Wendigo

“For the panic of the wilderness called to him in that far voice—the power of untamed distance, the desolation that destroys. He knew in that moment all the pains of someone hopelessly and irretrievably. He had seen the Wendigo.”

-Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo”.

***

Four of us went up: Shawna, Eric, Karina, and me. I’m the only one who came back.

The trip was Shawna’s idea to begin with. She said, “It’s been years since we all went up to the old house like when we were kids. Why don’t we make a weekend of it?”

“We” in this case should have been her, me, and Paul, but of course this time it would be just the two of us. I guess she brought Eric to make up the difference.

I didn’t mind: I’d known Eric for years, ever since he’d been Paul’s roommate as an undergrad. He was engaged back then, and of course this was when Paul was still around, so I didn’t think much of Eric at the time, but lately…

Well, he’d been on my mind since his breakup with what‘s-her-name. I had to start living again sometime, after all.

I hadn’t known Karina would be coming until she arrived in the RV. I barely knew her, though we knew all the same people. She was a sweet girl and she minded her own business, but I was surprised Shawna invited her.

I didn’t find out until later that she’d had a history with Paul, very briefly, just before he and I got together. A terrible, petty part of me wants to try to blame all of this on her, but I know that’s not fair.

Shawna and Paul’s parents still owned the old house way out in the country, but no one had lived there for years. It’s the house Shawna and Paul grew up in, and for the most part it’s where I grew up too.

Even my earliest memory is of that house: I was a little girl, no older than four, and it was snowing, and we were playing near the woods. I went to make a snow angel without realizing how deep it was and when I fell on my back I sank and couldn’t get back up.

I remember how cold it was and how much I screamed, and how it was Paul who came to my rescue. He was six then, I think, but in my mind I see him as grown-up Paul, the Paul I remember, picking me up and brushing me off and taking me back to my parents.

I like to remember Paul that way, the way he was when he was young and cared. Not the way he was the last time I saw him. Not the Paul I still have nightmares about…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

There would be no snow this trip, of course. It was May, and even this high up the spring thaw had set in. It was just as well. It was a long drive, almost six hours with the four of us in the RV, Shawna in the driver’s seat, talking and talking the whole way.

That’s how she was now, she almost never shut up. Eric was in the back with Karina, and he seemed to have a lot on his mind, as he kept quiet. Karina was always quiet, of course, and she seemed enthralled by the view as we got deeper into the forest.

So it was up to me to keep up with Shawna’s conversation, because I didn’t want her to run us off the road if she had one of her breakdowns while at the wheel. She was complaining about her boyfriend of the week.

“Now he says he wants to do cross-country skiing,” she said. “I don‘t think he‘s even been on skis in his entire life.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, staring out the window.

“But I guess it‘s better than the boxing thing.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I don‘t know what to do with him, really. Do you think he‘ll actually settle on something this time?”

I didn’t hear her at first, and the silence rode out a few seconds longer than was comfortable. Eric came to my rescue: “That‘s how Ian‘s always been: some new big plan every other week,” he said.

“I guess,” Shawna said.

I was watching the trees: It’s strange the way a forest will grow just up to a certain point and then stop at some invisible line. It looks like a stage curtain with gaps you can just barely see through, and it makes you wonder what you’ll find if you walk behind it.

Once you do though, you just see another gap, and more trees with more gaps behind them, and it just keeps going like that until eventually you turn around and see that there’s nothing behind you anymore that looks like anywhere you’ve been and now you don‘t know how to get out of wherever you are.

It was dark when we got to the house. It looked exactly as I remembered, except a bit gloomier for so many years of being empty. It was a box-shaped thing, half again as tall as it was wide, and for some reason it had only one story despite the high ceiling.

More than half the space was just a single big, multi-purpose room, with two bathrooms and a pair of bedrooms built onto the back. It was big and dark and drafty and old and a barn, but it felt like home. It was where we all grew up, after all, Paul, Shawna, and me.

I always called them my cousins, but really they were no relation at all, just the children of my mom’s best friend. But they felt like family anyway.

Maybe that’s why it took so long for Paul and me to get together: He’d been the cousin—or maybe even the brother—I never had for so long that at first it was difficult to get around. It was a strange feeling, right and wrong at the same time. Then one day Paul called us “kissing cousins” and I punched him in the shoulder. He laughed and punched me back, but not hard.

We’d brought food and enough booze for the weekend but we left most everything in the RV for now, too lazy to unpack. Karina and Shawna wanted to go off for a walk on their own for some reason, and that suited me just fine, since it left me alone with Eric.

I told him we would go get the old generator started and pray that the electric heating still worked. There was a big old stone fireplace, but it was better for setting the mood than heating. Even in May the nights got cold up there. I always remember that cold.

I was never much good with tools or machines, but I knew the generator backwards and forwards. Eric wanted to help but was mostly stuck standing around looking out of place, shuffling his feet and not knowing what to do with his hands. I’ve never seen anyone who managed to look awkward in so many different ways and places as Eric. It was cute.

“So this is the fabled old house,” he said.

“Yep. Old House: capital O, capital H,” I said.

I was on my knees, using wrench on the generator’s gas cap. It always stuck.

“It might not look like much, but…” I trailed off and furrowed my brow. “Actually, not sure what else to say about it.”

Eric had the best laugh. I smiled, hoping it was at least equally as impressive. He helped me fill the tank.

“It gets so dark so early up here,” he said.

“Between the mountains and the trees it’s a miracle we get any sun at all,” I said. “Why the hell did Shawna take Karina off like that anyway? If they can’t find their way back we’ll have to go look for them.”

“Probably something to do with—” Eric said, and then stopped and looked away. I appreciated the view of him blushing but was curious about the cause. He tried to hedge, but it didn’t take much pressure before he caved.

“Well, you know why Shawna brought Karina along, right?”

I had no idea. By now the generator was going and the lights were on in the house and we were sitting on the old couches in the part of the big room that always served as the living room.

Eric made coffee and I broke into the liquor cabinet and added a little something to it. Eric was kind of a lightweight and he was already flushed around the cheeks, although some of that was embarrassment and I wondered if maybe another part of it was just the effect of us being alone together. I could hope, anyway.

“I guess you don’t know Karina that well?” he said.

“Never even met her before, just heard everyone talk about her.”

“Well,” said Eric, scratching his head, “she’s kind of…intense.”

“Karina? She’s a mouse. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard her say a word.”

“Not her personality. I just mean, she’s pretty religious these days. Devout. Shawna too.”

“I’ve never seen Shawna go to church. She’s always too hungover.”

“Not that kind of religion,” Eric said. “Some spiritual thing. I don’t really know the details. But that’s why Shawna and Karina are here, some kind of ritual observance to, you know, say goodbye. To Paul.”

I was a little surprised. Of course, it wasn’t a surprise that this trip was about Paul. That went without saying. But I hadn’t realized the rest. Eric wouldn’t meet my eyes now and I felt bad for making him snitch on Shawna when Shawna obviously hadn’t wanted me to know.

“I thought it was a little weird,” he added, almost sounding like he was apologizing. “But I don’t know, maybe it’ll be good for her. Closure. Maybe.”

I went to the window and looked out at the trees, thinking. It made sense, in a way. Although she never said it, I always guessed Shawna couldn’t quite give up on the idea that Paul might still be alive.

They’d never found him, you see: He went up here with four friends on a camping trip March of the previous year. They’d used the old house as a base camp and went further and further out a few days at a time, sometimes following the old trails and sometimes going off of them.

Paul’s dad had always lectured him not to go too far into the mountains, but that was Paul for you: never happy staying close to home.

They called it a “freak storm,” although snow in March wasn’t that unusual for this part of California. Probably Paul and the others went off the trail not expecting the weather to turn and then got snowed into some place they couldn’t get out of, or maybe just lost their way in the whiteout.

The search recovered remains for the other four; just bones, of course, some of them nothing but fragments gnawed by coyotes. But at least it was something for the families to bury.

Nothing of Paul ever turned up though, not even his clothes or the ID tags on his bags. And because of that Shawna always held out hope, long past the point when there was even the smallest reason. How could she not?

So if whatever Shawna and Karina were doing could give her something final so that she could sleep at night and not keep wondering…well, like I said, it made a kind of sense.

As it got even darker out we went silent. I glimpsed movement outside, just at the place where the “curtain” of the forest opened, and I hoped it was the two of them coming back, but when I looked what I saw instead was—

When we were kids, six or eight years old, I would have nightmares about the forest in winter. The snow settles on the big trees in strange ways, and sometimes I’d imagine that they were monsters, great big shaggy things like in “Where the Wild Things Are,” monsters who stayed very still and let themselves be covered by falling snow so that they would look like trees until you got too close.

One day I told Paul about this and later he hid in a snow bank and burst out, snow flying in every direction, roaring, and I screamed and ran away, and his mother yelled at him when she found me crying. He apologized, and cried almost as hard as I did when he saw how scared I was.

Ever since then, though, no matter how old I got, I thought of the forest as a place for monsters. And now, as I looked at that gap in the trees, I thought I saw something very tall, its head scraping the boughs of the trees.