The Fifth Day

by Gordon Bonnet

  Lissa gave her a quirky smile. “Good thing you’re straight.”

  Z nodded.

  “Is there any way of helping Gary?” Margo asked. “My grandma always said that once you got caught by a Kitsune, there was nothing anyone could do to help you. But still….”

  Z shook her head. “I don’t think so. At the end, before he jumped through the window, you could tell that anything human in him was gone. His self didn’t exist anymore. You could see it in his eyes.” The tears welled up, but with an effort she forced them back.

  “That is awful,” Margo said.

  “It was horrifying. Watching him—watching him transform. You know, in fantasy movies it always seems exciting when some character turns into a bird or a wolf or whatever. Even if it’s a bad creature, like a werewolf. But watching it actually happen? It was hideous. And it looked like he was in pain, or at least scared and confused, while it was happening. His eyes were terrified, and when his face just—just stretched out, like taffy, his mouth and nose pulled into a snout….” She shuddered, and Margo put one hand on her arm.

  “Don’t. You don’t need to relive it.”

  “But it was Gary, you know? At first he acted like a macho jerk type, but he really was kind of sweet. He didn’t deserve this. And how are we going to tell Ben?”

  “I’m surprised Ben didn’t come down when you screamed.”

  “Kids can sleep through anything.”

  “Jeff and Gareth too, apparently,” Margo said. “Maybe it’s a male thing.”

  “You do see what this means, though,” Lissa said.

  “What?”

  “We can’t take for granted that all of the monsters are outside of the house. Mikiko may not be the only one impersonating a human.”

  Margo said, “Oh, my god,” under her breath.

  Z simply stared.

  “It’s horrid, but we have to consider the possibility.”

  “How—how can we deal with that?” Z said. “If one of us, or more than one, is something in disguise, how would we tell? And what would we do if we could tell?”

  “It’s a valid question. I didn’t mean to freak you out even worse than you were already. But we need to be realistic about this.”

  “It’s funny, you of all people using the word realistic to describe this.”

  Lissa smiled again. “I’ve always said that my understanding of the world was based on evidence, that given sufficient data proving that what I’d thought was wrong, I’d have no choice but to change my views. I guess in the last day, I’ve been forced to reevaluate.”

  “So, you think that it’s a real possibility that there might be other… other imposters here?” Margo’s voice sounded shaky, tremulous.

  “I think we can’t afford to ignore the possibility.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, going on your behavior and how you’ve interacted since we met, I have good confidence that the two of you are who you say you are. Some of the others, though?” She left the implication hanging between them.

  “Jackson,” Margo said.

  Lissa nodded. “He’s odd, no doubt. There’s something about him that’s like a locked room. Ben picked up on it right away, remember? He said he wished he hadn’t called out to Jackson and Olivia. And this afternoon, he and Gareth both came to talk to me about him. They both think he’s dangerous.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes. One right after the other, in fact. Ben in particular said Jackson was a danger. He said Jackson hates you and me, Z.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t think Ben does, either, other than his sense that Jackson likes to control things, and we’re pretty independent. You can see how we’d be a threat to a man like him.” She frowned. “But maybe he’s more than that.”

  “I assumed he was just a cocky asshole,” Z said. “There are lots of those in the world. Or were.”

  “That’s true. But Ben and Gareth are right. There’s something about him that is off-key. I can’t put my finger on it.” Lissa paused. “Although Ben said he wasn’t sure about Gareth, either.”

  “I wonder why? Gareth seems harmless enough.”

  “I don’t know. But I’m not discounting it. There’s another thing I’ve had to admit to myself—intuition is a real thing. In the last few days, I’ve had to call on a number of facets of my personality I never knew I had.”

  “What occurs to me,” Z said, “is to ask whether we should tell Jackson and Olivia what happened to Gary. You know? If you’re right, and Jackson is one of the….” She stopped, swallowed. She’d been about to say monsters, but it sounded ridiculous in her ears. “If he’s not who he says he is. Maybe it’d be better to say that Gary and Mikiko vanished together during the night. It’s not a lie, even if it’s only part of the truth. It’d ring true, if for no other reason than because they were obviously hooking up with each other. If we’re right to suspect Jackson and/or Olivia, we’d be wise not to show our hands.”

  “That makes good sense.”

  “In your place,” Margo said, “I don’t know if I’d be able to tell a lie. If I’d, you know, if I’d seen it happen. It’d show in my face. I’m a lousy liar.”

  “I’m not. I’d gotten pretty good at it, given that my entire job was a lie.” She smiled, but it was forced, inauthentic—a lie, too. The last thing she felt like doing right now was smiling. “So we’ve got a plan. Gary and Mikiko upped stakes and took off without telling anyone where they were going. We can take their clothes and hide them. We’ll need to move Gary’s motorcycle—if it’s still here, that’d look mighty suspicious.”

  “Don’t go out alone,” Margo said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ll take care of the clothes,” Lissa said. “And I’ll wait until you’re back to go to bed. Be careful. There could be anything out there.”

  “Literally,” Z said.

  —

  BUT THE TWO women met nothing strange as they dashed outside, wheeled Gary’s motorcycle out of sight behind a hedge across the street, and then trotted back up the stairs and inside. Lissa had returned the living room to its previous state, removing the clothes that were strewn on the floor, straightening out the coffee table Gary had leapt on in his last, terrified flight from the room.

  “There,” Lissa said, as Z and Margo came back inside. “Nothing to raise an eyebrow any more. You see anything out there?”

  “No,” Z said. “All quiet.”

  “So, we all go back to bed. Try to get some sleep.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to,” Margo said. “I’m too keyed up.”

  “Even so. Back to bed with you. We don’t want to be down here having a tête-à-tête if Jeff or Ben decides to come down for a midnight snack.”

  —

  WHEN Z WOKE, it was in the full light of another clear, mild day. She registered some surprise that she’d been able to return to sleep. She hadn’t said so, but she thought Margo’s prediction of insomnia was going to be accurate, or at least, that any sleep she got would be fraught with nightmares.

  But her mind and body had relaxed into a deep, dreamless slumber minutes after she closed her eyes. Upon awakening, she instinctively looked for a clock, but the only one was a digital clock-radio, its display dark.

  It was morning. That would have to be good enough.

  She got out from underneath the covers, stretched and yawned, and pulled on some clothes, wrinkling up her nose as she donned the shirt. Pretty soon they’d have to see about washing their clothes, probably using the old method of beating them on a rock in the creek.

  The only one awake was Lissa, who was lying on the couch reading an Astronomy magazine. She tilted her head as Z came into the room.

  “Sleep well?”

  “Better than expected.”

  “Me, too. The oxycodone helped, of course. But it’s fogging my brain. I’m switching to ibuprofen today. Wouldn’t do to get hooked on opiates here and
now.”

  “No. But you didn’t sound like you were suffering from any kind of brain fog last night.”

  Lissa smiled. “I cover it up well. But the pain is manageable, and I’d rather be as clear as I can be even if it means I’ll hurt more.”

  There was the noise of footsteps on the stairs, and they turned as Gareth came into the room, looking groggy and disheveled.

  Z gave him a tight grin. “Morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “Sleep well?” Her eyes met Lissa’s for a fraction of a second.

  “Yeah, fine,” Gareth said. “You?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. Everyone else still in bed?”

  “Apparently. Haven’t seen any of the others.”

  “I was about to put some oatmeal on. Want some?”

  “Sure.”

  As the pan of oatmeal simmered on the camp stove, Jeff came into the kitchen. There was something furtive about his manner, and he looked around, face pale, movements jerky and nervous.

  Z frowned. “Morning, Jeff. What’s wrong? You look upset.”

  Jeff swallowed. “I—um. I didn’t want to—well, to alarm anyone. We’ve been through a lot, you know, and if it’s a false alarm…. But I thought he might be down here, because he wasn’t in his room when I checked. The door was open, so I peeked in. The bed didn’t look like it’d been slept in, so I was worried.”

  Her heart gave an unsteady gallop. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Gary since last night.”

  “Gary?” Jeff’s gaze was uncomprehending. “I’m not talking about Gary, I’m talking about Ben.”

  5

  WHY DO YOU judge us? one asked. Who gives you the authority to pronounce our fate?

  The blind woman smiled. Judge you? Speaking the truth about your nature is no judgment. As for who gives me the authority to speak, it is no one. I speak for whoever comes here, and who dares challenge me? I stand in the crossroads, and all who would cross the forest come to me eventually and hear my voice. Make no mistake. You will continue on your journey only if you are wise enough to listen.

  —

  BEN WENT OFF TO the guest bedroom at the back of the first floor once it was dark, but he had no real intent to sleep.

  His mom had taught him to offer guests the most comfortable place to sleep, and her voice had come back to his mind that evening as he looked at the newcomers, wondering where they would all find to bed down. He didn’t want to give his room to Mikiko—no telling what the strange girl would do there. So he picked the other newcomer as the best of bad options, and told Gareth to take his own bedroom.

  Gareth gave him an apologetic smile and a quick, “Thanks.”

  Let Mikiko figure out on her own place. She could sleep out in the yard, for all he cared.

  Afterwards, he said good night to everyone. He had The Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Folklore and his rolled-up pajamas tucked under one arm and a flashlight in his right hand, guiding his footsteps past the kitchen and down the short hallway to the little guest bedroom his mother had called “a souped-up closet.” He thought about seeking out Z or Lissa for a talk—they were the two most likely to listen—but Lissa went to bed early, and he could never catch Z alone long enough to have a chance at a conversation.

  In the end, he gave up, and trotted barefoot to the little room that overlooked his mother’s vegetable garden, now sorely in need of water. The light of the waning moon turned the back yard into a surreal geometric landscape of silver, black, and gray blocks, an eerie, alien vista despite its being familiar ground. He pulled the curtains shut, cinching them tightly closed, and sat down on the narrow bed.

  The monsters were out there. The problem was, they were in here, too. It was strongest when Jackson was in the room, but he caught echoes, vestiges like scents left behind in an empty room, when he was near the others.

  Mikiko was the worst. Something about her was feral, animal, predatory. He had seen immediately she wanted Gary to have sex with her—it was obvious even to someone of Ben’s age. Equally obvious was that Gary was drooling at the prospect.

  In fact, they might be doing it right now. He wrinkled his nose. He’d known how babies were made since he was six—his parents had been practical, modern, and completely forthright. It’d seemed weird and kind of icky when they explained it to him, but just in the last couple of months he’d started thinking there might be something interesting about sex after all, a sense that had accelerated significantly since he had his first wet dream only three weeks earlier.

  But Gary and Mikiko? That wasn’t intriguing. That wasn’t even sexy.

  It was wrong.

  He’d tried to warn Gary. Not that the dude had listened, though. Mikiko was dangerous, and Gary was being drawn to her despite the danger or, perhaps, because of it.

  Maybe he should have tried harder. Made him listen. Made him promise he wouldn’t have sex with Mikiko. Ben had a sudden, deep knowledge that if Gary and Mikiko coupled physically, her weirdness would be drawn into him, permeate his body the way the light had clung to the sleeping Margo.

  But the problem was, it wasn’t only Mikiko. Jackson scared him in a completely different way. Even after his talk with Lissa, his fear of Jackson hadn’t lessened. The usual relaxation he felt when he was able to turn over his problems to an adult never occurred. He pictured Jackson’s rugged, handsome face, with his unsmiling lips and flint-hard eyes, and shuddered.

  Olivia was almost as frightening, and it was because she herself was frightened. When he was nine he saw a rabbit cornered by a Rottweiler in a neighbor’s yard, and had stood, unable to do anything to stop it, his high cries for help inaudible over the snarling barks of the dog. The rabbit sat, trembling, its face seeming all eyes, and he was sure it was moments from being torn to pieces.

  But then the rabbit launched itself at the dog, squealing so loudly he clapped his hands over his ears, and in a flash its chisel-like incisors had bitten right through the dog’s leg. There was a whirlwind of motion, and the rabbit was flipped end over end, bounced once, and then was gone through a gap in the hedge.

  Olivia was that rabbit. Frozen, terrified, angry, certain she was about to die—and because of that, capable of doing anything, anything at all, and heaven help whoever got in her way.

  Of all of them, Z and Lissa were the most solid, the most real. Margo had been too, at first, but now? He was glad Margo was awake, but every time he looked at her that afternoon, something about her was translucent, ghostly, as if she’d faded around the edges. Even her speech was soft, vague, so mild he couldn’t remember a single specific thing she’d said since her awakening.

  Jeff acted normal, but there was an air of tragedy about him. It was most pronounced when he spoke—before going to bed he’d said, “God keep you til morning,” under his breath, and Ben had to stop his throat from tightening and tears from starting to his eyes at how the words sounded, like the tolling of a cathedral bell.

  Because God was not watching. Or if he was, he was playing with them.

  About the newcomer, Gareth, he could pick up nothing at all. He was a blank wall—smiling, genial, and in his own way, as closed off from them as Jackson was. The only impression he got from Gareth was that he wasn’t like them, that there was some power or knowledge bubbling just beneath the surface he was not allowing them to see. When Gareth had come in while he was talking to Lissa, he had a moment’s panicked thought, I hope he didn’t overhear us. He’ll betray us. Then Gareth had confided surmises that were almost identical to his, which should have been reassuring, but wasn’t.

  He left more rattled than ever.

  So, after dinner, he escaped with his book and his flashlight and his pajamas. Because it was up to him. He was the only one who saw it all clearly. Z was too busy trying to manage everything, and Lissa still only half believed it herself. But he knew what was happening, and he was the one who had to figure it out before bad things started.

  The feu follet. Grendel. Baba
Yaga. Leshy. The Loup Garou. What could the thing be that had attacked Z and the others in the hospital? They hadn’t talked about it much, but it sounded like some kind of swamp thing out of one of the dumb black-and-white horror movies he sometimes watched with his dad and his uncles, ones with special effects so bad you could see the zipper running up the monster’s back.

  Only this thing had been real. It had attacked them, knocked Jackson down, nearly broken his neck barehanded before Z shot it.

  What was it? No way to tell, probably. Some creature from legend, folklore, or cultural nightmare, improbably come to life and ready to carry out whatever malign purpose humanity had imagined for it.

  In any case, that wasn’t as important as figuring out the monsters who were here, now, ready to strike.

  So he returned to The Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Folklore. The answers were in there. They had to be.

  But two hours’ poring over the book, the flashlight dimming as the batteries ran down, didn’t tell him much. His eyes were sore and his head swam with the weird names of all of the creatures people in different places had dreamed up. There were lots of things that could impersonate people, apparently, for lots of different reasons. No way to tell who was who until they acted, and then it’d be too late.

  He only found one thing of importance. Ragnarok, the strange word Gareth had heard Jackson say as he sat, apparently in a trance, on Jimmy Acosta’s front porch. That one was easy to find. It was in the section on Norse myth.

  It was the name for the final battle, the catastrophic fight between the gods, the ice giants and fire giants, and the monsters—like the Serpent of Midgard, Nidhogg the dragon, and Fenrir, the enormous wolf, who ended the world at the finish by eating the sun itself.

  A battle in which the gods themselves lost and were destroyed. The king of the fire giants, Surt, came up through the ground, destroyed the bridge to Asgard, and killed the valiant god Frey who had offered himself up as a sacrifice to save the remnants of humanity.