Supernatural Noir (18 page)

“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 daylong hikes and skipped meals, and her scent was different, almost gamy, 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 fuck 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 that 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.

One 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 barbecue. There were dozens of guests. Bruce flipped burgers and hobnobbed 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, 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 assholes 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 fuck 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, honey bunch. 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.”

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, a beacon. 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 fucking 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 stumbled outside. She could smell everything, and strange thoughts rushed through her head.

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 that picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies in the van. 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.