The figure was wearing what seemed like a heavy jacket. He must have seen Brett climbing, Brett figured, and come through the woods. That’s what he should have done, instead of climbing the cliff.
Sasquatch stepped closer. The moon caught his face.
“Oh, it’s you,” Brett said, and then felt puzzled.
“You thought I was Sasquatch?”
“Well, what else?”
“Heard you were talking at the hospital. Someday someone might listen. So I followed you here, to make sure no one ever will.”
Brett nodded. It made perfect sense.
“I didn’t leave a note,” he said. “I should go back, leave a note. For Aspire.”
“Too late.”
“Really?”
“Leave your jacket, so they know.”
“Good idea.” Brett stripped off his jacket and stood there, shivering,in a short-sleeve shirt. He didn’t know why he hadn’t put on a sweater. He wasn’t thinking right anymore. Heck, he hadn’t been thinking right for a long time.
“What about Aspire?”
“She’ll be better off without you.”
The wind felt cold and sweet on his naked arms. His lungs felt filled with fluid. He knew his skin was a pale yellow, his eyeballs stained the color of piss. He coughed again, and tasted blood.
“I wish I had left her a note,” he said.
The visions were returning. Brett saw tall shapes in the trees. All the ghosts of the past were returning. They were stumbling from wet graves in the woods, coming toward him, asking why he hadn’t done more.
“Why did you do it?” he asked Sasquatch, who had stopped being a man he knew and returned to what he had been all along: half man, half monster.
“She asked me to,” he said.
“Who?” Brett asked, afraid.
“You know,” the man whispered.
Brett took a step back.
The man felt bad. In a way, it was like saying goodbye to an old friend. Brett had been part of this story for a long time, and it was hard to see him go.
“Goodbye, Brett,” he said.
Brett turned to face the moonlit sky. The air was breathtaking, and the sea huge. The horizon was a single black line, but everywhere else there were dark waves, cresting over the glittering black sea. He wondered what it would feel like to plunge into that water, to feel the icicle shock of cold before the waves smashed him against the rocks.
“You don’t have to—” Brett said.
The man stepped closer, and pushed. Brett felt himself falling, intoopen air. He felt his arms stick out, as if he were embracing the air, but his mind was a jumble of thoughts, and the primary one was that he didn’t have more time to think. He wanted to put things in order. He wanted—
He fell, hard, into the water, plunging so deep he lost consciousness, and the waves crashed him against the rocks, and he was sucked back with great force, and someplace in all that greatness, the life left Brett Jarvis.
All was silence again. The man stepped back. He took his time, erasing any trace of his boots from the thick dander of the mountaintop.
He left the jacket for the constable to find.
