Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (24 page)

But it worked now. On the far side, she realized she’d been holding her breath. She stopped, feet planted on the hard dirt, back against the stone she’d just walked through, and inhaled the fresh air of the High Hills. The place on the far side of the waterfall door.

Maybe she should just stay here. The faintest whiff of an ocean breeze licked her face and sent her salt and seaweed and the thin distant cry of gulls. Her stomach rumbled. She’d forgotten to stop and buy lunch. Stupid.
Well, it was still lunchtime over here. Time in the High Hills was behind time in the modern world, the real world. Sometimes Gisele knew she was coming and brought extra.

Overhead, the sky shone pale summer-blue, but to the west, white and gray clouds billowed over the ocean. The feel of rain prickled the skin on Carly’s bare arms. Just downhill, the familiar meadow was summer-brown, thirsting for the storm, and sere brown hills dotted with scrub oak surrounded her on all sides. A clutch of houses nestled behind the westernmost oak grove, all of the houses and most of the trees invisible from here but just ten minutes away on foot. She stalked across a wooden bridge over a thin stream that meandered through the meadow and walked down the path on the far side. The High Hills didn’t lighten her mood any, nor did the first fat drops of warm rain hitting her shoulders and nose.

As if the clouds had warned everyone inside, Carly didn’t pass a soul before getting to Gisele’s door. She didn’t knock—why knock when Gisele always knew when she was coming? She found her mentor bent over, carving a fist-sized fish, her gnarled hands moving surely under the bright battery-operated desk lamp Carly’d brought over for her last summer. Gisele’s thin gray hair tumbled over a faded green shawl draped over her shoulders. An old ginger tabby, Tab, curled on the woodpile behind the old woman, and bestirred herself long enough to lift her heavy head and drop it back to her paws. Wood blocks of various shapes and colors piled on the desk to Gisele’s right, and on her left a basket had been filled with finished carved animals, each delicate, detailed, and still dead.

Gisele’s eyes widened in surprise before her gaze softened. “Carly. I hoped you’d be back.”

Before Carly could say anything, Gisele’s attention returned to the fish. Of course. It was always that way when Gisele was finishing a carving; the life in the wood demanded her focus.

Carly looked around the cluttered workshop. No visible food.

She shrugged, as if there were anyone watching her to see, and went to the basket of finished animals. She began picking through, looking at each one. Her hand wouldn’t be steady enough for a horse. Not today. Gisele must have a special order for fish—there were a dozen. They didn’t interest Carly. Nor did the border collie or the dachshund. A broad-shouldered lab waited to become a black lab or a chocolate lab or a golden lab. Carly fisted the dog, rubbing its wooden snout with her thumb.

Not right.

Maybe none of the animals wanted her to paint them alive. After all, she was a thief, and she’d abandoned her mother.

She closed her eyes and murmured to herself.
Choose.
She carefully reached deep into the basket, trying not to slice her thumb on a sharp fin or ear. Her hand emerged with a fat frog. Its wide belly was already blond wood, its humped and knobby back a darker color. Exaggerated eyes dominated the fat face and the front legs bowed inward. Its haunches looked well-muscled and powerful. A jumping bullfrog of some kind.

Very well.

She settled herself into her own spot, a low desk in the back of the room, surrounded by paints, brushes, and rags. One glance confirmed that Gisele remained lost in her fish. Carly closed her eyes and held the frog to her for the briefest moment, less time than she had
ever spent looking for the heart of a being. Who cared, after all? It was just a frog. It felt heavy and solid, easily a pound or maybe one and a half, as heavy as a big apple or a medium-sized stone. Her hand ranged to a deep gray-green, settled for a moment, then passed it, stopping on the shade of black that existed in new winter boots until a moment after you put them on.

She dipped the ends of a medium-sized horse-hair brush into the paint, and drew it dripping dark along the back of the frog’s head and in a wide stripe down to the nub where its polliwog tail had disappeared. Again, and again, each line touching the other, the paint sliding into the tiniest crevices as it softened the wood toward flesh. The great bumps along the frog’s back got her darkest gray, and the soft parts of the belly a softer grey, but mottled and demanding a few drops of red that turned to buried veins as she painted them on.

Gisele and the whole room, remained largely silent, the only sounds the soft splash of Carly’s brushes and the snick-snick pause, snick-snick pause of Gisele’s carving knife. Most days this silence was more restful than oppressive. But most days she would have chosen a horse.

The last thing Carly reached for was the eye-black, which slid from her fingers. The bottle rang sharply against the small ceramic cup Carly had mixed the belly colors in.

The frog didn’t want black eyes? What now? Green eyes for a black-bodied frog? Her mood wasn’t getting any better.

The eyes had always been eye-black. Of everything. Horses and dogs and fishes and goats and birds. Always. The eyes were the last step, the final windows into the being.

She reached to dip her brush into the thickening gray paint in the ceramic dish.

It didn’t feel right, the brush too light.

She stared at the frog, giving a near-silent whisper. “What do you want?”

It didn’t answer. It was, after all, still dead, even though its skin felt cooler and more supple. It held the paint well, barely losing any to her fingers.

She pondered.

Her thoughts drifted to the stolen twenty in her pocket and she imagined her mom stumbling though helping some faceless stranger buy candlesticks or a set of mugs or a great round serving plate. No wonder she couldn’t figure out what to do with the frog. She wasn’t giving the damned thing any attention.

She brought it close to her face and stared at the eyes. Then she poured two great drips of eye-black into the gray belly paint, watching the black and grey mingle, a few traces of red staining it here and there. Her brush slid easily into this paint, and she gave the frog its eyes.

It blinked in her hand.

The frog had turned out to be a dark thing, all black, barely lightened by gray, mottled, the only other color the flecks of red on belly and eyes. It stared at her, rocking back so its weight concentrated in the long bony back feet. Its back elbows—or whatever they were on a frog—dug into her palm so sharply she cried out.

Gisele turned toward her, her eyes startled and her mouth falling open.

The frog smiled.

It had teeth.

It leaped at her. Fast and hard. She flinched back, throwing a hand up for protection and knocking the frog
away. It landed on the ground on its back, feet scrabbling against the air for nonexistent purchase.

The wooden fish Gisele had been working on clattered to the floor.

The old woman leaped up faster than Carly had ever seen her move, then squatted on the ground, staring at the black frog. When she looked up at Carly, her old yellow-blue eyes were full of something Carly couldn’t quite name: fear or anger or both. Her whisper sounded like a hiss. “Did I not teach you to create the mood of the animal as you paint?” She didn’t wait for an answer. But she picked the frog up, setting her palm on its belly and curling her fingers around its back. As she lifted it in the air, its back feet pressed against her splayed thumb and it nearly leaped free, all the time smiling so the improbable teeth showed.

Gisele kept her arm extended, keeping the frog far away from them both. She regarded it for a long time, and when she turned to look at Carly, she seemed to be looking at some pitiful being. Her voice held pity, too. “You’ve created a monster.”

Carly stiffened.

The frog thrashed.

Gisele said, “Take it. You must kill it.”

Carly had thrown up all over the teacher when they’d made her dissect a frog at school. “No,” she said. “No. I won’t kill anything.”

Gisele shifted the frog to her other hand, her arm shaking a little. Carly couldn’t make the old woman keep the heavy thing. She held her hand out, expecting Gisele to drop it into her open palm. But Gisele shook her head. “Two hands. It’s strong.”

Carly drew in a sharp breath, and a shiver of fear ran up her arms. She held the bullfrog at arm’s length, as
Gisele had, and it twisted and flopped and then, with a great effort, braced both its legs and hopped onto her shoulder. Its sharp teeth dug into the fine flesh of her earlobe just as Gisele swatted it. It leaped from her shoulder to a nearby shelf. “Catch it!” Gisele demanded, “But don’t let it bite you.”

“What?” Carly blinked. “You carved a vampire frog?”

It was the wrong thing to say. All the softness left Gisele’s face. “Catch it.”

Carly swallowed, still mad, maybe even madder. The frog watched her, as if assessing her ability to capture it and deciding she didn’t have a chance. She stood still in front of it, the frog a foot above her head on the shelf. It didn’t move except for the rise and fall of its fat sides as it breathed. She forced every muscle of her face and back and legs to stay still, moving only her hands . . . slowly . . . slowly. Her arms rose to shoulder height. Hard rain spit against the dusty window, startling her, making her move a bit too fast.

The frog flinched but didn’t move.

Carly’s hands neared the bottom of the shelf.

The frog leaped past them both, seven, maybe eight feet away, landing among the scattered paints and brushes on her desk. It dipped its long tongue into the mix she’d painted its eyes with, just a touch, the tongue a blur of movement between teeth. It leaped again and again. Once it came near Tab, and the cat rose faster than Carly had ever seen the old thing move, the fur on its back straight up so the cat looked twice its size and, briefly, young again. The frog gave Tab a glance before it hopped away, finally stopping as far from the two women as it could get.

Carly wanted to scream. Everything, absolutely everything she had ever painted alive had been sweet. True,
the small paint pony had been skittish, and one dog had run away for two days before coming back, hungry and thirsty, riding in on Gisele’s boot. They’d all been soothable. They’d all gone on to be children’s pets or parts of traveler’s wagons.

The great black frog didn’t look soothable. It looked like a kid’s nightmare. Its very existence made her hot and angry. First she’d been trapped in the hot booth, then she’d stolen from her own mom, her belly was rumbling empty, and now this stupid frog.

She turned to look at Gisele. “How?”

Gisele sighed. “That frog is your black mood.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t make it black. It wanted to be black.” She remembered how her hand had gone to black. The animals always picked; they guided her hand. “You taught me to stay open and be a conduit for the animal’s soul, for what it wants. The frog wanted this.”

“And the desires of a block of wood are all that gives them personality? With all of our animals? Your feelings don’t matter?”

Our. Gisele had said
our animals
. So she had something to do with it, too. And why couldn’t Gisele just spit out whatever she was trying to say, instead of making Carly answer questions? “Maybe you should help me catch the frog.”

“Why do you almost always paint the horses? Isn’t that your desire?”

“The horses are pretty.”

Gisele started advancing on the frog. “You do a wonderful job with them. You like them, maybe love them, and you picture them as proud and tractable. No apprentice has ever done so well with horses.”

Apprentice? She tucked the word away for later.

“You have to catch it,” Gisele whispered hoarsely. “How do you feel about frogs, anyway?”

“Compared to horses? They’re fine. I mean, who cares . . . whatever’s wrong with that frog, it’s not because of me. It can’t be.” Could it?

“Why not?”

They rounded the corner of Gisele’s big work desk, now halfway to the frog. “I don’t know. I just know it’s not my fault.”

“We all have a black side.”

Carly frowned, but they were getting close to the frog, and she didn’t want to say anything to startle it. If this was her black side, it was damned ugly.

The frog blinked it heavy-lidded eyes and let out a single loud sound that was more bark than croak and then leaped onto Gisele’s shoulder. Carly reached out to grab it, but it leaped again, this time heading toward Tab. “Maybe I will kill it,” Carly muttered.

“You have to. You have to fix this,” Gisele said as she turned, too, both women drawn toward a high hiss from the cat. The bullfrog had managed to land on Tab’s back, and the cat shook and screamed, but didn’t move. Maybe it was too old to carry such a heavy frog. The frog’s head was buried in the cat’s neck. It looked as though the frog should slide off, but it didn’t.

Carly started toward the two animals, but Gisele grabbed her arm and held her back. “Watch!”

Maybe the cat would kill the frog. The frog’s muscular back legs scrabbled across Tab’s back and the cat’s howl turned to a scream of pain. Tab’s tail twitched behind her.

Carly tried to wrench free from Gisele. The old carver’s hands were strong, her grip impossible to eel out of,
so tight Carly feared that if she did make forward progress she might pull the old woman over and hurt her. She couldn’t take her eyes off the fight in front of her. Tab sank down under the weight of the bullfrog, crouching, then leaped up into the air. The frog finally slid off. Tab backed up against the wall, hissing angrily. For a long moment the two stared at each other. Then the frog jumped up onto a chair and then onto a table.

Maybe it was over.