Chapter 1 #2
Not long after, winter announced itself with a terrible thunderstorm.
Carolyn was not afraid of such things, but with each flash of lightning Isha and Asha trembled.
The three of them were a family now. They took shelter together beneath a stand of beech, where Carolyn and Isha held Asha between them, cuddling to keep her warm.
They lay together all that night. Carolyn felt their slight bodies tremble, felt them jerk with each crack of thunder.
She tried to comfort them with caresses, but they flinched at her touch.
As the night wore on she searched her memory of Father’s lessons for words that might comfort them—“don’t worry” would be enough, or “it will be over soon” or “there will be clover in the morning.”
But Carolyn had been a poor student. Try as she might, she could find no words.
Shortly before dawn Carolyn felt Isha jerk and drum her hooves against the earth, kicking away the fallen leaves to expose the black loam below. A moment later the rain flowing over Carolyn’s body ran warm, and the taste of it was salty in her mouth.
The lightning cracked then, and Carolyn saw David.
He was above her, standing on a branch some thirty feet away, grinning.
From his left hand dangled the weighted end of a fine silver chain.
Not wanting to, Carolyn used the last light of the moon to trace the length of that chain.
When lightning flashed again, Carolyn stared into the lifeless eye of Isha, spitted with her fawn at the end of David’s spear.
Carolyn stretched her hand out to touch the bronze handle protruding from the deer’s torso.
The metal was warm. It trembled slightly under her fingertips, magnifying the faint, fading vibrations of Isha’s gentle heart.
“Father said to watch and listen,” David said.
“If you had found the words, I was supposed to let them live.” He jerked the chain back to himself then, unpinning them.
“Father says it’s time to come home,” he said, coiling the chain with deft, practiced motions.
“It’s time for your real studies to begin. ” He disappeared back into the storm.
Carolyn rose and stood alone in the dark, both in that moment and ever after.
III
Now, a quarter century later, Carolyn knelt on all fours behind the base of a fallen pine, peeping through a thick stand of holly.
If she angled her head just so, she had an unobstructed view down the hill to the clearing of the bull.
It was twenty yards or so wide and mostly empty.
The only features of note were the bull itself and the granite cairn of Margaret’s grave.
The bull, a hollow bronze cast slightly larger than life, stood in the clearing’s precise center.
It shone mellow and golden in the summer sun.
The clearing was bounded on the near side by the stand of wild cedar in which Carolyn now hid.
On the far side, David and Michael stood at the edge of a sheer drop-off cut into the hill to make a little more room for Highway 78.
Across the road, twenty feet or so below, the weathered wooden sign marking the entrance to Garrison Oaks hung from a rusty chain.
When the breeze caught it right you could hear the creak all the way up here.
Carolyn had snuck in very close indeed, close enough to count the shaggy, twining braids of Michael’s blond dreadlocks, close enough to hear the buzz of flies around David’s head.
David was amusing himself by quizzing Michael about his travels.
Seeing this, Carolyn winced. Michael’s catalog was animals, and he had learned it perhaps a bit too well.
Human speech was difficult for him now, even painful—especially when he was fresh out of the woods. Worse, he lacked guile.
Emily had visited the librarians’ dreams the night before, saying that David required them to assemble at the bull “before sundown.” That was different from “as soon as possible,” a distinction that no one but Michael would overlook.
Still, it might be for the best. Jennifer had been stuck alone with David for weeks, the two of them waiting on news of Father.
Now, as David tormented Michael, Jennifer—the smallest and slightest of the librarians—worked at tearing down Margaret’s grave.
She trudged back and forth across the clearing, stooped over from the weight of head-sized chunks of granite, her strawberry-blond hair drenched in sweat.
Still, after weeks alone with David, lugging granite in the hot sun was probably a relief.
Mentally, Carolyn sighed. I suppose I should go down there and help them. If nothing else, this would encourage David to divide his attentions among three victims rather than two.
But Carolyn did not lack guile. She would listen first.
David and Michael stood looking down over Garrison Oaks.
Michael, like his cougars around him, was naked.
David wore an Israeli Army flak jacket and a lavender tutu, crusty with blood.
The flak jacket was his. The tutu was from the closet of Mrs. McGillicutty’s son.
This was at least partly Carolyn’s fault.
When it became clear that they could not return to the Library, at least not in the near term, Carolyn had explained to the others that they would need to wear American clothes in order to blend in.
They nodded, not really understanding, and set about rummaging through Mrs. McGillicutty’s closets.
David chose the tutu because it was the closest thing he could find to his usual loin cloth.
Carolyn thought about explaining why this was not “blending in,” then decided against it.
She had learned to take her giggles where she could find them.
Her nose wrinkled. The wind smelled of rot. Is Margaret back as well? But no, she realized, the rot was David. After a while you didn’t notice so much, but she had been away. Flies buzzed around his head in a cloud.
A year or two ago, David took up the practice of squeezing blood from the hearts of his victims into his hair.
He was a furry man and any one heart yielded only a few tablespoons, but of course they added up quickly.
Over time, the combination of hair and blood hardened into something like a helmet.
Once, curious, she asked Peter how strong this would be.
Peter, whose catalog included mathematics and engineering, looked up at the ceiling for a moment, thinking.
“Pretty strong,” he said meditatively. “Clotted blood is harder than you’d think, but it’s brittle.
The strands of hair would tend to alleviate that.
It’s the same principle as rebar in concrete.
Hmm.” He bent to his pad and scribbled numbers for a moment, then nodded.
“Yeah. Pretty strong. It would probably stop a twenty-two. Maybe even a nine-millimeter.” For a while David had dripped it into his beard as well, but Father made him chisel this off when it became difficult to turn his head.
All that was left was a longish Fu Manchu mustache.
“Where were you?” David demanded, shaking Michael by the shoulders. He spoke in Pelapi, which bore no resemblance at all to English, or any other modern language. “You’ve been off playing in the woods, haven’t you? You finished up weeks ago! Don’t lie to me!”
Michael was close to panic—his eyes rolled wildly, and he spoke in fits and starts, conjuring the words with great effort. “I was…uh-way.”
“Uh-way? Uh-way? You mean away? Away where?”
“I was with…with…the small things. Father said. Father said to study the ways of the humble and the small.”
“Father wanted him to learn about mice,” Jennifer translated, calling over her shoulder, grunting at the weight of her rock. “How they move. Hiding and the like.”
“Back to work!” David screamed at her. “You’re wasting daylight!”
Jennifer plodded back to the pile and hoisted another rock, groaning under the load.
David, six-foot-four and very muscular, tracked this with his eyes.
Carolyn thought he smiled slightly. Then, turning back to Michael: “Gah. Mice, of all things.” He shook his head.
“You know, I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but you might be even more useless than Carolyn. ”
Carolyn, safe in her hiding blind, made a rude gesture.
Jennifer dropped another rock into the underbrush with a dry crash. She straightened up, panting, and wiped her forehead with a trembling hand.
“Carolyn? What? I…not know…I…”
“Stop talking,” David said. “So, let me get this straight—while the rest of us have been killing ourselves trying to find Father, you were off playing with a bunch of mice?”
“Mice…yes. I thought—”
A flat crack rang out across the clearing. Carolyn, who had long experience of David’s slaps, winced again. He leaned into that one.
“I did not ask what you thought,” David said. “Animals don’t think. Isn’t that what you want to be, Michael? An animal? Come to that, isn’t it what you actually are?”
“As you say,” Michael said softly.
David’s back was to her, but Carolyn could picture his face clearly. He would be smiling, at least a bit. If the slap drew blood, perhaps he’ll be giving us a look at his dimples as well.
“Just…shut up. You’re giving me a headache. Go help Jennifer or something.”
One of Michael’s cougars rumbled. Michael interrupted it with a low yowl, and it went silent.
Carolyn’s eyes narrowed. Behind David, she saw from the grasses on the western edge of the valley that the wind was shifting.
In a moment the three of them would be downwind of her, rather than vice versa.
In her time among the Americans Carolyn had gotten acclimated to the extent that their smells—Marlboro, Chanel, Vidal Sassoon—no longer made her eyes water, but Michael and David had not.
With the wind coming from the west she would not stay hidden long.