In the age-old tradition of fiction writers, Edo van Belkom is a newspaper reporter. He has worked for several years on the sports and police beats of weekly and daily newspapers in and around Toronto. A prolific short story writer, he is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Horror Writers of America, SF Canada, and Ontario Hydra, and his work has appeared in On Spec, Gent, The Nightside, Haunts, and Eldritch Tales. His first published short story, “Baseball Memories,” appeared in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories XX, edited by Karl Edward Wagner.
The cabin’s silence was broken only by the sound of the rocking chair’s runners as they cut into the cold hardwood floor.
Nadia Varga sat in the rocker, a knitted shawl covering her shoulders, a flannel blanket over her legs, and a two-shot double-barrelled shotgun sitting on her lap.
She was waiting for the beast.
And when it came she was going to kill it.
She’d been waiting for the beast ever since it had taken her husband last October. She had been lonely, but she’d never once broken her routine of loading her shotgun, pulling her rocker up to the front door, covering herself against the night’s chill, and waiting for it to come.
While she sat rocking, her mind invariably slipped backward in time to the first time the beast had come.
It had been a night just like this one . . .
Nadia dug her arm into the pumpkin up to the elbow and scooped out a handful of stringy pulp and seeds. She disliked the feel of the slimy mess on her hands, but Thomas liked her pies so much that the discomfort was little more than a minor inconvenience.
Outside, with the October sun rapidly falling below the mountains of the western horizon, Thomas was busy stacking firewood against the side of the cabin. The winter’s chill had come early, and they now had to keep the potbellied stove fixed around the clock. Even though they had enough firewood to last the two winters, Thomas had been splitting and piling logs the past four days, just to be sure.
The day had been almost perfect, full of chores that were more like relaxation for the elderly couple than work. Their retirement had been full of many such days, the kind they’d looked forward to all their lives. Later that night they might play cards at the kitchen table, watch a movie off the dish, or read the latest two-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. Or they might just go to bed early. After a world war, four children, and decades of work in the sawmills of British Columbia, the quiet uneventful hours were easy to take. They filled up their days and stretched them out until they overlapped each other like fallen autumn leaves.
That was why, when Nadia heard the first scream, she thought it was nothing more than Thomas having some fun with her. But the second scream told her that something was wrong, unnaturally wrong.
Quickly shaking the pulpy pumpkin innards from her hands, she ran outside and around the cabin to the woodpile, arriving just in time to see Thomas’s mauled body being dragged by its feet out towards the forest.
His neck and chest had been ripped open, and dark red blood bubbled up from the open wound like oil from the ground.
Nadia’s mouth fell open in a silent scream.
“Get back,” Thomas said in a thin and ragged voice, the words already sounding as if spoken by a dead man. “Get away.”
“Thomas!” Nadia screamed in a shrill voice that sliced through the chill night air like a knife blade.
The beast stopped in its tracks and turned. It hesitated a moment, staring at her with wide, dark eyes and growling softly under its breath as if deciding whether or not to take her as well.
As it stood there in the full light of the moon, Nadia clearly saw the mark of the beast cut into the thick tangle of blood-matted fur on its chest—and suddenly wished her husband dead.
The beast turned back around and took two steps towards the woods before it and Thomas were swallowed up by the black night shadows of the forest.
Nadia’s eyes rolled over in their sockets. She felt her world darken around the edges, and fell to the ground in a heap.
A couple of hikers found Thomas’s remains two weeks later, fifteen miles from their cabin on the eastern shore of Pitt Lake. What they found was little more than body parts scattered across a small clearing some ten metres across. The right half of the jawbone found underneath a foot was enough for a positive ID.
The RCMP told Nadia her husband had been taken by a grizzly bear that had come down from the mountains looking for food. At first she couldn’t be sure if the two officers believed what they were telling her, but once they said a police sharpshooter had shot the bear near the shores of Harrison Lake she knew they were lying to her.
But what else could they say? The police hadn’t seen what she had seen. The police hadn’t seen the seven-foot-tall manlike beast dragging her husband away like a rag doll. They hadn’t seen the huge hairy arms and legs or the talon-like claws that tore his body apart like paper. They hadn’t seen its large vulpine face, the big dark eyes, or the long sharp teeth. Most of all, they hadn’t seen the pentagram that was carved into its chest as if by a jagged knife.
The mark of the beast had been unmistakable.
Nadia tried to tell her story to the local newspapers, but all they wanted to talk about were rabid bears, Sasquatches, and Bigfoots.
No one wanted to know the truth.
No one wanted to hear about ravenous creatures that had once been men.
But when a three-hundred-pound bear was found mauled to death on the side of a nearby logging road, tourists and townsfolk suddenly became conspicuous by their absence.
When Nadia heard about the bear on the radio, she didn’t run. She knew what was coming and she was ready for it. The two-shot gun on her lap was loaded with two shells she’d had specially made by a gunsmith in Port Moody. She’d brought the man six silver spoons and asked him to replace the lead buckshot of two shells with bits of silver.
Nadia was surprised that the gunsmith didn’t laugh at her request. He simply told her he’d made silver bullets twice before, and went into the back of his shop to do the work. When he’d finished the job later in the day, he gave the shells to her in an old pine box and refused to accept payment for his work.
He simply placed a comforting hand in hers and said, “Good luck.”
A hard snapping of a branch outside the cabin brought Nadia back to the present.
She stopped rocking and listened.
The night had been silent save for the whispering rush of wind through the pines, but now even the wind had hushed, silenced by the same short sharp sound that Nadia had heard before.
The hairs on the back of Nadia’s wrists stood up on end, feeling as if they’d been charged with electricity. And she knew.
The beast had come at last.
Although she’d had a year to prepare herself, Nadia found her body shaking at the thought of confronting the beast. Doubt slowly crept into the thinking part of her mind.
What if I miss? What if the silver isn’t enough to kill it? Will I be able to kill it, or will I just die trying? What if it scratches me before it dies, and I live?
Her heart began to pound inside her chest like a fist and blood began to roar through her ears. Her hands trembled in mortal fear. The urge to flee, to find a corner and cower there hidden, was strong within her, but mixed somewhere in the torrent of fear swirling through her was the single sweet thought of revenge. It wasn’t enough to calm her fears, but it was more than enough to keep her seated in her rocker.
A scratching sound came from the living room window. Nadia turned in her chair in time to see the large hairy hand creeping through the small space beneath the open window. Her breath became short and choppy and her entire body began to tremble as she watched the clawlike hand crawl over the windowsill as if reaching for her.
She turned the gun around on her lap, pointing it at the window. She was about to pull the trigger, but stopped. Her whole body froze, so paralyzed by what she saw that even her eyes refused to blink.
The beast was looking in through the open window, its angry red eyes glaring at her, boring into her as if they alone were enough to tear her body to pieces.
Then, just as quickly as they appeared, the eyes were gone, replaced by a second hand that clawed its way in, tearing at the window frame. The beast was trying to rip open a hole in the wall big enough to crawl through.
The sound of splintering wood brought Nadia out of her daze. Her heart pounded painfully, her body trembled, and her hands shook violently as she reached for the shotgun. Her fingers wrapped around the stock and barrel of the gun so tightly that her knuckles turned a ghostly shade of white.
Keeping the gun close to her body to try and steady it, she picked it up off her lap, took aim—
—and fired.
The shotgun’s kick nearly sent Nadia toppling over backward but she managed to keep herself upright. When the smoke cleared she saw that the window’s glass was unbroken. About four feet to the right of the window was a huge hole in the wall.
Her shot hadn’t even been close.
The beast had been scared off, but it would be back.
One more chance.
There was one shell left in the gun, one chance left to shoot the creature full of silver.
She’d had only two shells made because she’d figured there wouldn’t be time to reload the gun once the beast was upon her. There was no more room for error; she had to be sure her last shot was on target.
Her body began to shake now for a different reason. She was crying.
“Why have I been so foolish?” she said aloud, only to be answered by the sudden howl of the wind through the gaping mouth of the open window.
“Stupid old woman. What makes you think you can kill it?”
The wind died down, replaced by the empty rustling of the pines.
“Why didn’t I leave like the rest of them?”
Silence.
“Why did I have to stay behind?”
For Thomas.
The voice in the back of her mind spoke clearly to her, reminding her and wiping away all her fear and trembling.
“Yes,” she said. “For Thomas.”
She was suddenly embarrassed. How could I have forgotten for even a moment?
She straightened herself in her chair, adjusted the shawl over her shoulders, and placed the gun comfortably in her lap. She still had one shot.
It should be enough to kill the beast.
But even if she steeled herself against the approach of the beast she couldn’t be sure she’d aim well enough to hit it. She’d have to shoot it at point-blank range. She would have to wait until it was nearly on top of her before pulling the trigger.
Or would she?
There was another possibility.
She’d once read that a silver bullet entering a werecreature’s body at any point would bring instant death. That did not mean the bullet had to be fired from a gun.
What if . . .
She paused a moment, preparing herself for the horror of her own thought.
What if I turned the gun on myself. My flesh would be tainted with silver fragments—a deadly feast for the beast.
It could be done. She’d turned the gun on herself once before in the dark time of her life immediately following Thomas’s death. She’d almost pulled the trigger too, before the thought of revenge welled up inside her and forced her to carry on.
An icy chill ran the length of her spine as the night sounds diminished slowly until the silence was absolute.
Taking her own life in order to take that of the beast seemed so blackly macabre that she wasn’t sure she could go through with it.
She considered her options.
If she tried to shoot the beast she risked missing it. If that happened she’d surely end up dead. She also risked sustaining a scratch or wound before she was able to kill it. If that happened, if she became infected by the beast, she would become one herself, consigned to a lifetime of hell.
She shook her head. It was hard for her to think that by taking her own life she would have the best chance of achieving the one thing she’d lived for this past year.
She laughed. The idea seemed so—
The door opened, hinges creaking out a shrill cry of terror before diminishing into silence.
Claw-fingers curled around the edge of the door, pushing it open and allowing the light of the full October moon to shine into the cabin. Moonbeams streaked across the hardwood floor toward the far wall and the long, grotesque shadow there.
Nadia’s heart leaped into her throat, pounding like a thunderclap. Her breath became rapid and ragged. The gun trembled in her hands as she slowly lifted it from her lap.
The beast was upon her, so close that she could smell the stench of carrion on its breath. She looked deep into its two dark eyes . . . and smiled.
Then, with a sense of pure and complete calm washing over her, she took careful aim—
—and fired.