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Authors: James Bartholomeusz

The White Fox (7 page)

BOOK: The White Fox
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The door opened and a woman answered. “Yes?”

“I’ve got a detention with Dr. Orpheus tonight. Is he here?”

The woman looked behind her distractedly. “No. He left this afternoon with an urgent call home.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Oh, his wife was sick or something. I assume you can just go home?”

Jack nodded at her as she closed the door in his face.

He left the school and headed down the road. The clouds had dissipated around two, typically just as lunch break had finished. The sun was once again a glazed gold, but it was lower in the sky now, hovering over the rooftops of the town. No one was around. All the students had gone home, and the teachers were either running after school activities or in their offices. He was on his own.

There was a quicker way back to the orphanage, which Jack rarely took because Lucy’s house was down the other route. A car went by as he crossed the road and passed down a side street. A few cars were parked around and about, and on his right a small Methodist church interrupted the regular pattern of terraced houses. He reached a crossroads, and up ahead, surrounded by a high wooden fence, was a private ground. A notice bolted to it proclaimed it to be private property, with the threat of prosecution if trespassed upon. Someone had scribbled their tag in purple over the letters. He didn’t stop to read the notice again. He slipped behind a bollard designed to stop cars and cut down an alley.

The road continued, and a second alleyway led off to the right, which he turned into. Brown and orange leaves were clustered at each end. On one side, the fence of someone’s house. On the other, high evergreens spread their rough fingers through a wire mesh. Both sides blocked the fading sunlight, casting the path into the purplish-grey shadow of the sunset.

Jack began down it. Someone, probably in imitation of Banksy, had sprayed hearts in the steadily darkening colors down the fence, each about a meter apart. He passed white, yellow, orange, pink, red.

There was a rattling behind him. He looked back, but the alley was just as empty as it had been before.

Turquoise. Green. Blue. Indigo.

There was a shimmer of light to his left. The last heart was black, then below that a stylized man in a tracksuit and trainers, holding out a lighter. The word
ignite
was scrawled next to it in white paint.

There was a flapping noise from above, and a pigeon cleared the treetops. Jack watched it over the rooftop, then dropped his gaze, looking behind him. Still nothing was there. Slowly, he turned back to the front. And jumped.

A fox was sitting in the middle of the path. It was undoubtedly the same fox he had seen twice in the last three days. It shone out of the dull brown, each miniscule strand of its fur catching the sunlight perfectly, again despite it sitting in shadow. Up close, there were more details that made it seem even less fox-like. It had dark markings around the eyes, but the eyes themselves, far from being beady and black, were pearly and pupil-less. Its tail waved slightly behind it, like a bushy paintbrush, the tips dipped in ebony.

Jack stepped forward tentatively. He’d read somewhere that foxes were scared of humans and any sudden movement would make them run away.

The fox did not move. It continued staring at him through those pupil-less white eyes.

Jack waved wildly.

No response.

Hugging the fence, he edged around the animal and kept walking.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Jack spun around. The fox was facing him once more, but there was no one else there.

“They’ll be coming soon.”

Jack started again, but again no one was within eyesight. The fox was still staring at him. Slowly, he approached it. “Was that you?”

“Who else?”
It inclined its head slightly.

Jack staggered backwards in shock. No one else was about … but it
couldn’t
be a talking fox. Most people learnt to leave talking animals with melon-sized eyes, along with people spontaneously breaking into song, in Disney cartoons from the age of about two.

“What?”
the fox asked, examining its paws and looking itself up and down.
“What did I get wrong?”

“Well, generally, foxes don’t speak,” Jack replied breathlessly.

“I’m not speaking,”
the fox said.

Jack listened for a moment, but as soon as he did he became distracted from what the creature was saying. He did not seem to be
hearing
the noise. It was as if it were talking directly into his brain, rather than going through his ears first.

“Okay, okay,” Jack said, trying to straighten it out in his head, “so you can talk. What are you? What are you doing here?”

“What I am is of little importance. And there’s no time to explain … Hold out your hand.”

Wondering where sarcasm had entered the equation, Jack hesitantly held out his hand, palm up. The fox’s eyes flared with white light for a second, and something dropped into Jack’s hand. He lifted it into the sunlight for a closer look. It was some sort of crystal shard, about the size of a bean pod, and completely clear. It sparkled on the edges in the golden rays, and as he looked closer, Jack could just make out a tiny star symbol carved in gold into one of the sides.

Jack looked up, his mouth forming the words to ask what it was. But there was no sign of the fox creature. He glanced around and in front of him again, but there was no glint of white. He stood for a moment, his brain turning over what he had just seen. He studied the pendant in his hand, then slipped it around his neck, making sure to hide it under his shirt. He wasn’t really sure why—and it sounded crazy in his mind—but if the fox had needed him to take it so badly, then it couldn’t do any harm to keep it. He wondered whether it had been some kind of animatronics with a microphone. But then he hadn’t exactly
heard
the thing speak. It had been inside his head, and it was absurd to think of a
mental
microphone.

He set off again and emerged out of the other side of the alley onto the pavement beside a road. It was deserted. The sun had sunk behind the houses across from him, the silhouetted shadows casting cliffs of darkness on either side of him and all down the street. The pink-orange sunset was receding, and encroaching from behind was the infinite veil of deep blue, tinted amber from the light pollution. A few downstairs lights glimmered, and a cat meowed in a garden somewhere to the left. Adjusting his bag on his shoulder, he followed the road on the leafy side, the pendant bobbing slightly against his chest.

On the other side of town, where the houses were built high and close together, darkness was falling fast. The twilight amber blue was giving way to the third and final stage of the evening—the absolute sheet that was the night sky. The temperature had dropped like a hawk, and out of the condensation fog had begun to rise. Immaterial yet solid, it swept over the streets, snaking between the buildings and through gardens, covering everything in an opaque veil. A cat shrieked and darted inside. The tendrils slithered up the steps behind it.

Dr. Orpheus strode down the road, his long frock coat pulled tight around his body. The fog was rising higher, and now thin sheets of it hung at head height and beyond, so he could barely see his feet in front of him. The buildings were only faint outlines, and the occasional light here and there did nothing to penetrate the pallid gloom. The sound of his footsteps was completely masked, which meant that so were anyone else’s.

He reached a bridge and stopped. It was a small, curved one, the kind in any village built around a stream. Now, in the dense darkness, he thought, it was the kind that a troll might live under in a fairy tale. But of course, this was no fairy tale. He pulled his coat a little tighter and glanced around.

Dr. Orpheus never heard the man coming. He was only aware of him when he reached the other side of the bridge, by which point he was sure he had already been seen. The figure was shady, but he seemed to be wearing an old-fashioned black cloak, the hood completely concealing his face. Being unable to see his feet gave it a spectral look. Dr. Orpheus forced his mind away from such thoughts. He was a man of science and rationalism, and no Homo sapien dressed in the style of the popular subculture popularly referred to as goth was going to scare
him
.

The figure made to move. He did not speak.

Orpheus stood his ground. The seconds moved agonizingly on.

The figure did not even turn its head. The blackness of the hood stayed firmly fixed upon him.

Orpheus’s hand twitched in his pocket. “Well? What do you want?”

The figure remained silent.

Orpheus could not control himself. “I’ve given you all the information I have,” he said, not entirely successful in keeping the pleading out of his voice. “I don’t have anything more. I’ve told you where the girl lives, and I’ve got no idea what happened to the boy. Now, where’s my wife?”

The figure still did nothing.

“Where is she?”

“She is in use.”

“What do you mean? We had a deal. I want her back.”

“You cannot have her back.”

“But you said—”

“We became bored waiting for our plans to ripen. She provided …
entertainment
for us.”

Orpheus’s nostrils flared and he grunted in anger. Rage seethed out of him in flecks of spittle, and he made ready to jump at the man. But he steadied himself. He could hear a slight sweeping sound. He looked down. On the apex of the bridge, in the gap between himself and the figure, something was changing. The fog, though not discernibly moving, seemed to tense, as if put under some spatial pressure. Below, shadows began to collect, flowing inwards like dark fluid from all around. Then, slowly, something began to rise out of it. A hulking figure clinging low to the ground, its rough silhouette just visible below the fog.

Orpheus stumbled backwards, his jaw slackening and his eyes widening. From what he could see, the shadow was moving, weaving hypnotically from side to side as if waiting to strike. It reminded him of biology documentaries about the hunting patterns of wolves. Except this was much, much worse.

“You made a promise,” he shouted, gazing up at the figure.

The cloak was still hanging motionlessly, watching him intently. “We do not make pacts with the Mass Ignorant.”

The shadow tautened suddenly. Orpheus stood stock-still. Then he turned and tried to run. He could hear the shadow lurching behind him. He reached the nearest lamppost and slipped on the wet tarmac. He rolled over, shielding his face, but couldn’t help seeing what was looming over him, its eyes glowing a deep, bloody crimson in the dark.

He screamed.

The shadow leapt at him.

Jack heard the scream.

It echoed over the rooftops, absorbed by every corner and gap. He froze, standing outside a disused pub. The windows were boarded up, and graffiti had been scrawled onto the wood. The sign, a faded painting of a woman in ghostly Victorian dress, creaked in the low wind. Jack’s feet were submerged in a sluggish tide of murky grey fog, flowing down from the hill to submerge the town. The houses were now just dim shapes in the gloom. The lampposts, placed every ten meters, only served to illuminate the sheets of dismal mist. The last echoes of the scream died away.

BOOK: The White Fox
4.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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