20 RAIL AND RAVE AND RAVAGE
20
R AIL AND R AVE AND R AVAGE
The Wrangler had seen better days. Caleb’s time with it nearly ran it into the ground, and he was still resentful about me reclaiming it to drive back to Rotham two days after Christmas. Dad checked the oil three times before he gave me the keys, suspiciously eyeing the engine as we stood in the driveway like the hood might pop open and snap at him. It was a reptilian shape—the front end was spiked with metal accents, its deep green body like something lurking just beneath the surface of a mossy pond. But it was such a relief to see it. I couldn’t get on another plane. I wanted to be in control of my own pace, needed the option to pull over and breathe.
“It’s icy,” Mom said for the tenth time, dropping my backpack into the passenger seat and slamming the door shut. She had her bathrobe on over her Christmas pajamas. The combination made her look so small. I wished there wasn’t so much resentment in my heart. That I could banish the sound of her saying we spend so much money on your education, and you come back with ghost stories playing on a loop in my head.
“It’s always icy this time of year,” I answered. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”
“It’s a nine-hour drive, Joanna. You really shouldn’t be going alone.”
Honestly, it didn’t sound so bad. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone for more than a few hours, and Rotham lured me in—Finch was already back on campus, and Amrita would arrive the day after I did. Caroline was supposed to follow close behind her, with Saz the last one to come home. I wanted to get back to them, even if I was afraid of the fallout that might come along with our reunion.
“I just don’t get why you have to go so early,” Mom said, frowning. “You said you were going to stay for two weeks.”
“That was before Survey. Now that I have a chance of showing my work, I’d fuck myself over if I wasted that time when I could use it to get ahead.”
“Language,” Dad said.
But that was what they wanted after all, wasn’t it? Proof that I was taking advantage of every opportunity. Mom just shook her head, mouth wrung up like a rag, her hands pushed so deep in the pockets of her robe that I thought they might tear through the cloth.
They let me go with only brief goodbyes. It was brutally cold, morning-on-the-mountain kind of cold. Weak heat puttered out of the car’s vents. I alternated between holding the wheel and waving my hands in front of the tepid air.
The first few hours of the drive were easy once the car finally warmed up. I kept myself entertained with podcasts and a playlist of Finch’s playing over the speakers. The only stops I allowed were coffee and pee breaks, though I tried to limit them to as few as I thought my body could handle without my kidneys melting.
It was the setting sun that got to me. There was only an hour left in the drive when darkness blanketed the road—I’d left early, but winter’s stolen daylight didn’t care. The roads closer to Rotham were in desperate need of repaving. Dormant trees bent close. There was hardly anyone else around, everyone still at home for the holidays.
The Wrangler ate up yellow lines. I looked at the road. I looked at the trees. I looked at the rearview mirror and then back at the road. Was there ever a point when the brain got bored enough to conjure a new vision, to replace the one it was seeing? Fuzzy warmth from the vents made me sleepy and spent. A woman waved at me from the woods. A woman waved at me from the woods?
My head snapped up from where it’d nearly drooped to my chest, and the car’s tires roared against the rumble strip. Thudding heartbeats nearly drowned out the stereo I’d cranked up to stay awake. A frantic glance over my shoulder told me there was no one in the woods, that I hadn’t seen anyone, that I needed to pull over and go the fuck to sleep. But I was so close. Just twenty more minutes. I could go twenty more minutes.
I ripped my eyes away from the woods in my rearview mirror, and they landed on a black animal darting across the road.
This time I swerved hard. Screaming was an instinct—all sound, no words, just a desperate body-deep wail. The car’s grille connected with something hard as I barreled into the grass, barely wrenching to a stop before it could crash headlong into the trees. Headlights lit up the trunks. Finch’s playlist blared ’80s pop at me. I shut it up with a violent twist of the dial.
When I flung the door open, everything smelled of cooked rubber and churned mud. Beneath that earthiness was the musk of animal pelt, a sleeping scent, unwashed. Something on the dashboard beeped incessantly as I slid out of the driver’s seat. I was shaking too hard to let go of the door handle. Everything else remained impossibly quiet—no rolling tires, no wind in the trees.
Then Kolesnik screamed.
The dragged-out cry bleated from the mouth of the animal slumped on the asphalt. I staggered toward it. Swallowed the lump in my throat that made me think I might vomit. Frost crunched under my boots, dead grass flattening. “Not real,” I whispered, “not real not real not real.”
Because it was a wild boar lying on its side, hind legs a twisted mess, the snout huffing clouds against the pavement and front legs pedaling wildly. The hips wouldn’t obey. I’d injured it. The mouth parted, tusks jutting out of the jaw as it released another echoing scream, that endless HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME.
“Not real,” I whispered again as I crouched as close as I could while staying out of the creature’s line of sight. The shattered glass hadn’t been real. So there was no way this could be either. I was sleep deprived and buzzing from too many cups of gas station coffee. But I’d felt the impact in the steering wheel.
It was so much smaller than I might have once expected a boar to be after seeing Kolesnik’s hulking apparition. It was round and wiry with the same seeking eyes but lacked all the humanoid mass—save for its voice, Kolesnik’s stolen and recreated. I wanted to touch it and prove that it wasn’t real. But I was so scared to feel the heat of its fading life. I reached for it, shaking.
My phone rang from the car. Headlights blinded me when I twisted to get to my feet, scrambling to answer. The screen flashed MOM in big white letters, and I swiped to answer. “Hey,” I said shakily. “Sorry I didn’t call yet, I’m almost back.”
“HELP ME,” the voice on the other end of the line wept, and for one seizing moment it was her. Then the shift came over my mother’s familiar tone—wiped it away and replaced it again with Kolesnik’s last plea—“PLEASE HELP ME.”
The boar began to echo the cry until the words seemed to come from every direction, booming between the trees: HELPMEHELPMEHELPMEHELPMEHELPME.
I threw the phone, and it clattered across the pavement. It came to a stop beside the boar’s body just as it let out a squeal. Its body stilled. Immediately the screen lit up again, the same jolly ringtone chirping into the dark.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Leave me the fuck alone!”
The phone went black. I stared at the boar and the knot of its hind legs. Then the ringtone began again. I snatched it up to answer, shards of the shattered screen cutting into my thumb. “ What the hell do you want ?”
“Jo?”
It was Finch. My Finch, warmth and worry in her voice. “Oh, fuck,” I panted with my head in my hands, phone pressed harder against my cheek to ground myself with the pain. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I thought—I didn’t realize it was you.”
“Are you alright? You were supposed to be home by now. I went by the Manor and it was empty.”
The cold made it hard to hold the phone. I nearly dropped it and shattered it further, stranding me without her voice. “I’m okay,” I said, shakily. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m close to campus. I just—I hit something with my car.”
“What? Are you okay? Do you need me to come and get you?” The panic in her voice shocked me back into my body. I shook my head, shut my eyes against the headlights. “I’m getting my keys. Just give me five minutes and I’ll be in the car. Can you send me your location?”
“No.” The boar’s eyes stared into the street. I could hear tires for the first time in what felt like hours—a car coming down the road. I needed to get out of the way. “I’m okay, the car’s okay, everything is fine. I just had to catch my breath. I’ll be back soon.”
Her exhalation was long and loud. I could imagine her, fingers pressed to her forehead, rearing to scold. A car came around the bend about fifty feet back and slowed to a crawl when it saw me and the boar. I kept Finch against my ear as an older woman pulled up, rolling down her window. “You alright, sweetie? What happened here? Did you hit that thing?”
Finch was saying something I couldn’t hear as I waved the woman on, even as my stomach sank. The woman’s horrified eyes on the boar were confirmation. She could see it. It was real.
“I’m fine, car’s fine,” I said again. “I’m just going to move it out of the road. Thank you for stopping.”
“Never seen one of those around here before,” she said with wonder, unable to peel her eyes away from it.
I hadn’t either. No one really had, except for Kolesnik—it had been the inspiration for his very first Masquerade Grotesque costume, the reason it came into existence at all. He’d seen a feral pig outside of his cottage on campus, rooting in the garden, tearing up all the green until he chased it off with a gun on his shoulder. He used to tell everyone who would listen that they were violent things.
“Jo,” Finch said. “Jo!”
“You can go ahead,” I said to the woman. She just gave me a concerned nod and slowly picked up speed again, tires crunching over the rumble strip until she grew smaller and smaller in the distance.
I pressed my fingers to my temple, tried to inhale without feeling as if I might split in two. “Sorry. What did you say?”
“Can you drive?”
“Yeah, of course,” I whispered, eyes shut.
“Come over,” Finch said, her voice stern over the phone’s frayed line. “We don’t have to be at the airport until eleven tomorrow, and I don’t think you should be alone right now.”
I nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see me. The knees of my jeans were wet with something—mud, or the boar’s blood, everything too dark to decipher.
“I’ll be there soon,” I said, and ended the call. The boar lay on its side. Trembling, I took it by one massive tusk, the head dragging limply with my straining pull. It was so impossibly heavy. I thought that nothing this heavy could be dead—that whatever abandoned a body must leave it lighter than before. It took all my strength to move it into the grass where it would lie until someone else came to find it, police or animal control or someone more capable than me.
A smothered cry ripped up my throat and out of my mouth: the sound of pent-up horror and the sense that a steadfast piece of myself had snapped off. Then I sucked the breath back in. Left the boar behind. Got behind the wheel of the car and turned the key and drove the last twenty minutes back to Rotham to the sound of nothing but the engine and my pounding heart.