Torry, Son of The Wendigo

The natives looked around the dimly lit cavern, they furtively sneaked peeks towards the ceiling under lowered dark lashes. Torches flickered around them as if blown by a breeze…but there was none.

A low keening howl sounded outside and around the cave…but no wolves ventured nearby. The natives, adorned with all things nature- hawk, owl, and wild turkey feathers, pearls and carnelian beads, jet black breast plates made from the sternum bones of wildebeest- they spruced themselves up, their clan’s version of formal attire, dating back two thousand years.

The fire pit suddenly spewed a center circular tube of flame, like the center of a big surf rolling wave, and like a wave of the ocean, the outer flicks of flame were green and teal and Caribbean Ocean blue.

The eyes grew rounder. The natives no longer glanced side to side hesitantly on the sly, but instead stared intently into the rising column of unnatural fire from their humble sacrificial pit. Mica flecks sparkled like precious gems. Small puffs of white dust ignited and threw off sparks like the sparklers the children ran with on solstice nights. And the smooth, hand polished rocks of agates and jades embedded in the wall of the fire pit glowed as if an artist began coloring in a paint by numbers. This humble cave was not so humble after all…it was, indeed, a cathedral of simplicities, man made, but as ethereal as a Hawaiian sunset, or the phenomenon of an aurora borealis.

***

The Wendigo looked down upon the scene in the cavern, he was an invisible presence there- a dark god in pitch blackness- but because of the austerity of the night, they could have looked up and away from the splendid holocaust he’d created. They’d have seen him…hovering there like a great black cloud with a face…and horns…and great ivory teeth.

“Ha HA!” he thought to himself. “It would be too much. They’d shit themselves so hard they’d by turned inside out like a snug glove removed from a hand.”

He turned like a wisp of black smoke to his son, who stood by his---

“Son?” The Wendigo looked around him. “The fire is perfect. It has them hypnotized. The time is right. Come on now, I’ve worked hard for this.”

From under Quazmo Wendingo’s tail of swirling oily black smoke, came Toraman Wendigo, just half the size of his father, a spitting image but for the fangs and horns. Quazmo’s horns were enormous, graceful racks of onyx and his teeth long and sharp but yellowing with age. Torry’s horns were merely three-pointers; his teeth pearly white and growing long.

Quazmo sighed. “Son. Go. Make your entrance!”

Torry looked up at his father. He refrained from trembling because he wasn’t scared…he just didn’t want to scare the ones called people.

Torry had been watching them since he was old enough to travel through shadows of the night. He’d gotten so good at being undetected, mastering concealment amongst the inky pools and clefts of the forest and even found purchase amongst the low-lying swamp greens and lake reeds. The delicate looking human beings fascinated him. He enjoyed the diversity of their features and skin colors, understanding they all harbored the same desires and needs.

He had been eavesdropping their conversations just like the other gods do.

But instead of wiping them all out like some gods did, or controlling them with the threat of Hell, or chomping their bones…’ugh’…like his ancestors had---

“TORRY! Get down there this instant!”

Torry sighed and leapt into the tunnel of flame, to emerge as if from its center before the goggling eyes of the attendees around it.

They gasped. Some fainted. A few females (and perhaps a couple males too) screamed as if their lungs were being torn out through their esophaguses.

Torry felt bad for their terror and lowered his hands, palms down, in a ‘slow down, slow down’ gesture; he was sickened by the scent of urine permeating the cavern’s pleasantly cozy atmosphere, more sickened knowing he’d caused it by his mere presence.

The humans blinked in unison and Torry found that sort of creepy in its own way. He very much wanted to look upwards to where his father, The Wendigo, floated like a black kite frozen in viscosity, but he would ruin all his father’s planning if he did. It would be like a bride running away from the groom down the aisle back the way she’d come- white veils and gauzy trains billowing.

The people rose and started circling the colorful fire, chanting words of worship to the Wendigo that hovered in its center; they sang, they wept, at least nine of them fornicated right there on the ground. (Torry admired the odd man out’s creativeness.)

He hovered and forced a toothy grin that excited more ‘AAAAHhhhhhs’. He liked these people. They’d survived wild animals, and mother nature, and even his own father…he admired them.

“TORRY!”

Agg. Torry was yanked from his reverie as his father’s booming head voice boxed his ears.

“Eat that offering and do that move like we practiced!”

Torry hadn’t noticed the baby goat strapped to the altar between the two elders. Dang it was cute. It’s small wavering bleat melted his heart. The irony of the situation was not lost to him: the goat looked like a close relative of his. In a wave of inspiration, he clawed his hairy dark hands over the little goat as if preparing to rend its limbs from its body, the wee kid lifted onto its hind legs and pawed the swirling air between them as if it too found Torry to be a cousin or sibling wanting to play. As the kalidescoping flames rose and surrounded them, Torry whirled, the kid was sucked into his vortex and upwards. A rain of blood descended, splattering the upturned faces, streaking them like wet zebra stripes of red. As they vanished into the night through the cavern’s ceiling Torry bellowed his best maniacal laugh- pure theatrics worthy of an Oscar.

***

“Hmf,” Quazmo muttered as they stepped through the forest over the packed dirt of the pathway home. Quazmo’s hooved feet stamped like distant thunder, Torry’s issued delicate tumps like those of a six-point buck…and the wee little goat’s four hooved feet pattered like happy rain as he kept pace.

“Dad?”

“Hmf!”

“I’ll take care of him. I promise. C’mon, look at him, he looks just like you.”

Quazmo sighed. “Well, that was quite the performance tonight. I am actually… impressed. You got your way and scared the piss outta them lowly humans. Heh heh…I’ve always enjoyed the blood regurgitation trick, you really mastered it. They thought the goat was torn apart in the air. Heh heh.”

“Thanks Dad.”

“You get that stubborn streak from your mother…”

“Um actually…”

“Shut it.”

Torry did. He didn’t want to push it after he’d gotten his way so creatively. He would have to bring the goat to school with him, lest he come home one afternoon and find kid stew on the dinner table. Torry was fifteen years old and after a great deal of convincing, had been allowed to attend a regular school after much debate and a life up to thirteen of home schooling.

His winning argument was based on the fact he was heir and knowledge built power- the more he learned of the human world, the more powerful he could become. When at last he reached the age of thirteen, he stood two feet taller than the average 7^th grader, plus his teeth were growing long and sharp, and his horns though small, sharp-tipped, and his crimson red irises he could make flare like oil tossed onto hot coals. His parents were confident that he would be feared enough keep bullies and troublemakers at bay.

Torry had no friends at school. He was in the ninth grade and though he was smarter than his classmates he hid it by keeping to the back of the classrooms and not raising his hand. He just wanted to soak up knowledge and study young people. It wasn’t that he didn’t want friends, it was just that he knew he was a freak in the other students’ eyes, an oddity… and he scared them.

On the day he brought Willy to school, (he’d named the goat after his favorite writer, Shakespeare) a new student showed up. She sat in his home room class at the back next to him. He had not looked up from his social studies textbook as she sat but Willy made a little ‘Bah’ and Torry detected a light but alluring fragrance wafting by like a fly fisherman’s line. His head rose from his book, and he chanced a glance to his left.

Yvonne was milky white pale like a vampire. And like one, she had dark hair, ebony black and cascading like satin drapes over her shoulders. She wore cobalt blue lipstick and a tiny diamond in an eyebrow piercing. She was petite in size and slim as a twelve-year-old boy. She wore leggings, a long-sleeved lace tunic, and a pinstriped vest with what looked like a watch chain from the pocket. Her knee-high boots shifted slightly as she turned to look at Torry. “Hey,” she said.

Without waiting for a reply, she turned back to face forward.

Torry could not have spoken even if his vocal cords were not frozen in awe. She was the most amazing human being he had ever laid eyes on. And, she had spoken to him.

Yvonne was not in his math class. He was disappointed. During the lunch hour, instead of creeping off to the secluded copse of trees in the farthest edge of the school’s yards, he roamed around the place, looking in cafeteria windows and even the dimmest lit hallway recesses. Yvonne was as elusive as he.

She was in in French class after lunch, sitting in the back. They were separated by two empty desks. He looked over at her covertly, pretending to look out the windows but she waved a little queen-like wave at him and said, “Hey.”

Under all the dark fur, he felt redness like a sudden onslaught of the flu. “Uh. Oh. Hi.” He felt like a total boob.

After the last bell, as the students surged through the hallways and outwards, Yvonne had again vanished like a ghost. He was impressed…and intrigued. His heart had never beat faster.

On his way home his mind was filled with images like still photographs in an old fashioned slide show- some black and white, some technicolor, some with movement like stop motion animation- they were all of her.

As usual, Torry kept to the shadows and alleys. While lost in reverie in a nice tenebrous alleyway between a neighborhood of slightly decrepit homes, he heard with his overly large jackal’s ears, a pitiful whimper. He’d grown keen to the sounds of all things nature and humankind and instantly felt the true anguish in the cry.

“AAAieeeee-ooooo---”

The cry came again but was ominously cut off.

Torry sprinted through the alley and although the dog was not howling anymore, he could hear its anguished heavy breaths. He followed the sounds no human could detect, halted at the end, and peeked over a fence there through a tangle of wild blackberry bushes.

The backyard was littered with the sort of junk humans called ‘hoarders.’ Where there were hoarders, there’d be a buttload of rats. Some piles of machine and car parts had tarps stretched over them, but some didn’t, and the parts were indistinguishable under decades of rust…and there... in the corner was a man with a leather belt in his hands, obviously his, his grimy faded to white jeans had slid past his bony hips, revealing half of a flat butt. Torry shifted his position and saw the dog.

A Shepard-lab mix, it’s malnourished body radiated neglect from under dirty, tufted golden fur. The dog had bald patches like an Alaskan tundra devoid of greenery. It cowered under the belt the stumbling man held aloft, waving it around like a wrangler at a rave. Torry could see where the man had struck, the dog’s haunches were bare there, obviously a regular spot.

“…Yar…Yar a goot fur nuttin mutt. Done bark at those come ‘round. No good! Yar a rotten mutt go ta’ell!” The man raised the belt again.

Torry swirled into smoke and whooshed to the man, enveloping him in a fine spray of charcoal-like dust. 

“Wha…?”

Torry solidified, loomed over the man and levitated a foot off the ground between him and the dog. The dog’s breathing calmed. The man’s escalated. Torry grinned. His teeth glistened, and the dog yipped with what sounded like a puppy’s cry of grateful thanks.

Torry did not hesitate. He leapt in front of Bluebell. (He had gleamed that be her name before her first owner died and left her to a shelter.) and the man fell sideways, into some trash and a pile of metal rods and sticks. He came up spewing spittle, whipping his greasy hair around, as he looked around frantically, not believing he’d seen the devil.

Torry had studied this sort his whole life. This man had no goodness in him. One who would abuse a loving, trusting creature such as a dog…he towered over the hateful man, blinking back tears, and grinned. The man clutched at his heart and gawped like a fish out of water…then fell lifeless amongst the squalor of his yard.

“I knew you were the one!” the voice came from behind him, and startled him alert.

He turned. It was Yvonne!

“I’m sorry---”

“You’ve been following me. Why?”

“Ha! Really? You’re a Wendigo. But not evil…I’ve just seen you do good. I KNEW it!” Yvonne laughed and Torry was smitten.

He felt his face burning as he untied Bluebell from her nasty, blood-crusted tethers. He turned to Yvonne and said, “Will you take her to a shelter?”

The dark-haired beauty said, “No. I will keep her.”

“How did you know…?”

“I’ve been following you---”

“But! I didn’t even ---”

“You’re not the only one who lives in the shadows y’know?”

“You’re not afraid of---”

“You are what I have wished for all my life. You are good. I’ve seen it.” Yvonne knelt and hugged Bluebell to her. She looked up at Torry, her eyes gleamed like emeralds caught in a fire. His heart tumped in his ribcage and he suddenly knew his fate.

***

“Father, I have found my calling. And a compromise between us. I will destroy humans with terror or my own hands. But only the ones that deserve it. The ones that escape punishment by their laws, the ones that torture innocents…”

Quazmo looked at his son and studied his face. He said, “I could not be prouder. I do not have remorse for what I have done in the past, but I understand this new future for us. I approve. And I do love your cause. You have my blessing.”

“Thank you, father---”

“Oh, and by the way. Go pick that girl some wild irises, they’re blooming now and they are her favorite.”