Chapter 2 #2
Another memory flashed in my mind. A man with amber eyes and dark brown hair hanging down to his shoulders. Bare-ass naked, because why wouldn’t he be… He’d told me to run.
“That’s him,” I whispered. “That’s the man I saw in the ravine. The one who—”
I stopped myself before I said turned into a wolf, because I could see from Cole’s expression that I had already maxed out my credibility for the day before I even started talking.
“The one who was there when Mark—when whoever it was—” I caught myself again. My credibility wasn’t just maxed out, it was overdrawn. “Look. I know what I sound like. But there was a man and there was a… creature, and I need you to understand that I am not making this up.”
Cole’s pen hovered over his notebook. He hadn’t written anything in the last five minutes. The notebook was a prop at this point, a courtesy extended to the confused head-injury patient so she’d feel like her statements were being taken seriously.
Yazzie, on the other hand, was watching me with an expression that defied easy categorization.
Not pity, exactly, and not the level of concern my story would generate if it were actually believed.
But if the light was right, I could see a tiny little sprout of something that said maybe, just maybe she was starting to wonder if there was more here than pure delusion.
“Miss Gregory,” Cole said, and I could hear the period at the end of whatever he was going to say before he said it.
The conversation was wrapping up. He was going to close his notebook and click his pen and say something about following up and then walk out of my hospital room and file a report that used the phrase inconsistent with objective evidence at least three times.
“I can describe them. Both of them, in detail.”
Cole paused. “You’ve already described—”
“I told you what happened. I haven’t described them.
Like, specifically. Their features. What they looked like.
” I was grasping and I knew it, but I didn’t have much alternative.
“You have sketch artists, right? People who draw faces from descriptions? Get one in here. Let me describe the man. If the nurses confirm the sketch matches the guy who brought me in, that at least proves I’m not inventing people. ”
Cole rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. I recognized the gesture. It was the one my Property Law professor made when a student asked a question that was technically within the scope of the syllabus but spiritually a waste of everyone’s time.
“Fine. I’ll have Chen come by. Give us twenty minutes.”
He stepped out. Yazzie stayed.
We looked at each other across the bedrail. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she sat very still.
“You think I’m crazy too,” I said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Your partner’s face said it for both of you.”
“Cole isn’t my partner. We’re from different agencies. And what I think isn’t relevant to what I can put in a report.”
That was an interesting answer. I filed it away.
The sketch artist arrived in about forty minutes, which I spent staring at the ceiling and having a deeply unproductive internal debate about whether I should have told a different, more believable story, just to keep me from getting thrown into the loony bin if nothing else.
But that would have required constructing a plausible alternative story on the fly, and my brain was not yet firing on all cylinders in the creative fiction department.
Chen was a slight man with wire-framed glasses and a quiet demeanor. He set up a large pad on a portable easel, pulled a chair close to my bed, and produced a set of pencils.
“Whenever you’re ready, Miss Gregory.”
I closed my eyes. And there he was, sharp as a photograph, burned into whatever part of the brain stores things it can’t explain.
“His face is… wide. Not fat. Structured. Like the bones underneath are bigger than most people’s.
Heavy brow, not Neanderthal, just prominent.
Strong jaw—square, covered in stubble, maybe a week’s worth.
His nose looked like it had been broken at least once, maybe twice. It sits a little to the left.”
Chen’s pencil moved. He didn’t rush me, just asked clarifying questions in a low, unhurried voice.
Wider or narrower through the cheekbones?
How deep-set are the eyes? Describe the hairline.
I answered them with a certainty that surprised me.
Not because I was good at remembering faces, although I was.
Because I couldn’t have forgotten this one if I’d tried.
“His eyes are lighter than you’d expect for his complexion. Amber. Like light brown but with gold in them. Unusual.”
“Hair?”
“Dark. Past his jaw. Not styled. It just…” I gestured vaguely. “Hangs. Like he cut it himself with a hunting knife and didn’t check a mirror afterwards.”
“Lips?”
“Full for a man. His lower lip especially.”
Chen worked for another ten minutes, adjusting, refining. When he turned the pad around, the air went out of me.
It was him. Not perfectly, Chen had softened the jaw slightly and missed the particular wildness in the eyes, but the face looking back at me from the sketch pad was unmistakably the man from the ravine.
The man who had told me to run. The man whose voice made me feel things I couldn’t explain. “That’s him.”
Cole, who had returned during the sketch and was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, straightened up.
“Let’s see if the nurses agree.” He stepped into the hallway and returned thirty seconds later with my regular nurse, the dark-haired one who had been checking my vitals all morning.
She looked at the sketch and her eyebrows went up.
“Yeah, that’s him. That’s the guy who brought her in. He’s been here almost every day. Sat in that chair for hours.” She pointed at the plastic chair beside my bed. “Quiet. Polite. Big guy.”
A part of me wanted to look at Cole and say told you so. The rest of me was too focused on the implications of what the nurse had just confirmed.
The man was real. He had brought me to this hospital. He had sat beside my bed for a week.
And in the only memory I had of him, he’d been naked and turning into a wolf.
“Thank you,” Cole said to the nurse. She left. “Alright. So the man exists. Now you said there was something else? An animal of some kind?”
“Not some kind. A specific kind. And I use the word ‘animal’ loosely.”
He clicked his pen. It was an involuntary gesture, almost a nervous tic. “Go ahead, then. Describe it for Chen.”
I took a breath and closed my eyes again.
This was different. Looking for the man in my memory had felt kind of exciting, like recalling a fantasy from the romance books I liked to read when I needed to turn my brain off.
Looking for the creature was like opening a door I knew had something awful behind it.
My heartbeat kicked up, and my palms went slick against the hospital sheets.
I opened my eyes and focused on Chen’s blank page.
“It’s built like a canine. Coyote proportions, roughly, but too angular.
Like a coyote drawn with a ruler.” I held my hands up, trying to shape the air into what I’d seen.
“The limbs are too long. The joints bend in extra places. Not like a broken leg, more like there are additional joints that shouldn’t exist. Elbows where there should be forearms. Knees that hinge both directions. ”
Chen’s pencil moved more slowly now. He kept glancing up at me with a carefully neutral expression.
“The body is gaunt. Not starving-dog gaunt. More like…” I searched for the right comparison. “Like the skin is stretched too tight over its bones. You can see every rib, every vertebra. The head is coyote-shaped but narrower, longer, and the muzzle is pointy.”
“Eyes?”
“Not eyes. Holes. Like someone poked two holes into the face and whatever’s behind them is just… nothingness. Looking into them felt like looking into a well that has no bottom.”
The room had gone very quiet. Cole’s pen had stopped clicking. Yazzie hadn’t moved, but something in her posture had changed.
Chen worked. He erased, redrew, adjusted angles. Twice he asked me to clarify proportions and I answered the best I could. I didn’t want to remember this thing this clearly, but my brain had catalogued every jagged line of it with almost obsessive accuracy.
When Chen turned the pad around, the temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Again, it wasn’t perfect. Pencil on paper couldn’t capture the texture of the thing, the sense of wrongness that radiated from it.
But the shape was right, the proportions were right, and the angular, jagged geometry was right, and looking at the sketch made my stomach do the same slow roll it had in the ravine.
“That.” My voice came out rough. “That’s what I saw.”
Cole stared at the sketch.
“There’s no animal that matches this description. I know what a coyote looks like. I’ve lived in New Mexico my entire life. That thing is not a coyote.”
“I know it’s not a coyote. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
“What I’m saying is that with a traumatic brain injury, it’s common for the mind to—”
“To what? Invent a brand-new species? With detailed anatomy and a smell so viscerally terrible I can still taste it in the back of my throat? I’m a law student, not H.P. Lovecraft.”
Yazzie hadn’t spoken. I looked at her.
She was staring at the sketch. Not glancing at it the way Cole was, with the wary distance of a man confronted with something he’d already decided to dismiss.
She was studying it. Her dark eyes tracked the lines of the creature’s impossible joints, the angular shape of its skull, the jagged ridge of its spine.
One hand had drifted to her braid and her fingers worked the end of it slowly.
Something passed across her face. Recognition? Fear? Both? It was there for maybe two seconds and then she shut it down.
“Ranger Yazzie?” Cole’s voice pulled her back. “You have anything?”