Chapter 8 A Growl in the Aftermath #4
Green closed his eyes so he could drink without seeing his fever-dream hand holding the jar. It was cool, simple, and sweet. He downed the whole jar without pausing. He stood with his eyes closed, returning to the healing power of his breath.
Valentina took the jar from his hand. He heard her futzing with the backpack and moving around nearby, but he resolved to stay in his calming darkness until she asked him to follow.
“Just a moment. I need to rule out a few more possibilities before we depart.”
He could hear her pacing back and forth.
She spoke to herself in a soft monotone while she worked.
“No visible tracks. No scorching. No obvious soil disturbance. No mucus trail. No musk or marking. Sky is intact. Turning left still possible. Turning right still possible. No carrion kings. No number repetition. Taking samples of live and dead grasses.”
Green didn’t open his eyes to see if she was speaking into a recorder. He didn’t ask follow-up questions. Valentina was absolutely correct. He was done putting a brave face on it. It had been too much.
The fact that half of what she spoke to herself hinted at lifetimes more to learn might have been exciting at other times, but at that moment it just felt like sinking chest-deep in a sulphureous swamp.
The growl came without warning.
It was deep as caves beneath the ocean and undeniable as gravity.
Green’s eyes snapped open.
Valentina was already more visible. She lay on her stomach in the grass with her ear pressed to the ground.
His heart pounded.
“Teacher, did you hear it?”
“Just a moment, Mr. Green. I’m listening for burrow echo.”
“No! Listen! The growling!”
Valentina sat up.
“What growling?”
The growl came again. It felt like it was ringing Green’s rib cage like a church bell.
He staggered and held up a finger.
“That growling.”
Valentina narrowed her eyes and surveyed the tree line.
“I don’t hear any growling.”
The growl came a third time and this time there was a single command in the sound.
Run.
Green spoke that command aloud as it tumbled through his skull on the back of that primal threat.
Valentina stood up calmly. She shouldered her pack and tilted her head in assent.
“Toward the truck, then,” she said, and moved in a jog toward the woods.
The jog quickened to a run as he joined her.
Branches whipped.
Twigs cracked underfoot.
Green’s chest ached and his legs were on fire.
He looked over his shoulder and hated that he could still see the roofs of the cabins. They were too slow. They couldn’t escape.
He slammed into a dogwood sapling that sprang back and shoved him off his feet. He got up running and risked another look behind.
The wolf was there.
Standing motionless forty feet off.
The monster.
A horror desecrating the fading light of evening.
Its skeletal legs were exposed, birdlike, too narrow for the massive body they supported.
The skull was bare, eyes fixed on Green’s back.
The dark flesh collected above the shoulder, rising up in jagged points like a young mountain range.
The whole of the creature stood in a great pulsing shadow, an inverse fire.
It was an outrider of night, a trespasser in the waking world of birdsong and golden sun.
It stood statue-still, watching their desperate flight.
Green could do nothing but turn his attention back to Valentina before he lost her in the woods or crashed into another tree.
He hadn’t heard the wolf approach, not until it growled, not until it wanted him to hear.
He wouldn’t hear when it decided to close the distance and clamp his spine in those white gravestone jaws.
He wanted to scream a warning, but why?
There was nothing he could do.
They were already running.
It was up to the wolf if they would outlive the day.
He ran and felt a kind of bleak gratitude for the branches that stung his face and the briars that bit his hands, because those were pains he could comprehend. Those things were real and in front of him and held no secret malice that might threaten him in ways deeper than physical harm.
They made it to Alf’s truck.
Green slid down the embankment on his back, fighting for breath.
Valentina climbed inside.
He kicked up a spray of gravel rounding the hood and threw himself into the driver’s seat.
He knew what the horned wolf made of modern obstacles like steel doors and windshields.
Valentina caught her breath with dignified precision.
Green turned the key and stomped the accelerator, spinning the tires and leaving a rooster tail of dirt and stones spraying up behind them.
Then, they were away, fishtailing onto the road. Yet even speed and distance felt like empty comforts. Paper armor.
“Mr. Green, slow down.”
He hadn’t even seen the wolf run. It wasn’t there. Then it was.
“Mr. Green, slow down.”
He was hyperventilating.
If Valentina would admit that a word like “sacred” existed for a reason, then how could she deny words like “monster”? Words like “evil”?
She placed a hand on his forearm.
“Mr. Green…”
He glanced at the odometer. She was right. They were approaching sixty miles per hour on curving mountain roads. He eased off the gas and hated every ounce of speed he surrendered.
His hands were shaking.
He tried to grip the wheel tighter to steady himself.
“Would you like to hear about my favorite comfort food?”
“What?”
Forty miles an hour had never felt so slow.
“My favorite comfort food. I want to tell you about it.”
It was too slow. It was far too slow. Did it matter? What was speed to a thing that could appear out of nowhere?
“Shouldn’t you be preparing one of those contingencies you mentioned? Where’s that log thing?”
“Listen to my voice, Mr. Green. Nothing is chasing us. If something did, we would handle it. Now, I would like to tell you about my favorite comfort food for autumn.”
She didn’t see it.
She didn’t hear it.
She couldn’t understand.
“It’s had a few names. Welsh rabbit or Welsh rarebit in the eighteenth century, but given the origins of those names I think ‘cheese on toast’ will do.”
“It’s still chasing us. I can feel it. It knows where we are.”
“And it waited until we drove away to spring its trap? No. You’re driving home to a rest. You’re warm and dry. You’re learning about my favorite food for autumn evenings.”
He glanced at Valentina. Her color still looked wrong, like a badly painted mannequin, but it was improving.
Green checked the rearview and said nothing.
“You might infer from the name ‘cheese on toast’ that you already understand the recipe, but you would be oversimplifying. The name doesn’t do the meal justice.
Like most simple foods, the ingredients are key.
A homemade loaf. Not too dense. Thick slices.
Toasted on a fork by the fire. Modern toasters do not replicate that flavor. ”
She paused and fished out her jerky bag and insisted Green take a piece.
“You chew while I talk.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t say you were. Now chew.”
He did as he was told. The jerky tasted like salt and campfire smoke.
“Toasted bread.”
Green’s heart still beat in his ears, but he felt the adrenaline easing.
“Yes. Fire toasted on a fork. Once you have your toast, you need a rich Cheshire cheese. Hard to find in North America these days, but worth the effort. The smell of it sets your feet on cobblestones in eighteenth-century England. Now, you would be doing this while you toast your bread, mind you, but you crumble the Cheshire with a three-finger pinch of breadcrumbs and the crushed yolk of a boiled egg into a pan and warm it on the fire. Just hot enough to melt the cheese and bring the mixture together.”
Green chewed jerky and shivered. He worked to watch the road without thinking about his hands on the steering wheel. They were still the wrong color.
Valentina’s words pulled him into a firelit place full of the smell of toasting bread and cheese.
“Like all the best comfort foods, this recipe isn’t too complicated, and it has the added benefit that if you begin with frost-reddened cheeks and numb fingers, you will thaw yourself while you prepare your meal. Turn left here.”
Green turned.
If it wanted to, the wolf could already be back at Candle-Fly.
Maybe it was stalking Dancer as she walked out to watch the sunset.
Maybe it was visiting Alf and Jerome. Perhaps everyone he met now was cursed to die.
Maybe it was lying low in the bed of the truck.
He thumbed the acorn in his pocket and heard a line from an old horror movie.
The call is coming from inside the house!
“Next, of course, you spread the Cheshire mixture on your toasted bread. You could eat it then, but you would miss the crowning touch that takes it from simply delicious to transcendent.”
They passed the Count and Countess and Green slowed to look. No wolf. No sign of danger. His car was there, windshield still broken.
“Do you know what a salamander is, Mr. Green?”
He was half listening.
“Small, squishy reptile.”
“Amphibian, actually, but I’m talking about culinary equipment. I believe they have been out of fashion for some time, but a salamander is essentially a thick disk of iron with a long handle.”
Green lost the thread of his morbid thoughts and remembered wondering about the tools next to the cabin’s fireplace.
“I think I saw one in the cabin, right? I wondered what that was for.”
“Just so, though you can use a hearth shovel if needed. The last, key step of cheese on toast involves heating up your salamander red-hot. Truthfully, this is the first step. You set your salamander in the fire as soon as the idea for the meal occurs. That sort of forethought was usually involved in older recipes. I always thought it added to the satisfaction of the finished product. Careful intention. Ritual.”
Green felt wrung out and on the edge of tears.
“Now, my favorite part. With the Cheshire mixture spread on your toast, you pull that almighty hot salamander from the fire and hold it just above the cheese. It bubbles and browns and the cheese sinks into the bread, components fusing into a greater whole.”
Dusk proper had arrived when they pulled into Candle-Fly Camp.
Green looked to Dancer’s office.
The light was on.
Her body was not broken and spread out by her front door.
“Have you ever had it, Mr. Green? Proper cheese on toast?”
“No. It sounds…pretty good.”
“Sometimes I think people deny themselves comforting tasks like making handcrafted meals because they are told so often how convenient their lives are. They begin to think that instant, soulless nutrition is all they need. Nonsense, of course. Go ahead and drive straight to my camp. I can abide a vehicle for one night. This vehicle has served with honors.”
Green hadn’t realized until that point, but Valentina hadn’t complained once about being a passenger on the drive back, not even with his erratic driving.
She hadn’t betrayed an ounce of fear or anger as he took mountain roads at unsafe speeds.
Damn. I must be truly pitiable.
“I’ll understand if you wish to go straight to bed,” Valentina said.
“But, if I can tempt you, I have everything we need for cheese on toast and I can have the cabin hearth alive and crackling faster than you’d believe.
Full moon tonight. Clear. Crisp. The cabin will be warm enough to leave the door open and let the smell of leaves in.
It will be too cold to fret about insects. Probably not a thing to be missed.”
“What about the wolf?” he asked weakly.
“My camp is safe, Mr. Green. Our home is a safe place to rest. Put your faith in that.”
In the last light of sunset, Valentina looked very much like a witch. A witch, Green thought, who is on my side.
He decided to trust her.
He didn’t seem to have much choice.
“Okay,” he said. “I think cheese on toast would be nice.”
And it was.