A Hawk in the Woods

by Carrie Laben

  Briggs grabbed Abby by the upper arm, fingers pinching into flesh. “Get the other one,” he told the cop, and Martha’s flinch actually seemed to steady the other woman under Briggs’ control. Abby thought of school, and the weird ways that thinking they had power worked on the duck people.

  She didn’t have long to think about it, though, because Briggs started shoving. He was pushing her towards the guardrail, the cop and Martha close behind him and then Enoch covering the whole lot with his damn gun. When they came to the wooden fence, waist-high and painted a red a bit too bright and eye-catching to be a real wood tone, he kept pushing. For one heady moment Abby grew dizzy and tensed to struggle before she realized that throwing her down the slope into the river couldn’t possibly be part of their plan. They’d need her whole.

  Nevertheless, once she stepped over the guardrail it took a moment to gather her nerve back up. A person didn’t have to fall off a cliff on purpose to die at the bottom. She had no idea what the cop’s balance was like, Briggs and Enoch were in bodies they had only days or hours of familiarity with, and Martha was terrified. There was ledge enough to walk, here, and path enough to navigate down a little way on, but it would only take one round stone or turned ankle and they were clustered enough that they’d all go down together—or rather, Enoch would be left alone and thwarted looking at a crumpled mess of limbs below.

  She was being dramatic, she told herself. It wasn’t that much of a cliff, wasn’t even that much of a river.

  “It’s not much of a river,” Enoch said as he caught up to them and for a horrible moment she thought he could read her mind outright, but his attention wasn’t on her at all; he was just legitimately disappointed in the glistening band below them. “Why couldn’t we get closer to the sea?”

  “And do the rite at the edge of the waves? Without Nathaniel’s explicit permission? That would turn into the biggest family reunion since Halifax.” Briggs shook his head. “We need privacy for this.” He jabbed at Abby’s shoulder with his free hand, driving her towards the path that led down towards the water. She concentrated on her feet and didn’t allow the tendril shadows that came too far out from beneath the scrubby trees to distract her.

  Her eyes were still down when a hawk screeched above and she was too late bringing them up to see either man’s reaction. She’d just assumed, in the first rush of fear, that she’d been mistaken about the hawks earlier, that the birds were the tools of this pair the same as the cop, but the more she made herself think calmly the less likely it seemed. They couldn’t both have been in the hawks—Briggs at least would have been busy occupying #findCaiden—and it didn’t make sense. Not if they were following the shoggoth, which stayed under and alongside and in shadow and in secret. A soaring bird above the treetops could never trace it.

  Besides which, the hawk she’d killed had wanted to hurt them, not possess them.

  One problem at a time, she told herself. They were at the foot of the bluff now, on a nice paved new bike trail, the kind of thing that hopeful towns made out of abandoned railbeds and old rights-of-way. Further ahead, trees closed over the path into an arch that would suit the shoggoth far too well and didn’t suit Abby at all.

  Martha recognized the danger too, and slowed despite the cop’s shoving. This seemed to amuse Enoch.

  “Briggs,” he said, “I think our little cousin is afraid of the dark.”

  “She’s only right to be,” Briggs replied with a chuckle. “The dark woods aren’t safe for little girls. There might be a big bad wolf. Good thing you have two big strong Waite boys to protect you.”

  You cringe before an old man who pretends to be a prophet, Abby thought, a man who sends his own sons to bring him little girls or die trying. Even my mother alone was stronger than your whole soft-water family.

  The gestures Enoch made as they passed under the shadow of the trees were constrained, and he muttered words instead of yelling them. But the shadows shrank back instead of reaching for the group of soft vulnerable humans. So maybe that was one point for him over Mom after all.

  They came through the trees quickly, and Abby wasn’t sorry—even knowing the thing was constrained it was hard not to look for it in every moving leaf and ripple. Now the blacktop veered away—it didn’t track the main body of the river but an oddly straight tributary. An old canal, Abby guessed.

  It wasn’t easy to guess how far they walked, or how long it took, especially not with Martha as freaked out as she was. Certainly there was no more conversation, and though she considered herself to be in good shape she was tired and a little sweaty when they reached the cave. It was just a slot in the rock, vaguely and raggedly keyhole-shaped, nothing to draw attention to it as it sat near a bend in the path a bit beyond a cluster of picnic tables. Once Briggs and Abby were inside, he let go of her arm. There was no need to do anything to control her but let Enoch keep covering the entrance.

  When they got out of this, Abby thought, and they would get out of this, she was going to take that gun and carry it goddamn everywhere with her. She couldn’t possibly be as stupid with it as Enoch.

  “I told you this would work,” Briggs said to Enoch, in the tone of an old argument only continued because it must be; he wasn’t expecting a reply.

  But Enoch had too much pride to take it with good humor. “Hurrah, yes, lovely, we get to be a couple of rather stupid girls for the next devil knows how many decades.”

  “It hardly matters that they’re stupid now,” Briggs said airily. “And just imagine how popular you’ll be back at home!”

  Abby put a hand on Martha’s arm to steady her, and faked an aghast look to match her sister’s real one. And that, a stupid gross remark that might or might not have been a rape joke, was what finally broke Briggs’ hold on the cop. Abby saw the break and leaped in, not controlling the cop but channeling her, pushing her away from her natural inclination to see them all as bad guys now and forcing her to realize what her duck-brain had been avoiding, that she’d pulled a gun on a pair of innocents and committed a blatant kidnapping.

  This only enraged her at Briggs and Enoch more—she seemed to sense that they were to blame, though she didn’t know how.

  Briggs pushed back, of course, in moments and as hard as he could. But he wasn’t expecting Abby’s strength. The cop’s weapon cleared holster before Enoch even realized what was going on, and he went down with a bullet in his leg before he knew he was in danger.

  The noise in that enclosed space nearly deafened Abby and as much as Enoch’s pain delighted her, she couldn’t have any more gun play—the risk of a ricochet just seemed too great. She grabbed the cop and, mentally, pinned her wings as you would a flapping bird, soothing and restraining her. It would have worked, too, except for goddamn Enoch. His mind, outraged by both the pain and the fact that this being he’d been thinking of as his servant a moment ago had caused it, seemed to forget all about ricochets and for that matter the horrible noise they’d all just been subjected to. He barely aimed the gun before he shot.

  Of course he didn’t hit his target and of course the damn bullet ricocheted straight into Martha’s arm, Abby saw her fall to her knees and dropped down beside her to make sure she didn’t get stepped on in what was now as near to mass confusion as you could achieve with five people, the sounds of the shots still ringing in the rock and the cop clearly shouting but completely inaudible, drawing another bead on Enoch—who, at this point, could get shot all he wanted as far as Abby was concerned. Briggs was shouting too and between lip-reading and watching his mind she could see that he didn’t know who to be outraged at first, the cop for opposing his will or his nephew for damaging one of their precious new bodies.

  She also noticed what no one else could be bothered with—the shadow that briefly braved full sunlight just outside the cave to get to its now-distracted targets, the men who’d been keeping it at bay. She couldn’t have shouted a warning if she’d wanted to, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to until it was too late and a dark ten
tacle thick with toothed mouths latched itself to Enoch’s leg. The cave suddenly smelled exactly like their basement back home—a smell that Abby had always chalked up to the damp but now saw was something else entirely.

  Briggs lunged towards Enoch, still shouting inaudibly, and the cop, not understanding what she was seeing, assumed that he was going for Enoch’s gun and lunged towards him. Abby grabbed Martha’s hand, which was weak to clasp but still warm, and hoped that they would kill each other quickly, without any more stray bullets. If they did she could take care of the rest. She remembered the words.

  Martha made a strange strangled sound and Abby looked away from the fight to her sister, the enormous patch of blood now sheeting her arm and staining the edge of her sleeve, but she wasn’t hit in the center mass and certainly not in the lung, that would be impossible and so freaking unfair now when they needed each other so much…

  Of course, Abby didn’t just think about her social life and the weird dramas of the duck-people while all this was going on. She tried to figure out what Mom did with the bodies, too. She wasn’t made of stone.

  She had some ideas, naturally. Grandfather’s notebooks were full of important tips on how to put someone down so that they couldn’t come back up again on their own—it was one of the first techniques he’d had to perfect, of necessity. It wasn’t so hard with one of the duck-people, of course. Even if another Waite, or someone with similar powers, found a nice fresh dead duck-person body, they couldn’t get it out if it was buried in the right kind of earth and the spot was marked with the right kind of symbols—the kind of symbols that confused archaeologists down the years, carved in marble or granite, or seemed to disappear when scratched in soft earth or scribbled on paper and yet left a residue of power hanging in the air.

  With Waite bodies it was a bit trickier. Someone like Grandfather or the pop-eyed boy—or for that matter, someone like Abby herself—wouldn’t give up even when weakened to the point of death. Death just sort of seemed to irritate the Waites, offended them, pissed them off. They’d try anything to stave it off, even jumping back out of the grave a time or two before they rotted. Keeping another Waite dead was therefore an important skill for any Waite who wanted, themselves, to stay alive.

  The cleaver was the first tool you needed, Abby didn’t really have to be told that. Hard to jump out of the grave when your feet were someplace miles away from your head. It also made the holes you had to dig much smaller, and the body easier to transport, which was helpful when you needed to travel to find that right kind of earth. You also needed a shovel to dig in that earth, and salt for the grave—table salt was good, rock salt was better—and the strength to oppose a pissed-off, desperate Waite. Nothing hard to get, except the last one. And you needed a couple nice patches of that right kind of earth.

  The farm itself wasn’t, technically, the right kind of earth. When Grandfather had first come here, new-married and trying to evade his family, he’d needed someplace cheap and obscure and fast. He’d bought the first farm available that was even sort of right, and he’d sunk power into making it a place where he could live. The search for the cabin in Minnesota came later. In a way it had been the right decision, because no one had ever thought to look for them here until he’d let the shoggoth out in his fit of pride and anger.

  But that meant that Grandfather and the pop-eyed boy weren’t buried anyplace convenient. The earth here wouldn’t hold them down. Grandfather himself had proved that with what Abby now thought of, with a bit of a sneer, as his final experiment.

  “Where did you go?” she asked Martha one Saturday, trying to sound casual. She succeeded too well, because Martha just looked at her stupidly.

  “When Grandfather was in your body. You could tell when he was coming back. Could you tell how far he went, or in what direction?”

  At first it seemed like she’d veered from too casual to too direct, and that Martha was upset and would refuse to talk about it. She tried to act nonchalant, to preserve the idea that it hadn’t been weird to ask so she could try again later.

  Then Martha relented, or maybe she just remembered something she actually wanted to share. “A couple of times I could see, just for a second, what he was looking at with my eyes. Or however it worked.” She shuddered. “It wasn’t anything I recognized, much. A dead tree, or a creek or a swamp. One time he was driving and I saw a road sign for Wyoming County and I freaked out thinking I was actually driving and I was gonna crash.”

  Abby wondered how he’d thought he’d get away with it, how he didn’t expect to be pulled over as a nine-year-old girl driving his stupid giant Buick. And yet he had gotten away with it.

  But that was all Martha had—trees and water and driving away out into the sticks—and it was obviously useless to ask Mom. After a while she’d had to give up. Only, she told herself, until she herself could drive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Of course there was no real town to be found and they had to settle for Subway. Buddy started whining after about fifty miles. “Maybe he has to pee,” Martha suggested. That seemed plausible. Might actually be the first helpful thing she’d said since she got out of jail—although Abby had a vague recollection that she’d done something pretty clutch.

  Oh yeah, that. She was going to have to work to remember it, and that knowledge irritated Abby half to death.

  They pulled over and let him out. It wasn’t as muggy as Abby would have predicted, but still too hot for her liking. The grass exploded with brown grasshoppers that flew away on black-and-yellow wings as Buddy nosed around, wagging vigorously. “We should have saved the sandwiches,” Martha said. “We could have had a picnic.” Abby just nodded, thinking of how fast Martha had inhaled a foot-long, a bag of chips, the big chocolate cookie, the large soda. She thought of the grasshoppers leaping into their hair if they sat on the ground, of Buddy trying to snorfle up their food.

  Abby half expected the dog to run off through the fields, abandoning them to undertake some kind of Incredible Journey human-interest story trek back to Daines. That was what dogs did, wasn’t it? But he marked a telephone post and hopped back up into the truck obediently when Martha patted the seat.

  Martha crooned over him then, rubbing his ears and telling him what a good boy he was, and though it made Abby want to roll her eyes she had to admit she was a little pleased too. She snapped a picture of him and tagged it #dogsofinstagram and it was an instant hit, almost a head rush. With that under her belt Abby decided that the best plan was to just drive as long as she could and then find a Holiday Inn or something. She obviously couldn’t let Martha drive again. Not and make her explain at the same time.

  “So,” she said, leaving the opening as ambiguous as she could as she pulled back onto the road. “What was that all about?”

  Martha had the brass ones to look blandly confused for a moment, as though she was trying to figure out which ‘that’ Abby was referring to. Or maybe she couldn’t remember clearly any more than Abby could, and they’d never know—which raised horrible questions about everything Abby did remember, and for a moment she wanted to pull back over and sit still until she wasn’t dizzied by it. But then Martha straightened and said, “Oh! Of course.” She smiled; her cheerful pride was a palpable thing, the pride of a small child holding a large fish.

  “I mean obviously,” Abby said, hazarding a guess that wouldn’t run her too much risk of being wrong, “obviously you went far enough back to fix…”

  “I made sure you didn’t let that thing out,” Martha said with just a tiny gloat in her voice. She thought Abby was trying to avoid admitting an old mistake, not avoid making a new one. “So none of that ever happened. Ryan’s fine—except that we have his dog and truck, I guess. Daines isn’t blown up, no one got murdered back at home, we didn’t get arrested or shot at. All gone.”

  “And you can hold all that, and the fold that got you out of prison early. All at once, indefinitely.”

  “Well, no, that would be nuts. No one co
uld do that. I could barely even do the fold in the first place, when my arm hurt so bad.”

  “So…” Abby looked around her, at the road that could be anyplace, at the sky. “How long do we have? Will we know when it’s about to unfold?”

  “It won’t, I tied it off.” Martha was downright enjoying being the one who got to explain things for once, Abby could tell. It was irritating, but worth it to know what the hell was going on. “Grandma taught me but she said it was only for emergencies. You don’t just fold, you make a knot, and then it never unfolds and you can never go back past that point and fold it or change anything again.”

  Abby nodded, although she was only mostly sure she really understood.

  “That moment you closed the door, and everything before it—that’s permanent now. I can never go back there again. Not that we’d want to.”

  Abby nodded again. She’d closed the door, all right. One of the two main possibilities for fixing this shit had always been asking Martha to take them both back far enough that she could get diagnosed earlier, treated earlier—but that meant asking Martha to put herself back in prison, which seemed awkward. And now it was too late to ask. Which left only one possibility that Abby could see.

  Martha had no idea of any of this—it was irrational to be angry, it was Abby’s own fault she hadn’t opened the wine and had the conversation—but still, seeing her so pleased with herself over it was almost unbearable. Abby forced her face into a grin.

  “Of course now I have the world’s worst headache. And I’ll probably nap all day.” Martha had already settled back and down in her seat, leaning her head to one side. “But still. No one chasing us. No more of those stupid hawks.”

  Her eyes were already closed, and she couldn’t see what Abby saw—the dark rounded form on the telephone pole ahead, rising and soaring out to pace them.

  The time that Abby thinks of as “when we were normal”—the time after grandfather and after the pop-eyed boy, the time when Mom had a job, a few work friends who would drop by or take her out for drinks, when besides reading and re-reading that handful of saved notebooks Abby spent her afternoons eating microwave burritos and watching TV and playing Duck Hunt with Martha—is in her mind a short historical aberration. But when she tries to put her finger on it, things didn’t get fucked up again in any specific way until they were fifteen, nearly sixteen.