The Vanishing by Wendy Webb Page A

once been human. But now it feeds on human flesh.”
    I shivered. “I have heard about this,” I said, the long-forgotten ghost stories told around campfires when I was a child seeping back into my brain. “So, Andrew learned about the Windigo from the natives?”
    “More than learned.” There was a dark sheen in her eyes. “As the story goes, Andrew became obsessed with the beast and aimed to catch it and kill it. He had grown to love this land and wanted to rid it of this evil.”
    “So he thought the Windigo was real? But it’s just a legend.”
    “Where do legends come from, Julia?”
    I held her gaze. Surely she didn’t mean to suggest this old fairy tale was true, that a monstrous cannibal was roaming these woods.
    “In any case,” she said quickly, “real or not, Andrew set out to find it.” She took a sip of her tea and stared into the fire. “That was a mistake.”
    “A mistake? What happened?”
    Mrs. Sinclair turned to me and smiled. “We’re not quite sure. After a month or so alone in the wilderness, he returned to his business’s base, and then came the news that his parents had died in a stagecoach accident. The family fortune was now his. But instead of returning to his beloved Scotland, as everyone thought he would do, he built a replica of his family home right here. At incredible expense, I might add.”
    “So, he loved it here enough to stay.”
    “That’s one way to look at it. He certainly had success here, and by all accounts became a good man. After several years, he fell in love with a local girl and got married, and they had children. And once the house was completed, he began holding salons for the arts—he brought in musicians and artists and writers from not only the East Coast of the United States but from all around the world.”
    “I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming right about now.”
    Mrs. Sinclair nodded. “Exactly right, my dear. He never left. Never again did he venture beyond the estate.”
    “He never went back to Scotland, even for a visit? Why?”
    “That’s the interesting question, isn’t it?”
    I sensed she was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. “Was he compelled to stay?”
    “Or prevented from leaving… by someone or something. There is more magic, both good and evil, in the woods beyond this house than you could imagine in your wildest dreams.”
    “Or nightmares,” I said, shuddering.
    “As the story goes—and this is just pure speculation, now, nobody really knows for sure—Andrew did indeed encounter the Windigo one lonely night in the woods. He saw the creature—tall, thin as a skeleton, sunken eyes, with an insatiable hunger for human flesh, the remains of its victims strewn around it. Andrew froze in terror as it turned its horrible gaze toward him. He surely would’ve been killed but for a Native American shaman who had also been hunting the Windigo to rid his people of its menace. He used dark magic to kill the beast, saving Andrew’s life in the process.”
    As she took a sip of her tea, I noticed her eyes were twinkling with delight. She set her cup on the end table and continued. “It was a magical gift, but a price came with it, as is most often the case. Andrew McCullough could indeed live on, but only where he was. Here.” She opened her arms wide. “And that is how hecame to own this property. That is why he reconstructed his beloved family home here, brick by brick. That is why he never left. He chose the name of the house for that very reason. This was Andrew’s haven in the woods. If he ventured one foot beyond the estate, he would fall dead. If he stayed, he would live on, charged with protecting the estate and all who live here from the same menace that almost took his life.”
    A shiver ran up my spine, thinking of a creature as horrible as the Windigo on the estate.
    “So what happened to Andrew in the end? He married and had children, you said, right?”
    She nodded. “He did