Instead

by Jason McIntyre

  That’s when Farrah could see the oozing wound in Dad’s side, right around where his kidney might have been. “Daddy!” Farrah screamed. Doug said nothing. His breathing was shallow. Farrah bawled. Through her streaming vision, she saw the stranger return to her, standing as tall as he could and smoothing his patchy hair back with bloody and wet hands. He looked her up and down.

  “Now,” the stranger said in his thick, scratchy voice. Farrah strained against her wailing sobs and against the burning of the muscles in her chest and arms. “I have everything set up. Your ma, she’s been kind enough to set this lil blind date of ours up. Let’s not disappoint.”

  He clapped his hands a fourth time and sauntered off in the vague direction of the where he’d stood when Farrah and the men had first entered the clearing. Tugged by the will of the dogs, who each clenched a piece of the ropes binding her, Farrah was made to follow.

  9

  It was as though the dozens of dogs that had sprung up from the ground under their blanket of new snow had been nothing but a dream. This whole period of two days had been one sprawling dreamscape.

  At least that’s how it felt. Farrah strained against the ropes to try and look back at where Gramps and Dad lay tied in the muddy section of the clearing.

  She got a glimpse, but nearly fell when the animals seemed to feel the resistance in her arms. They yanked harder, accordingly. She stumbled but caught herself when the dogs instantly gave her slack. They functioned like a machine, designed only to shepherd her down the wintery path.

  They gurgled and growled. But they acted in concert, like one mind was being shared between them all. That batch tugged on her in that direction, and this batch pulled this way. The movement was sloppy and bouncy but they got her moving behind the stranger at a relative pace.

  The stranger didn’t look back.

  They left the clearing and wound through a path that Farrah hadn’t been down since she was a girl. That was when she’d go for long walks with Grandpa Danny and Bazzy. Baz would sniff or pee on everything. Grandpa would show her meadow frogs and they’d see birds and learn which berries could be eaten. In this moment, being led to her death, Farrah felt so far away from those times.

  The cold of the morning bit into her wet cheeks and stung her teary eyes. She blinked hard and tried to focus. Morning light was coming, and the forest was brighter than it had been when the trio had set out from the back kitchen door of the house to find Mom.

  On the mainland, you heard stories. All the girls in Farrah’s dorm talked about how they knew someone who knew someone who’d been out at a bar late into the morning and decided to walk home, how that girl had never turned up, or had, but only after someone had forced himself on her in a dark alleyway or some back room.

  Never did Farrah think that she was in such danger. Not there. And never here. At home. On the island where she grew up. And in the exact trails where her grandpa and his dog had walked for hours in the heat of summer.

  The trail wound and wound. The stranger stayed silent. The dogs gnashed and bit at the ropes they towed. They came to the small creek and went over the soggy foot bridge. Farrah started weeping uncontrollably when she saw her Grandma Kit’s second pink slipper, muddy and discarded on the icy surface of the bridge. She stepped over it. It can’t have laid there more than a half hour.

  Ahead of her, the wild dogs kept tugging Farrah along by ropes that bound her wrists.

  10

  Ahead, the stranger emerged from the path into a new clearing. This one was much smaller than the one close to the Hellegarde house. Across from her, Mom stood in her own mother’s pink housecoat. She had her hands clasped in front of her and stood half turned away from the coming stranger and the arrival of the eight dogs towing her daughter. She looked serene, as though she stood at a grave that brought fond remembrances. She stared up at the treetops in the direction of the pending sunrise where the sky was beginning to lighten.

  “Mom!” Farrah hollered, never more happy to see anyone, ever before.

  As the dogs pulled her closer, her view widened to encompass these new surroundings. Mom stood in front of the gaping mouth of a cave, jutting from the rocks with a dusting of white around the black maw of its cavern.

  The dogs seemed to lessen their force. They didn’t depart but they grew weaker in their control. “Mom?” Farrah called, this time with hesitation.

  Now Mom turned towards her. It was her, certainly it was, but her face was somehow…different. It was her eyes. They were glazed over like Bazzy’s had been from the cataracts. “Honey?” Mom said. “Is that you?” She reached out. Mom was blinded.

  “I can’t see you, honey,” she said. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Mom,” Farrah said as the dogs brought her near to her mother.

  The stranger went over to the opening of the cave. He reached down and picked something up from the ground. It was a bouquet of flowers. Only the flowers were long dead. They hung in drooping collections of squished black heads that only showed a hint of the colour they might have once had. He held the bouquet out to Farrah but she only looked back at Mom.

  Disgusted by her refusal, he tapped his wrist even though he wasn’t wearing a watch. “Tick-tock, ladies,” he said. “Time’s a wastin’.”

  “Mom, who is he? What does he want?”

  “Oh child,” Kathy said as though the girl had no idea how the world really worked. “Your dad told you about the redheaded man. I told you about him. He’s not here anymore…his job was done. He was supposed to round up a few of us. Frank here was one. I came out to see him last night when he called to me. He’s ready for you now.”

  “Mom—I—” Farrah stammered. “I don’t get any of this.” She threatened to cry again but held it. She was determined to make some sense of this…madness.

  “You might never get it all, dear,” Mom said in a dreamy voice, as though she might still be asleep. “I don’t. I only ever got my tiny piece. But here’s the truth of that piece. I was never crazy, Farrah. Your dad thought I was, but he was wrong. Your mom, she was always of sound mind. The redheaded man was real. Just like Frankie here—” She gestured in a vague way towards Frank who took a stage bow. “I went after your father with the kitchen knife because the redhead, he was in here—” she tapped her forehead with one slender index. “But he either miscalculated, or he didn’t want me to be nabbed. Your father did exactly what I knew he would. It was part of my plan. To plant the idea for the redhead. So I could get away. So your dad would send me away. I didn’t want to hurt him, no no no, but I couldn’t stay and I knew this was my chance. It might not make sense to hear that but, oh, I was all kinds of right in the head. I knew what would happen if I didn’t escape. The redheaded man would take me. Like Frank here finally has...

  “Sad thing is, honey—” A single tear rolled down her cheek from one of her milky-white eyes, which only showed a hint of the corneas below its glaze. “—I didn’t understand it then. I do now. I couldn’tescape. I could onlydelay. Frank let me see that. And now, I’m only needed for fetching something for him. What he needs to finish his work for the King.”

  “Fetching?” Farrah said. The dogs started tugging her away. The muscles in her arms screeched again. “Fetching what? I don’t get it, Mom!” she wailed as they pulled at her.

  “Fetchingyou.”

  11

  The dogs yanked Farrah violently. She tried to reach out for her Mother, but of course, her arms were bound at the wrists, tugged by snaking coils of octopus rope that ran out to the drooling, voracious mouths of eight wild dogs.

  Farrah screamed again as she was pulled towards the gaping mouth of the cave. This Frank stranger, dressed in a very fine suit that looked too big for him, went ahead yet again and his outline turned to charcoal ahead of her as her eyes strained against the coming darkness inside the cave. The path into it seemed to slant downwards. They were headed underground. Farrah could not only smell the foulness of the dogs’ mange but also their b
reath and now a new smell: the minerals of this dank cave.

  Instead of straining to look back as she had done with her Dad and her Gramps in the clearing, she could only duck so the ceilingof the cave would not bash her skull. Though, that might be a better outcome.Let me die now, she thought, wanted to actually wail.Better than whatever waits for me down in this cave.

  But then she did look back. She had to. Despite all the madness of the last days, despite how she’d lie in her bed as a girl and simultaneously hate and long for her mother all those years, she loved the woman. She craved being with her. And so she looked.

  And the dogs let her.

  There, at the mouth of the cave, the sky was brightening. In front of it, Mom stood in her mother’s pink housecoat bent down as if, through her gauzy eyesight, the woman could actually see her. Mom watched her daughter go with one arm outstretched.

  “Wait!” Mom called.

  “Jeezus, effin—” Frank muttered from the darkness up ahead. “The King is waiting.”

  “It won’t work,” Mom called.

  Frank came out of the shadows and revealed his foul-looking face in the dim light. “What won’t?”

  “The girl,” Mom said. “It won’t work with her. Bring her here and I’ll show you why.”

  Dejected, Frank tilted his head as if he was listening for an overhead plane. Farrah could hear nothing. She sucked back tears and snot, even more confused than ever. “Sonofa—” he said. “Fine.” He said it like a child, one told to come in for dinner but desperate to keep playing. Still carrying the dead bouquet, he started trudging back towards Farrah and the dogs. “Let’s go,” he said and gestured to the animals. The dogs did as he commanded and started pulling Farrah around to head back to the cave’s opening.

  Once there, Farrah blinked back against the now bright morning.

  Mom crouched at her on her knees in the melting snow. All around them, the forest had started to awaken. Birds twittered. Running water trickled and dripped.

  Mom looked up at her daughter’s face, her white eyes still blank. Maybe she could see. “Honey,” she said. “I told you, I’m not crazy. Never was. And neither are you. You never have to worry about that. My mom, she wasn’t either.” Unbelievably, Mom laughed and smiled. “There’s no insane gene in us Hellegarde gals. Nothing of the sort. So live your life without that worry.

  “When this started happening, I could see it clearly. The zappings—” Did she mean the electroshock therapy, the ‘treatments’ at the hospital on the mainland? “—they took a lot of that away from me. So did the pills. I was numb. I hid from it. For years. But I’m clear again. It took coming back here and getting clear to see it. I remember doing those things to get away. I remember the redhead in my head, making me think, ‘If I hurt your dad, he’ll send me away.’ I knew him better than anyone and I knew the outcome of that. He’s a good man, Farrah, a great father. But I knew he would send me off. And I’d get a reprieve. Like I said, it was only a delay. I was scared of it. I’m not anymore.”

  She put her hand on Farrah’s stomach. It was surprisingly warm.

  “You wanted to kill him didn’t you?” Kath said up at Farrah as she held her hand on Farrah’s stomach. “That boyfriend of yours. You wanted to find a way to get back at him.”

  Farrah’s breath hitched in her throat. How did Mom know? Call it another hint at a powerful women’s intuition. Maybe. But maybe something more. All of this was something more. All of it made no sense but perfect sense at this chilly moment.

  Then Farrah blurted it all. The same story she’d told Gramps, the one she couldn’t yet tell her father. But it all poured out of her now in hiccupping sobs of hurt and relief. “H—He came at me. Mom, oh Mom. He’d been out drinking. He was never mean before—We were together. I thought I loved him, Mom—I was his girlfriend but we hadn’t— you know—gotten that far—and then he wanted it and he wouldn’t stop. I hated it. Every second of it. I never wanted it to be like that. But I stopped fighting him. And then I felt…awful.”

  Mom nodded. Mom understood. How, Farrah didn’t know. But she knew that Mom did.

  “You can’t use her, Frank,” Mom said to the stranger. “She’s already…carrying.” She took her hand off her daughter’s stomach and nodded to it as if prompting the stranger to see for himself.

  Frank came up from the cave those last few steps and, for the first time he looked anything other than cock-sure and ready. He gave Farrah a blank look then an angry one at Mom. He bent down to Farrah’s stomach then clapped his hands. One of the dogs let his rope leash fall from his mouth and then came closer.

  The dog sniffed at Farrah’s crotch and she instinctively flinched away. The dog looked at Frank, sat on its haunches and whimpered.

  Again, Frank cocked his ear at the sky. “What—?” he blurted, as if he was talking on the phone.

  “Jesus H,” he said after a moment.

  Mom stood and stiffened her back. “Take me instead. Let her go. It’s the only way.”

  Frank stared her down. Then he looked over at Farrah.

  “Dammit,” he said. “I like the younger ones.” He licked his lips. “Always have.” He threw the bouquet of dead flowers on the ground just inside the opening of the cave. He gave Farrah a wink. “I’ll see you soon, darlin, I’m sure I will,” he said in his gravelly tone. But his smile returned. He turned and stepped on the flowers, then headed back into the dark.

  “Mom?” Farrah said, with a whimper of worry when Mom started to follow the stranger. Frank, she’d called him, like either Mom had known him or that, like so many other things, she just knew these things. Knew what he was up to, knew where this tunnel would lead.

  Farrah pulled on her arm-leashes, straining to pull away from the dogs and reach out to stop Mom. They snarled and bit and held her so she only managed a few inches of progress towards following her mother.

  Mom turned back. With a smile and with eyes that looked less glazed than a moment ago, Kathy Birkhead smiled. She returned the three or four steps and hugged her daughter but pulled away in a moment. A moment after that, she too dissolved into the darkness of the cave.

  12

  Instantly, the other seven dogs let their reins go. The ropes dropped to the ground and Farrah was instantly released from the strain of their pulling on her. Her arms fell slack and her whole body experienced a rushing wave of relief.

  Free from their duty of confining her, all eight animals bounded after Frank and Kath into the darkness of the cave.

  Stunned, Farrah started down the path and into the dark, intent on following them towards Mom, intent on getting her to come back with her to the house.

  A rumble started. And before Farrah even got two steps within the mouth of the cave, the blackness within erupted into noise and dust. Something was rushing out of the cave at her. At first it was a giant whoosh of air that threw her hair around and made her blink against it. The gust promised something bigger on the tail of that wind.

  Peering into the darkness, frozen by a tremor of cold and fear, Farrah watched the blackness of the cave turn mottled and grey. Inside, something moved, like a flurry of things going this way and that. It registered what was coming. The earth itself was rushing to fill the gaping void.

  Dirt, mud, tree roots, boulders, pebbles and rocks became a coagulated landslide and hurled toward the opening and toward Farrah. The rush was so fast and so hard and so noisy, the world quivered beneath her and she fell back, landing atop the dead bouquet that Frank, the stranger, had proffered her.

  Pebbles and smaller rocks mingled with dirt and debris, finished the landslide and came pounding to a rest as though a giant dump truck inside the cave had poured its load across the opening.

  At once, she pulled the ropes from her wrists. It only took a half minute now that she could use both hands. She got to her knees and pushed ahead through the cloud of noxious dust as it settled. She coughed like Grandpa Danny always did after his years spent in the south mine. She made it to the f
ace of the avalanche and started shoving rocks and stones away. The mud was ice cold, prickling her fingertips as she tugged and hauled. But she made no headway. Whatever she moved out of the way was only replaced by smaller avalanches that crowded in.

  In frustration and tears, Farrah wailed. She hollered for her Mom to come back. She made deep, guttural noises that would have made no sense in any language. And then she collapsed back to the cold, wet floor of the forest clearing. She would not get this dug out, not by hand, not on her own. And maybe never.

  Alone, shivering and crying, Farrah called at the clogged opening of the shaft of the black cave a dozen more times until her voice turned harsh and raspy. No voices returned to her, except for the failing, flat echo of her own.

  Finally, she got to her feet and fled back in the direction she had come. She hoped Dad would be there. There and still breathing. She couldn’t lose them both, not now. Maybe Gramps had pulled himself free and gotten Dad to the house. Maybe they were patched in to the shortwave radio right now, calling for the town’s new doctor.

  She hurried down the path. Now, instead of calling for Mom, she called for her dad, and for her Grandpa Danny. Her mind was exhausted. She nearly fell as she bumbled along.

  She ran across the soggy bridge, past her Grandma Kit’s ragged pink house slipper.

  Take me instead, Momhad said to the frightening stranger.Let her go.

  Mom had taken her daughter’s place. In whatever strange madness this was that she couldn’t escape—could only delay—Kathy had decided not to fetch her daughter for this man. Instead, she had gone in the girl’s place.

  ~ fin ~

  The Dovetail Cove saga doesn’t end here. In DEATHBED (1971), go back in time and discover how the madness began in Dovetail Cove. In BLED, journey to 1972 with Frank Moort and Teeny who serve up more than pineapple cheesecake at the Highliner Cafe. In ZED (1975), Tom Mason learns what evil truly looks like. In UNWED (1976), Bexy McLeod faces off against the entire town. In SHED (1977), we find Simon and Rupert dealing with the trials of a new stepfather. And in DREAD (1978), Mac and Dave McLeod return home to the island and embark on a murder mystery of sorts, revealing even more terrible truths about the island.