by Alissa York
He took one of the kitten’s front paws between a finger and thumb. There were two, maybe three extra toes. “They’re all like that. One of the back ones is worse.” He let go the paw. “So, what do you think?”
Edal shifted the kitten to one hand and took hold of his splayed paw. He didn’t squirm. If anything, he relaxed, surrendering his small weight and considerable warmth, watching her through his mismatched eyes.
“I’ll take him.”
“What about your mom? You think—”
“It’s okay,” Edal blurted. “She already said I could get a pet.”
“Is that right?”
“For my birthday.” Her face felt suddenly raw. She was unused to outright lying; Letty rarely paid sufficient attention to give her cause.
He said nothing, and Edal saw he was making his mind up to come back another time, when her mother was home.
“She says I need somebody to play with,” she said quickly.
His mouth changed then, softening in the black circle of his beard. “No brothers or sisters?”
“Nope.”
“Neighbours don’t have kids?”
“What neighbours?” She squeezed the kitten’s paw and felt seven or eight claws slip from their little pink sheaths. “My birthday’s next week.”
“In that case,” he said, “happy birthday to you.”
It was the best present she’d had in years. When Nana and Grandpa Adam had been the ones doing the wrapping, the thrill of picking open bows and peeling back tape had been exquisite. Letty’s gifts generally came in brown paper bags. Edal wouldn’t mind always getting books if she could at least see some sense in the titles her mother chose. She used to try following Letty’s line of thought: Nana liked knitting, so maybe she thinks I want to learn how to crochet; or, she knows we do French in school, so maybe she figures I know German too.
A name for the kitten came to her moments after Jim Dale drove off, his arm crooked out the window in a lazy wave. Its paws weren’t so strange, especially if you stopped thinking of them as paws. The toes were like petals, radiating from the central pad. She would call him Daisy. Whoever decided all flowers were girls?
Daisy could live in her room. He’d be safe there, thanks to the padlock. It was hard to imagine leaving him alone all day while she was in school. Maybe she could take him along, smuggled inside her Mack. The other kids might make fun of his paddle paws at first, but they’d think his eyes were cool.
Only three weeks remained until summer holidays; after that she could stay home with Daisy all the time. She could play with him in her room when her mother was around, take him out in the yard whenever Letty drove off to clean somebody’s house or burn up her wages touring the region’s sad little Sally Anns. At some point Edal would own up, appearing with a grown-up Daisy slung around her neck. He’d be heavy by then. She’d wear him like a lead-weighted fur collar, the way Jimmy Watt wore Edal the otter the day he carried her back to Camusfeàrna when she’d run away from home. Even Letty would fall for him then.
It was a good plan, one Edal went over and over like an elaborate picture she was colouring in. That first night, she played with Daisy for hours, baiting him with wiggly fingers beneath the sheet. At length he tired of the game and began to groom himself. Edal watched his little tongue work, wondering if a mother had taught him—or if, like herself, he was good at learning things on his own.
Once clean, he began to knead her chest. His claws came out once or twice, but he put them away the moment she tapped his toes. Satisfied, he settled in to sleep, his head cradled in the dip at the base of her throat.
She woke in a strip of moonlight to find him gone. She turned back the yellow blanket, then the sheet with its worn pattern of ferns. Not there. She stood up, careful where she put her feet. After a moment she went down on all fours, dropping her face to the floorboards to look at the world his way.
He wasn’t under the bed. Or the dresser, or the little brown desk. She didn’t think kittens could flatten themselves like bats to slide under doors, but she opened the closet just in case. Rummaging through the laundry basket, she knew a moment’s elation when her fingers met the nap of an inside-out sock. She bit her lip and felt inside her runners, her ankle boots. She delved into the bag of stuffed animals she couldn’t quite seem to throw away. Not one of them responded to her touch.
Edal began to hum, a single droning note. She backed out of the closet. The crack beneath the bedroom door was slimmer still, an impossible squeeze. Sitting back on her heels, she saw the dormer window she’d left open. The screens weren’t in, not since Grandpa Adam last took them out. But Daisy was too little, wasn’t he, to climb up all that way? She crawled closer. Close enough to see the tear in the checkered curtain, the dangling threads. It came to her then, clear as anything: more toes meant more claws.
Edal rose up on her knees and looked out. The slant was steep, but maybe not too steep for a kitten with grip to spare. Surely the curling asphalt shingles would afford some kind of hold. She pictured Daisy slipping and catching himself, inching down toward the volunteer alders that crowded up against the house. In her mind’s eye he managed the leap with ease. Landing in leafy chaos, he let the bobbing branch settle before clambering inward to the trunk. From there he made his way to ground level. Down among the coyotes and the foxes. The shadowy minks.
Or maybe he never even got that far.
He would’ve stood out like a pale invitation against the scabby shingles. The threat could’ve come swooping from behind, silent wings and saucer eyes, horned head rearing as the talons closed. Poor Daisy, pinned between the tilt of the roof and the sparkling black cavern of the sky.
She could call Jim Dale, summon him from the darkness where she imagined him lying alone. He would come, wouldn’t he? And what if he did? He’d find out she couldn’t even be trusted to look after a kitten. He’d see her for the stupid kid she was.
Better to go looking for Daisy on her own. She crept downstairs in her pyjamas, slipped on her flip-flops and took the flashlight from its hook beside the door. The porch steps felt off-kilter. The grass licked her ankles and left them wet. As she swung her beam up onto the roof, swishing it to and fro, mosquitoes caught wind of her breath-scent and came to feed.
Daisy was so light—how could she expect to find proof of his passage? All the same, she looped her beam over the yard, searching for pressed-flower prints in every patch of telling ground. In any case, tracks were only one aspect of what Tracking: The Subtle Art had referred to as “sign.” If the killer had come on foot, there would be a fresh trail through the grass. If it had arrived by air, there might be pellets, regurgitated and let fall from its tree. A feather come loose when it struck.
If it was in fact an owl, there were a few things Edal could be sure of. For starters, it had no teeth; Ontario Birds had taught her that. Bird bills were nothing more than overgrown jawbones covered in something like horn. Like the jaws of snakes, they hinged top and bottom to swallow their victims whole.
15
The Chronicles of Darius
Grandmother waited until Darius was old enough to keep a secret before she showed him the book. On the way back from the school bus that day, he told her about the video they’d watched in class, the giraffes and the elephants and, best of all, the pride of lions.
“Pride?” she said.
“That’s what they call it.”
When they stepped into the warmth, she carried on to his room without pausing to take off her coat. He followed to find her down on her knees on the rug, sliding her hand under the dresser, as though she were pushing a fat envelope under a door.
The paperback came out downy with dust. Grandmother blew across it, sneezed and blew again. Darius looked down on the book’s cover. A face like a gold medallion, dark, sparkling eyes above a broad, majestic snout.
“It was her favourite,” Grandmother said, stroking the lion’s face. “She’d have taken it with her, I’m sure, if she hadn’t
left in such a rush.” She looked up at him. “Shall I read it to you?”
Darius wasn’t sure what to say. He was ten—plenty old enough to read for himself.
“He’d kill me,” she added quietly. “He’d kill us both if he knew.”
Darius bit his lip. “Okay.”
He sat on the bed while she took the small, hard chair that belonged to the desk. He had questions, the first uttered before she could even open the book.
“What’s a wardrobe?”
She thought for a moment. “It’s like a closet, only it stands on its own.” She turned to the beginning. “You be sure and listen for the truck.”
They weren’t far into the story—the four children had arrived at the professor’s country house and were upstairs talking—when Grandmother glanced up from the page.
“I’ve just remembered something.”
“What?”
“Your mother—she used to like me to say her name in place of Lucy’s. Lucy was Faye.”
Her face was soft as an old pillow, puffy and creased. Darius looked down at his hands, lying separate from each other in his lap. “Read it like that.”
“You want me to?”
“Yes.”
She took a breath. “‘“What’s that noise?” said Faye suddenly. It was a far larger house than she had ever been in before and the thought of all those long passages—’”
“Grandmother?”
“Yes, Darius?”
“Can I be—” He wanted to say Peter, the older brother who referred to the professor as that old chap, but it didn’t seem right somehow. Not when Lucy-Faye was the youngest. “Can I be Edmund?”
“Edmund? Are you sure? He has a pretty rough time of it.”
Darius nodded.
“All right.” She read on. “‘—the thought of all those long passages and rows of doors leading into empty rooms was beginning to make her feel a little creepy. “It’s only a bird, silly,” said Darius.’”
She read the whole first chapter: the children stuck indoors because it rained; the huge house offering up hallway after hallway, room after room. Darius had trouble imagining it—even school had only the one floor. Several rooms in the professor’s house were lined with books. Faye had sometimes flicked through the magazines at the laundromat, but she’d never brought any of them home. Grandmother had a few Reader’s Digests in her knitting basket and the heavy blue book of recipes on the kitchen counter; Grandfather had only the newspaper and the black leather bible beside his chair.
The idea of empty, extra rooms was bewildering. One had nothing in it but a wardrobe, which Lucy-Faye looked into on her own. She rubbed her face against the fur coats it held, then passed through them into a snowy wood. The little man she met there had the legs of a goat and, sticking up through his curly hair, a pair of pointy horns.
“Horns?”
“Yes, Darius.” Grandmother met his eye. “Not like that, though. You’ll see.”
They kept to a single chapter a day; anything more made Grandmother jumpy. She wouldn’t chance it on weekends, when they could never be sure of the old man’s movements. On Saturdays he might make a quick trip for supplies, or he might stop in at the mill to check up on the relief foreman and be gone for hours. On Sundays, after they’d sat down to buckwheat pancakes and ham, he would read to them from Leviticus or Proverbs or Romans I, often carrying on where the Scriptures left off. The weekend paper supplied no end of inspiration, stories about heathens who had no business coming over here in the first place, government money-grubbers and women who thought they were men. When Grandfather ran out of words, he generally filled his vest pocket with shells and took the twelve-gauge out for a walk. He might be back with a grouse slung over his shoulder in no time, or they might not see him again until Darius was laying the table for four.
All in all, it took them most of October to make their way through the book. Darius could see why Grandmother had warned him against being Edmund, and yet his name grafted easily onto the character’s back, as though they were made of the same poor stuff. He understood perfectly when Edmund-Darius couldn’t help being spiteful to Lucy-Faye—and later, when the boy in the book followed his sister through the wardrobe and stood calling her name in that unfamiliar world, Darius too grew sullen when she failed to reply.
It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine being impressed by the White Witch when she drew up in her sledge. Of course he accepted her gift of Turkish delight, whatever that might be. Of course he told her everything about himself and his siblings—even going so far as to offer them up in exchange for more of the magical treat. Never mind that it had turned him into a red-faced, sticky-fingered thing.
With the passing of every chapter, things grew worse for the little boy. Darius might not have had any brothers or sisters, but he knew well enough what it felt like to be left out. When Peter called his younger brother a poisonous little beast, Darius felt the injury keenly and shared in the dark fantasies it spawned.
It wasn’t until all four children came upon a talking beaver, though, that Darius slipped entirely under the story’s skin. Much of the tale had been foreign to him until then—the endless country house and its treasures, the odd, stilted manner in which the children spoke—but the beaver was Canada’s creature. He’d learned all about it in school, even before he came to live in the mountains and saw a dam with his own two eyes. How many times had he dreamt of entering a lodge via its secret underwater passage, of folding his flat tail and curling up wet yet somehow warm? And now he could—only this lodge had a door and a stove and a kitchen table, and it turned out to be another place Edmund-Darius didn’t belong.
The beaver lodge was where the children learned about the third element of the book’s title. Darius hadn’t realized he’d been waiting for the lion on the cover to appear until the beavers brought up his name. He felt a little nervous, like Lucy-Faye and Susan, but at the same time, like Peter, he longed for the King of Beasts to appear. In his heart of hearts, though, like Edmund, he felt compelled to run.
When Edmund-Darius did make a break for it, no one noticed for the longest time. He got a good lead on them, making straight for the White Witch’s distant house. Darius felt the saliva well up under his tongue at the thought of the coming reward. It hurt to learn Lucy-Faye and the others never doubted the news that he’d betrayed them; it made betraying them the right choice.
Or if not right, then at least inevitable. Just as it was inevitable that he should grow colder and more miserable and more alone as he approached his protector’s house, and that it should turn out to be not so much a house as a castle surrounded by frightening statues—one of which turned out to be a living, breathing wolf—and that the wolf should lead him to the White Witch who, instead of welcoming him like the prince he might have been, mistreated him like the wicked little boy he was.
Edmund-Darius missed the visit of Father Christmas and the picnic of ham sandwiches and tea. Instead he got hard bread and water, and was forced to jam in alongside the witch in her sledge, and ride with no coat through the frozen dark. There was no fooling himself that she was a good queen anymore. You could still try when someone had only yelled at you and called you names, but not once they’d hit you. Not once they’d tied your small hands behind your back.
Lucy-Faye and the rest of them carried on without him, passing out of the witch’s winter into the lion’s gift of spring. Together they mounted the hill to the great stone table, where they met a host of well-meaning creatures, including the great beast himself.
Meanwhile, the witch had Edmund-Darius lashed to a tree. It came as a relief when she showed him her terrible white arms; the whiz of her knife against the whetstone was like a comforting sigh. He would be out of it now. No matter what else happened, none of it would be his fault. But this was a storybook, so instead of having his throat slit, he was rescued and reunited with Lucy-Faye and the others. Even less credible, he was forgiven by them all.
It was then that th
e story took a turn. Edmund-Darius was a traitor, and according to the deep magic, the White Witch was owed his blood. The witch knew it, and the lion knew it too. Darius nodded and began believing again.
When the story turned back on itself, and it seemed his character would be saved a second time, Darius wasn’t fooled. If he wasn’t going to die, it could only mean something worse was bound to occur. Right again. The lion had bought the little traitor’s freedom at a terrible price. He would lie down in Edmund-Darius’s place and let the White Witch have her way.
She could have done things quickly, cleanly, but Darius wouldn’t have bought it if she had. His own character was back at the camp with Peter, so he watched the scene of sacrifice through Lucy-Faye’s streaming eyes. Though the lion didn’t struggle, the witch had him bound. And shaved. And muzzled.
Again the witch bared her pale, pale arms. Grandmother read the closing lines of that chapter quietly: “‘The children did not see the actual moment of the killing. They couldn’t bear to look and had covered their eyes.’”
When the witch and her minions left to do battle, Darius assumed the story would follow them back to Edmund. Instead, it held vigil with the girls. Grandmother read slowly, as though she never wanted that sad night to end. At one point she left such a long pause, Darius wondered if she’d slipped into an open-eyed nap. He was about to speak up when she read on.
“‘I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Faye were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness.’”
The story was real now, so real it threatened to drag Darius down and hold him under. And then the lion came back to life. It was worse somehow than when he’d been killed—the surge in Darius’s chest felt dangerous.
He wanted the reading to stop then, but Grandmother kept on, soft and unrelenting, through the part where the lion—his mane magically regrown—stooped to lick Susan’s brow, then on to the passage where he romped around madly with both girls, tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws. Darius was a stranger to such abandoned play. Son of a careless mother, he’d started out careful, watching his step long before he came to live under Grandfather’s roof.