At least, for a little while. Then suddenly, her grip tightened on his hand with a strength he wouldn’t have credited her with, and he winced in pain, turning. “Look, there’s no time, okay? We have to go.” He started forward again, but the girl’s grip had gotten even stronger, incredibly strong, in fact, so that Matt cried out, feeling as if the bones in his hand were going to snap.
“We have come far enough,” a voice said from behind him, one that sounded nothing like a little girl’s voice at all. It was far too guttural, that voice, too deep, with a hissing quality to it he did not like, not at all. He heard something strange behind him, squishing sounds mixed with loud, cracking ones. He’d heard such a sound once before. He’d only been a child at the time and one of the older boys in the village had fallen from a tree, fallen in such a way that his leg had broken. It was like the sound of a tree limb snapping in the frost but far louder, far worse, and despite the fact that he’d only been a kid, Matt remembered it clearly.
He heard that sound now, over and over again, just as he heard the mewling hisses from behind him, hisses that seemed like sounds of pleasure and pain all at once. Matt wanted to turn, knew he should turn, but he was suddenly frozen with fear, terror which made it impossible for him to move, nearly impossible for him to think at all, and he understood in that moment why elk sometimes froze at the sight of their hunters and the bows they carried. He’d always wondered why they did that, from time to time, why they did not run and try to save themselves. Now, though, he understood.
The grip of the hand holding his tightened still further, seeming not just to tighten but to grow so that it engulfed his entire hand up to the wrist, wrapped around it in some slithering, sickening way, and he screamed as pain lanced through the bones of his hand and up his arm. Then, he heard a shockingly loud sound from behind him, branches snapping as someone—or something—crashed through the undergrowth. There was a terrible, keening wail from behind him, the sound of something striking flesh, and in another moment the pressure on his hand vanished as if it had never been.
Matt finally coaxed up the courage to turn and froze again, staring in horrified silence at the scene before him.
Cutter stood only feet away, his great chest heaving in breaths, blood inexplicably splashed across his face and arms. In one hand he held a torch which blazed bright in the darkness, dazzling Matt’s eyes. In the other, he held a tree limb, one so thick that Matt would never have been able to hold it in one hand even if he could have somehow lifted its weight, which he doubted. The end of the limb was shattered, broken off, and the blood coating it was as odd and confusing to Matt as the blood on the big man’s arms and face. At least, that was, until he followed Cutter’s gaze to his feet.
Some thing lay there in a bloody mass just where the young girl had been moments before. But it was not the young girl nor anything that resembled her. Instead, it was a creature unlike anything Matt had ever seen, a monster or demon out of nightmare. The creature’s skin was pale but that didn’t cover it—in fact, it was translucent, so that Matt could see veins running through it, thought he could actually see the blood pumping. It had very short, incredibly thin arms, like a child’s, but attached to those arms were thin but very long fingers with claws like daggers on the end of them. Even that, though, wasn’t the worst of it. It had legs, too, of a sort, long, spindly legs which were completely disproportionate to the rest of its body. But what caught Matt’s attention—what he could not look away from, even though he wanted to—was its mouth. The creature’s mouth was ten times as large as a human’s and was opened in pain to reveal several rows of teeth which were nearly as long as its claws, all of which came to a sharp point.
“W-what is it?” Matt gasped.
“Your death, if I hadn’t come along,” Cutter growled, staring down at the monster which mewled in obvious pain as its blood continued to pump out onto the snow-laden bank. “But if you’re asking for a name—their own kind call them Gretchlings, though you might have heard them called Doppels.”
Matt’s eyes went wide at that, and for a moment it seemed as if he couldn’t catch his breath. “I…I didn’t think they were real. I didn’t think—”
“No,” the man growled, looking at him and standing there, covered in blood, making an even more terrifying visage than normal. “You didn’t think. I told you, boy, to stay in the cutout, to listen to nothing. Do you remember?”
“But…but I thought she needed help. I thought…I mean…”
“That you could offer that help?” Cutter challenged, then made a growling sound that might have been considered a laugh, assuming bears could laugh. “Look at you, boy. We’re on the run from men seeking to kill us—to kill you—and you thought, what, you would go and play the hero? Gods, you’re a fool.”
Matt cowered, he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to be outraged, to shout back, but the problem was that he did not feel outraged. What he felt was scared. He had never seen this side of Cutter before, this anger. He had thought it was there, of course, had seen hints of it the way a person might catch hints of their reflection in a rushing river. He had suspected it existed, but he had never actually seen it and in none of his suspicions had he ever thought
