The Ozark Howler and the Search for the Snawfus

Chapter 3 - The Cave

He woke to an itch.

Unlike any of the other itches Henry had experienced in his life, he couldn't isolate it this one. It seemed to be everywhere, as if the irritation ran all the way through him.

Giving in to the temptation to scratch, he turned over to free his hand from where it had been pinned underneath his body. As he did so, however, he hit his forehead on something hard, just above where the bed where he was laying down.

"Careful, there," warned an unfamiliar voice.

Opening his eyes, Henry realized that he wasn't in a bed at all. He was lying on a patch of tree boughs and dry leaves. There was a fire in front of him, perhaps five feet away, and it its light showed walls of rough stone close around it.

Henry was in a cave. The chamber he was in rose to over ten feet in height, but he was himself tucked into a corner where the roof of the cave was only four feet above him.

A man wearing a flannel shirt, checked gray and blue, stood over the fire, watching him. Behind the man in flannel, the cave opened up widely, to show a thick woodland.

"You're lucky I came along, or you would have been gotten," the man said.

"Gotten? What would I have gotten?'

"Oh, you got bit, of course, but you would have gotten bitten bigger."

"By bigger bugs?"

"No, by a bigger booger. They say he can bite you even when he doesn't have a head."

"I'm sorry, but what are you talking about?"

The man in flannel smiled. "It's a howler."

"I'm not laughing."

"No, that's what it is."

"What it is?"

"That's its name. One of its names, anyway."

"What is?"

"The howler."

"What's that?"

"It's what would have bitten you but didn't, thanks to me coming along first."

"The howler," Henry repeated, allowing silence to fall for for quite some time.

The man in flannel stoked the fire, then walked out of the cave without a word.

Henry lost himself for a while, staring into the flames. His mind moved loosely around several questions at once without pursuing any of them to their ends. He considered whether he ought to be getting up, but couldn't think of a single thing that he should get up for, and quickly abandoned the idea.

He was unexpectedly comfortable, in spite of the itch and the growing sense of a bruise on his forehead. After years of searching in vain for the right number on his Sleep Number customizable mattress, he discovered that no mattress at all was what suited him best, and he fell back asleep for a while.

When he opened his eyes again, the man in flannel was back in the cave, squatting next to a pile of not quite logs, each thinner than his wrist.

"I never heard anything," Henry said after a few minutes.

"Never heard what?"

"There weren't any howls last night."

"There never are, until there are."

Henry didn't feel like asking questions, and his companion in the cave didn't seem to feel like offering any answers. So, the two sat in silence for what could have been an hour, or could have been five minutes. The fire fell apart on itself, and the man in flannel did not move to revive it.

Without any apparent cue, the man in flannel stood up, and handed Henry an old-fashioned metal canteen.

"You'll be all right," he said, and walked away.

Henry remained.

For a while, he scratched. Red bumps from the night before turned white under his fingernails. In places, he drew blood.

After a while, however, he forgot the itch, and his mind lifted out of the presence of the flames only now and then, only to place another round of wood on the fire.

The forest outside was only a backdrop, a green scrim through which the diffused sunlight entered the cave, a pale echo of the firelight. There was no sound but the popping and hissing of the fire, other than the birdsong, with an avian grammar was beyond Henry's comprehension.

So the day passed, and Henry remained, still in the cave, unconcerned with the descent of the darkness outside. The pile of large sticks gathered by the man in flannel was only down to half its size by nightfall. Mosquitoes seemed to be deterred by the smoke, and so, quietly, Henry continued his watch until once again, he fell asleep.

It was not at all close to dawn when Henry became aware of an unfamiliar sound.

He was used to an image of night defined by a blue glow from the face of his digital alarm clock, and the silhouette of the window frame cast by streetlights outside. Now, however, having slept on his shoulder with his face turned to the wall of the cave, he experienced the uncanny feeling of being unsure whether his eyes were open, and whether he was awake.

What he heard sounded like it came out of a dream. A low pitch like a moan of dull pain combined with a higher pitch, more like a screech, something like the noise produced from metal scraping against metal, rising in tone for several seconds until it ended in a yip. A few seconds of silence, and then it came again, and again.

It was so unlike anything else he had ever heard that Henry couldn't tell how far away the sound was. What he could tell is that it was coming closer, growing in intensity with every repetition. It was behind him, and whatever the sound was coming from seemed to be moving back and forth, as if it was searching, or pacing.

Henry did not want to discover what it was. He found that he could not move, not even to unclench his fists, which were achingly tight. The weight of an instinct to hide was pressing down on every muscle in his body, squeezing him into irresistible stillness. Even his breath became still, a tiny thing spinning around in his open mouth, never passing his lips. 

Still the call continued, passing closer and closer until in between the burst of violent sound, something softer became apparent, coming through the ground itself, a tremendous thudding of footsteps. Henry felt his ears filled with the sound, the way that the throbbing of his own heartbeat felt trapped after a swim underwater, before the surface tension breaks. The pacing of this thing seemed to match the rhythm of his heartbeat perfectly, so that the two became indistinguishable.

Had it been his heart all along? The calls had stopped, and all he heard now was the thudding, over and over, until in what felt like a surrender, he took in a deeper breath, released it, and heard nothing at all.

Henry waited, certain now that he was awake, but confused about everything else. There was nothing but darkness and silence.

Finally, his body released itself, and he rolled over out of the blackness to see that the fire had fallen into a slumber along with him, and was now nothing more than a bed of simmering coals, deep red. The pinpricks of stars shone through gaps in the canopy, blinking in and out as a rough wind swayed the treetops back and forth before them.

The terror had been unreal. The glowing warmth of the embers brought him back to the small world of the cave, brightening and fading with each eddy of cool air pulled in from outside.

Henry pulled himself up into a crouch, and pulled several smaller branches onto the coals. Blowing beneath them, he rekindled the flames, and relaxed into the comforting crackle of the burning wood.

Rolling his shoulders, he reached for a drink from the canteen, but froze with his fingers on its cap.

The call came again, its booming and scraping coming from a distance, only once, but unmistakably real.