The limbs in between were harder to classify. It wheezed—a gurgling, cackling kind of respiration—but it was difficult to ascertain through which of the slit-holes in its emaciated torso, all below a ribcage that was gaping open, ribs jutting out through the skin. And it had a face of a sort. Most of its head, wobbling sickly at the end of a twisty-tendoned neck, was blank, all smooth gray salamander skin; but a single feature, a deep barbwire impression from absent ear to absent ear, smeared with black blood, seemed to mark where the mouth was supposed to be.
Andy became aware she would have to react way before her reflexes did. Or her heart. Her whole body was literally paralyzed. The literal literally.
“It’s a dream,” Kerri piccoloed next to her.
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s a dream!”
“Kerri, open your fucking eyes!”
The thing responded at her outburst with its own roar, debunking Andy’s sketchy perception of its face by proving that the moving jaw was the one on top. Nothing out of its throat, not even the chord-gashing furnace scream, could have impressed Andy more than the sight of the hundred long, needle-thin teeth dirty with the creature’s own blood.
At least three of those teeth broke when Andy’s right arm finally reacted and whacked the frying pan across its face.
Tim rushed onto scene, barking, trying his best to scare the thing away. Andy pushed Kerri back, remembering later she had not checked to ensure it was clear behind them. She couldn’t tell where the tent was anymore. She was lost.
The thing stepped forward, a sort of webbed two-fingered foot finally making Tim cower, and it thrust a clawed hand at Andy’s face. She jolted back, her legs about to give way again, but she managed to push off with all her strength and launch a kick. It connected; the monster screeched and stared eyelessly at Andy in incredulity. Then its jaws opened once more in a scream to show the actual mouth within.
And then its head exploded.
Black matter and pieces of cartilage splashed onto Andy’s sweater and face.
The headless thing wavered and collapsed on the ground, its medial limbs still twitching.
Nate lowered the smoking shotgun, gaping at the corpse. Then he polled the girls: “We were all seeing that, right?”
—
Andy tried to remember how to breathe. She turned to Kerri for help: she was standing right behind her, next to the tent (there it was!), catatonic.
Tim sniffed thoroughly the wreck on the ground, then jumped over it and ran to Nate, erect tail signaling extreme concern. About effing time, he strongly communicated. We could have died here—we were lucky the thing’s head exploded!
“Where the fuck did you get that gun from?” Andy asked.
“It’s Uncle Emmet’s; I put it in the trunk. I just went to the car for my pills.”
“I’m gonna faint,” Kerri announced.
“No, don’t,” Andy bade, holding her. “Kerri, take deep breaths. Deep breaths.” She tried to demonstrate and failed miserably. Even her lungs were rebelling. “Okay, okay, look, everyone’s fine, right? So the next step is…”
She looked for the next step. Her eyes couldn’t pan past the gray limb-tangle of a corpse on the ground, its three-dimensional volume, the space it stole from the natural world.
“Holy shit,” she concluded, and fell on her knees.
Nate pulled his shirt up to his mouth and spoke through it. “Next step is, we get the fuck out of here.”
“Okay,” Andy answered. Some wind was blowing; visibility was improving. She started to make out the amber blur of the Chevy Vega. It had been ridiculously close the entire time. “Take care of Kerri and pack up. But don’t bother taking anything that won’t fit with you in the backseat.”
“Why? Wait,” he asked and self-answered. “We’re gonna…We’re carrying this?!”
Andy looked up, the adrenaline she’d failed to use bleeding through her eyes. “This is the thing that has almost driven us mad for thirteen years. God help me if I’m not putting it on the Pennaquick Telegraph front page.”