‘There’s something in the fox,’ I say, and amn’t sure exactly why I’m saying, ‘a kind of … something … It’s warm there. Much too warm.’
I can hear the fear whining through my voice. Annoying me. I want to be more calm. I should be calm. It’s only a dead animal. I see them at the bus stop, on the road. A normal part of living in the country. Nothing to be frightened of at all.
Mamó tilts her head at me, like an owl would, looking at a mouse.
‘Plenty of things that you can do with blood,’ she says, ‘and some of them leave things behind you after.’
‘Is that what the fox was? A …’ I try my best to find the proper word. ‘… sacrifice or something? Did a person do it, like?’
‘We’ll say no more of it,’ she tells me, ‘until we’re finished. We don’t know what is listening.’
‘Ha,’ I say. I think she might be joking. She did a thing with her eyebrows that was definitely either a joke or a threat. She pulls in at a sort of moonlight glade and grabs a lamp and the shovel from the boot.
‘Let’s walk,’ she says, holding the light aloft like an old-timey night watchman.
We move, walking for what seems like forever. It’s hard to gauge the distance in the dark. Everything looks wild and unfamiliar. I can feel the give of leaves under my feet.
When we stop, she gestures to the shovel. ‘Dig.’
‘How deep?’ I ask.
‘I know people say six feet under, but I prefer a healthy ten,’ she says.
I raise an eyebrow, but I get to work.
She looks through the canvas bag and makes some sounds that aren’t quite disapproval, but come close.
‘You forgot the Hart’s tongue,’ she points out.
‘How was I supposed to know what to bring?’ I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
Digging a grave in silence takes forever. The slice of shovel into earth, the lifting. My biceps hurt. The last time I dug a hole was on the beach, when we were small. This is nothing like that. Forcing the blade in, scooping out the velvet black, the rocks. The discordant sound of metal hitting stones.
I’m standing in it when she tells me, ‘Stop.’
She pulls me out. She has really strong arms for an old woman, rippling muscles. She should have dug the hole herself, I think. It would have been faster.
‘Let’s find this fox,’ she says. We set off to the crossroads, at a pace. The woods are darker now, I use my torch to light the way. It makes the things it touches ashen grey. Devoid of colour. Mamó strides ahead. She doesn’t seem to need or want the light. She leads. I follow. Everything is still. A photograph of something I once knew. I can feel a warmth beginning to build within me like a fever.
I remove my coat. She looks at me, and nods. We do not speak. The fox is still there when we reach the crossroads. I step on something soft. It doesn’t give. A kidney? Mamó bends down to smell the fox, to look.
‘It’s fresh,’ she says.
‘How fresh?’
‘A couple of hours.’
‘So we might have disturbed whoever …?’ I let the question hang unfinished, in the air. And there it stays.
Mamó calmly opens her doctor’s bag and takes out some binocular-looking things. She peers through them. Up and down and around. It should look more ridiculous than it does.
‘There’s something heavy here,’ she says. ‘Some wrong.’
I nod. The sweat is beading on my face. I want to curl into a ball and sleep. I want to run.
‘The wounds are strange,’ I tell her. ‘And the fur … is roasting hot.’
‘It senses you,’ she says. ‘You need to push through that. Can you feel the weight of it as well? The nudge?’
I nod. She’s right. Something is pulling at me, straining like a peculiar aftertaste at the edges of my brain. Something heavy and bilious. Something like a threat, or like a plea. But the kind of plea a bully makes for your pocket money. Something that needs fixing, rearranging. My gathering squirms and fattens in the pit of my belly.
‘I can feel something.’
‘That’s the Ask,’ she says. ‘You won’t like the Answer. I need three orange leaves, as orange as the fox, and three red leaves, as red as freshest blood. And holly berries.’
‘What’s the Ask?’ I ask.
‘Did I misspeak?’ she snaps. ‘Bring me the things I need to make this right.’
‘Fine.’
And it is fine, even though my muscles are aching. I want to collect the leaves. My urges are in tune with what Mamó wants and it truly is the weirdest thing, but it is right as well. I feel validated. I turn the worry off and click into a sort of focused calm. Turn the torch on my phone to the brightest setting. I have this. It is winter, but leaves litter the forest floor. I crawl along on hands and knees, feeling for the textures that I want. When I find one I like, I raise it to the phone and check the colour. It can’t be mottled. I need it to be smooth and bright and whole.
I get them, and run back towards the crossroads. Mamó is bent over the fox, holding a beeswax candle. Her brow is furrowed.
‘Now, rub the leaves over him while I say the words.’
I look at her in disbelief. ‘Seriously?’
‘I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I was a jokester.’
I shrink a little and do what she says.
As I rub the leaves along the fur and nose and blood and bone she mutters in a tongue that isn’t English or Irish but kind of like a mixture of the two that’s maybe spliced with German. I feel a hum within the fox’s body begin to shift. It isn’t unpleasant exactly. Pins and needles, deadening the flesh.
It ebbs into the leaves. My body cools.
We put the leaves inside an old marmalade jar ‘to contain it’. Then it’s time to bury the fox.
‘We’ll use your coat,’ Mamó says.
‘What?’
‘You have it taken off. It’s dirty anyway,’ she tells me. And she’s right, but scooping all the parts of fox into it isn’t the best use of my coat or my time, I think. The fox is cooler now, slimy and disgusting on my hands. I feel the give of flesh as I grasp at it.
That could be me, I think. We’re all so delicate.
We burn the leaves over the fox’s grave. She wipes the jar on the last clean part of my coat and puts it back in her bag. I think of Dad again. How easily we’re hurt. It only takes a minute for the leaves to smoulder into nothing. They were already dead. They weren’t in pain.
I feel a ripple suck out of the leaves and down into the ground.
‘That’ll shut it up,’ declares Mamó, brushing grave soil off her big flat hands.
‘Shut what up?’ I ask. I shiver, and she hands me my coat. It’s damp and reeks of fox. I glare at her and do not put it on.
She sighs, her face impassive.
‘I have to know,’ I say, my voice quiet. She looks at me, and even though it’s dark I think she sees.
She sighs again. As if I were an inconvenient guest. I can sense her brain, working out how to phrase it best to such an idiot.
‘Somebody invited something in. They left the door unlocked, to make it easy. Could you feel a signal off the fox?’
‘Like heat?’ I ask.
‘It’s different things to different people. But what got called, it could decide to come.’
‘Does it have a name?’ I wonder, as though it matters. As though a name would put my finger on exactly what it was, and what it did.
‘Names are for ordering things,’ she tells me, ‘and this yoke is disordered, cruel and angry. And when you call a thing like that, it bashes through quite strongly. Leaves a hole behind it in its wake. And other weaker things can use that hole to get into the forest. And even though they’re weaker, they aren’t weak at all. Compared to us. There are people in the world who want things, Madeline. And they don’t much care how they get them.’