“What, this?” Uly sniffed at it like it was no big deal. “It’s always been like this.”
“Huh.” She stared at his paw with a sadness in her eyes, as if it reminded her of something. But then she shook the thought away. “Welp, see ya!”
Mia gave her hips another wiggle and then darted off between the trees. Uly sat and waited. He’d grown very good at it. He listened to the insects and the birds and the wind in the leaves, trying to ignore his grumbling stomach.
He’d thought maybe Mia had abandoned him forever when he heard a splash and a miserable croak, and then she came trotting back, fur dripping, a dead creature in her jaws. Uly had never seen anything like it before. It wasn’t quite a frog, and it wasn’t quite a lizard, and it had gills like a fish.
Mia laid the creature on the ground. “I’ve never hunted something by myself before!”
She pinned the creature’s tail between her paws and ripped it in half, plopping the hind parts in front of him.
“What … is it?” he said, trying not to wrinkle his muzzle.
“I don’t know! It has gills, but it walks around! Ha ha.” She snorted. “The forest is squipping crazy.”
Uly’s eyes went wide. A word like that would get his sisters’ lips bitten. But Mia hadn’t even batted an eyelash.
His stomach gurgled again. He bit into the creature, and a gush of slime squirted down his throat. At first, he fought not to gag, but then his teeth ripped through the flesh, and hunger roared up inside him. After that, he couldn’t devour the legs quickly enough.
“This tastes amazing!” Mia said, gulping down an eyeball. “I’ve been eating hot mud for weeks!”
“Hot … mud?” Uly said.
“Uh-huh!”
The two feasted in slobbery silence. Uly could feel his stomach stretching, his skin pushing away from his ribs. He had to stop himself from whimpering it felt so good to eat.
“Y’know,” Mia said, licking slime from her beard, “just ’cause you’re not a mouser doesn’t mean you can’t still catch stuff. You could use the nap-and-capture technique.”
Uly stopped eating. “You can catch things by taking naps?”
“Yep! You just pretend you’re dead. Like this.” Mia flopped over on her side, letting her tongue hang out. “And when something delicious comes sniffing”—she leapt up, chomping her teeth and making Uly wince—“you kill it! Miss Vix told me about that trick.”
Uly nodded. He might be able to actually try that. So long as he didn’t start hiccupping.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
When the gill creature was nothing but bones, Mia got up, shook the slime from her beard, and then came at him, teeth bared.
“Wh-what are you doing?” he asked, pressing his muzzle protectively into his throat.
“I was going to clean you,” Mia said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “We just ate.”
“Oh,” Uly said.
No one had ever wanted to clean him before. His mom did it only because his sisters refused. And she hadn’t cleaned him since Ava died.
He swallowed. “Okay.”
Mia gave his muzzle a lick. His forepaw trembled. A snarl rose in his throat. But as she started to clean his ears, he leaned into it. Her tongue was warm and scratchy, and sent shivers to the end of his tail. He widened his eyes again, trying to stop the tears.
Once Mia had finished cleaning, she said, “Does your friend need cleaning too?”
Uly shook himself out of his reverie. “Who?”
“Your”—Mia nodded toward the canopy—“friend?”
“Oh. Um … not right now. I cleaned him earlier.”
She gave him a knowing smirk. Then she closed her eyes and jutted her muzzle forward.
Uly hesitated. “You want me to…”
Her ear twitched. “If you don’t mind.”
Anytime he’d tried to clean his sisters, they had bounded away, screaming, “Yuck! Ewwly breath!”
He gave Mia’s ear a small lick. Then another. And another. Her fur tasted of smoke at first. Then something bland. But once he’d cleaned that away, she tasted as sweet and sour as unripe apples. Mia whimpered just like he had. As if she, too, hadn’t been cleaned in a long time.
When he finished, Mia shook her ears dry.
“Welp,” she said in a goodbye sort of way.
“Yeah,” Uly said, heart skipping a beat. “Welp.”
“I should get going,” she said. “My mom’s waiting for me on the other side of these trees. And I don’t want her worrying about me.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Me too. Er, I have to go find my friend … the one hiding in the trees. So we can go to where we’re going, which is pretty close to here.”
“Okay, then,” she said.
“Okay.”
His heart sank. Mia had nipped at him and jumped over him and knocked him over. But she had fed and cleaned him too. Uly knew that the moment she walked away it would feel like his guts were yanked out, leaving him as empty as that dangling rabbit skin.
He pointed his newly cleaned whiskers toward where he thought his mom might be. And he knew that he was wrong.
“Have fun with your friend!” Mia said.
“I—I will,” Uly said. “Have fun with your mom.”
She walked off slowly. “See ya!”
“See ya,” he called after her.
“Bye!”
“Yeah, bye.”
And Mia set off in one direction while Uly set off in the same direction, and they did not part ways again … for a time.
“THAT ONE WASN’T scary at all!” the third kit said. “Like, really truly!”
“Yeah,” said the alpha. “That was almost … heartwarming.”
“I liked it,” the beta said.
“You would,” the third one said.
The sky above the Antler Wood was greeny-white now.
The little one was relieved to hear a nice part of the story for once. But she could sense they were far from the end. The sounds of the Antler Wood still made her skin jumpy. Each tumbling leaf swiveled her ears. Every shadow looked like a dangling fox skin.
“Mia and Uly’s meeting was a welcome respite from what they’d been through,” the storyteller said. “But it’s a dangerous thing to start caring for someone else. Now they each had two foxes to look after instead of one. And they were about to stumble upon a place that was neither field nor forest. Neither meadow nor wood. They were going to see something few foxes had seen before. And those who had seen it had not escaped with their lives.”
If the little one had felt a touch of safety, that strangled it.
THE SLITHER OUT OF DARKNESS
ONE
ULY FOLLOWED MIA’S unripe-apple scent through the forest as she talked faster than a tree full of chickadees.
“So then my mom asked if Miss Vix bit me, and I said no, and then she asked if I was sure and made me drink water for some reason, and when I did, she told me I was the only kit who passed the stinky-yellow test. I think if Miss Vix had bitten my tail, then I would’ve failed, but because she only got a few hairs off the end, I passed. And that’s why I got to leave the Eavey Wood when my brothers and sister didn’t.”
The branches were growing thicker. The canopy strangled the sky. Mia’s words made the shadows come to life in Uly’s eyes, with rickety heads and gooey eyes and dry fangs. He wanted to bite Mia’s whiskers and tell her that being lost in the wood was no time for scary stories. But he didn’t know her well enough.
“So then me and my mom came north,” Mia continued, “and that’s when things got really scary.”
She proceeded to tell him about the furless terror who walked on two legs and trapped animals’ essences in white leaves before ripping off their skins, replacing their eyes with shiny rocks, and stuffing them full of straw.
The story made the trees reach towar
d Uly with their long fingers. He hopped to catch up to Mia’s tail—even though she was the one scaring him.
“And that’s when you showed up and saved my life!” Mia said, peeking over her shoulder. “Did I say thanks? ’Cause, thanks.”
“Oh, um,” Uly said, “you’re welcome.”
He was still trying to figure this Mia kit out. He didn’t understand why she insisted on hunting for him and cleaning him one moment, and then the next, nipping his ears or telling him a story so terrifying it made his eyes water. Was Mia more like his mom … or his sisters?
“So!” Mia spun around and trotted backward. “Two kits in the forest. Funny, right?”
“Um, sure,” Uly said. “Funny.”
“Why are you out here?” she asked.
“Well…”
Uly had flashes of his father—his ashen face, his moon-bright fangs, his lips saying, Break its neck. He didn’t want to tell Mia his story, because then she would know that his family thought he was as disposable as a gopher’s toenails.
He cleared his throat. “I just, uh, went out hunting and got lost and”—he hopped over a pebble—“never found my way back.”
“Huh,” Mia said, eyes narrowing.
She turned right side around and continued through the heather. Uly worried that he’d given himself away. Any moment, Mia might start seeing him as dead weight she had to drag around.
He bounded to catch up. “I, um, think I could tell you what happened to your brothers and sister.”
“What do you mean?” Mia said.
Uly’s sisters had told him about the yellow stench once. They had tried to convince him their mother had it, and that she was going to eat him for supper.
“So, if the yellow gets inside you,” he said, “then it, uh, strangles your personality, making it go away forever. Your tongue runs dry, and the only thing that will quench it is, well … blood. You start hearing whispers in your head that tell you to kill, and your gooey eyes start seeing everything as food. Even other foxes. Once you bite someone and pass the yellow on to them, then you dry up and you die.”
Mia stopped walking. She turned and stared at him.
Uly glanced around uncomfortably. “So, yeah, um, that’s what it is.”
She looked at him a long time. “You’re a liar,” she finally said. “My siblings are safe in the Eavey Wood. They’re taking lessons from Miss Vix.”
“Oh.” Uly gulped. His ears flattened. “Yeah. Probably. Sorry.”
She continued on in silence.
“Hey, um, you want me to clean your ears again?” he asked her.
“No,” she said.
TWO
THE BREATH OF the trees grew damp, and the ground grew squishy underpaw. Mia and Uly found themselves walking through the dripping gray expanse of a swamp.
“What is this place?” he whispered.
“How should I know?” she said.
She’d barely spoken to him since he’d told her about the yellow. Now that it was quiet, he realized how much her voice had brightened their journey. Strange sounds echoed from the swamp’s belly—slurps and slogs and splooshes and croaks.
Uly saw unsettling shapes in the darkness—spidery blossoms, green-crusted mushrooms, and moss that hung like long gray foxtails. He saw an insect dissolve crisply in the petals of a flower and a frog try to catch a wriggling worm hiding under a stone, only for the stone to snap shut, slicing the frog in two.
His ears folded. “Do you, um, know where you’re going?”
“North,” Mia said.
She stopped at the edge of a murky stretch that was half-grass, half-puddle. She sniffed at a row of dry humps and then hopped across them.
“Why north?” Uly asked, doing his best to follow, forepaw wobbling on each hump.
“My mom told me to go to the other side of the forest,” she called back. “When we first got to the trees, the sun was setting to the left, so that would have been west. So as long as I keep the purple in my eyes, we’ll head north out of the forest, and I’ll find her.”
“Oh, right,” Uly said, like what she’d said made sense to him.
The humps soon came to an end, and the ground grew soppier still. With each step, Uly had to yank his forepaw out of the marsh and lunge forward, only for it to plunge deep again.
Yank. Hop. Sploosh.
Yank. Hop. Sploosh.
He tried to hop again, but the mud held tight to his forepaw, and his muzzle splashed into the water. He whimpered bubbles.
Mia didn’t seem to notice, continuing without him.
“Wait!” he called.
She looked back and huffed, annoyed.
He couldn’t lose her. She was the only reason he hadn’t starved to death. He tried to pull his leg free, but white pain bloomed in his shoulder.
“I’m stuck,” he said.
“You’ve just got a mild case of soppy paws,” Mia called to him. “It’ll pass once we get to dry land.”
She kept walking, and Uly gazed the way they’d come. “Can’t we just go back? It’s easier back there.”
“There’s traps that way,” she said. “And that’s where Miss Potter lives. Besides”—she bounded twice through the water—“my mom’s waiting for me.”
He gave another tug on his leg, but it was stuck deep.
“Why do you want me to come with you anyway?” he asked.
“Because you saved me from getting boiled and eaten, duh,” she said. “Now come on.”
Uly hadn’t meant to save her. He’d just been in the right place at the right time and done exactly what she told him to do. He wasn’t heroic. Just lucky.
When he didn’t budge, Mia pointed her nose into the dripping darkness and gave a deep sniff. “Mm! Do you smell that?”
He sniffed. All he could smell was drowned insects and fish leavings. “Smell what?”
“There are centipedes,” she said. “And—snff snff—mm! Peaches past these trees.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “And it won’t work.” He looked down at his stuck leg. He didn’t like being treated like a baby kit. “Besides, I don’t even like peaches. They make my paw sticky.”
He didn’t mention that centipedes would probably make a home out of his eye sockets someday and that the thought of eating them gave him the creeps.
Mia scowled at him. “Why are you being so stubborn?”
He scowled back. Because, he wanted to tell her, if I don’t get dissolved by a flower or chomped by a rock, then my foreleg is gonna get yanked right out of its socket. Because if I try and take one more step through this water, I’m gonna pass out and drown. Because I don’t know if you’re more like my mom or my sisters …
Uly’s whiskers perked. He had an idea.
“The Golgathursh,” he whispered darkly.
“The huh?”
He gazed into Mia’s eyes. “The Golgathursh.”
“What the squip is a Gorga—a Gluga—a Gurgl—”
“Golgathursh.”
“Yeah, that.”
He licked his lips. He wanted to scare Mia out of heading north, scare her from dragging him deeper into the dripping mouth of the swamp. And the best way he knew to do that was with one of his sisters’ scary stories.
“The Golgathursh lives in the bottom of every pond, every puddle,” he began.
The first time Uly’s mom had taken him and his sisters to the rain pool, carrying them one by one across the crack, his sisters had pointed their noses toward the water’s surface, where scaly backs slipped and shimmered.
See that, Uly? Ava had said.
That’s the Golgathursh, said Ada.
Nuh-uh, Uly had said. That’s just carp.
Nope, Ani said.
It’s the Golgathursh, said Ali.
It lives in the bottom of every lake.
Every pond.
Every puddle.
The Golgathursh is bigger than boulders.
Bigger than mountains.
It has serpents for legs.
And a body made of mouths.
And nothing else.
If you step too close to the water’s edge—
There’ll be a sploosh—
And a snap—
And all of a sudden you’ll be just half a fox—
Instead of a whole one.
Of course, Ava concluded, you’d be even less than half a fox, wouldn’t you, Ewwly?
His sisters had snickered.
“That’s crazy talk,” Mia said. “No one’s ever even heard of a Googulthrosh before.”
“Golgathursh,” Uly said.
He didn’t believe in it either. But he couldn’t let Mia know that. Not when he was trying to scare her.
“Nothing is made of just mouths,” she said. “How would it poop? Now, come on.”
Uly rested his chin in the water. “No.”
Mia splashed back to him. She clamped onto his scruff and pulled.
“Come. On!” she said, mouth full of fur.
“No!” he said. “If we go any deeper, the Golgathursh is gonna eat us!”
“The Grogglethrish isn’t even real!”
“It’s Golgathursh!”
Mia gave a sharp yank, and her fangs sent a piercing pain through Uly’s neck. Anger shot straight to the tips of his ears.
“You said the yellow wasn’t real either! But it still killed your brothers and sister!”
Mia released his scruff. Her muzzle clamped shut.
Uly frowned, his neck still throbbing. He’d known what he’d said would hurt her. But he didn’t care. She was hurting his foreleg by forcing him to walk through this marsh. She was hurting his scruff by tugging on it. She tortured him with scary stories while they were lost in a dark and dangerous place. She deserved it.
Mia’s eyes wavered with tears. “Fine. Stay here and die. See if I care.”
She bounded through the wet grass.
“Fine!” he called after her. “Maybe I will!”
Uly watched, scowling, until her tail faded to gray and then vanished. He waited for relief to flood through him, like it did whenever his mom snapped at his sisters to stop bullying him.
But relief didn’t come. Instead, he felt a tug toward Mia, just like he’d felt when he’d had to leave his den behind.
Scary Stories for Young Foxes Page 10
