by Caleb Carr
“Tell ’em to mind their own business,” Mike shot back, disappearing behind the black backdrop and, I could hear, taking his place at the desk before the monitors. “That is why they call it a graduate education, after all. Now get the fuck out of here, I’ll see you in an hour or so.”
“Good luck,” I answered, starting down the steps. But as I did, I felt a sharp pain in my hip and stumbled rather badly, letting loose a loud “Mother-fucker!”
“Trajan?” Mike called, pulling the backdrop away just enough to get a glimpse of me regaining my footing. “You all right?”
“Yeah, just slipped,” I said, trying not to give away the true cause of my clumsiness. “But I’m fine, Mike.”
“You’ve been ‘slipping’ a lot, lately,” he said carefully. “And working awfully late. Plus you slept in that enclosure with her again last night. Don’t push it too hard, L.T.—remember what the doc said last time.”
“I am forever remembering ‘what the doc said last time,’ ” I answered, finally gaining the concrete floor of the hangar; and in a few more seconds, I was on my way to the only true comfort I’d ever known, during the lowest moments of our pastoral banishment.
The afternoon light outside the hangar was the kind of late day sunshine that warms and reveals without burning and blinding; and, feeling somewhat enlivened by it, I made the short walk up to Marcianna’s gate at what passes, in my case, for a fast pace, knowing that she would be waiting impatiently for me. Her wild excitement upon observing my approach was a unique and almost indescribable tonic, an outpouring of complete trust, a mutual trust that it had taken us years to develop, and which was now so strong that before I had even arrived at the gate, I was mirroring her joyous anticipation as plainly as my exhaustion and my discouragement over the case would allow. Marcianna and I were, as Mike often put it, “like a couple of kids—big, fucking freaky kids” when in each other’s company, a phenomenon not difficult to explain. After all, when you care for and then gain the trust of, say, a small white dog such as my great-aunt Clarissa kept almost constantly at her side, it’s a thing to be expected; but to be granted the faith of an animal never intended for human companionship—one who, though captured in her infancy and held through her youth for the amusement of human children, was thereafter shut away in cramped, filthy cages and exposed throughout her early adulthood only to disease and abuse by her keepers, without ever losing her essential freedom of spirit—well, that is another matter entirely.
I opened the lock on the tall, thick gate that separated us, perfectly aware that Marcianna could, if she wished, have killed me on the spot and vanished into the mountain wilderness that surrounded her enclosure. Instead, she submitted gladly to the clipping of the leash in my hand to the collar that she had long ago agreed to wear—and I felt any sense of sadness about the past disappear altogether. In welcome contentment we began our walk through the grounds surrounding Shiloh’s square-columned farmhouse: grounds that, like the house itself and, indeed, the whole of the farm, had been the vision of peace that Colonel Caractacus Jones had carefully formed and nurtured during his four horrifying years of service in the Civil War.
Our stroll took us first by the hangar and then down to the barns, inside one of which—the milking barn—I could hear my great-aunt Clarissa’s little white dust-mop of a dog (Terence, he was improbably called) yapping away as always, the wolf from which he was not so far removed as one might think driving him to try first to herd and then to nip at the heels of the incoming cattle. He was prevented from such mischief by Clarissa’s own gravelly, sharp voice, a sound that exuded complete command and authority, whether she was shouting at the farmhands, keeping Terence from running amok, or dealing with local political and law enforcement officials. Marcianna’s ears went forward at the sound of Terence’s sharp bark with evident interest. But it was just this interest that I had lately been working with her to eradicate: for the only thing that disturbed my otherwise hard-nosed great-aunt about having Marcianna on the farm was the threat that she might pose to the creature who was, somewhat inexplicably, Clarissa’s darling.
I was teaching Marcianna not to give in to her ancient instinct regarding Terence in a moderately sized clearing located beside a relatively straight stretch of the noisy stream that flowed down from the mountaintops through Death’s Head Hollow. The flat, recently mowed bit of field (a pasture for goats, in times gone by) lay beyond a screen of trees that ran along the hollow road itself. To reach it, we needed to walk across a wide stretch of lawn on the west side of the farmhouse; and as we did, Marcianna’s interest picked up again, the smell of beef and chicken being grilled just outside the kitchen in the back of the house reaching her black, triangular nose. But we had business to attend to, and she knew it; thus she was happy enough to press on, knowing that there would be rewards of a different kind very soon.
Once across the dusty hollow road, we walked through the line of maple, birch, and oak trees along it and toward the twin limestone posts of the pasture’s old, rotted gateway. Other than the gate, nothing much prevented access to the bracing waters of the stream, where one could cool off, get a drink, or go trout fishing. And it was fishing that, unbeknownst to Marcianna and myself, was about to bring about a most peculiar encounter: one that would prove a shot in the arm to Mike’s and my efforts to solve the deaths of the three local children.
Inside a weathered wooden box that I had placed beside one of the gateposts, I found my tool of instruction on these occasions: a long nylon string tied at one end to an eight-inch piece of broomstick, and at the other to an old white pillowcase, which I had stuffed with sawdust and tied into various sections, making them resemble a torso, legs, and a head. The final touch had been the supergluing of large cotton balls to the puppet’s head and extremities and black buttons to serve as eyes. Holding my cane under my arm, I found a suitable spot to place the decoy, behind a low, mostly ruined stone wall that had been part of the original fencing of the pasture. Then I led Marcianna to the opposite side of the clearing, letting the cord out as I went, and together we found a hiding place behind a fallen member of the stands of still more trees that ran along the stream. Finally, I released a long section of Marcianna’s leash, and tugged at the nylon string until the decoy began to appear from behind the stones some thirty yards away.
Her eyes locked onto it and her ears went forward, the memory of Terence’s yapping at the milking barn fresh in her mind. I immediately began speaking to her, issuing gentle but firm warnings as I ran a hand along the upper portion of her long, gently dipping spine, where her fur had already begun to stand in preparation for a determined stalk. My first efforts along these lines appeared to be in vain, however, and she quickly began to move out from our hiding place, keeping her body low as her ears sank slowly back on her head. I let her go until impatient movements of her hind legs seemed to indicate that she was getting ready to strike out across the clearing, a distance that she could have covered in a mere instant at her top speed. Then I spoke her name sharply, and pulled on the leash in a firm manner to tell her that this was just the sort of behavior she was to suppress, when faced with the image of such prey—at which point something unprecedented, something truly remarkable, happened:
She not only took my meaning instantly, but turned and issued one of her many chirping sounds, this one the most like a quick laugh, which she followed up by returning to the fallen tree at a quick trot. We repeated this process several times, Marcianna seeming to curb her instinct more each time as her amusement at the situation mounted. In return for her cooperation, she received praise spoken in the soft tones she found most pleasing, along with gentle scratching of my fingers behind her ears and along her back, and finally, some soft-cored, beef-flavored dog treats that I kept in my jacket pocket. (Ironically, my great-aunt bought the treats in bulk for little Terence; but Marcianna enjoyed them every bit as much as did her nemesis.) She was learning more quickly than she ever had before—or, I wondered, was it tha
t she only seemed to be learning something that she already understood perfectly well? Was Marcianna simply toying with me? She had shown signs of playfulness on many occasions, certainly; but she had never exhibited this deliberate pattern of making me believe she might be embodying dangerous, regressive behavior, then releasing the tension with a mischievous laugh, ultimately returning to my side to demand her reward.
Her amusement suddenly stopped, however, when she caught a sound on the light western breeze; and in an instant, she turned her gaze toward the rocks of the stream bed behind our fallen tree, beginning to growl in an alarmed, though not yet threatening, manner. Following the line of her sight, I became aware that there was indeed a foreign element intruding on the scene of our shared triumph: it was a pair of young voices, murmuring excitedly somewhere behind the rocks and in the stream. They were boys; certainly not older than about fifteen, I determined. The exact words of these very intrepid observers—for it was well known in Surrender that trespassers received stern treatment from Clarissa Jones—were difficult to make out, at first, given that I was trying not to turn directly toward them; but as the pair became more excited, individual phrases grew clearer, and as they did, I shifted my head very slightly to see the upper portions of faces that were strange to me.
They were staring at Marcianna and me in wide-eyed fascination—and fear. (In fact, they were so transfixed that they apparently did not notice that a pair of fishing rods they were carrying were by now waving high above their heads, offering a clear indication of their whereabouts.) The boy on the left was the shorter of the two, with sandy hair and a pair of sharp blue-grey eyes that contrasted with the darker hair, skin tone, and black eyes of the boy on the right. The smaller boy soon began to whisper even louder, in order to be heard over the waters of the stream, and I strained hard to make out fully what he was saying without giving myself away. But Marcianna, whose mood was changing quickly, foiled this attempt: her ears went steadily back on her head, and loud chirps of alarm punctuated her growling. Events in the clearing were no longer a piece of theater, for her: very soon, she began to make the scratching, hissing sound that in her case indicated threat. That sent the two boys’ heads back behind the rock, a move negated by the increased volume that heightened fear put into their voices:
“I told you to keep down!” said the smaller boy, in words that came quickly, their tone one of accustomed command—in the company he was presently keeping, at any rate.
“I ducked down as fast as you!” said the second boy; and, although his voice was deeper, indicating that he might be slightly older (or had simply developed faster) than his companion, he was evidently used to defending himself on such occasions. “He ain’t seen us, anyway,” he went on, at which he apparently rose up again to have another look.
“Derek!” the first boy ordered. “Get back down here!”
“I wanna see,” the second boy insisted; and from the corner of my eye I did indeed observe his head reappearing.
The sounds the pair were making, and especially the bobbing of their heads, were now disturbing Marcianna quite profoundly, and she began to look from their hiding place to me, moaning out questions as to why I was not allowing her to pursue the interlopers immediately. But I continued to stroke her back and to issue soothing but firm instructions that she was not to move from our own hiding place, despite its being fully exposed to the stream. Meanwhile, the next statement that the second boy made indicated that he had ducked down again to report some urgent intelligence:
“Lucas,” he said, breathlessly but with a very peculiar and particular sort of confusion and fear. “Lucas, he’s talking to his dog!”
“Yeah, so?” said the first boy. “Lots of people talk to their damned dogs, Derek, don’t you even know that much!”
“Yeah, but Lucas,” the boy called Derek insisted, still in apprehensive amazement, “the dog is talking back to him!”
“What?” said young Lucas, whose every utterance confirmed him as the leader of their band of two. “What the hell are you talking about now? Aw, stay here, I’m gonna find out for myself. ‘The dog is talking back to him,’ Jesus, Derek, it’s no wonder people think you’re so…” But his voice trailed off as, I presumed, he took his turn peering around the rock. I kept my own eyes locked on Marcianna’s and continued to try to calm her; but the task became steadily more difficult, until finally, she could restrain herself no longer. In a sudden, snarling burst, she leapt out of our hiding place and, landing in an upright, defiant pose, faced the large stone that sheltered the two boys. Then she issued one of the hoarse yet startling bark-like sounds that were her most extreme call of warning and threat. Turning my head, still not fully, I could see that the observer behind the rock was utterly terrified—yet his eyes, instead of being locked on the image of the still-enraged Marcianna, were fixed on the ground just behind her:
There, inside a tight loop of my companion’s long leash that I had not noticed curling itself around my left ankle, lay the whole of my left “leg” (and quite a realistic piece of prosthetic work it was), which had been torn loose from its socket on what little remained of my left thigh by Marcianna’s sudden leap, then dragged on through my pants and into the grass of the clearing. A painful throb soon reached my brain, and I grabbed at my thigh stump through the fabric of my empty pants leg. Though hardly a shocking sight, for Marcianna or myself, the scene had evidently horrified our young observer, although he quickly disappeared back behind the quartz rock with admirable self-discipline and only a short cry.
I waited for the next exchange from within the stream bed as I retrieved my prosthetic, hopped to a more discreet spot behind our fallen tree, and loosened my pants in order to be able to reseat the leg onto its socket. But what I heard next from the stream was so comical that it made this procedure considerably more difficult than usual.
“I got news for you!” the boy called Lucas declared to his friend. “That thing may be talking, but—it ain’t no dog!”
“Whatta you mean?” the boy Derek asked, more confused than ever.
“Just what I said,” answered his partner in crime. “It ain’t a dog—it’s a—a whatta you call it—one a those big cats!”
“Aw, who’s crazy now, Lucas?” came the skeptical reply. “Everybody knows the guy has some weird kinda dog—”
“Yeah? Well, as usual, everybody’s full of shit! I seen pictures of those things, it’s a—a cheetah! And not only that, Derek—” He paused, either for effect or out of disbelief, before declaring fatefully: “The damned thing just ripped the guy’s leg off!”
“No way,” Derek answered. “First of all, Lucas, cheetahs are in Africa; and second—aw, shit, I’m taking a look for myself…” A few more silent seconds passed, while Derek did indeed sneak up for another glimpse. By now, I had reaffixed my “leg” and reordered my pants, and was standing next to the downed tree, leaning on my cane. The boy Derek went low once more, saying quickly, “You’re crazy, Lucas. Batshit crazy. The guy’s standing right out there, on both legs—and he’s staring at us! Or at this rock, anyway.”
“Whatta you mean?” Lucas asked. “Like, he grew it back?”
“I guess so—but take a look,” Derek said. “Maybe he’s a mutant, or something, I mean, assuming it was really off—”
In the time it took Derek to mutter that brief statement, the top of Lucas’ head appeared and disappeared again; and from the way Derek was cut off before his next thought, yelping and gurgling a bit, it was my impression that Lucas had grabbed his friend’s shirt, somewhere near the collar. “A mutant—that’s it! He can regrow parts of his body, like a starfish! But whatever his explanation is, the animal took the whole leg right off, it was lying right there in the grass, hell, the fucking shoe was still on it—” There was a brief pause, and then Lucas seized hold of his terror for long enough to grow suddenly suspicious, muttering the words, “Wait a minute…”
This last statement made me realize that I would not be able to keep
from laughing out loud at these two for much longer. Therefore, when Lucas’ head reappeared, I took the chance to lock eyes with the boy, after which I put up a hand and beckoned him to come out of the stream bed. But Lucas just dove behind the rock again, after which even more furious, muted chatter passed between him and his confederate, expressing the urgent need to “get the fuck out of here!”
This, I was not prepared to allow. “Hey, you two!” I finally called aloud; and as I did, I saw the rapidly fluttering fishing poles above the quartz boulder suddenly grow still, their carriers evidently abandoning their planned escape, at least for the moment. “That’s right,” I continued. “Stand still, and then walk toward me—and if you’re carrying anything more serious than those poles, let me see it, right out in front of you.”
At that, quickly whispered accusations that ran on into words of defense and mutual recrimination rose up from the stream bed; and I will confess, the ridiculousness of the exchange kept me close to laughter; but I was determined not to allow that until I knew what the pair were up to, which was obviously something more than simple fishing.
“Do you really think you still need to whisper?” I called; at which I could hear what sounded like one of them landing a sharp blow to some solid part of the other’s body, likely a shoulder. I presumed the striker to be Lucas, as I heard his voice next:
“What did I tell you, Derek?” he said quite audibly. “If he’s already seen us, no point in trying to whisper any-fuckin’-more!”
“But you never said that, Lucas,” Derek moaned; and when they finally revealed themselves—both dressed in T-shirts of muted earth tones, along with jeans and, as protection against the rocks in the stream bed, canvas sneakers of some inexpensive variety—I could see that the taller boy was indeed rubbing his shoulder, while his face tightened in pain. His nearly black hair was shorter and more neatly cut than Lucas’ raggedly shorn mop of light brown; and this confirmed the impression that, despite his size, he was accustomed to following his friend’s lead and orders, even when he didn’t much like the results.