Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (11 page)

I feel my eyes go wide. “Really? You can do that?”

Shaking that disturbing image off, I grasp backward for the thread I know I don’t want to lose. “If I called you, then am I—”

“So I could be surrounded by gods and not know it.”
Most definitely. Coyote himself could be out there snickering away with your name in mind. And may I assure you that is a scary thought indeed.

“So it’s my fault my cats got eaten.”

I sink down, sitting hard on the ground. A small weasel the color of chocolate with a beige face slinks closer and lifts onto his back legs, placing his front paws on my leg. Without thinking, I reach out and stroke a hand down his back. He nuzzles me. “And it’s my fault other people’s cats have gotten eaten.”

The little weasel on my leg twists his head around toward his god and makes an odd noise, between a squeak and a yip. Then he bounces up into my lap and curls up on me, staring at his god with his teeth showing. One of the fishers swings his head toward the god and makes a low hiss, like an angry cat.

Oh, fine.
I have the feeling the fisher god wants to roll his eyes.
It’s not your fault. My followers insist I not leave you with all this metaphorical cat blood on your hands. Each animal acts on his or her own recognizance. Simply because I came here due to the pull of you does not mean you need to take responsibility for all the various results of my residency. Understand?

“Yes.” I don’t elaborate that while I understand, I don’t agree. I appreciate what his followers are saying. Instead, I change the subject. “So why do I call you? Before I started concentrating on fishers, back when you first just felt a draw.”

The fisher god opens his mouth, and as one, the surrounding
animals react. The squeaks, growls, and hissing noises startle me, and I remember to be a little scared. The god hisses back at them, his mouth opening wide, showing an alarming number of teeth. The collected followers subside, but an uneasy tension hangs in the air. The god turns his attention to me. Dark eyes stare into mine until I feel like I’m seeing straight through the pupils into that amber gleam deep inside. Finally, he says,
Haven’t you heard the saying? Like calls to like.

I puzzle over that, but it doesn’t get any clearer. I’m not a fisher and I’m not a god. It’s a nonanswer. I wish I could make sense of it, and I wish I knew why the animals reacted. The weasel in my lap is calm again, his head resting on my thigh.

“Now what, now that you know it’s me and we’ve met?” I stroke the weasel on my leg with one finger.

The god stretches his body forward, and his front feet hit the ground. He walks toward me, his back end hunched so that his gait is odd. The surrounding animals retreat, but the weasel on my leg only lifts his head. The god skulks right up to me, until his muzzle almost brushes my arm. He circles me, and a crackle of static electricity raises the hair on my arms, on the back of my neck. I feel that same electric charge I felt in the basement on Hogback Mountain. If I touched him, I don’t doubt I’d get zapped. My hands curl into fists.

The fisher god circles back into my line of sight, his fur glowing that subdued red again. His nose twitches as he leans in, directly in front of me.
I’d like an alliance. A partnership.

“With me?”

“I’m special,” I sigh. “Right?”

“And do what?”

I think of some of the kids at school. Yes, I know dangerous. “So I heal hurt animals?” I can do that.

“I can do that. What do I get?”

He rises up onto his hind legs, looking affronted again. His lip pulls back.
Excuse me?

“What do I get from our partnership?”

“You ate my cats.”

The pause hangs heavy.
What would you desire, for offering healing when needed?

“Stop eating my cats.”

The way he says that makes me wonder what I’m missing, what else he’s getting out of this deal, and what else I should ask for. But that’s all I had in mind. “Yes. Just leave my cats alone.” Another thought occurs. “And protect them from other things.”

“Then get some of your followers to do it. Just see nothing happens to any of my future cats. In the way of being eaten. I know you can’t keep them from getting run over.”

He inclines his head.
I can do that.

Wow. That worked out well. For once there’s a benefit to being strange. “Okay. If that’s it, I ought to be going. My mother is probably freaking out.”

I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but I’ve had enough of his cryptic pronouncements. Lifting the weasel from my lap, I scratch his head in parting and get to my feet. “I’ll watch for you.” I start back, lifting a branch and ducking under it. Sudden rustling tells me the followers leave too, and I glance over my shoulder. They’re already gone, to a one. Only the god sits, perfectly still and watching me. I walk through the woods to our yard with the feel of his eyes on my back the entire way.

I scrub my hands until they’re bright red but all the pitch still won’t come off. I sit digging at it while Daddy watches the weather. When it’s over, he turns off the TV, then sits back down on the couch. “What’s up? You look sad.”

“I just . . .” I stop. There’s no good way to talk about any of this. I knew that years ago, and nothing has changed. Finally I say the only thing I can. “I think it’s my fault all our cats disappear.” I know it is. But I can’t say that.

He’s quiet for a few minutes, settling his arm over my shoulders. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do, Evan, no matter how much you want to. It’s not your fault, it’s just the way the world is. It’s probably one of the hardest things to accept, but it’s always there, especially when you feel responsible for something. You can love it so much you never want to see it get hurt, but you can’t protect it from everything.”

I think about how I feel when I’m around him—that
he can protect me from anything—and start to say so. But even as I’m thinking it, I remember him holding me the night Bernie died. I remember him telling me what happened, and I remember his tears. He couldn’t protect me from that—not the death and not his hurting. I look up at him and see a similar pain now, in the lines around his eyes. It’s not one I can heal away, any more than I can explain the strangeness that is me.

I know
I
can’t climb in a box and never get hurt. I can’t expect anything else to do the same for me.

“It’s okay,” I finally tell him. “You do a really good job anyway.”

The lines around his eyes ease, then crinkle again as he smiles. The ache in my own chest relaxes a little when I realize that, in a way, I can heal some of that pain. I think if I could figure out how to explain everything that’s so strange about me, he’d be pleased with me helping the fisher god. It’s something he’d do.

The idea that he’d be proud of me if he did know cheers me up. One of these days I’ll be able to explain to him about me. He’ll understand.

As soon as I find the words.

BONE WHISPERS

K
evin Blancmore slowed as he approached the old graveyard. It had been almost forty years since he’d been here last, and the place looked as if it hadn’t changed in the slightest during that time. It was not a thought that provided comfort.

Kevin braked and pulled his Nissan Altima—on which he was two payments behind, not that it mattered anymore—onto the side of the road in front of the graveyard’s black wrought-iron gate. There was no parking lot—the graveyard predated the road by nearly a century, he guessed—and Kevin scarcely had enough
room to get his car off the road. There wasn’t a lot of traffic out here in the country, and he doubted he’d have to worry about someone coming along too fast, not seeing his car, and broadsiding the damned thing. But even if they did, what did he care?

Kevin turned off the engine and pulled the keys out of the ignition, but instead of getting out of his vehicle right away, he sat for a moment, staring through the windshield and listening to the car’s engine tick as it began to cool. He wasn’t sitting there because he was afraid, though he supposed he had good reason to be. And he wasn’t nervous, not even a little. He felt nothing, and that was the reason he sat behind the wheel of his car, hesitating. Considering what he had come here to do or, more to the point, to
find,
he should feel something. A moment like this . . . well, it was why the word
momentous
had been created, wasn’t it? It was potentially life-altering in the profoundest of ways and should be marked as such, if only inside his own heart. But just because he was aware that he should feel something didn’t mean he would. It seemed he was as dead inside as any of the graveyard’s residents, and all that remained was for the rest of him to catch up.

He unlocked the driver’s side door and climbed out of the car.

The weather in southwest Ohio in early June could range from cool and mild to hot and sweltering. But that was Ohio, where the weather changed as often as people’s minds. Unfortunately for Kevin, it felt more like mid-August, the air steamy, thick, and damp. Even worse, he still had on the suit he’d worn for Nancy’s graduation, and the instant he emerged from the Altima’s air-conditioned environment, sweat began beading on his forehead and pooling beneath his armpits.
He considered leaving his jacket and tie in the car and rolling up his shirt sleeves, but even though he would be more physically comfortable, he decided against it. A momentous moment like this called for a certain level of formality, so the suit would stay on and he’d just have to endure the discomfort. He could do that; after all, he’d had a lot of practice. An entire lifetime’s worth it seemed sometimes.

Let’s have a pity party for Kevvy-wevvy,
he thought.
One, two, three—awwwww!

Half amused and half disgusted at himself, Kevin walked across the uneven grass that covered the small strip of land in front of the graveyard—
Looks like the county’s behind in their mowing
—and stepped up to the gate. The graveyard was enclosed by a salmon-colored brick wall that measured five feet high, nine feet on either side of the gate and at the wall’s four corners where conical black-brick turrets pointed skyward. Kevin thought the graveyard’s designer must’ve been going for a somber yet dignified effect, and he couldn’t say the man had missed. The gate was in fact a pair, held shut by an ancient rusted padlock. Not locked, though. The padlock hung open on the gate, just as it had done during Kevin’s childhood. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the padlock rested in the same exact position that it had then, untouched by hands all these long decades. Human hands, anyway.

A metal plaque was bolted on the turret to the right of the entrance, its surface dingy, the letters worn some but still legible.

QUAKER BRANCH MEMORIAL BURIAL GROUND. EST. 1957.

Kevin knew the date referred to the construction of the wall. The graveyard itself was much older.

He took hold of one of the gate’s bars, careful to grip a section where the black paint hadn’t flaked off too much—
Didn’t come all the way here to get tetanus,
he thought, almost smiling—and pushed. The gate resisted at first, the bottom edge digging into the ground, and he gave it a bit more muscle. Finally, the gate budged a few feet, giving him enough space to slide through, even with his less-than-modest gut. The gate hadn’t made a sound when it moved, no slow creaking or harsh grinding, and Kevin recalled that it had been similarly silent the last time he was here. Now, just as then, he was vaguely disappointed. A proper cemetery gate should open with some manner of sinister sound to establish the appropriate atmosphere.

Once inside, he paused to look around. Large oak and elm trees bordered the outside of the graveyard, making it impossible to see what, if anything, lay beyond, There were no trees inside, no bushes, no greenery of any kind save grass. Just as outside, the grass was uneven, almost a foot high in some places, in others trimmed so close to the ground that bare patches of dry earth peeked through. There were a good number of gravestones, over a hundred, he estimated, and they were divided into two roughly even sections. On his left were the newer stones, dating from around the time the outer wall had been constructed. They were larger, more varied in type, and the legends engraved upon them were still readable. To Kevin’s right was what he thought of as the old section. Here the headstones were much smaller, set closer together, and more uniform in shape. They were colored either stony gray or chalk-white, their edges softened by the passage of one season after another and the elements’ less than tender ministrations. Kevin knew from previous experience that the inscriptions—those
that remained legible, that is—were both simpler and somehow more elegant than those in the newer section. WILHEMINA MOTE, B. 1834, D. 1867. JACOB HOBBLIT, B. 1856, B. 1859. The birth and death dates were almost always closer together in that section, as well. Sometimes too close.