Read Online The Curse of the Wendigo by Rick Yancey - Free Book Online Page A

space, far from all that was familiar, adrift in a strange and indifferent sea. I watched through half-closed eyes the shape of my master outside; it comforted me somehow. I fell asleep holding close that unexpected balm, drawing it into me or allowing it to draw me into it—the conceit of the monstrumologist watching over me.
    The unease I suffered that first night in the bush—made all the more distressing after the keen anticipation I had felt on the outset of the journey—persisted in the days that followed, an odd mixture of boredom and anxiety, for as hour followed monotonous hour, the woods took on a dreadful sameness, each turn of the path bringing more of the same, mere distinctions with no difference. At times the trees suddenly parted, like a curtain being whipped aside, and we’d stumble from the forest’s perpetual gloom into the sudden sunlight of a clearing. Huge boulders thrust their heads from the earth, stony leviathans breaking the surface of the glen, their craggy faces sporting shaggy beards of lichen.
    We crossed innumerable streams and creeks, some too wide to jump across; we’d no choice but to ford their icywaters on foot. We scrambled over washouts and through deep ravines where the shadows pooled thickly even at midday. Ruined landscapes that Hawk called
brûlé
rose up to meet us, where the charred bones of silver birch and maple, spruce and hemlock, marched to the horizon, victims of the spring fires that had raged for weeks, creating an apocalyptic vista stretching as far as the eye could see, where the restless wind whipped the inch-deep ash underfoot into a choking fog. In the midst of this desolation, I looked up and saw high above a black shape against the featureless gray, an eagle or some other great bird of prey, and for a shuddering moment I saw us through its eyes—pitifully small, wholly insignificant nomads, interlopers in this lifeless land.
    Sergeant Hawk tried to halt each day’s march at some open spot in the bush, but sunset often caught us deep in the forest’s belly, forcing us to make camp in a blackness as profound as the grave’s, where, if not for the campfire, you could not see your hand an inch from your face.
    Our guide’s good nature helped too in relieving the insistent dark. He told stories and jokes—some, if not most, on the bawdy side—and, possessing a fairly decent voice, sang the old songs of the French voyageurs, tilting his chin slightly as if to offer his song to some nameless forest god:
    J’ai fait une mâtresse y a pas longtemps.
    J’irai la voir dimanche, ah oui, j’irai!
     
    “Do you know that one, Doctor?” he teased my master. “‘
Le Coeur de Ma Bien-aimée’
—‘
The Heart of My Well-Beloved’
? ‘A gentle lady charmed me, not long ago . . .’ Remindsme of a girl I knew in Keewatin. Can’t recall her name now, but by God I was damn near to marrying that one! Are you married, Doctor?”
    “No.”
    “Ever been?”
    “I have not,” replied the monstrumologist.
    “Been damn near ready, though?”
    “Never.”
    “What, don’t you like women?” he ribbed, giving me a wink.
    The doctor pursed his lips sourly. “As a man of science, I have often thought that, for the sake of accuracy, they should be classified as a different species altogether—
Homo enigma
, perhaps, or
Homo mortalis.
”
    “Well, I don’t know much about your science, Dr. Warthrop. I reckon a monster hunter looks at things a little differently than most, always with the eye turned to the dark and ugly, but all the more appreciative of the bright and fair when it comes along, or so I’d guess. I’ll take your word for it, though.”
    He sang softly,
“La demande à m’amie je lui ferai . . .”
    Warthrop pushed himself to his feet with a snarl. “Please, would you cease with that infernal singing!”
    He stomped away into the thick underbrush, stoppingwhere the light of the campfire met the dark of the forest. His lean frame seemed to writhe as