Did she understand that? That what happened to her—stolen away, throat slit, Billy and all the rest of them after her in the woods—that was my fault for not looking after her, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up again? For her or anyone else? Nick, that thing just barely masquerading as a dog, it had Naomi out in the lake up to her waist, a fast rip current surging toward them both to drag her under. I saw it, right here, last night, from this same spot on the dune ridge where I was standing now. Standing right here, I saw Nick splash around the shoreline and then paddle further and further out. A long, thin, frothing plume of lake water approached them both from the side, moving faster than any wave should ever move, while Nick stared hard and long at it like he was pulling it in by invisible reins. Naomi laughed and waded after Nick happy as anything because she was just a kid and didn’t understand, past the waist, up to the chest, as I tried to outrun the current and grab her before she was pulled in and drowned—
But then something happened and we weren’t in the water, we were back on shore without my knowing how we got there, and Naomi couldn’t have been out in the lake like I’d thought because everything but her sneakers was perfectly dry. Just like Nick’s fur, not even a stray droplet of water to betray him. But I saw him do it. Just like I saw him knock Amy to the ground and sink his teeth into her cheek, ripping and tearing down to the bone, Lucy’s screams just making him bite deeper—but then there wasn’t any blood, and Nick was somehow gone, and everyone thought I’d gone crazy with hating him. I saw it! I saw him do it! Amy had been the only person alive who could see and hear Nick, once, before we ever even met, and that didn’t make what she saw of him untrue—but now she thought I was crazy too, she thought I was just making up stories too. Why would I do that? Why couldn’t anyone trust my own eyes... not even me?
I keep seeing things everyone else tells me didn’t happen, and for a few minutes when I woke up this morning, I couldn’t see anything at all. I stared into the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust and thinking it must still be the middle of the night, and then I realized that this was something else entirely. Nighttime had shapes, nebulous and disorienting but still visible in the shadows, and faint moonlight trickling through our cabin window that had no curtains. This, though, this was a formless colorless blank, an absence, not just a lack of light and vision but the impossibility of such things ever even existing. As if I had gone to sleep normal, and somehow woken up not merely blind, but with no eyes at all.
My hands flew to my face in a panic, seeking to assure myself my eyes were still in their sockets, and I blinked and blinked frantically but nothing happened, nothing was there at all, and I opened my mouth to shout for help—who could have helped me?—and then, all of a sudden, the world was there again. The light was deep gray and pale pink against the cabin wall, the first full light of sunrise. Lucy was curled into a ball next to me, an arm flung over her face, still fast asleep; Amy was already up and gone. Nick was there too, a coarse hot weight against my shoulder, gazing straight at me. His eyes just inches from mine, unblinking and expressionless. Blank. His teeth bared, ready to bite, ready to—
Except that he can’t have been there, next to me, because even as I stared back at him I heard him outside the cabin, heard his barking and Amy’s voice shushing him through the open window. I turned to the window, sitting upright looking for him and Amy outside, and when I turned back again there was no Nick beside me. Gone. Which had been the real him? Both of them? Did I dream him, dream the void and the blankness that preceded him, and only think I’d woken up?
I already have voids and absences, huge blank spots in my brain, thanks to what they did to me all those years in the lab over and over again. Memory holes, ridiculous trivial shit sometimes like what I used to eat for breakfast or how to get to places I’d already been dozens of times, but bigger ones too, whole months and years just wiped out. Gone. Maybe all this was another side effect, another way for my brain to misfire. I hoped to God not. Amnesia was embarrassing, but hallucinations—if that’s what they were—were humiliating. Even Amy, the way she looked at me. I’d thought she would understand. Maybe she did, inside, but didn’t want to. I knew that feeling.
I didn’t imagine anything. I knew I’d seen it. I had. And that I’d... not seen, at all, this morning.
It was stupid to come down here, sit around sulking on the sand like a kid Naomi’s age when there were questions needing an answer. I had to find that so-called dog, if he hadn’t already fled somewhere no human being—even one like us—could follow. I didn’t want to hurt him, I didn’t have fighting anywhere on my mind. I just needed to see him again, to try and work out what exactly I was seeing when I looked at him, and why. Maybe it wasn’t even him at all, really. Maybe it was this beach itself, where we were, that was causing it.
I didn’t ever want to hurt him. I swear. It’s the truth.
I climbed back up the ridge and headed for the trees, veering far away from the cabins because I wasn’t up to talking to anyone just then. Part of me was afraid they might laugh. The woods were still thick and green and if the ravages of... something else had set in, like we’d seen on the road, it wasn’t spreading fast. I set off to the left, my feet slippery on slick mats of fallen leaves turning to muck, and as I circled around a huge old oak’s tree trunk, nearly ran straight into Lisa’s sister coming the other way. She jumped backward, glaring at me, all thin sharp angles like some stick figure drawing and her narrow face gone narrower with suspicion.
“So what the hell are you wandering around for?” she demanded. “If you changed your mind about breakfast, you’re a little late.”
I couldn’t stand their voices, the exes, hard and super-staccato like high heels on a corrugated metal floor. Amy’s voice was full human, soft and flowing like water, there wasn’t anything harsh about it to my ears even when she was mad as hell. “I’m walking around,” I said. “Is that allowed? I thought you were happy if we all just stayed out of your way.”
She stood there with her arms folded, sizing me up and down. Her hair fell over her face, auburn hair in such long snarled clumps it looked like failed dreadlocks. “That dog,” she said. “Does he talk to your little girlfriend, or something?”
I blinked. He made her nervous, too? I’d thought Nick was the only one of us she could stand. Lisa had warned us she always picked animals over people. “I doubt it,” I said. “Why don’t you ask her yourself, if you really want to be sure? Is it true what Lisa told us, that you can see things other people don’t?”
Jessie’s eyes actually went wide in surprise. Then she shrugged. “She said that? Well, anybody can see just about anything, when they’re delirious sick. Don’t listen to her.”
Delirious sick. Maybe that was my problem—another fever, another plague. I hoped it would happen fast, if that’s what it was, not make me some demented hallucinating thing before it finally killed me. Without bothering with goodbyes I turned away, heading past the big oak and deeper into the trees, and she surprised me again by following me, as if she were on the same goose-hunt I was but also didn’t want to talk about it. We walked along in silence, side by side.
“Word of advice,” she said, after a few moments. “Things you think you see, and nobody else does, don’t bother trying to convince them they’re there. It never works.” She laughed, an explosive burst that sounded like a human doubled over coughing. “No matter what, even if it seems like they’re listening to you, it just never fucking works. They just go along with it so they don’t hurt your feelings or start a fight or some other equally shit-useless reason, and it just makes you feel crazier than you already worry you are.”
I thought that over. Then I plucked a stick from the underbrush, fringed all down its length with tiny pale green leaves that would never mature, and poked at the leaf clumps below our feet. “You don’t like us humans,” I said. If that was what I still had a right to call myself, after what the lab did. Whatever I was, though, at least I wasn’t like her. “So
why don’t you just chase Tina and the others away from that settlement they were talking about? Another favor to Lisa, like us?”
“They only got here after she left.” She sounded irritable, like I’d just mentioned something any polite person would ignore, but then, she hadn’t stopped sounding irritable since we arrived. “They just showed up here one day and kept coming. I can’t stop them from setting up down the road if they want to—I’m not a fucking feudal duchess. The rest of them at least know to leave us alone. Tina, though, she always thinks she can make another fucking convert.” She snorted. “And I mean, a convert that actually used to be dead for real? In that whackjob religion of hers? She’d shit herself with happiness.”
She shook her head suddenly, thrust hands in her pockets as she pushed ahead of me through the cottonwoods. “Anyway. They’re there, we’re here. Not worth the trouble of getting rid of them.” Her voice dropped, muttering almost, like she was talking to herself. “Not much of anything’s worth the trouble lately, if you ask me—”
The sky went dark. The sun was gone.
We both stood there blinking into the sudden darkness, actual darkness and not a blank void because I could still make out the shape of her, the surrounding trees and bushes and rocks. And then the shapes, themselves, began to dissolve. The shadows were gone, my own hand in front of my face gone, everything—
And then as fast as it had vanished, the light was back, and the woods were back, and only a small, swift shadow was passing overhead, nowhere near big enough to block out the sun. We both looked up, watching the dark spot of a bird—a hawk of some sort, big-beaked and wide-winged—maneuver over the trees and out of sight, and then we stood there staring at each other, waiting for something to happen. For something horrible to happen. The sun kept on shining, and the world kept its shape.
“We’re out here looking for the same thing,” Jessie said. “You and me. Aren’t we?”
“Are we?” I asked. I knew we were, somehow, I’d known it since she started following me. Somehow. “How do you know that?”
She pondered the question, hands in her pockets. “I don’t have a fucking clue.”
She took off, slip-sliding unevenly on the muddy leaves and sandy dirt, her head hanging down so her limp clumpy hair fluttered like torn strips of cloth as she threaded through the cottonwoods. Even at a laggard pace she was faster than me, fast enough I had to almost jog to keep up. Who the hell put her in charge of this snipe hunt, anyway? But exes were all alike, always grabbing charge of everything and everyone like they did you a favor—even Lisa, dragging us out here for no good reason I could yet figure out, though Amy wouldn’t hear a word said against her.
But it happened to both of us, me and Jessie, that split second just like this morning when light and vision and everything else disappeared; this time it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just my head, my memory, my craziness inventing it all. So I must not have just imagined Nick being beside me and not beside me, this morning, two places at once. Drowning Naomi, but not. Maiming Amy, but not.
A hallucination? Or a warning?
We had to find him.
A small, dark thing shot ahead of us, just yards from where we stood, zigzagging over the underbrush in a blur of feverish speed. Jessie let out a surprised sound, ran toward it—but as soon as we saw it, it’d vanished, lost among the trees. I couldn’t even tell if it was dog-shaped or deer-shaped or what it was, it was going far too fast. Jessie banged a fist against a tree trunk in frustration, barely seeming to notice when the gnarled gray flutes of bark made her knuckles split and bleed.
“Nick!” she shouted, in the direction the thing had gone. “Here, boy! Nick!”
No answer. We kept walking. And walking.
“He’s got to be nearby,” I said. “He wouldn’t just leave Amy.”
“Keeps that close an eye on her, does he?” asked Jessie.
Answering that felt like disloyalty to Amy, like betraying a secret. So I didn’t say anything. Even though the question made my stomach twist.
“This way,” she said, and barreled over a hillock of interlaced tree roots and slippery rotten leaves without waiting for me. “Nick? Nick!” Nothing. “For fuck’s sake, why doesn’t your damned girlfriend come and help us find him, if he won’t listen to—Nick!”
I cupped my hands over my mouth. “Nick!” Nothing. Then I had an idea—a stupid idea, but I didn’t care. “Nick! Amy wants you! Amy’s looking for you!”
Nothing.
And then, like there’d been a test, and I’d finally passed it, the faint but not faraway sound of barking. We took off toward it, over a narrow dried-up ditch that might’ve once been a creek, past thick handfuls of mayapple and violets, into a tiny clearing bordered by butternut trees where Nick crouched down, his teeth bared and his eyes gone blank. Jessie crouched down beside him and made wordless sounds, soothing apologetic noises like we’d scared him, but he kept on barking like he couldn’t even hear her, a guttural basso drowning out her, and the birds, and everything else—
And the woods and the world were gone again, vanished, blankness like the blank of Nick’s eyes surrounding me and swallowing me alive. And nothing was in front of me and nothing behind me except a sharp hot whiteness, a dog’s teeth fully bared and his mouth wide open to devour me where I stood, and through the void I saw him. Surging up through the blankness, leaping for me, for my throat.
And I raised up my arms, to stop him—
A high, outraged yelping and howling, the unmistakable noise of an animal in pain. I heard it as I came back to myself, as I felt someone with a grip that could break bones twisting my arms behind me—animal howling, and pounding footsteps. I opened my eyes that I’d squeezed shut against the nothingness, a mere split second of nothingness, and saw Amy running toward us, Lucy panting to keep up; as they reached the clearing they almost fell over each other, they’d skidded to a halt so fast. And Nick. Nick lay cringing at my feet with his ears flat back and rheumy eyes wide with fear, any dog anywhere trapped and afraid. A bloody streak ran along the length of his side. More blood on the top of his head, where the fur, and the skin, were split open.
I stood there over him, my breath uneven and loud like I’d worn myself out in just that split second, and as Jessie let me go I realized I was holding something, gripping it hard enough to break in my hand. A small, heavy piece of branch, the kind lying all over the woods, the bark on its business end smeared with blood. My fingers faltered and it dropped from my hand back to the ground.
Lucy gasped. A hot thick feeling of disbelief surged over me like nausea and I opened my mouth to say something, to try to explain, but there was nothing I could say. Nothing. Amy took a step toward me, another, her whole face pleading with me to explain she hadn’t really seen this, it was all a mistake.
“What did you do?” she asked, very softly.
I kept trying to talk, to explain what I’d seen and how I hadn’t even known what I’d done, no memory of striking him or even picking up the branch at all—but words wouldn’t come, I’d forgotten how to talk. Nick cringed and whined and Jessie crouched beside him once again, gently touching the parts of him I hadn’t beaten.
“He went crazy,” she said. “Just grabbed a branch and went at him, I couldn’t stop him before—”
“What the hell did you do?” Amy repeated.
I shook my head. I didn’t do this, I didn’t, but I did, but he’d come after me, even if yet again nobody else had seen it he’d come after me. Hadn’t he? “I—”
Amy marched up to me and shoved me so hard I stumbled and nearly fell; her hand rose to slap, to punch until she left bruises, but her fingers shook and she dropped her arm again. “Did you enjoy that? Were you just waiting your chance to do that while my back was turned?” She was yelling, yelling herself hoarse, and I had to explain what had happened, that all this was some sort of mistake, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t. “How could you do that to him? To get him to stop barking?”
I w
as going from hot-sick to cold-sick, my teeth actually chattering, and my head shook like I was some wind-up toy gone berserk. “Amy, I didn’t know I did it, you have to—everything just went blank, Jessie saw it happen too not even half an hour ago, then it happened again and I don’t—I didn’t—”
But Jessie’s voice sliced and cut right through mine. “Nothing went blank—some clouds passed overhead, that was all, nothing else happened. Okay? Nothing. Until you went crazy and beat a fucking dog.” She kept stroking Nick, who’d grown calm and quiet; he’d already stopped bleeding, he wasn’t as badly hurt as he’d looked, but I knew that didn’t matter. That in the face of this, the little details didn’t matter at all. “You proud of yourself? You a big strong man, now that you’ve found something a third your size to fuck with?” Her mouth was twisted on itself, each thick heavy word spat out in quiet rage. “You another fine upstanding human fucking being? One of the really good ones?”
I was growing hot again, from her words and her lies. Pretending nothing happened before this, that we hadn’t talked at all, that all we saw getting here were some clouds. “There is no way,” I said, not caring that Amy and Lucy were listening, “that I’m taking morality lectures from your kind. No way.”
“My kind.” Jessie laughed, a sound like a handful of gravel hurled at a closed window. “My kind, that stayed in the woods and minded its own damned business until your kind went out and fucked us up and fucked themselves into oblivion—”
“Is this what Natalie meant?” Amy was nose to nose with me, trembling with rage, Lucy’s hands on our arms trying to calm us both, cool little islands lost in a boiling sea. “When she said you’d enjoy trying to get her to talk? Is this what she—”
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