“No, the cut’s healing fine. But he’s been jumpy the last couple times we’ve seen him. Especially yesterday. I thought he came over to go out with Eddy and their gang, but they went and Sean just hung around with us.” Pause. Laugh. “Right, we’re big fun on a Saturday night. Listen, though. He kept getting up last night. I think he was checking the doors and windows downstairs. He’s never done anything like that before. Maybe something happened at your house?”
All Sean could hear of Dad’s response was a vocal rumble. It sounded low to him, but it kept cutting Celeste off: “What— No, we— I don’t—” Finally she got in a complete sentence. “Okay, I just wanted to give you a heads-up.” Click. End of call.
Sean slunk down to the bottom step. Eddy came over to keep him company. They didn’t say much. It was kind of like a wake, or a pre-wake, since Sean wasn’t dead yet.
The Civic pulled up ten minutes after Celeste’s stealth call—Dad must have floored it on the highway. Normally Eddy would have chatted Dad up for a while, but today she only waved before running home. Et tu, Brute, again. Sean was on his own.
He considered getting into the backseat. No. With just the two of them in the car, that would be the same as admitting he had some reason to feel guilty, while riding shotgun would mean he had a clear conscience. Sean trotted around and slid into the passenger seat. “Hey, Dad!” he said. “What’s up?”
Right off the bat, Dad scrutinized him, frowning. That was Celeste’s fault. “Getting home is what’s up. I’m exhausted. You look pretty worn-out, too.”
“Yeah. Joe-Jack’s really been working me.”
Dad shifted his gaze to Sean’s left hand. “How’s that cut?”
Sean turned the hand over to show him a shiny pucker of new skin. Red dots marched along either side of the closed wound, suture holes. “Aunt Cel took out the stitches this morning. Ten of them.”
“That’s impressive for one crummy bagel.”
Sean tried to sound proud. “Hell yeah. Did you get any of those praline things?”
“Three pounds,” Dad said, but he didn’t fall for the diversionary tactic. “Sean, did you really cut your hand slicing a bagel? Come on. You’re an expert at that.”
Sean sucked in his lower lip, which smarted. In goddamned August, it was winter chapped, he’d been gnawing on it so much. That was a little-kid trick, not anything he needed Dad to see. They’d started rolling. He looked out the side window in time to see Prospect Park go by.
“Sean?”
He kept his face to the park. “The bagel’s what I told Aunt Cel. It’s not what really happened.”
“So what did?”
“I’ll tell you, Dad. But can it wait until we get home?”
Dad didn’t answer until after they’d swooped all the way to the bottom of College Hill: “All right. I guess it’ll keep that long. Is there any food in the house?”
There couldn’t be much, since Eddy had resorted to frozen Polish lasagna the day before. “Not a lot.”
“Then we should stop at Shaw’s before we go home.”
“Sure, Dad. We could stop wherever you want.”
Sean must have sounded too eager to scavenge an extra thirty minutes of grace, because Dad shook his head. “Why do I get this feeling I shouldn’t have left you unsupervised?”
That should have been Sean’s cue to get indignant. When he kept his mouth shut, Dad shook his head again.
The supermarket parking lot was packed, probably with people who’d decided to throw a last-minute barbecue and who’d come in search of burnable meat and the charcoal to burn it with. Dad had to park all the way down by the chain-link fence between the lot and the Pawtuxet River Trail. Joe-Jack’s van was parked a couple spaces over. “Joe and Beo must be hiking,” Dad said.
This late in the afternoon, when Joe-Jack was so worked up about the “coyotes” by the river? The dashboard clock read: 7:09. “It’ll get dark soon.”
“That never stopped Joe before.”
It had better stop him now. What if the Reverend was hiding in the woods, waiting to kill more pets? What if something worse than the Reverend was there?
Shove that, Sean’s inner Eddy commanded. As he and Dad trekked up to the supermarket, Sean tried to obey, but he only succeeded in squashing the fear when he spotted Joe-Jack leaning on a column by the entrance, cell phone to his ear. All right, then. Joe-Jack had just come for some veggie burgers to burn. Now he was just calling home to see if they needed soy milk, too. The world was in order, nothing to see here, move along, folks.
The one who moved along was a guy with a cartload of soda twelve-packs. As he labored past Joe-Jack into the parking lot, Sean saw that Beo crouched behind his father, his back to the wall of the market, fists jammed into his mouth. Jesus, was he crying?
It was like a plug had been pulled at the base of Sean’s skull, letting all the blood run out of his head. He stopped, dizzy. “They saw it,” he said, because as the last drops drained he knew it was true. He knew it.
Joe-Jack closed his phone and turned toward them. His face had been scorched by too many summers outdoors to go white; it had gone gray instead. “They’re coming,” he said dully. “The police.”
Dad had squatted next to Beo and put an arm around his jerking shoulders. “What for, Joe?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to call them from the trail,” Joe-Jack went on. He was looking at Sean. “In case the thing’s still around.”
“What is it?” Dad asked, raising his voice.
Beo choked.
“We were looking for Hrothgar,” Joe-Jack said. “The gate was open last night, and he ran off. He always comes back in the morning; he gets hungry. Only not today. We walked the trail on our side of the river. Then we drove over here to walk the rest. He must’ve swum across, right? Stupid dog’s always swimming across, chasing the ducks.”
Sean’s heart constricted, forcing enough blood back into his brain for him to speak: “You found him, he’s hurt?”
Beo keened suddenly: “He’s ripped up. I left … the gate open … and he’s ripped all apart—”
The sound of Beo keening pulled Joe-Jack to his son. People drifted over to see what the crisis was. Sean shoved himself between two orange-vested cart boys to escape the tightening circle. He had to see what Joe-Jack and Beo had seen. It was the last thing Sean wanted to do, but it was the first duty of his new life. Because his life was new. As he started to run, he seemed to feel under his feet the boundary that separated old normality from sudden strange, and that boundary was a knife-edge pointing him straight into the woods beyond the parking lot.
“Sean!”
He hip-checked a line of carts snaking in from the lot, staggered, caught his balance, and ran on. He dodged a blatting SUV, then skirted a refrigerator truck to strike the chain link that shielded asphalt from thick August underbrush. A gate opened on the river trail. He bolted through, into the shadows under the trees.
“Sean, wait!”
Dad’s voice was small, back in the old world. “Stay there!” Sean shouted over his shoulder. After that he had to save his breath. He pounded up the clearer sections of the path and swerved and ducked through the stretches overgrown with pokeweed and bull briars. A festoon of briar snagged his shirt, and he got both hands bloody freeing himself to run on.
To his right, he began to glimpse crumbling brick buildings: the old industrial park. That meant he was nearing his summoning site. Sean stopped to breathe and listen. Cicadas, a sultry jungle sound high in the canopy. Otherwise silence.
Except for Dad’s shout, nearer now: “Sean!”
Sean ran on. Cracked blacktop edged closer on his right; sun-dazzled river curved in on his left. There it was, the back of the iron-casting factory, but he didn’t pause to see what might be left of his magical circle. He leaped a weedy culvert. The industrial park was behind him now. The trail veered toward the water, where the soil got sandier. One open patch looked particularly trampled. Sean stopped again. H
e easily read sneaker treads and the crepe-sole prints of work boots, Joe-Jack’s, no doubt. Dog paw marks were all over the area, big ones. Other prints looked like a waterbird’s, long, thin toes with webbing between them, but these prints seemed linked in places to impressions of a broad spurred heel. The complex prints were as big as the work boot prints.
Sean crossed the clearing. Purplish spots began to pepper the sand, mixed with splotches of a glistening gray-green. He didn’t have to bend to identify the splotches—their stench shimmered in the air like heat waves. Here it reminded him of a rotting whale carcass he and Eddy had found on Second Beach one summer, but this was rotting whale mixed with metal tang and burning sulphur, the gray powder and the yellow, Zeph and Aghar.
“Sean!” And running footsteps, he could hear those, too.
Sean ran. Just before the clearing bottlenecked back into trail, he made a desperate broad jump over tufts of brown fur and a patchwork of purple-red and noxious green. The red had to be blood, soaked into the sand.
In the next clearing he saw the trunk of an ancient maple that had toppled across the trail during last winter’s storms. Brown fur littered the sand around it. Brown fur and other remnants. That plug in his skull? Pulled again, blood racing down, making him light-headed. Sean leaned on the maple. For a few seconds, he closed his eyes and stood in spinning darkness. But he had come to see, to witness.
He opened his eyes.
The worst of it was the heap of fur and bone and viscera that lay not far from his feet. That was the greater part of Hrothgar, but tossed willy-nilly were flaps of hide, gnawed-through bones, the thick tail that had been so adept at sweeping bottles and knickknacks off low tables. The head lay on the verge of the river, one ear pricked, the other missing. Also missing were the eyes and, apparently, the tongue. At least, no tongue lolled through the screaming gape of mouth.
“Sean, where the hell are you?” From the first clearing, close.
He opened his mouth to answer. Bile rushed up his throat, but no words. Sean twisted over the maple trunk and vomited down its far side. Vomit, whale-metal-sulfur, ripe blood and waste, raw meat. He was going to drown in the rising stink—
“Sean.” Dad’s voice was harsh and tight, as if he were going to puke, too. Instead Sean heard him retreat from the slaughter yard. When he returned only seconds later, after no sound of retching, his voice was even: “Sean, do you hear me?”
He spit out bile. “Yeah, Dad.”
“Let’s go.”
Go?
Dad took his shoulders and drew him up and around. It was all still there, the heap, the head. “Look at this shit,” Sean said. “Oh man. Shit, shit.”
Dad ignored the litany of the forbidden word. “Come on,” he said. “And stop looking.”
The remnants were easier to face than Dad. Sean ducked his head. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going back to the car.”
“No, about Hrothgar, about Joe-Jack and Beo.”
“There’s nothing we can do here, Sean. We’ll figure it out later.”
Sean pushed off the trunk, too violently. He stumbled, fell against Dad, then squirmed free and started down the trail on rubber-wobbly legs. He had to concentrate on his knees, so they wouldn’t bend the wrong way. Dad followed a few steps behind.
They reached the backside of the industrial park. This time Sean looked into the lot where he’d set up his magical circle. The brazier-grill was still there, still overturned. Dad must have followed his gaze, because he said, “Some kids had a party, looks like.” His voice was strained, trying too hard to sound casual. His footsteps became muffled, as if he’d left the trail.
He had left it. Sean turned to see Dad pushing through the underbrush to the lot. He froze, watched, silent. Dad kicked over the grill. Ashes. He lifted the grill cover. Dead briquettes. A halfhearted breeze carried the ghosts of Zeph and Aghar to Sean. Now Dad was scuffing a toe against the worn blacktop. From the trail Sean could just make out faded chalk, a sweep of circle, crisscrossed lines.
Dad straightened. His eyes met Sean’s. He couldn’t have forgotten all the practice sessions in the driveway and how he had taught Sean how to draw the pentagram.
Sean looked away first. He broke into a clumsy trot. It seemed to pump blood back into his legs; soon he was sprinting, and he sprinted the rest of the way to the supermarket lot and the Civic. Up by the entrance, Joe-Jack was talking to three policemen. Two cruisers idled in the fire lane. A police van, ANIMAL CONTROL, pulled up behind them.
Dad joined Sean half a minute later, panting. He waited until they’d both caught their breath before he asked, “Do I have to talk to the police?”
“Do you have something to tell them? Do you know what killed Hrothgar?”
Sean chewed his lower lip. “They wouldn’t believe me,” he said.
“Get in the car. We’re going home.”
Sean obeyed. Seven fifty on the dashboard, and the sun was balanced on the roof of the veterinary hospital across from Shaw’s, about to sink out of sight. As Dad reached to jam his key into the ignition, Sean grabbed his arm “We can’t go to the house,” he said.
“Sean, we’ve got to talk. Home’s the best place.”
It was scary to hear how thin Dad’s patience had already been worn by this shitstorm Sean had landed them in. He couldn’t back down, though. “No! It’s not safe. Please, let’s go back to Aunt Cel’s. God, please, Dad.”
Dad pulled his arm from Sean’s grip and dropped his keys in the change tray. It wasn’t so dark yet that Sean couldn’t see that the glint in his narrowed eyes wasn’t anger but fear, fear for Sean.
Seeing that was what touched off the explosion, the sobs. Sean managed to keep them almost soundless, but his shoulders heaved like he was puking again and the tears sheeting down his face were so hot he dabbed his fingers in them and checked to make sure they weren’t blood. “What, Sean?” Dad demanded. “Why not home?”
Sean swallowed a few times and finally got the words out: “Because the thing that killed Hrothgar might be there.” Yeah, all right. He said “the thing.” He didn’t say some nutcase I met on the Internet, because he couldn’t believe in the Reverend in a monster suit, not anymore, not after seeing Hrothgar’s scattered corpse.
The car keys rattled as Dad fumbled with them. At last one chunked into the ignition, and the Civic came to life with its usual mild cough. “Okay,” Dad said. “Okay, Sean. We’ll go to Cel’s.”
11
Sean slept through the night thanks to his aunt, who’d dosed him with Valium right after the supper he hadn’t eaten. In the morning, still dopey, he lurched downstairs. By now, he hoped, Dad and Celeste and Gus would have decided what to do about the Reverend; the evening before, they’d done nothing but argue, well, Sean and Dad anyhow.
The kitchen was full of early sun and the smell of French roast coffee, empty of Dad and Gus. No Celeste, either, but she’d left Sean a note: “Gone to hospital. Jere and Gus gone to Edgewood house. Don’t go out, your dad’s orders.”
Would Dad count Eddy’s house as going out? Sean considered the question over cornflakes and still-piping coffee from the carafe on the table. The slap of flip-flops on the back porch made the question irrelevant. He opened the door before Eddy could reach it. Good thing: She was toting two pies and a newspaper. “You’re finally up,” she said.
Sean checked the clock. “It’s, wow, eight eleven.”
“I’ve been over twice already. Here, take these. Blueberry. Mom said you guys might want pie for breakfast, like the Amish.”
Why not? The Amish were sensible people who never got mixed up with Internet freaks. Sean cut himself a slice. “Want some?”
“God, no. Did you read the paper yet?”
“No.”
Eddy plunked herself down across from him, and Sean saw that her eyes were rimmed with red. “There’s an article about Hrothgar.”
The pie, still warm, oozed purple juice. Sean ate a couple bites—he
had to, now that he’d taken a piece. Eddy was tough, but dogs were like people to her. It killed him to see her bummed, like it had killed him to see Joe-Jack and Beowulf after their discovery in the woods. “You’ve got the article?”
“Yeah.” She dropped the newspaper on the table. “I called Beo last night when I heard. He said you ran up the trail to look.”
Sean was glad Rachel had moved on to blueberries—strawberry goosh would not have been easy eating this morning. “How’d you find out about Hrothgar?”
“Your uncle came over and told me. And he asked for the Redemption Orne stuff. You know, the chat records and the ritual.”
“You gave them to him?”
“I figured if he knew to ask, you were talking. Weren’t you?”
He nodded. Then, shunting aside cereal bowl and pie plate, he dragged the newspaper into range.
The story about Hrothgar was on the front page. The headline read: “Mystery Killer on the Pawtuxet: Man or Beast?” There were pictures on page 4, where the story continued. The biggest was of the clearing with the fallen maple, but all that remained of Hrothgar was some dark patches on the sandy bank. Otherwise, it looked like a travel brochure, the Pawtuxet at sunset, a place you wouldn’t mind visiting.
The second picture Joe-Jack must have taken a while back: Beowulf hugging Hrothgar and getting his face tongue-washed. The third was of two police officers on the trail, one pointing at webbed footprints. Sean flipped back to the front page and started reading:
Yesterday afternoon Joseph Douglass and his son, Beowulf, were searching the Pawtuxet River Trail for their chocolate Labrador, Hrothgar. On the Warwick side, near the defunct Dawtuxet Industrial Park, they found the remains of their dog. He had been decapitated and dismembered. It appeared the attacker had also eaten part of the corpse.
The killing may be linked to recent animal disappearances in Pawtuxet Village. Several residents have reported missing dogs and cats, and last week Douglass found a mutilated raccoon corpse on the trail. Warwick animal control officer Peter Annunziato was among the policemen who responded. “This was a big, strong dog,” he told the Journal. “It took a powerful animal to kill him. There are coyotes along the river, but we haven’t seen any attacks like this.”
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