Instead

by Jason McIntyre

  Farrah shouted. “Mom—don’t!”

  But she’d already opened the door. With a whine, it swung open. The sleeping woman took two steps. And with those, she was out on the porch among the wild dogs

  10

  Farrah felt like she would faint. She got to the bottom of the stairs and thought she would just keep going, right into the hardwood floor of the hallway, face first, lucky to get her arms up in defence as she plummeted. She grabbed the newel post and teetered. Ahead of her, Kath sauntered out into the cold night on to the floor boards of the deep verandah. On either side of her, the two dirty and imposing wild dogs looked up at her and got to their feet, licking their chops as though the woman carried raw meat in each hand.

  It was dreamy and slow.

  Farrah’s mind spit out an idea. At this angle, she could see the broom leaning against the fridge in the space between it and the wall it shared with the hallway.

  With clouded eyesight, a lightheadedness that threatened to pull her to the ground, Farrah lunged for the broom. Snagging it up, the front door felt far away.

  She rounded the corner back into the hall with a bang and a thud against it.

  Outside, beyond the gaping mouth of the front door, a steamy cloud escaped from the front of her mom’s face. In her fugue, the woman kept heading forward, as though she was oblivious to the animals at her sides. She was.

  The animals both reared up. Their front paws reached for Mom as though she was a gazelle and they were lions.

  Without thinking it through, Farrah bolted through that front door behind Mom and bat at the first of the dogs—the closest—with the kitchen broom as if it was a spear. It connected with the neck of the first, and the animal roared.

  She got it back up and swatted at the second dog. Out on the front steps, the other members of the mangy pack were starting up the stairs.

  Farrah and her mom were outnumbered, ten or eleven to two.

  Farrah grunted and swung again. She connected, but only gently, with one of the beasts. She managed to get up alongside Mom and shouted at her to come inside.

  Out of one corner, she saw Mom’s blank expression. Still, the woman took steps toward her meeting place on the steps with the charging pack of brethren.

  A snap lit up the insides of Farrah’s head. It was a terrible crack that sounded like thunder. Behind her, a flower bloom of light illuminated the dim porch.

  It was Danny. He’d fetched his hunting rifle.

  His first shot connected with the lead animal on the stairs.

  She heard him re-engage and another blast roared out.

  Flower bloom, re-engage, and then another animal went down. She was shouting. Danny was shouting.

  She kept swinging and the other animals shrieked.

  They started to recede. One by one, they shrank back in to the blackness of the night.

  One howled and another barked. They cleared off the porch entirely and Farrah dropped the broom to throw her arms around Mom’s shoulders.

  She guided Mom, who hadn’t so much as blinked against the noise and the chaos around her. But she came with the gentle prodding of her grown daughter.

  Farrah got her mother aimed back at the front door, warm but feeling the icy itch of sweat against the cold of night.

  Her eyes met Danny’s, who stood with his rifle outstretched in shaking arms.

  “I saw him,” Danny said, his voice wavering as much as his outstretched arms. “Out there. The guy from the woods. They guy they went to. He was out in the yard just now.”

  Farrah felt like she’d been struck. She brushed past Danny into the house while guiding her mom. “We’re getting my dad,” she said.

  Part III

  The End (Is The Beginning)

  1

  Grandpa Danny’s telephone had been down since a rainstorm in October had flooded out the road and softened the ground in the ditches. The muck had tilted a pole enough that it parted ways with its overhead cable and zapped a relay box. There were only a handful of homes out this way. And one party line carried seven of them. None of the seven homeowners were on payroll at City Hall or owned a piece of Main Street property. So the repairs had waited.

  “I’ll go in the car,” Farrah blurted. She was pacing in the front foyer with her upturned hands on her waist as though her back ached. In truth, it was her head that hurt. She was having trouble understanding what was going on here.

  All the lights in the house were on. Mom was safely stowed back upstairs, sleeping off this latest bout. Leaning with his own rump against the trim on the opening to the kitchen and holding his knees as if he might pass out, Gramps looked up at his granddaughter with strain in his face. Winded, he winced, like he was fighting a runner’s cramp under his rib. Beside him, leaning with its scuffed barrel in the cranny of the trim versus the wall, stood the hunting rifle which killed at least three wild dogs.

  Grandpa Danny let out a whistling breath. His squeezed his eyes shut. To Farrah, it looked like he was wincing in pain. But her mind was mostly elsewhere. It was running over the same ground a hundred different ways: the standoff with the wild dogs on the front porch. Mom, as though she was drugged, sauntering in a stupor while wearing the same nightgown she had on when she undoubtedly made it much further the night before. On that night, she must have walked at least out into the sloppy yard where rare snow had started to crystallize in the sucking cake of mud.

  Gramps stood as tall as he could and lolled his head back on his shoulders. He wasn’t breathing hard, but he was dizzy. He reached out to steady himself with the wall and made his way back to the front door. It was locked up. After, he’d rushed to the kitchen door to ensure it as well. Not for the dogs, no. But for the man in the dirty black suit he’d seen in the distance while the dogs had gone after his daughter.

  Now, he fingered the drapes on the front door’s window and peered out.

  He gave a start when he saw the carcass of one dead dog being dragged out of the light and thumping down the stairs. It left a trail of dark blood on the wooden boards, a long smear that was shocking to Danny. He was a hunter, but hadn’t taken big game down in years. There hadn’t been anything that big on the island in two decades, at least. Not even up north, a set of lands that used to be stocked for exactly that purpose.

  His heart stammered as he saw what was pulling the dead animal.

  It was two of the other wild dogs, gnarled mouths pulling the dead one by its hind legs. They wore the dead one’s blood like a wicked lipstick smile and when they bared teeth. Those teeth looked garish in their whiteness against the red and the black of their lips. Then they paused and appeared to look right at Danny through the window, grinning. His heart pounded and he backed away, beginning to cough.

  He said something, but Farrah couldn’t make it out.

  “What?” she asked. “What, what, Gramps?”

  Danny got his spell under control enough to tell her again. He said, “I have a radio. You’re not going out there to get in the car. No way in hell.”

  2

  Farrah had crazy thoughts all the time.

  In late October, she had the idea that she’d kill her boyfriend, and in a sleepless night, when illogical things made sense, she’d even convinced herself of a plan that might have been strong enough for her to get away with it. Or, at least, stay out of jail. She’d not finish out the school year—there was that wrinkle—but she’d get back to school and finish her degree. One day.

  Light of day came, and so did rational thought. At least, that time. But crazy thoughts had come and gone. They scared her, as they should have.

  Now, as she paced in the hall outside Danny’s den, she was convinced that this was a similar, sleepless stupor—where irrational thought seemed rational.

  But no, getting Dad made sense. Dad was the goddamn Chief of Police for all of Dovetail Cove. Not the island itself, but these southern parts. He’d been at this for years.

  Hell, he might even know what the goddamn was going on wit
h these dogs.

  She’d stopped short of shouting at Gramps. Even with little to no sleep under her belt, she was level-headed enough to realize that tearing into him for keeping the shortwave radio a secret was not helpful.

  Of course he had a way to get in touch out here, this removed from town.

  Of course he couldn’t be that blasé about a useless phone for three months.

  Why he hadn’t told her about the radio when she’d wanted to call Dad before, she didn’t know. Actually, scratch that, Littlest Lady. Both of you knew the reason.

  Grandpa Danny, the loveable galoot, he carried a grudge. Sure he did.

  Had to.

  His son-in-law had booted his daughter out of their house and left his only granddaughter without a mother during some heavy, formative years. He’d said as much to Farrah over the years.

  He had nothing good to say about that son-in-law. He certainly didn’t want to bring him out to his home with, “Hey, Sonny, give an old man a hand snaring some wild ones that tore my pet apart? Oh, and pull up a chair for dinner when we’re through.”

  Farrah got it.

  But they were calling him now. And Danny finally saw sense in it.

  Neither of them were equipped to tackle Mom and how she was—what?—coming down from a decade of electro-shock and god-knew-what kind of medications for her quasi psychosis and mental degradation, something that Danny himself had simply called ‘a sleeplessness that she’d inherited from her own mother.’

  “It made her a bit loopy is all,” Farrah remembered Danny saying a few years back. “Just the same as her Mom, Grandma Kit. You remember. She’d have a tough night, no sleep and by morning she’d be talking a bit goofy and putting the milk on her toast instead of her cereal. No big deal. I’d insist on a nap and she’d be right as rain after a couple good nights of rest.”

  Farrah knew it was more than that. Doug Birkhead was a reasonable man—he was the Chief for heaven’s sake—he didn’t lock Mom away with no chance of parole for simply a misdemeanour of failing to get enough sleep and then pouring coffee on the cut bananas and the fresh cream down the garbage disposal.

  In the den, Danny got the radio hooked up and was adjusting some dials and settings. Farrah knew that Dad had a radio at home. In his line of work, he had to. She said to Gramps, “You have Dad’s channel at the house?”

  “Course,” he said with a grunt and another cough.

  Static squirted out of the speaker and Gramps dialled the volume down. He looked nervous. Maybe as though he didn’t know what he’d say to his son-in-law. They’d barely crossed paths in years. They hadn’t spoken in more than that.

  “Chief, come in,” Danny said into the mic. “This is Daniel Hellegarde out on the east lane, for Chief Birkhead. Come in, Chief. Over.”

  In a few minutes, a tired-sounding Doug Birkhead answered.

  “Danny? That you? What in hell? It’s the middle of the night. Farrah and Kath okay? Over.”

  “No,” Danny said, without use of the traditional over at the end. “Not at all. We need your help, son.”

  3

  Doug Birkhead arrived after four a.m.

  Farrah had paced in the hallway at the front door for the twenty or twenty-five minutes it took him to arrive. She saw the headlights first, heard the engine second, and closed her eyes to steel herself before looking out the front window. She went to the door. Burned by the memory of the last time he’d peered out the curtains on the front door (the image of those clown smiles on the dogs as they yanked their dead brethren thumping down his porch steps), Danny went into the living room and parted those curtains.

  They watched the Chief’s patrol car inch along the lane and up the long gravel driveway. After a day of melting, the snow was mostly a glaze of ice. Doug had his window down a bit and he had a spotlight mounted on it. He drove as slow as he could while he swept the yard and the house with the spot.

  Danny had given him a three-sentence gist of what had happened. If Doug took his father-in-law at his word, he was now looking for the mystery man and the dogs before he left the safety of the patrol car.

  None of the wild pack remained. The yard was empty, except for hundreds—if not thousands—of indents in what remained of the snow and muck. Paw prints.

  It was agonizing to see Dad this close and still not have him inside the house. Farrah hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him until she saw the familiar brim of his hat and the dark versus white of his patroller.

  She followed the slow swoop of the spot light. But then she started looking out into the dark parts of the world—the parts that the spot wasn’t hitting. If she was up to no good, she thought, that’s where she’d hide. She had this crazy, irrational idea that the dogs shared a brain. They’d controlled Mom and brought her out onto the porch. Why couldn’t they do the same with Dad? They were making him shine his light in certain spots while they hid together in the dark parts of the world.

  Stupid girl, she thought. She tried to banish such irrational, childish ideas.

  But still. She looked at the shades of black and grey and dark blue where the spotlight wasn’t going. And she tried to find sets of porthole eyes, shining and blinking out there in the black.

  The patrol car crunched along in the gravel. Brakes squealed gently against the silence of the night. The car stopped and the spotlight settled on the front porch. Farrah now saw it for the first time, just as her father was seeing it too. None of the three carcasses that Danny’s rifle had produced were anywhere to be seen. Only smeared trails of their blood. Farrah, who hadn’t seen the removal of them by the other pack members, was shocked. Her mind sped through reasons for how the animals could have been retrieved.

  She thought of what Danny had said as she had gotten Mom safely back in through the front door and her ears rang with gunfire.

  The guy from the woods. He was out in the yard just now.

  “Here he comes,” Danny said from the living room. Doug had left the sanctuary of the patrol car. He’d left behind and switched off the spotlight. Now, he carried a single torch and his pistol, both drawn out in front of him at the length of his arms. He crunched along the gravel in his boots and made his way to the foot of the porch.

  “Coming in!” Doug shouted. “Porch is clear.” He stepped around the smears of dark, drying blood just as Farrah cracked open the front door.

  “Hurry,” she said. “They might come back.”

  Doug eased in and drew the door closed behind him. Farrah brushed around and latched the handle lock and the deadbolt. She backed up and gazed up at her dad. He looked as tired as she felt.

  Even before he had his pistol and his flashlight holstered, she had her arms around him. She held back tears, determined not to cry.

  His jacket was cold, but her warmth overwhelmed that in a half second and then she felt his inner warmth bleed through to her. This hug felt good. Needed. A long time in coming. She had talked to him on the phone, sure, but hadn’t seen him since the summer.

  “Where’s your mom?” he asked at last.

  “Upstairs,” she said, pulling back and wiping at the tears which hadn’t dropped from her eyes yet. “Sleeping. I hope.”

  Doug smiled. It immediately diffused Farrah. She felt okay again, for the moment.

  Behind Farrah, Grandpa Danny appeared. “Glad you could come, Douglas,” he said. “I’d take care of this,” he said, looking down. “If it wasn’t this complicated. It’s more than just some animals sniffin’ trash. Seems we have a visitor. And I can’t shake the feeling that he...dunno...trained some of these dogs to kill my Baz.”

  He shuffled past Farrah and her father towards the kitchen. “I’ll put on coffee. None of us is going to get any sleep for the last of this night.”

  “Sounds weird, son,” Danny said as he moved around to the kitchen side of the bar. “But he’s out there. And he’s involved.”

  Doug came in and both he and Farrah took up bar stools to sit across from Danny while he got the co
ffee perk set up.

  “Ever seen him before?” Doug didn’t whip out his notebook, but Farrah could tell he was in fact-finding mode already. He’d done this kind of questioning—even at home—since forever ago.

  “Nuh,” Danny said, scooping grounds from a Folgers can. “Can’t say’s I have. He’s wearing a pretty nice suit, tho. But it’s all grubby and torn. He looks...older than his years, I think. His face is all grey. But patchy-like. So’s his hair. He looks like he’s been out there a while. Might even have a touch of frostbite. I’ve seen that. In the war.”

  He trailed off. This was two mentions of his time in the war. Farrah knew how seriously he took this situation if he was bringing to mind his time in Europe.

  “Didn’t say anything?” Doug asked.

  “Too far away,” Danny said, eyeing his son-in-law. Before Doug could say anything further, Danny cut him off. “I know what you’re thinking. Bad ears, bad ticker, bad eyes. I was using the scope on my rifle. So I saw it clear as day. It wasn’t my imagination either. I never had one of those. Not like Kathy or her mom did.”

  He stopped what he was doing and put his hand heels on the counter to stare at Doug. “He was out there. And I saw him closer than that. Here. In the yard. Tonight.”

  Doug put one hand up. “I believe you, Dan,” he said. “I just want to understand the whole picture here. You can can see that.”

  “Course I can,” Danny huffed. “Just tired is all. Tired and pissed off and maybe a bit dumb by it all. Makes no sense.”

  Doug looked at Farrah, then back at Danny. “Sure doesn’t. Lots of things don’t and then, you dig enough, and an easy explanation usually covers it all.”