beast at the door

2021-01-12

I am in the outskirts of the Neighborhood, somewhere near camp. It is late. The light is fading.

Up ahead a woman is frantically trying to open a door in the side of a long wide bunker. There is a jointed garage door large enough to admit two semi-trailers side-by-side.

Seconds pass. She gives up trying to open the door herself. She glances quickly over her shoulders. Starts pounding at the door with her fists. Begging to be let in.

Something crashes through the bushes at the edge of the clearing. A large bear charges forward like a bullet from a gun. The woman screams. First in fear, and then in pain and terror, as the bear rakes its claws across her back.

She crumbles to the ground. Tattered shirt trailing behind her in ribbons as she goes. Yellow hair pooling around her head. The bear stands over her. It roars and draws back to strike again. This one will end her for sure.

I quickly fold and slide my hands over each other, binding an evocation to a ward and delivering it. It’s a pattern I’ve practiced hundreds of times. But I have so rarely ever used it. I’m not confident I got it right until the bear swings its claws down again and pierces the ward.

Like a rock in a sling-shot, the bear flies up and away from the girl. It clips the edge of the roof of the building and scatters into a couple pieces across the roof.

I rush to the girl’s side. She’s in shock. Eyes wide, wild, and unseeing, rolling all around. Her breath short, ragged, and rapid. Some of the neighbors come out now from around the side of the building, long faces and thin lips. I look to them for help but they hold back.

Much later, the girl leaves after she has mostly recovered. She won’t live among those who sacrificed her to the bear.

In her absence the drawn faces of the neighbors eventually ease. They smile again. The small pockets lose the hard edge of desperate survivors, and appear to be just simple families.

There had been a monster preying on them. Slowly picking them off one by one. And finally, their options exhausted, they had summoned the great bear to do away with her. My intervention, they were sure, had meant their ultimate doom. But, apparently chastened in defeat, dead but for the intrusion of an outsider, the beast decided to leave of her own accord.