Julie looks up. A car is approaching the cottage. She stretches her neck so that she can see above the windowsill to where the road appears between the trees. The car is going very fast and it sprays stones as it brakes dramatically at the foot of her parents’ driveway. Julie slips out from under Jim. He drops his elbows against the wood floor. Unable to speak, he rolls his glass angrily across to the wall.
“Shhh. There’s somebody coming to see Mom and Dad. Come on.”
Julie grabs her brother’s hand and they sneak out of the clubhouse. Jim resists her. He’s frightened of his parents, more than usual.
He thinks that they’re sick, and he’s right.
The children crouch behind a large green wheel of hose that hangs on the side of the cottage. They hear a door open and a man emerges. Very serious. Mud on his clothes. Is that mud? Julie pushes her brother down and she covers his back with crossed forearms. Listen. She hears an animal, a bird maybe. Something crying across the lake. No. Not across the lake. Nearer. Julie turns her head, her face an inch from the side of the cottage. From in there?
The sound becomes shrill. Louder. It is in there. Julie drags her brother into the bushes across the path. The front door opens and Julie can hear a man yelling. Pursued. She keeps her eyes trained on a small patch of the front yard that she can see through the leaves. The man running. Mom. Dad. After him. She leaps from the bushes to the edge of the cottage. Mom and Dad are chasing him into the lake. The man dives in from the shore and Mom and Dad fall on each other, howling. Slapping each other. Biting each other.
Mom has a piece of Dad’s cheek between her teeth, and when he turns from the lake she doesn’t let go. Suddenly they stop. They see me. Dad punches Mom under the chin, knocking her teeth from his face. She trips her tongue under the piece of flesh and snaps her mouth forward, catching and swallowing in one movement. With his eyes steadily on Julie her father pushes his wife to the ground and steps toward her. His cheek has a hole where her mom bit him. His eyes are huge and black. Mom springs from the ground, knocking his limp arm out of her way as she breaks into screaming flight. Julie grabs Jim by the arm and they run down a path that goes behind the clubhouse. Where is that tree? Where? Here. She pushes Jim up first on a ladder of tilting sticks nailed to the trunk, and she follows him, trying to force the rungs out with her heel as she climbs.
Something crashes against the side of the clubhouse. A grunt. Growl. It pushes back and something else falls through a bush. Julie covers her brother’s mouth. Her mother steps out of the bushes near the base of the tree. She doesn’t look up. Her husband follows, in a stupor, walking very poorly. He approaches his wife, tries to lean against her, and falls. He lies on his back almost directly under where Julie and Jim are holding each other on the branch of a tree. One of his eyes has been pricked by a twig and the other blinks. His lips slap against the violent, soundless air that he’s forcing through them. He reaches up to point at Julie, but his hand fails, and he grabs his wife’s wrist, yanking her down on top of him. She hunches her shoulders down to his face, and with a single snap breaks both of their necks.
Julie can feel her brother shaking. In fact, she can see it in the leaves around them. Weapon. I need a weapon. She reaches to a small leafless branch and pulls it back. The branch splinters but doesn’t break. Mom rises from her husband. Listening. She turns to find the noise, and her head flops on its broken neck. Julie yanks once, hard, but the branch holds. Mom twirls to face the tree. She lifts her head off her chest and holds it, controlling it in her hands like a remote device. She spots her children. Julie freezes in the monster’s glare.
The mother tries to make a word with the torn skin of her mouth and falls to her knees. She lowers her head in her hands and little sobs pump in the broken pipes of her neck. Julie looks down at the matted leaves clinging to the back of her mother’s bathrobe. She feels a sudden compulsion to reach out.
“Mom? Mom? What’s going on, Mom?”
The sound of her voice, the identification of this savage creature as mother, opens a flood of pain. Julie suddenly feels a panic of responsibility. She leans her brother against the branch and hovers her foot down to a rung. She scrambles to where she can begin lowering herself. One leg. Another. A hiss. A hand snatches her ankle.
“Mom?”
She feels something hot and wet slide across the soul of her foot.
“Mom!”
Teeth biting. Not biting. Teething.
“Jimmy!”
A form falls past her. Jimmy drops from the branch onto his mother’s head. Julie springs off the ladder to the ground and lands in a confusion of bodies. Jimmy is sitting on his mother’s chest and, with his eyes closed, he slaps wildly at her face. The woman drags her dark angel wings through the leaves, frantically touching the ground beneath her.
Julie drives in the stake. It rides a groove of tongue and drips to a point through the base of Mom’s skull. Like a canoe gliding onto sand it rests in the fresh opening behind her, followed by a wake of lake blood. The woman shudders softly under her children and closes her perspiring body with an invisible sheen of pearls. Dead.
The woods around Lake Scugog are not a jungle. Dragons do not stalk deer up and down black hillsides. Siberian tigers do not sulk over the torn body of a villager. There are no monsoons, no undiscovered species of spider, no diamond mines. There is a snake, however, hanging, quite contrary to its known behavior, high in the top of a tree. This snake, a common garter snake about twenty-six inches long, has coiled the length of its body around the thin, bending tip of a Birch. The snake holds its strong neck and powerful jaws out away from the tree. Its tongue oscillates in the sun like a skipping rope. At a dizzy distance of fifty-five feet below is the body of a woman nailed to the ground through her mouth. Beside her is her husband: still alive, though insensible. His only movement is in his hands. They repeat a broken tap at the ground beneath him. A ceaseless investigation that will go on for days. The snake, whose eyesight is poor, cannot see these minute twitches; its tongue, however, touches a picture so complex that something closer to the future than the present shimmers on its fork. Two children run into the woods along separate tapered paths and, when the tongue slips back to refresh itself against the cool bones of the snake’s mouth, they disappear.
15
Contact
Greg can see Grant at his desk. Steve and his girlfriend are standing on either side of him. To Greg they look like a family. Grant flips the tip of a pen at the girl. She looks across to Steve, who shrugs. She looks back and nods seriously. Grant writes in a pad, tears off the sheet, and hands it to Steve without taking his eyes off the girl. Steve folds the paper and tucks it in his shirt pocket. He reaches across and takes his girlfriend’s hand. She exhales visibly and follows Steve around Grant’s desk. They walk directly toward Greg. Greg jumps. I’ve been watching you. Uh oh. Steve doesn’t look up as he passes. His girlfriend looks directly at Greg. He can see fear in her clapped-open eyes. She passes him and he thinks: Those eyes have seen something. Something horrible? No. No, those eyes are hiding something. Greg turns, and she has hesitated at the office door. Hiding something she wants to show me. What? Why me? Greg feels his skin lift in scales around his neck. She hasn’t told anybody yet. She’s sick. Like me. Like the guy in the alley.