Enrique was pale,having just come back from a commotion in the schools swimming pool.He staggered and stumbled into Taylors arms'not because of the Wendigo,but something truly out of the ordinary had had witnessed at the swimming pool.
The girls swim team had been having their practice laps in the
pool in the previous hour.
All had seemed normal till the girls came out just as the boys,including Enrique
had filed in in the swimming suits.
Miss Ichya had counted her girl students and the count showed that one of the swimmers hadn't come out.
Everyone had been ordered to stand near the perimeter lining the pool and see if they could spot the missing swimmer in the
pool.
It was Enrique that noticed the water in front of him was staining red and he could just see the figure of the missing female swimmer lying on the bottom of the pool.
Strangely she seemed to be waving back at him in the murky reddish water but Enrique was having the dawning horrific feeling that she was dead,drowned and beyond revival.
He just stood there as Miss Ichya dived in and with the help
of the boys swim coach the missing swimmer was brought up
from the depths and deposited on the bloody red pool tiles near Enrique.
Miss Ichya screamed loudly,as did many of the gathered
girl swimmers .
For it was obvious the swimmer hadn't merely drowned,but had her skin flayed and ripped ,exposing the white of bones here and there.
It was as if the girl had been in a swiftly moving river whirlpool
and rapids and had been clawed and bashed by the rocks along the river bottom.
Clearly not something that lay at the bottom of the schools swimming pool.
Enrique felt as if he was having a out of body experience as his
body seemed to act of its own accord and walked away from the scene of supernatural horror.
He staged into the wrong set of showers,the girls showers,where
he threw up his lunch in the supposedly empty girls showers.
Then he noticed the shadow off to one side of the room and his
eyes went wide.There,licking its paws,sat a blacked scaled panther the size of a pony,with horns and puddles of pool water
all around it.The creature was licking blood and bits of human
skin off of itself,and was rubbing its huge head against a towel
that hung from the walls rack.
It was then that the creature sported a short pair of horns on the
top of its head,which also were covered in blood and bits of
human flesh.
The creature thus cleaning itself,Enrique just lay there staring
at it,dead certain this creature was responsible for the flaying and gouging of the dead girl swimmer.
He just waited for the end to come.
It never did
and as Enrique watched the form of the underwater horned panther seemed to shimmer and change.
Where it had once been now crouched the much smaller and slender form of a native American girl,in a style of dress Enrique knew hadn't been common in these parts for easily two centuries or more.
She got up and walked over to Enrique and with a strength not possible by a human female,the mishi' pishu got the nearly semseless Enrique back on his feet and spoke to him as she handed to him a medicine bundle containing various relics and
bad/good aboriginal medice she'd fashioned from the dead girl swimmers clothes and effects.
The mishi ' pishu gently chastised Enrique and explained to him
that because he had foolishly invoked and invited the even nastier supernatural creature the Wendigo into the town
she'd been forced to cross to this earthly plane as well in order to stop the grisly carnage the Wendigo was about to unleash on Enriques
fellow students.
The price to stop the Wendigo was of course required
a human sacrifice,which the underwater horned panther girl
had carried out against the innocent girl swimmer.
Then the mishi ' pishu tapped at the medicine bundle created
by thee human sacrifice and told Enrique not to misuse the powerful shapeshifting and shielding powers
it contained,or she'd be forced to slash another of Enriques fellow students to death to balance matters.
Then the underwater horned panther girl walked away,leaving Enrique to his own thoughts and horrors.