The doctor unhooked his seat belt, reached to push open his door. No, Ally thought. Whatever this is, I don’t want to see it. But when the doctor climbed out of the car, she found she couldn’t help herself. She climbed out, too. Then they started up the path through the trees, Dr. Thornton walking in front with Ally a few feet behind him.
“There were two problems with Bert’s idea, as it turned out,” the doctor said. “One is that it’s not as easy as it might seem to kill a skad. The juvenile you encountered last night—you broke both of its wings and most of its legs. But you didn’t kill it. And—given sufficient time—it will recover completely. Pretty much the only way to kill them, in fact, is to burn them. And even that isn’t as simple as it sounds—you have to burn them completely. You have to reduce them practically to ash.”
It was a large house, two stories, with a high, steeply slanting roof. And it was in ruins. It looked as if it had once been painted blue, but this was decades ago, and the weather had long ago stripped most of the color from the exterior. The windows were empty of glass; most of the shingles had blown free from the roof. Ally didn’t want to get any closer, but Dr. Thornton kept walking. So she did, too.
“The other problem,” the doctor continued, “is that while the skad are indeed more or less helpless during the day, at night, it’s we who are the helpless ones. So Bert Rogers and his men went up into the hills and attacked the skad while the sun was in the sky. Then, once the sun had set, the skad came down out of the hills and did their own hunting. And it turned out that they were far better at this than we were.”
The house’s porch had collapsed. To reach the front door, which was hanging partway open, the doctor had to prop a fallen shutter against the foundation and scramble up it, using it as a ramp. Then he turned and held out his hand to Ally. One part of her mind tried to tell her head to shake—no—but a more powerful part submissively ordered her arm to rise. Dr. Thornton grasped her by the wrist, pulled her up. He pushed the house’s front door all the way open, and they stepped into the building.
“This is where the Baggers lived,” he said. “Steve and Katherine and their four children.”
They were in a small foyer. Across from them, a flight of stairs climbed toward the second story. There was a long hallway to the left of the stairs, leading to the rear of the house. To the right, an archway opened into what Ally guessed had once been the Baggers’ living room. The doctor had retained his hold on her wrist. When he stepped toward the archway, he gave her a tug, pulling her with him. The room still showed evidence of its former occupants. There were the ragged remains of a brown carpet on the floor, a sagging couch, two armchairs, a large coffee table lying on its side, several broken lamps—even a painting lying faceup on the floor. It didn’t look abandoned, though. It looked vandalized, as if someone had come here one day long ago and worked to destroy the room, laboring at the task with a malevolent vigor.
Or no, Ally realized; that wasn’t right. It wasn’t one day. It was one night.
“After this—and two other similar incidents—the village turned against Bert. They went back to the old ways. They made peace with the skad.”
“How?” Ally asked.
“Careful,” the doctor said. She’d taken a hesitant step into the room, wanting, despite herself, to see what the painting depicted, and in the process her foot had come into contact with something lying among the tumbled debris littering the floor. The doctor pulled her back from it. Ally stared down at the object, struggling to decipher what it might be. It took her a moment, but then it came all at once: it was a hand, a child’s hand, stripped of flesh, only the bones remaining, the bones and the leathery brown ligaments that held them in place. Seeing this—really seeing it—yanked other objects in the room into focus. Beyond the couch: a dirty-looking pair of jeans, with a shattered femur poking through a tear in the denim. And then, between the two armchairs: what Ally had at first mistaken for a stone, revealed now for what it actually was—the top half of a man’s skull.
Inside, Ally could feel herself fleeing from this place. Fleeing and screaming. But she didn’t make a move, didn’t make a sound. She was conscious of the doctor’s grip on her wrist, conscious of the slant of sunlight through the glassless windows across the room. It was getting late, but how late? How soon would it be dark?
“Why is it still like this?” she asked.
“Like what?”
She waved at the room, the broken furniture, the tumbled bones. “All these years. Why hasn’t it been cleaned up?”
“It’s a gesture of respect.”
Respect? The word felt obscene to Ally; she couldn’t imagine it ever having any connection to such a setting. “Toward who?”
The doctor shrugged, as if he believed the answer ought to be obvious. “The skad.”
Ally felt exhausted suddenly: nauseated, and empty of any desire but the urgent need to leave. “I want to go,” she said.
The doctor nodded. “Of course.”
He seemed to think that by “go,” she meant leave the house. And, as a start, this would suffice for Ally. Dr. Thornton guided her back through the foyer to the front door; he helped her down to the ground, then began to lead her back along the winding path to the road. The dirt here was thickly carpeted with pine needles; their footsteps didn’t make a sound.
Go, go, go, go, go . . .
They climbed into the car, pulled on their seat belts. The road was too narrow for the doctor to turn around at first, so he had to drive in reverse, twisting sideways in his seat to see the way. Ally sat facing forward, watching the house slowly disappear into the trees.
Go, go, go, go, go . . .
They didn’t speak. The road finally widened enough for the car to turn around, and then the doctor drove more quickly. Ally felt herself begin to breathe again. She must’ve been breathing all along, of course, but for a while there it had felt as if she hadn’t.
Go, go, go, go, go . . .
By go what Ally meant was leave altogether. She didn’t need to return to the Hobbits’; there was nothing there she could imagine as being worth the time it would take to retrieve it. So when the doctor reached the crossroads and continued south, toward the village, rather than turning back toward Stan and Eleanor’s house, Ally remained silent. She’d find someone in the village to drive her west, toward Burlington. She didn’t know how she’d accomplish this; she just knew that she would. She’d go door-to-door, if she needed to, pleading for help. There had to be someone in the village who would take pity on her. If she hurried, if she were lucky—and why shouldn’t she be lucky for once in her life—she’d be miles away from here before it began to grow dark.
They entered the village. The doctor pulled to a stop alongside the green. Ally was surprised to see that a crowd had collected here. All of the people who’d been up at the Hobbits’ house that morning were once again present, along with many others from the town, some of whom Ally only recognized by sight. They were gathered together now, she was certain, because of what had happened last night, but Ally had no desire to know anything beyond this. However they intended to deal with the wrath of the skad, it was their problem to solve, not hers. She would go from one to another of them, begging for her ride west. Somewhere within that crowd, there was bound to be a man or woman with a kind heart.
The doctor shut off the car. “I showed you all that because I wanted you to understand.”
Ally wasn’t really listening. She was watching the people on the green, most of whom had turned now to peer at the car. Ally wanted the doctor to stop talking. The sun was lower than she’d thought. She didn’t have much time.
“You do understand, don’t you?” the doctor asked.
Ally nodded. She had no idea what he was asking, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to get out of the car.
“I’m so glad to hear that, ma’am. So glad. Thank you.”
The word ma’am hung in the air between them, tugging at Ally’s consciousness—
when had he stopped using her name? And why? But then the doctor was pushing open his door, climbing out onto the green, and Ally was, too: they moved forward together, side by side. As they neared the crowd, it parted, and Ally stopped short, startled to glimpse Eleanor and Bo. Eleanor was sitting in a lawn chair, smiling first at one person, then another; she always seemed to enjoy large gatherings. Bo was lying in the dirt a few yards to her right; he appeared to be asleep. It took Ally a moment to realize that they were both tied to hitching posts. As soon as she saw this, she understood why, and she turned to the doctor, intending to protest, to insist that this couldn’t possibly be the right solution, no matter how old the two of them might be, no matter how close to death. But then, before Ally could speak, she glimpsed the third hitching post.
This one was empty.
Empty, that is, except for a short length of chain attached to its base.
She tried to flee. And—to her credit—when flight proved impossible, she tried to fight. She kicked, she clawed, she screamed. Then Ollie Seymour, who was a big man, struck her on the side of her head, knocking her to the ground. Ally didn’t lose consciousness, but the blow stunned her into immobility. Helpless, she felt herself being dragged across the grass by her feet—felt them chaining her ankle to the post. It was Dr. Thornton who locked the cuff. Still too dazed to resist, Ally saw him give the chain a tug, making sure it was secure.
After that, the crowd quickly dispersed. Ally heard car doors slamming, engines starting, the crunch of gravel as people drove away. Others were walking off across the green toward their houses. The doctor was among this latter group. Ally called out to him: “Dr. Thornton . . . !”
He didn’t glance back.
The dusk had deepened enough now for Ally to realize that there were lights on in many of the houses that lined the green. She could see figures beyond the windows, watching.
Oh, those beautiful houses! The well-kept lawns, the rows of carefully trimmed shrubbery. The gliders on the porches, the flowerpots full of geraniums on the window ledges.
And the hitching posts.
Soon, only one man remained on the green, standing near its far corner. Ally called to him: “Help me . . . ! Please help . . . !” She managed to climb painfully to her feet, then staggered a few steps in his direction, until the chain yanked her to a stop with a clatter. That was when she realized her mistake. It wasn’t a man; it was the war memorial, the statue of the young soldier, staring west toward the now vanished sun, his face immobilized in that silent howl of torment.
It was only now that Ally noticed the cardboard box, sitting in front of the three hitching posts, about fifteen feet away, its top folded open. There was bedding inside—a little nest of blankets. And nestled among the bedding was the creature. It had been silent all this time, but as the dusk continued to settle upon the village, it began to make a mewling sound. The only language Ally had ever known was English, yet there had been times in her life when she’d overheard people speaking in a foreign tongue and known immediately what they were saying, simply from the pitch of their voices. The same thing happened here, with the creature. Perhaps it was simply because the box looked so much like a cradle—the blankets so much like swaddling—but what Ally heard was a frightened child, calling for its mother.
Mommy . . . ? Mommy . . . ? Mommy . . . ?
The creature’s voice seemed to gain strength with the advancing darkness: a wounded child, calling for someone to protect it.
Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama . . .
Ally could picture how the hills above the village must look at this time of day, the shadows already triumphant beneath the trees. The creature had started to shift about in the box, waving its broken limbs in the air: an angry child, calling for someone to avenge it.
Mother . . . ! Mother . . . ! Mother . . . !
Ally hugged herself, shivering. All around her, the light was fading fast.
Night was coming.
And with the night, an answer to the child’s cries.
SOMETHING LOST, SOMETHING GAINED
SEANAN MCGUIRE
Lightning lashed across the summer sky, coloring it with the purple-black of a fresh hematoma. It was followed by a roll of thunder some three seconds later. No rain, not yet, but the air was heavy with the taste of it, a heady, electric smell that promised downpours yet to come. Lou picked her way along the bank of the creek, mud squishing between her toes, keeping a wary eye on that sky. Summer storms were the best kind for watching and the worst kind for getting caught in. They were unpredictable, temperamental, like her stepdaddy when he had a couple of beers in him and his eyes started to wander along the curves of her sundress.
Lou stopped for a moment, clenching her fingers a little tighter around the jar in her hand as she shook off the memory of his eyes and breathed in the clean scent of yet-unfallen rain. Those were thoughts for another time and place, huddled under her blanket and listening to the shouts from downstairs. She was thirteen: old enough to understand that she was what her mother and her stepfather fought about half the time, and nowhere near old enough to understand why it had to be that way. She sometimes thought that she would never be old enough, that “old enough” was the sort of idea that came only to frightened thirteen-year-old girls, waiting for the doorknob to turn. It hadn’t happened yet, but she saw the way he looked at her, and she listened to the way the other girls at school talked sometimes in the locker room, when the teachers weren’t around. She knew what came after the sundresses and the shouting.
(There was a smell in the locker room sometimes, when the teachers were away and the girls started talking. It was a sharp, hot smell, and it made Lou think of storms on the way, even though there were no clouds in the locker room, never could be; even though they were safe, small, contained when they sat in that room. Maybe girls and storms weren’t so different after all.)
She resumed her pacing along the creek bed, eyes flicking from the fresh-bruised sky to the black branches of the trees that grew beside the water. Lightning flashed again. This time, the thunder was only a second behind. It was time to go back, time to get home before the rain came down and she got another lecture about behaving like a child. She started to turn—
Lights appeared in the branches of the nearest tree, as unsteady as birthday candles, flickering luminescent green through the darkness. Lou’s cheeks stretched into a grin as she uncapped the jam jar she’d been carrying all this while.
“Gotcha,” she whispered.
Catching fireflies was an art form. Most of the girls her age had already lost whatever skill at it they’d once possessed, trading the steady hand on the collecting jar for a steady hand on a mascara wand. She didn’t see anything wrong with that, exactly—everyone had to grow up to be who they were going to be—but she sometimes felt like there’d been a bell rung over the course of the past two years, one that all her classmates could hear, while she couldn’t hear anything but the siren song of the creek and the woods and the promise of summer fireflies.
When she went back to school in the fall, she would be a high school student, expected to buckle down and fight for her future. What’s worse, she would be a little deeper into her teens, and those sidelong glances from her stepfather would no longer have as much reason to be coy. She couldn’t say exactly what she feared would happen; she didn’t have the words for it, any more than she had the words for the smell that accompanied an impending storm. She just knew that she was afraid.
But that was a fear for later. Right now, it was just her, and the storm, and the fireflies that she swept, one by one, into her collecting jar, until it glowed with the will-o’-wisp light of dozens of circling insects. She held it up to her eye, looking critically at the fireflies as they flew. Lightning flashed again overhead. She barely noticed.
“You’re big ones, aren’t you,” she said, tipping the jar a bit to give herself a better angle. “Must have been a good season for you guys. Never seen ones quite like you before . . .”
<
br /> And the sky ripped open, and the rain came down.
All summers are unique to the places in which they happen. California summers are hot desert things, brutal in the daylight and cold at night. Florida summers are humid and wet, unforgiving in their unrelenting heat. Indiana summers are alight with storms and fireflies, the sky always the color of a bruise, from the angry green of the impending twister to the acid yellow tainting the edges of an otherwise perfect blue. Indiana summers never let anyone forget that they are wounds carved out of the flesh of the calendar, warm not because of the presence of the sun, but because they are still bleeding.
Lou ran through the rain, her feet squelching in the increasingly sodden grass, her jam jar full of fireflies clutched against her chest like some sort of talisman of safe passage through the storm. She ran, and the storm pursued, sending down torrents of water that threatened to sweep her legs out from underneath her and send her sprawling into the grass. The conditions weren’t right for a flash flood, she knew, but she ran all the same, because the longer she stayed out here, the more her mother would worry. Her mother seemed to worry all the time these days, and maybe that was another sign of how dangerous the impending storm at home was growing. The time between the lightning and the thunder had worn away to almost nothing, one lingering look at a time.
The motion seemed to be agitating the fireflies. They lit up a little brighter every time her foot came down, until she was carrying a jar full of light across the field, as bright as a fallen star, beating back the darkness as fiercely as it could. She could see the back side of her neighborhood from the hill, the lights on and glowing a little more gently than her captives. All the windows would be closed against the rain, she knew, and the back door with its bad latch would be locked to keep the wind from blowing it open. She was going to have to go around the front of the house and knock like a guest, begging for entrance to her own place. What if they didn’t let her in? The fear wasn’t new, but it was shocking every time it showed its face. She tried to push it aside, and it came springing back, twice as big. What if they said “You want to be a storm’s child, go be a storm’s child, don’t bring any of your rain or wrongness here,” and turned their faces away, and turned the porch light off?
Seize the Night Page 5