“Hair?”
“Dark. Past his jaw. Not styled. It just…” I gestured vaguely. “Hangs. Like he cut it himself with a hunting knife and didn’t check a mirror afterwards.”
“Lips?”
“Full for a man. His lower lip especially.”
Chen worked for another ten minutes, adjusting, refining. When he turned the pad around, the air went out of me.
It was him. Not perfectly, Chen had softened the jaw slightly and missed the particular wildness in the eyes, but the face looking back at me from the sketch pad was unmistakably the man from the ravine. The man who had told me to run. The man whose voice made me feel things I couldn’t explain. “That’s him.”
Cole, who had returned during the sketch and was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, straightened up. “Let’s see if the nurses agree.” He stepped into the hallway and returned thirty seconds later with my regular nurse, the dark-haired one who had been checking my vitals all morning.
She looked at the sketch and her eyebrows went up.
“Yeah, that’s him. That’s the guy who brought her in. He’s been here almost every day. Sat in that chair for hours.” She pointed at the plastic chair beside my bed. “Quiet. Polite. Big guy.”
A part of me wanted to look at Cole and saytold you so. The rest of me was too focused on the implications of what the nurse had just confirmed.
The man was real. He had brought me to this hospital. He had sat beside my bed for a week.
And in the only memory I had of him, he’d been naked and turning into a wolf.
“Thank you,” Cole said to the nurse. She left. “Alright. So the man exists. Now you said there was something else? An animal of some kind?”
“Not some kind. Aspecifickind. And I use the word ‘animal’ loosely.”
He clicked his pen. It was an involuntary gesture, almost a nervous tic. “Go ahead, then. Describe it for Chen.”
I took a breath and closed my eyes again.
This was different. Looking for the man in my memory had felt kind of exciting, like recalling a fantasy from the romance books I liked to read when I needed to turn my brain off. Looking for the creature was like opening a door I knew had something awful behind it. My heartbeat kicked up, and my palms went slick against the hospital sheets.
I opened my eyes and focused on Chen’s blank page.
“It’s built like a canine. Coyote proportions, roughly, but too angular. Like a coyote drawn with a ruler.” I held my hands up, trying to shape the air into what I’d seen. “The limbs are too long. The joints bend in extra places. Not like a broken leg, more like there are additional joints that shouldn’t exist. Elbows where there should be forearms. Knees that hinge both directions.”
Chen’s pencil moved more slowly now. He kept glancing up at me with a carefully neutral expression.
“The body is gaunt. Not starving-dog gaunt. More like…” I searched for the right comparison. “Like the skin is stretched too tight over its bones. You can see every rib, every vertebra. The head is coyote-shaped but narrower, longer, and the muzzle is pointy.”
“Eyes?”
“Not eyes. Holes. Like someone poked two holes into the face and whatever’s behind them is just… nothingness. Looking into them felt like looking into a well that has no bottom.”
The room had gone very quiet. Cole’s pen had stopped clicking. Yazzie hadn’t moved, but something in her posture had changed.
Chen worked. He erased, redrew, adjusted angles. Twice he asked me to clarify proportions and I answered the best I could. I didn’t want to remember this thing this clearly, but my brain had catalogued every jagged line of it with almost obsessive accuracy.
When Chen turned the pad around, the temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Again, it wasn’t perfect. Pencil on paper couldn’t capture the texture of the thing, the sense of wrongness that radiated fromit. But the shape was right, the proportions were right, and the angular, jagged geometry was right, and looking at the sketch made my stomach do the same slow roll it had in the ravine.
“That.” My voice came out rough. “That’s what I saw.”
Cole stared at the sketch.
“There’s no animal that matches this description. I know what a coyote looks like. I’ve lived in New Mexico my entire life. That thing is not a coyote.”
