The suspension springs creaked on his truck. Then, with a crunch of collapsing metal and a clash of glass, he heard the truck roll over. He must have left the brake on. Piece of junk anyhow; he’d buy himself a Peterbilt with his money and run his own truck. Nice CB on the dash, TV back there in the sleeping cube, and loads of road whores bouncing around in the trailer . . .
Brakes. Dog. Shit!
Lester finally caught on when the trailer began to rock. Simultaneously, a rock blew in his living-room window, rolled off the unmade bed, and thumped to the floor. He looked across the kitchen to the crank-handled window. A face was looking in.
Lester could not take his eyes off it. It was horned and hairy, with narrow eyes rimmed in red, and it swallowed up more window than any human’s would.
The window behind his neck smashed to pieces, and the draft brought in a sudden stench. He looked into a second face not ten inches from his own.
It was a knowing face, like the other one. The red eyes looked into Lester’s, then at the shapeless mess on the table.
The face writhed into a contorted mass as though snakes were jumping under the skin, all the features going against each other. Lester flung his beer at it.
An arm the size of a tree trunk rammed through the window frame, grabbed Lester’s entire head in a hand so enormous it swallowed it up, and squeezed convulsively.
The last thing Lester heard was the howling dog and the wall caving in as the other beast hooted into the kitchen to the child’s body. Lester did not blame them. Lester did not blame them one damned bit.
NEMESIS
11
On Saturday morning, Jack Helder joyfully shut off the snow guns and serviced the five snowmobiles in the shed. The place was packed for the weekend. He told his staff Colby would stand or fall on the weekend business, so he was releasing half of them during the weekdays. They’d make more money on Saturday and Sunday. The worse the weather, the better for him. Naturally, the airport would be closed for the storm, but he could send the van to Clayton, where the diverted planes would be landing.
Saturday afternoon, he shivered on his sun deck, watching the sun lance feeble rays over the valley. Tomorrow the sun deck would be shielded behind heavy metal shutters. The storm would seize the valley as a dog seizes prey in its teeth and yanks it about. They would all move to the game room at night, where there were pinball machines and billiard tables. The colder it was, the more liquor he would sell. He could make it on the bar alone.
On Saturday afternoon, Martha Lucas and Raymond Jason visited a weary James Drake at Ranger headquarters.
“No, no, we haven’t found anything. We did the north face most of the morning and found a lot of stripped foliage, but nothing recent.”
Nor had they found any more entrances to the Limerick, but it could be a cave hidden somewhere. “Those charts will be here by Thursday, and we should really be cracking then.”
Martha asked if she could tell Jack Helder yet. Drake yawned. “If you ask me, they’ve cleared out of here. Go ahead and tell him, but also make damned certain he doesn’t let anyone run around that mine.”
And she would have if it were not for John Moon. Helder would land on the Indian like the Gestapo, pumping him for every bit of information, wheedling, cajoling, demanding, offering more pay, perhaps driving that fragile sensibility beyond endurance. Judging by Moon’s dark-ringed eyes and recent poor performance on the archery field, he was not far from there now.
“Cool it,” Jason told her. “If they’re really gone, he’ll catch on before long.”
That night Raymond Jason lay on his bungalow bed in a state of profound melancholy, watching cigarette smoke curl up to the ceiling. He dwelled on that medicine bundle at Moon’s waist. The bag smelled like the beast, no doubt about it. There could very well be a piece of it in there, probably taken from the trap it had sprung. If so, Jason was going to take it.
It was either that or get out of this impasse the way he had come in. With nothing. For Jason was convinced that the beasts were gone for good, leaving him and Moon in the lurch.
Him and Moon.
Jason was a hair’s-breadth away from hating that laconic redskin, that weirdo with his silly, savage superstitions. His psychiatrist would have said it was because Moon reminded him of himself. But Jason’s hatred for Moon was tinged with contempt. Put a Raggedy Ann doll before him and he’d follow you anywhere.
And so would Jason. Two peas in a pod.
Jason angrily squashed out the cigarette and lit another one. Think about something else. Think about what they both had missed.
So far Kimberly had called the shots beautifully. He had suggested that some kind of genetic damage had decimated the population of Bigfeet over the past hundred years. And it had been confirmed when Jason saw its face in the river. A damaged mismatched face with a human chin on the superstructure of a monstrous primate. Parts that did not mesh. Kimberly had stated that the chin was irrefutable proof that it was human.
Jason believed that.
Almost.
The trouble was, primitive humans were small, not giants. Twinkletoes, not Bigfeet. Kimberly had suggested that giantism, some glandular disorder, accounted for its size and hair. Yet giantism was a crippling disease that weakened bones. This thing was built huge. He could walk and run for distances of up to a thousand miles. Nature had designed it that way, using the basic superstructure of the ape.
Dammit, it was a missing link. It was both ape and human. Had to be! Even Paranthropus had not been that big a hominid. This was a gorilla-scaled apparition no matter what kind of face it had.
Genetic damage.
Jason watched the smoke curl. Genetic damage? Now just a bloody minute here, there’s a third possibility. It was so far out of imagination, he even had trouble pinning it down.
Jason slowly sat upright on the bed. Until now his plight paralleled the Indian’s, in that he was not quite sure what he was chasing. To Moon it was a spirit, to Jason an equally unlikely creature.
A third possibility. A third Sasquatch. Kimberly had neglected to speculate what could have caused a genetic upset in the animals. Bad water, air pollution, all that stuff was the assumption.
The trouble was, genetic damage was fatal too. Oh, you could make it through two or three generations, but still, the timing was off. They’d be extinct by the mid-sixties.
So maybe genetic damage was the wrong word, too. A genetic change! Plain Darwinian evolution. The things were changing from ape to human. How in the hell could that happen?
It took something of a struggle for Jason to face that question squarely. There was only one way it could have happened, absurd as it was . . . as incredibly far out and unbelievable as it was, that had to be it.
From the drawer he pulled out a Gideon Bible. Religious fanatics! They were everywhere. He had not looked in the Bible since he was a child, but after half an hour of searching, it was there in front of his eyes.
Yes! He knew what the things were! Jason knew exactly what he was chasing.
Jack Helder was alone in the Grizzly Bar, with the color television flickering lines across the screen. He had been counting receipts and sipping Scotch. Sip. Count. Sip. Count. He fell asleep with his head on the counter as the rising wind shuddered the lodge.
When he heard the crash of crockery from the kitchen, he awoke thinking it was morning and the cook had arrived to fix breakfast. Nice of him to get an early start.
Except it was three fifteen in the morning, according to the watch, which would not stay in focus.
The second crash was louder than the first and was accompanied by plaster tearing out of the wall and water gurgling onto the floor. It brought Helder to his feet, wide awake and hung over. He went into the lounge and listened.