Edgewise by Graham Masterton Page B

flickering—a dim, silvery light, like a figure from a black-and-white movie.
    The light flickered again, and again. As she came nearer to it, she saw that it was making its way between the trees on two legs, yet it was strangely hunched, and it had an odd, jerky gait, as if it were a four-legged animal that had been trained to walk like a man. It was then that she realized what it was, and she stopped, her chest constricted so tightly that she could hardly breathe.
It was the Wendigo,
It was turning around and around, in some kind of slow, spasmodic dance. When it turned to face her, she could dimly see it. But when it turned edgewise, it vanished altogether—
dissolved
, as if it simply wasn’t there.
    She took two or three steps backward and tried to run away, but now the branches and the briars snatched at her clothes even more viciously, and she became inextricably entangled. She struggled and fought and twisted from side to side, but the more she struggled, the more entangled she became.
    â€œGaaaahhhh!”
she cried out.
“Gaaahhhhhh!”
    She opened her eyes. Her bedside light was still on. Her magazine was still lying open on the quilt in front of her. But there was something different. Her bedroom door was wide open, and she was sure that she had closed it. She always did.
    Frowning, she climbed out of bed and shucked on her slippers. She looked out on to the landing. There was nobody there. She didn’t expect anybody to be there. Since the kidnap, she had fixed deadlocks on every door and window and upgraded her security alarm so that nobody could possibly enter the house without setting off sirens and flood-lights and alerting the local police.
    Yet she had the strongest feeling that somebody had been here. She felt that somebody had somehow managed to enter the house and climb the stairs and look at her while she was asleep.
    She sniffed. She could smell something, too. It was curiously metallic, like a red-hot poker. She sniffed again.
No,
she thought.
I’m imagining it.
    It was then that she heard voices, downstairs in the living room. She froze, and listened. A man’s voice, and then a woman’s.
    She stepped back into her bedroom and picked up the phone. She was about to punch in 911 when she heard the woman speak again.
“I have jewelry,”
she said.
“Please. I have my children to take care of.”
    She felt a prickly, tightening sensation all the way up her back, as if scores of centipedes were crawling up it. That woman’s voice: there was no mistaking it. That woman’s voice was
hers.
    The man’s voice said,
“We was sent by God. We was sent by God, Mrs. Blake, to carry out divine retribution.”
    And that was him. That was the man who had appeared on TV tonight, calling himself “Victor Quinn.” She was listening to
herself
, and to the men who had kidnapped Tasha and Sammy.
    Treading as lightly as she could, she went back out on to the landing, and looked downstairs toward the living-room archway. A fitful light was shining out of the living room. It flickered and jerked like the light from a black-and-white movie projector, so that even the chairs in the hallway appeared to be jumping.
    My God,
she thought.
The Wendigo. It’s here. The Wendigo is inside the house.
    She lifted up the phone again, but then she hesitated. If she dialed 911, what was she going to say to the police?
“I have intruders . . . a Native American spirit and two men who aren’t really here, and me?”
    She crept along the landing to the top of the stairs. She was too frightened to go down, but she wanted to listen. The voices rose and fell in volume, and she could hear the same hissing sound that she had heard in the birch woods when the Wendigo had first appeared.
    â€œThe children is the reason we’re here.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou won custody, didn’t you? You got to take sole care of