Chapter 35 #2
Cathy sucks smoke into her lungs. She feels flustered and ill at ease, her skin wrapping tightly round her bones.
She points to a spiderweb strung between the leaves of the rhododendron, now laced with frost. “Do you know about spider silk, Danny? It looks so fragile, and you can snap it with just a finger, but pound for pound it’s five times stronger than steel.
Me and Hazel are a bit like that. From the outside, the things that bind us look like they’re fragile, and easily broken, but they’re stronger than they look. ”
“Wow, Mum. I think that’s the corniest thing you’ve ever said.”
They both laugh, watching as Scout grins at them, showing the stubs of his baby teeth gleaming in his gums.
Danny sighs, his shoulders sagging. “Scout does my head in sometimes, but I can’t imagine him not being my brother. If anything happened to him, it would break my heart.”
Cathy thinks again of that boot print on the windowsill, the smell of him that morning so strange and unfamiliar. A changeling, she thinks, and shivers.
“You didn’t by any chance get your brother up this morning, did you, sweetie? Maybe picked him up out of his cot and changed him out of his clothes?”
Danny frowns. His cap is pulled low over his eyes, but she can still see the bafflement in them. “Course not. Why?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “So much weird stuff has happened recently, and I can’t get a handle on any of it. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“It’s the snow. You know that Joseph Bray lost his mind because of the Idless winters, right? It’s something about the way the light fades so early. Look at this. Nearly dark at four o’clock. That’s enough to freak anyone the fuck out.”
“Bad word,” Scout says solemnly, wiping his hands on Cathy’s jeans. “Annee said the bad word.”
“Yes, he did, didn’t he?” Cathy points at Danny. “Mind your language round him. He said ‘shit’ at the childminder’s earlier. I tried to laugh it off, but it’s embarrassing.”
Danny giggles at that, and Cathy once again marvels at how like his father he is.
Always laughing, full of energy. Bouncy, like a puppy.
She used to call him fidgety when he was younger.
Used to tell him he had ants in his pants, and that would make Danny laugh so hard he got the hiccups.
Then the school started sending home bad reports and behavior slips—Danny is a concern, he appears unable to keep still, he lacks focus, distracting others—and she’d stopped joking about it then. She’d had to. He’d become a concern.
“I’ve got to go and get some food, Mum. There any more of those noodles?”
“Sure. Just wait—wait a minute.” She has a good feeling, the three of them out here together, in the little yard she built to be beautiful, even if the house is not, even if it’s cold and getting dark, their feet damp from the melting snow.
She doesn’t want to break the spell, not yet.
Let it last a little longer. “You got your phone on you? Why don’t you show me that video of yours? ”
“Now? Here?”
“Why not?”
Danny shakes his head, more in surprise than anything else, and pulls his phone out as Cathy pitches her cigarette into a bucket by the back door. “Here. Just press Play.”
“And this was part of your school project, was it?” She takes the phone from him, frowning at the screen. “What was the subject?”
“History. We had to research and make a video about a historical event in our town.”
Cathy presses Play, turning the phone sideways. At first there is nothing but a shaky slice of blue sky, the tops of the trees.
“Ready?” a voice off-screen asks.
The camera pans to reveal Danny standing in a shady thicket, his cap turned back-to-front. He begins talking, pointing to the screen of trees behind him.
“One hundred and fifty years ago, these woods were witness to a terrible murder. I’m talking, of course, about Joseph Bray, the farmer who—”
Of course it’s about Joseph bloody Bray, Cathy thinks, resisting the urge to roll her eyes because Danny is watching her, not the screen, assessing her reaction.
All the kids Danny’s age are obsessed with Joseph, just like they had been when she was younger.
Idless is a small town with a long past, and, like the house on Beeker Street and the ghost of the packhorse bridge, Joseph Bray has become a town bogeyman, chasing teenagers down, down into their dreams since the day he picked up the axe and took his youngest daughter out to the barn barefoot in the snow.
Every Halloween, there’s usually about three or four Joseph Brays roaming the streets, bulging their eyes and baring their teeth, holding on to cardboard axes painted red with “blood.” The year Danny had dressed up as Joseph, he’d spent weeks building a papier-maché head to carry under his arm, telling people it was his wife.
He’d come home with bags full of sweets that year, his eyes sparkling with good humor as he held a severed head by the hair and swung it loosely around.
“Many people know the story,” the Danny on the screen is saying now, stepping agilely over a fallen log, “but few know that the Bray Farm is still standing. Somewhere. Out here in these woods.”
The camera pans round to show the thick forest. Ambient noises—rustling leaves, the wind, rapid breathing—become a roar. There is the briefest glint of metal, like the flare of sunlight on chrome. Danny is still talking.
“We’ve come out here to get some footage of the place where the Bray family saw their last sunrise. Who knows wh—”
“Shit!” a voice off camera whispers, sounding loud and distorted so close to the mic. “Can you see that, Danny? Is that a car?”
They are filming in what looks to be a small clearing of flattened grass ringed with deadfall. The foliage is colored in the muted golds and browns of early autumn, the light soft and gauzy.
Danny crosses in front of the lens as the camera lurches forward.
More glints of metal, a rustle of movement, and Danny steps back to reveal a vehicle half-hidden in the scrub.
Cathy watches as her son begins to lift the leaves and branches away, his grin turning slowly into a puzzled frown as he looks back up at the camera.
“It’s a truck.”
“You think it’s been abandoned?”
Danny shakes his head. He has revealed most of the pickup now, reaching up to brush the last of the leaves away from the roof. “Nah. It’s in pretty good condition. I bet one of these would cost, like, ten grand.”
“Why’s it out here, then?”
Danny doesn’t answer, but Cathy recognizes the look on her son’s face.
He’s nervous, and she doesn’t blame him.
Something about the situation doesn’t feel right.
She thinks briefly of Mrs. Scott saying, He was in the truck that Hazel climbed into, and something squeezes her heart, making it flutter and palpitate.
“It’s been hidden,” Danny says, so quietly she almost misses it. “See? All these leaves and branches are just laid on top of it to cover it up. Someone doesn’t want it to be found.”
“Put ’em back then, man,” the off-camera voice snaps, and Cathy finds herself nodding in agreement.
Even though he is standing right beside her, near enough for her to reach out and touch if she wanted to, Cathy is still very worried for her boy in the video.
She can feel her pulse quickening, making her sweat.
“Why drive it all the way out here and then just leave it?” Danny-in-the-video is asking, rubbing at his chin with his fingertips. “There’s nothing out here. Where have they gone?”
Lots of places to hide in the woods, Cathy thinks.
She opens her mouth to say something but then the camera is panning around again—the two boys have obviously decided to clear the hell out of there, and as far as she’s concerned, that’s the best decision they’ll ever make, when she catches sight of something.
Only a flash, no more than that. Like a kingfisher flying past. No, not a kingfisher.
It’s just the color. That bright, beautiful blue.
“Go back.”
She holds the phone out to Danny, who takes it from her, frowning in confusion.
“But you haven’t finis—”
“Go back. About ten seconds.”
Cathy is leaning over his shoulder now, her mouth hot and dry with excitement. She is almost shaking with agitation as Danny drags his finger along the bottom of the screen and the footage rewinds. She waits to see that flash of blue again, her finger poised to jab at the screen, pausing it.
“There! Do you see it?”
Danny squints at the freeze-frame. In among all those drowsy autumn colors is a flash of vivid blue. He enlarges the image with his fingers before turning the screen toward Cathy. “Is it a fish?” he asks her, still looking confused.
She peers at it. He’s right. A fish, floating among the treetops. Seeing it that way is surreal, particularly as the design of it is monstrous and strange, like something from a medieval woodcut.
It clicks then. “It’s a thing for the wind…” She gropes for the right word, gesturing with her hand while Danny and Scout both look at her with identical expressions of confusion. “Come on, you know what I mean. It’s a thing that turns in the wind. Fuck, it’s a weather vane!”
“Oh.” Danny sounds disappointed, like he’d been expecting more. “Is that all?”
But Cathy isn’t disappointed. She grits her teeth against the cold, feeling a swell of fear and excitement surge up through her chest. Like something out of a fairy tale, there is a house out there, deep in the woods.
“Mum?” Danny is shaking her arm, trying to get her attention. “I think I heard your phone just go. Sounds like you’ve got a message. You want me to go get it?”
It takes her a moment to answer. She isn’t thinking clearly.
“Grab your brother. I just need to check something and I’ll be right in.”
Danny turns to go inside with Scout close behind, trotting on his sturdy little legs.
Cathy waits until the door closes before walking around the corner to the spot just below Scout’s bedroom window.
Inside, his little night light is already on, casting a soft peach glow through the curtains.
It’s just enough light to see by, and as Cathy bends down to peer at the frozen ground her thoughts are gathering speed, accelerating.
The buried truck, Mrs. Scott, that weather vane in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe it means nothing, maybe it’s just wishful thinking. God, she needs a drink.
Could be that Danny’s right about the winter in Idless, she thinks.
All this snow and darkness doesn’t put anyone in their right mind.
Still, she lingers long enough to look for tracks in the dirt, maybe evidence that someone was here who shouldn’t have been.
A discarded cigarette butt, a thumb smudged on the glass.
Anything. But there is only that ghost of a boot print on the sill and she turns away, planning to open up the bottle of wine in the fridge and not move off the sofa till it’s drunk, but Danny is blocking the doorway.
He holds her phone out to her, his face pale and spooked.
“What is it? Jesus, Danny, what is it?”