The wendigo exploded out of the underbrush in a rush that human eyes could barely follow. Seven year old Robert watched out the window of his cabin in horrified disbelief. The wendigo resembled a cross between some kind of bipedal dark demon and deer with strange antlers instead of demon horns and a massive maw out of nightmares filled with titanic teeth. The dark demon’s colossal claws cut like chainsaws through the brush. The wendigo was almost upon Robert’s uncle, named Michael, when Loretta screamed to her brother Michael out the window.
“Michael, catch! She shouted, throwing a twelve gauge shotgun out the window.
Robert’s father cursed his wife for getting involved and dragged her away from the window.
Michael adeptly snatched the cast weapon and he spun firing the shotgun from his hip. The 12 gauge thundered booming in a succession of shots as Michael expertly pumped the gun to shuck shells while triggering torrents of buckshot that tagged his target’s torso and even sledged the head.
No living creature should have been able to withstand the welter of buckshot that bludgeoned its body and clobbered its cranium. Michael fired four times in a flaring, fulminating fusillade that flogged but failed to fell the wendigo. The demon rammed into Michael and ripped the gun from his grip.
Michael was a former combat soldier and his hunting knife flared to life in a savage swipe that should have slashed a bad gash but instead rasped harmlessly along the demon’s scales nicking its neck innocuously. Then Michael was screaming in its crushing grasp.
Robert would always wonder exactly what he’d witnessed. A dimensional gateway seemed to open around the demon and it seemed to pull Michael inside itself as if absorbing his body and soul as he shrieked in agony and terror.
The wendigo looked in the window and made eye contact with Robert. In those eyes Robert glimpsed a place of both darkness and fire, where demons danced and human souls screamed in anguish being tortured for entertainment by the demons. He also briefly glimpsed the flip side, souls that thought they were going to heaven that instead languished in a prison type of limbo waiting for God to judge them.
“Don’t look at it! “Robert’s father shouted, yanking him away from the window.
“I told you to watch, Robert!” Thomas shouted at Loretta furiously. “You’re sick brother brought the wendigo down on himself by raping and killing those girls. Then he runs here for your help and you risk our son’s life to help your freak brother!”
Loretta was crying. She’d loved her little brother, despite his evil side.
“Congratulations, Loretta! Our son looked into the wendigo’s eyes! How do you think that will affect him?”
Loretta could only cry in response.
***
18 Years Later
Over fifty women were rumored to have disappeared on the trail of tears through Canada. Robert could personally take credit for 23 of the victims. He’d become a serial killer by age 16 carefully picking his victims and preying on the drug addict and alcoholic prostitutes that often had to hitchhike that long stretch of highway. Robert would offer them rides and get them high and drunk and then make his moves subduing them swiftly. He had a cabin in the woods he would take them too and usually keep them for days to torture and rape like toys before killing them.
Looking into the wendigo’s eyes as a boy had given him a look beyond his own dimension. He’d sold his soul to the devil praying that when he died that he would become a demon able to torture other souls.
He spotted his next victim trudging through the freezing snow along the road and drove up beside her. “Hey, Alecia, need a ride?”
“Thanks,” Alicia climbed in. She was an attractive brunette Inuit woman with a bad heroin addiction.
“I got some stuff if you want to party,” Robert offered.
“That’d be great,’ Alycia responded.
“I got a little hunting cabin nearby,’ he suggested.
Sounds great,” she agreed.
Robert smiled.
**
Robert gave Alecia a big dose of heroin in the needle and waited for her to grow groggy. Much to his surprise, she stayed fully alert staring hard into his eyes with an intensity that made him uncomfortable.
“The shot won’t work on me Robert,” Alecia said in a voice that was suddenly completely inhuman. It sounded like a beast snarling the words at him and fear flooded Robert.
“You’ve had a lot of fun with the victims you brought here. You did your pathetic praying thinking you were talking to the devil and making some kind of pact. We watched and laughed at you,” the female demon snarled.
Robert pulled his pistol and it profusely popped out projectiles that peppered her. But she just shrugged the slugs off and snatched the pistol from his grip with a twist that snapped his wrist.
“What are you,” he screamed in terror and agony.
“You don’t recognize me? We met long ago,”” she growled monstrously.
Alecia's shape shifted. She morphed from a woman into the wendigo. Robert tried to run for the door and she lamed his leg with a claw lash that smashed home on bone fracturing his femur. The wendigo’s claws expertly flayed the flesh from his leg from ankle to thigh and ripped the skin right off his leg. Robert screamed at the overwhelming agony.
“I’m going to pull you apart slowly here,” the wendigo rumbled in its demonic voice. “Then when you die and we get your soul to the other side we’re really going to enjoy working on you. You thought you were some kind of special demon in training. Instead you’re just a pet for us to play with.
The wendigo’s head dipped down and its teeth tore through Robert’s testicles.
The End
Bio:
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in The Horror Zine, J Journal, Chiron Review, Churches, Children and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, Freedom Fiction Journal, Short-Story Me, Blood Moon Rising, Dark Harbor, Flash Phantoms, You Phantomaniacs Anthology, Wicked Shadow Press, The Listening Eye, Evening Street Review, Conceit, Spotlight on Recovery, Outdoor Life and Muscle and Fitness. His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy Center in 2019. He has numerous novels and audiobooks available. You can read more of his writings at https://tomkropp.wordpress.com.