A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [100]
A swirl of fine silver hair ripples and settles, catching the ambient light of the room and absorbing it. His head swivels toward us, a dark face standing out starkly in the mass of white hair. Lips pull back, long teeth gleam, and it lunges, screaming.
We fling ourselves backward. My arm whips out, shoving Dean behind me. My other wrist snaps downward in the practiced motion that releases the VisiBlade into my hand. The yeti rocks forward onto its knuckles and charges on all fours, straight for us.
“Don’t!” Bernie yells. The yeti swings itself right into my face, teeth bared, and rises upright again, towering over us. Reflex kicks in past all assurance of bluffs and my arm flies upward, blade angled.
“He won’t hurt you!” In my peripheral vision, Bernie limps across the room as fast as he can, one hand reaching out as if to hold the yeti back.
In the next instant Catherine stands between me and the yeti, unflinching. Still in human form, tiny as she is, she tilts back her head and meets the yeti eye- to-eye, silent and still, her arms folded over her chest.
Low rumbling vocalizations fill the air. Just before Bernie reaches him, the yeti lowers back down onto his knuckles. The magnificence of the creature’s hair strikes me even in my petrified state. Every shift of muscle sends it swaying, until it takes on the appearance of floating underwater. I long to touch it. I don’t know if that’s my fiber-fascination talking or if yeti-hair sparks the same urge in normal people.
Bernie’s hand settles on the yeti’s back. It lifts its hand and pokes one long finger at Catherine’s shoulder. When she doesn’t move or respond, the yeti tilts its head to one side, withdraws its hand as if satisfied, and hoots softly at Bernie.
“Settle down,” Bernie snaps, voice cross. “Damn fool.” He points at the couch, and the yeti turns away. “Put that away,” he waves at my blade. “He won’t hurt anything.” He follows the yeti.
Catherine turns to us, rolling her eyes. “You okay?”
I nod, sheathing the blade with fingers that start shaking in reaction. That thing is BIG. “Thanks,” I manage, knowing that without her, I could have easily knifed the yeti. That likely wouldn’t end well. I look back at Dean to find him chalk-white and shaking, but staring at Catherine with a peculiar expression. Apparently there could be an upside to getting threatened by a yeti and protected by a werewolf.
The yeti continues hooting as he swings himself up onto the couch in a cloud of glittering silver. The couch creaks under him, and for the first time I notice that it, like the room, is set up to accommodate the movements of something huge, without creating frustration or wreckage.
I return to the rocking chair, happy to sit. Dean positions himself behind it, fingers biting into the puffy back. Catherine stays put. The yeti glances at her now and again, but both seem happy to maintain the distance.
Now that it’s calm, I can’t keep my eyes off the yeti, thinking about Ned’s “gorilla on steroids” comment. The posture, stance, length of arm, and size of hand all say “primate.” Hair distribution also resembles the apes, only the face and palms bare. Facial features continue the simian theme, eyes small and close-set under a heavy forehead, nose flatter and broader than a human’s. The prominent canines call up images of snarling baboons stalking baby antelope on Nature programs. His fingers pluck at Bernie—now on his hair, now at his shirt—in the manner of apes grooming.
The differences are just as striking. The length and quality of the hair is more akin to a horse’s mane or human hair than a baboon’s fur. Sheer size and body structure also argues against ape. The yeti doesn’t have the swaybacked bulk of the gorilla, nor the comical long-armed, round-tummy look of the orangutan. The body structure most resembles a chimpanzee with