by Ellen Datlow
“I wasn’t sure,” Hunter said.
“No, it totally works,” Carl said. “Gives a real, ‘You’re going to suffer a horrifying death here’ vibe.”
“Exactly what I was aiming for.”
They advanced quickly, Hunter aiming for a group of three pines beside a recliner. About four feet up, the trunk of the middle tree had been scored with a series of short, shallow cuts, forming a symbol somewhere between a diamond and an eye. Hunter gestured at the mark. “All right. That’s one of the runes Annie’s using to stitch everything together. We can use them to guide us. More importantly, you can follow them out of here.”
“I thought I was supposed to be whooshed to safety.”
“That’s the plan, but I figure we should have a backup.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
In the middle distance, a larger pine was faintly visible. Skirting an end table, Hunter set off toward it. The snow had returned to large, damp flakes, which dropped around them in slow, lazy motions. To the left, a shape appeared: a brown box, big enough to hold a washing machine. On the side facing them was written HUNTER in childish letters. “Jesus,” Carl said. Hunter did not comment.
The same blend of diamond and eye stared at them from the second tree’s bark. Hunter brushed it with his fingertips. “Okay,” he said. “The next part is tricky. We have to walk in a more or less straight line until we come to a tree that’s forked at the base. It shouldn’t be too far, but distances can be tricky, here. The important thing is to maintain our direction.”
Carl nodded. He switched the knife to his left hand, flexed the fingers of his right. “After you.”
Two steps from the tree, the mist congealed, rendering Hunter dim, insubstantial. In the dim light, the red figures written on his skin appeared clearer, as if the mist were a lens bringing them into sharper focus. Carl had the momentary impression the symbols were carrying Hunter, a mix of strange creatures and unfamiliar characters taking him through the mist. “You with me?” he said. The mist muffled his voice, making him sound farther away.
“Yes, sadly.”
First on the left, and then the right, Carl heard the click of claws on hardwood. They were being paced, by several animals, from the sound of it. Glances to either side showed only mist. He returned the knife to his right hand. “Hey,” he said.
“I know,” Hunter said. “Nothing to do but keep going.”
Now the claws were behind them, as well. The skin between Carl’s shoulders tingled. He said, “I thought you were supposed to be camouflaged.”
“Who says it’s me they’re tracking?”
“Great.”
Another box, this one tall and narrow, loomed directly in front of them. “Shit,” Hunter said. HUNTER’S FRIEND was scrawled on it. Carl’s mouth went dry. He approached the box, reached out his hand to touch the words. The mud in which they were written was still damp. He wiped his fingers on his jeans. He felt his distance from Melanie, the girls, from everything he knew, a gap vast and profound. The claws herding them slowed but did not stop. Cold filled him, his interior weather mirroring the exterior conditions. “Oh,” he said, “I am fucked.”
“Not yet, you’re not,” Hunter said. He stepped closer to Carl, caught his elbow. “Come on.” Carl nodded, allowed Hunter to tug him around the obstacle.
On the other side of the box, the dogs struck. To the right, claws scrabbled on the floor. Raising his left hand to guard, dropping his right to stab, Carl pivoted at the sound. As he did, another set of claws raced at him from the rear. He half turned in that direction, and the first dog smashed into his left knee. The pain was instant, overwhelming, taking him from his feet. Although he landed on his elbows, adding injury to injury, he held on to the knife. With the shock broadcasting from his leg, it was the most he could do. His assailant continued into the mist, as did the decoy, passing close enough for him to feel the drum of its paws through the wood. In this position, he was horribly defenseless, his back open to the teeth of the next attacker, but he could not move, could not draw sufficient breath to voice the curses streaming through his head: Fucking fuck oh motherfucker fuck me you fucker fuck.
Laughter burst around him, a shrieking choir whose volume suggested it issued from a hundred throats. Had it not been for the hurt, his nerves would have glowed with fear. As it was, he registered the approximate number voicing their delirium and added one more curse to his mental litany: Shit.
Hunter crouched beside him. “What happened?”
“My knee,” Carl said, nodding at it.
He felt Hunter’s hands on his leg. “No sign of a bite or cut.”
“No. Hit it with their head.”
“Right,” Hunter said. He caught Carl under the armpits, started to lift. “Let’s go. You don’t want to stay here.”
Of course he was right. With Hunter’s help, Carl pushed himself to standing. His knee protested, but took his weight.
“You need to lean on me?” Hunter said.
“I think I can manage.”
Accompanied by the laughter, and under it, the snicker of claws on wood, the two of them resumed their trek. The snow had tapered to scattered flakes, which circled them like moths. Cold numbed Carl’s fingers, ears, face, made his nose run. He passed the knife back and forth between his hands, tucking whichever hand was free under the opposite armpit to warm it. At least the movement helped the pain radiating from his knee, allowing him to breathe more freely. But as the hurt ebbed, a tide of dread pushed in to take its place. A solid shot from one of those things and he was left helpless. How was he supposed to handle the laughing horde trailing them?
A red pine materialized in the mist, split at the foot into a pair of thick trunks whose lower branches were barkless, dead. On the trunk to their left, Carl recognized the diamond/eye symbol. The right fork was inscribed with the figure, too, but this one was surrounded by a tall rectangle, above and below which were cut short horizontal lines. Hunter stood beside the left trunk and pointed into the mist at about a forty-five degree angle from where they were standing. “This way,” he said, and set off in the new direction.
At first, Carl thought it was his imagination, or an acoustic trick played by the moisture around them, but as they left the latest signpost behind, so did the laughter diminish in intensity. He wouldn’t have sworn to it, but it seemed to be moving away from them. For a brief time, individual yips and screams continued to sound perilously close, and then the only noise was his and Hunter’s feet on the floor. He said, “Is this the part where I say it’s too quiet?”
“Another one of Annie’s tricks,” Hunter said. “Won’t last forever, but it’ll allow us to put some room between us and the dogs.”
The mist was thinning, trees coalescing to either side. Hunter veered slightly to the right, to a young pine whose slender length bore the familiar mark. At the tree, he turned ninety degrees to the left and continued walking. “You know,” Carl said, “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to remember this route.”
“Relax,” Hunter said. “You won’t have to, remember?”
“And if something goes wrong? What happened to the contingency plan?”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Hunter said. “We made it this far, didn’t we? Jesus, when did you become such a worrywart?”
“Two kids and one business ago.”
“It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Why do you have to be like this?”
“Because I’m the one looking at a future as the chew toy of the damned.”
On their left, a collection of geometric silhouettes, smaller rectangles and larger squares, appeared through the mist. Another couple of steps, and the shapes resolved into a series of shoeboxes stood on end, forming a half circle before a pair of square boxes. Beyond this arrangement, further boxes were visible, clusters of low boxes interspersed in front of a line of bigger boxes, which were joined in what might have been a tunnel whose ends continued into the mist. Behind the tunnel, assorted boxe
s stacked three, four, and even five high formed precarious towers. Here and there, a birch rose in the midst of the constructions. Clearly, this was the box fort of Hunter’s story, but it had grown from fort to metropolis, its full dimensions obscured by the mist. There appeared to be writing on some of the boxes, but between the distance and the mist, Carl could not read any of it. He said, “Wow.”
“Natalie was never one for half measures.”
“I can’t help thinking how cool this looks. Is that crazy?”
“You have to respect her dedication.”
They proceeded within sight of the cardboard city for ten minutes, more, past long, narrow boxes balanced to form a succession of archways, past a massive collection of coffee-mug-sized boxes meticulously layered into a ziggurat whose flat top stood as high as Carl’s head, past tiny jewelry boxes arranged upon the floor in great spirals and stars. Mixed with his admiration and dread, Carl was aware of a new emotion, pity, for a child whiling away the endless days of her afterlife in yet another game. “Do you suppose,” he said, “your sister has anyone else with her? Not the dogs, I mean another person.”
Hunter shrugged. “My previous trip, she was the only one I saw. It’s hard for me to imagine her tolerating another kid for very long. If an adult wandered into this place, I expect she’d consider them a threat to her authority.”
“She must be lonely, though.”
“Yeah, well, she’s kept herself busy, hasn’t she?” Anxiety strained Hunter’s words.
“Is it much further?”
As if in answer, Carl saw a trio of red pines ahead. The trees on the right and in the center bore Madame Sosotris’s symbol. Hunter strode between them. Carl followed. “We’re most of the way there,” Hunter said.
“That’s good. Right?”
Instead of replying, Hunter stopped. Carl was on the verge of asking him what was wrong, when he saw the girl standing directly in front of them, a large animal behind her.
Natalie Kang might have been any nine- or ten-year-old entering an early growth spurt, all long skinny arms and legs. Her thick black hair reached past her waist and was in need of a brush. She was barefoot, wearing denim shorts and a red long-sleeved T-shirt. A cardboard crown circled her hair. Looking at her there in front of them, Carl was reminded of his daughters at that age, brimming with energy, possessed of surprising depths of melancholy and reflection, as well as titanic mirth. She was much smaller than he remembered, which was a ridiculous observation, because he had glimpsed her just the night before, but Hunter’s stories had caused her to grow in Carl’s memory to a raging monster, twelve feet tall.
When she shifted her large brown eyes from her brother to Carl, however, any reassurance her appearance might have caused withered. The gaze she directed at him was of pure, distilled malice, of hatred concentrated into its coldest form. He thought of Deb and Karen unhappy, of the rages they could fly into, the expressions of raw anger that would lower their brows, straighten their mouths. What was scalding him now like a jet of liquid nitrogen was the same emotion focused over decades, refined to a degree far in excess of what was humanly possible, tolerable. Briefly, he had wondered if Hunter might have misjudged his sister, misinterpreted her actions; now, he saw, his friend had not. Her eyes swung to Hunter, and it was as if Carl’s skin warmed.
“You’re naked,” Natalie said. Her eyes narrowed, as if she was attempting to decipher the characters on Hunter’s skin. Something was off about her voice; it had a worn quality, as if it had been too long at the same pitch. Carl found it simultaneously frightening and sad.
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “Hi, Nat.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said. She raised her chin. “I am Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs, and you are trespassing in my kingdom. Who is this?” She pointed at Carl.
“He’s a friend. He agreed to come with me on my way through here.”
“Why does he have a knife?”
“To protect himself. There are some pretty scary things in these parts.”
“You mean my dogs.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’re right,” Natalie said, “he should be afraid of them.” She glanced behind her, and the creature at her back crept into view.
At the sight of it, Carl’s stomach dropped, and despite himself, he said, “Jesus Christ.”
The size of a big dog, a Great Dane or an Irish wolfhound, it slunk close to the floor, slender limbs out to either side like an enormous insect. Its hide was the damp white of flesh left days under a Band-Aid. Its head was awful, a pair of jaws distended by a cage of fangs the length of Carl’s hand. Eyeless, it tasted the air with a fluttering white tongue whose edges were ragged from its teeth. A low chuckle rolled from its throat. The Hungry Dog positioned itself in front of Natalie, sitting as best the awkward arrangement of its limbs would allow, and turning its monstrous head in search of the palm she laid on it. She said, “This is Sam.”
“Hi, Sam,” Hunter said.
“Don’t talk to him,” Natalie said, her words laced with contempt. “He’s mine.”
“Okay,” Hunter said, hands held out in apology, “I’m sorry.”
“They’re all mine,” Natalie said. “Now you are too.”
“Can we talk about that?”
“No.”
Left hand low, palm forward, right hand holding the knife close to his body, Carl slid next to Hunter, who said, “Are you sure? I’m going to the summer country; maybe you could come with me.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To see Mom and Dad.”
“Them? They let me die.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“Shut up,” Natalie said. “When I got sick, I asked them if I was going to die. ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘we would never let that happen.’ I did everything they told me to. I took their stupid medicine, which made me feel terrible. All my hair fell out. And it didn’t work. I died anyway. Before I did, Mom and Dad promised me I was going to heaven. ‘You’ll be lifted up by angels,’ they said, ‘and brought straight to Jesus. You’ll see Grandpa Hugh again.’ But there weren’t any angels. I didn’t see Jesus, or Grandpa Hugh. I wound up here. I saw a box fort and stopped at it. I didn’t know where I was. I thought I was in Hell. I didn’t know why; I didn’t know what I had done. For a long time, I was so scared. Then I got tired of being afraid and got mad.” Natalie lifted her hand from the dog (Sam) and he lurched to his feet. She said, “I knew when Mom and Dad died. I was ready for them. I was going to show them this place. I was going to ask them why they’d lied to me. I was going to make them apologize. Only, I missed them. Both of them. I went to find them, and I couldn’t. It was like they didn’t want to see me. Don’t you think they would have? Don’t you think they would have come looking for me?”
“I’m sure they did,” Hunter said. “After I returned from here—after I was resuscitated—you were the first thing Mom asked me about. ‘Did you see Natalie?’ she said while we were in the ambulance.”
“She did?”
“Yes, really.”
“What did you tell her?” Eagerness blended with Natalie’s anger, softened the stern cast of her features.
“I said I’d seen you.”
“Did you tell her about my kingdom?”
“No, I did not.”
“Why not?”
“To be honest, I was pretty freaked out by it. I thought Mom would be too.”
Natalie’s face hardened. “So even if she had wanted to find me after she died, she couldn’t have, because you didn’t tell her the right place to look.”
“Whoa,” Hunter said. “Hang on a minute.”
Carl didn’t pick up on the exact cue Natalie employed, but he caught the dog rocking back, gathering himself to leap, and pushed in front of Hunter as the creature sprang. For an instant, the Hungry Dog hung in the air, his abundance of fangs spread wide. Ice water flooded Carl’s chest. Sam drew nearer in fits and starts, as if in a series of slide
s caught in a stuttering projector. Somewhere inside Carl’s head, a voice was saying, Move move move move move. When the dog was an arm’s length away, he did. Aiming for Sam’s throat, he snapped the knife straight out, exhaling sharply as he twisted his right hip into the strike. The dog came in lower than he anticipated, however, and the knife drove into Sam’s open mouth, piercing his tongue and lower jaw. Fangs tore Carl’s hand as the dog jerked his head left in an attempt to avoid the weapon that had already wounded him. His momentum carried him into Carl, who released the knife and stumbled backward, thudding against Hunter and knocking the two of them to the floor. Sam landed next to them, thumping on his side, and immediately started wailing, a frantic cry halfway to a laugh. On his ass, Carl scooted clear of the thrashing dog, colliding with Hunter and forcing him back too.
“Dude,” Hunter said when they were a safe distance, “your hand.”
Carl raised it. It was bright red with blood streaming from the furrows Sam’s fangs had dug in it. “Jesus.” His head swam. He was aware of pain, incredible pain, astonishing pain, the moment his ravaged hand came into view, but he was more concerned that neither his thumb nor his middle finger seemed capable of movement. Nausea fought with panic in his throat.
“Holy shit,” Hunter said.
At first, Carl thought his friend was commenting on his hand, until he saw what was happening to Sam. All over him, the dog’s pale flesh was quivering, losing its solidity, becoming gelid, sliding partway from his limbs and torso onto the floor, then regaining its integrity and retracting up his frame. In some places, what reformed was not the shape of the Hungry Dog, but of a child, a seven- or eight-year-old, Carl would have guessed. An arm, a leg, a hand, a foot, a shock of curly red hair, a green eye wide with agony and fright, all blended with the dog’s monstrous features, while he continued his laughing wail, pawing at but unable to dislodge the blade buried in his lower jaw.
“Hush,” Natalie said, and Sam’s cry diminished to a whimper. Mingled with his whining were sounds that might have been words; Carl thought he could pick out, “Hurts.” Natalie crouched in front of the dog, her left hand on his head, her right reaching amidst his fangs to grab the handle of the knife. She murmured something to Sam, too low for Carl to hear, and tore the knife from his mouth with a downward stroke that split his lower jaw to the throat. Carl and Hunter shouted. The halves of his jaw flapping, pinkish blood venting from his open neck, Sam reared on his mismatched hind legs and fell over. His eye rolled frantically, then fixed. He sighed, shuddered, and was still. His body began to slide apart.