He’d been talking so fast I wondered if I’d missed something. “Charlie, what buck?”
He looked surprised. “I didn’t tell you about the buck?”
“I don’t think so.”
Charlie’s gaze returned to the fire. “Hasn’t snowed in weeks. The ploughs stopped coming. Sometimes I swear I can hear them, way off down the road, so I go out, right? I go out and wait, figuring they’re coming to check up on me. But they must be doing something else, cause they don’t come. I can hear them, all right. They must be busy, right?”
“Sure.” I stood. “Listen, I’m gonna get some other wood, if that’s all right?”
“Fine. You go right ahead and get it, Daniel. That’s fine by me. I got some birch out back.”
“Great,” I said.
Outside, I stood in front of the woodpile, holding Charlie’s axe in my hands. I listened to the silence beyond the sounds of my breath. The muscles around my neck felt tight. I let the quiet sink into me, studied the grey trees beyond the clearing. Without leaves the trees all seemed to be standing alone, each one cut off from the others. The snow beneath them was like empty space, as if the roots and earth had been wiped away, leaving nothing behind.
My feet began to tingle. My toes had been frozen so many times there wasn’t much feeling left in them anyway. All I had to do, I knew, was to get moving, but I just kept standing there, and the cold started working its way up my legs the way it does – picking out little areas, making them feel sort of wet, exposed. Then the feeling goes and there’s just an empty patch. My knees went, then my thighs.
Behind me the backdoor opened. “Hey, Daniel?” The spell, or whatever it was, broke. I turned around. Charlie was standing just inside the door, clouds of vapour around his legs.
“Just thinking,” I said to him, smiling.
“Thought you froze right up!” Charlie said, laughing. “Hurry up back inside. I got hot chocolate brewing.”
“Right,” I said, turning back to the woodpile. I began pulling out birch logs. To split them all I had to do was let the axe fall of its own weight – the logs seemed to almost jump apart. But the moving around brought the feeling back to my legs.
I piled wood on the back porch, then brought an armload inside. Charlie was in the kitchen, standing by the stove.
“They must be pretty busy, right?” he asked, stirring Fry’s cocoa into a pot of simmering milk.
“Who?”
“The guys who clear the roads, like I was saying before. There’s lots of side roads that probably need work, ones they couldn’t get around to earlier, right? Can you believe this cold snap? All night long I can hear trees cracking. Exploding, you know? It’s an eerie sound, all right. Can’t say I like it. Do you like it, Daniel? I’ve been getting up at dawn and I make some coffee and sit in the rocker so I can look out over the lake.
“That’s how I first saw the buck, looking out over the lake. He comes from the far side, every morning. Stumbling through the deep snow. Uses a different trail every time. Can you figure that?”
Charlie poured us cups of hot chocolate. We returned to the den. I set my cup down on the mantle and went to bring in the birch. The echo of the axe splitting the wood kept going through my head, making me think of what Charlie had been saying about exploding trees.
I stoked the fire, then sat down again. “That doc in the city,” I said, “he’s still phoning you every week?”
Charlie rubbed his face, then licked his lips. “I unplugged the phone. He kept saying the same old thing, over and over again.” He leaned towards me and gestured for me to get closer. “Tell me, do you think my tongue’s turning blue?” He poked out his tongue.
I looked at it, then sat back. “Hard to tell,” I said. “Don’t think so.”
“I think so,” Charlie said.
The heat coming from the birch logs made me push my chair back. I thought about the nights I’d spent alone, wrapped in my Woods arctic sleeping bag, watching my breath lay a sheet of ice on the nylon ceiling above me. I’d be filled with the silence, so filled and warm, with my thoughts going slow as they like to do. Then crack! A tree would explode. I’d jump, stare into the darkness, my heart pounding. Black spruce. It’s the black spruce that explodes.
“I hope the ploughs come back,” Charlie said. “We’re running low on hay.” He frowned suddenly. “Oh,” he said, “I forgot.” He climbed to his feet. “Come on, Daniel, let’s look out over the lake.”
I followed him to the large frosted window. We stood side by side and stared outward. I could see the buck’s trails, shadowed blue. They stopped at a scuffed-up area just below the porch deck, maybe thirty feet away. The scuffed-up area was spattered with frozen blood, and off to one side lay the frosted carcass of the buck, half-eaten.
“Wolves? Jesus, nobody’s seen a wolf in this park for years.”
Charlie asked, “Did you see the Northern Lights last night?”
“I’m usually asleep by seven,” I said.
“From horizon to horizon, I’ve never seen them so big. They made a sound like, like wind on sand, falling all around. All around. It’s so beautiful, Daniel. There’s no real way to describe it, is there?”
“Not really. You’re right in that.” But I knew that sound, the voice behind the silence, the voice that pushed the silence into me. And I knew what that voice said, the single word over and over again. Alone, alone, alone.
“Only,” Charlie continued, “only, there’d be this falling from the sky, right? And all these streams of colour. And deep in the forest, deep in the forest, Daniel. The trees kept on shattering. As if, for just last night, for just those few hours when I was standing out there, the world was made of glass. The thinnest glass. And the trees reaching upward. I don’t know.” Charlie turned to me, a terrible frown on his lined face. “Maybe the trees were made of glass, too. But all gnarled and bubbled and black. Trying to join the sky, but too rough.” He turned back to the window. “Too rough. Just no way they could make it. They were reaching up, to where the colours played. Reaching. Then snapping. Like gunshots. I tell you, in certain lights you can see it – the blue on my tongue. Then the glass in the sky shattered, and there was this falling. Endless falling.”
I nodded. “Like the world was made of glass.” His words had left a pain inside me, a deep, spreading pain. “Too rough,” I said, “wanting to play with the colours, all the colours. But too rough.” The voice whispered its word in my head, and it hurt me.
“That buck,” Charlie said, “he was so strong, so healthy. All his life. You could see that. He – I built this cabin with my own hands, Daniel, did you know that? He was strong, healthy. He’d been through hard times lately, but he was all right. Four wolves. I watched it all happen. That buck, running across the lake, full bore. I was sitting in this rocker, this one right here. They took him not twenty yards from here – you can see where he first went down. I’d been thinking about getting my bear rifle, but it was already too late. That’s the way it looked anyway. But the buck,” he shook his head, “that buck, he just got up and kept coming. You can see it – he dragged those wolves ten, fifteen yards. Dragged all of them.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
“He’d been so strong, all his life. He dragged them all right, but in the end it didn’t matter. It didn’t count for nothing. I just sat here, all this morning, watching them wolves eating. Funny, they kept walking around and around him, not knowing what to do, really. What to do with it all.”
I stared at the carcass, at the gnawed ribs and purple ice-flecked meat. “They’ll be back for more,” I said. “They earned it.”
“I’m thinking, Daniel, the same things over and over again. Funny how that happens, eh? I’m thinking about my rifle, and that taste filling my mouth. Metal. He’d been so strong, cut down just like that. And I’m thinking about this window, this one right in front of us, Daniel. Two panes each a quarter inch thick. How everything happened in absolute silence. And the only sou
nd I knew, I know, is something I feel more than hear. It’s probably psychological, eh, Daniel? But there’s this tingling, like glass chimes, and there’s this humming – both coming from my chest. It’s fading, I think, Daniel.”
I shook my head, again and again, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me. I didn’t even know what I was saying no to, but in my head a voice kept asking, “Why?” Why? And Charlie, he kept answering me, he kept saying “Because, Daniel. Only because. Just because.”
“The strangest winter,” Charlie said. “No way to explain it, any of it. My tongue turning bluer and bluer, getting stained deeper and deeper every time, the doc telling me it’s psychological – what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
We stood there for a long time, staring at the carcass. I wanted to cry, I wanted to shut my ears, stop the silence outside, never again let it in. But the tracks were cut too deep inside me. I’m not an old man. I don’t think I’m very smart as far as young people go. I was never good at things they’re good at. I’m not brave, and I’m sorry for that. I really am. I left Charlie that afternoon. I ran from him, across the lake, using one of the buck’s trails. I pitched my tent on the other side of Jessica Lake. I could’ve gone farther but I didn’t. I know it wasn’t a tree shattering that woke me that night, made me jump up, staring into the darkness, heart pounding. I know that it wasn’t a tree, and I’m sorry. Truly sorry.
GLEN HIRSHBERG
Miss Ill-Kept Runt
BOTH OF GLEN HIRSHBERG’S first two collections, American Morons and The Two Sams won the International Horror Guild Award and were selected by Locus as one of the best books of the year.
He is also the author of a novel, The Snowman’s Children, and a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist. Currently, he is putting the final touches to two new novels and a new collection.
With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a travelling ghost story performance troupe that tours the West Coast of the United States each October.
His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including multiple appearances in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors, Inferno, The Dark, Trampoline and Cemetery Dance. He teaches writing and the teaching of writing at Cal State San Bernardino.
“Like many of my stories, this one springs perversely from a happy memory,” Hirshberg reveals. “Much as my more talkative, squirmier brother and I got on each other’s nerves during car trips, we both always looked forward to the annual summer driving vacation, and especially the drives deep into the night, when it was cool outside and the traffic was non-existent and we could lie side by side in the way-back of the station wagon and watch the dark drop down on us . . .”
“My mother’s anxiety would not allow her to remain where she was . . . What was it that she feared? Some disaster impended over her husband or herself. He had predicted evils, but professed himself ignorant of what nature they were. When were they to come?”
—Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
CHLOE COMES CLINKING out the front door into the twilight, pudding pop in one hand and a dragon in the other. The summer wind sets her frizzy brown hair flying around her, and she says, “Whoa,” tilting up on one foot as though anything less than an F5 twister, a tag team of grizzly bears, a fighter jet could drag her and the fifteen pounds or so of bead necklace around her neck off the ground. The plastic baubles and seashell fragments and recently ejected baby teeth bump along her chest as she tilts, then straightens.
“I told you to get in pyjamas,” says her father from the side of the station wagon, where he’s still trying to wedge the last book and pan boxes into the wall of suitcases and cartons separating the front seat from the way-back, where Chloe and her brother the Miracle will be riding, as always.
“These are pyjamas,” Chloe says, lifting the mass of beads so her father can see underneath.
Sweating, exhausted before the drive even starts, her father smiles. Better still, the Miracle, who is already stretched in the way-back with his big-kid feet dangling out the open back door and his Pokémon cards spread all over the space Chloe is supposed to occupy, laughs aloud and shakes his head at her. In Chloe’s world, there are only a few things better than pudding pops and beads. One of them is her older brother noticing, laughing. The baby teeth on her newest necklace are mostly for him; she actually thinks they look blah, too plain, also a little bitey. But she’d known he would like them.
“Miss Ill-Kept Runt,” her brother says, and goes back to his cards.
She’s just climbing into the back, enjoying the Miracle’s feverish sweeping up of cards, his snapping, “Wait” and “Don’t!” at her, when her mother emerges from the empty house. Freezing, Chloe watches her mother tighten the ugly grey scarf – it looks more like a dishrag – around her beautiful dark hair, linger a last, long moment in the doorway, and finally aim a single glance in the direction of her children. Chloe starts to lift her hand, but her mother is hurrying around the side of the station wagon, eyes down, and Chloe hears her drop into the passenger seat just before her father wedges the Miracle’s feet inside the car and shuts the way-back door.
“Stan,” her mother says, in her new, bumpy voice, like a road with all the road peeled off. “Let’s just go.”
It’s the move, Chlo. That’s what her father’s been saying. For months, now.
Her father’s already in the driver’s seat and the station wagon has shuddered to life under Chloe’s butt and is making her necklaces rattle when her mother’s door pops open, and all of a sudden she’s there, pulling the back door up, blue-eyed gaze pouring down on Chloe like a waterfall. Chloe is surprised, elated, she wants to duck her head and close her eyes and bathe in it.
“Happy birthday,” her mother says, bumpy-voiced, and reaches to touch her leg, then touches the Miracle’s instead. He doesn’t look up from his cards, but he waves at her with his sneaker.
“It’s not my birthday yet,” Chloe says, wanting to keep her mother there, prolong the moment.
Her mother gestures towards the wall of boxes in the back seat. “We’ll be driving most of the night. By the time I see your face again, it will be.” And there it is – faint as a fossil in rock, but there all the same. Her mother’s smile. A trace, anyway.
It really has been the move, Chloe thinks, as her mother slams the door down like a lid.
“Say goodbye to the house,” her father says from up front, on the other side of the boxes. Chloe can’t see him, and she realizes he sounds different, too. Far away, as though he’s calling to her across a frothed-up river. But right on cue, she feels the rev, rrruummm, rruummm; it’s reassuring, the thing he always does before he goes anywhere. She bets he’s even turned around to give her his go! face, forgetting there’s a wall of cardboard there.
Then they are going, and Chloe is surprised to find tears welling in her eyes. They’re not because she’s sad. Why should she be, they’re moving back to Minnesota to be by Grammy and Grumpy’s, where they can water-ski every day, Grumpy says, and when Chloe says, “You can’t water-ski in winter,” Grumpy says, “Maybe you can’t.”
But just for a moment, pulling out of the drive, she’s crying, and the Miracle sits up, bumping his big-kid head against the roof and squishing her as he turns for a last look.
“Bye, house,” she says.
“Pencil mouse,” says the Miracle, and Chloe beams through her tears. It’s her own game, silly-rhyme-pencil game, she made it up when she was three to annoy her brother into looking at her, and it mostly worked. But she couldn’t ever remember him playing it.
“Want to do speed?” she says, and the Miracle laughs. He always laughs now when she says that, but only because their father does. Her father has never said what’s funny about it, and she doesn’t think the Miracle knows, either.
“Play speed,” he answers, grinning, maybe to himself but because of her, so that doesn’t matter. “In a minute.” And h
e glances fast over his shoulder towards the wall of boxes and then turns away from her again temporarily.
But Chloe has noticed that his grin is gone. And when she settles onto her shoulder blades and stretches out her legs to touch the door while her head brushes the back of the back seat, she realizes she can hear her mother over the rumbling engine, over the road bumping by.
“Oh, freeze,” her mother is whispering, over and over. Or else, “cheese.” Or “please.”
It isn’t the words, it’s the whispering, and Chloe realizes she knows what her mother’s doing, too: she’s hunched forward, picking at the hem of her skirt on her knees, her pale, knobby knees.
Knees? Is that what she’s saying? No. Please.
“Bye, trees,” Chloe whispers, watching the familiar branches pop up in her window to wave her away. The blue pine, the birch, the oak where her father thinks the woodpecker always knocks, the black-branched, leafless fire-trees the crows pour out of every morning like spiders from a sac. After the fire-trees comes the open stretch of road with no trees. The trees after that are ones she doesn’t know, at least not by name, not to say hello or wave goodbye. Then come brand new trees.
“Please,” comes her mother’s voice from the front seat.
“Dad, Gordyfoot,” the Miracle all but shouts.
“Right,” comes her father’s answer, not as shiny as usual but just as fast. Seconds later, the CD’s on, and Chloe can’t hear her mother any more.
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