999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [110]
So there we were, locked together, me bleeding, the beast thrashing, trying to get its powerful tail on me. Sheer terror fought my growing fatigue to a standstill, but the beast’s tail was coming closer and closer, thwapping the water viciously. The force of its attack was driving me backward downriver, and now I could feel the current quickening, swirling around me, sucking at me like a leviathan’s mouth. It grew in strength until, all of a sudden, my feet were swept out from under me. I was whirled away with such force that even the beast’s reflexes weren’t fast enough to catch my arm. I was underwater, fully in the grip of the roaring current. I struggled to regain my balance; when that failed, I tried simply to get my head above the surface. Pain blossomed as I hit an underwater rock. I bounced off, spinning. A flash of pain snaked up my side. I gasped for air and began to choke on water. I no longer knew which direction was up or down. Then I struck something. Not another rock; this was soft and cylindrical. It was a body—Gimel’s body. I encircled it with my arms and held on, riding out the current as my head rose into sweet air before I was plunged under again. But with my second gulp of air, I could feel the current lessening, and at last I was able to strike out for shore.
I pulled Gimel’s white corpse up onto the sludgy bank and I lay there next to her, more dead than alive it seemed to me, for I felt a curious kinship with her. She had saved me from the beast as Vav had done in Paris. Her withered left leg now seemed as natural and necessary a part of her as her heart-shaped face. I felt her arm like a lifeline across my chest and I closed my eyes, wondering whether I was at last safe.
A moment more and it didn’t matter, as I was cast into unconsciousness.
I awoke with rain in my face. It was still dark. I could have been out for an hour or twenty-four hours, there was no way of knowing. Thunder rumbled and, as I rose onto one elbow, a flash of lightning illuminated an utterly unfamiliar landscape. I lay in a swale at the edge of a forest; the stream that had carried me here was gone. Clearly, I was no longer in the Charnwood Forest. By the look of the thick stands of pines and American sugar maples I wasn’t even in England anymore. And Gimel had vanished along with the stream. I rolled over onto the spot she had occupied and wondered at the deep sense of loss inside me.
At length, I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. The arm I’d jammed into the beast’s mouth was as good as new. No blood at all. Naturally. The air was decidedly colder, and I shivered inside my damp clothes. I knew I had to get to some kind of shelter quickly or face the threat of hypothermia. I wondered where my next guide was, for this had been the pattern in my previous two realities. Sensing no one about, I rose and, choosing a direction at random, set off in that direction. I decided it was just as well that the pattern had been broken, since my two previous guides had ended up dead.
Because my father was a furniture restorer and coppersmith, I was born and raised in Hadley, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed an excellent reputation. This terrain, identical to the densely wooded hillsides of my childhood, put me immediately in mind of the one and only time I had consented to go on a family outing with Lily. I was used to those woods; I was twelve at the time this outing took place, and already I’d been out hunting plenty of times with my father. He loved to hunt the way most men his age loved to play golf. He was not a violent