He turned finally and hustled back into the house, rushing to lock the door and put out the lamp, and he sat on the daybed beside the stove with the.22 across his lap.
The cold woke him. The fire in the stove guttered to ash and the air in the kitchen crystalline, an arctic stillness about him. He was on the daybed in his boots and coat and he didn’t move for fear of rolling onto the dog. He felt around for the creature, but it wasn’t anywhere within reach. And he realized then he’d left the dog outside, when he ran into the house and barred the door. Hours ago, he guessed.
Sweetland was calling for it before he’d even gotten to his feet, yelled its name from the open door. The moon gone down and only the stars for light. He walked around the building, calling into the wind. He crouched at Diesel’s doghouse to look inside, the towel on the floor drifted over with snow. He walked a little ways down toward the cove, shouting at the top of his lungs.
He went out to the shed where he’d seen the dog last and he found a blur of tracks beyond it, to the back of his property and heading through drifts to the path leading out of the cove. Sweetland went into the house for a hat and gloves and the rifle, a flashlight. The dog spooked by the flurry of gunshots and could be anywhere up there, he guessed. Running mad on the mash until it holed up somewhere out of the wind. There wasn’t enough meat or fur on the creature to keep it alive through a night this cold, that much he knew.
He put in a fire, so the kitchen wouldn’t be a complete icebox when he got back. Took an old blanket from the shelf over his boots and went to the shed where he stripped the tarp off the quad. He picked up a red gasoline container from beneath the workbench and shook it. Put the empty down and grabbed the Priddles’ container beside it, poured the last of the fuel into the tank. It hadn’t been started since the cold snap settled in and Sweetland wasn’t even sure it would turn over. The engine rolling sluggishly at first, like something buried in taffy. He didn’t want to flood it and he took his time, coaxing the reluctant spark along, leaning over the machine like he was protecting a flame in the bowl of his hands. When it finally took hold it roared in the enclosed space, choppy and discontented. Sweetland kept it alive with the accelerator and he let it idle a long time after it settled into a steady rhythm. He thought long enough on the gunshots he’d heard at midnight to take his last box of ammunition from a cupboard over the workbench and he packed it with the blanket into the carryall. Opened the front doors and kicked the machine into gear, edging out into the night. He couldn’t guess how much time the dog had left, if it was still alive at all. He stopped long enough to close the doors behind him and then started up out of the cove.
Sweetland paused at the top of the path, beside the King’s Seat. It was buried in drifts of snow, just one cold stone arm visible, but the mash beyond it looked to have been scoured clean by the wind. He stood holding the handlebars as he lurched over the frozen trail around Vatcher’s Meadow, driving slow and calling as he went. He couldn’t see much beyond the headlight’s reach and he stopped occasionally, shutting the engine off to shout the dog’s name and listen.
He left the quad on the far side of the meadow and started walking, afraid the noise of the machine might be driving the animal further away. Now and then he stopped, thinking he’d heard some motion ahead or behind him. But it was just the nylon whiff of his own pants as he walked, the toggle on his jacket zipper knocking in the wind. Near noises made strange in the dark.
He was close enough to Burnt Head he could see the light over the rise, an intermittent glim like photographs being taken, away in the distance. The wind had dropped while he wasn’t paying attention and a calm that felt otherworldly had settled on the night. He was about to call for the dog again when he saw the first of them moving on the rise. Dark figures outlined in flashes against the horizon, heading toward the lighthouse.
Sweetland stopped still where he was, flicking off the flashlight. Watched without moving, to be sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. Another, and then another, following the same path down toward the keeper’s house. He’d left the box of ammunition in the carryall on the quad and he considered going back for it now. But he was afraid to look away, thinking it might all disappear if he did. He watched the silent procession swell above him, dozens more trailing in from the blackness and disappearing down the ridge toward the Fever Rocks.
When the last of the figures passed out of his sight he made his way up toward them, moving slow in the unearthly quiet. He could see the keeper’s house over the rise but there was no sign of the walkers. He waited until the building’s details came clearer to him in the dark before he went down toward it, stayed close to the side of the house, edging up to the far corner. Allowing one cautious eye beyond it.
There were hundreds of them standing on the headlands. All clustered close to the cliffs of the Fever Rocks, as many people as ever lived in the cove, he guessed, and not a sound among them. All facing the ocean where the intermittent light stirred the blackness. A pale glow about the unlikely congregation though the moon was down, each figure silhouetted against the night sky. An air of waiting about them so palpable that Sweetland held his breath as he watched.
He felt exposed there, as if he was spying on some secret ceremony and bound to be found out. He turned to sneak off the way he’d come when someone brushed past him, a hunchback in a black overcoat, limping toward the rest. Sweetland fell back against the lighthouse to keep his feet, holding out the barrel of the.22 in both hands to fend off the night. They were still walking down from the rise in a steady trickle, he saw, their faces blank and unhurried. They went past without showing the slightest concern to have him there. Strangers every one of them, though he felt they knew him. That he was known to them somehow. A woman in a headscarf turned her head as she went by and smiled blankly. An eerie incongruity to the expression on her face. The teeth in her head too small for her mouth.
The cold woke him. Light outside when he opened his eyes, mid-morning already. He could hear the trickle of water running in the sink, though the stove was long dead and the room ticked with frost. A heated beach rock at the small of his back the only hint of warmth in the world. He reached behind himself, touched a hand to a matted tangle of fur. The dog licking at his bare fingers. He shifted carefully to get a look at the animal, the head coming up to greet him.
“Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. He scratched underneath the dog’s ears and it leaned its weight into his hand. There was a streak of white fur on its black chin, like a soul patch, and Sweetland stroked it between his fingers. “I hope you had a better night than I did.”
The dog jumped to the floor and shook itself and Sweetland pushed himself upright. His head two sizes too small for all it carried. He was still wearing his coat and boots, the.22 leaning against the foot of the daybed. He spent a few minutes trying to separate out the night, to set what was real from what he might have dreamt lying there on the daybed. The dog ran up to nip at his pants and then clattered across the painted wood to the door, scratching to be let out. “Hold your horses,” Sweetland said.
He opened the storm door and the dog ran into the cold air, cocked a leg against the clothesline pole. Sweetland keeping a close eye, not wanting to let the creature out of his sight again. He was about to call it in when he looked across at the shed doors and the mad trip up on the mash came back to him, the walkers parading to the light. He went to the side door and listened a moment before he went in, expecting he didn’t know what. Found the quad there, trussed underneath the canvas tarp, with no sign the machine had been moved in weeks.