Windigo by Steve W. Jenkins

Steven W. Jenkins is an artisan who handcrafts split bamboo fly rods by trade. When time allows he pens short stories and novels of horror and speculative fiction. His short story "Windigo" offers a brief glimpse into the subject matter of his first novel, "Cold Hunger". Details about the book can be found at http://www.coldhungerbook.info. Steven's list of short stories keeps increasing. Steven requests that those kind enough to read his stories forward a brief and honest critique of his work to rodmaker@sopris.net .

I am the primordial embodiment of winter-the ancient incarnation of cold and starvation. I am famished and insidious. To the pitiable members of the Algonquian race who inhabit the bitter north, I am winter's savage rouge. My disease leaves men with the blood of their families staining their teeth and the flesh of their ancestry churning in their bellies.

The missionaries that came claim to have banished me as a heathen belief, but the words "God" and "Christ" are frail and weep against my primeval preeminence. My power is far beyond the faith man dreamed to dispel his fears after the creation. I am old as the earth. I am the bitter cold that steals fire and sustenance from clay pots stirred with sticks over open fire. I bring depraved desperation, starvation and the irrepressible lust for human flesh.

I am Windigo.

As light as air and colder than space, I have no conscience and no sense of decency, only the power to mold men's minds to disease-ridden mush. This is my charge and ancient purpose. Those who believe in grace and prayer are powerless against my wickedness. They end as the others do, gnawing the bones of their family.

An incurable disease, I blow with the freezing wind that rips through the densely wooded Precambrian Canadian Shield throughout the winter. I beckon the feeble with a desperate call of famine hidden in the hideous scream of the wind. The unfortunate who hear me whisper their names are helpless against the sickness I impart to them.

When I drifted into Lou Hunter's one-room hovel that night, I was as dark and cold as the air that inhabited the space. Perfumed with the whiff of burnt wood from the extinguished potbelly stove, the room suited me fine.

The inadequately fashioned structure was built from sadly butted logs, sealed with pine needles and tree pitch that did little to hold the icy chill of winter at bay. Lou's head looked like a large coconut as it rested on the squalid pillow. It was a hairy palmae full of sweet milk just waiting to be spoiled.

As I was the space above the bed, I watched his breath drift out in visible, gossamer clouds. I could feel him shiver and sense his hunger. As the snow continued to suffocate the earth outside of the window, I whispered his name and settled onto his body. When I did, he released his wife who was enveloped in his arms. He turned away from the bundle of infancy cuddled between them. Lou thought he was dreaming. After rubbing his eyes open with quivering fingers, he stared through me at the ceiling. I could feel his muscles stiffen and feel his mind reel. The Indian exhaled the fear momentarily and gathered the threadbare blanket closer around his body. Just a nightmare, he thought before closing his eyes again.

Fleeting comfort for the dammed.

I began to worm through the blanket, into his epidermis. The fleshy organ of brown tissue that encased him grew colder, oozing an oily sweat heated by the core of his body. The perspiration turned to a frail glaze, freezing. Wrapping around him, I delighted as the warmth of his body began to leach out. The mattress beneath gathered the heat and locked it under the stained fiber wrap. The Indian was immediately conscious of my presence and gasped in an exhalation that tried to be a scream. It never escaped his icy lungs. Lou's silence was sealed. He writhed in voiceless dread as I slowly entered his body.

When he blinked his eyes open, I could see the through them. Delighted in his terror, we lay quaking in the darkness. I began to feel Lou's transformation as the pigment in his brown irises began to blend to black. I shared the defenseless anguish as his heart began to solidify.

Lou tore the woven blanket from his body. He threw it atop his wife and his daughter, leaving us naked and freezing on the bed and gaping up.

I could feel Lou shudder as he released the last of his body heat. He surrendered to my indecent, utter wickedness and hacked a pool of viscous, slushy drool from his mouth where it quickly froze on the pillow in the shape of a heart.

After forcing Lou to sleep again, I began to craft a nightmare in fractured scenarios that moved in pixilated, black and white motion.

There was the image of a famished Whitetail doe. Barely visible amidst a crystalline forest of lodge-pole pines, she hopelessly pawed into the powdery flakes heaped around her quaking haunches for food. Nearly buried in the snow beneath her, a dying fawn tried to nurse from her spent utter...

The couple was embraced in a loving embrace with his wife's head resting on his shoulder at their wedding. Her face was turned away from the camera, but her ebony hair oddly appeared as short, sable, hollow strands...

Smiling on the porch of their home, his wife's nose was jet-black with two white bands behind it. Her face sported auburn hair, her eyes encircled in white. His wife's right arm, which was wrapped around Lou's shoulder, ended in an ungulate shaped hoof...

Lou was spooned with his wife in their bed, highly aroused and determined to experience the pleasure he craved. An intense odor of musk filled the room. His wife's hips felt abnormally narrow as he forced penetration. She only mewled in a soft whimper after he was satisfied...

His pregnant wife was bundled in threadbare blankets. She stirred a pot of boiling water that held the last of the onions and venison hocks with her left hand. Lou fed the potbelly with an armful of fractured pine whorls gathered from the growing mantle of white outside. The interior began to cloud with steam escaping from the dying stove fed with too much cold...

It was a freezing February morning. Lou knelt at the foot of their bed with a pan of hot water and rags on the floor beside him. The child wasn't expected until April, but the baby was coming and no mid-wife was available. His bundled wife had been lying on her side for thirty minutes, draped in blankets and a hooded housecoat. Lou hadn't anticipated her calm and quiet. She suddenly rose from the bed, shed the blanket and walked to the center of the room. Lou stared in awe as she opened the housecoat revealing a bloated belly covered with bluish-brown hair. Her torso was no longer that of the slender woman he'd married. The exposed portion of her form was ungulate in form. Her abdomen undulated for several minutes. Without a sound uttered, six pounds of birth dropped from her drooling uterus onto the woven reed rug on the floor. With four hooves and its head tucked between pair of spindly forelegs, the creature writhed on the floor for a moment. The cloaked woman immediately dropped to her knees and began licking the fawn, ingesting the translucent white membranes and afterbirth covering her spawn. She followed with a tongue bathing of the bloody mat while engaging Lou's stunned expression with a crimson smile covering her face. His wife's jaws moved in animated motion as she spoke between determined laps. "What a beautiful child our union has created, Lou."

What followed was the last and final act of my filthy and wicked indulgence.

I left Lou's body and hovered above him again, continuing my labor of love inside the hairy palmae as his skin began to pale and drape around his bones. I delighted as my depraved contamination took effect.

With the horror show etched permanently in his brain, Lou awoke to the same pixilated, black and white nightmarish world. He was insatiably hungry. His stomach felt like an empty balloon of muscle consuming itself with acid. Lou blinked repeatedly, trying to focus on the covered forms of his wife and daughter lying next to him. He reached out and stared in astonished horror as his skeletal left hand began peeling the blankets away. The beings beneath the covers no longer held any resemblance as human or family to him. They were only the starving animals portrayed in the dream and a source of effortless sustenance. The sound of grinding ice followed. Lou slowly turned his head toward the ceiling and looked up through black eyes deeply set in a gaunt skull.

Lou's soulless gaze found me. He begged pitiably for my permission. I courteously offered it. With a gaping mouth, he turned toward his wife in a slow, stealth motion. Lou wrapped the lethal array of new frozen sabers around her neck and deliberately clamped down, tearing away half of the skin and muscle, severing her jugular. A pulsating flood of crimson poured over her pillow, ushering the feast that followed.

I am Windigo.

I am everlasting.