Follow the Wounded One
Follow the Wounded One is being published this month as a standalone chapbook by
Not One of Us. Papaveria has been given permission to publish a sneaky peek at this second part of Panther's story. Scroll down to continue reading, and be sure to look for the chapbook which will be available for purchase
here.
The beast wore a man's face.
It moved on all fours, the size of a city bus, its vast blue eyes fixed on me above a crooked nose, a grim mouth, a long matted beard. One of its ponderous antlers was broken, terminating in a splintered point. Great bird talons made no noise as they settled in the earth. All its fluid motion, its feathered and scaled detail, registered with crystal clarity in the corner of my eye: the muscles bulging in its legs, the sunlight that speckled the scales of its spiny tail, tall wings that lowered ever so slightly, and raised ever so slightly, like the beating of a slow, silent heart. I didn't dare turn my head to meet the creature's gaze.
I stood in a grove of pine trees which had lost all their needles, their sticky black trunks afflicted with rot, rings of bare branches ascending each trunk like stacks of upturned spiders' legs. A path wide and straight as a church aisle sloped upward through the grove, and as I began my ascent, the beast paced me along a ridge about a stone's throw to my right, never inching closer, never looking away.
A recent rain had soaked the ground; mud and softened pine needles squelched with each step I took. The incline grew steeper, and the black-blighted trees grew taller, older, as if they were columns holding up the arched ceiling of some primeval gothic cathedral, its ceiling formed of the crisscrossing canopy far overhead. I marched up this astonishingly elongated nave toward some unseen altar.
Though the beast never quickened its pace, it was gaining ground, getting ahead of me, its blue-scaled flank glittering in my peripheral vision, in and out of view as it wormed through the black, blighted pines. How did I know this creature was an eater of men? Why did it keep its distance?
Above me a new path defined itself, perpendicular to mine, bordered by agonized, lightning-split trees that had survived to renew their growth with tortured curves that groped around each other in a struggle for sunlight. The beast would reach that path before I crossed it, and when it did, it would turn to block my way, the stare of its headlamp-sized eyes piercing me head on, the lips parting in its tangled nest of beard to reveal a mouthful of boars' tusks.
Beyond the crossing path, the pine grove opened, revealing a distant cluster of dogwood and elm, a white steeple rising incongruously from their midst like a signal flare.
Wood popped like gunfire as the beast smashed through a ruined tree and forced its way onto the intersecting trail, its spiny tail hissing through the air as it whipped back and forth. I raised my hands instinctively, defensively, expecting to see great cat claws shimmering in blue outline, electric and dangerous, but instead I saw mere hands, my own feeble flesh.
I stared between my useless fingers as the horned head rose above me, eyes large and crazy as broken china plates.
...to be continued...
