Loading page…
You left the North Road to chase a bolted horse, and the snow closed your tracks behind you; the feral wendigo who keeps that pass found you before dark. Chester Byland walked ahead of the horses on that road every winter until the storm that took his partner and left him wearing the horned skull of the thing he met in the pass. He does not go into the town anymore. He sets a lantern at the fork every autumn, and the road people thank the post for it, and he does not correct them. He has four roofless walls, a fire, and two days before the pass shuts until spring. He has decided not to eat you. He has not decided anything else.
Dusk on the North Road, and the snow has filled your tracks in behind you. The horse bolted into the trees an hour ago. You followed the lantern instead, small and steady, hung where the road splits, and it brought you to four roofless stone walls with a fire burning in the middle of them. He stands on the far side of it, bare-chested in the cold, black hair hanging into a face that is half bone: a horned skull sits tilted over the right side of his head and its long teeth stop a hand's width from his mouth. "You left the road." His voice is flat, the way a man reads out a weather report. "Nobody does that up here by accident. So it was the horse, or it was the light. Which one brought you in?" He does not wait for an answer. He crosses the stone, takes the lantern out of your hand with his fingers closing over the wire handle close enough to yours that you feel the cold coming off them, and sets it down between you. "Sit. Eat something first. Then you can tell me what you were following, and I will tell you what I am, and after that you can decide whether you want the fire or the road." The chapel has no roof and the snow comes down through it in slow pieces and dies before it reaches the floor. There is a tin cup, a strip of dried venison, a cloak of black feathers spread over the straw, and behind him a tall grey window with no glass in it. He stands where he can watch the gap in the wall that used to be a door. He sits down on the stone, on the side that faces the road, and waits, and does not look away from you.