Staring at him with those dead, cold eyes.
“God save me,” he muttered, pushing away from the tree and moving on. The snow was deep here, coming almost up to his knees in places, and the long habit grew heavy where snow and ice stuck around its hem.
He struggled on through a dense forest, the stark tree canopy offering little shelter from the snowfall. A while later, as light began to fade and shadows emerged from their daytime hiding places, he found a place to rest.
It was barely an overhang, but the rocky lip of a shallow ravine offered some shelter from the weather, and the snow cover was lighter than elsewhere. He dragged a log into the sheltered area to sit on, then went about building a fire. He carried a flint and kindling in his bag, and was relieved to find them still dry. But to find other wood to burn, he had to root around on the sheer walls of the ravine, reaching up onto narrow ledges to rescue fallen leaves and twigs that had gathered there. Though damp, they would be his best hope for a constant flame.
He hoped the practicalities of survival would divert his mind from what had happened. But he found himself pausing every few moments and cocking his head, listening for the one thing he dreaded hearing. The breeze remained, but it carried only the gentle patter of snowflakes against the rocky wall above him, and the creaking of trees.
God does not speak. The words echoed back at him, however much he cast them aside, however hard he disbelieved them. She had been not only mocking but confident, a certainty in herself that belied her years. I’m not little anymore.
It took Winfrid a long time to light the fire, and by the time he had an ember and nursed it into flame, dusk had settled around him.
The growing fire made the night even darker. He welcomed the crackling of the flames, but for the first time in his life he feared what lay beyond. Darkness had rarely troubled him, because he had always been surrounded by safety at the monastery. Even fleeing the French and the devastation they had left in their wake, God had been with him to soothe any doubts about what might lie beyond his nightly fire.
Now he saw glimmering eyes among the trees, heard the creak of snow compacting beneath cautious feet, smelled the carrion rot of creatures stalking the shadows just beyond the reach of his fire’s light. He sat close and took comfort from the heat, but he could not sleep. Weary though he was, each time he closed his eyes, something jarred him awake. He hoped it was memory. He feared it was something else.
Winfrid tried to position himself as close to the steep slope as he could, but even then, his back felt exposed. He prayed. He stood and circled the fire, realized that the snow had ceased, looked up at the clearing sky and the stars and moon silvering the landscape.
When the breeze died out and moonlight revealed the deserted woodland around him, he began to settle. He ate the last chunk of stale, hard bread from his bag and drank the final dregs of ale, thankful that the bottle had not been smashed. Thirst and hunger attended, if not sated, he finally closed his eyes to sleep.
The screams shattered his dreams and scattered them across the snow. He stood quickly and staggered as his sleeping legs tingled back to life. Snatching up a burning log from the fire, he turned a full circle, wondering whether he had heard anything at all.
Maybe I just imagined—
Another scream, long and loud, sang in from some distance. It changed to a series of short, sharp cries that seemed to echo from the cleared sky.
“Not wolves, not foxes,” he whispered, comforting himself with his voice. “Nothing like that. That’s human pain.”
He shouldered his bag and started through the woods. Away from the screams, the agonies, and whatever might be causing them. He imagined Lina smiling in the shadows, her childlike shape hidden beneath the trees and as ancient and uncaring as the hills. Guilt pricked at him but he was only a man, a monk who had never raised a hand against another. How could he help?
There was movement ahead of him. Shadows shifting, flitting from one tree to another, and when he paused and stared they grew motionless. He held his breath, heart thumping in his ears. Edging sideways, downhill and away from the shadows, he came to an old trail heading through the trees and down into the valley. He followed, glancing over his shoulder and seeing movement behind and to his right.
Following him.
Winfrid tried not to panic, running at a controlled rate instead of a headlong dash that would wear him out, trip him up, injure him and leave him prone and vulnerable to whatever—
Another scream, and this was much closer, coming from just ahead of him past where several trees had fallen across the trail. He skidded to a halt and pressed in close to the splayed branches, hunkering down so that his habit and cloak gathered around his knees and thighs.
Ducking down lower, he saw beneath one tilted trunk to what lay beyond. His breath froze. His heart stuttered. His vision funneled so that all he knew, all he saw, was the grotesque, moonlit scene playing out not thirty steps away.
A man was impaled on a tree several feet above the ground. A broken branch protruded from his chest, bloody and glistening, and he was clasping it, trying to pull or push or twist himself away. He writhed and kicked against the tree, every movement bringing fresh pain, inspiring another scream.
Who put him up there? Winfrid thought, and then Eadric and his wife came into view, running to the tree, reaching up, and for an instant Winfrid believed he was going to see the man saved. It was the natural thought, the only good one, and it lasted less than a heartbeat.
Because he remembered the dead man he had seen hanging from a tree the afternoon before, and what had been done to him.
Eadric tugged at the scraps of clothing the man still wore, ripping them away. The man kicked feebly, and the woman caught his foot, pulled his leg straight, and hacked at it with an ax.
The man screeched.
Eadric sliced at his other leg with a knife, cutting away a chunk of flesh as big as a fist and dropping it into the snow. Blood spattered and sprayed, drawing sickly curves across the ground. Moonlight blackened the blood.
Winfrid wondered how they could both still look so thin, so weak, considering the meat they had been ingesting.
But perhaps the flesh of your own was poison.
“No!” Winfrid shouted, pushing his way through the branches and clambering over the trunks of the fallen trees.
The woman glanced back at him, surprised, but Eadric continued cutting. He worked only on the man’s thigh, and already the victim was bleeding out. He cried now rather than screamed, shaking uncontrollably so that Winfrid heard his ribs creak and break against the snapped branch.
“What are you doing?” Winfrid shouted. He ran toward the couple, and the woman turned on him with the ax raised.
“We’ve got to eat,” she said. “Got to stay strong so we can find Lina.”
“Lina is gone!” Winfrid said.
“No!” Eadric said, still slicing, dropping gobbets of meat to the ground and wiping blood from his face. “She’s still with us. We hear her singing.”
“That’s not your daughter you hear,” Winfrid said. Tears filled his eyes, then anger dried them away.
“Stay out of our business,” the woman said.
“Killing people to eat is a work of evil, so it is my business.”
“We don’t kill them. We find them.”
“Then who—?” Winfrid said, and then the singing began. At his back, perhaps as close as the trees he had just been hiding behind, the song floated across the small clearing and seemed to freeze the scene in place.
In Eadric’s and the woman’s eyes, delight and disbelief as they looked past Winfrid.
The dying man saw only horror.
Winfrid turned and saw Lina approaching him. Three others were with her, two women and a man, and Winfrid knew that he was in the presence of the unholy, the monstrous. They presented themselves as human—scraps of clothing, pale skin marked with dirt and scars, an air of insolence—but they were clearly something else. Their eye
s betrayed that.
“Lina,” her mother whispered.
Winfrid went to his knees and began to pray, and Lina stared at him. Her mouth was not quite in time with her song.
They passed him by.
“Lina, we knew, we waited, and you’ve come back to us,” Eadric said.
The singing ceased. Winfrid found his feet again and backed toward the fallen trees. Before him, Lina and the three adults. Beyond them, her desperate and insane parents, hands marred with the dying man’s blood, chunks of meat from his wretched body melted into the snow at their feet. The hope in their eyes was grotesque.
But it did not last.
Lina and one of the women took her mother down. The other man and woman pounced on Eadric. Neither of them screamed as the beasts bit hard into their throats, their necks, opening them up and gasping in the sprays of blood that arced into the starlit night.
Winfrid tried to back away farther, but his feet would not move, his legs would not carry him. He was as bound to witness this horror as the dying man stuck on the tree. For a second, the two of them locked eyes but then looked away again, the terror drawing their attention.
A new song began. It held nothing of Lina’s previous tune, which, though unsettling, had been light and musical, singing of uncomfortable mysteries best left untouched. This new song was made up of grunts and sighs. The sounds of gulping and swallowing. And then the sickly groans of ecstasy as Lina and the others bit, lapped, and raised their faces to the stars, their bodies squirming in intimate delight as blood flowed across their pale skins and into their heavily toothed mouths.
What monsters are these? Winfrid thought, but he could dwell only on what he saw. It horrified and fascinated. The victims on the ground were thrashing beneath the weight of their attackers, and he caught sight of the mother’s face only once. Eyes wide in disbelief. Throat wide and gushing. Her daughter dipped her head down again, seemingly lowering her face for a kiss but then pressing herself into her mother’s open neck.
She drank and groaned, and the woman died.
Winfrid still could not move. He had to watch, and he saw the moments when Eadric and the man on the tree perished also. That left him alone with them, and when Lina stood and turned, he thought she was coming for him.
But she paused, only looking his way.
“Because I’m a man of God!” he shouted. “Because He does have a voice, and you hear Him in me! That is not pride. That is faith.”
“Your blood is weak, your flesh bland,” Lina said as she turned her back on him. “Holy man.”
She and the others disappeared into the trees, shadows swallowed by the night, and he saw that the truth should have been obvious to him long before. That Eadric and his wife had been fed and nurtured for this moment, eating the human flesh presented to them to make their own that much more . . . delectable.
Winfrid remained there for a while, unable to move, slumped down against the fallen trees. A chill seeped into his bones, though his soul was already colder.
As dawn broke and color came into the world, most of it was red.
MRS. POPKIN
DAN CHAON AND LYNDA BARRY
I.
A new family moved in across the road and their name is Popkin. A mom, two big teenage boys, and a boy and girl about my age. I like to walk down the hill to their house because I enjoy the company of other children.
But my mother has somehow gotten the idea that the real reason I go is because of Mrs. Popkin. Whenever I go over to their house, my mother teases me about it. Mrs. Popkin, she says in an exaggerated sexy voice. Oh! Mrs. Pop! Kin! I don’t know when she decided this, but she thinks it’s hilarious.
“Todd’s on his way to see his girlfriend tonight,” she tells Old Lady Hotchkiss over the phone. I am sitting at the kitchen table reading Watership Down and she regards me for a moment. I act like I’m not even listening.
“The family that moved in across the road,” she says. “The woman and her seven dwarves.”
“Four,” I say under my breath.
“Ha!” my mother says to the phone. “It’s so cute; you should see how he looks at her.”
I am thirteen years old and small for my age and the word cute is not a word that I particularly like, but I don’t say anything. I just turn the page of my book.
My mother is currently in the process of trying to be happy. This is her new thing. She had been very low for a while, for a year or two, I think—so low that she didn’t think she wanted to live anymore. But we are going to put that behind us, she says.
Live life to the fullest! That is her new motto. She has ideas about JOY! SPONTANEITY! To somersault in the grass, for example. To take a moment to TRULY EXPERIENCE the world of nature around us, looking at birds, for example, and spreading some birdseed out in the yard where our late dog used to be tied up. RECONNECT TO YOUR CREATIVE SELF, which might include, for example, a tea cozy crocheted in the shape of a ball gown, with a plastic doll head at the top of it. The two of us made it together one afternoon.
This tea cozy is sitting on the counter by the sink and staring at us as my mother talks on the phone to Old Lady Hotchkiss and I read Watership Down.
We live outside of town off of Highway 30. On our side of the road, houses are about a mile apart, sometimes more. On the other side of the road are fields of wheat, alfalfa, and pastures where white-faced Hereford cattle wander around, grazing.
I never understood why people want to live out of town. There is no cable television, no one to play with, nothing to do. I remember reading a book about some children who lived in a city and they went down to the corner store to get a Popsicle. I loved that idea. The corner store.
When my mother tried to kill herself, there was nowhere to go for help. She had told me never, ever to call the cops. Under any circumstances. I didn’t know whether I should call Old Lady Hotchkiss or not.
I went outside, and the circle of the porch light extended only part of the way down the gravel driveway. Beyond that was pitch darkness, no streetlights, not even stars. There was nowhere to go.
Then the Popkins moved into the old farmhouse down by the creek. That house had been empty ever since a fire had killed a family there the year before, but it wasn’t uninhabitable. Most of it was still intact. Must have been cheap to buy it, my mother said.
Mrs. Popkin put the teenage boys to work immediately once they arrived, and soon they had planted flower beds and grass in front of the house, and they had painted the rooms where the smoke damage was, and patched up the hole in the roof where the fire had broken through and licked up toward the sky. The younger two—a boy named Bernard and a girl named Cecilia—built a rabbit hutch, and one day it was filled with rabbits, rabbits of all colors, and one white rabbit with red eyes. Magenta, like the color of the crayon.
When the farmhouse had burned, so had one of the trees, but the skeleton of the tree still stood, just along the bank of the creek. The Popkins put a rope on the tree and swung themselves into the water. I watched from the window of my house as the older boys dove off the swing, still wearing their work clothes and boots, and splashed like boulders into the creek. Cecilia and Bernard stood on the bank, observing.
II.
His name is Todd. The kid of the house up the hill. The standing-there kid. The staring kid. Staying on his side of the gravel road that runs between our two houses. Watching us watching him. We didn’t even know there was a kid in that house. The whole time we were moving in, there was no evidence of him. No bike, no swings, no toys lying in the yard. The only one I thought lived there was the lady who came out in her nightgown to water her hanging begonias. She had bad veins on her legs. Mom pointed that out.
Now there he is, staring at our house, dressed in school clothes like he’s going somewhere, but it turns out, no, he’s dressed in school clothes because those are the only kind of clothes he can stand to wear.
Mom tells me to get her cigarettes and when I come back, she is standing in my spot at
the front room window, pointing through the drapes at him. “I feel kind of sorry for that one.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I recognize the type.”
“What type?”
Then Bernard starts walking across the yard toward him fast with a rock in his hand.
Mom steps to the screen door and hollers his name.
“Bernard!”
“What?”
“Don’t you dare!”
“I wasn’t!”
“Go find out his name,” she says to me.
“Make Bernard.”
“Cecilia,” she says.
“Why do I have to do it?”
“I shouldn’t have to tell you why.”
When I come back to tell her his name is Todd, Mom repeats it. “Todd,” she laughs. “Todd, Todd, Todd. What was your mother thinking?”
Then she’s at the screen door calling his name, and the kid turns. “Hello! Todd! Come in and join us for some lemonade! Todd.”
I say, “We don’t have lemonade.”
Mom says, “Oh, he won’t care.”
It’s late in the afternoon and I’m walking with Todd and Bernard along the gravel road to a cutoff Todd wants us to see. It’s hot and Bernard keeps kicking gravel at my legs to show off. He runs way ahead and kicks up a huge dust cloud and dives in and out of it. “Gas attack! Poison gas! Gas mask! Ahhh! I don’t have a mask!” and I’m embarrassed by his babyishness. Todd isn’t babyish. He moves back from the dust. He’s the type that doesn’t like to get dirty.
The cutoff leads to a part of the creek that is deeper and when we get there, Todd says, “There is something you need to know,” and he starts telling us that the people who lived in our house before us died in a most terrible way.
“It was most terrible!” says Bernard, making fun. “I say, old boy! Most terrible!”
“You think I’m joking, but I’m not,” says Todd.
Seize the Night Page 25
