Little Wolves

HEWHOSLEEPS





Home at the parsonage, Clara waited to hear the sound of sirens howling past on the road leading out of town, but none came. When she tried calling the emergency number, the operator patched her through to a roiling static on the other line that smoothed into silence and then a busy signal before she hung up the phone. She went upstairs to get ready for bed, changing into a nightgown with a robe thrown over it to keep warm. Her hair still reeked of smoke from her visit to the Fallon place, but she didn’t want to draw a bath, in case the phone rang or Logan came home early.

Ever since she’d returned, cramping jolted her breath, as if the baby had hold of his umbilical cord and tugged on the other end. She pictured a chubby little monk yanking on a rope leading to a bell tower in her head.

Five weeks remained until her due date. Clara sat in the rocking chair up in the nursery, hoping the motion would ease the cramping. The day’s events had exhausted her, yet when she shut her eyes and tried to focus on her breathing, a throbbing pressure in her lower back pierced any sense of calm. Her breath came easier, a lightness in her head and under her ribs, yet her baby manuals said lower-back pain was likely the baby stepping on her sciatic nerve, not some augur of birth. She timed the Braxton Hicks contractions, if that’s what this cramping was, knowing that if they grew shorter or intensified that this was not false labor. A suitcase packed with essentials waited by the front door in case she needed to go to the hospital tonight.

She stood and paced the room, her hands on her hips, which also hurt. Logan had assembled a plain pinewood crib, and they’d put fresh sheets on the mattress. A windup mobile of a manger scene, circled by stable animals and a winking crystal star, attached to the railing. The mobile had been hand carved and painted by someone from the church. Clara wound it and listened to it play a tinny version of “Silent Night.” Every time she saw the barn animals she thought of Thomas Hardy’s poem about the legend of oxen kneeling at midnight each Christmas Eve in memory of the Christ Child. I should go with him in the gloom, she remembered the final lines of the poem, the speaker’s longing to return to a childhood faith he had lost, Hoping it might be so.

Outside snow spilled from low clouds as dark came on. Logan was at the hospital in Sioux Falls, more than a hundred miles away. He hadn’t wanted to go after he’d heard the weather predictions, he explained in a note she found on the dining room table. There had been an accident, a car on an icy road sliding through a stop sign to strike a semi. The accident left the parishioner driving the car, a young father of three named Morgan, in a vegetative state. Logan had to be there with the family when the doctors removed Morgan from life support. Clara pictured Logan with his black communion kit, the red velvet lining and its vial of wine and canister of stale crackers. His quiet voice speaking promises of eternity. Unbidden, she thought of Leah down at the bottom of that pit, of her own mother trying to come home through such a storm. Dizzying thoughts whirred in her head like the thickening haze of snow whirring outside in the lamplight.

The doorbell rang.

Clara froze in place. How much time had passed since Grizz hurried off to the Gunderson farm? It must be him, returned with news about what happened. The doorbell rang again, but she remained where she was. All through her body her blood hummed right down to her fingertips, the nubs of her left hand quickening. The ringing went on and on until the sound hived in her mind. This is how you survive: stay still until the shadow passes over you.

Downstairs the door opened and slammed shut. She heard footsteps in her kitchen and only then did she move. Clara slid open the desk drawer where she kept her writing supplies, groping for any sort of weapon, a letter opener, scissors, anything. All she had was the Meiserstruck fountain pen she’d been using to set down her wolf child stories. She touched the tip with one finger, a sobering bite of sharpness.

The stairs creaked. There was no place to hide in this old room, not even a closet. Whoever had come in knew she was here, knew to follow the light upstairs. When he stepped into the nursery, he brought the cold from the outside in with him, a smell like methane. Cold and methane poured from his clothes into the warmth of the yellow room. He wore the same dirty tennis shoes and oilcloth coat she had seen months before. A black-haired boy with a pretty, curving mouth. Kelan.

He held a double-barrel shotgun in the nook of his arm, the gun loose and bobbing with each step. Snow dripped from his hair and coat to the hardwood floor, and he was shivering, breathing hard. When he spoke, his Adam’s apple danced in his throat. “Clara, I need you to come with me.”

Clara opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The line sounded practiced, obsessive, like he’d been rehearsing it in front of a mirror. “Is this about Leah?” she said, knowing it wasn’t. She didn’t ask about the gun.

Kelan nodded, his eyes glassy and vacant. Seth. This is what his ghost had been trying to tell her. All along she had known the truth. Two of them that day.

“In the corn. That was you.”

“We have to hurry,” he said, not looking at her.

It had not been Seth she had seen going back into that corn. It had been Kelan trailing him. It had not been Seth’s ghost she had seen emerge from the corn, but Kelan biding his time. And the town, reeling in shock over Will Gunderson’s death hadn’t considered that there might be something else out there, someone worse. “It must be so hard for you,” she said. “I can’t imagine.”

“Please, you got to help me, Mrs. Warren.” In his face she read some inner struggle, a tic pulsing violently in his cheek.

His voice, the pleading. It sounded so much like Seth, like he was channeling his dead friend. She felt the same icy fingers running up and down her spine as the night she thought she heard Seth’s spirit under the stairwell. Her grip tightened on the pen she held behind her back. Focus. The minute she let him take her elsewhere, she would die; she was sure of it. Use your voice. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, sounding as soothing as she could. “Not until I understand what’s going on.”

Kelan drew in a hissing breath through clenched teeth as though he’d been struck. When he raised his head, he glared at her, his nostrils flaring. She had said the wrong thing. Kelan lifted the gun and walked toward her until she was backed up against the wall.

She got out one word, “Don’t,” and then he shoved the barrel so hard into her belly that the pain bent her over. Steel met watery membrane, pushed against the tight drum of her stomach. Something wet and warm leaked down her leg. Clara screamed.

“Shut up,” he screamed back. “You don’t get to decide.” He cocked both barrels and pressed deeper, and her gorge rose in her throat. Then he must have seen the urine pooling underneath her because he stepped back. “Gross.”

While stooped over, Clara stroked her stomach when she could breathe again, felt pressure shifting from her back to her pelvis, the baby searching for a way out. Somewhere, she’d dropped the pen she had been hoping to use for a weapon. So stupid. Squeezing her eyes shut, trying to steady her breathing. Her heartbeat, the child’s heartbeat, thumping in her ears. Think.

“Filthy,” Kelan said. His voice deeper now. A man’s voice, angry. His father?

Clara opened her eyes and studied him. The same gleam, opaque as smoked glass, as she’d seen in that old woman’s eyes. Bynthia. Cold and hostile. “I can be clean again,” she said. She felt tears warm on her face. Her nose running hot. As though she were a witch, melting. “If you show me how.”

“Stop it!” he shouted at her. The gun shaking in his grasp. “Stop crying!”

Clara wiped her nose on her sleeve, wiped away the tears.

The voice, the fatherly baritone, came into him. He drew himself up, circling her, careful not to step in the mess she had made. “Do you want to live forever?” It sounded like something he’d been asked many times himself, a question beaten into him.

No, she thought. The most important thing was to go on living right now. For her, for the baby inside her. “Yes,” she said. Heaven. Heofon. The sky, the firmament.

“Forever with me?” Softly spoken now, a slackness sliding over his face.

“Yes,” she said, keeping her voice firm. Lull him into trusting you.

His face contorted, lips peeling back to show his teeth. “Liar!” he shouted. “You lie! Why do you have to lie to me all the goddamn time?”

Her legs gave way. She was sitting in the puddle of cold urine. Dizzied by a sudden contraction squeezing her middle, by the force of his anger. Kelan stomping up and down the room, ranting. “I’ve seen you! I’ve watched you!” She hoped his words carried out into the street. To Nora’s, to neighboring houses. “You thought you had me fooled. You fool all the rest of them, but not me. I know what you’ve been doing. I see everything. I know, I f*cking know what you are.”

He was reenacting something, some familiar drama. He didn’t really see her in that moment, Clara realized. She was an it, an object, and they were both playing parts. A terrible sense of helplessness swept over her, Clara pulling her knees up to her chest, her vision narrowing to a single vanishing point.

Then a sharp pain drew her up to her feet, Kelan dragging her by her hair. “Get up. Not here.”

“Let go of me,” Clara cried, and he did. His face drained of color, he bid her take off the soiled robe, and she let it drop to the floor, and he stood looking at her in her damp gown, her one shoulder bare, exposed. Whatever happened she was not going to let him push that gun into her belly again.

Kelan pointed toward the door with his gun. Clara brushed past him and stepped into the hallway. Midway down the stairs another contraction halted her, and she had to grab hold of the banister to keep from falling. Kelan prodded at her back with the barrel. Somehow she made it down the stairs, and midway through the kitchen she saw her own shimmery reflection in the window, her hair wildly askew, the boy behind her in a coat too large for him, the sleeves rolled up, his mouth muttering. The images pale and blurring, like they were both already dead, walking together in some other afterlife. “I need shoes,” she said when they reached the door. “They’re in the other room.” Where was he taking her? Next door, to the church? The graveyard?

“Keep going,” he said in the low voice.

Outside the snow felt good under her bare soles, woke her up from her dreamy disconnect, but when she spotted Grizz Fallon’s truck under the yard lamp, all hope fled. Kelan absently opened the door for her and shut it once she climbed in. He went around to the passenger side and swung himself up. The gun lay in his lap as he passed her the keys. “Don’t flood the engine. You do anything stupid, I’ll blow your face off.”

After what she had been through, the threat sounded weak, pathetic. Her cheeks flushed as sudden anger coursed inside her. “Like Seth did your father?” The words left her before she even knew what she was saying.

“Shut up. Start the engine.”

“You asked him to meet you that day in the corn, but he didn’t follow your instructions, did he? He wasn’t supposed to stop at the parsonage. Your dad wasn’t supposed to be there.”

The winter storm sweeping down from the prairies, the wind blasting. Full dark and the rest of the town huddled in their homes with televisions turned up loud. In answer Kelan pressed the barrel of his shotgun up under her jawbone, shutting her mouth. “Please,” he said. “Just start the truck.”

Once they left the driveway, she knew without being told to take the road heading out of town. Clara knew where they were going, though she had never been there. The place where they kept hell. Helle. Hellir. Infernal. A cave. A hidden region. Kelan, dazed, was talking to her the whole time. He was sorry, but Seth didn’t have the stomach for it. Seth was a chickenshit. And Clara, she was a witness. He needed her to see. Once she saw she would understand. Through the thin nightgown Clara felt the itchy wool blanket Grizz had thrown over the seat. The cab smelled of manure, an earthy, pungent scent.

Thick wet snowflakes clung to the wipers, icing over the windows. Soon it would freeze solid, and they would be driving blind. Clara found the defroster, but when she looked up again her headlights illuminated a huge dog. Not a dog, a coyote. Clara tapped the brakes, and the vehicle skated, a thousand pounds of steel drifting unmoored on the ice.

“What the f*ck?” Kelan said. “Run it over.” Her hand pressed the horn, but no sound came out. The gray, its muzzle bearded with ice, stayed planted in the road. She jammed on the brakes and the truck wheeled into a full spin.

Kelan reached across and tried to yank the wheel in the same direction as the spin. His shotgun slipped to the cab’s floor. She heard the blast, smelled acrid gunpowder. They were turning, spinning in circles as the truck whipped around on a patch of ice before slipping backward toward one of the steep ditches bordering either side of the road. It caught, held on the lip, and then the snowbank gave way, and they plunged down the ditch. Dimly, Clara heard her own voice, high and shrill, before the roof caved in, and her face slammed the steering wheel.

WHEN CLARA WOKE, HER heartbeat pulsed in her forehead, and she realized she was upside down, clamped in by the steering wheel, her scalp torn and bleeding. Her side cramped, the baby pressing on her internal organs. Alive, the baby was alive inside her. The backwash of the headlights against the snowbank illuminated the cab. Beside her Kelan stirred, his face a red smear, one eye crusted shut. Clara touched her ribs. Bruised or broken, she didn’t know.

She found she could move her legs, wedged under the steering wheel, and she wormed her way out. Clara pushed at her door, but it was jammed shut. The rear window had shattered, snow sweeping in to fill the cab. Clara crawled under the overhanging seats to the opening. Just as she reached it, Kelan grasped her ankle. She lashed out with her other leg, kicked him in the face, and kept crawling. Halfway through the window, she cried out. The snow had hidden serrated glass teeth, and these bit deeply into her shoulder and back. She forced her way out, a sound like a ripped sheet inside her as she dropped into the dark cave beneath the upturned truck bed, her arms sinking elbow deep in the snow. Clara dived headlong into a drift, and squeezed her body out from under the truck.

Before she could catch her breath, the passenger-side door crunched open into the other side of the ditch as Kelan struggled to get out. Clara scrambled up the steep slope, grabbing hold of long grasses poking through the snow.

When she reached the top the road lay empty in either direction. Run. She had to run before shock settled in. Under her skin, the lanugo, the long ago. Her wolf self. If she stopped even once, she would not be able to get going again.

Across the road she spotted a small drop down to the frozen river and across it a span of woods that led to the opposite hill. Home and the promise of safety lay no more than a half mile away. Earth and sky one in the swirling storm light.

Clara set off, crossing the iced-over river as wind skirred snow along the glassy surface. She could hear him behind her, screaming words the wind tore from his mouth, but she forced herself to keep moving. She had lost all sensation in her feet, the numbness spreading into the rest of her body as she waded through deeper drifts where pale, thin birch trees thrust from the snow. There was something human about their peeling skin, their upraised arms. Her mother, urging her on. In the wind she heard another sound as well, an echoing call. They were here, the coyotes, bounding through high drifts, fluid as phantoms among the trees. Run with us.

When she turned, she saw her own bloody footprints in the dark; Kelan had closed the distance, lugging the shotgun from the cab.

Clara pushed on through the bramble into a clearing. In the midst stood a run-down cabin leaning crookedly on its foundation. It was lit from within, warm and beckoning, the door banging open and shut in the wind. The sheriff’s cruiser parked behind it, the roof humped with snow.

She shouted, not knowing what or why.

When no answer came, Clara limped toward the cabin, crossed the clearing. She climbed up on the stoop, recovering her breath, caught the swinging door, and stepped inside. The smell in the room so strong it burned in her nose, stung her eyes. Something chemical. She wiped her eyes and looked for a weapon.

She spotted the soiled mattress first, centered on the wood floor, a menagerie of impossible animals around it. What looked like red paint splashed underneath it, an uneven pentagram. A kerosene lantern, hissing quietly, cast flickering light over the scene. The sheriff himself slumped in the corner, his uniform soaked with dried black blood. An eyeless boar’s head topped where his skull should have been, the jaws wrenched open to show the terrible teeth. BEHOLD THE NEW CREATION scrawled in the same red paint on the wooden boards behind him.

Clara reeled away. The place had been made for her. This bed. This was where Kelan wanted to take her all along, the tableau he made for her. Please, God. But with the prayer, the thought that there was no God here. She was in a place where God would not come.

Her leg muscles had stiffened, but Clara managed to limp outside. Kelan stood waiting in the clearing, not more than fifteen feet away, his breath smoking. “Look at me. Look at what you did.” He grimaced, fingered the glistening open flap of skin on his cheek.

“I can fix it,” she promised. “Let me help you.”

“Go back inside,” he said. He stood in the center of the meadow, shuddering. He looked near collapse himself, but he had the strength to raise his gun, cut off her only path of escape.

“No,” she said. If she was going to die, it might as well be here, where she could feel the snow on her skin. Out in the open, among the trees where her spirit might run free. Not in there.

Kelan cursed. “I can tell you things,” he said. He wove back and forth as he came closer. His voice rising and then falling, pleading with her and then berating. “About the devil. I knew him. I lived with him.” He told her about the woman in the woods. An adulterer. A slut. Filthy like all women. His father and Sheriff Steve killed her and her lover and took the baby. Didn’t Clara know that? Didn’t she know who she was? The whole world was going to know. “Go inside. This is where you belong.”

When he lifted the shotgun, something roared off in the woods, a cry so utterly inhuman it raised the hackles on Clara’s neck.

Kelan pivoted and they were here, the coyotes surging from the woods all around him. Their ears peeled back, their yellow eyes huge and rolling. The gray pounced and snagged the edge of Kelan’s coat in his teeth. Off balance, Kelan spun and fired, and the unbraced shotgun leaped in the looseness of his hold and smashed into his face. He toppled backward into the snow. But instead of falling on him, the coyotes fled, scared off by the blast, the gunpowder smell, his high-pitched screams.

The two were alone again in the clearing. Clara limped off the stoop, hoping he wouldn’t notice her creeping up on him. Kelan, bleeding freely from his forehead, squatted as he levered open the shotgun, fumbling shells from his coat pockets. He blew on his fingers, numb from the cold, and looked up at Clara as if expected her to try rushing him. She approached, her palms upraised, when it came again, the primal bellow of something immense and wounded.

“No,” Kelan said, seeing it first. “It’s not possible.” The thing entered into the clearing, and Clara retreated, unsure which way to run, caught between the cabin and Kelan and what had come from the woods. It looked like Seth, risen from his shallow grave. Seth’s revenant here for vengeance. A thing massive and dark, as though it had formed from the fertile black soils of the farmlands stretching all around. A giant from under the earth, deep in the mountain. Her father’s giant, dripping something wet as though disintegrating with each step. HeWhoSleeps. A demon summoned.

Kelan crammed in two shells and clanked shut the chambers. The giant stepped into the clearing, black and seething. It grabbed Kelan from the ground before he could fire, lifted him in a huge hug that left Kelan’s feet windmilling above the ground. Kelan wheezed, dropping the gun, his fists flailing, knocking off wet dark earth. His screaming ended when the embrace tightened and all breath squeezed from his body. His rib cage collapsed, bones snapping brittle, an almost delicate sound, like icicles breaking on stones. Then the giant flung him away, the boy’s body folding as he fell.

Later she would wonder why she did this, how she had such presence of mind. Clara went over and crouched beside Kelan, crumpled in the snow. He blinked up at her, his pupils darkening, the color of falling ashes. He tried to speak through a mouth filling with blood. She lay her hand on his icy cheek, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” until he shuddered and was still.

The giant swayed above them, black circles ringing his eyes, and when he opened his mouth what came out was an animal’s cry of pain.

She was burning up under her skin. Somewhere off in the woods one of the coyotes howled, a question in the night, the others joining in. Clara’s own pain washed over her, splitting her strange calm. It came in waves, in beats. “Grizz,” she said to the giant. “Seth Fallon.” She called by his full name, his baptized name. She needed him to come back to his human self. “I think my water just broke.”