The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  The thing kicks her again.

  It wants you to lie down, her voice tells her. It wants you to have nothing left to fight with and then it will gut you like a fish.

  Lily can see no way to prevent it. She leans against the bench, her legs out straight in front of her. She feels her eyes spinning around. It’s why when the monster bends to put its face close to hers she catches only glimpses of it, as though she’s on a carousel and sees it only once each revolution.

  “I don’t know what Michael saw in you,” it says.

  The eyes are dead. It brings its right claws up slowly to the soft skin at the top of her throat.

  “But I’d like to see some of it for myself.”

  Lily only intends to block its arm with her own but as she wildly swings her left hand up she makes contact with something else. She hears an audible tearing, wet and thick, as the ends of the long blades on her glove catch its skin and cut a line through the side of its throat. There’s a pause, an extended moment of frozen soundlessness, before a hot spume fires out of the monster’s neck, then another, another. Its life rushing out to the steady rhythm of its heart.

  It sees what she’s done. The black eyes look around its feet at the rising pool of himself.

  It lashes its claws at her and cuts her chest. Lily screams at the instant burning, but she can feel that the wounds aren’t deep. She has another chance. Only one.

  She uses her teeth this time.

  Whether it’s from a lack of balance, or it wasn’t expecting her to come at it this way, it doesn’t block her attack. She bites down into the open wound at its neck. The blood surges into her mouth and she swallows and swallows.

  It fights her but she doesn’t let go. She can feel its claws slapping and tearing at the back of her jacket but it can’t dig into her properly so long as she maintains this embrace, keeps the teeth clenching tighter.

  Lily measures its passing in increments of weakness. The abandoned strikes to her back. The quieting of its teeth. Finally, it shudders once and goes still.

  Lily spits out the remaining fluid in her mouth. Once more she thinks she’s going to be sick but then her stomach calms. It’s as if she’s ingested a fortifying consommé, comforting and warm, not the crimson glue spilling onto the floor.

  A new strength brings her to her feet. She looks down at the thing’s body. Is it Hyde or Michael? The eyes are open and vacant, the lips tight over the silver teeth. Part of its features are those of her father, and others the ancient thing within him. She knows that whatever it is, it’s dead.

  Lily removes the teeth from her mouth and puts them in the pocket of her jacket. The claw-gloves she wraps in a canvas bag she finds under the sink, ties the top with some of the rope she’d used to hold the door closed.

  She considers pulling the body out of the trailer and hiding it. The police will find all this in time. They must already be in Faro, looking over Jim Hurst and concluding it was more than a bear attack. Then they’ll find Will, and this man in the trailer, neither immediately identifiable. It’s the kind of puzzle they’d call outside authorities to help with.

  It’s all too much to think about. There’s the cold to worry her more than the police. There’s making it to the road.

  Yet she still lingers long enough to notice the journal.

  The button on his jacket pocket that had held it inside must have been opened in their struggle, and now the top of its leather cover poked out, the thick string that tied it shut stretched over his chest like a snake.

  Lily pulls it out. She winds the string tight around it and the pages inside crinkle like the sound of distant applause. It fits as snug in her pocket as it had in his.

  She starts along the trail. How much light is left in the day? She’s so disoriented by the events of the past few minutes it’s impossible to guess. A couple of hours? Three? All she can do is follow the narrow gap cut through the trees.

  After a time she comes upon the crash.

  The Jeep Cherokee the thing had taken from the lot in Faro and driven here, smashed into the back of her pickup, totaling them both.

  Lily walks on.

  He let you do it, her voice says. Not the thing inside him, not Hyde, but the other part. Michael.

  Now that she hears this she can see no other explanation. There’s no way she should be the one walking out of the bush alive. This was his plan from before he committed the crime that sent him to the Kirby. Perhaps you could resolve the question of my missing name. He had threatened her, pursued her, killed before her eyes so that, when the time came, she would defend herself with everything she had. Everything within her that was his that she needed to discover for herself.

  He wanted you to swallow his blood.

  Lily thinks of something from the books she’d read. What Stoker had one of his vampires say.

  The blood is the life! The blood is the life!

  And it is.

  51

  * * *

  It’s almost full night when Lily walks out of the forest. She crawls up the incline out of the ditch and collapses at the side of the road. If she can rest here for a while she might find the strength to walk a few miles more. This is what she tells herself.

  You did it. You killed your own mother. It was you.

  She keeps her eyes on the road as it slowly rises to the north. The cold is making her sleepy. She fights it by concentrating on the horizon.

  The road, the trees.

  The horse.

  A stallion emerges from the forest a couple hundred yards ahead. Its hide is whiter than the fresh powdering of snow it stands on.

  The great animal stops in the middle of the road, looking at her.

  If it’s a hallucination, she could close her eyes and make it disappear. But when she does so and opens them, it’s still there.

  Lily raises her arm and waves at it, beckoning. Come back!

  The horse starts across the road and slips into the trees on the opposite side. Her cheek touches stone as sleep pulls her down.

  It’s over. She’s dying, and it’s okay. Michael is gone. The baby. Will. Her mother. No one to return to, no one to be returned.

  Before her tears freeze her eyes shut she sees the truck coming over the rise. It eases to a stop next to her. Lily sees spools of wire and an aerial arm in the back. It’s an electrical contractor. She’s seen them before up here, the mechanical arm used to lift workers to power lines. The driver’s door opens and a workman jumps out.

  The man approaches her. Her wounds are healing even as she lies here, a prickly tingling, like a team of invisible ants pulling skin together, stitching and smoothing.

  He leans over her. He smells like copper.

  “What happened to you?”

  “There was a man—” she answers, and lets her voice trail off when she realizes there’s no way to tell the truth.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I think I’m bleeding.”

  “You better get in the truck. Can you do it on your own?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He scoops her up. The muscled arms feel good under her back. Closer now, she can smell coffee and the doughy sweetness of a donut on his breath.

  The driver sets Lily down on the passenger seat and closes the door. He walks around to his side. She watches his deliberate motions and sees how he’s a man who thinks in steps. Get the ladder’s angle right, make sure the line is grounded, attach the new cable. Except now he’s working through a new process. Put the woman in the truck, drive to the hospital in Fairbanks, keep her awake.

  They won’t find anything until spring if you do it now.

  She feels the journal pressing against her left side as if it’s a small animal seeking her protection. Later, she will add to it. The end of his story. The beginning of her own.

  “You cut anywhere?” the truck driver asks her. “You been shot?”

  “No. I’m just . . . scared.”

  “Well you’re okay now. You’re safe, a
ll right?”

  Lily reaches inside her coat pocket on the right and feels the silver teeth. The sharp points sticky and slick.

  The driver avoids looking at her. Lily can feel his concern for her, his fear that she’s going to die in his truck. She can hear beyond his interior voice too. His heart. Loud and getting louder.

  “You want to listen to the radio?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  He turns it on. Country and western, just like when she was picked up by a man in a truck on this same road when she was six. Not Randy Travis this time but Ronnie Milsap. “There’s No Gettin’ Over Me.”

  The driver turns up the volume but Lily can barely hear it. There’s only the man’s heart, the deafening passage of blood through his neck. She slips her fingers through the open-mouthed gap of the silver teeth. The driver’s eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  Well you can say that you need to be free

  But there ain’t no place that I won’t be . . .

  There’s nothing in her head, not a sound or voice or thought. The warm life inside him, whooshing and pounding. So close and ready it’s like he’s here only for her. A gift.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks first to my primary idea bouncer and amazing wife, Heidi Rittenhouse, the best partner in all this a man could ever dream of, and to Maude and Ford, the children who affirm our love and good fortune every day.

  I’d say why the following deserve thanks but I’m trying to save a tree or two and in any case they already know: Nita Pronovost, Emily Graff, Jonathan Karp, Marysue Rucci, Kevin Hanson, Anne McDermid, Howard Sanders, Jason Richman, Martha Webb, Chris Bucci, Monica Pacheco, Peter Robinson, Jon Wood, Jemima Forrester, Ben Willis, Amy Prentice, Craig Davidson, Peter McGuigan, Stephanie Cabot, Dominick Montalto, Steven Hayward, Mike Edmonds, and Sarah Knight.

  Researching The Only Child took me here and there, both in body and books. As to the latter, special mention must be made of the following excellent texts and biographies: Robert Louis Stevenson by Claire Harman, Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark, The Poet and the Vampyre by Andrew McConnell Stott, and Who Was Dracula? by Jim Steinmeyer.

  About the Author

  HEIDI PYPER

  ANDREW PYPER is the author of seven novels, most recently The Damned. The Demonologist was a #1 bestseller in his native Canada and won the International Thriller Writers award for Best Hardcover Novel. His other novels include Lost Girls (winner of the Arthur Ellis Award and a New York Times bestseller), The Killing Circle (a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year), and The Guardians (a Globe and Mail Best Book). Three of Pyper’s novels are in active development for television or feature film. He lives in Toronto. Visit him at www.andrewpyper.com.

  @andrewpyper

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  ALSO BY ANDREW PYPER

  The Damned

  The Demonologist

  The Guardians

  The Killing Circle

  The Wildfire Season

  The Trade Mission

  Lost Girls

  Kiss Me (Stories)

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Pyper Enterprises, Inc.

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5521-2

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5539-7 (ebook)