Seize the Night Page 4

  The creature fell to the lawn, scrambling with its legs in the dirt, one wing wildly flapping, the other dragging, its shrieking taking on a higher note, pain mixing into its fury: Ally lunged forward and swung again—and again—and again. She could hear more bones cracking, could feel them break through the shovel’s wooden handle, and the sensation seemed to drive her onward, into a growing frenzy. She would’ve killed the thing, would’ve continued swinging until her strength gave out, pounding the creature into the sodden earth, but then, in the brief hesitation between blows, she glimpsed its face. There was something unavoidably human in those eyes—intelligence, terror, bewilderment—and it knocked Ally back into herself. She heard the creature’s cries: the rage had vanished. Pain was triumphant now, with a childlike undertone suddenly emerging; the creature sounded like a frightened toddler. It was trying to crawl away. All of its limbs but one appeared to be broken, and it kept grabbing at the dirt with its single undamaged hand, struggling to pull the limp weight of its body out of the yard, into the trees, to what it must’ve imagined was safety—struggling, failing.

  Ally heard herself start to sob. She dropped the shovel, stepped toward Bo. The dog was still lying on his side, eyes shut, panting. Ally untied the rope from his collar. “Come on, sweetie,” she said, crying, wiping at her face, at the tears, the snot. “Can you get up?”

  Bo lifted his head, peered blindly toward her. His tail thumped against the ground, a feeble wag . . . wag . . . wag. Ally didn’t think he’d be able to rise, but she prodded at him anyway; she wanted to get him back into the house, away from his attacker. Bo groaned, rolled onto his stomach. She pulled at his collar, straining to lift him, and he surprised her by lurching upward; he swayed, almost fell, but then, when Ally gave another tug, started to stumble back across the lawn toward the house, whimpering with every step. Ally glanced back at the creature as they fled. It had fallen silent now—so had the birds; the only sounds were Ally’s weeping and Bo’s cries of pain as he staggered forward. Ally could see the creature continuing to move, that single limb reaching to claw impotently at the dirt.

  Eleanor was still standing in the mudroom, just inside the screen door. She followed Ally and Bo into the kitchen, watching as Ally led the dog to his bed beside the stove. Bo collapsed onto the bed, immediately shut his eyes. Ally nudged his water bowl toward him, but he ignored it. There was blood on his fur, thickly caked—his neck, his shoulder, most of his flank—but when Ally tried to examine his wound, the dog gave a yelp and started to thrash his legs, scrambling backward. So Ally let him be. It took him a minute to stop whimpering; it took Ally even longer to stop crying.

  “Oh, Ed,” Eleanor said. “No, no, no. Oh, dear. Oh, no.” She was standing in the doorway, still naked, wringing her hands, staring at the dog in obvious distress.

  “It’s okay,” Ally said. “He’ll be okay. Here—sit.” She took Eleanor by her elbow, guided her to a chair at the head of the table. Once she got her seated, Ally turned and went out through the mudroom again. She peered at the lawn through the screen door. Dawn was just beginning to break; the first traces of red had appeared in the east, beyond the barn. There was already enough light so that, even from this distance, Ally could discern the creature, feebly shifting about in the dirt beside the hitching post.

  She heard a noise behind her, in the kitchen, and when she turned, she saw that Eleanor had gotten up from her chair. She was standing over Bo, dragging at his collar, trying to pull him to his feet. Ally hurried toward them: “Leave him. He needs to rest.”

  “We have to,” Eleanor said.

  “Shh.”

  “The sun’s coming up.”

  “I know. Stop it now. Let him go.” Ally eased Eleanor’s grip off Bo’s collar, led the old woman back across the kitchen.

  Eleanor was peering toward the window, the sky growing lighter with each passing second. She covered her mouth with her hand. “What do we do, Ed? What do we do?”

  Ally sat the old woman down in the chair again.

  Then she did the only thing she could think of: she picked up the phone and called Dr. Thornton.

  She’d awakened him, she could tell. There was a burred quality to his voice, a sleepy lag before he recognized her name. But she’d hardly begun to tell her story when she felt him snap into clarity. The whimpering . . . Eleanor standing in the mudroom . . . Bo tied to the hitching post . . . the creature hanging from the dog’s neck . . . the shovel—that was as far as the doctor allowed her to get. “Stay inside,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” And then he hung up.

  Ally got Eleanor into her robe. She placed a bowl of Cheerios on the table in front of her, a glass of orange juice. Then she quickly changed out of Stan’s pajamas, back into the shorts and T-shirt she’d been wearing the night before. There was blood on the pajamas: spattered and smeared. Whether it was Bo’s or the creature’s, Ally couldn’t tell. By the time she returned to the kitchen, the dog was asleep. Ally worried for an instant that he might’ve died, but then she heard that familiar rising sequence of inhalations and the long wheezy sigh that followed. Eleanor was eating her cereal. She’d grown quieter as soon as the sun broke free of the trees, filling the room with light: it was possible, Ally supposed, that she’d already forgotten the entire drama. Ally stepped into the mudroom, peered out the screen door. The creature was still there, lying in the dirt beside the hitching post. It had stopped moving now.

  Ally went back into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of juice, quickly drank it. Then she got Eleanor onto her feet, led her through the mudroom, out onto the lawn. She knew the only way to keep Eleanor occupied was to put her in the barn with the birds. All the way across the yard, she worked to keep herself from turning to glance at the hitching post. Even in the daylight, even with the creature so grievously wounded, it felt frightening to be out in the open again. She pulled back the big wooden door, set up Eleanor’s chair. Eleanor was still in her bathrobe—teeth unbrushed, body unbathed, hair uncombed—but she didn’t seem to mind. She sat down, smiling toward the gray parrot, who was perched above her, on the edge of the hayloft. “It’s raining,” the bird said, muttering the words. He lifted his right foot and gnawed at it for a moment with his beak. Then he spoke again, with more vehemence: “It’s pouring!” All of the birds were calmer now. It was almost as if nothing had happened in the night.

  Ally could hear Dr. Thornton’s car approaching down the drive. She stepped to the doorway and watched through the netting as the doctor parked, turned off the engine, climbed out. She assumed he’d come to the barn when he saw her standing there, but he just glanced in her direction and then walked to the hitching post instead. He stood for a long moment, staring down at the creature. Ally pushed aside the netting and started toward him.

  Dr. Thornton didn’t hear her coming, but the creature seemed to. It had gone still once the sun had risen—quiet, too—but now it roused itself with a screech of panic, making the doctor jump. The creature’s hairy little leg started to thrash about, its head twisting to peer at Ally, its eyes looking huge in its tiny face, terrified. The doctor turned, following its gaze. He had an uncharacteristically disheveled look to him: it was a window into the urgency of his morning thus far—roused from sleep by her call, hurriedly dressing, skipping the shower, the razor, grabbing whatever clothes came to hand, pulling on his shoes, plucking up the car keys, rushing out the door. It seemed improper somehow for Ally to glimpse him in such a state, and she realized for the first time how much care he normally took with his appearance. He was a vain man—how could she have missed this?

  The creature kept looking at her. Screaming. Thrashing.

  “Do you know what it is?” Ally asked.

  The doctor nodded.

  “You’ve seen it before?”

  He shook his head. “But I know what it is.”

  Ally hugged herself. She wished the thing would fall silent again, but if anything it only seemed to be growing louder. She glanced around them, at th
e trees bordering the yard, the hillside above the barn. “Are there others?”

  The doctor didn’t answer. He said: “I think it might be best if you went back inside.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have to make some calls.”

  “To who?”

  “Please, Ally. Go back into the house.”

  So she went inside. She showered, put on fresh clothes, combed out her hair. She stood at the kitchen sink and ate a piece of toast, watching out the window as the doctor paced in the dirt beside the hitching post, on his cell phone, making his calls. As soon as Ally had left, the creature had fallen silent again. Eleanor remained in the barn with the birds. Every now and then, Ally heard the parrot call out: “Ed! Big Ed!” But otherwise, all was quiet.

  The first car arrived thirty minutes later. Ron Hillman, the village pharmacist, was driving. He climbed out and stood with the doctor, both of them frowning down at the creature, their hands on their hips. Ally watched them as they talked. Whatever Ron was saying, the doctor didn’t appear to like it; he kept shaking his head. It was odd to see Ron without his white coat, dressed in khaki shorts and a golf shirt, his legs looking so pale and thin in the early morning sun. Another car arrived: this one held Philip and Christina Larchmont. They joined Ron and the doctor by the hitching post, forming a little circle around the wounded creature. Philip was the village’s mayor. He owned a small trucking company. In the winter, according to what Stan had once told Ally, he liked to head out in one of his trucks and help plow the local roads, charging nothing for this service. Christina worked part-time in the little library beside the village green. Ben Trevor, from the hardware store, was the next to arrive, then Mike and Jessica Stahl, then Mickey Wheelock. Ally thought she should make a pitcher of iced tea, bring it out to them on a platter, but there was something about the way everyone kept turning to glance toward the house that gave her pause. She couldn’t say precisely how it made her feel, but it wasn’t a pleasant sensation—wary, a bit uneasy. The doctor had told her to wait inside, so that was what she would do. She turned from the window, sat at the kitchen table, and tried not to think about the people on the lawn, tried not to think about the blood on Stan’s pajamas, tried most of all not to think about the creature.

  Ally heard the sound of water softly falling, and when she looked up, she saw urine soaking the dog’s bed, running off it onto the floor in little rivulets: Bo had lost his bladder in his sleep. Ally tried to rouse him, but he just opened a single eye, stared blindly toward her, and then slipped back into unconsciousness. She was cleaning the mess up as best as she could, when there was a knocking at the screen door.

  “Come in!” she called.

  It was Christina and Jessica. Neither of them could’ve been more than a handful of years older than Ally, but there was something about both women—so stout and competent and matronly—that always made Ally feel very young. Whenever she encountered one or the other of them, she ended up wondering how she could’ve managed to live so many years without ever really growing up. The two women bustled into the kitchen with a friendly air of command, each talking over the other.

  “Oh, dear,” Christina said. “Did someone have an accident?”

  “We’ll take care of that,” Jessica said. She was already by the sink, rummaging in the cabinet underneath, pulling out a bucket, filling it with hot water from the faucet.

  Christina stepped to the little closet beside the refrigerator, opened its door, found a mop. “Why don’t you try to get some rest?”

  “Yes,” Jessica agreed. “It sounds like you’ve had quite the night, haven’t you?”

  “Would you mind if we made some coffee for the men?”

  “What’s happening?” Ally asked.

  Christina waved the question aside. “It’s all right, honey.”

  Jessica nodded, hefting the bucket out of the sink. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Christina came toward her, mop in hand. She took Ally by her elbow, guided her toward the doorway. “You go on upstairs. Try to lie down.”

  Ally allowed herself to be herded in this fashion; she was too worn out to resist. But she didn’t believe she’d ever be able to sleep. She climbed the stairs to her room and stood at the window, watching the men in the yard. Ollie Seymour, the village barber, had arrived. And Chad Sample, who owned the house just up the road. Ally couldn’t see the creature from this angle, just the men gathered around it, talking among themselves, turning now and then to glance at the house. She lay down on the bed. She didn’t expect to sleep, or even to rest, but her head had begun to ache, and she thought it might help to shut her eyes. There was the Hobbits’ Volvo, and the bank card . . . she could still just vanish . . . but all those cars were blocking the drive now . . . and the doctor had told her to stay in the house . . . and the women in the kitchen had sent her upstairs . . . she should remind them to bring Eleanor her lunch . . . there was roast beef in the fridge . . . Eleanor always enjoyed roast beef . . . they could fetch a jar of pickles from the root cellar—

  “Ally?” It was Dr. Thornton’s voice.

  Ally glanced blearily around the room. She could tell from the way the light had shifted that it was much later now. She fumbled for the clock on the night table: it said 4:03. Somehow, she’d managed to sleep for almost six hours.

  “Ally . . . ?” He was calling to her from downstairs.

  “Coming!” Ally pushed herself off the bed, stepped out into the hallway.

  The doctor was on the landing halfway down, peering up at her. “Would you mind joining me for a drive?” he asked. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Most of the cars had left. But Christina was still there, sitting in the kitchen with Eleanor. They were drinking tea and eating cookies. The kitchen had been cleaned; everything smelled sharply of bleach. Bo had been cleaned, too—his fur, his wound. He seemed to sense Ally’s arrival downstairs. He lifted his head, gave a single slow wag to his tail. Ally had washed her face, changed her T-shirt. She asked Christina if she’d be okay here on her own, and Christina smiled, waved her toward the door.

  The doctor was waiting in his car, its engine already running. When he saw Ally approaching, he climbed out, stepped around to the passenger side, and opened her door for her. It made Ally feel like this was a date, and—ridiculously—she felt herself begin to blush.

  There was no sign of the creature. As they were pulling away from the house, Ally asked: “Did it die?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Where is it?”

  Dr. Thornton made a vague gesture. “Ron Hillman took it into town.”

  Ally assumed that this must be where they were headed, too, but then the doctor turned north at the first crossroads they reached, and they began to climb higher into the hills. They passed the house where Ally had seen the goose, and then the doctor made another turn, onto a narrow gravel lane, and suddenly they were in a part of the country Ally had never glimpsed before. Pine trees grew close to the road on both sides, cutting off the view.

  “You’ve seen the war memorial, I assume,” the doctor said. “On the green?”

  Ally nodded.

  “Did you ever look closely at the names?”

  There was a carved scroll at the base of the memorial, Ally knew; it listed the young men from the village who’d died fighting to keep the union whole. But she’d always been too unsettled by the statue’s ghostly grimace to pause long enough to read the names. She shook her head.

  “Seventeen names,” the doctor said. “And two are Thorntons: Thaddeus and Michael. Which is all just to say that my family has lived in the village for a very long time. One of the first white men to establish a farm in this part of the state was a Thornton. And for all those many years, we’ve been living with the skad.”

  “The skad?”

  The doctor nodded. “The Abenaki Indians used a longer word, which sounded something like ‘skadegamutch.’ When the first white set
tlers came, they shortened this to skad. If you go to Harvard’s Houghton Library, they have a book with a drawing a French priest made in 1742. Mythical Beasts of the New World. It shows the creature that you encountered last night. Quite a fine rendering, really. Only much larger.”

  “Larger?”

  Another nod from the doctor. “If you think of a bear? What you saw was a cub. A young cub. Recently weaned, would be my guess.”

  Ally shut her eyes. She imagined a creature like the one she’d fought, imagined it the size of a bear. Then she pictured more than one of them, an entire clan or pack or troop, lurking somewhere in these hills.

  “The Abenaki were hunters. And at some point, they developed a tradition. When they wounded an animal—a deer, a moose, a beaver—they’d leave it outside their encampments at night, tied to a tree, as an offering for the skad. In this manner, the two groups found a way to live in peace with each other.”

  Ally thought of the animals she’d glimpse on her late afternoon runs. The old cow, the spavined donkey. “The hitching posts,” she said.

  Dr. Thornton nodded. “The white settlers adopted the practice when they began to establish themselves in the area. Horses, cattle . . . as they neared the end of their usefulness, they’d be tied to a hitching post. Left out in the night.”

  “And dogs.”

  “That’s right—dogs, too.”

  The gravel road came to an end. A chain had been strung across its path, from one tree to another. Beyond the chain, a narrow trail wound up the hillside, climbing steeply. It led to a house, which was just visible through the pines. Dr. Thornton put the car in park, shut off the engine. He didn’t undo his seat belt, didn’t reach to push open his door, and Ally was happy for this. There was something about the house she didn’t like.

  “There were probably other times when the arrangement broke down,” the doctor said. “But the only occasion I know of for certain happened in 1973. A man named Bert Rogers was elected mayor of the village. Bert had served in the marines, a career officer. He’d been a lieutenant in Korea. He’d commanded an entire battalion in Vietnam. He was a serious man. A hard man. He decided it was time to resolve the issue of the skad—that there was something cowardly about how we’d been accommodating their presence in our lives. They were nocturnal creatures, and Bert argued that it ought to be possible for us to hunt them during the day. That the men of the village could hike up into the hills and ferret the creatures out of their caves and burrows. That they could kill the skad off.”