It’s not exactly a dream; dreams tend to involve movement—some narrative progress, however irrational, from
a
to
b
. The image in Stephen’s head is still. He’s made the burnt-out den his own, imported it from the files of blogmonster.com to the recesses of his sleeping mind.
He wakes with the sheet up over his face, struggles frantically for moments before finding he can still breathe, still see. The den is gone. The room is dark. Turning his head, he sees the hour spelled out in glowing crimson: 3:49.
He sits up, pausing to get his bearings before standing and dragging on his clothes. Padding barefoot into the darkened office, he stoops to bring up the blog. Nothing new. Which means he’s still out there, looking for some poor creature to kill.
Edal’s right—Stephen has to tell the police. He’ll go as soon as it’s light, cross the Queen Street Bridge and cut down to the cop shop at Parliament and Front. They’ll take a statement, maybe even sit down with him at a computer and go over the blog. And then what—uniformed officers descend on the valley in formation? Cyber-detectives trace a virtual trail back to the suspect’s last known address? Even if they do take the threat seriously, it will take time to organize any kind of response. Meanwhile, Coyote Cop’s free to follow his instincts—and it’s more than likely he’s got a gun.
Stephen should have insisted Lily stay with them, should have made her see sense. Instead, he let her go back down into that half-wild valley, with no more protection than a dog. Billy’s a force to be reckoned with, but he’s not bulletproof. What if the next desecrated bodies Stephen finds are known to him? What then?
One year in training, six months in country. He may be no longer fit to serve, but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten the secrets a soldier knows. Guy and Edal are civilians; they won’t understand. Stephen fetches his jacket and boots in silence. Not even the kits wake up to hear him go.
M
ost girls would have come up with a cover story, but Edal didn’t feel the need. Even when Letty noticed she’d been out, she never bothered asking where.
Knocking the shed together used up two visits; painting it dark brown with yellow trim filled a couple more. They worked well together, Jim and Edal, Edal and Jim. She wasn’t sure what they’d do once the shed was complete, but she felt certain there would be more.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said one afternoon as she crouched in front of his little fridge, holding the door open to get the good of the cold. “You ought to spruce this place up a bit.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked up from the binder he had open before him on the desk. “Tell me more.”
She turned on the balls of her feet, twisting them against the dirty white soles of her flip-flops. “You could plant some flowers.”
“Yeah?”
“Out the front. And maybe some down around the sign.” The fridge kicked on, sending a fresh chill down the gap at the back of her shorts.
“What kind of flowers?”
“How do I know?” She reached behind her and felt for a can. “I could come with you to look.”
“You could.” He turned a page and gave it his attention. “And you could close that fridge door too.”
She got busy digging the beds while Jim went to work patching the larger of his two canoes. By the time he was done, she’d made a ring of black dirt around the signpost and two coffin-shaped plots, one on either side of the front steps. She was still on her knees when he came to look over all she’d accomplished. The hair on his bare calf tickled her arm.
She sat beside him on the way to the nursery, the view from the truck cab putting the Chevy’s smeared windshield to shame. Together they picked out red and white begonias—Canada’s colours, and the blotted-out sun on the tag meant they’d do all right among all those trees. While they were choosing the best plants, Jim accidentally snapped off a stem.
“Careful,” Edal said.
He grinned, tucking the prong of fleshy blooms behind her ear.
She knew just what to say. “How do I look?”
He stared down at her, the grin frozen for a moment, then gone. “Pretty.”
“You think so?”
“I think,” he said, turning back to the plants, “we ought to be getting our butts in gear.”
The lady behind the counter was pink-faced, too big for her smock. She let out a noise like a small dog settling when they lined up their trays to pay. “Nice to see dad and daughter doing a project together.”
Edal laughed. “He’s not my dad.” She turned to share the joke with Jim, but found him staring down into his wallet.
“Is that right?” The lady’s face had altered, the gentle fat gone hard.
Jim fingered his bills. “What’s the damage?” he said, still not looking up.
He didn’t speak on the way out to the truck. Edal thought he might say something once they were out of the parking lot, but he held his tongue until they were nearing the turnoff to Dogleg Road. “How about I drop you off at home.”
She looked at him. “What about the flowers?”
“You can put them in another day. Or I can.”
Edal felt her stomach drop inside her. She’d done something to piss him off. Or else he was just sick of her. It wasn’t such a long jump from helper to pest. “It’s okay.” She reached for her seat-belt buckle. “Just let me out here.”
“Don’t be stupid, it’s not far.”
“It’s okay, I’ll walk.”
“Edal.” It was his teaching voice, the one she hadn’t heard since he stood at the front of her classroom drawing on the board.
“Just drop me at the turn,” she said, and when they reached it, he did.
She stayed away for a whole ten days. When she finally set out around noon, after waiting for Letty to drive off to the
Pettigrews’ in Owen Sound, she told herself she wouldn’t take the turn. Even if she did, she’d double back at the kink in the road.
The beds had already thrown up a fair crop of weeds. No truck, but the begonias were in plain view, still in their flats, set down to one side of the front steps. They looked thirsty and thin. Edal could’ve used a drink herself, and so, after a long moment spent standing at the foot of the steps, she mounted them and tried the door. Locked. She turned, looking back at the road. Listening hard for his engine, she heard nothing but a squirrel flailing through the canopy, leaf litter shifting with beetles and shrews.
The shed was still a possibility; he often left the open padlock hooked through its loop to avoid fishing for his keys. It was all right to go inside—she’d helped build it, after all. She took down the trowel, then stood still in the dim interior, letting her eyes move over his things.
She started on the beds out front of the cabin, rooting up weeds and laying them aside, replacing them with the plants he’d bought. She did her best to make the flowers look natural, mixing up the colours and staggering the rows, but it was hard with all that bare black dirt. Watering only made it worse, spattering the bright petals with mud.
Having planted four flats, Edal carried the remaining two down to the foot of the drive. She worked on the ring garden for what felt like forever. Time and again she imagined him driving up to find her kneeling in the dirt, saw him leaning out of his window as she rose.
At last she stood to survey her work. The begonias looked rubbery and desperate, a flock of unfledged nestlings anchored
in soil. She trudged up the drive and returned the trowel to its nail on the shed wall. Aside from the three ugly beds, she left the place as she’d found it. As though she’d never been there at all.
D
arius was thirteen when it happened. If it had been any other chore—carrying the garbage out to the shed, shovelling, checking the snares that ringed the yard—it might have been him who stepped out into that twilit scene. But Grandfather liked splitting the wood himself.
When the back door slammed, Darius stood at its little window and watched. Axe in hand, the old man kicked through the snow to where the woodpile stood in the lee of the shed. He reached for an oversized piece and balanced it on the scarred face of the stump. Hoisted his weighted blade and let it fall.
Now and then the axe met a knot, or lodged in a stubborn streak of grain, forcing the old man to lift the whole works and bring it thudding down. More often than not, though, a single blow was sufficient. Pieces halved and sprang apart. He let them lie where they landed; it would be Darius’s job to gather and stack them after he was done.
“What are you doing, Darius?” Grandmother came up
behind him, bringing the smell of the soup she was making with her.
“Watching.”
They stood together then, her looking over his shoulder, touching him nowhere save with her breath at the back of his ear. It was a pretty picture they looked out on—tree boughs laden, the yard smothered and still. With no wind, the only movement came from the old man, the axe, the leaping wood.
Except there, on the roof of the shed.
Grandmother saw it when he did—he knew by the sharp inhale, the touch of her breath withheld. It had taken its time finding them; three years had passed since Grandfather had levered Darius down over the deer, showing him what teeth could do.
The length of the beast surprised him. Crouched low, it spanned the six-foot roof, its head at one edge, its muscled hind end at the other. Its tail rose and fell, a slow, shuddery dance. Its back hammocked down like a saddle, a hollow where some lucky child might hold on for dear life and ride.
As was to be expected in those parts, the lion had no mane. No matter. Just like in the story, the shorn face was
braver, and more beautiful, and more patient than ever
. Grandfather didn’t see this. He had his back to it. His breaking, straightening back. The three of them—beast, woman and boy—watched the man.
Grandmother didn’t say anything—how could she with no air in her throat?—and Darius found he too had no words. He thought of what he might do. There was the shotgun, but he’d never so much as picked it up.
The Lord help you if you lay a finger on it
. There were Grandmother’s kitchen knives,
which shrank to toothpicks in his mind; and there was the axe, already in Grandfather’s hands. Last but not least, there was Grandfather’s whipping belt—and wasn’t a whip the very thing men used for controlling lions? Men, yes, but boys?
It was then that Grandmother finally made a sound. Not a scream or even a squeal, but a sigh, the air leaving her body the same instant the cougar left the roof. The leap was golden. Grandfather took the brunt of it, the axe shooting from his grip. The impact alone would have been blinding, never mind the talons.
His huge and beautifully velveted paws
.
The cougar bent its head as though it would drink from a stream. Its brave and patient face opened wide.
See the neck, boy? Spinal cord snapped clean through
. It would all be over soon.
Or it would have, if Grandfather had been any other man.
When the cougar closed its jaws, it closed them not on flesh and bone, but on wood. The old man’s stand-in spine blocked the bite; more than that, it froze the bite in time. Jammed behind the killing canines, the board held the cougar fast. The cat wrenched and writhed, the old man thrashing beneath it in the snow.
Darius jumped when Grandmother’s hand landed on his shoulder. “God,” she breathed. “Please, God.”
For once the blind bastard in the sky was listening. As luck would have it, He misunderstood.
Somehow, despite the great twisting weight on his back, Grandfather began to crawl. While the cougar panicked, desperate to tear its face free, the old man worked his torn-open shoulders. The axe hadn’t flown far. Inch by inch, he wormed toward it. Groped through the snow until one hand, then the other, found the handle’s curve. The strength in those wrists
was inhuman. The blade shot up dark and glinting, and plunged into the cat’s yellow back.
Stretched on his belly, face down in the snow with a six-foot mountain lion bucking like a stallion on his back, Grandfather somehow retained the ability to think. To calculate, even. He lifted the wedge of his blade from the lion’s back and shortened his grip on the handle. Swung it down blindly again.
In Faye’s book, the children covered their eyes when it came time for the sacrifice. Not Darius. The lion in his story thrilled at the second touch of the axe, turning rigid, almost electric, before it slumped. Darius saw everything: the long, shapely handle of the axe suspended; the blade buried deep in the animal’s skull.
For a moment, nothing stirred. Then, like a dark fin surfacing, an arm bent at the elbow sliced up out of the snow.
“God help us,” Grandmother said, her fingertips digging under Darius’s collarbone.
As they stood staring, the old man levered up on the hand he’d planted. The cat shifted on his back, Grandfather shouldering, heaving, until the body capsized. Now the old man was on top. Still anchored to the cat, snow-caked and spluttering, he kicked like a beetle on its back.
“God help us,” Grandmother said again, releasing her grip. “Nothing can kill him.”
She’d gone for help—at least that was what Darius told himself. It seemed strange, though, leaving like that, without a word.
He’d turned at the sound of the front door slamming, stood stunned as the truck’s engine roared to life. Too late to
stop her, he caught only the tail lights winking away down the drift-choked road. Strange. Maybe shock could alter a person, make them thoughtless, even cruel.
If Darius knew anything, it was that his life depended on what he did next. He thought for a moment, decided to pull on his boots but not his coat. A coat would look as though he’d taken his time. His only chance was to be ignorant of all that had transpired, aware of nothing but the old man’s roar.
He acted the part admirably, bursting from the back door, stumbling like a mad thing through the snow. “Grandfather, Grandfather!” Drawing close enough to make out the fur-clad corpse, he let out what he judged to be a suitable scream.
“It’s all right, boy,” the old man said hoarsely. “It’s dead.” And Darius knew he was in the clear.