by Hailey Piper
White mist painted most of the windshield.
Margaret returned to digging. “It’s going to be a chilly night. Natalie’s body heat is just warming the car.” Her tone was dismissive, as if what she said was harmless, but she was painfully right. Natalie’s body heat became its own atmosphere at night and it was filling her car as night drew near.
The shovel hit a firm surface. Margaret exhaled so hard it came out as a guffaw. Then she gritted her teeth and growled, and her digging grew frantic. She was close in one spot, so she was close all around that spot. She just needed to clear the coffin’s upper half. Another fifty or so shovelfuls, maybe.
Her car squeaked again. Now the windshield and fellow windows were completely clouded up, obscuring the inside like the smoke of burning spruce wood. The sky eased into a quieter, darker hue.
“I won’t look again,” Margaret promised herself. “That’s a promise I’m keeping for me. Natalie, sweetie, please wait. Please.”
She plowed her shovel to the side of the casket. Blisters dotted her palms. Her arms weren’t willing to dig much longer. That was fine—she didn’t have much longer to make them dig. She was beginning to see the perimeter of the casket.
Her tires groaned, the car being jostled from the inside. Natalie’s body could manage her bedroom doorknob even with the lioness inside her, but maybe not car door locks. The next sound Margaret heard was a hand or foot or paw breaking one of her back windows.
She kept her mouth shut now, breathing as soft as she could while she continued to dig. The casket lid was almost clear enough to open. If she was quiet, perhaps the lioness would hunt elsewhere in the empty cemetery. Margaret could dig and breathe and sweat in peace.
Sweat. She’d been digging most of the day and sweated through most of it. Her blazer hung from the side of Nathaniel’s headstone, a blazer she’d already used to distract Natalie another night. Body and clothing reeked together. The lioness would smell it, sure as she smelled it last night and the night before.
Stiff, dry grass crunched beneath heavy steps.
Margaret fell to her hands and knees and swept at the lid of the casket. One hand fumbled for a latch. A simple, brass-colored clasp held the casket shut on the right side. She tugged, but it wouldn’t budge. There wasn’t time to figure out how to open it. She stood again, lifted her shovel high, and drove the head down on the lock. The clashing metal sang loud as a dinner bell.
If Natalie drew closer, Margaret didn’t hear her now. The lioness could be quiet too, like the other night when she crossed from kitchen to stairs. Wouldn’t want to alarm her prey. As if Margaret could crawl out of this hole fast enough to outrun a hungry, undead predator.
Only the ache in her legs and the stinging across her hands kept her from turning to useless jelly. Her fingers clawed at the edge of the casket and thrust it open. The smell hit her strong. She had to press her face into her arm and hide a cough. When she leaned over the open casket again, there was heat across her back. She didn’t dare look, not after keeping her promise this far.
Nathaniel had been dead ten months. Long enough to decompose, not long enough to be a skeleton. There was no hat on his head.
A growl rumbled just above. It quaked through Margaret’s bones and the dewy bones beneath her. She broke her promise to herself. There was Natalie, standing in her dreamlike stupor, the way she stood at the fridge that first night.
And at her side, head leaned down into the grave, stood the lioness, her golden gaze fixed on Margaret. The one who got away twice now. She would pounce tonight. She would feed.
Into the coffin. The thought turned Margaret’s stomach, but if she clambered inside with the body and closed the lid, she would be safe until pre-dawn when Natalie’s episode passed. The casket had to stand against all the earth. It could resist four hundred pounds of muscle and fury. It had to.
Margaret pressed her hands against Nathaniel’s clothes and his chest gave way beneath her. “It’s your fault,” she said. “You were supposed to have the hat. You did this to your family.”
The lioness tensed. Margaret didn’t have to look. She could feel those muscles, feel that black frown on the lioness’s snout curl open into a hungry maw. Saliva dripped onto the nape of Margaret’s neck, into her soiled hair. The lioness was practically alive tonight among the mounds of earth. Perhaps even Margaret had underestimated the power of the graveyard soil to unite the worlds of the living and the dead.
Her hands pawed across Nathaniel, pressed him to the side to make room. The stink made Margaret’s head swim. She couldn’t pass out here, no matter how exhausted and overwhelmed, not with the lioness above her. Her arm stretched into the lower half of the coffin.
Bristly fur stabbed at the blisters on her palm.
Of course Nathaniel didn’t wear the hat on his head. That would have looked crass at the wake and the funeral, as if the man’s pride was more important than his family’s mourning. The hat was tucked into the side of the casket, gently, lovingly. Margaret’s fingers seized it and tore back from inside the casket.
“I have it!” she snapped. She saw it for the first time as she sat up. That beautiful golden color, twisted into an ugly little round hat, the hair trailing down a little as if it was a coonskin cap made of lion.
On the slope of soil, the lioness hunched her back. About to strike. About to maul.
Margaret forced herself to stand. She thrust the hat at the lioness’s face. That golden gaze shined beyond the hat. The lioness didn’t understand. Her spirit obeyed instinct, and that instinct said hunt and feed, nothing more.
“This is what you wanted.” Margaret stumbled over the open casket. She was about to die. She knew it sure as the lioness knew she was about to eat. This wasn’t that night in the kitchen with Natalie and the crucifix, when untold possibilities stirred in the darkness. This was a surety. She owed a hundred apologies and wouldn’t have the chance to give a single one.
She pressed the hat only inches from the lioness’s face. The lioness inhaled its scent and neither she nor Margaret knew the graveyard anymore.
***
All she knows is the heat today.
It is immense. It is greater than hunger. She cannot wait for the others to return. She must drink. It is not a hunt. She is sloppy, but she only understands this later.
At the watering hole, the prey-beasts continue to drink despite her presence. She is not close, but not far. She is not interested in them and they know it. If one of the pride can be seen, then she is not a threat. If she wished to be a threat, she would not be seen. Always fear one of the pride that is unseen, as if she is always there.
One creature does not respect the ways of the watering hole. It is not a starving hyena and not an elephant in heatstroke. It is a man-beast. She has seen his kind before and knows the terrible fire and earth they spit from afar. He sees all there is to see at the watering hole, or so he thinks. He sees her, yes. He does not see her see him.
When he tries to sneak, when he tries to kill too close, she is on him. She comes to drink. Had he come to drink, she would have let him, but he comes to kill. So she must kill.
Or try to. The man-beast knows her kind. His fire and earth pierce her foreleg when she pounces at him. Her claw rips his chest, her teeth find his arm. Another peal of thunder puts his fire into her low places. This tells her to leave, but not before she’s taken a small piece from one limb. Then she disappears into the brush, her thirst not sated, her blood sating the thirst of the earth. She is dying.
She wants to go home. To wander is more important, to not lead the man-beast back to her. She believes the man-beast to be like one of the pride in this, to chase the weary, the injured, the sick across the grasses, to devour the prey.
The man-beast is different. She learns this only when her long, wayward travel finds her home. By then, she is weak with lost blood, with thirst. The sun above is merciless. Merciless as the man-beast.
The man-beast did not follow her trail of blood, but instead found th
e path she took to reach the watering hole and followed it to where she came from. To home. To where she left her three small ones.
They are missing.
If the man-beast’s fire was not killing her, she believes she might stay. Lost cubs can be replaced if their mother lives. Except she does not want to replace them. They were hers. They were the first she had and now the last. The male she made them with was young and soon driven from the pride by a stranger. Many nights she hid her small ones from this strange male. She took great pain to keep them alive in this world.
She cannot let them go. So, she begins to walk. The man-beast can track. She can track, too. She tracks his steps and the trails of the monstrous wheeled creatures that the man-beasts ride. He leads her through the grass and into a place where the man-beasts gather. There are young she can easily feed on, but she is not here for feeding. She is here for revenge.
The other man-beasts cry out when she enters their nest. The man-beast who stole her young hears the warning, is expecting her. He readies to spit fire and earth, the same that is killing her but has not killed her yet.
Again, she does not understand the ways of the man-beasts. They are not like the prey-beasts, and most importantly, they are not like the pride.
It is her small ones who give her pause. It is her small ones who kill her. They lay on a table. The man-beast has killed them.
If she understood the language of the man-beasts, she would hear that they had no intent to kill her small ones. They want cubs alive. There was an accident. A fall, because the man-beast who is killing her was too weak to carry the bag he stowed them in. She cannot comprehend. There is only heat and rage, thirst and starvation, and deep inside, an emotion she can barely understand. All those nights she protected them, only for their lives to end in this. She wants a greater destiny for her young. Too late. All for nothing.
The man-beast erupts and she feels the fire and earth again, this time through her neck. Blood cakes the fur down her limbs, her belly, and now it crosses her face. She watches the small ones’ faces. They are the last thing she sees in the living world.
And what comes after is hunger, fear, and hatred. She can see nothing else.
***
The lioness retreated from the edge of the hole. Nathaniel’s cap lay idle in the soil. The lioness growled low. Three mewling throats answered her. Where there were once only four legs, now three lion cubs circled and nuzzled.
Margaret stood steady and cautious. She remained fixed under that golden gaze, but the force of it slackened. The lioness looked confused, as if she hadn’t known what she was doing, hadn’t even remembered she birthed little ones or what happened to them when their mother crossed paths with Nathaniel Glasgow.
Natalie moaned. Margaret clambered up out of the hole just in time to catch her before she went careening into her father’s grave. She pulled Natalie back from the edge, across the soil mounds, and held onto her tight.
Natalie nestled her face into Margaret’s chest and began to cry. They were the same racking sobs as her mother.
“It’s alright,” Margaret whispered. “Everything’s okay now. You’re safe. Let it out. Good girl. You’ll be okay.” Over and over, as many times as Natalie needed to hear it, as many times as Margaret could say it. She rocked Natalie back and forth.
Her attention returned to the lioness and her cubs.
The lioness finally turned from her and Natalie. She pressed her face against each of her cubs and breathed deep the scent of them. They purred beneath her, chased at each other, no memory of what had happened to them.
Margaret hoped the same for Natalie.
The lioness uttered a rumbling purr and ushered the cubs ahead of her. They began to pad along, still playing, but headed east. Their mother brought up the rear, where she could keep an eye on them. Tonight and last night, she stalked with each step, a predator on the hunt. Now she strolled peaceably, her long tail swatting back and forth.
Behind her, she dragged a strip of fleshy material the way a hurried shoe might drag an unnoticed errant strip of toilet paper out of the restroom.
Margaret grasped Natalie’s head tight to her chest in case the girl stopped crying and tried to look. She couldn’t have her seeing this.
It was Nathaniel Glasgow. Part of him. No muscle, no inner tissue, no bones. He was only a skin, dragged by his leg at the hind foot of the lioness, an unmoving, powerless shadow. Almost all skin, a hide stripped from a body. On his face, most of it caved-in where a skull would have been in life, to the side of his now-shriveled hawkish nose, Nathaniel still had one wide eye. It looked this way and that, alert and pleading. No other part of him could move. It fixed a desperate stare on Margaret, or maybe on sobbing Natalie, but that was all it could do. Glance and stare and be dragged by the lioness.
Margaret stared back at him. He wanted help. It was outside her power to give. Everything he killed became a frayed yarn ball of fury, ready to snag anything it touched after he died. Perhaps even himself.
She watched his tearful eye until the lioness pulled him too far away in the dark to be seen. Her golden visage remained a moment longer, but then that, too, faded into the darkness with her three cubs.
A cool breeze set in across the graveyard and Natalie began to shiver in Margaret’s arms. It was going to be a chilly night.
About the Author
Hailey Piper was born in New York, and there began an endless obsession with monsters, ghosts, and all things that go bump in the night. She and her wife now live in the D.C. metro area, where she keeps her childhood nightmares alive by writing them down. She enjoys hopping between a dozen short story collections or devouring a novel in quick bites, no middle ground.
Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Black Rainbow, Neon Druid, The Bronzeville Bee, Planet Scumm, Blood Bath Literary Zine, and many more.
THE POSSESSION OF NATALIE GLASGOW, originally released as The Haunting of Natalie Glasgow, is her debut novella.
Visit www.haileypiper.com to keep an ear to the ground on what Hailey is working on, or find her on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays.
Table of Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
About the Author