Maujaq
An old short story written in and about the soul-snuffing bleakness of winter
Maujaq was first written for a fiction writing workshop I took in college. This is wholly unchanged from the version I submitted for that class (and my personal favorite of the trio). This is the meditative sort of horror story which places the reader in both the sensory and psychic experience of the hunted, and features some of the best action I have written to date.
This short story contains depictions of loss - varyingly, loved ones, blood, and motor control.
Maujaq
by Mitch Collins
He really didn’t like that noise.
It was the exact kind of sound, he decided, that he would quite appreciate never hearing again. Even amid the bleakness, the frostbitten discomfort of his shabby cabin, he imagined he could be quite content – happy, even – if it never happened again. As if in reply to his unspoken wish, it did: another snowchoked, stranglethroated cry not quite a howl and not quite a death rattle echoed across the valley. It sounded hungry. Eustace felt certain it had been made by a cruel something with jagged teeth and forward-facing eyes. He suddenly grew very conscious of the hearty, inviting smell of the stew bubbling over his fire.
The noise came again. Was it louder, now? Closer? Perhaps it was just amplified by the growing blizzard winds. Some nights, he swore he caught ear of music borne by the wind from far-off fur camps, or snippets of strained conversations from travelers braving the mountain pass. Earlier he had pitied them for their vulnerability to the wrath of winter, but now, with whatever this thing was stalking around…
“Christ.” Eustace trimmed the end of his thoughts with a hoarse, quiet mutter. Aside from the odd bout of whistling or humming, pruning his worries with a swear had become his sole manner of making noise. The season of words for any ears but his had ended after his last trek to town to provision for the whitecapped months. Now, all that heard him was the crackling fire and freezing winds, the critters among the taiga and whatever –
Again. Quieter, this time? Hard to say if it actually was, or if he just really wanted it to be. Not much he could do about it in the end. That thought should have been a comfort, but he wondered if it was simply resignation to some unimaginably grisly end. What Eustace could do, he decided, he would.
He double checked the bolt on the door and the rounds in his Winchester: Nine left, one in the buck now hanging in his shed. He moved to the window, where the frost-framed glass gave only a few feet of insight into nightdrenched taiga before all devolved into swirling blobs of snow and shadow. As his eyes shook off the warm dullness of candlelight, he saw a silhouette shifting on the treeline – panic gripped him, he swung his rifle up toward the movement – and saw the branch bounce back up after freeing itself of too much snow. His sigh of relief was cut short by another sounding of the haunting call.
Was it a call? Eustace often caught stray echoes of timber wolves summoning their packs together to feed upon the forest. Was this creature, too – certainly no wolf or fox or forest-dweller he had ever heard before – searching for more of its kind? He hoped there weren’t any – the gnarled, clawed thing in his mind’s eye needed no company. Somehow, he knew it was something else; an expression of rage, of pain, of cold hate – announcing these woods were its own, and its alone.
Were they alone in this valley, him and it? He peered into the darkness of interminable night, trying to glimpse something, anything alive in this frigid hell other than him. No sign of deer or hare or owl betrayed the unquiet stillness – the frost-caked firs struggled under the weight of wind and white, obscuring any and all life amid the harshswirling torrents of snow. He thought of days of yore when horsebacked torches cut through the night, and how even then nature knew better than to let itself be seen.
He lurched away from the window to the nearest candle with such speed that the flame flickered in surprise before its sudden snuffing out. One by one, the others expired into lazy twists of smoke as he dashed around the cabin, half-mad with urgency. The room settled into uneasy darkness, save for the orange halo of the fireplace. Vision unhindered by candlelight, Eustace looked again into the night – now far too aware that it might be looking back. Rifle readied and curtains drawn, he resolved not to make it easy for whatever –
A cry. Not that which had been menacing the blizzard, but a fresh one – the high-pitched, death-stopped yelp of an unlucky beast. Eustace hoped it was quick. He stood at attention, waiting for another, freshly-redmouthed howl to pierce the gale. As it failed to come, memories bubbled up within him, thawed by white-hot panic – stories of great hunts in days of old.
According to ceremony, these began with the triumphant sounding of a horn and ended in a lavish feast. Eustace had never taken part in such decadence, born too late and to too thin a family to ever have the chance. He only killed to survive, but knew himself to be a stranger among the woods nonetheless. With a chill, he wondered if nature could hold onto a tradition long after it had passed, and how a snowy hell such as this might remember it. For now, at least, it seemed the hunt was over – the thing would busy itself with its prey, and, for a time, Eustace would not have to worry about becoming it. The Winchester relaxed in his hands. He could not afford the vanity of true relief unless the noise never came again, but he could perhaps spare himself a moment.
Gentle wisps of stewsteam called him toward the fire, loosening the tightness in his chest just enough for the emptiness in his stomach to eclipse it. Eustace pulled a chair over towards crackling flames and thickburbling stew. He sat, scooped a bowlful, and took in its nourishing warmth. As he ate, he picked up a dusty thought and turned it over in his mind: Time had a way of softening. It made venison tender, onions sweeter, mulled gaminess into ironspiced richness.
Him, too: the minutes since his terror’s temporary, gurgled end loosened his feartaut limbs. His handful of years in self-imposed exile had done the same, and more; it snuck in the quiet chill of age alongside the tired in his bones, greyed his hair and mourning black alike… With a jolt of mental discipline, Eustace pulled on the leash around his mind as it neared the place he had come to the frozen edge of the world to escape. Despite his practiced habit of self-protection, Eustace allowed the unexpected moment of peace to overtake him and let his melancholy out to wander.
He took a fine chain out from its place beneath the folds of fur and flannel around his neck. Against the better judgement of his senses, he pulled off a glove to feel the cold metal of his necklace’s griefheavy cargo. In warmer days he could wear the ring in its rightful place, but now the pale band of skin around his finger was frostbitten enough without the icy teeth of gold. Even through a thick wool shirt, Eustace could feel its dull chill upon his chest.
He rolled the ring between his forefinger and thumb as fullbellied warmth radiated throughout him. Fatigue followed, let loose from his marrow by the sharp chill rocking back and forth upon on his fingers. Swaddled in twin comforts of fire and dinner, Eustace allowed his eyelids to fall and awareness to sink out of him through his chair. Gravity snatched the ring out of his fingers as his thoughts became dappled by ever-blurrier visions of her face.
Their happy marriage, like their daughter, was stillborn. Though he had scarcely been a husband, influenza made him a widower. A god-fearing man in his mourning’s fresher years, he sequestered himself away from the unkind world to await their reunion in his eternal reward. As the years without her grew longer, Eustace began to merely hope for an end to waiting. The face in his mind’s eye drifted up and out with the meager smoke of the cooking-fire. His head fell limp, escaped his neck, and ran off with his thoughts.
The dim glow of his eyelids churned into black, angry snow that did not abide any light or hope for respite from its brutal, everlasting chill. The blizzard gale outside the cabin became the screams of some great beast called Winter, whose bitter wrath now pointed icicle-sharp upon him. At once, he both shivered in a chair by a dying fire and sank backwards into hungry snow. His ungloved hands twitched limp at his sides while scrambling into ever-shifting, pitch-dark powder. The only thing to stand out against the icepit sky – a distant beacon of her: a pale, shining deathmask memory hanging at the back of the heavens. He gazed upon it like a polar star and could find within it no reprieve, only point of reference for where the torrent of swallowing cold began. Sinking ever deeper, Eustace felt the numb settle in as his dreams played on their dirge.
Suddenly, a discordant note ripped him into waking – he heard it again, the rage-quavering call of the hunter in the night. His dreams curdled in an instant, leaving him squinting in the blue darkness of the cabin as if it was searing daylight. He reached for his Winchester, instead knocking it over with frost-clumsy fingers. When he opened his mouth to curse, all that escaped was a plume of pale breathsmoke.
Sleep had mortared his lips together and dulled his gloveless hands to clubs. Eustace beat them against his thighs and let out a low groan in time with the aching wood of his cabin. The fire was embers, now, and the blizzard had swept snow against his cabin up to the windowsill. He held his hands over the flickering coals until they protested with sluggish afternumb ache, thrust them back into his gloves, and coaxed the fire back to life.
The baleful sound came again, cutting through the storm with cruel clarity. It was different, somehow – closer, more focused. His rational mind figured it had somehow caught the scent of the frozen deer carcass in his shed, but part of Eustace knew with primal certainty that it now called for him; not to quell its insatiable hunger, but to put down a poacher in its woods.
Whipcord nerves pulled tight, spine snapped to rigid attention. His rifle leapt into his arms as the window stepped toward him almost without his noticing. He stood frozen at his post, locked in unbreathing, unblinking rigor until his cold-stung eyes and aching lungs forced him to yield.
An eerie calm draped around him and slowed his hummingbird heart. His eyes, which had darted after every stray snowflake, now fell upon the base of one particular fir. The world sank away as his gaze met two points of bile-hued eyeshine that betrayed a silhouette wrong and wild against the shadows of tamer night. Eustace could only just make out antlers shedding fetid velvet and the broken, gnarled form of a thing not quite cervine and never quite human.
His thrumming chest fell still and head fell limp, though his eyes could not leave the leering thing with too little skin stretched over too much bone. It crept past the treeline in peristaltic lurches, marring the blizzard-snow with a trail of dark, sloughed-off wetness that could not seem to freeze. It approached the cabin, glacial inch by fevered yard – the wicked membranes of its rotting eyes holding Eustace all the while in tetanic stillness.
His eyes burned from frigid tears brewing beneath them as the beast, the bitter tyrant of the taiga, stopped and drew itself to its full, unearthly height. Its gasping inward breath came ripped from Eustace’s own lungs. From behind cracked, blood-wetted lips and bone-whetted teeth, it prepared to howl in triumph at finding its prey.
At last, an icy droplet cut across Eustace’s face, and the sudden shock of cold sent a twitch of agony throughout him – and through just enough of his frostbitten forefinger to hit the trigger of his 1873. The rifle leapt aflame in his hand, the world screamed back into torpid senses – it spat a round through the wooden windowframe and met the creature just below its seventeenth rib. It reeled back, letting out a dull wheeze as it crumpled to the ground.
Freed from its wretched gaze, Eustace shot back into himself like the spent cartridge hurtling over his shoulder. He allowed a weak thrill of victory to course through him as he pulled the lever back anew. The repeating-action hunk of wood and metal had pulled him back in turn from powerlessness. It had not failed him yet, and would not do so now. He dropped to a knee and nestled the rifle deeper in its makeshift emplacement. Eight left in the chamber. He held it steady, focused on the twitching form in the middle distance. Seven.
The blizzard howled into the cabin, following the bullet-burst through the fresh gap in the wall. Though it sliced at his eyes, Eustace could not worry about the slow death of hypothermia while the nightmare outside arose and let out another rasping, hateful bellow. The winter winds shifted with it, and his next shot went wide. Six more.
The thing disappeared in a sweeping wave of turbid white. Eustace squinted into the chaos raging outside the cabin, the faintest hues of blue moonlight the only indication that the heavens were still there. An unnatural shadow left a trail of snowdarkening slime as it lumbered towards the shed. Eustace let another round fly.
It met its mark – barely. It grazed the creature, just enough to earn a howl of pain but not enough to stop its spasmodic march toward his supplies. Five left. By the time he chambered the next round, the figure had shambled out of his sight. Eustace stuffed himself into a thick coat and went for the door – he’d rather take his chances with becoming this thing’s dinner than allow it to take his. He pulled a kerchief up to his eyes, grit his teeth, and opened the door.
He stepped out into bitter, biting winds. The storm had piled powder up to his thighs with no sign of slowing. Amid the swirling madness he could scarcely make out one silhouette from the next. Sudden movement to the left – his Winchester went off at a reflex, and the gale suffocated the noise almost before it could reach it his ears.
Damn. Just a fir collapsing after losing the battle with the blizzard. Four left. Eustace glanced to the right as he pulled the lever back. There!
It lunged toward him from behind a roiling curtain of snow, its too-long, too-thin form tearing the ice beneath it. He wheeled around and squeezed the rifle as the fell beast barreled into him. Hooked claws found purchase in the meat of his left shoulder as it slammed them both through the cabin door.
The rifle burst – his attacker screeched a frantic wail and raked its talons out. It scrambled back as Eustace fell prone upon the floor. Beside him splatted lumps of grey and greasy flesh and the splintered wreckage of an antler, all mottled with inky soot. Agony flared throughout him – though Eustace willed his blood to freeze, the holes in him bled hot. Gulping down the rising bile, he chanced a look at his attacker.
The thing had recoiled to the threshold to probe its skull with spindly, sharp-end fingers. Eustace sucked in a breath and swung his rifle over his torso. He tried to move his other arm to steady it, and received only pain-blurred vision in reply.
Eustace propped himself up on his right elbow. The beast’s jagged breaths slowed. Eustace slid the barrel of the rifle to his left knee. A low growl shook the cabin. He pulled back the lever and chambered the next round – three left. Blizzard winds tousled mange and skinflaps encroaching by the door. Eustace raised his knee, took aim. Pale, greenish-yellow eyes fixed upon brightbleeding shoulderflesh and thirsted – in a scream of silver gunsmoke one of them disappeared.
The creature folded backward over itself and collapsed. Eustace knew better than to assume he was truly free of it, and set to readying the penultimate round. Sure enough, the thing shuddered on the cabin’s stoop, and began to rise from the snow. Faint streams of soot-black powder flowed from its wounds – is head hung at a grotesque angle, unbalanced and leaking from the cavities where its antler and eye had sat. Again, Eustace squinted to line up his shot – now, though, the weirding gaze of its remaining eye met his.
All breath left him. His every muscle locked tight, frozen. Even the blistering pain of his shoulder fell away into utter, rigid numbness. A raspy snarl dribbled from a mouth made blue with cold and red with blood in sprayed blotches. It may have been the way its jaw hung, broken and twisted, but to Eustace it seemed almost smiling. He tried to back away, to run, to flee, anything, but the shining of its rotten eye held him still.
It crept ever closer toward him. He sprained his will trying to crawl away, only to feel he was once again sinking, helpless. All else hid in blur and quiet from its slow-encroaching figure. The hunter moved toward him now as if through molten glass. Eustace thought it cruel that the numbness did not reach his mind, making eons of his final seconds. It would almost be a kindness – a moment’s glance, and then… Either he would meet his wife and daughter, or endure their grief no more.
Even now, he felt the cold of the ring on his chest. His eye was held by the should-be-dead thing that limped torture-slow upon him, but among the numb he could place a thin halo of ice. It was faint, tiny – but stung through coat and shirt and hijacked nerve alike. Eustace knew it, was so accustomed to its weight that not even this state could break that. Eustace thought of how the rifle must be shaking in his hand, almost buckling under his shivering, white-knuckled grip. He rummaged through the numbness for another favorite landmark. His captor slowly unhinged its jaw, baring cracked and countless teeth. As it reared back, Eustace ripped himself through the void of feeling and into his trigger finger.
His Winchester spat into the creature’s rancid eye. The thing bellowed, blind and frenzied, slashing wild in the dark. It caught the rifle, swatting it clean across the room to land muzzle-down in the fire. The sound seemed to distract it – agonizingly slowly, Eustace scrambled backward, out of its reach. He stood, carefully, and leaned against the wall. The floor beneath him creaked.
A blackbleeding, eyeless head snapped toward the sound – Eustace dove as it tore into the cabin wall with claw and tooth alike. He landed hard on his table, jostling a bowl and spoon. As the raving fiend drew nearer, he grabbed and hurled them at the door. The stewcrusted clatter drew the creature’s wrath, and Eustace dashed the other way. It didn’t follow the noise outside, like he’d hoped, but the fury of the blizzard might muffle him. He waited for the wind to howl at its peak before he unsheathed his rifle from the coals. The edge of the barrel glowed with a dull, red heat as he cocked the handle. The final round sat ready in the chamber as the empty cartridge fell.
Too late, he reached after it – the casing sang a high-pitched trill as it clattered on the cabin floor. The creature whirled around from the doorway, and went still. Eustace froze. He could not understand how, but his adversary seemed to still the storm, too – the winds halted in an instant and snowflakes stopped in their downward tracks. All the throes of winter quieted so his hunter might find its prey.
He did not dare to breathe nor move. He was bent over, left arm still stretched out toward the brass cylinder rolling away. His reflexes had forgotten the agony of his shoulder, and this position had doubled it. Eustace bit down hard on his tongue to keep any would-be sounds of pain from betraying him to the thing that now stalked toward him.
His face began to throb and redden. All he could now hear were the wheezing breaths of the approaching creature and the rush of blood behind his ears. Eustace glanced at the exposed tatters of his shirt – already stained with crimson and dampening further still. He felt the barest trickle escape and travel down his arm. The casing rolled to the end of its arc, meeting a table leg with the thinnest metallic thunk.
The beast launched itself over, missing Eustace by mere inches and once again stopping in its tracks. He dared not flinch. A spot of red bloomed between his sleeve and glove. Despite his silent pleading, it shed a single, sanguine tear. It splatted almost imperceptible and shattered the silence.
Eustace dropped to a knee and swung his rifle up as the beast wheeled around and slashed the air where his head had been to ribbons. The barrel pushed through tattered folds of pallid skin and paper-dry offal, coming to rest its red-hot muzzle against a solid chunk. In the utter stillness, it made a glassy, tinkling sound that gave way to a sizzle. Eustace pulled the trigger.