by A. F. Henley
Randy sought out Vaughn's eyes when Vaughn sat, and whether it was imagination or hopeful thinking, Vaughn seemed to be sitting much closer than he'd been before. The rhythm inside Randy's chest skipped up several beats. He swallowed. "I should go..."
Fire crackled, embers popped. Lights hummed, critters skittered. Snow fell.
"Yes." Vaughn gave up Randy's stare and turned his own to the glow of his woodstove. "You should go."
There wasn't really anything else Randy could do except follow through. He set the glass down, rose, and without another word from Vaughn, he left. As promised. As directed. As agreed.
His hallway and his den, compared to the balmy barn, were cold and quiet. The fire had died out and Randy had forgotten to close the drapes in an attempt to trap some of the heat inside.
Glass frosted, breath clouded. Snow fell.
He almost cranked up the thermostat. Fuck it, he told himself. His energy was zapped and the prospect of starting a fire seemed daunting. Good sense prevailed. It stepped up to tell him that his savings would only go so far and there was no sense in throwing them away on electricity or oil. The faster the funds dwindled, the sooner he'd have to get himself out in public and find some kind of work. With a sigh, Randy's hand fell from the thermostat and he walked away from it.
He had no idea why he felt so drained. Or why he was suddenly so disheartened. Perhaps the booze, the exhaustion, maybe just the fact the house seemed so lifeless after the space he'd come from. So he started a fire. He poured a glass of wine. Then he sat and he watched the fire try to struggle into existence.
And the snow continued to fall.
Don't you dare complain, he told himself. This was what he'd come for. This is what he was supposed to be enjoying. The silence. The solitude. His bad mood was probably just brought about by the weather. A lack of vitamin B or vitamin D, or whatever it was the experts said happened when the days got shorter and the sun lacked vitality. It wasn't because Randy was already missing Vaughn's company. It wasn't cold because Vaughn was no longer sitting alongside him. That kind of thinking was ridiculous. After all, the man could become quite an ogre when wound up, troll-like, even.
"He should be living under a bridge somewhere, snarling at travelers," Randy whispered, and then mocked himself for the pitiful sound of his voice that made it clear to the entirety of the empty, cold, silent house that Randy didn't believe a word he'd said.
And the clock ticked. And the fire snapped. And the snow fell.
*~*~*
One of the nicest things, Randy found, about living on one's own was that if one was too drunk to drag one's ass to bed, one could flop on the couch and just sleep there without ever having to worry about being bitched at. The worst part about that benefit, however, was that there was no one there to lovingly reach over and pull the drapes closed or to stoke the fire during the night. Those oversights tended to have negative consequences when morning light met hangover, such as being damn near frozen to death, and having to swat pointlessly at the sun while it glared through the back window. It was a punishment that served, if nothing else, to force Randy's ass off the couch and try to figure out why it sounded as though there were wild dogs fighting in his front yard.
With the couch blanket draped over his shoulders, and only his toes properly wedged into his slippers, Randy shuffled to the front door and yanked it open. Pleasantly enough, it was not vicious beasts tearing each other open at all. Mostly, anyway. Beasts, possibly, but vicious? Doubtful.
Amongst the drifts of newly fallen snow, three forms lay sprawled in the yard, panting and grinning. Randy's porch had been cleared; the walkway was also clean, and even the driveway had even been blown out. But it wasn't until one of the forms lifted its snow-covered, hat-bound head and called, "Hey, Mr. Connor! Mr. Connor, save us! Lyle keeps snow-bombing us!" that Randy managed to wrap his brain around exactly who the three of them were.
The grin on Isaac's face did not lend credence to his plea for aid. Instead, both Isaac and Hannah appeared to be enjoying themselves to the fullest. It wasn't the two kids who came bounding up to the door that fueled Randy's amusement, though. It was an embarrassed Lyle who rolled himself out of the snow, brushing off his shoulders, shaking his clothing, and making a pointless attempt to display cool nonchalance. Oh, the drama of trying to look cool at eighteen... Randy snickered.
He smiled down at Hannah when she grabbed his arm with a soggy mitten. "You can call me Randy, Hannah. And if you don't, I will start calling you Miss O'Connell."
She laughed, probably entirely too thrilled with that idea. She didn't run with it, though. "Randy, guess what?" Her eyes were as bright as her nose as she gushed, "Dad said we could come help finish with the cookies! He said you asked and that it would be okay 'cuz you asked first!"
Randy reached out and brushed snow out of her hair. "I did. And that's fantastic! But look at this. What did you do out here? Did you guys do all this work?"
"Mostly Lyle," Isaac said, swiping at his nose as he spoke. "He used the blower on the drive. We just cleared the porch and the walk. Dad said we had to do it first if we were going to come over and take up all your time."
Randy winced. "And how did poor Lyle manage to get roped into this?"
Isaac shrugged. "Lyle does what we do."
While Hannah and Isaac peeled off their snowsuits, Randy peered through the window and watched Lyle walk the snow blower down the driveway and into the road. He didn't look back once.
Randy nodded at Lyle's disappearing form. That was all right. Lyle was under no obligation to like him. Randy wouldn't have been too impressed either if their roles were reversed. There were probably a million things Lyle would rather do on sunny Sunday morning other than help a neighbor with two good legs and two good arms clear snow, and as much as Randy appreciated the help, it didn't seem right that Lyle got punished with chores just to help the little ones get rewarded. But Randy had already learned his lesson in that regard—Vaughn would raise his children the way that Vaughn saw fit, and Randy would keep his nose out of it.
At least Lyle hadn't rushed right home when the job was done. He'd seemed to be enjoying himself tumbling around in the snow with his younger siblings—had been, in fact, the cause of most of the shouting and screeching, if appearances could be trusted. And the kids were there, with their father's blessing. That had to mean something good. Maybe the new moon had brought some changes along with it, a softening of prejudices or what not.
He could only hope. Hope and be grateful.
JANUARY
Step in step, side by side, they ran—two beasts, one prey. As it was, as it always should be. Breath rasped through icy air, and slick surfaces threatened every footfall. But they were strong, and the prey they were chasing was weak. Cornering it was almost too easy.
It was only when they stilled, rounding on the cowering creature, that one raised his head and growled distaste at his companion's closeness. The challenge didn't go unquestioned. And as the prey was abandoned, hunger lost to the instinctive need to dominate, both beasts rushed toward each other furiously, teeth bared.
Only the moon watched. Every living thing within range shrank away from the sounds.
Night-time always felt slippery to Randy. Not the 'it's eleven o'clock, so I'd better go to bed' night-time, but the 'it's three a.m. and something's just startled me out of sleep' night-time. That was when reality seemed a little harder to hold on to, and the things a person had long since written off to childhood imaginings—the ghouls and the goblins, the monsters and the malevolent—began to slither back into thought. It had been a long time since Randy had woken up and felt the urge to pull all his limbs back under the covers (they can't get you if you're under the safety of the comforter) or held his breath to listen for oddities (they can't find you if they can't hear you breathing).
He'd almost managed to tell himself it was nothing. The brilliant red numbers that read 02:54 had been allowed to fade into watery squiggles, the pull in and ou
t of Randy's lungs once again started to deepen, and just as the wings of sleep closed around him, the sound came again. Thwack! Thunk... thunk... clunk.
Randy forced his eyelids back up and peered through the dark. In the aftermath of the noise, the house was silent. He focused on the quiet, trying to figure out where the sound had come from and deduce what had caused the disturbance, but it was impossible to focus on mere memory. Again he told himself it was nothing—nothing he had to worry about, anyway. An animal, maybe, or a branch.
Then, as if something had read his intention to close his eyes yet again, the wind outside picked up, the bedroom window trembled in response, and not even a second later the sound was back. Thwack! Thunk... thunk... clunk.
He shoved the covers off, shivering at the rush of cooler air, and lowered his feet to feel for his slippers. Not too close to the bed. Just find your slippers and then jump. Jump away from whatever it is that reaches out for ankles and calves.
"Don't be stupid," Randy mumbled. Then he purposefully left his feet in place, still bare, planting them on the hardwood floor. He wasn't a kid anymore. It was okay to feel the pricks and bumps that the transition from sleep to waking brought, but it certainly wasn't all right to carry that fear into the waking hours with him. The only monsters that existed were the ones in the real world: the pedophiles, the murderers, and the rapists. Nothing in fantasy could ever be as scary as mankind.
Nothing reached for Randy's ankles. Nothing visited at all but for the thwack! Thunk... thunk... clunk.
"For fuck's sake," Randy hissed. Within a single step he located his slippers, within another, his robe, and Randy marched out of the bedroom with a glower at the clock. It wasn't walk-through-the-house time, it was sleep time. It made him irrationally angry that something had dared to come loose, get dislodged, or give way when it was obviously the middle of the night.
He followed the sound, peering around corners and doing his best to try to figure out what could possibly be making the racket, and it took him several minutes of wandering the lower level, and three more refrains (Thwack! Thunk... thunk... clunk) before he realized the sound was coming from outside. He walked to the side door, pushed the little lace curtain aside, and peered through the grid of glass.
The carport between the house and the garage sat empty, his truck safely stowed in the garage to save him the trouble of having to dig it out of the snow. Though the wind couldn't have been blowing for long—the skies had been clear and bright and cold when Randy had gone to bed—its effects were beginning to show. Snow swirled, silent but insistent, at both ends of the carport, and the wind was building a drift of monumental size at the end closest to the front of the house. He flicked on the exterior light; what had seemed to be a perfectly calm snowfall transformed into chaos once he could see it clearly. It would take hours to clear it in the morning, if it had stopped by then. The drift, however, did serve to keep the rest of the carport clear for the moment. Even so, the concrete pad had the sparkly, diamond-studded look that concrete tended to get when it was cold enough to freeze skin on contact, and when the wind did manage to find its way through the carport, it blew with enough force to shake the entire structure.
Thwack! Randy lifted his head to the sound and watched the man door of the garage get snapped against the siding. Thunk... thunk... The door bounced back, then again, before resting open with a gentler bump. Clunk.
Randy tilted his head. So that was the sound. But how had the door opened? Surely the wind wasn't strong enough to have broken something? Had he closed it properly the last time he'd been in there?
The questions were pointless. Regardless of why or how, there was only one solution and that was to walk through the carport and shut the damn thing. It was an annoying concept; it meant either bundling up for twenty precious minutes of lost sleep, or it meant rushing through the cold with his slippers and his robe and hoping he didn't lose too much body heat in the process.
"Well..." Randy said to himself, nodding at the garage. "I'll be quick."
A blast of cold hit him as soon as he opened the door, and that was with the aluminum screen door still between him and the outside. He wrapped his robe around him tighter, shoved his hands inside the sleeves, and with one terrycloth-wrapped fist at his neck to keep the robe closed, and the other on the handle of the screen door, he opened it as well. The wind stole his breath and seemed to freeze the skin of his face and bare calves instantly. He rushed across the carport, snagged the door of the garage, and that was when the scent hit him—musk, sweat, animal—not entirely unpleasant, but strong enough to suggest that whatever had come sniffing around hadn't been long in passing. He eyed the black square between carport and garage and for a second he considered just slamming the door and not worrying about whatever might or might not be inside. Something drew him forward, though, and even though he told himself he was being foolish, that reaching into the garage was about the stupidest city brat thing a man could do, the scolding wasn't enough to stop him.
He felt along the wall for the light switch, and then had to step into the garage when he couldn't quite seem to locate it. The scent grew stronger. Flutters woke in Randy's belly, and he strained his eyes to see through the dark. Had the moon managed to make it past the snow clouds, he might have had a chance. When he'd turned off the lights and climbed into bed, the moon had been full and bright, and probably would have lit the space quite nicely. Now, it was as black as pitch.
Something moved in the far corner.
Mental images of rabid raccoons and angry possums started flooding Randy's mind, and once again his fingertips scrabbled to find the switch. Why he was struggling, he had no idea. It wasn't like he hadn't reached for same switch a hundred, no, a thousand times. One couldn't just lose a switch. Had the goddamn thing just disappeared? He actually whined when his fingers found the corner of the plate and, with a sweep of the side of his hand, so as not to miss his target should he be off an inch or two, Randy flicked on the lights.
Fluorescent bulbs winked and hummed, doing their best to warm up and respond in the cold. It didn't matter. Randy didn't need the light to be any brighter to see.
"Holy fuck..." Both of his hands slapped the wall behind him, regardless of the shock of cold it gave his system, and Randy flattened himself against the surface. He remembered the wolf at his back deck. More, he recalled the size of it. And if this wasn't the same damn one, it was Wolfy's close cousin.
He already saw the headlines: Idiot city brat eaten by wolf in his own garage. It would be followed with a plea for everyone else to please, please keep the morons that didn't know how to deal with the animals of the county out of their county.
The wolf lifted its nose and sampled the air. Then, in a gesture that Randy read as 'dinner smells about ready', it lowered his head and trained its gaze on him.
Run! A voice in Randy's head screamed and just as quickly something else knocked it aside. Stay still! If you run, it'll chase you, and there's no way you'll make it out the door in time to shut it!
Even if he did, would he have the strength to shut it if the wolf leapt at it? Probably not. Its shoulders were wide and muscles rolled underneath its thick fur. One lunge would knock Randy on his ass.
It stepped, not exactly forward, but on an angle, crossing its paws and almost gliding several inches closer.
Randy's bladder twinged, his throat seized, but a groan still managed to squeak its way out. The wolf's ears perked, it shook its head and stepped again.
"Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck." He was barely whispering, but he couldn't stop the words from coming. "Please don't eat me. Please don't eat me."
When the wolf advanced again, the pleas became a bastardized prayer. "Oh, God, if there's a God... right now I hope so... I am so sorry for anything and everything I've done wrong." He swallowed a breath of panic and flashed a quick glance at the ceiling. "Unless 'anything wrong' includes me being gay. Because if this is payback for that, then fuck you, the damn thing can eat me."
In a move so sudden that Randy shrieked, the wolf lowered its head and sniffed Randy's furry slipper. "Oh, holy mother of Jesus Christ and everything else that goes with it!" Randy tried to imagine himself melting through the wall and back into the carport. "I was just kidding, God! Not fuck you, not fuck you!"
A very cold, very wet nose touched the inside of Randy's calf and that killed any ability to speak that Randy had. The drag of that nose up to his knee and then his thigh, parting the bottom of Randy's robe as it sniffed and sniffed and sniffed, made everything in Randy's body clench and shake.
I will not piss myself... I will not pass out... I will think of something, I know I will. I have to.
Randy didn't even notice he'd screwed his eyes shut until he opened them again, and that was only because the sensation of the cold nose had disappeared. Timidly, cautiously, Randy lowered his line of sight and did everything not to catch the wolf's gaze as it backed up a step.
Oh, yes. Yes, please. Nothing tasty here, right? Just go on now. You forget about me, I forget about you...
Then it crouched, and Randy knew its plan before its front paws even left the ground.
The wolf jumped, both paws landed with heavy thumps on either side of Randy's head, and Randy screamed. The wolf opened its jaws wide, lolling tongue huffing drops of spit on Randy's face, and Randy knew it was now or never. He dropped to the ground, slid along the wall, and lifted both arms to cover his face and head.
Go, go, go!
He rolled to the left, choking on the too-close scent of the animal, and, as he lifted himself to his knee, praying to just make it out the door—just make it out the door and he'd take it from there—another shape whipped past him so fast that for a second Randy was dumbstruck. Something collided with the wolf, a sharp yelp was tossed into the air. Randy turned to stare in awe as not one but two wolves tumbled across the floor of his garage. The new wolf was bigger, maybe even stronger, judging by appearances, and Randy knew that the new wolf was the one he'd seen on his deck. It had to be. It felt right.
