Haunted Legends (33 page)

•  •  •

But foxes
do
eat children. They eat boys and girls as easily as they eat women and men. They’ll do it and they won’t regret a thing.

The truth of it is that foxes will eat everything and everyone. They’ll eat your entire village, and then, just as a gesture of kindness, they’ll plow any freestanding structure into the earth to erase any hint of your existence. The foxes are demolishers. They want to do to you what the disease and the colonizers did to them. They do it without any remorse. They do it swiftly,
but often, they pause for just long enough for you to understand what’s happening. They do it to raise and then eradicate consciousness. They are vicious and cruel.

But they save one. With every village they destroy, their pack, their family grows, slowly. Now they have an army of foxes.

•  •  •

Khanh’s mother was diligent. She went from door to door and gathered the village women. She didn’t know what to do. No one else did either, but they still gathered and talked. Each woman told her version of the fox legend. Khanh’s mother thought that in the gaps of the different versions of the legends, there could be some secret, something to save them all, but as each woman spoke, it became evident that nothing could be done, that they were all doomed, and worst of all, it became clear the foxes would not choose her son to join them. The foxes didn’t want men in their ranks; they didn’t need another man to kill them all over again.

•  •  •

The problem with the colonizers, which is a problem with all colonizers in general, is that the land they colonize is not their own. They don’t know what belongs and what doesn’t. They don’t acknowledge the customs because they don’t know them. So when the colonizers hanged those seven sick women, they didn’t stop to think about the process of death, they didn’t think about where the bodies should be interred, and they certainly didn’t think of the possible repercussions.

But it wasn’t out of malice that they hanged these women. That would be a complete misunderstanding. No, the colonizers were afraid. They were certain the devil was trapped in these women, behind the black flesh and protruding cage of bones.

The colonizers didn’t notice that after they’d hanged the women the corpses just disappeared. With all those dead bodies in the village, the colonizers had so much to do, and these women, they were simply lost in the shuffle, and yet still, they should have noticed. But that was the way it was. These seven pregnant women, after surviving the disease and encountering these colonizers, after being hanged and certainly certified dead, simply vanished.

It was only a few weeks later that the foxes appeared. Of course, the colonizers didn’t notice them either.

The disease creates huge blisters on what is left of the body. They grow to the size of a fist. Inside, you can see little spots swimming in the pus. If you’re conscious enough to see them, you know that those spots
are
the disease, but by the time the blisters come, your brain is already soup and the only thing you can actually think to feel is pain.

Khanh’s mother was right that the foxes had their eye on her house, but they didn’t want her son. To them, he was a pathetic epitome of the colonizers. No, they wanted her.

The day the foxes attacked her village, it was silent.

The day the foxes attacked her village, the sun was out and shining brightly. The villagers knew something big was coming: the sun never lit their town with such clarity.

And then, they came. The foxes came.

•  •  •

The night before the foxes came, all the women in the village dug small but deep holes around their houses. They placed sharp stakes at the bottom and
covered them with straw and hay. They stocked their homes with gasoline and matches. They sharpened their knives and hid their children in rooms they’d built under their houses. These women were ready. The foxes would have a force to be reckoned with in them.

•  •  •

When my father tells the story, he says, “It was the colonizers that brought the disease.” My father says, “The disease was like a warning sign.” He says, “The disease was merciful to those it killed.”

He says all of this and yet he took the colonizers’ religion.

When my mother tells the story, she says, “The foxes can come at any time. You should always be ready.”

•  •  •

The disease came only a week before the colonizers arrived. By the end of that week, only seven women survived. They were the ones the disease rejected.

•  •  •

The day the foxes arrived, the women hid their men and children. When the foxes arrived, only the women stood strong. The foxes came into their village and began killing.

Khanh’s mother watched from her kitchen window as the foxes leapt over the holes, as they dodged the gasoline and matches. She watched as the foxes simultaneously pirouetted through their front windows.
It’s beautiful,
she thought. She saw blood cascade, and she heard the foxes enter the basements. She heard the children and men scream and then, there was silence. It had all happened within minutes. She had barely breathed.

Then, before she even knew they were in her house, she too had a tail.

•  •  •

There are warning signs, but no one can decide what they are with any certainty. Some say that it becomes incredibly hot. Others say that insects swarm. Others insist that the night sky becomes devoid of any light.

Either way, it’s clear that the foxes control nature.

•  •  •

When my mother tells the story, she tells me that my great-great-grandmother once saw a village the foxes hadn’t completely demolished. My mother says, “She could barely tell it was a village. The houses all had large cracks running along their sides, where the foxes had rammed their heads with the force of
earthquakes. Inside each house, the family was lined up—Mother and Father side by side, the children curled in the fetal position at their feet.” She says, “Your great-great-grandmother saw one family and only one family where the mother was missing.”

When my mother tells the story, she says, “The fields had nothing in them. They were mounds of dirt. There were no animals. There were no plants, not even grass. There weren’t even insects. The whole town was nothing but collapsing buildings and dead people.”

When my father tells the story, my mother’s story has no credence. When my father tells the story, there are no surviving villages. Not even one.

•  •  •

Khanh was a good boy. He was smart and loving, but he was not immune. The foxes killed him like they would anyone else. He was not special.

•  •  •

My great-great-grandmother saw this when she was just a little girl. She also played the Foxes game. One day, she was chosen as the newest fox initiate, and as a reward, her fox friends took her to see this ransacked village. They took her to see her destiny. My great-great-grandmother, after seeing this, stopped talking. She could barely eat. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw all the dead faces, serene and accepting. She saw the one cocoon missing a piece and dreamt.

•  •  •

The only time the foxes did not take a new fox with them was the very first time they killed. They were newly born, undeveloped, not fully sophisticated. Back then, they killed out of necessity. They killed for survival and revenge. They did not have a message. They did not have a politic. They simply wanted to ravage the men that had done the very same thing to them.

The first time the foxes killed, the colonizers had been settled for decades. They’d made children and dispersed them across the land. The foxes had waited too long, and as such, they decided, right then, right when they saw the faces of the colonizers, to devote the rest of their lives to fighting everything they’d created.

•  •  •

Now, my children play the Foxes game. They run around and dance in these elaborate rituals. I don’t remember my games being so sophisticated. When
they run home to me, I tell them not to worry. I tell them that the foxes won’t hurt them, that they’re not real, but even as I say this, it takes all the strength I have not to show them my lush and beautiful tail.

Afterword

My parents have created this mythology about my childhood, one that I don’t remember, one that I have no proof of whatsoever, but one of the most prominent mythologies tells the story of a little girl version of me with a bowl haircut. I’m young, although I’m not sure exactly how old I am. Surely, I am no older than three or four years old. I hold a book in my hand, a book of folktales written in both English and Vietnamese. When strangers come to my house, my parents put the book in my hand and I read. I read out loud. I read first in English. People ooh and aah. Then I read the very same story in Vietnamese. Then, everyone is speechless. They are amazed. I am a genius. I make my parents proud. I am proud that I can make them proud.

Laird Barron’s work has appeared in such publications as
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCIFICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy,
and
Lovecraft Unbound.
It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s-best anthologies. His debut collection,
The Imago Sequence & Other Stories,
was the winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.

Every autumn for a decade, several of the Redfield Girls, a closeknit sorority of veteran teachers from Redfield Memorial Middle School in Olympia, gathered for a minor road trip along the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest. Traditionally, they rented a house in a rural, picturesque locale, such as the San Juan Islands or Cannon Beach, or Astoria, and settled in for a last long weekend of cribbage, books, and wine before their students came rushing into the halls, flushed and wild from summer vacation. Bernice Barber, Karla Gott, Dixie Thiess, and Li-Hua Ming comprised the core of the Redfield Girls. Li-Hua served as the school psychiatrist, and Karla and Dixie taught English—Karla was a staunch, card-bearing member of the Dead White Guys Club, while Dixie preferred Neruda and Borges. Their frequent arguments were excruciating or exquisite depending on how many glasses of merlot they’d downed. Both of them considered Bernice, the lone science teacher and devourer of clearance sale textbooks, a borderline stick in the mud. They meant this with great affection.

This was Bernice’s year to choose their destination and she chose a rustic cabin on the shores of Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula. The cabin belonged to the Bigfish Lodge and was situated a half mile from the main road in a stand of firs. There was no electricity, or indoor plumbing, although the building itself was rather comfortable and spacious and the caretakers kept the woodshed stocked. The man on the phone told her a lot of celebrities had stayed there—Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Elizabeth Taylor, and at least one of the Kennedys. Even some mobsters and their molls.

Truth be told, Dixie
nagged
her into picking the lake. Left to her own devices, she would’ve happily settled for another weekend at Ocean Shores or Seaside. Dixie was having none of it: ever fascinated with the Port Angeles and the Sequim Valley, she pushed and pushed, and Bernice finally gave in. Her family homesteaded in the area during the 1920s, although most of them had scattered on the wind long since. She’d lived in Olympia since childhood, but Dad and Mom brought them up to the lake for a visit during the height of every summer. They pitched a tent at a campsite in the nearby park, and fished and swam in the lake. Dad barbecued and told ghost stories, because that’s what one did when one spent a long, lonely night near the water. Bernice and her husband, Elmer, made a half dozen day trips over the years; none, however, since he passed away. Lately though, she thought of the lake often. She woke in a sweat, dreams vanishing like quicksilver.