They Thirst (2 page)

"Thank God you're home!" Mama said, clutching onto him. "It's over, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. "It's over." He turned and closed the door, letting the bolt fall.

"Here, step over by the fire. God in Heaven, your hands are cold! Take off your coat before you catch your death!"

She took the coat as he shrugged it from his shoulders, then his hat. Papa stepped toward the fire, palms outward to receive the heat. Flames glittered briefly in his eyes, like the glitter of rubies. And as he passed his son, the boy crinkled up his nose. Papa had brought home a funny smell. A smell of . . . what was it? Think hard.

"Your coat is filthy!" Mama said, hanging it on a hook near the door. She brushed at it with a trembling hand. She felt the tears of relief about to flood from her, but she didn't want to cry in front of her son.

"It's so cold in the mountains," Papa said softly, standing at the rim of the firelight. He kicked out with the toe of one scarred boot, and a log shifted, revealing a finger of flame. "So
cold."

The boy watched him, seeing a glaze of ice from Papa's snow-whitened face begin to melt in droplets. Papa suddenly closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and shivered. "Ohhhhhhhh," he breathed, and then his head came around, eyes opening, looking into his son's face for silent seconds. "What are you staring at, boy?"

"Nothing."
That smell. So funny. What was it?

Papa nodded. "Come over here beside me."

The boy took a single step forward and then stopped. He thought of horses and coffins and sobbing mourners.

"Well? Come over here, I said."

Across the room the woman was standing with one hand still on the coat. There was a crooked smile on her face, as if she'd been slapped by a hand that had snaked from the shadows. "Is everything all right?" she asked. In her voice a note quavered like a pipe organ in the Budapest cathedral.

"Yes," Papa said, reaching out for his son. "Everything is fine now because I'm home with my loved ones, where I belong."

The boy saw a shadow touch his mother's face, saw it darken in an instant. Her mouth was half-open, and her eyes were widening pools of bewilderment.

Papa took his son's hand. The flesh was hard and welted with rope burns. And so terribly cold. The man drew him nearer. Nearer. The fire undulated like a serpent uncoiling. "Yes," he whispered, "that's right." His gaze leaped upon the woman. "You've let it get very cold in my house!"

"I'm . . . sorry," she whispered. She began to tremble now, and her eyes were deep pits of terror. A low whine came from her throat.

"Very cold," Papa said. "I can feel ice in my bones. Can't you, André?" The boy nodded, looking into his father's shadowy firelight-sculpted face and seeing himself suspended within eyes that were darker than he remembered. Yes, much darker, like mountain caverns, and rimmed with eruptions of silver. The boy blinked, dragged his gaze away with an effort that made his neck muscles throb. He was trembling like Mama. He was beginning to be afraid but didn't know why. All he knew was that Papa's skin and hair and clothes smelled like the room where Grandmother Elsa had gone to sleep forever.

"We did a bad thing," Papa murmured. "Me, your uncle Josef, all the men from Krajeck. We shouldn't have climbed into the mountains . .."

"Nooooooo," Mama moaned, but the boy couldn't turn his head to look at her.

". . . because we were wrong. All of us, wrong. It's not what we thought it was . . ."

Mama moaned like a trapped animal.

". . . you see?" And Papa smiled, his back to the flames now, his white face piercing the shadows. His grip tightened on his son's shoulder, and he suddenly shivered as if a north wind had roared through his soul. Mama was sobbing, and the boy wanted to turn to her and find out what was wrong, but he couldn't move, couldn't make his head turn or his eyes blink. Papa smiled and said, "My good little boy. My good little André . . ." And he bent down toward his son.

But in the next instant the man's head twisted up, his eyes filled with bursts of silver. "DONT DO THAT!" he shrieked. And in that instant the boy cried out and pulled away from his father, and then he saw that Mama had the shotgun cradled in her shaking arms, and her mouth was wide open and she was screaming, and even as the boy ran for her, she squeezed both triggers.

The shots whistled high over the boy, striking the man in the face and throat. Papa screamed—a resounding scream of rage—and was flung backward to the floor where he lay with his face in shadow and his boots in red embers.

Mama dropped the shotgun, the strangled sobbing in her throat turning to stutters of mad laughter. The recoil had nearly broken her right arm, and she had fallen back against the door, her eyes swimming with tears. The boy stopped, his heart madly hammering. The smell of gunpowder was rank in his nostrils as he stared at the crazed woman who'd just shot down his father—saw her face contorting, lips bubbling with spittle, eyes darting from shadow to shadow.

And then a slow, scraping noise from the other side of the room.

The boy spun around to look.

Papa was rising to his feet. Half of his face was gone, leaving his chin and jaw and nose hanging by white, bloodless strings. The remaining teeth glittered with light, and the single pulped eye hung on one thick vein across the ruined cavern where the cheekbone had been. White nerves and torn muscles twitched in the hole of the throat. The man staggered up, crouched with his huge hands twisted into claws. When he tried to grin, only one side of the mouth remained to curve grotesquely upward.

And in that instant both boy and woman saw that he did not bleed.

"Szornyeteg!"
Mama screamed, her back pressed against the door. The word ripped through the boy's mind, tearing away huge chunks that left him as mute and frozen as a scarecrow in winter.
Monster,
she'd screamed.
Monster.

"Oh, nooooooo," the hideous face whispered. And the thing shambled forward, claws twitching in hungry expection. "Not so easily, my precious wife . . ."

She gripped her son's arm, then turned and unbolted the door. He was almost upon them when a wall of wind and snow screamed into the house; he staggered back a step, one hand over his eye. The woman wrenched the boy out after her into the night. Snow clutched at their legs and tried to hold them. "Run!" Mama cried out over the roar of the wind. "We've got to run!" She tightened her grip on his wrist until her fingers melded to his bones, and they fought onward through whiplash strikes of snow.

Somewhere in the night, a woman screamed, her voice high-pitched and terrified. Then a man's voice, babbling for mercy. The boy looked back over his shoulder as he ran, back at the huddled houses of Krajeck. He could see nothing through the storm. But mingled with the hundred voices of the wind, he thought he could hear a chorus of hideous screams. Somewhere a ragged cacophony of laughter seemed to build and build until it drowned out the cries for God and mercy. He caught a glimpse of his house, receding into the distance now. Saw the dim red light spilling across the threshold like a final dying ember of the fire he'd so carefully tended. Saw the hulking half-blinded figure stumble out of the doorway and heard the bellow of rage from that mangled, bloodless throat— "I'LL FIND YOU!" And then Mama jerked him forward, and he almost tripped, but she pulled him up, urging him to run. Wind screamed into their faces, and already Mama's black hair was white with a coating of snow, as if she'd aged in a matter of minutes, or gone mad like some lunatic in an asylum who sees nightmares as grinning, shadowless realities.

A figure suddenly emerged from the midst of a stand of snow-heavy pines, frail and thin and as white as lake ice. The hair whipped around in the wind; the rags of its worm-eaten clothes billowed. The figure stood at the top of a snow mound, waiting for them, and before Mama saw it, it had stepped into their path, grinning a little boy's grin and holding out a hand sculpted like ice.

"I'm cold," Ivon Griska whispered, still grinning. "I have to find my way home."

Mama stopped, screamed, thrust out a hand before her. For an instant the boy was held by Ivon Griska's gaze, and in his mind he heard the echo of a whisper.
Won't you be my playmate, Andr
é
?
And he'd almost replied,
Yes, oh yes,
when Mama shouted something that was carried away by the wind. She jerked him after her, and he looked back with chilled regret. Ivon had forgotten about them now and began walking slowly through the snow toward Krajeck.

After a while, Mama could go no further. She shuddered and fell into the snow. She was sick then, and the boy crawled away from the steaming puddle and stared back through waving pines toward home. His face was seared by the cold, and he wondered if Papa was going to be all right. Mama had no reason to hurt him like that. She was a bad woman to hurt his father who loved them both so dearly. "Papal" he called into the distance, hearing only the wind reply in frozen mockery of a human voice. His eyelashes were heavy with snow. "Papa!" His small, tired voice cracked. But then Mama struggled to her feet, pulling him up again even though he tried to fight her and break free of her grip. She shook him violently, ice tracks lacing her face like white embroidery, and shouted, "He's dead! Don't you understand that? We've got to run, André, and we've got to keep on running!" And as she said that, the boy knew she was insane. Papa Was badly hurt, yes, because she had shot him, but Papa wasn't dead. Oh, no. He was back there. Waiting.

And then lights broke the curtain of darkness. Smoke ripped from a chimney. They glimpsed a snow-weighted roof. They raced toward those lights, stumbling, half-frozen. The woman muttered to herself, laughing hysterically and urging the boy on. He fought the fingers of cold that clutched at his throat.
Lie down,
the wind whispered across the back of his head.
Stop right here and sleep. This woman has done a bad thing to your papa, and she may hurt you, too. Lie down right here for a little while and be warm, and in the morning your papa will come for you. Yes. Sleep, little one, and forget.

A weather-beaten sign creaked wildly back and forth above a heavy door. He saw the whitened traces of words: THE GOOD SHEPHERD INN. Mama hammered madly at the door, shaking the boy at the same time to keep him awake. "Let us in, please let us in!" she shouted, pounding with a numbed fist. The boy stumbled and fell against her, his head lolling to the side.

When the door burst open, long-armed shadows reached for them. The boy's knees buckled, and he heard Mama moan as the cold—like the touch of a forbidden, loving stranger—gently kissed him to sleep.

A star-specked night, black as the highway asphalt that bubbled like a cauldron brew beneath the midday sun, now lay thickly over the long dry stretch of Texas 285 between Fort Stockton and Pecos. The darkness, as still and dense as the eye of a hurricane, was caught between the murderous heat of dusk and dawn. In all directions the land, stubbled with thornbrush and pipe-organ cactus, was frying-pan flat. Abandoned hulks of old cars, gnawed down to the bare metal by the sun and occasional dust storms, afforded shelter for the coiled rattlesnakes that could still smell the sun's terrible track across the earth.

It was near one of these hulks—rusted and vandalized, windshield long shattered, engine carried away by some hopeful tinkerer—that a jackrabbit sniffed the ground for water. Smelling distant, buried coolness, the jackrabbit began to dig with its forepaws; in another instant it stopped, nose twitching toward the underside of that car. It tensed, smelling snake. From the darkness came a dozen tiny rattlings, and the rabbit leaped backward. Nothing followed. The rabbit's instincts told it that a nest had been dug under there, and the noise of the young would bring back the hunting mother. Sniffing the ground for the snake's trail, the jackrabbit moved away from the car and ran nearer to the highway, crunching grit beneath its paws. It was halfway across the road, moving toward its own nest and young in the distance, when a sudden vibration in the earth froze it. Long ears twitching for a sound, the rabbit turned its head toward the south.

A gleaming white orb was slowly rising along the highway. The rabbit watched it, transfixed. Sometimes the rabbit would stand atop its dirt-mound burrow and watch the white thing that floated high overhead; sometimes it was larger than this one; sometimes it was yellow; sometimes

It wasn't there at all; sometimes there were tendrils across it, and it left in the air the tantalizing scent of water that never fell. The rabbit was unafraid because it was familiar with that thing in the sky, but the vibration it now felt rippled the flesh along its spine. The orb was growing larger, bringing with it a noise like the growl of thunder. In another instant the rabbit's eyes were blinded by the white orb; its nerves shot out a danger signal to the brain. The rabbit scurried for safety on the opposite side of the highway, casting a long scrawl of shadow beyond it.

The jackrabbit was perhaps three feet away from
a
protective clump of thornbrush when the night-black Harley-Davidson 750cc "chopper," moving at almost eighty miles an hour, swerved across the road and directly over the rabbit's spine. It squealed, bones splintering, and the small body began to twitch in the throes of death. The huge motorcycle, its shocks barely registering a shudder of quick impact, roared on to the north.