The Year's Best Horror Stories 7 Read Online Free PDF Page A

cage.
    "Well, we've just got to go and get him," I said. "The three of us. Come on." And we ran toward Mr. Indrasil's trailer through the gloom of the coming night
    We pounded on his door until he must have thought all the demons of hell were after him. Thankfully, it finally jerked open. Mr. Indrasil swayed and stared down at us, his mad eyes rimmed and oversheened with drink. He smelled like a distillery.
    "Damn you, leave me alone," he snarled.
    "Mr. Indrasil-" I had to shout over the rising whine of the wind. It was like no storm I had ever heard of or read about, out there. It was like the end of the world.
    "You," he gritted softly. He reached down and gathered my shirt up in a knot. "I'm going to teach you a lesson you'll never forget." He glared at Kelly and Mike, cowering back in the moving storm shadows. "Get out!"
    They ran. I didn't blame them; I've told you Mr. Indrasil was crazy. And not just ordinary crazy-he was like a crazy animal, like one of his own cats gone bad.
    "All right," he muttered, staring down at me, his eyes like hurricane lamps. "No juju to protect you now. No grisgris." His lips twitched in a wild, horrible smile. "He isn't here now, is he? We're two of a kind, him and me. Maybe the only two left. My nemesis-and I'm his." He was rambling, and I didn't try to stop him. At least his mind was off me.
    "Turned that cat against me, back in '58. Always had the power more'n me. Fool could make a million-the two of us could make a million if he wasn't so damned high and mighty… what's that?"
    It was Green Terror, and he had begun to roar ear-split-tingly.
    "Haven't you got that damned tiger in?" He screamed, almost falsetto. He shook me like a rag doll.
    "He won't go!" I found myself yelling back. "You've got to-"
    But he flung me away. I stumbled over the fold-up steps in front of his trailer and crashed into a bone-shaking heap at the bottom. With something between a sob and curse, Mr. In-drasil strode past me, face mottled with anger and fear.
    I got up, drawn after him as if hypnotized. Some intuitive part of me realized I was about to see the last act played out.
    Once clear of the shelter of Mr. Indrasil's trailer, the power of the wind was appalling. It screamed like a runaway freight train. I was an ant, a speck, an unprotected molecule ‹before that thundering, cosmic force.
    And Mr. Legere was standing by Green Terror's cage.
    It was like a tableau from Dante. The near-empty cage-clearing inside the circle of trailers; the two men, facing each other silently, their clothes and hair rippled by the shrieking gale; the boiling sky above; the twisting wheatfields in the background, like damned souls bending to the whip of Lucifer.
    "It's time, Jason," Mr. Legere said, his words flayed across the clearing by the wind.
    Mr. Indrasil's wildly whipping hair lifted around the livid scar across the back of his neck. His fists clenched, but he said nothing. I could almost feel him gathering his will, his life force, his id. It gathered around him like an unholy nimbus.
    And, then, I saw with sudden horror that Mr. Legere was unhooking Green Terror's breezeway-and the back of the cage was open!
    I cried out, but the wind ripped my words away.
    The great tiger leaped out and almost flowed past Mr. Legere. Mr. Indrasil swayed, but did not run. He bent his head and stared down at the tiger.
    And Green Terror stopped.
    He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were evenly matched.
    I think, in the end, it was Green Terror's own will-his hate of Mr. Indrasil that tipped the scales.
    The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk shirt lost shape, the dark,