I could imagine the Hyena running up, knocking the rocks from where they sat, crushing me. Knocking me ten feet to the right, so I hit the ice and broke through to hypothermia-inducing water. Doing something. I was vulnerable while climbing. But I wasn’t about to backtrack.
The savaging at the Hyena’s hands that would inevitably follow, to defile my corpse and ruin me after death…
I picked my course carefully, with attention to where I put my hands and feet, and where everything was. No icy patches to slip on, no areas where the ground wasn’t really solid.
I was focused enough on the navigation and my thoughts of the shitting ghost that I was caught entirely off guard by what waited at the top of the hill.
The little boy stood there. His eyes technically on me, but looking through me. From my angle, I could see his face beneath the hood.
Large eyes, with exaggerated dark circles under them, a thin mouth, hair plastered to his forehead by sweat. Hands in his pockets.
His eyes moved this way, then that. Searching his surroundings.
“We keep running into each other like this,” I said. “Is that because you took good paths, or because you want to run into me?”
“The slaves sang songs,” he said. Voice high. Prepubescent.
“What?”
“…a secret way to spread the word.”
“That so?” I asked, not really looking for a response. Riddles. I climbed to my feet, walking around him. There weren’t as many spirits over here. But then again, most of the spirits had come in response to the noise. I’d chosen the path with the fewest of them, in an indirect way.
Which made sense, sort of. The stream was blocking ones on the other side from coming over here. It was only natural there would be less lurking around here.
Was this a good battleground? If I were to lay a trap…
“Wade in the water,” he said, drawing out the words slightly.
“What’s that?”
“Wade in the water, children,” he said, a lilt to the words. “Wade in the water.”
Singing? Halfway between a whisper and a song.
“Something, something, trouble the water…” he murmured.
I heard hints of a chorus. They could have been an echo, but there were different tones, different cadences. Some were more song, others more whisper.
“Rest assured,” I said, “You’re doing a fantastic job at being creepy. As ghosts go, you’re first rate.”
He turned his back, then hopped along the biggest rocks that sat at the upper edge of the short, frozen waterfall.
A moment later, I saw him doing it again, the opposite way.
A half-dozen flickering replays all at once. Back and forth over the river.
While the scenes played out, he appeared again in front of me, still very alert, watching the surroundings.
“Not your average ghost,” I said.
I had a very bad feeling. A sense of pressure. Foreboding.
Was this the trick? The trap that saw me tumbling over the waterfall to become a ghost?
“Are… you the Hyena?” I asked.
“The wolf,” he whispered, in response, eyes wide and staring.
Not reassuring.
A moment later, he turned, running. Scrambling away.
I heard a frightened noise escape his mouth as he scrambled over the rocks, interrupting his whispers to himself. “Wade in the water.”
I turned to look, and I saw it.
It stood in the thickest patch of trees. The way it was obscured, I could only make out bits and pieces. Fur, matted and stained with mud and dark bodily fluids. It breathed hard enough that I could see its chest expanding with each intake of breath. Fog appeared with each exhalation, and it took a moment before the fog faded enough to reveal a deep red eye that I could make out through the gloom and intervening branches.
All in all, the thing was big enough that its shoulders rubbed branches I couldn’t have touched if I reached overhead and jumped.
Silent. I hadn’t heard it approach, hadn’t heard branches break or snow crunch. Its breathing didn’t make a sound.
It moved forward, cutting off my retreat. Not that I was particularly capable of running from it. I had the creature to my ten o’clock, the river to my right, and the steep hillside behind me. Walking forward would mean walking to the same destination it was heading to. Walking to my left would only require the thing to turn around.
I saw its limbs. Scrawny fore and hind limbs, narrow enough for me to make out the bones and tendons. I could see gaps where the flesh sucked in around the ribcage, its dangling, twisted, knotted genitals, and the broken, splintered claws on each foot.
For all that it was gaunt and broken, it was more scary, not less. Those claws wouldn’t cut me like a scalpel. They’d tear me like the uneven end of a broken bottle.
This thing was mangy, malnourished, and it was still strong enough to beat me in any contest of strength, no question.
I owed that little boy ghost an apology, for the accusation. No mistaking what I was looking at.
“Hello,” I said. “You’re the thing they call the Hyena, I take it?”
It moved through the trees without a noise. When it was visible again, I could see its muzzle pulled into a leer, revealing teeth that were every bit as broken and disgusting as the claws.
Hatchet wouldn’t do a thing. Shotgun… assuming it was vulnerable and not weak to the iron, and the bullets would hurt it as much as they would hurt any other non-Other thing, I couldn’t imagine the shotgun doing anything substantial. The chain was too fucking short to surround the bastard.
Maybe this was a suitable battleground. But I sure as fuck wasn’t ready to fight the thing.
It stopped pacing forward, now at my twelve o’clock. Standing by the bank of the frozen stream. Two red eyes stared at me.
Seeing it more clearly, where I could make out any feature, I could see that it didn’t resemble a hyena. It didn’t resemble a wolf, either. Everything fit together wrong. Proportions were off, if even, muscles overlapped in odd ways. This was not a creature crafted by years of evolution. It had been made wrong, more like a humanoid thing that had once walked on two legs and then been twisted and wrenched into a four-legged shape, everything torn apart and rearranged and regrown until it was this.
If anything told me that, it was the expression it wore.
I shook my head a little.
It was a goblin. A big, bad sort of goblin, twisted into a monstrous shape. It wanted to tear me apart and then tear my ghost apart.
That was the reality I needed to focus on.
“Do-” I started.
I stopped because he lunged.
Crossing the distance between us.
Stream to my right, steep hill behind me, thick trees to the left.
Wade in the water.
I took the same path the ghost had. Over the jutting, ice-slick stones.
I got about two steps over before I fell. Foot slipping, shin slamming into the space between two rocks, chest hitting another rock dead on, knocking half of the of air out of me. All in all, I came a matter of inches from simply bouncing off the rock and tumbling down the ‘waterfall’.
I heard a crash. I looked down and to the right, and I could see one of the big boulders from the hilltop tumbling down, tearing out chunks of frozen earth and ice on the way, sending smaller stones skidding out onto the frozen stream’s surface.
When I looked up, the thing was no longer there. I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it the Hyena anymore. It felt off-target. A bad name for what I was dealing with. But what fit? The Goblin-beast? A bit wordy inside my head.