Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

“Whatever it is you’re hunting, you’d best be doing your hunting on somebody else’s land,” Wells growled. He nudged the shotgun muzzle a fraction higher. His eyes never wavered from the rifle Colby cradled in his arms. “Now get on out of here the way you come.”

The thin man’s nasal voice cut like a knife. “Don’t deal in when you don’t know the stakes, redneck. This is none of your business.”

He started forward, but Colby warned him back. “That scatter-gun’ll cut you in half!” Wells declined to contradict him.

“Be reasonable, Mr. Wells,” argued the plump man, who seemed to know the mountaineer’s name. “We’ll gladly pay for the unintended trespass.”

“Don’t want your money,” Wells grated. “Just get off my land. Right now.”

The tableau held for a breathless interval — tension straining to an unendurable silent scream.

Beside Kirsten’s place of concealment something rustled in the rhododendron thicket. She tore her stare away from the impasse in the streambed. A few feet from where she crouched, the heavy foliage parted. A pointed, yellow-fanged muzzle poked through the long waxy leaves and pink blossoms. Eyes large and round as an owl’s stared back at her.

Their hound… thought Kirsten. Then the animal raised itself on its hindlegs, and she saw that it wasn’t a hound. Its front paws were spade-nailed and long-toed, and they gripped the branches like hands to push them aside. The possum muzzle grinned to show double rows of sharp-pointed teeth.

Kirsten’s nerve broke in that instant. A frightened cry escaped her tight-pressed lips.

Then a sudden rush from the other side of the dead hemlock trunk, and Ben launched himself for the creature’s throat. The bearhound struck the animal like a black thunderbolt of muscle and snarling fangs, driving it back into the rhododendron bank. Floral branches lashed to hide their combat.

In that same instant Kirsten’s sharp outcry broke the tableau, as heads jumped toward the sound. Colby saw his chance and jerked his rifle into line.

The blast from Wells’s ten-gauge thundered in the ravine. Colby squawled like a stepped-on toad and flipped a broken somersault — the rifle flung from his grip by the charge of leaden shot that caved in his chest.

Already the thin man had jerked a.45 Colt automatic from the holster at the small of his back. His shot ricocheted wild as the second shotgun blast caught him at beltline. The ten-gauge was long-barreled and full-choked, and Colby had not exaggerated.

Echoes walloped and rolled down the stream-bed, and in the moonlight the silvered water showed tarnish.

The plump man was slower than he looked. It saved his life. On the far side of the stream only a few pellets spattered past him. The.45 Colt New Service he’d dug out of his waistband looked too big for his chubby fist. His round face was cruel and colorless from the close brush of death.

“That’s both barrels, redneck,” he sneered, raising his revolver. “Want to try to reload?” Brandishing the empty shotgun, Wells stood on the blood-tainted water, waiting for death.

“You can live if you just show me where you got her hid, redneck,” the fat man hissed. “You know who I mean. We all heard her yell. Just call her to come out.”

Wells gauged the distance to cover, didn’t like the odds. “You can go right to hell,” he told him.

The plump face twisted in a grin. “First one goes right through your belly button.”

“Wait! I’ll come out!”

The big revolver didn’t waver from Wells’s midriff, but he shot a glance in the direction of the sound. The fat man’s grin grew broader. From the hound’s angry baying, fast growing distant, he judged that Dread’s stalker had fled — and he knew his chances of finding the girl by himself in the gathering darkness were nil. The chance that she was still close enough to see her defender’s plight — and would be fool enough to think her surrender could save him — was all that had kept Wells alive for a few minutes longer.

“That’s smart, sister,” he barked. “Come on over here with your big friend.”

The full moon bathed the water with silver light. Too bright, thought Wells, blinking his eyes. The water cascaded in droplets of bright silver, the rushing stream was a torrent of silver light, the quiet pools were vast mirrors of blinding silver-white. He wanted to shout to the girl to run, not to throw her life away in a useless effort to save his. His head felt dizzy. The words would not come.

“Here I am,” sang Kirsten, stepping into the moonlight. “Come to me.”

She had slipped out of her clothing. Her body was silver-white in the moonlight as she stood at the edge of the stream. Her eyes were a lambent green glow.

“Come to me,” Kirsten purred. “Come to me.” Her smiling lips were red as blood, and her teeth were white and sharp.

The pudgy face went slack. The hand with the revolver drooped. Vacant-eyed, the man took a step toward her. Another step. His feet reached the edge of a deep, silvery pool. He stumbled forward woodenly, like a sleepwalker — except the icy water would awaken any sleeper.

“Come to me,” Kirsten crooned.

The water rose over his waist. He staggered as his feet groped over the uneven bottom. He reeled drunkenly.

There must have been a deep hole, or maybe he lost footing on the slippery-smooth boulders that pieced together the streambed. The fat man staggered another step, and suddenly the water was up around his double-chin. Silver water ran into his gaping mouth.

It couldn’t have been silver-white arms that rose from the water to embrace the gunman, to drag him under in a sudden swirl of ripples… It was only a trick of the moonlight, Wells told himself. Silver-white moonlight reflecting on the drowning man’s splashes. Ripples raced across the pool for a moment. Then the silver-white mirror was smooth once more.

Wells shook his head, blinking the moon-dazzle from his eyes. Mists trailed down over the ridges, night was deepening in the ravine, and it was a very ordinary full moon that shone its pale light on the two gory bodies sprawled over the polished boulders. Of the third gunman there was no trace.

Kirsten touched his arm and Wells jumped. But she was dressed in her tattered frock and looked like a smudged woodsprite, and not a silver-white Lorelei whose consuming beauty was deadly sorcery.

“Are you all right?”

Wells shook his head. Had it been a dream? Not likely. “What — what was that!” he managed to reply.

“Call it hypnotism, Mr. Wells,” the girl told him. “A very old form of hypnotism — but I think you’d better just call it hypnotism.”

Wells shrugged, his self-presence returning. “Lady, I’ll call it whatever you say, because I don’t rightly know what else there is to call it. And, because I’ve seen some other things in these hills that it’s best you just put some scientific name on it, and let the matter rest without thinking on it.”

“Like that — that teufelhund —that hound-thing they were stalking me with?”

Wells broke open his shotgun, extracted the spent shells and replaced them with two new ones from his pocket. “Did you get a close look at it, then? Well, as to that, Miss von Brocken, let’s just say it was a kind of hound most folks never see — and thank your lucky stars they couldn’t use the thing until it got dark enough for its eyes to stand being out in places where it don’t normal belong.”

The Plott hound loped back to join them, sniffed the corpses curiously. His black fur was streaked in places with blood, but from his evident satisfaction not all of it was his own.

The mountaineer whistled to him, closed the shotgun with a snap. “Guns can fight guns,” he mused, “and teeth can fight against teeth. I may look like a ignorant old hill-billy to you, but I was a sergeant overseas in the War, and I still read books and the papers. I can make sense out of words like ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘occult research’ and maybe read between the lines of what they print about such things.”