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It’s almost like they’ve got to get a running jump to leave their human form.
    Three of my friends had disappeared inside its mouth, and it was still hungry. But the blows they’d struck were beginning to have their effect. From the knife sticking out of its back, a white mist began to waft. From the hatchet handle poking out from under an armpit, another little tendril of mist.
    Three members in good standing of the Roanoke Society, local chapter 8601, were dead and consumed. The Wendy grabbed Manny, our old hand who’d been doing this since the 1970s. With a roar, it lifted him up and scooped its lower jaw (which was stretched like a pelican’s lower beak by now) and tossed him in. John “Lumberjack” Tolliver, who stood 6'6", swung a machete low to the ground, biting into its knee. But that barely fazed it.
    I unrolled the duck tape and extended it in front of me.
    The machete had done less than one of the daggers had, don’t ask me why. We can never tell.
    * * *
    Some wendigos seem to fear the crucifix, and will stop resisting entirely; we don’t know if it’s because some of them have adopted cultural taboos, or if we’re dealing with different subspecies.
    Some of the creatures are easily bound up in rope, while others simply break it into shreds.
    Chains were tried in the early 20th century, and always ended up being used against the Roanokans; somehow, the Wendys could heat the links and burn the hands of the people trying to wrap them up.
    Guns never did any good, because the fast projectiles did little but perforate them, and in closed spaces we could shoot each other by accident.
    Any sharp object did some good, because it started them bleeding out their mist. Some mythical vampires (depending on the author) are able to turn themselves into mist; that was surely based on wendigos bleeding out that white vapor; but it’s not some shape-shifting thing—it’s their death throes. If they’re able to drift out of the room, they can sometimes re-coalesce and survive to prey another day; hence, we have to seal the room fairly tight, always. We have to lock the room . Their body evaporates into mist, the mist becomes just water stains on the walls, and the bitch is dead.
    It’s slow though, damn it.
    I jumped at the Wendy just as it had pushed Manny’s Doc Martens down its hellish gullet. The gray tape stuck in a diagonal slash across its face (it looked like a Silly Putty-stretched comic strip had come to life—not a trace of its human guise as a beautiful woman remained) but I dropped the roll and it simply hung on the other side of “her.”
    Thank God for Jane. She’s a jogger and a health nut, and at most of our chapter meetings she can be depended upon to rant about overweight America and diabetes and government-subsidized corn syrup—you almost want her to choke on her carob and soy-substitute milkshakes. But she’s in great shape. In a blur of motion, she wrapped it around the creature’s head three times.
    Fitting that a weight-loss scold would bind up a wendigo’s mouth. No more meals for you, Wendy.
    We bagged its head, wrestled it down to the floor, and sat on it; soon its life would bleed out. It took a while. We’d made a ruckus, but no one called the cops in this neighborhood. As the three of us survivors sat quietly, waiting for the wendigo to evaporate into dead mist, a shouting match (in Spanish) broke out between a male and female voice.
    We would sneak out of here soon, and go back to our normal lives. The management would find a trashed hotel room, but no bodies.
    Finally, the Wendy was gone. A few scraps of clothes, bunched up duck tape, and an empty burlap sack were all that remained of it—and our departed friends.
    We cleaned up and left.
    If it had happened differently, there would have been a locked-room mystery.
    It could have gone like this: If everyone was eaten except me, and I succeeded in killing the Wendy, and died of wounds after killing it, they would have