Feral (21 page)

“I want to do this,” she told her father, in an
I'm in control here
tone. The same tone she'd used months ago, when her story about Rachelle had been picked up, going from a piece Claire had written for the school paper to a bit on the evening news.

Dr. Cain simply nodded. “All right. Then I'll go with you,” he said.

Claire nodded. She could live with that.

The Cains' Gremlin was quite literally the only car on the road that Thursday, as Claire and her father drove to the church. They passed by dark houses, deserted sidewalks. Wadded-up newspapers danced through the desolate high school parking lot like tumbleweeds as the car edged past 'Bout Out, where a Closed sign had been turned outward.

The parking lot at the Peculiar First Baptist, though, was crammed with cars and trucks; parked vehicles spilled into the nearby streets and grassy areas.

“Looks like we're just about the last two people in the entire town to arrive,” her father observed, steering their car into one of the seemingly endless rows of pickups in the muddy field behind the church and to the side of the walled-in cemetery.

Inside the church, a sickeningly sweet smell exploded. It traveled halfway down Claire's throat, tugging out a gag. And as she and her father eased down the aisle—forcing an entire pew of mourners to press their sides together, pursing their lips disapprovingly—the smell only grew stronger.

Claire struggled to keep the contents of her stomach down.

Lilies
, she realized, glancing about the church. They'd never bothered her before. Today, though, there were just so
many
of them. Sprays of them blanketing the casket and lining the walls. All of them radiating nauseatingly strong perfume. Her father eyed her nervously as she wiped sweat from her forehead and put her sweater sleeve over her mouth, attempting not to have to breathe in the scent. All crammed together, the lilies began to smell foul—as though they were radiating the strong stench of decay.

She coughed as the scent invaded her nose again, crawled into her brain, burned like fumes.

Her raspy cough turned heads. At the front of church, in the first pew, Rich angled his head to toss an expression at her that Claire interpreted to mean,
You okay?

She offered a slight nod as Becca turned around in the pew just in front of Claire and her father.

Becca sighed, glanced about the church. “Where
is
he?” she asked Chas, who was slouching uncomfortably beside her. At her left, she'd propped her purse into the wooden seat, as though to reserve a spot.

Chas shrugged. “Dunno,” he mumbled.

Becca shook her head, clenching her jaw in annoyance.

At the piano up front, a woman struck the full, warm-sounding chords of a hymn; as the song died down, Pastor Ray turned to thank his wife for the musical accompaniment.

While Pastor Ray gathered his thoughts, an arm flew in front of Claire's face, plucking Becca's purse out of the seat. Owen placed it on the floor and slid into place at her side.

Becca's eyes widened as she stared at him.

“Did it already start? Am I late?” Owen asked, staring into Becca's shocked face.

“For what—your meeting with all the rest of the accountants?” Chas asked.

Owen shot him a glare. “Shut up.”

Becca's look of utter bewilderment intensified as her mouth drooped open and creases appeared between her eyebrows. “A three-piece suit?” she whispered. “With a tie?”

“So what?” he asked. “You dressed up, too,” he added, pointing at her long-sleeved black jersey dress.

“So—you wouldn't even wear a tie to homecoming,” Becca hissed. “And wingtip shoes? Dress socks?”

Chas snickered.

Owen simply shook his head and ran his hand across his immaculately combed hair, parted on the side and gelled over his crown. He straightened his back, took a deep breath, and gave his full attention to Pastor Ray, in a way that suggested Becca and Chas should follow his lead.

Less than ten minutes into the service, Chas's head dropped forward. Claire eyed him, expecting his shoulders to start heaving with sobs. For a sniff to erupt. For him to wipe his nose or his eyes. But as Claire took in his slow, deep breaths, she slowly began to realize he was asleep.

Asleep!
Claire could hardly believe it. Even if he had wanted out of their relationship at the end, Serena had still been his girlfriend. And now he was nodding off at her funeral like it was no skin off his teeth?

Claire coughed again, her cheeks turning shades of red, even as she tried to calm herself, to hide her face beneath the curtain of her hair. She was sick; the smell of flowers had become the smell of a body. Throughout the service, she could not stop thinking of the way Serena had stared back at her from underneath the fallen limb. She could not stop thinking of the biting, yowling ferals. Even sitting in a church, at her father's side, she couldn't lose the odd sensation of being chased by vulture-like figures screaming her name. The memory of the woods was magnified; it buzzed in her ears. It became too close, with no escape (
Escape from what, though?
Claire wondered). She was terrified—and the soothing tones of Pastor Ray's voice offered no relief.

Claire eyed the enlarged portrait of Serena positioned on an easel next to the casket, taking deep breaths and trying to calm herself.

As she stared, the portrait slowly began to bulge forward—to ripple, almost like the picture had been caught by a gust of wind.

There was no wind in the church, though. Not even a draft.

She glanced about at the faces surrounding her. Was she the only one seeing this?

As she stared, Claire began to realize that it wasn't the picture that was moving—the image was. Serena's face was spreading outward, into a smile. And she was staring right at Claire. Gradually, Serena's chest began to turn. The light streaming through a nearby window bounced across a necklace at the base of Serena's throat: a gold cameo.

Claire gasped, letting her fingers trace the cool, bumpy surface of the cameo that she still wore. The necklace she'd found on the cat's tail, that had refused to snap, that she'd decided to leave on, thinking it wasn't doing any harm.
A new good-luck charm
, she'd thought. Now she knew it was Serena's necklace. Knowing made the necklace feel more like a noose.

The service continued on, but the moment it ended, Claire raced out onto the front step, as January decided to spit on her all over again, unleashing a fresh round of sleet that instantly began to tangle in her eyelashes.

Mourners poured out of the doors, their black coats flowing around her like a polluted stream. She knew she should get out of the way, but somehow, simply moving to the side seemed as far to her as walking back to Chicago. Rich paused on the step beside her, his girth like a dam that kept the stream of people behind him from flowing as it wanted.

“You okay?” he asked, in a way that implied she didn't look okay. Claire already knew she didn't, though—her forehead was damp with anxious sweat and she felt the kind of clammy that had no doubt turned her peaked cheeks into white sheets.

“If you want to talk to my dad—” he offered.

She shook her head, as the stream of mourners trickled off, and as the entire town marched around the church, toward the cemetery. They followed the pallbearers, straight to Serena's grave.

“Remains,” everyone called a body—the word bounced through Claire's head. “Remains,” implying it was just the leftovers. What got shucked once the soul left. As though the physical aspects were the least important, not the most.

But those words, she suddenly realized, didn't match up with the mourners' actions. What they were truly honoring, it seemed, with the flowers and the glistening casket,
were
the remains. The body.

The body was nothing, Claire knew now—a container. Because of what she'd seen in the basement—the way that Casey's spirit had outlived his physical being. His spirit was the strongest part of him.

So where, exactly
, she wondered,
is Serena?

Rich was still standing beside her as she raised her eyes toward the winter sky—the kind of sky in which the clouds looked like cupped hands cradling tiny mounds of snow. Clouds whose fingers could part at any minute, send flakes tumbling toward the earth.

“I'm—fine,” Claire finally mumbled, trudging forward, her shoes sinking into the sloppy mud. All around her, half-melted snow pooled in the footprints left by the hundreds of residents who had marched across the same cemetery that held their grandparents, their ancestors. That would someday be their own resting ground. Claire wondered what it must feel like to know the smell of the earth that would someday cover your own face like a winter blanket.

She stuck her hands inside her coat, hugging herself as the wavy ends of her long hair began to coat with ice, to harden like tree branches.

“. . . tragedy . . .,” Pastor Ray was saying. “. . . love that endures . . .” He went on, babbling, it seemed to Claire. Her mind wandered so much, she felt he wasn't speaking in full sentences, but just tossing out words, the same way people in a parade tossed out candy as their float drove by. All of the tidbits sweet, light, and easy to forget as soon as they melted.

“The soul,” Pastor Ray preached. “The soul never dies. ‘For whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.'”

It was so true, Claire thought. The soul never died. The soul was the strongest part. Far stronger than the body.

Pastor Ray's voice grew distant as Claire's ears filled with the sound of crunch and crackle. And spit. Mist danced on brittle limbs, half-frozen droplets making clicking sounds as they danced against the shoulders of wool dress coats.

In the spaces between the clicking sounds of the mist, the sounds of heartache hit the air: sniffing—murmurs—half-squelched wails—sobs.

Claire glanced toward the entrance of the Peculiar cemetery, its wrought-iron gates curving like witch's arthritic fingers.

“. . . youth . . .,” Pastor Ray went on, his last few words beginning to feel like the ache caused by a cavity.

“. . . ashes to ashes . . .”

Claire glanced out at the rest of the town's mourners, noting the way that the droplets had begun to glitter across everyone's shoulders.

“. . . dust to dust.”

This last phrase thunked against the air. Serena's “In Memoriam” was over.

The crowd began to snake again, and to split—half the mourners inching closer to the grave, the other half turning and making their way back toward the cemetery gate.

Claire trudged toward Owen and Becca, watching as Owen wrapped an arm around Becca's shoulder and kissed the side of her head. Claire edged past Mrs. Sims, who was getting no apparent comfort from her husband's embrace. Mrs. Sims wailed like something that had spent its whole life in the wild—like something that had never learned a single word of any language in the human world.

Claire hiked the large collar of her naval trench around her ears, as though the material could somehow block the sounds of Mrs. Sims's grief.

As she walked, she watched Rich step into place in between his parents. Dr. Cain stopped to speak to Principal Sanders.

Halfway to the gate, Ms. Isles pulled her heels from the mud and inched her way back toward the coffin, her red lipstick throbbing like a sore just above the black collar of her coat.

As the last in the line of mourners, Claire arrived at the casket just as Isles stepped in behind Owen and Becca, draping her arms around their shoulders. Becca buried her face in her hands, and Owen dropped his chin on his chest, shaking suddenly. Death was a trembling rattlesnake's tail, Claire thought with sympathy. It was both frightening and powerful. And seeing it up close did strange things to people.

Becca and Owen broke away from Isles, heading back toward the gate. Isles stared at the coffin a moment; she reached out to touch its edge in a gentle way. And then she turned back toward the gate herself.

While Dr. Cain continued to talk to Sanders, Claire took another step closer to the casket.

Trembling inside her coat, Claire stood staring at the mound of lilies on the coffin's rounded mahogany top—until a flicker of movement stole her attention. She glanced up just as a cat with black-and-white speckled fur jumped onto the stone wall surrounding the entire cemetery. Her gaze slid down the wall. All four sides were lined with cats. Every single feral in town. Some were cleaning their whiskers—others staring right at her.

She was surrounded. Cornered. She tried to call out to her father, but her voice failed her.

What are they doing here?
Claire wondered about the cats perched along the cemetery wall.
Do they smell her? Do they smell Serena, there in her casket? Do they think she smells like raw meat, like a meal? Are they back for more?

“They're
cats
,” she muttered. “Just cats.” And took a step backward.

Unexpectedly, Claire bumped into a figure just behind her. “Ooh!” she blurted in surprise. Wasn't she the last one to reach Serena's grave?

“Sorry, I—” she started as she turned on her heel. But her apology ended abruptly as she found herself staring into the weather-worn face of the old man she'd first seen in the parking lot of 'Bout Out, moments after arriving in town.

“Told you those ain't no house cats,” he said, stretching his wrinkled face into a satisfied grin.

“Musta followed Maxine,” he went on. “Since she and Ruthie came to the service. Those little critters follow her everywhere—she's like the Pied Piper of Peculiar, that Maxine!” He opened his mouth and wheezed into a laugh.

A cemetery worker appeared, squatted next to Serena's grave, and reached for the crank handle on the casket-lowering device. Metal pieces thunked against the winter air as the worker grunted and heaved. He waved for another to join him. “Frozen,” Claire heard one of them say, as they groaned in another attempt to move the handle.