35. Talking to Deer Head (D1)

__ Ardy Jacobi dreamed she was being dragged to the edge of a glowing orange lake of fire. Freezing air burned her face, but her arms and legs were warm. In fact, her right leg and right arm, the ones held out to ward off the heat of the lake, were beginning to bleed smoke.
__ "No."
__ Thrashing from side to side, Ardy saw what was taking her to the lava pit. On the one side was R. Lee Munson brandishing the slippery grin of a mass murderer, just as she remembered the first time she saw him. The other shape belonged to Pizza Kid. His pimply expression was wild and lustful. And he was naked.
__ As she approached the lake, fire snapped and crackled from her shin and thigh. In just a couple of seconds her entire right leg was engulfed in searing flames.
__ "Don't! No, please! Don't!"


__ Though the pain in the dream was intense, and the circumstance increasingly urgent, Ardy felt herself wake slowly, groggily, and realized the pain was genuine and crackled without the snapping sound. But her right leg and arm weren't burning. They were broken and contorted. And, from what she could see in the hissing yellow glow of a Coleman gas lantern, they had been crudely splinted with curtain rods, a dirty two-by-four, and tied with torn sheets.
__ Delirious with agony, Ardy lolled her head and forced her eyes to focus on her surroundings. She didn't remember getting hit by the car. She only remembered being in Doug's Datsun, pulling over for some unknown reason, and running out into the snow. Now she was here.
__ "Where--?" She croaked. Her voice was weak and cracked, but she had to hear it to make sure she wasn't still dreaming. A pulsing cramp ached in the part of her thigh that didn't burn, but she dare not move it to get comfortable, if that were possible.
__ The place looked like some kind of windowless cabin. Dark red-brown plank wood made up the walls and ceiling. Cobwebs laced the air like the remaining filaments of nightmares. The only door was heavy oak but stood slightly ajar. Snow drifted in with tiny swirls on the hardwood floor. The bed Ardy currently occupied was musty smelling and the blankets under her body were itchy and oily at the same time, and its springs were large and uncomfortable through the thin mattress pad.
__ Despite the freak winter chill outside and the breeze coming through the slightly-open door, Ardy felt as though she were burning up. Her head pounded in time with the throbbing explosions of pain in her leg and arm. The pain and discomfort screamed and refused to let her make sense of what was going on around her or even recall the events of the day that lead her to this place. Her only calming thoughts were fleeting memories of the Kind Ones, the angels or whatever they were who touched her gently on the other side when she had died for a short time.
__ When was that? I died? Impossible.
__ That odd memory or delusion seemed to be the only strand of mental webs she could reach, so she concentrated as best she could on that. What on earth made me believe I was dead? Am I dead now, suffering and burning in hell--?
__ Then she remembered the other death, the one that wasn't hers. The one she "rode along" on. Who was that?
__ Then, as quickly as she was starting to remember, her visions faded away.
__ The oaken door creaked as it slowly opened.
__ Ardy's eyes alternately grew wide, then squinted, as she tried to focus on what was surely a living nightmare.
__ Into the cabin-room walked a creature with the body of a man, naked and muscular from the waist-up, with the head of a deer. The antlers on his head numbered six points and, to Ardy, resembled the horns of the devil.
__ Reflexively trying to scoot away from the creature as it reached out for her, Ardy felt a surge of pain peel through her insides from her ruined thigh, into her groin, and up into her chest.
__ Then she was mercifully unconscious.


__ Whatever it was that grabbed Doug Testerbird's pant leg had released it and withdrawn. Sure the trickster Alterling was baiting him somehow, he kicked angrily in the direction of the retreating gripper only to meet nothing but air.
__ "You're on your own, now, Douglas," came the paper-tear voice from somewhere far off to the right. "Try not to hurt her before you take her to Legad."
__ All Doug could do -- considering living through death, witnessing murder and despair, feeling the day and temperature give way to a freezing and frost-filled night in August -- was stare and scream. His yells echoed in the woods but his raspy-voiced friend was true to his word and did not take the bait.
__ "Please! Please! I need you." Knowing full well that he was beseeching an agent of God's own enemy, but feeling this evil shadow was the only thing that could help him find and rescue Ardy, Doug dropped to his knees and cried. He leaned back, bellowing to the treetops skirted with snow, "Please! I have to find her. Help me! Somebody, help me!"
__ "It'll b-be okay, D-D-Doug. N-N-Now that you're he-he-here."
__ The voice belonged to a young girl, her clicking teeth tapping out I'm freezing in Morse Code. She was behind the small arm that had gripped Doug and was now huddled next to a snow-covered, and apparently dead man and wrapped in the filthy jacket of another corpse rapidly becroming part of the snowscape nearby.
__ Doug stumbled back and fell against a tree before sliding down onto his rump. "W-Who are you?"
__ When the girl didn't answer right away, he persisted with, "Are you okay? Where are your parents?"
__ The girl coughed and said, "My name is M-Maggie. I don't have any parents."
__ Doug started to ask, "Then who--?" but Maggie cut him off.
__ "This is Mr. Munson. I think you know him."
__ If he wasn't already on the ground, the last comment would have knocked him there.
__ The girl seemed to warm with Doug's presence as he continued to grow colder. She stood and brushed herself off before turning to Munson's corpse to brush the snow out of his hair, off his shoulders, out of his ruined eye sockets--
__ "Don't," Doug commanded. He reached out to pull her away from the body. Who was this kid? How does she know R. Lee? Why isn't she scared out of her wits?
__ Must be demented, Doug reasoned as the girl retreated from his reach. She's lost it. Who wouldn't in all this? This crazy night?
__ "Please don't touch him. He's... He's not... umm."
__ "He's dead. I know that." Maggie stared down at Doug, then glanced to Munson's body as if to say, Well, aren't you going to do anything?
__ Doug eased off the ground but didn't rise higher than a squat. He waved a finger loosely in Munson's direction. "How-- H-How do you know--?"
__ "R. Lee Munson."
__ Doug nodded, stare vacant.
__ "He found me. He saved me from the crazy boy."
__ "C-Crazy boy? Who--?"
__ "The one who took your girlfriend. Ardelene."
__ Doug stood, almost hit his head on a low dark branch lost in the shadows of cris-crossing trees. "Ardelene?"
__ "Ardy to her friends," Maggie filled in, perplexed that she had to fill in so many blanks that Doug should already know.
__ "I-I know. She--"
__ "The crazy boy's got 'er. He drove off in Mr. Munson's car before you got here. Long before." She emphasized the time she spent waiting by brusquely rubbing warmth into her arms.
__ Doug stepped closer to her, crouched down to eye-level. "Tell me how you know these things."
__ Maggie shrugged. "After you wake up Mr. Munson."
__ Doug glanced at the body. "I can't do that. I don't--"
__ "Yes you can. You can do it just like you did it before, like you did it for Ardy."
__ "But I didn't--" Doug started to protest, swinging his arm back and brushing his fingertips inadvertently over Munson's cold hard shoulder. In that imperceivable instant, tiny jolts of lightning fired through Doug's fingernails and surged into the corpse. "--have anything to do with those things. It's Ardy. She's the--"
__ And that's when Munson drew his first breath in over an hour.

__ Ardy lay shaking, staring up at the dead black eyes of the deer-headed creature who sat next to her bed. Fear and pain, not the cold, had her head quivering and thrumming from side to side.
__ When she woke she found her good arm and leg were bound to the bed where she lay and a broken syringe lay on her stomach which heaved with each laborious breath.
__ The creature checked her pulse, pressed the back of a bloodied hand to her cheek to feel her temperature. It let out a short grunt of satisfaction but it showed no other emotion. Ardy was so out of it from the trauma of the accident she still wasn't believing her eyes. Having been to hell twice already, she was sure this was yet another layer of it.
__ "Who?" she croaked.
__ The creature twitched at her voice, leaned its deer snout closer as if to hear better. A drop of pussy blood dripped from a torn nostril and tapped her t-shirt just above her left breast. It made her wince and pinch her eyes shut. She tried to wish it away, tried to cry out from her soul for the warm loving spirits she knew before.
__ But when she opened her eyes, it was still there, silent and horrifying.
__ "P-Please. Who?" Ardy muttered through a sudden flow of hot tears. "Where am I?"
__ No reaction from Deer Head.
__ Going only by what she knew of the past insane 24 hours, Ardy did the only thing she could. She plead for her soul. She wept through the words, "I'm sorry. Please don't hurt me anymore. I-I'm so sorry."
__ The creature bellowed something from its throat that sounded like, "Muhr Maharmu!?"
__ Ardy flinched and cried out. Pain echoed through her bones as the Deer Head reared back, then forward again.
__ "Muhr Maharmu!? Mvoaw vahkum nahr mu!"
__ "No!"
__ Then Ardy's eye glimpsed a twinkle from another dangling snot in the creature's nose as the ambient light of the cabin were suddenly concentrated in that point for the purpose of catching her eye....
__ And drawing her in.
__ Within seconds, Ardy understood everything.