by Peter Liney
It was so dark in that moment, I still couldn’t say exactly what it was. I had this idea it had four legs rather than two, and it was certainly big and heavy, but more than that, I couldn’t even guess. I half-expected to hear something chasing after it; that it’d escaped its torturers and they were in hot pursuit, but there was nothing, just that endlessly repeated howl slowly fading into the night, occasionally coming to an abrupt stop, as if it’d fallen, or maybe even collided with a tree, then just when you started to hope it was over, it would start up again.
Finally it was gone, absorbed into the deadness of night, and the breath I’d unknowingly been holding onto exploded out of me. What the hell was that? Why had it been so distressed? Was it running from something—or running from itself?
Whatever the answer, I didn’t want to spend another minute in those woods in the middle of the night. I headed back toward the farmhouse, keeping a real watchful eye out, and yeah, I don’t mind admitting it, spinning around now and then to make sure I wasn’t being followed.
I can’t tell you how grateful I was to finally see a dull light straining through the trees. At the very moment that I emerged into the open, the moon came out from behind the clouds and lit up the whole night, as if to reassure me I was now safe . . . yeah, thanks a lot for that.
I hurried back to the house, my footsteps the only sound on what now seemed to be an eerily silent night. Nothing else stirred: no distant owl hooted, no echoing unspecified grunt or call from somewhere down the valley. It was almost as if everything was as shocked as I was; as if they were perched in their trees and peering out of their burrows, the pounding of their hearts only now subsiding.
I’d just about made it to the farmyard when damned if I didn’t get that feeling again, that same sense that something or someone was whispering into the darkest of the night. I doubled back a few yards and slipped into the shadow of the barn, having no idea what I was waiting for, but waiting all the same.
I don’t how long I was there, ten minutes or more maybe, over and over telling myself it was nothing, ’til finally I actually believed it. I had a warm bed and a wonderful woman waiting for me, and after what’d happened over in the woods, I wanted to be back in her arms. Whatever I’d heard or felt the previous night—and I wondered if the most likely explanation was some kind of meteorological phenomenon—it could wait ’til morning.
I started to make my way over toward the porch, feeling like at last I might be able to give sleep a really good go, then suddenly stopped, this time even more frightened than before. What in God’s name was that?
Something big and black had just slid across the land, triggering the objects on the wires, setting the cans rattling, the bottles chinking—like the rumbling approach of an earthquake. Again I looked up into the night sky, but nothing passed across the face of the moon or the stars, not as far as I could see. So what the hell was it?
CHAPTER FOUR
The following morning dawned so bright and uncompromised it was hard to believe the events of the previous night. I told the others what had happened but found myself backing away a little from the final part of the story. Bad enough they had to deal with me coming face to face with whatever had been howling in the night, let alone some mysterious dark force stealing across the land like a hunting shark; which was probably why they concentrated on what had happened in the woods and treated the rest a bit like it might be the product of the over-stimulated imagination of an insomniac.
“Gotta be an animal,” Delilah said, “ain’t it?”
“I guess,” I replied.
“Are there wolves around here?” Hanna asked.
I shrugged; Nick had mentioned he’d once caught a glimpse of a small pack, but what had swept past me had been on its own, and much bigger than a wolf.
“Should’ve brought the lasers,” Jimmy grumbled. “I told ya. Not cool.”
I sighed; God knew how many times he’d brought that up—and maybe it irritated me so much ’cuz I knew he was probably right. Once we’d decided we were coming over the mountains and getting well away from our previous life I’d kinda insisted we got rid of the lasers, convinced that we’d have no need of that sort of thing anymore.
Lena and Hanna had been in complete agreement, Gigi—a little surprisingly—had sat on the fence, but Jimmy, Gordie and Lile had been dead against it. In fact, they’d gone on about my stupidity so much that, in a spirit of compromise, when I hid the limo in the cave, I stashed the lasers in the trunk, just in case. Now, of course, that wasn’t looking like such a great decision.
“Someone could go back for them?” Lile suggested, though Gordie’s mind was heading off elsewhere.
“Why don’t we set traps?”
Hanna stared at him as if he’d betrayed her in some way. “No!” she cried.
“Why not?”
“It’s cruel!”
“Cruel to what?” he asked, pointing out that we had no idea what we were dealing with.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Gigi ventured, always ready to seize the chance to stir things up a little.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” Delilah commented. “Least we might find out what it is.”
Jimmy nodded. “I can make something up—we might even get a little fresh meat out of it.”
Hanna made this face, like she wanted to argue some more but knew there was something in what they were saying. Since we’d arrived on the farm we’d been mainly living off the stored fruit and vegetables and what we’d been able to dig up, most of it well past its eat-by date, ’specially as we’d traded a lot of the better stuff with those in the next valley. But there was very little left, and gradually we’d become more and more reliant on trading Jimmy’s know-how or my muscle for food. For sure a little fresh meat of our own wouldn’t go amiss. Mind you, I had to wonder, once we saw what we’d caught, would we actually want to eat it?
In the end we agreed Jimmy would make up some traps and Lena, Gordie and me would go and set them in the woods. Hanna still wasn’t happy about it—bad enough hunting animals, let alone trapping them, when that often resulted in a long and painful death—and when Gordie asked her to come along, she refused. Which, of course, meant Gigi immediately said she’d come.
Jimmy was as good as his word, and later that morning emerged from the barn with not just one but two types of trap: a simple snare to catch smaller animals—which Hanna got so upset about I said we didn’t need—and several examples of what looked like good old-fashioned bear traps.
As ever, the little guy made a real production of explaining them to us, insisting we showed him that we understood how they worked and that we could set them correctly, and when I tried to make light of it, warned me that was how people lost limbs. Finally, when each of us had satisfied him that we really did understand, he left us to it, scuttling back to his workshop as if there was something there much more suited to his talents.
The four of us made our way over to the woods, the daylight still embarrassing me, the way everything looked so peaceful and unthreatening. But the moment we crossed the tree line, you could feel the mood change: it was cooler, darker, the trees so dense in places anyone or anything could’ve been hiding in there.
We didn’t set the traps right away, just took a general look around for anything that didn’t feel right. Lena was stopping every now and then, sniffing the air, this slightly concerned look growing on her face.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She shook her head, like she was getting a bit of an idea but wasn’t yet ready to share it.
We went deeper into the woods, still not seeing anything unusual, taking the gentle slope down toward the road, then suddenly Lena picked up speed and I realized she was leading us somewhere.
“What is it?” I asked, and again she didn’t reply, but I knew she was onto something, calling on those specially honed senses of hers, negotiating her way by sound and smell.
At first I wasn’t sure what it was. I could see something
up ahead, strewn out across the forest floor, and even though my instincts told me it was bad, it took me a while to work out exactly how. As we got nearer I could see there were four of them, blackened and burned, each one so twisted and contorted by death I couldn’t even make out what sorta animals they were.
“What is it?” Lena asked, stopping along with the rest of us, though the smell was so strong, she must’ve had a pretty good idea.
“Four burned animals,” I told her, moving forward to take a better look, the kids following but looking distinctly queasy.
At first I thought they were all the same animal—all those sets of razor-sharp teeth, they had to be wolves, maybe the same ones Nick had seen—but then I realized that the one partly hidden under the others was something else, possibly a deer.
“All burned?” Lena asked.
It was the way she said it that made me stop and think, consider what I’d seen—what I should’ve seen right away.
“Jeez,” I groaned, bending over the charcoaled bodies, studying them, but sure enough, with the possible exception of the deer, which I couldn’t see clearly unless I extracted it from the pile of carcasses, they were all burned the way George’s dog had been. “It’s the same thing: burned from the inside out.”
“Same as Sandy?” Gordie asked.
“Yeah,” Gigi sneered, like it was surely obvious to anyone with a brain.
By the look of the ground around us and a couple of nearby trees there’d been a bit of a fire, but thankfully it’d burned itself out and all that remained now was this grotesque sculpture of skeletons in the middle of a blackened canvass.
“Anything else?” Lena asked, starting to sniff again.
“Whaddya mean?”
She looked a little confused. “Nothing?”
I took a more careful look around, even up in the trees, and it was there that I made yet another gruesome discovery. “Jesus!”
“What?”
“There’s a bird—a really big one—just hanging from a branch by one of its claws. It’s been burned, too.”
I don’t know why, but for some reason that was even more disturbing than the wolves and the deer, maybe ’cuz of the way it was just hanging there, like some ghostly sacrifice, or maybe ’cuz it immediately struck me that if this was the work of crazies, how the hell had they managed to get up there and do that?
In the end we moved on, wondering what other surprises lay in store for us, though as it turned out, the answer was none. There was one place where a tree had been badly damaged, but as there were deer around, maybe that’d been caused by a stag? Mind you, if that was the case, he must’ve had a real sore head afterward, ’cuz it looked like he’d gone crazy, butting that trunk over and over, leaving a canvas of blood smears, and I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of state he’d ended up in.
We didn’t bother to set the traps. It looked like we’d solved the mystery of what’d been howling in the middle of the night, and odd as it might sound, if there were others, we weren’t of a mind to eat them when they were in such distress.
I did my best to play the whole thing down, but I gotta say, it disturbed me far more than I let on. Animals dying by being burned from the inside out, both wild and domestic? How could that be, for chrissake? That night, lying in bed with Lena softly breathing beside me, I found sleep even more elusive than usual. I wanted Thomas to wake so I had an excuse to get up, and when he didn’t, I got up anyway and went to sit out on the porch in Delilah’s favorite chair.
I reckon it was that bird as much as anything that unnerved me: suspended up there all black and naked. Jimmy said it sounded like some kind of raptor, maybe even an eagle, but it’d felt like more like a crucified angel maybe? As if someone had murdered an ambassador sent here from Heaven.
I stayed out on that porch for a good hour or more, the atmosphere in the valley now feeling so different, as if everything we’d built, everything we’d discovered, was now under threat. Hanna came out to see me, all tousled-haired and heavy-lidded, asking if I’d heard anything and not looking that reassured when I said I hadn’t. For a while she sat with me, but eventually tiredness got the better of her and she went back inside.
No more than five minutes later, Jimmy replaced her—Jeez, things had to be really bad if the little guy couldn’t keep his head down.
“Everything okay?” he asked, slumping up against a wooden post, taking in the surrounding countryside. For the third night running, clouds were darting in and out of the path of the moon, like sheep playing soccer with a luminous ball.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound confident. “God knows what caused it—maybe they ate or drank something they shouldn’t—but it looks like they were the problem.”
For a while he didn’t reply, just stood there with his back to me, then he turned. “D’you really think so?”
“Why not?”
He took in a deep breath, then slid it out, like it would help ease the passage of his words. “She’s gonna come over those mountains one day.”
There was no need to ask who he meant. “Maybe not.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
I stared at the little guy, for some reason it finally occurring to me that he’d resurrected his thinning ponytail; that like many old people, he’d tried a new look—shaving his head in his case—but now had reverted to the one he’d had most of his life. Whatever his taste in hairstyles, he was one helluva smart cookie, and if he didn’t know what was going on, sure as hell I didn’t.
“It’s not often you can say that the death of one person would improve the world a thousand times over,” he commented, “but in this case—that is one mean, evil, uncool daughter-of-a-bitch.”
“You got that right.”
He took one last look out into the night before hurrying back to Lile and their bed, almost as if he was concerned they might not have much more time together.
I only stayed a few more minutes myself, just long enough to go over my checklist of worries: there’d been no more howling in the night, no dark specters consuming everything in its path, no rattling of cans or chinking of bottles. In the morning I’d be able to give everyone the encouraging news, maybe even predict that our troubles were over . . .
I just wished I believed it.
It was a surprise, yet not an altogether unexpected one (if that makes any sense?) when the following day Gigi told me she was going back to the City. We were out walking the plowed fields, making sure that every one of those seeds we’d sown had been covered by soil and had its chance of growing. It hadn’t occurred to me, but she’d obviously been waiting for a moment when we were alone to tell me.
“Why?” I asked.
As always, her first line of communication was a shrug, but I waited for something a bit more informative. “Might as well,” she told me.
“Is this ’cuz of Gordie and Hanna?” I asked, the seriousness of the subject provoking me to say what I’d normally avoid like a plague.
God, did she lose her cool. “No!” she shouted, jutting her bottom teeth out like a piranha. “Jesus—! What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I dunno.”
“I was never interested in him!” she snarled.
I nodded, crouching down to cover a couple of exposed seeds, turning away from what seemed like a telling degree of anger.
“The princess is welcome to him,” she sneered. For a while she went quiet, maybe fearing she’d given herself away, doing her best to restore her air of indifference before going on, “I wanna see some friends, that’s all,” she said at last. “Make sure they’re all right.”
I really didn’t know what to say—that whole area was so hazy with her. She’d mentioned friends before, but in such a way that I’d never been sure they even existed. There were so many mysteries surrounding Gigi—the main one as far as I was concerned being, of course, what’d gone on with her and Nora Jagger.
“But you’re coming back?” I asked.<
br />
Again she shrugged. “Depends.”
I paused for a moment, all sorts of thoughts going through my head, and shit to admit, the one that was disturbing me the most was: did I trust her on her own in the City? I guess after all that time of living and working together that sounds a little strange, but Gigi was always a complicated person; there was a side to her I’d never been able to isolate, let alone understand. Despite recent events, none of us wanted to have to flee the farm. There were plenty of people in the City who would’ve given anything to know the whereabouts of Lena and Thomas, who’d be offering all manner of inducements—certainly possessions and a lifestyle that an Island kid couldn’t even dream of. On the other hand, she’d sampled some of that with Nora Jagger, but had still ended up “killing” her—or she would have if I’d set my laser correctly. And bearing that in mind, going back there and risking confronting that woman again seemed like just about the stupidest thing she could do.
“She’ll still be looking for you,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I can take care of myself,” Gigi told me fiercely.
For a while the two of us walked in silence, still scouring the ground for seeds, Gigi covering a few more over. She wasn’t asking my permission—she didn’t need to. We might be a kinda family, but it was up to her what she did. After all, she was an adult . . . well, more or less.
“I’ll come with you,” I said eventually.
“Why?” she asked, taken aback.
“I want to.”
She gave this half grunt, half chuckle. “You don’t trust me.”
“Sure I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do!” I said, trying to sound convincing. “I just wanna see what’s been happening. The way things are going. Maybe look someone up.”
“Who?” she challenged.
I declined to say and she obviously took that as proof of my lack of trust; that she should never have mentioned her plan to one of the two people who’d seen her with Nora Jagger that night. But later, over lunch, when the subject came up again, the others’ reactions were equally concerned.
