The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

The Carrion Gods in their Heaven

The leaves were turning.

Lorna fueled the car at a mom and pop gas station in the town of Poger Rock, population 190. Poger Rock comprised a forgotten, moribund collection of buildings tucked into the base of a wooded valley a stone’s throw south of Olympia. The station’s marquee was badly peeled and she couldn’t decipher its title. A tavern called Mooney’s occupied a gravel island half a block down and across the two lane street from the post office and the grange. Next to a dumpster, a pair of mongrel dogs were locked in coitus, patiently facing opposite directions, Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu for the twenty-first century. Other than vacant lots overrun by bushes and alder trees, and a lone antiquated traffic light at the intersection that led out of town, either toward Olympia, or deeper into cow country, there wasn’t much else to look at. She hobbled in to pay and ended up grabbing a few extra supplies—canned peaches and fruit cocktail, as there wasn’t any refrigeration at the cabin. She snagged three bottles of bourbon gathering dust on a low shelf.

The clerk noticed her folding crutch, and the soft cast on her left leg. She declined his offer to carry her bags. After she loaded the Subaru, she ventured into the tavern and ordered a couple rounds of tequila. The tavern was dim and smoky and possessed a frontier vibe with antique flintlocks over the bar, and stuffed and mounted deer heads staring from the walls. A great black wolf snarled atop a dais near the entrance. The bartender watched her drain the shots raw. He poured her another on the house and said, “You’re staying at the Haugstad place, eh?”

She hesitated, the glass partially raised, then set the drink on the counter and limped away without answering. She assayed the long, treacherous drive up to the cabin, chewing over the man’s question, the morbid implication of his smirk. She got the drift. Horror movies and pulp novels made the conversational gambit infamous; life imitating art. Was she staying at the Haugstad place indeed. Like hell she’d take that bait. The townsfolk were strangers to her and she wondered how the bartender knew where she lived. Obviously, the hills had eyes.

Two weeks prior, Lorna had fled into the wilderness to an old hunting cabin with her lover Miranda. Miranda was the reason she’d discovered the courage to leave her husband Bruce, the reason he grabbed a fistful of Lorna’s hair and threw her down a flight of concrete stairs in the parking garage of SeaTac airport. That was the second time Lorna had tried to escape with their daughter Orillia. Sweet Orillia, eleven years old next month, was safe in Florida with relatives. Lorna missed her daughter, but slept better knowing she was far from Bruce’s reach. He wasn’t interested in going after the child; at least not as his first order of business.

Bruce was a vengeful man, and Lorna feared him the way she might fear a hurricane, a volcano, a flood. His rages overwhelmed and obliterated his impulse control. Bruce was a force of nature, all right, and capable of far worse than breaking her leg. He owned a gun and a collection of knives, had done time years ago for stabbing somebody during a fight over a gambling debt. He often got drunk and sat in his easy chair, cleaning his pistol or sharpening a large cruel-looking blade he called an Arkansas Toothpick.

So, it came to this: Lorna and Miranda shacked up in the mountains while Lorna’s estranged husband, free on bail, awaited trial back in Seattle. Money wasn’t a problem—Bruce made plenty as a manager at a lumber company, and Lorna helped herself to a healthy portion of it when she headed for the hills.

Both women were loners by necessity or device, as the case might be, who’d met at a cocktail party thrown by one of Bruce’s colleagues and clicked on contact. Lorna hadn’t worked since her stint as a movie theater clerk during college—Bruce insisted she stay home and raise Orillia, and when Orillia grew older, he dropped his pretenses and punched Lorna in the jaw after she pressed the subject of getting a job, beginning a career. She’d dreamed of going to grad school for a degree in social work.

Miranda was a semi-retired artist; acclaimed in certain quarters and much in demand for her wax sculptures. She cheerfully set up a mini studio in the spare bedroom, strictly to keep her hand in. Photography was her passion of late and she’d brought along several complicated and expensive cameras. She was also the widow of a once famous sculptor. Between her work and her husband’s royalties, she wasn’t exactly rich, but not exactly poor either. They’d survive a couple of months “roughing it.” Miranda suggested they consider it a vacation, an advance celebration of “Brucifer’s” (her pet name for Lorna’s soon to be ex) impending stint as a guest of King County Jail.

She’d secured the cabin through a labyrinthine network of connections. Miranda’s second (or was it a third?) cousin gave them a ring of keys and a map to find the property. It sat in the mountains, ten miles from civilization amid high timber and a tangle of abandoned logging roads. The driveway was cut into a steep hillside; a hundred-yard-long dirt track hidden by masses of brush and trees. The perfect bolt-hole.

Bruce wouldn’t find them here in the catbird’s seat overlooking nowhere.



* * *



Lorna arrived home a few minutes before nightfall. Miranda came to the porch and waved. She was tall; her hair long and burnished auburn, her skin dusky and unblemished. Lorna thought her beautiful; lush and ripe, vaguely Rubenesque. A contrast to Lorna’s own paleness, her angular, sinewy build. She thought it amusing that their personalities reflected their physiognomies—Miranda tended to be placid and yielding and sweetly melancholy, while Lorna was all sharp edges.

Miranda helped bring in the groceries—she’d volunteered to drive into town and fetch them herself, but Lorna refused and the reason why went unspoken, although it loomed large. A lot more than her leg needed healing. Bruce had done the shopping, paid the bills, made every decision for thirteen, tortuous years. Not all at once, but gradually, until he crushed her, smothered her, with his so-called love. That was over. A little more pain and suffering in the service of emancipation—figuratively and literally—following a lost decade seemed appropriate.

The Haugstad Cabin was practically a fossil and possessed of a dark history that Miranda hinted at, but coyly refused to disclose. It was in solid repair for a building constructed in the 1920s; on the cozy side, even: thick, slab walls and a mossy shake roof. Two bedrooms, a pantry, a loft, a cramped toilet and bath, and a living room with a kitchenette tucked in the corner. The cellar’s trapdoor was concealed inside the pantry. She had no intention of going down there. She hated spiders and all the other creepy-crawlies sure to infest that wet and lightless space. Nor did she like the tattered bearskin rug before the fireplace, nor the oil painting of a hunter in buckskins stalking along a ridge beneath a twilit sky, nor a smaller portrait of a stag with jagged horns in menacing silhouette atop a cliff, also at sunset. Lorna detested the idea of hunting, preferred not to ponder where the chicken in chicken soup came from, much less the fate of cattle. These artifacts of minds and philosophies so divergent from her own were disquieting.

There were a few modern renovations—a portable generator provided electricity to power the plumbing and lights. No phone, however. Not that it mattered as her cell reception was passable despite the rugged terrain. The elevation and eastern exposure also enabled the transistor radio to capture a decent signal.

Miranda raised an eyebrow when she came across the bottles of Old Crow. She stuck them in a cabinet without comment. They made a simple pasta together with peaches on the side and a glass or three of wine for dessert. Later, they relaxed near the fire. Conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence until Lorna chuckled upon recalling the bartender’s portentous question, which seemed inane rather than sinister now that she was half- drunk and drowsing in her lover’s arms. Miranda asked what was so funny and Lorna told her about the tavern incident.

“Man alive, I found something weird today,” Miranda said. She’d stiffened when Lorna described shooting tequila. Lorna’s drinking was a bone of contention. She’d hit the bottle when Orillia went into first grade, leaving her alone at the house for the majority of too many lonely days. At first it’d been innocent enough: a nip or two of cooking sherry, the occasional glass of wine during the soaps, then the occasional bottle of wine, then the occasional bottle of Maker’s Mark or Johnny Walker, and finally, the bottle was open and in her hand five minutes after Orillia skipped to the bus and the cork didn’t go back in until five minutes before her little girl came home. Since she and Miranda became an item, she’d striven to restrict her boozing to social occasions, dinner, and the like. But sweet Jesus, f*ck. At least she hadn’t broken down and started smoking again.

“Where’d you go?” Lorna said.

“That trail behind the woodshed. I wanted some photographs. Being cooped up in here is driving me a teensy bit bonkers.”

“So, how weird was it?”

“Maybe weird isn’t quite the word. Gross. Gross is more accurate.”

“You’re killing me.”

“That trail goes a long way. I think deer use it as a path because it’s really narrow but well-beaten. We should hike to the end one of these days, see how far it goes. I’m curious where it ends.”

“Trails don’t end; they just peter out. We’ll get lost and spend the winter gnawing bark like the Donners.”

“You’re so morbid!” Miranda laughed and kissed Lorna’s ear. She described crossing a small clearing about a quarter mile along the trail. At the far end was a stand of Douglas Fir and she didn’t notice the tree house until she stopped to snap a few pictures. The tree house was probably as old as the cabin; its wooden planks were bone yellow where they peeked through moss and branches. The platform perched about fifteen feet off the ground, and a ladder was nailed to the backside of tree….

“You didn’t climb the tree,” Lorna said.

Miranda flexed her scraped and bruised knuckles. “Yes, I climbed that tree, all right.” The ladder was very precarious and the platform itself so rotted, sections of it had fallen away. Apparently, for no stronger reason than boredom, she risked life and limb to clamber atop the platform and investigate.

“It’s not a tree house,” Lorna said. “You found a hunter’s blind. The hunter sits on the platform, camouflaged by the branches. Eventually, some poor hapless critter comes by, and blammo! Sadly, I’ve learned a lot from Bruce’s favorite cable television shows. What in the heck compelled you to scamper around in a deathtrap in the middle of the woods? You could’ve gotten yourself in a real fix.”

“That occurred to me. My foot went through in one spot and I almost crapped my pants. If I got stuck I could scream all day and nobody would hear me. The danger was worth it, though.”

“Well, what did you find? Some moonshine in mason jars? D.B. Cooper’s skeleton?”

“Time for the reveal!” Miranda extricated herself from Lorna and went and opened the door, letting in a rush of cold night air. She returned with what appeared to be a bundle of filthy rags and proceeded to unroll them.

Lorna realized her girlfriend was presenting an animal hide. The fur had been sewn into a crude cape or cloak; beaten and weathered from great age, and shriveled along the hem. The head was that of some indeterminate predator—possibly a wolf or coyote. Whatever the species, the creature was a prize specimen. Despite the cloak’s deteriorated condition, she could imagine it draped across the broad shoulders of a Viking berserker or an Indian warrior. She said, “You realize that you just introduced several colonies of fleas, ticks, and lice into our habitat with that wretched thing.”

“Way ahead of you, baby. I sprayed it with bleach. Cooties were crawling all over. Isn’t it neat?”

“It’s horrifying,” Lorna said. Yet, she couldn’t look away as Miranda held it at arm’s length so the pelt gleamed dully in the firelight. What was it? Who’d worn it and why? Was it a garment to provide mere warmth, or to blend with the surroundings? The painting of the hunter was obscured by shadows, but she thought of the man in buckskin sneaking along, looking for something to kill, a throat to slice. Her hand went to her throat.

“This was hanging from a peg. I’m kinda surprised it’s not completely ruined, what with the elements. Funky, huh? A Daniel Boone era accessory.”

“Gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps? It’s just a fur.”

“I don’t dig fur. Fur is dead. Man.”

“You’re a riot. I wonder if it’s worth money.”

“I really doubt that. Who cares? It’s not ours.”

“Finders keepers,” Miranda said. She held the cloak against her bosom as if she were measuring a dress. “Rowr! I’m a wild-woman. Better watch yourself tonight!” She’d drunk enough wine to be in the mood for theater. “Scandinavian legends say to wear the skin of beast is to become the beast. Haugstad fled to America in 1910, cast out from his community. There was a series of unexplained murders back in the homeland, and other unsavory deeds, all of which pointed to his doorstep. People in his village swore he kept a bundle of hides in a storehouse, that he donned them and became something other than a man, that it was he who tore apart a family’s cattle, that it was he who slaughtered a couple of boys hunting rabbits in the field, that it was he who desecrated graves and ate of the flesh of the dead during lean times. So, he left just ahead of a pitchfork-wielding mob. He built this cabin and lived a hermit’s life. Alas, his dark past followed. Some of the locals in Poger Rock got wind of the old scandals. One of the town drunks claimed he saw the trapper turn into a wolf and nobody laughed as hard as one might expect. Haugstad got blamed whenever a cow disappeared, when the milk went sour, you name it. Then, over the course of ten years or so a long string of loggers and ranchers vanished. The natives grew restless and it was the scene in Norway all over again.”

“What happened to him?”

“He wandered into the mountains one winter and never returned. Distant kin took over this place, lived here off and on the last thirty or forty years. Folks still remember, though.” Miranda made an exaggerated face and waggled her fingers. “Booga-booga!”

Lorna smiled, but she was repulsed by the hide, and unsettled by Miranda’s flushed cheeks, her loopy grin. Her lover’s playfulness wasn’t amusing her as it might’ve on another night. She said, “Toss that wretched skin outside, would you? Let’s hit the rack. I’m exhausted.”

“Exhausted, eh? Now is my chance to take full advantage of you.” Miranda winked as she stroked the hide. Instead of heading for the front door she took her prize to the spare bedroom and left it there. She came back and embraced Lorna. Her eyes were too bright. The wine was strong on her breath. “Told you it was cool. God knows what else we’ll find if we look sharp.”



* * *



They made fierce love. Miranda was much more aggressive than her custom. The pain in Lorna’s knee built from a small flame to a white blaze of agony and her orgasm only registered as spasms in her thighs and shortness of breath, pleasure eclipsed entirely by suffering. Miranda didn’t notice the tears on Lorna’s cheeks, the frantic nature of her moans. When it ended, she kissed Lorna on the mouth, tasting of musk and salt, and something indefinably bitter. She collapsed and was asleep within seconds.

Lorna lay propped by pillows, her hand tangled in Miranda’s hair. The faint yellow shine of a three-quarter moon peeked over the ridgeline across the valley and beamed through the window at the foot of the bed. She could tell it was cold because their breaths misted the glass. A wolf howled and she flinched, the cry arousing a flutter of primordial dread in her breast. She waited until Miranda’s breathing steadied, then crept away. She put on Miranda’s robe and grabbed a bottle of Old Crow and a glass and poured herself a dose and sipped it before the main window in the living room.

Thin, fast moving clouds occasionally crossed the face of the moon and its light pulsed and shadows reached like claws across the silvery landscape of rocky hillocks and canyons, and stands of firs and pine. The stars burned a finger-width above the crowns of the adjacent peaks. The land fell away into deeper shadow, a rift of darkness uninterrupted by a solitary flicker of manmade light. She and Miranda weren’t welcome; the cabin and its former inhabitants hadn’t been either, despite persisting like ticks bored into the flank of a dog. The immensity of the void intimidated her, and for a moment she almost missed Bruce and the comparative safety of her suburban home, the gilded cage, even the bondage. She blinked, angry at this lapse into the bad old way of thinking, and drank the whiskey. “I’m not a damned whipped dog.” She didn’t bother pouring, but had another pull directly from the bottle.

The wolf howled again and another answered. The beasts sounded close and she wondered if they were circling the cabin, wondered if they smelled her and Miranda, or whether their night vision was so acute they could see her in the window—she half in the bag, a bottle dangling from her hand, favoring her left leg, weak and cut from the herd. She considered the cautionary tale of Sven Haugstad and drank some more. Her head spun. She waited for another howl, determined to answer with her own.

Miranda’s arms encircled her. She cupped Lorna’s breasts and licked her earlobe, nibbled her neck. Lorna cried out and grabbed Miranda’s wrist before she registered who it was, and relaxed. “Holy crap, you almost gave me a heart attack!” The floor creaked horribly, they’d even played a game of chopsticks by rhythmically pressing alternating sections with their shoes, but she hadn’t heard her lover cross the room. Not a whisper.

Something metallic snicked and an orange flame reflected in the window and sweet, sharp smoke filled Lorna’s nostrils. Miranda gently pressed a cigarette to Lorna’s lips. Miranda said, “I needed this earlier, except I was too damned lazy to leave the covers. Better late than never.”

“Gawd, you read my mind.” Lorna took a drag, then exhaled contentedly. The nicotine mixed with the alcohol did its magic. Her fear of the night land and its creatures receded. “I guess I can forgive you for sneaking up on me since you’ve offered me the peace pipe. Ahhh, I’ve fallen off the wagon. You’re evil. Did you hear the wolves?”

“Those aren’t wolves,” Miranda said. She reclaimed the cigarette. She inhaled and the cigarette’s cherry floated in the window as her face floated in the window, a blur over Lorna’s shoulder. “Those are coyotes.”

“No shit?”

“Is that why you’re so jumpy? You thought the wolves were gonna get you?”

“I’m not jumpy. Well, sheesh—an almost full moon, wolves howling on the moor, er, in the woods. Gotta admit it’s all kinda spooky.”

“Not wolves. Coyotes. Come to bed…It’s chilly.”

“Right. Coyotes,” Lorna said. “I’m embarrassed. That’s like peeing myself over dingoes or raccoons.”

Snug under a pile of blankets, Lorna was drifting off to sleep when Miranda said in a dreamy voice, “Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up.”

“What?” Lorna said. Miranda didn’t answer. She snored.



* * *



One morning, a woman who resembled Vivian Leigh at the flowering of her glory knocked on the door. She wore a green jacket and a green and yellow kerchief and yellow sunglasses. Her purse was shiny red plastic with a red plastic strap. Her gloves were white. Her skirt was black and her shoes were also black. She smiled when Lorna opened the door and her lipstick was blood red like the leaves. “Oh, I’m very sorry to disturb you, Ma’am. I seem to be a trifle lost.” The woman introduced herself as Beth. She’d gone for a drive in the hills, searching for the Muskrat Creek Campground. “Apparently, I zigged when I should’ve zagged,” she said, and laughed a laugh worthy of the stage. “Speaking of zigzags, do you mind?” She opened an enamel case and extracted a cigarette and inserted it into a silver holder and lighted up with a stick match. It was all very mesmerizing.

Lorna had nearly panicked upon hearing the knock, convinced Bruce had tracked her down. She recovered and invited the woman inside and gave her a cup of coffee. Miranda had gone on her morning walk, which left Lorna with the task of entertaining the stranger while deflecting any awkward questions. She unpacked the road map from her Subaru and spread it across the table. She used a pencil to mark the campgrounds, which were twenty-odd miles from the cabin. Beth had wandered far off course, indeed.

“Thank goodness I came across you. These roads go on forever.” Beth sipped her coffee and puffed on her fancy cigarette. She slipped her sunglasses into her purse and glanced around the cabin. Her gaze traveled slowly, weighing everything it crossed. “You are certainly off the beaten path.”

“We’re private people,” Lorna said. “Where’s your car?”

Beth gestured toward the road. “Parked around the corner. I didn’t know if I could turn around in here, so I walked. Silly me, I broke a heel.” She raised her calf to show that indeed yes, the heel of her left pump was wobbly.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. I was supposed to meet friends at the campgrounds, but I can’t reach anybody. No bars. I’m rather cross with them and their directions.”

Lorna blinked, taking a moment to realize the woman meant she couldn’t get proper phone reception. “Mine works fine. I’d be happy to let you place a call—”

“Thanks anyway, sweetie.” Beth had sketched directions inside a notebook. “It’ll be a cinch now that I’ve got my bearings.” She finished her coffee, said thanks and goodbye, waving jauntily as she picked her way down the rutted lane.

Lorna started the generator to get hot water for a quick shower. After the shower she made toast and more coffee and sat at the table relaxing with a nice paperback romance, one of several she’d had the foresight to bring along. Out the window, she glimpsed movement among the trees, a low and heavy shape that she recognized as a large dog—no, not a dog, a wolf. The animal almost blended with the rotten leaves and wet brush, and it nosed the earth, moving disjointedly, as if crippled. When it reared on its hind legs, Lorna gasped. Miranda pulled back the cowl of the hide cloak, and leaned against a tree. Her expression was strange; she did not quite appear to be herself. She shuddered in the manner of a person emerging from a trance and walked to where the driveway curved and left three paper plates pressed into the bank. She spaced the plates about three feet apart. Each bore a bull’s-eye drawn in magic marker.

Miranda came inside. She’d removed the hide. Her hair was messy and tangled with twigs and leaves. “Who was here?” Her voice rasped like she’d been shouting.

“Some woman looking for a campground.” Lorna recounted the brief visit, too unnerved to mention what she’d witnessed. Her heart raced and she was overcome by dizziness that turned the floor to a trampoline. Miranda didn’t say anything. She opened a duffel bag and brandished a revolver. She examined the pistol, snapping its cylinder open, then shut. Lorna wasn’t particularly conversant with guns, but she’d watched Bruce enough to know this one was loaded. “I thought we were going to discuss it before you bought one,” she said.

Miranda rattled a small box of shells and slipped them into the pocket of her vest. “I didn’t buy one. A friend gave it to me when I told him about Brucifer. An ex cop. This sucker doesn’t have a serial number.”

“There’s no reason to be upset. She was lost. That’s all.”

“Of course she was.”

Lorna watched her put the gun in her other pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve only paid cash, right? No debit card, no credit card?”

“You mean in town?”

“I mean anywhere. Like we agreed. No credit cards.”

“Tell me what’s wrong. She was lost. People get lost. It’s not unheard of, you know. And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t tell her my name. I didn’t tell her anything. She was lost. What was I supposed to do? Not answer the door? Maybe stick that gun in her face and demand some ID?”

“The campgrounds are closed,” Miranda said. “I was outside the door while she gave you her shuck and jive. She came in a panel van. A guy with a beard and sunglasses was driving. Didn’t get a good look at him.”

Lorna covered her face. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

Miranda’s boots made loud clomping sounds as she walked to the door. She hesitated for a few moments, then said, “It’s okay. You handled her fine. Bruce has got entirely too much money.”

Lorna nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “We’ll see how much money he has after my lawyer gets through with him.”

Miranda smiled. It was thin and pained, but a smile. She shut the door behind her. Lorna curled into a ball on the bed. The revolver fired, its report muffled by the thick walls of the cabin. She imagined the black holes in the white paper. She imagined black holes drilling through Bruce’s white face. Pop, pop, pop.



* * *



Miranda brought Lorna to a stand of trees on the edge of a clearing and showed her the hunting blind. The bloody sun fell into the earth and the only slightly less bloody moon swung, like a pendulum, to replace it in the lower black of the sky. “That is one big bad yellow moon,” Miranda said.

“It’s beautiful,” Lorna said. “Like an iceberg sliding through space.” She thought the fullness of the moon, its astral radiance, presaged some kind of cosmic shift. Her blood sang and the hairs on her arms prickled. It was too dark to see the platform in the branches, but she felt it there, heard its timbers squeak in the breeze.

“Been having strange dreams,” Miranda said. “Most of them are blurry. Last one I remember was about the people who used to live around here, a long time ago. They weren’t gentle folks, that’s for sure.”

“Well, of course not,” Lorna said. “They stuck a deer head over the fireplace and skinned poor hapless woodland critters and hung them in the trees.”

“Yeah,” Miranda said. She lighted a cigarette. “Want one?”

“No.”

Miranda smoked most of her cigarette before she spoke again. “In the latest dream it was winter, frost thick on the windows. I sat on the bearskin rug. Late at night, a big fire crackling away, and an old man, I mean old as dirt, was kicked back in a rocker, talking to me, telling me stuff. I couldn’t see his face because he sat in the shadows. He wore old-timey clothes and a fur jacket, and a hat made out of an animal head. Coyote or wolf. He explained how to set a snare for rabbits, how to skin a deer. The dream changed and jumped around, like dreams do, and we were kneeling on the floor by the carcass of, I dunno what. A possum, I think. The meat was green and soft; it had been dead a while. The old man told me a survivor eats what’s around. Then he stuck his face into that mess of stinking meat and took a bite.”

“That’s a message,” Lorna said. “The great universal consciousness is trying to tell you, us, to adapt. Adapt or die.”

“Or it could be a dream, full stop.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I think it’s time to get our minds right. Face the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“We’re never going to get away,” Miranda said.

“Well, that’s a hell of an attitude.”

“I saw that van again. Parked in that gravel pit just down the road. They’re watching us, Lorna.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Don’t worry about those bastards. They’ll be dealt with.”

“Dealt with? Dealt with how?” Lorna’s mind flashed to the revolver. The notion of Miranda shooting anyone in cold blood was ridiculous. Yet, here in the dark beyond the reach of rule or reason, such far-fetched notions bore weight. “Don’t get any crazy ideas.”

“I mean, don’t worry yourself sick over the help. Nah, the bigger problem is your husband. How much time is Bruce going to get? A few months? A year? Talk about your lawyer. Bruce’s lawyer is slick. He might not get anything. Community service, a stern admonition from the judge to go forth and sin no more.”

Lorna winced. Stress caused her leg to throb. The cigarette smoke drove her mad with desire. She stifled a sharp response and regarded the moon instead. Her frustration dissolved in the presence of cold, implacable majesty. She said, “I know. It’s the way of the world. People like Bruce always win.” She’d called Orillia earlier that evening, asked her how things were going at the new school. Orillia didn’t want to talk about school; she wanted to know when she could see Daddy again, worried that he was lonely. Lorna had tried to keep emotion from her voice when she answered that Mom and Dad were working through some issues and everything would soon be sorted. Bruce was careful to not hit Lorna in front of their daughter, and though Orillia witnessed the bruises and the breaks, the sobbing aftermath, she seemed to disassociate these from her father’s actions.

“There are other ways to win.” Miranda was a black shadow against the dead silver grass. “Like you said—adapt or die. The old man showed me. In the beginning you need a prop, but it gets easier when you realize it’s all in your head.”

It was a long walk back through the woods. Dry leaves crunched beneath their shoes. They locked themselves into the cabin and got ready for bed.

Lorna’s dreams had been strange as well, but she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t open about such things, not even with Miranda. The ghost of old man Haugstad didn’t speak to Lorna; instead, her dreams transported her to the barren slopes above the tree line of the valley. The moon fumed and boiled. She was a passenger in another’s body, a body that seethed with profound vitality. The moon’s yellow glow stirred her blood and she raced down the slope and into the trees. She smelled the land, tasted it on her lolling tongue, drawing in the scent of every green deer spoor, every droplet of coyote musk, every spackling of piss on rock or shrub. She smelled fresh blood and meat-blacked bone. There were many, many bones scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them—ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches and among the high rocks.

Lorna stroked Miranda’s belly. Miranda’s excess had melted away in recent days. She was lean from day-long hikes and skipped meals and her scent was different, almost gamey, her hair lank and coarse. She was restless and she whined in her sleep. She bit too hard when they made love.

Miranda took Lorna’s hand and said, “What is it?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”

“Oh, where the f*ck is this coming from?”

“Something’s different. Something’s changed. You weren’t honest about where you found the coat. The skin.”

Miranda chuckled without humor. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I’m not in the mood for cute,” Lorna said.

“My sweet one. I left out the part that might…frighten you. You’re skittish enough.”

“I’m also not in the mood for Twenty Questions. What did you mean earlier—the old man showed you?”

“Old man Haugstad told me where to look, what I needed to do.”

“In a dream.”

“Not in a dream. The day I discovered the blind, a coyote skulked out of the bushes and led me along the path. It was the size of a mastiff, blizzard white on the muzzle and crisscrossed with scars.”

“I don’t understand,” Lorna said, but was afraid she might.

“We’re here for a reason. Can’t you feel the power all around us? After I lost Jack, after I finally accepted he was gone, I pretty much decided to off myself. If I hadn’t met you at that party I probably would’ve died within a few days. I’d picked out the pills, the clothes I intended to wear, knew exactly where it was going to happen. When was the only question.”

Lorna began to cry.

“I won’t leave you. But it’s possible you might decide not to come with me.” Miranda rolled to her opposite side and said nothing more. Lorna slowly drifted to sleep. She woke later while it was still dark. Miranda’s side of the bed was a cold blank space. Her clothes were still piled on the floor. In a moment of sublimely morbid intuition, Lorna clicked on a flashlight and checked the spare bedroom where Miranda had taken to hanging the fur cloak from a hook on the door. Of course the cloak was missing.

She gathered her robe tightly, sparing a moment to reflect upon her resemblance to the doomed heroines on any number of lurid gothic horror novel covers and went outdoors into the freezing night. Her teeth chattered and her fear became indistinguishable from the chill. She poked around the cabin, occasionally calling her lover’s name, although in a soft tone, afraid to attract the attention of the wolves, the coyotes, or whatever else might roam the forest at night.

Eventually she approached the woodshed and saw the door was cracked open by several inches. She stepped inside. Miranda crouched on the dirt floor. The flashlight was weak and its flickering cone only hinted and suggested. The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took notice of the pallid light, and as she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda’s musculature.

The flashlight glass cracked and imploded. The shed lay in utter darkness except for a thin sliver of moonlight that burned yellow in Miranda’s eyes. Lorna’s mouth was dry. She said, “Sweetheart?”

Miranda said in a voice rusty and drugged, “Why don’t you…go on to bed. I’ll be along. I’ll come see you real soon.” She stood, a ponderous yet lithe, uncoiling motion, and her head scraped the low ceiling.

Lorna got out fast and stumbled toward the cabin. She didn’t look over her shoulder even though she felt hot breath on the back of her neck.



* * *



They didn’t speak of the incident. For a couple of days they hardly spoke at all. Miranda drifted in and out of the cabin like a ghost and Lorna dreaded to ask where she went in the dead of night, why she wore the hide and nothing else. Evening temperatures dipped below freezing, yet Miranda didn’t appear to suffer, on the contrary, she thrived. She hadn’t eaten a bite from their store of canned goods, hadn’t taken a meal all week. Lorna lay awake staring at the ceiling as the autumn rains rattled the windows.

On the fifth or sixth afternoon, she sat alone at the kitchen table downing the last of the Old Crow. The previous evening she’d experienced two visceral and disturbing dreams. In the first she was serving drinks at a barbeque. There were dozens of guests. Bruce flipped burgers and hob-knobbed with his office chums. Orillia darted through the crowd with a water pistol, zapping hapless adults before dashing away. The mystery woman Beth, and a bearded man in a track suit she introduced as her husband, came over and told her what a lovely party, what a lovely house, what a lovely family, and Lorna handed them drinks and smiled a big dumb smile as Miranda stood to the side and winked, nodding toward a panel van parked nearby on the grass. The van rocked and a coyote emerged from beneath the vehicle, growling and slobbering and snapping at the air. Grease slicked the animal’s fur black, made its yellow eyes bright as flames.

A moment later, Lorna was in the woods and chasing the bearded man from the party. His track suit flapped in shreds, stained with blood and dirt. The man tripped and fell over a cliff. He crashed in a sprawl of broken limbs, his mouth full of shattered teeth and black gore. He raised a mutilated hand toward her in supplication. She bounded down and mounted him, licked the blood from him, then chewed off his face. She’d awakened with a cry, bile in her throat.

Lorna set aside the empty bottle. She put on her coat and got the revolver from the dresser where Miranda had stashed it for safekeeping. Lorna hadn’t fired the gun despite Miranda’s offer to practice. However, she’d seen her lover go through the routine—cock the hammer, pull the trigger, click, no real trick. She didn’t need the gun, wouldn’t use the gun, but somehow its weight in her pocket felt good. She walked down the driveway, moving gingerly to protect her bum knee, then followed the road to the gravel pit where the van was allegedly parked. The rain slackened to drizzle. Patches of mist swirled in the hollows and the canyons and crept along fern beds at the edges of the road. The valley lay hushed, a brooding giant.

The gravel pit was empty. A handful of charred wood and some squashed beer cans confirmed someone had definitely camped there in the not so distant past. She breathed heavily, partially from the incessant throb in her knee, partially from relief. What the hell would she have done if the a*sholes her husband sent were on the spot roasting wienies? Did she really think people like that would evaporate upon being subjected to harsh language? Did she really have the backbone to flash the gun and send them packing John Wayne style?

She thought the first muffled cry was the screech of a bird, but the second shout got her attention. Her heart was pounding when she finally located the source about a hundred yards farther along the road. Tire tracks veered from the narrow lane toward a forty foot drop into a gulch of trees and boulders. The van had landed on its side. The rear doors were sprung, the glass busted. She wouldn’t have noticed it all the way down there if not for the woman crying for help. Her voice sounded weak. But that made sense—Beth had been trapped in the wreck for several days, hadn’t she? One snip of the brake line and on these hills it’d be all over but the crying. Miranda surely didn’t f*ck around, did she? Lorna bit the palm of her hand to stifle a scream.

“Hey,” Miranda said. She’d come along as stealthily as the mist and lurked a few paces away near a thicket of brambles. She wore the mangy cloak with the predator’s skull covering her own, rendering her features inscrutable. Her feet were bare. She was naked beneath the pelt, her lovely flesh streaked with dirt and blood. Her mouth was stained wine-dark. “Sorry, honeybunch. I really thought they’d have given up the ghost by now. Alas, alack. Don’t worry. It won’t be long. The birds are here.”

Crows hopped among the limbs and drifted in looping patterns above the ruined van. They squawked and squabbled. The woman yelled something unintelligible. She wailed and fell silent. Lorna’s lip trembled and her nose ran with snot. She swept her arm to indicate their surroundings. “Why did you bring me here?”

Miranda tilted her misshapen head and smiled a sad, cruel smile. “I want to save you, baby. You’re weak.”

Lorna stared into the gulch. The mist thickened and began to fill in the cracks and crevices and covered the van and its occupants. There was no way she could navigate the steep bank, not with her injury. Her cell was at the cabin on the table. She could almost hear the clockwork gears of the universe clicking into alignment, a great dark spotlight shifting across the cosmic stage to center upon her at this moment in time. She said, “I don’t know how to do what you’ve done. To change. Unless that hide is built for two.”

“Don’t worry, baby.” Miranda took her hand and led her back to the cabin. and tenderly undressed her. She smiled faintly when she retrieved the revolver and set it on the table. She kissed Lorna and her breath was hot and foul. Then she stepped back and began to pull the hide away from her body and as it lifted so did the underlying skin, peeling like a scab. Blood poured down Miranda’s chest and belly and pattered on the floorboards. The muscles of her cheeks and jaw bunched and she hissed, eyes rolling, and then it was done and the dripping bundle was free of her red-slicked flesh. Lorna was paralyzed with horror and awe, but finally stirred and tried to resist what her lover proffered. Miranda cuffed her temple, stunning her. She said, “Hold still, baby. You’re gonna thank me,” and draped the cloak across Lorna’s shoulders and pulled the skullcap of the beast over Lorna’s eyes.

“You came here for this?” Lorna said as the slimy and overheated pelt cupped her and enclosed her. The room went in and out of focus.

“No, babe. I just followed the trail and here we are. And it’s good. You’ll see how good it is, how it changes everything. We’ve been living in a cage, but that’s over now.”

“My god, I loved you.” Lorna blinked the blood from her eyes. She glanced over and saw the revolver on the table, blunt and deadly and glowing with the dwindling light. She grabbed the weapon without thought and pressed it under Miranda’s chin and thumbed the hammer just as she’d seen it done. Her entire body shook. “You thought I’d just leave my daughter behind and slink off to Never-Never Land without a word? Are you out of your f*cking mind?”

“Give it a minute,” Miranda said. The fingers of her left hand stroked the pelt. “One minute. Let it work its magic. You’ll see everything in a whole new way. Come on, sweetie.” She reached for the revolver and it barked and twisted in Lorna’s hands.

Lorna didn’t weep. Her insides were stone. She dropped the gun and swayed in place, not focusing on anything. The light began to fade. She made her way outside and sat on the porch. She could smell everything and strange thoughts rushed through her mind.

There was a moment between twilight and darkness when she almost managed to tear free of the hide and begin making the calls that would return her to the world, her daughter, the apocalyptic showdown with the man who’d oppressed her for too long. The moment passed, was usurped by an older and much more powerful impulse. Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent. The hunt.



* * *



Two weeks later, a hiker spotted a murder of crows in a raucous celebration as they roosted around the wrecked van. He called emergency services. Men and dogs and choppers swarmed the mountainside. The case made all of the papers and ran on the local networks for days. Investigators found two corpses—an adult male and an adult female—in the van. The cause of death was blunt force trauma and prolonged exposure to the elements. Further examination revealed that the brake lines of the van were sawed through, indicative of homicide. The homicide theory was supported by the discovery of a deceased adult female on the floor of a nearby cabin. She’d died of a single bullet wound to the head. A fourth individual who’d also lived on the premises remained missing and was later presumed dead. Tremendous scrutiny was directed at the missing woman’s estranged husband. He professed his innocence throughout the subsequent trial. That he’d hired the deceased couple to spy on his wife didn’t help his case.

Years later, a homicide detective wrote a bestseller detailing the investigation of the killings. Tucked away as a footnote, the author included a few esoteric quotes and bits of trivia; among these were comments by the Chief Medical Examiner who’d overseen the autopsies. According to the ME, it was fortunate picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies, even the one in the cabin. The examiner said she’d been tempted to note in her report that in thirty years she’d never seen anything so bizarre or savage as these particular bites, but wisely reconsidered.