Beastkeeper

by Cat Hellisen

  He smelled odd, musty and sour, like a sick dog caught in the rain.

  But she’d been able to buy bread and apricot jam and peanut butter and instant noodles, so at least she didn’t have to starve.

  2

  AN IMPROBABLE BOY

  AFTER A WHILE Sarah gave up hoping, and when she walked home along the grassy pathways, she held on to her disappointment instead. It was all she had. She would recite a new mantra to herself, and let it fill her head. That way she could feel like she was Dealing With It, and other things that grown-ups did.

  After all, there is nothing quite like losing a parent to knock the childishness out of a person’s spirit.

  The freak icy snap had passed, and the weather had gone back to being the usual cold and sunny days interspersed with mushy drizzle. Sarah was on her way home from school, and the late-afternoon sun slanted thinly down through a clean blue sky tufted with the faintest wisps of faraway clouds. Her bag was slung over one shoulder. It was so overladen with books that the thin strap dug right through her school blazer and made her shoulder ache. It pulled her whole body off center. As she walked, she kicked at the pathway, and in her head the disappointment mantra was on a loop: Dad-and-I-are-all-alone-kick-Dad-and-I-are-all-alone-scuff.

  It was better to repeat this over and over in her head until it stopped making sense than to give her mind space to start hoping again.

  Every now and again her thoughts would slip from her little singsong, and Sarah would catch herself just about to think that maybe when she got home, her mother would have flown back and would greet her at the door, would allow herself to smile, hug Sarah so hard that her ribs would break—

  You are being ridiculous, Sarah thought. You are being ridiculous.

  She was so busy repeating this to herself in the hope that she’d eventually believe it, that at first she didn’t notice the boy following her.

  If the house that Sarah and her father lived in now was as empty of magic as a broken wand, it still had one tiny redeeming feature. Between the school and her house lay a very small parcel of untouched land. It had a FOR SALE sign older than Sarah, and this sign leaned dejectedly on one overgrown corner. The words were faded away so that only close up could Sarah make out the faint shadows of what was written. The edges of the board were chewed ragged by rain and time.

  Once, she supposed, the land had been cleared and ready for someone to grow a house from its broken stones, but it had been left untended for so long that it had become something that was not quite a forest.

  It was a thick tangle of fast-growing shrubs, and flowering weeds, and abandoned junk. The route through the Not-a-Forest was the long way to her house, but Sarah preferred to walk the extra distance on the narrow track that wound between the wiry bushes than to keep to the strict pattern of the roads.

  Her parents had told her she must never walk that way, as people could be hiding in the bushes just looking for a girl like her to steal, and the warning had made her all the more determined to take that path.

  Especially now.

  It wasn’t that she wanted anyone to steal her; it was more that she had long ago discovered a delicious pleasure in not listening to what adults say.

  In all the times she’d taken the path, she’d never seen anyone else, anyway, which just went to show. She always saw signs that other people had been there—new litter, carvings in the bushes that had grown big enough to look almost like stunted trees, the stamped-out coals of cooking fires—but always it seemed to Sarah that the moment she set foot on the path, the Not-a-Forest became hers and everyone else fled.

  That day, though, someone was in her realm and moving, silent, through the shrubs and weeds and rusted junk. Sarah paused to lower her bag to the ground so she could shake out her aching shoulder. It was only because of this that she stopped her little mantra and began to notice the world around her properly. Everything felt subtly wrong. It was as if a very neat thief had ransacked her forest and left only the smallest clues behind. The shadows had been moved an inch out of place, the bushes put back in not quite the right positions.

  Sarah had a skin-prickling feeling that someone was watching her. She swung around in the middle of the path, looking in every direction, but saw no one.

  “Who’s there?” The birds and the rustling lizards went about their business, and above, the sky stayed cold and blue. Sarah swallowed. “Hello?” she tried again. She was starting to feel foolish now. “And maybe it’s nothing,” she said to herself as she bent to pick up her overstuffed bag.

  “Maybe it’s a murderer,” said a stripling boy. He stepped out from behind a scraggly gathering of young eucalyptuses and pushed his russet-brown hair back from his forehead. “Or a hunter.”

  He was older than she was—he had that skinny, half-starved look that some boys got when they grew too fast for their meals.

  A shiver went down Sarah’s back, and she tightened her grip on her bag. She could run. She was fast. But perhaps not fast enough to outrun a lanky teenage boy. She kept her voice loud and firm even though at first the words felt shivery in her mouth. “Or maybe it’s just some stupid high school kid,” she said. Sarah wasn’t far from high school herself, but she didn’t quite trust the ones who had Moved On. The battle lines were firmly drawn, as far as she was concerned.

  The boy frowned. “I don’t go to school,” he said. “I’m Alan. Who are you, then?”

  Sarah had been warned never to speak to strangers, and this happened to be one of the adult rules that had managed to get itself stuck in her brain. Her parents hadn’t explained just how strange a stranger had to be to make him really a stranger, but she was quite sure that this boy qualified. Names meant nothing.

  He was dressed in thick corduroy trousers the color of bark and fallen leaves, the knees of which were black with dirt. His sweater was a gloomy green, like the middle of a pine forest, and he wore no shirt under it. In the thin and sandy soil, his bare feet were dirty as a child’s, and around his neck he wore a necklace strung with dull ivory shapes. Teeth. Teeth of all kinds, all shapes. “Beast got your tongue?” he said.

  “It’s ‘cat.’”

  The boy crouched down in the long, pooling shadows of the young eucalyptus trees and clicked his tongue. He appeared to be looking at markings in the earth. “What is?”

  “The saying. It’s ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’” Sarah eyed him. He was very definitely off, but at the same time he exuded a feeling of contentment. It crept up around Sarah, as soothing as her mother’s whispers in the dark. She shrugged her shoulders like she was trying to shake off a too-heavy blanket. The feeling didn’t go; it just pressed down, got even heavier, thicker. An eiderdown of warm laziness.

  “Well, has it?” he said, and glanced up at her, one eyebrow raised.

  Sarah leaned forward, just a little, as if to get a better view of whatever it was he found so fascinating on the ground. She’d listened to the girls in her class giggling over pictures they’d cut from magazines and stuck into their school notebooks, but she’d never understood why they got so excited over the actors and musicians whose faces covered the pages where their homework should be. She thought she might be a little closer to some kind of understanding now. It felt ridiculous. “Has what?”

  “The cat. Got your tongue.” The boy sighed. “We’re talking in circles. What are you doing here, cat-girl?”

  “I’m walking home.” Sarah straightened. “And I could ask you the same thing.”

  Alan blinked. He had heavy eyelids; they made him look sly and sulky but—and here was the stupid part, Sarah thought—in a good way. “Could you really? Go on, then.”

  For a moment, she really wanted to ask him just that, why he was in her Not-a-Forest, what he was doing there in a place that was hers. “You’re impossible.”

  That made him laugh. It was just the smallest little slip of good humor, and he caught it quickly. “Hardly. I’m just improbable.” He stood again and looked to the sky. “And los
t. This isn’t the right part of the forest at all.”

  “It’s not even a forest.”

  “Just so.” He frowned. “I could have sworn her trail led here. Still.” He tapped two fingers to his forehead. “It-was-a-pleasure-to-make-your-acquaintance.” Then he smiled, and his face changed, the sly look brushed away with the glint of his teeth. He looked awkward, out of place.

  “Um, same. I think.” But Sarah said the last to an empty space. Alan had disappeared.

  Sarah stared at the stand of eucalyptus saplings. After a moment, she reached out to push the branches aside, wanting to catch a glimpse of wherever he’d gone to hide himself. There was nothing—no one. He’d simply vanished.

  The birds began calling to each other, high and loud, and a fat bumblebee the size of her thumb droned past.

  “It’s Sarah,” she said to the trees. “My name is Sarah.” What a strange boy. She wondered briefly whom he could have been following. Then she turned and hurried the rest of the way home, and didn’t even care too much when she found the house empty as expected.

  3

  THE NOT-A-FOREST

  FOR WEEKS AFTER that encounter, Sarah stayed on the lookout for Alan in her Not-a-Forest. Although she saw all the usual signs of people there, she didn’t spot the russet-haired boy again. Every weekday she cut through the tangle of undergrowth and saplings, hoping for a glimpse of his muddy green clothes or a flash of tanned skin, but as the month dragged on, she began to think that she’d never catch sight of him again.

  That perhaps, after all, he’d merely been some kind of waking dream.

  On weekends she’d escape to the wilderness with her stack of library books. Even though Saturdays brought out the strangers and the rambling children and left the Not-a-Forest feeling more like a little scrap of land where people dumped their rubbish and less like something magical, she’d still make her way to the clump of trees where they’d met, settle herself down on an old camping blanket she’d taken out of storage, and read her books. She’d pack herself lunch, and always make an extra sandwich just in case.

  The end of every long afternoon brought with it the same strange disappointment, doubled by the heavy realization that once again she was going to return to a house that stood empty, waiting for her with its unwashed sheets and its sink full of dirty crockery. Once again, it hadn’t even been worth it. Sarah tried to make herself not think about the odd boy. The odd vanishing boy.

  * * *

  You’re as pathetic as them, Sarah told herself, thinking of her giggling classmates, the ones who were sneaking off to flea-market jewelry stands so they could get their ears pierced. And even worse, you’re going insane. You had an imaginary conversation with an imaginary person. Like you’re five.

  It was the end of another boring school day, and she’d promised herself that this time she wouldn’t go wandering off to the abandoned plot of land. Sarah let herself into the house with the key that her father had tied onto a length of string and slipped around her neck so that it wouldn’t get lost, cleared a cleanish place on the kitchen counter, and made herself something to eat.

  Every afternoon she had a sandwich, which always had the same thing on it—peanut butter—because her father still hadn’t mastered the concept of grocery shopping. After that she would rush through whatever homework she had and make an attempt to clean some of the large collection of gunked-up plates and cups. That afternoon was no exception.

  “Where do you even come from?” she accused the dishes as she scrubbed them. “It’s not like we use this many plates.” Her father was at least eating again, and had taken to preparing supper almost every night, but so far he seemed to be stuck on eggs and fries, alternating with takeout.

  Sarah gathered a scattered collection of greasy boxes and shoved them into the overflowing trash.

  It would be hours before her father came home from work, so she changed out of her school uniform and did a load of laundry. After all, she needed to do something to stop herself from just grabbing a library book and heading out to the Not-a-Forest. Or worse, sitting at the window and watching and waiting and hoping.

  Sarah curled up on one of the pin-striped couches in the front room, reading over her class notes and half listening to the whir of the machine. It was only when she got up to make herself a cup of tea that she realized things had gone badly wrong. She swung her feet down, and they landed in soggy carpet with a splash.

  She froze. Cold water soaked into her socks. With a small “oh no,” she looked down and stared at her feet. The white socks were now gray. The machine had flooded, and sudsy dirty water was slipping down the passage, drenching the carpets. “Oh. No.”

  Sarah lurched off the couch, abandoning it and her notes, and slipped to the kitchen to turn off the water and the washing machine. It was too late, however. The kitchen was a shallow lake.

  This was what being productive and helpful led to, Sarah thought as she splashed her way down the passage to fetch an armload of towels from the linen closet. She had to deplete the entire store, even the ones that were packed right at the back with little ornate soaps between them for freshness, before the worst of the flood was soaked up. The rest of the water she swept out the kitchen door.

  “This is an epic disaster.” Talking aloud was keeping Sarah from crying, but it wasn’t doing a very good job. It seemed to her that there was no way to fix anything before her father came home. It wasn’t like she could somehow vacuum all the water out of the sodden carpet. She toed the wettest part of the carpet, and the wool squelched at her.

  It might, she thought, be worthwhile to take a very long walk, one that led her far away from the remaining mess. When she came back—no, if she came back—she would discover that none of it had actually happened, and the house wasn’t a swamp of dirty water. She sighed. As if. Still, she thought it might be nice to pretend that could actually happen. Or perhaps that her dad would come home and clean the mess himself, after being racked with guilt over how Sarah was doing all the housework and he was doing nothing at all.

  Now we’re talking. Sarah hopped over the worst of the wet patches and the sudden new landscape of towel hills and woolly swamps, and went to grab dry socks and sneakers. A small pang of guilt squeezed at her as she locked the house behind her, but mostly she felt vast relief. And more than a smidgen of righteous fury—after all, why was this all falling to her? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that her mother had left them, it wasn’t fair that her father was falling apart, and it wasn’t fair that the only person she wanted to talk to didn’t even exist.

  Or probably didn’t.

  A few weeks ago Sarah had come up with the idea of leaving Alan a message. She hadn’t really known what to write, and in the end had settled on a short note that read What are you hunting? and tucked the folded scrap of exam paper into a forked branch. It had stayed lodged there for several days, until it had finally disappeared. Sarah supposed that the wind had ripped it away, sent it tumbling over the shrubs and bushes.

  If he was real, if he’d seen the note, then why had he never responded? Sarah cut through the overgrown little back alleyway that led out to the Not-a-Forest. The farther she got from the house, the more annoyed she felt. She refused to let herself worry about what was going to happen.

  Let Dad clean up the house for a change. Let him shave, let him do the groceries, wash the dishes, and act like a human being, instead of this useless waste he’s become. Sarah dashed a few hard, angry tears from her eyes and felt her throat close up tight from fury. It’s not fair.

  The season was hinting at change. Bracken was growing up around the thin, dark stems of the trees, and bare branches were just beginning to shimmer greenly. Even the sun seemed closer. Sarah squinted at the black trees. It was warm out here—the sun had baked the ground, had curled the edges of the arum lilies’ broad leafy hearts.

  Sarah went back to the section of pathway near the eucalyptus saplings and sat down in a patch of shade. She swallowed until the t
ight feeling in her chest began to soften and her shoulders dropped. A hazy contentment drifted over her as she leaned back against the biggest of the trees and watched the wind blow the new leaves of the tangled weeds with their pale purple trumpets. When she heard the softest crackle of dried leaves behind her, Sarah spun around, already in a crouch, ready to push herself up and away into a run.

  A sun-browned face stared down at her, and Sarah wasn’t sure whether to greet him like a lost friend or be angry at him for disappearing in the first place.

  “Ah, the cat-girl.” Alan squatted down so that his nose was level with hers, eyes wide. “Are you leaving me notes in the bushes?”

  “Maybe.” Sarah relaxed, but not completely. It felt like someone had just emptied a bowl full of goldfish straight into her stomach. They fluttered inside her, making her feel eager and ill at the same time.

  “Why would you do that?”

  She felt her face go red. “I was curious.”

  “And you know what happens to curious cats,” said Alan. He drew his finger slowly across his throat and made an exaggerated ghhh noise.

  “My dad says satisfaction brought it back,” Sarah countered. She wasn’t scared. Despite the kinda-sorta-almost death threat. It was hard to be scared around Alan. Whatever he said about being a hunter, he reminded her more of some cautious deer, with too-knobby legs and an awkward curiosity.

  “Now, see, that’s a lie. Dead beasts stay dead. There’s no witchery that brings them back. Ailing beasts, on the other hand…” Alan half-shrugged. “As to your question, I’m hunting a bird, a little wren.” He held his thumb and forefinger a few inches apart. “About so big.”