I feel the wrongness pouring from the earth.
Catlin’s lips are moving and her hands are clasped. I realise she’s praying. I look hard at her, not with normal eyes. It isn’t helping.
Our breath pools over the little corpse together. She peers at the delicate ribcage, white bone through the red. The clean lines of an incision, with a scalpel or those fancy cooking knives Brian bought in Asia. There were jagged edges too though. Like something had been tearing it, or eating. Some bits were stuck with pins into the earth, splayed wide apart. Like a butterfly in a box.
Catlin strokes its paw. ‘The poor dead thing. I hope it’s found its peace.’
I eye the branches, thinking of the person that did this. They could be close. They could be very close. They could be here. I pull at her and tell her we should go.
My sister nods.
We walk back through the woods in dark and silence. She links my arm like we’re kids again.
The fox rests on the soft floor of the forest.
A mockery of something lovely once.
15
Cowslips
The forest is harsh on the way home, the crossroads almost flickering in the moonlight. I keep an eye behind us in the night, and so does Catlin. The path is oil-slick dark, a black snake’s tongue. I feel as though we should have been dropping breadcrumbs on our way to meet Layla. To guide us home, like children in a story. Catlin’s hands are cold and she is shaking.
I rub my sister’s back.
‘Madeline, it reminds me of something …’ she tells me. ‘I can’t think what. But looking at that fox, it didn’t feel like it was a dead animal. It felt like it was someone that we knew. Like, gut-punch hard.’
I swallow. ‘I felt it too,’ I say. ‘And I kind of …’
‘Do you want to throw salt at it?’ she asks, her mouth a little crooked. Catlin knows me well. Salt for danger. Metal objects buried in the ground and wrapped in cloth.
‘Oh, so much salt,’ I tell her. ‘Like, ocean-level salt. Poor little dude.’ I’m trying to keep my voice light, but it isn’t working.
‘It feels as though the forest’s not for humans,’ Catlin tells me. ‘It’s like it’s uncharted. Off the map.’ She’s murmuring again, she’s saying the Hail Mary. I know it calms her down, but it’s making me so anxious here right now. My breath comes fast. She quiets then. She knows me.
‘I want to know …’ she begins, and then trails off. ‘Do you remember? Something about the fox …’
‘Catlin, you’re not making sense.’
‘You know,’ she says, ‘when you’ve had, like, this really detailed dream and then you wake up and all you can remember is, like, images? The general sense of it. The how-it-made-you-feel. And, like, you’re turning bits inside your mind, and waiting for other bits that will never come. And then you see, like a bowl of cereal or the colour blue and get a little flash?’
‘If you’ve been getting a little flash, Catlin, you should report it.’
‘Stop, Madeline. I’m trying to explain.’ Her hand is ratting through her hair, as though it were more tangled than it is. As though this were a thing that she could fix, if her ponytail were smooth enough.
‘You know that book that Dad had when we were small?’
I nod, and then I realise it’s dark, so I also say, ‘The stories, yeah?’
‘Was there one about a fox or something? Something like the thing we saw? A fox?’
‘There was that Mr Fox guy, I remember. The murderer.’
‘I remember him. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,’ she chants. ‘No, no, it wasn’t that. I’ve … I’ve lost it.’
Her voice is sad, frustrated. We’re almost halfway down the castle driveway. It’s wrong that it’s so normal. Everything’s the same shape that it was. Except our brains, and small bits of our hearts.
The castle, when we get to it, is empty. We call and call and run through rooms and halls, sheet-covered furniture like odd-shaped ghosts. Sometimes, when you leave a scary thing, the normal stuff around you makes you almost forget that it has happened. With this, though, the strange of it keeps bleeding through. Statues look as if they’re about to move. Shadows are dangerous. My breath sounds harsh, like it’s someone else’s breath. We can’t find Mam or Brian. We try their phones, but they don’t even ring. My body hums with action.
Catlin looks at me. ‘We have to do something, Maddy.’
‘I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. It won’t bring it back, like.’ It sounds lame and lying, coming out of my mouth. Not that I think we’ll resurrect the fox, but there has to be a thing. A concrete thing. To mark the little murder that we found.
Catlin’s mouth keeps moving, and her hands. Her head tilts up.
‘You need to see Mamó,’ she says, and her face is very sure. I’m glad that someone’s sure. I feel too young to deal with this myself. It’s too much death.
And that is why we knock on Mamó’s door. The smooth dark wood of it. The iron knocker, shaped like leaf and moon. I swallow down. I can’t hear any movement, but Catlin’s leaning in. She nods.
‘Someone’s inside.’
I knock again. The door cracks open. Mamó is wearing men’s flannel pyjamas. Her hair is in a braid all down her back. She looks quite put-upon and strangely normal. I never thought about her asleep before. She doesn’t seem the type. Unless it was with one eye open, watching.
‘What is it now?’ she barks, as though this were something we often do.
‘There was a thing,’ I say to her, so helpful. We step inside. Catlin looks at everything. I can see her big eyes drinking in the jam jars full of things, the many plants. Mamó sees it too, turns to her as though she were an unexpected mouse. An inconvenience.
‘A thing?’ she repeats, her face impassive. ‘Be more specific.’
‘We found a slaughtered fox in the woods. It isn’t safe.’
She makes a disdainful sound, but goes to pull on her boots and a long brown duster. She grabs her car keys from the kitchen counter.
‘Go home, Catlin,’ she says. Catlin looks at me. I look at her. She doesn’t move.
Mamó glares at her, and in a tone of I shouldn’t have to explain this to you but it seems I do, she adds, ‘Wait for Brian and your mam. They’ll worry if neither of ye are there.’
Catlin quietly nods. Mamó nods back.
She turns to me. ‘Take some jars with you. You’ll know which ones,’ she says, offering me a black canvas shopper. It has a strawberry embroidered on it. It is the least Mamó bag I’ve ever seen.
I scan the shelves, and pluck and choose a few things. I do not need many. I close my eyes and let my fingers find them. My breathing slows, as this clicks into place. I find my calm.
Mamó decidedly picks up a little brown doctor’s bag from beneath the coat rack. And a massive shovel. Why does she have shovels in her house, the way that normal people have umbrellas? She lashes it over her shoulder, and we stride towards the car. She doesn’t lock her door. I notice that.
The trip consists of Mamó, hands grimly on the steering wheel, firing question after question at me, about what we were doing in the forest. About the things we saw. The temperature. The placement of the organs. How decomposed or otherwise it had been. The gender.
‘It was male, I think,’ I offer. ‘But it was hard to tell. The pieces were all … moved around and things.’
‘What things?’ she barks.
‘Like bitten off or cut. And there were pins.’
And she says, ‘Hmmm.’ And glares. Mamó loves glaring. It’s probably her favourite thing to do. Except for glowering.