The Curse of the Wendigo by Rick Yancey

Muriel is a woman of remarkable—some might say damnable—stubbornness. She will not believe he is gone until she lays her hands on his lifeless corpse.”
    So expansive was his mood, I decided to step foot into the no-man’s-land of his past and risk getting my head blown off.
    “What happened, sir?”
    He frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “Between you and Muriel—Mrs. Chanler, I mean.”
    “Weren’t you there? I distinctly remember it, though I also distinctly remember telling you to leave.”
    “I’m sorry, sir. I meant before . . .”
    “Why do you presume anything at all happened?”
    My face grew hot. I looked away. “Some things that she said . . . and that you said, afterward, when you couldn’t sleep. I—I heard you calling out her name.”
    “I’m certain you heard nothing of the kind. May I give a piece of advice, Will Henry? In everyone’s life, as the apostle said, there comes a time to put away childish things. What happened between Muriel and me is one of those things.”
    On the night she had arrived at our house, it seemed to me he had put nothing away, childish or otherwise. He might have told himself so—even believed it to be so—but that did not make it so. Even the hardest cynic is gullible to his own lies.
    “So you’ve known each other since you were children?” I asked.
    “It is an expression that refers to the thing, Will Henry, not the person. I was not a child when we met.”
    “She was married to Mr. Chanler?”
    “No. I introduced them. Well, in a manner of speaking. It was because of me that they met.”
    I waited for him to go on. He picked at his venison, sipped his tea, stared at a spot just over my right shoulder.
    “There was an accident. I fell off a bridge.”
    “You fell off a bridge?”
    “Yes, I fell off a bridge,” he said testily. “Why is that surprising?
    “Why did you fall off a bridge?”
    “For the same reason as Newton’s apple. Anyway, I wasn’t injured, but it was February and the river was cold. I became quite ill with a fever and was laid up for several days in the hospital, and that’s how they met, more
over
me than
through
me, I guess you could say.”
    “Over you?”
    “Over my bed.”
    “Was she your nurse?”
    “No, she wasn’t my nurse. Dear God! She was—we were engaged, if you must know.”
    I was stunned. The thought of the monstrumologist betrothed to anyone was beyond my poor power to comprehend.
    “Why are you looking at me like that?” he demanded. “It was a fortuitous fall into that river. Barring it, in all likelihood I would have married her and suffered much more than the discomfort of a fever. I am not constitutionally suited for it, Will Henry. Think of it—a man like me, married! Think of the poor woman
in
it. I am not opposed to marriage in principle—it is, at least in our culture, necessary for the survival of the species—only as the institution relates to monstrumology. Which is why I told both of them not to do it.”
    “Not to do what?”
    “Get married! ‘You will live to regret it,’ I told her. ‘He will never be home. He may never
come
home.’ Obviously, neither listened to me. Love has a way of making us stupid, Will Henry. It blinds us to certain blatant realities, in this case the spectacularly high mortality rate among monstrumologists. Rarely do we live past forty—my father and von Helrung being the exceptions. And now time has proven me right.”
    He leaned forward, bringing the full force of his formidable personality to bear upon me. Involuntarily, I shrunk back, slipping down in my chair to make myself the smallest possible target.
    “Never fall in love, Will Henry.
Never.
Regardless ofwhether you follow in my footsteps, falling in love, marriage, family, it would be disastrous. The organism that infects you—if the population remains stable and you do not suffer the fate of your father—will grant you unnaturally long life, long enough to see your children’s children pass