01/04/21 Snippet, GARY AND THE WENDIGO.

Getting back to this one.

“Yeah,” Gary replied after thinking about it. “It’s very, huh, far, though? Not as many trees,” he explained when I looked at him. “You can see for longer.”

“Hmm, a fair amount,” I allowed. The cabin wasn’t at the top of a hill, just a flat spot on the side of the road; but from the porch you could see the ground start lowering itself to meet up with the river, down in the valley. I don’t know how far it was, really. We didn’t go down into that valley. But it’d be a hike, to be sure. “Somebody tell you about the clear space?”

“A little, Shirley Lee. I don’t touch the wooden poles, don’t go past them after dark unless I have iron, and if something tries to break them, I should go get help.” I wasn’t good at reading Bigfoot faces at the time, so I couldn’t see how unhappy he was about that. “They kept telling me that last one.”

“Who? The people who first moved you in?”

But he shook his head. “My paw and my uncles. Like there’s any help around here!” He stopped there, suddenly remembering that I drove up here to offer a hand, and everything. “You know what I mean.”

Snippet the Last, THE STARS ARE WRONG.

This was supposed to be a fairly short story, too. Thirteen thousand freaking words. I’m gonna see if this one I can sell to a magazine.

Why did I still follow? Was it from some compulsion, put on me? Or the pitiless stars above? Or was it simply because I still hoped to find my partner, and the other Guardians? I do not wish to say. Suffice it that I followed the Vicar, until we came to a door. A most ancient door, made of strange metals, and from methods now lost to time. It was priceless.  It was also obscene in its pitiless, rigid angularity. It imposed itself on my senses, as if to say: I exist, whether you like it, or not. And you cannot remove the idea of me from your world, for I am more real than you.

The Vicar casually pushed open the obscenity as if it was a commonplace item in the everyday world. He also snickered as I gingerly followed him through the doorway. “If a door alarms you so, Guardian, what will you think of what follows?” I did not answer him, for beyond the door was a room full of icons and images which threatened to send me shrieking into the boon of madness-fueled unconsciousness. Would that I had!

Described baldly, the icons were perhaps not so horrible. They were images or statues of people, both men and women, with a few beasts and some designs of no-doubt occult significance. But they were wrong. A woman, hand held high, cruelly intent in smashing her burning scepter upon the unworthy; a misshapen bird of prey, clutching foul weeds and weapons in its claws. Statues of leering fat men, brazen candelabra with unlucky numbers of unwinking candles, tiles inscribed with six-pointed shapes and sinuous scripts unknown to me; and above all, two horrid banners. One reminded me of a bleeding field, with what I realized were the horrible stars burning above it. The other was a simple emerald triangle on a silver field. I did not need to be told that this must be a sanctuary for the Emerald Pyramid; the horror that permeated the room was horror enough.