Scary Out There (44 page)

“Mom!” Sarah pitches her voice into a harsh whisper. “What are you
doing
?”

Giving you a chance.
The Avery-thing is just to her right, above her shoulder. Sarah can't tell how large it is, but her hair riffles over her forehead from the force of its wings.
Run, Sarah.

“Goddamn it, Jean, will you just open . . .” Another blast from the axe, and now there is blue light as moonbeams spill through wide splits.

Her mother doesn't budge, and now Sarah understands why her mother stands where she does: so their father can't see where they've gone.
No, I can't leave you, Mom. We can't
 . . .

“Go.” Her mother doesn't look, but her hand moves in a quick snap. “Get out, girls. Go now.”

“But, Muh-muh-muh
mmeee
!” Bethie wails. “We
c-can't
 . . .”

Yes, we can. We have to.
And maybe it will be all right; maybe nothing bad will happen, and maybe pigs have wings, but at that moment, Sarah has never loved her mother more for giving them this one chance.

She's right. Go,
the skull urges.
Don't make this be for nothing.

“Come on, Bethie.” Dashing to the back door, Sarah wrenches it open at the same instant that her father finally breaks through. She doesn't look around, but she hears her mother trying to soothe him. “John, take it easy. We can talk.” Then: “John, I don't want to die.”

“Yeah?” The word is rough, guttural, a growl. “You shoulda thought of that before.”

Sarah doesn't wait for any more. She pulls her sister out the back door, and they plunge into the night.

•  •  •

The cold slaps. Icy fingers jab through her thin pj's to sting her arms, her legs. Stones and twigs bite her bare feet, and she stumbles as her toes fetch up on a rock. A bolt of pain shudders into her right ankle, and she gasps, her breath bluing in the moonlight.

“Ow,
ow
!” Beside her, Bethie staggers. “This
hurts
!”

“Too bad.” They are a good fifty yards from the house now, out by the burn barrel with its oily reek. “We have to keep going. We can't—”

A scream, high and shrill and bloody, rips the night. Starting, Sarah whirls as another scream boils from the black maw of the open back door.

“Mom! She's
hurt
!” Bethie cries out. “Sarah, Mommy's . . .”

Mom's dead.
“Come
on
.” Turning away, she pulls her
still-stumbling sister after. She is aware of a presence above and off her right shoulder, a rush of air. She risks a single glance, and it is so odd because, in the moonlight, there ought to be something: an outline, a form. Yet there are only those steady red eyes and a larger blackness looming in the dark surround. From far away, in the bog, comes the
hoo-hoo-hoo
of a horned owl, doleful as a foghorn.

“But wh-where?” Bethie is gasping. “Where are we going?”

The woods,
the skull says.
The bog.

No way.
“Over here,” Sarah says, veering not left but right toward a wink of glass.

“The shed?” Bethie asks. “Are we going to hide?”

If they are lucky, they won't have to. Grappling for the knob, Sarah heaves a relieved sigh as the cold metal turns, and the tongue snicks back.
All right.
But when she pushes, the door creaks only two inches before hitching up with a metallic clank.
No, God, that's not fair!
Her fingers spider over the rectangle of a hasp and staple secured with a chunky padlock.
No, when did he do
that
?

Go into the woods.
The skull's voice drills into the center of her brain.
Head left, for the bog
.

“No, are you
crazy
?” she hisses. “
Help
us!”

“Sarah?” Bethie sounds even more frightened. “Who . . .”

I am. I will.
This comes not from the skull but her far left and high up. Sarah lifts her gaze to find the Avery-thing's eyes burning bright as beacons.
Bethie. Up here
.

“A tree?” Sarah says, and then realizes:
Wait
 . . .

“What tree?” Bethie asks.

“My old tree house.” She looks down at her sister. “You climb and hide . . .”

“Girls?”
Jumping, they both wheel. The house is far enough distant now that their father is only a lumpish bear of a man on the back stoop. “Girls?” From the question and then the pause, it's clear he can't see them.
“Kids?”

“Listen,” Sarah murmurs to her sister. “When I say go, you head for the tree house. Stay there until it's safe, okay?”

Bethie's stricken. “You're
leaving
?”

“Just for a little while.” She grabs her sister in a rough hug. “As soon as I move, you run, okay?”

Bethie presses her face into Sarah's middle. “Please, don't die.”

“I won't,” she says, not knowing if this is a lie. Then, before she can change her mind, she pivots and sprints for an open patch of ground splashed with moonlight.

“Hey!” her father shouts, and she knows she's been spotted. “Sarah, wait!”

“No!” The trees suddenly loom, and then she's in the woods. The air
hooshes
in a gush, or maybe those are wings beating at her back, speeding her on. The forest is alive, all greedy arms and whippy fingers and sharp talons snatching her hair. Something juts for an eye, and she gasps, jerking aside, feeling a branch draw a line of fire on her cheek. Over
the thunder of her pulse she can hear him thrashing after, bullish and wild, hot on her trail.

He missed Bethie.
Her breath tears in and out of her throat.
She's safe.
But maybe not for long.
If I can get to the bog
 . . . Yet how will that help? She doesn't know, and neither the Avery-thing nor the skull will say.

“Sarah!” Her father bellows something formless, the bawl of a dragon, a gargoyle. A devil. Maybe, in these woods and at this moment, he is no more human than the Avery-thing. Maybe the animal in him is so immense he can't contain it any longer.
“SARAHHHH!”

Ahead, the fork appears. Go right, and she can circle out of the woods and to the road. Instead, she veers left. Her lungs burn. Her heart thrashes the cage of her ribs.
Come on, come on.
Her feet are one bright blister of agony, and she is vaguely aware that the sudden slippery feeling on her soles must be blood.
How much farther
 . . .

And then there it is, flashing to brilliance. Studded with tamaracks, as straight and true as ships' masts, the bog gleams like a vast mirror-ocean. Along the deepest channels to her left, muskrat houses rise in messy jackstraw islands.

Now what? What do I
 . . . Suddenly, the ground under her feet turns cold. Startled, she comes to a dead stop.
Ice.
No wonder the bog is so bright.
It's iced over.
Is it thick enough? At the thought her toes curl like frightened snails.
I can't walk on thin ice.

You don't have a choice,
the skull hisses.
Go.

“Sarah!” It's her dad, coming on strong, blowing hard as a bull. “Sarah, don't make me have to punish you!”

Go!
Turning, she sprints onto the ice, something she shouldn't be able to do but does. She is moving fast, nearly flying, racing over paths of glare ice. Yet, with every step, the bog shudders and groans and cracks. It ought to break apart but doesn't.
What am I doing, what's happening?
This bog and these channels go on for miles. It hits her then that she hasn't seen the Avery-thing's eyes in what seems like forever. There is no sense of anything at her shoulder.
It's gone?
The thought makes her stop. At a glance she can see that she's somehow made it to the middle of a broad expanse of ice, a span that is easily an acre, studded with only a few muskrats' houses poking up like dark anthills.

“Where are you? Ms. Avery?” No answer. Hauling out the tiny screech owl skull on its leather cord, she gives it a ferocious squeeze. “Don't leave me!”

“Believe me, sugar”—and at that, her heart fails because she knows, even before she turns: she's done for.

“I won't,” her dad says.

•  •  •

“Come on now.” His voice sounds like he hasn't used it in a century. Her father holds out a hand, and she can see a thick, oily stain slicking his palm that stinks of wet iron and which she knows is her mother's blood. Moonlight breaks over his
head and shoulders, and if it is possible, he is hairier than ever, as shaggy as a beast.

And who, she wonders, is the bearwalker now?

“It's not safe out here,” her father snarls in his new animal-voice. “This ice is too thin. Come with me now.”

Go with him, and she's dead. Or she'll become what he is, which amounts to the same thing.

She slides back a step.

“Sarah.” His face darkens. “What are you doing?”

Another step back, and then she sees what she hasn't noticed: that she's blundered onto the bog where the channels are deep and the trapping best.

“Sarah, damn it! Come . . .” Abruptly, he lunges. Gasping, she stumbles, her heels tangling, and then she's falling as he looms.
“DAMN IT!”
he roars. “
Look
what you've made me . . .”

There is an enormous
CRACK
louder than any blast from any weapon she has ever heard. Her father suddenly cries out, throwing up his arms in a wild windmilling semaphore, and for a second, she thinks,
He's shot, someone's
—

With a loud groan, the bone-white ice gives, opening wide as a mouth, as the jaws of a skull . . . and swallows her father whole.

•  •  •

A gurgle. A slosh. The
chik
of broken ice against ice, and the more distant echoes of her father's single cry. Close by, an owl hoots.

Silence.

For a shuddering instant Sarah can only pull in one ragged breath after the other. Her heart's booming. Spread before her, the open blight in the ice is black and still.

“Dad?” The word is tiny. High above, the wind sighs and makes the naked tree limbs clack.
Like bone.
She looks up. No fiery eyes stare back. “Ms. Avery?” Moving to a crouch, she creeps toward a ragged lip of ice. “Dad?
Daddy?  
” The inky water is still. “Dad, can you hear . . .”

All of a sudden the water ruptures in an icy geyser. Breaching the surface, her father porpoises in a huge gush and draws in a shrieking breath. “S-S-Sarah!
H-honey! 
” Spluttering, her father flails. His terrified eyes are wide and white as boiled eggs. It might be her imagination, but his face is clearer, not as hairy, the animal in him . . . less? Fading? “Sarah! I'm caught! My feet . . . the rats . . . I'm . . .” His body slides back now, his face submerging again before he bobs back, vomiting water.
“I'M TRAPPED!”

Her father's voice from another time floats through her mind:
Rat saves you the trouble by drowning hisself
. His chin slides beneath the surface, and then his face. Choking, he surges up again. “H-help! Help me! I'm sinking, b-baby, I'm s-sinking”—his body slips down again, and now he's tipped his head so far back, he's shouting up at the sky and into the night—“S-Sarah, don't let me d-drown, d-don't . . .”

Dad.
It's his voice now, his real voice. He killed her mother; he must've
murdered Ms. Avery.
He's sick. It's the drugs, his temper, the booze.
She might never forgive him, but she can't let him drown. Not now when, at least, he's a man again.

“Daddy!” She scurries forward on the ice, but awkwardly, aware that the ice is much more slippery, as if whatever dark magic has led her to this place is fast draining away too. As he begins to sink again, she flattens onto her belly and worms for the edge. She hears a tiny
tick
of the owl's skull, still on its leather cord around her neck, against the ice. Thrusting her hand out over the water, she shouts to her struggling father, “Grab it, Daddy! Grab onto me! I'll save you!”

“That's g-good, th-that's . . .” Lunging, her father grapples for her hand. Their fingers brush, but then he's falling back, coughing, spluttering, sliding away from her.

“NO!”
Her chest hovers over black water; her naked toes dig into glare ice. “Daddy, Dad, take my
hand
!  ”

With a gigantic effort he thrashes up. His hands fall in an arc, grappling first in her hair, then slipping away before catching: his right digging into her shoulder—and the left knotting in the owl necklace around her throat.

“Get me
out
!” His teeth are set in a panicked rictus.
“Get me out of here!”

“I c-cuh . . .” He's choking her. The leather cord cuts into her throat, and her air is gone. Bright orange spangles burst over her vision even as it is darkening, and she can feel herself being pulled, inexorably, to her death. He's got her; he's killing
her. Maybe he knows this, maybe not. Maybe, regardless, he doesn't care.
D-Duh
 . . . A hole opens in the center of her vision. She claws futilely at his hand that is tight and then tighter on the cord that is sawing through her skin, cutting off her air. Her blood pounds, and yet everything else is fading, even her father's shouts. Distantly, she feels her naked feet drumming solid ice, and now there is frigid water slopping against her face, her chest.
D-Daddy
 . . .
p-please
 . . .