The Tyger

by Tegan Moore

  “Where are you going?” Sofia said again, doggedly following.

  Jules stopped and stared into the woods. “Those wolves are gonna get them.”

  “There aren’t any wolves.”

  He pointed. “Right there.”

  It was hard to tell where the fake trees stopped and the painted trees began. Sofia took a step closer. “There’s no wolves, Jules Drools. I’m not scared.”

  “You’ve seriously never seen them?”

  The farmstead soundtrack played: chickens bawking about their business, the thwock of an axe in wood. A dog barked; birdsong. Cheery, even in twilight. Sofia took another step. “You’re a liar and I don’t believe you.”

  She sort of believed him. “Look. Right there.” Sofia edged up to the rail to look. Right before Jules was about to grab her, the soundtrack played a wolf howl.

  Sofia squeaked and darted back toward the camera flash and burble of party sounds. When she was at the corner, she turned to shout, “Jerk!”

  Jules watched her go, and then squinted into the woods.

  There weren’t any wolves. Or there had never been before. Had that changed too? In the dark he thought there might be the outline of a big shaggy dog back there. Maybe more than one.

  A liquid feeling seeped into his belly. He didn’t want to stay there. A younger Jules would have run away, too, followed Sofia back to the safety of family, but this Jules hesitated. He watched the maybe-dog shape in the woods. Was it painted? Or real, amid the trees? He felt like it was there, and shouldn’t be.

  If he stayed where he was Sofia might return Or, worse, the shape might move. He stepped away from the fence. His heart banged his rib cage—not fast, just hard. The Path felt strange, unfamiliar, even though he knew it backward and forward. Dangerous, even though it wasn’t and couldn’t be.

  Beyond the homestead was the Pre-Columbian section, before white people took over America. Here the Path became a trail through the wilderness, though one with handrails. There was more forest, with skunks and a cougar hunting elk. In a clearing there was a cluster of Osage houses, tidy structures slabbed with bark shingles that Jules had repeatedly failed to replicate in the band of trees behind his house. Bare-chested kids chased each other; a woman buried her hands in the vines of her garden. All exactly as it had always been, because the Path wasn’t supposed to change.

  At the edge of the clearing a deer hung upside down from a tree while a man peeled its skin off. Its muscle gleamed licorice-red, the architecture of its ribs and the little cords of fiber between them fascinating, delicately gory. When you walked past you could see the darker red that showed in the flap cut in its belly. Clouded eyes, little pink tongue between its teeth.

  Once, standing here with his dad, his father had explained how to skin a deer. His dad said he would take Jules hunting when he was older. If you weren’t old enough to drive a car you weren’t old enough to shoot a gun, he said, even though he’d done it when he was a kid, but as soon as Jules had his learner’s permit they would borrow guns from his mom’s brothers. That was three years away, almost forever, but the promise stood.

  Who would they borrow guns from after the divorce? Especially with his mom crying to everyone. None of his uncles would loan his dad anything, after that.

  He felt suddenly seasick, wobbly. He gripped the railing, pressed his forehead against it, and squeezed his eyes closed. There was a smell in his nostrils, a sick smell, like a hospital but dirtier. A roadkill smell; a dead-meat smell. He heard a zippy hum—the buzzing of flies lifting and settling again. His eyes snapped open, focused on the deer carcass. Beyond the Osage man’s back the flayed muscles glistened in the low light.

  His mother’s voice carried around the corner, along with the clipping heels of approaching footsteps. Jules stood up.

  A giant tree split the path just beyond the Osage houses. Jules stepped behind it and crouched down. He regretted it immediately. Only little kids hid from their parents. He still felt nauseated. He leaned against the cool, smooth trunk to keep his balance.

  There were two sets of footsteps. “I just want to tell you,” his mom was saying. Her voice was liquid and unhinged. “I just need to talk to you about—I want to say—”

  “Em, you’re spilling.” Aunt Lydia’s voice. His mom and his aunt came closer. Jules tried not to move. His pulse rose in his ears.

  Right in front of him was one of his favorite parts of the whole Path: a tiny, white-spotted fawn tucked into a puff of grass. It lay flat against the ground and was hardly noticeable unless you knew to look. Jules was at eye level with it. The fawn had been real once, like the pioneer cat. Some baby deer had died and this was what was left, the shell of some perfect little dead thing.

  Maybe the fawn was the skinned deer’s baby. Jules remembered telling the girl in the window that her parents were never coming back. Her little pearl teeth and furrowed nose. But that was his imagination.

  “Oops,” Jules’s mom said. “Oh, it’ll wash out. Can we sit? I love you, Lyd, we need to sit and—”

  “Now probably isn’t the right time.”

  “I just—I’m so sad. We need to talk, Lyd, you’re my sister.”

  Jules could feel the flicking of blood in the veins of his face and neck, in time with his heartbeat. That nasty meat smell coated his tongue. The molten quality of his mother’s speech, fragments dissolving into each other, they warned him the way a sour-burnt miasma warns that someone’s lit a cigarette nearby. Easy to know what was around the corner.

  “Let’s just enjoy the party, okay? I don’t want to talk when you’re drinking.”

  “I’m not! Lydia! I’m not drunk, I’m—I just wish you’d talk to me.” His mother’s voice was getting higher and faster. “I’m so sad. You’re not listening. You’re my sister—”

  Jules stared at the fawn. His shoulder hurt where he leaned against the tree and his ankles burned from crouching. One of the baby deer’s oversized ears flicked. It lifted its head so one tiny hoof could scratch behind its ear. Jules could hear the flutter of the hoof against fur.

  His eyes stung and his mouth was dry. The fawn looked him in the eye, the small bony skull turning on an elegant neck. Then it lay its head down again.

  Something heavy smacked to the ground. “Emily,” Aunt Lydia said. “Emily, calm down. Breathe. Hey. Look at me. Breathe.”

  Jules toppled backward, away from the fawn, catching himself on the heel of one palm and tipping sideways. His knee banged against the hard ground. It was real; he’d seen it. It was dead, but it had moved.

  “Julian!” Aunt Lydia called. She had one arm around Jules’s mom, who was bent and red-faced, eyes bugging, tears smearing her cheeks. She looked like someone in a movie who had been been punched in the stomach. A glass lay broken at her feet.

  Aunt Lydia was pale, her hair piled up and shimmery, her dress as elaborate as the cake they’d cut earlier. She looked like a picture of someone else’s aunt getting married, and her expression was almost as desperate as Jules’s mom’s. “Help me with your mom.”

  Jules wanted to run, to flip and scuttle away on all fours. He struggled to his feet. As soon as he was upright his mother reached for him from Lydia’s arms, grabbed on to him while she heaved and shook. Lydia stepped back to let him take his mom’s weight. Jules felt stiff and unreal. He didn’t want to look at his aunt or his mother so he stared at the fawn, which didn’t move. His mom’s breath was hot. Snotty tears soaked his shoulder.

  “Breathe,” Aunt Lydia kept saying, and they stood there until his mother calmed down. It took a while. His mom grew heavier and heavier.

  “My good boy,” his mom said. She sniffled, recovering. “Isn’t he a good one, Lyd?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Lydia said. “Emily, I have to get back. The photographer—”

  “Oh,” his mom said. “Have you seen him do his poem?”

  “Mom. I don’t want to,” Julian said, but quietly.

  Aunt Lydia did not look like she wanted to see Jul
es do anything. “Maybe later.”

  “Come on,” Jules’s mom said. She could have been talking to either of them. “Real quick.”

  From the warm and damp cave of her embrace Jules heard the wet, wringing sound of his mother swallowing. Her arms were hot and bony. Jules tugged himself free. He felt sick and his cheeks and neck burned. “I already did it tonight.”

  “Don’t make him, Em,” Aunt Lydia said.

  His mom’s face seemed gray and papery, like a mask. With both of them against her, she dug in. “It’s only a minute of your time,” she snipped. “One minute.” Again, it wasn’t clear who she was talking to—her sister or her son.

  Jules mumbled, still looking at the grass that hid the fawn. “I’m sick of it.” He was sick of a lot of things. His voice got louder, getting desperate: “You’re always bugging me.”

  She was still teary, barely recovered, but her eyes hardened. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she sneered. “I never ask you for anything!”

  He rolled his eyes. That broke her.

  “You,” she spat. “You are just”—she sucked in a breath—“like your father.”

  “Emily,” Lydia said, taking Jules’s mother by her shoulder. “We’re going back. Come on. We have photos.”

  Jules’s mother glared at him. One hand at her side twitched, like she might hit him with it. He couldn’t help it; he flinched. She’d spanked him when he was little, but with spare-the-rod detachment. Never with the anger that hardened her cheekbones and jawline now. He felt his own body twitch, too.

  In the distance, someone called Lydia’s name. “Coming,” his aunt replied, and turned. Jules’s mom followed, arm caught in her sister’s grip, her mouth tight. One ankle wobbled in its high heel.

  Jules’s face stung like he’d been slapped. That voice. It turned every word into a curse. What had he done to make her so angry?

  He felt like a fist, clenched up, desperate to hurt something. He put a hand against the smooth bark of the tree. Then he drew it back and hit the tree, open-palmed. It made a loud, wet smack that rang the bones in his hand. He sucked air through his teeth and shook his wrist. He didn’t feel any better. Jules turned his back on the future and moved in the other direction.

  The Path grew darker; nighttime again, and plains instead of forest. Ahead, a herd of taxidermied bison were posed trundling around the turn from the Pre-Colombian to the Prehistoric, running in the night like massive bad dreams. Their coats were ragged and black. As they turned the corner the bison were replaced by bigger, hump-backed ones, some extinct kind, and then those by even huger mammoths, and at the end was a mastodon, biggest of all, great scythes of tusks curved and white as the moon, and then you were at the end of history.

  Rocks lined the Path and kept its creatures at bay. It smelled cool, like the air after a thunderstorm. Jules felt crazy. It was anger, he realized; he was so mad. You’re just like your father. When all she talked about was how much she hated his dad.

  There was plenty of light along the Path, but it wasn’t normal. The overhead lights were off completely, illumination coming from somewhere else, diffuse, as if lit by the moon screened by painted background clouds. The light pooled like ice, like you were walking someplace snowbound, but bright enough to see: there was the giant sloth pawing branches toward its shaggy Muppet face; a saber-toothed cat watching its cubs roll in the ice-light; a moose the size of a house brandishing its antlers at an ugly pig-thing. They were motionless, but the room felt like it was full of hidden motion, things moving behind his back. Jules might have been too afraid to go on. But the anger dammed up inside him was all he could feel.

  Glass eyes followed him. He couldn’t see the giant pelts rippling with breath, rib cages expanding, wet nostrils flickering, but that didn’t mean they didn’t. In the silent, silvery light everything was perfectly still, except for the wave-steady, slow-motion inhale, exhale. If he were watching, he would have seen it; if the fury hadn’t clouded his vision, he could have seen.

  The farther he walked, the angrier he got. It churned, solidified. Or maybe he was afraid. Maybe that’s what it really was.

  Arctodus was shielded behind an outcropping of rocks at the end of the hall, saved for last. Jules could feel its gravity. The air seethed where the sound of its voice would appear.

  He kept going. Anger pushed him, but also fear: an awe-filled, childish fear, the kind where you covered your eyes but peeked out between your fingers; your first roller coaster ride, strapped in next to your dad, his arm over your shoulder. Except it was the roller coaster, too, slam-fast movement and the rage of speed. Reckless, almost out of control. You couldn’t have the one without the other.

  He couldn’t find the edge to separate the fear from the anger. Maybe they were one piece, the same thing.

  Jules’s mom hated his father more than anything. That fucking animal. She’d only started cursing after she found out about the affair.

  The sound of Arctodus slithered over the Path, a low quivering. Jules froze with one foot in front of the other, his breath shallow as the growl rose to a slavering snarl, and another, and then a roar. Then silence sank back over everything like fog.

  Arctodus shouldn’t scare him anymore, not really. But of course it did. It would always scare him.

  Jules took another step. He touched the rocky outcrop that hid the great bear. The rocks were limned with frost. His fingertips burned with cold that was entirely real. Real ice on fake rocks. Real moonlight on imitation wilderness. He stepped around the boulders.

  Arctodus should have been posed on a rubbly mound, reared up with one giant paw raised, but the plinth was empty. Just the painted background of a sparse scrubland. There was no place for the bear to have gone.

  Jules approached, looking to either side as if Arctodus’s enormous, furious mass might be tucked behind a tree. There was no guardrail between the Path and the raised dais of mounded stone that usually kept Arctodus out of arm’s reach. The placard that told you about the bear was still in place.

  Jules touched the sign. He looked up at the empty pile of rocks. And then he was climbing, dress shoes slipping, hands on cold, real stone, waiting for alarms to sound, waiting to be dragged away and scolded and punished, but nothing happened. Jules climbed up to where Arctodus should have stood. He was afraid, and he was sorry he had come, except he had to come here and he couldn’t ever go back. He had stepped off the Path and into the place where the bear should have been.

  Lips quivering, he crouched on the rocks. Jules looked over the Path Through Time. He showed the Path his teeth.

  There was a great sigh behind him, or above or around him, and Arctodus was exactly where it had always been. It was Jules that was changed, because he wasn’t on the Path; he stood instead directly beneath Arctodus, with his back to it. The bear had returned, or had been there all along.

  Jules craned his neck up and saw the great shape looming above him. Its coat was all the shades of shadow and stone and its mottled, slobbering mouth was frozen open in a roar. He felt its presence, its largeness, the terror of it, like a sudden fall.

  The room’s soundtrack started up again, that low, building growl.

  The bear’s hind feet were planted on either side of Jules, legs like pine trunks, fur faintly blue in the frozen light. He smelled the musk of its tangled, burr-snarled coat, the wet-meat stink of its breath.

  Arctodus wasn’t real, hollow inside its fake fur, just drama and awe. Its teeth were something else’s teeth. The leather of its paws was some other animal’s skin. But Jules could smell its foul, thick, animal reek.

  It bellowed. Jules felt its massive chest vibrate as it rose to its full height. He looked straight up at jagged nonsense shapes tattered with dark fur. His eyes couldn’t make sense of what he saw, and anyway they swam with adrenaline. The roar coughed to an end. The bear’s huge jaws clapped shut. A strand of drool slunk out of the corner of its mouth and slimed to the floor next to Jules’s foot.

  It turned its face dow
n toward him, eyes blank, like a crocodile’s.

  Arctodus stood over him, looking down as Jules looked up, its head over Jules’s head. The weight of it surrounded him, wrapping him, enormous but also just big enough, like an adult’s coat or a closet that you’d hide inside, shivering with delight at your own terror. Jules shuddered. He could feel the bear’s claws extended from the ends of his own fingers, feel the bear’s teeth hot inside his own mouth, canines pressing into his lips. He breathed Arctodus’s stinking breath. It wasn’t real but it was real enough.

  This was the end of the Path Through Time. There was nowhere for him to go but forward.

  About the Author

  Tegan Moore loves to find the alien among us: in the minds of animals, in humans who might not be entirely human, in the monsters we create out of our own frustrations and fears. Her writing has been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. She is a Clarion West graduate, a professional dog trainer, is allergic to chocolate and only has eight toenails. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

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