In retrospect, charging headlong in the dead of night into an unfamiliar wilderness full of vipers, jaguars and other known dangers had been a damn stupid thing to do. But dizzy with resentment, and perhaps even then the incipient effects of the potion, Fernando slashed his way heedless through the verdant brush and trailing vines.
Unbridled vehemence fueled him. With absolute fixed intent he sighted the trail the goat had trampled in its hasty flight. More like a reaper than a tracker, he pursued his quarry, hacking down whatever lay in the path of his reclamation.
His perceptions by now had begun to reshape. There was an eerie extra-dimensionality to what he was seeing and experiencing, like a tangible halo of extrapolated sensation. A sort of double-sense. Well in advance of encountering them, he saw the phantom outlines of the spiked palm scrub, the feathered ferns and flared ceiba trees, the furred boulders and obsidian streams and the veils of twisting creepers that swayed apart ahead of him like a surreal projection.
He heard the whoops and croaks, the crackles and susurrations of the night creatures resounding in his mind seconds before they reached his ears—a ghostly echo in reverse. He felt his next breath rebound in his chest ahead of taking it. The detritus gave way under his foot before it fell. It was as though the motion of time itself had slowed relative to his, lending him an uncanny clairvoyance in his ill-conceived quest.
Hell-bent on the goat, Fernando didn’t ponder this much. It felt natural to him in the heat of the moment, this preternatural foresight. The trail of trampled brush ended abruptly. But this was no surprise to him.
He found the goat holed up precisely where he’d known he would—hunkered down in the bracken between a knit of gnarled trees, in a root-choked burrow hollowed out by the rain.
Against the inky shadows, he couldn’t see the hidden black goat, but he knew it could see him. Circling around the perimeter of the witchy glade, Fernando knew, too, the way the goat would flee once he flushed it out. He recognized the overhanging branch he needed as soon as he sought it. With the flashlight clamped in his teeth, he wove a snare from the hemp rope. Ignoring the spectral double-helix of the snare, he tossed it up over the branch so that it hung suspended among the curtain of vines, an invisible noose laying in wait.
Picking up a long sharp stick, Fernando crouched off to the side of the snare. He looped the free end of the rope around his arm, clamped the line underfoot with his full weight behind it. Bracing himself, he shoved the point of the stick through a crevice in the glade. The goat exploded from its hiding place in a scrabble of hoof-strewn leaves and horn-sheared vines.
As its sledge-shaped head shot through the noose, Fernando pulled with all his strength.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy