The beast? That had connotations.
The monster? That would have to do.
Moving more slowly, more carefully I dug my fingers into the craggier spots on the rock, where the snow didn’t cover it, found my feet and made my way across, slipping twice more, though not so badly.
It was gone. It hadn’t simply followed and pounced on me.
Why?
The water?
The little boy had apparently found a way to evade the monster he called ‘the wolf’. Crossing the water. Not explicitly an anti-goblin measure, but… well, labels were dangerous.
Distant murmurs and shouts suggested I wasn’t alone. The boy wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but the noise of the falling boulder had attracted attention.
I could make out the shitting ghost, way down the way, staggering in zig-zags, blind and clutching its stomach. More were visible in the trees. They walked around trees, but they passed through branches that had been lowered closer to the ground by snow and snowfall.
This was how the goblin functioned. Take the prey it could, use the remains of its prey when it couldn’t do it itself.
I headed into the trees, and the cries of the ghosts carried sensations. Illness, an inability to breathe, pains here and there, disorientation, blindness, weakness. Few lasted for more than a second.
Doubts harried me much as the ghosts did. The fact that there were ghosts on this side meant the monster could and would travel over this way. The stream wasn’t a barrier, not completely. It moved in near-silence, and it could find me.
I was following the boy, after a fashion. Taking his advice on paths and on that escape route.
Problem was, well, he’d died.
His advice wasn’t perfect, or he’d be alive.
I moved the shotgun around my body until I had it in position and ready to fire. More for the security than out of any belief that it would help.
The murmuring of ghosts fell behind me as I moved on. I saw an Other to my right, something more wooden than anything, doubled over in pain, but it moved too slowly to pursue me.
Moving was making my injuries from last night felt. The scrapes and gouges I’d left alone, because I simply didn’t have enough glamour.
There weren’t enough assurances here. The rules for this goblin were a little different than the usual. I had to bind it, and I had almost no experience on binding, let alone binding goblins.
The kid had figured something out, or he’d been awfully lucky. I could use that knowledge or luck.
“Little boy,” I said.
Not even a glimmer.
“Wet boots,” I said.
If there was a connection, I couldn’t make it out.
How to connect to him?
“The little survivor, trying to make it until he can go home,” I murmured.
There.
A connection, faint.
Through that connection, I saw something else. Not just a thread or a line between me and the boy, but a bolt of lightning, arcing off.
I focused on other things near me, on trees and stones.
I could tell, now, there was a conflux, a well. A star at the center of this small world of trees and hills and frozen streams. Something powerful and scary enough that every other thing in these woods related to it in some fashion. The monster.
Through the connections that surrounded me, I could see it.
No sooner did I try, than I felt it looking back. Far away. Navigating around the stream.
I felt it change course, making its way to me.
Instinct told me to make a break for the stream. If this was how he functioned, I could cross each time he came over to my side.
Instincts were not my friend, in this particular circumstance. He’d called things to that location by knocking the stone over. They would get in my way.
Besides, I needed to make progress. Backtracking over and over would be safe, but it wouldn’t get that monster bound and over to Conquest’s custody.
I headed in the direction of the kid ghost.
A kind of conviction settled within me, as pieces clicked into place. This was how he operated, how he hunted. The territory was his, almost like a demesne. All spirits fled from him, because there was no denying what he was and what he did to Others and mortals both. Thus, the rules of the world were bent. He made no sound, because there were no spirits to be found.
He littered the area with wounded spirits. His spirits. Maybe he held parts of them in his stomach. Maybe he had a kind of ownership of them because he’d traumatized them. But he maintained a kind of power over them all the same.
When a connection did form, when something did reach him, he was sensitive to it. Easy enough to be sensitive, when the only spirits that maintained any connection to him were the ones that had to.
Any maimed ghost I had contact with, in turn, contacted him.
As if the forest was littered with strings and bells.
Too many different types of Other to avoid contact with all of them.
It also meant that interacting with the little boy’s ghost would bring the monster down on my head.
I didn’t have enough chain to make a ring that would encircle him.
I found the boy in a tree. He’d made a makeshift treehouse. Chickenwire stretched across a ‘v’ of branches, forming a hoop overhead, with openings on either end.
I could see the fence posts the chickenwire had been taken from.
He simply sat there, twenty feet above the ground, arms around his knees.
“What’s your name?” I called out.
Stupid question, dangerous, given the fact that any connection to him would help the monster find us. A ghost could only give answers from its particular script.
“Evan,” the hooded ghost said.
“You’ve stayed alive all this time?” I asked. I could feel the connection, sense it drawing closer. ‘Close’ being relative. The monster had rounded the far end of the stream some time ago, though.
Not just the monster. It was causing noise, and the Others were following in its wake.
“It’s been days,” he said, high above me.
When he looked at me, eerily enough, he looked at me. Not through me.
“Trying to stay alive long enough for help to come?” I asked. While I spoke, my eyes roved over the area. The wire fence was up there. There wasn’t anything down here. “Have you eaten?”
“I haven’t eaten, I haven’t slept. I’ve barely drank.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not sure you want to drink the water from that stream.”
“I’m seeing things,” he said, his voice small. “The wolf was there from the beginning, but there are other things. There’s a fog. And the hungrier and tireder I get, the thicker the fog gets. I see things in the fog.”
I touched the chain from around my shoulders, but I had no idea what to do with it. Couldn’t form a ring big enough… clothesline the thing? It wouldn’t do anything.
The thing was getting closer, and my priorities were changing.
“Where do you run, when you need to run from here?” I asked.
I didn’t hear a response, so I looked up. He’d shrugged. “If they’re down there, I wait. But they have to leave. Or they leave so they can try to trap me. I go down, and then I go that way. Climb over the short fence and bushes. He doesn’t follow that way.”
“Can you show me?” I asked.
He didn’t climb down. He disappeared, in something between a flicker and a fade, and he appeared at the bottom of the tree, letting go of a branch and stumbling a bit. So exhausted he could barely stand. He took a step and nearly tripped.