Chapter 10 Root Causes
“You killed those people.”
Green stood in front of an entrance to an impossible forest, an arched gateway made of two bowed trees the color of bleached bone. The way beyond was as black as midnight water and in the center hung the skull of the horned wolf.
In a sense, the wolf answered.
Green looked up at the skull and felt only anger.
“A heart attack,” Green said. “A city bus. Cancer creeping like mildew. Old bones wrapped in night. Each as petty as the next. There is nothing impressive about bringing death. What you’re doing is empty.
Purposeless. Do you kill for sport? The sport of what?
How is serving decay sport? Decay doesn’t need any help. Entropy doesn’t need servants.”
It was Green’s own voice, but he felt he was speaking with Valentina’s words, her strange formality.
The skull said nothing.
“Answer me!”
Green thought his regret at the creature, projecting his empathy, his numbing compassion for the lives of people he did not know.
He thought of his old neighbor, Mr. Reynard.
He felt the old ice-dagger pain of his absence and watched that pain sprout and climb like ivy, winding like clockwork, clinging to the loss of Kyle Cartwright, the loss of the campers at Kinkaid Cabins.
His remorse grew and stretched, a thorny hedge of pain, hung with the corpses of songbirds and the dusky shine of acorns like polished brown agate reflecting the starlight.
He thought the skull dipped a fraction of an inch.
Annoyance? Acknowledgment?
You have grown. Stop calling my thoughts here, not-man. I have work to do.
Then, it was gone.
The hedge of pain snapped into grayscale and shattered, drifting off like smoke, like the dusty scales from a moth’s wing.
The darkness melted away and Green was looking down a tunnel of gray boughs like the rib-lined gut of an endless serpent.
There in the distance, he could just see the thin light of dawn pooling beneath the cabin door.
He awoke.
Great. Dreaming about work again.
He shook his head.
Nightmare creatures and haunted forests. Arguments with a murderous skull. Work.
He could tell by the birdsongs it was dawn.
A knock at the door.
“Come in.”
Valentina entered, carrying the same toast and coffee as the mornings before. The knock was new.
“Good morning, Mr. Green. Breakfast.”
“Morning. Thank you again, but please don’t feel like you need to bring me food every morning. It’s kinda embarrassing. And I can guess what Dancer would say about it.”
He stretched and swung his bare feet onto the cold dirt floor. With a pang of self-consciousness, he glanced down at himself, noting that his T-shirt and sweatpants were grubby, but not indecent.
“I’m a very early riser and feeding one’s apprentice is an old tradition,” Valentina said. “It kindles my nostalgia. Humor me.”
He rose and went to the table to eat. He would forever think of that table as the rag moth’s table.
The association made him think of the word “wake,” bringing to mind the parents of the Kinkaid Cabins victims. Would they have been called to the area to identify their children in some windowless basement of a county building?
“I don’t really feel like arguing with you,” he said. “I’ll never get sick of this bread.”
“We’ll add bread baking to the curriculum.”
Green ate and scratched his scalp. He felt greasy from being alternately too cold and too hot. Valentina said that he would get used to going without daily hot showers. He hadn’t yet.
“When you’re finished, I’ll be waiting by my trailer.”
“I won’t be long. What’s the plan for today?”
Valentina shook her head.
“It’s technically the weekend, a concept to which I am still acclimating, but if you don’t object, we have some catching up to do. Data. We still need data. And if it’s within my control, we’re going to have a gentler week, lest you think our entire profession is fear and chaos.”
A dim skull peered at Green from his recent dream.
“It’s hard to imagine we could have a less gentle week,” Green said.
Valentina spat a word Green didn’t know.
“Mr. Green, I’ve outlived many of my old superstitions, but just the same, don’t say things like that.”
He took a big bite of toast.
“Yup. Regretted it as soon as I said it,” he said with his mouth full. “Anyway, no, I don’t mind working on the weekend. It’s not as if I had plans. Another hike?”
“No, we will be staying in camp today. Probably for the next few days, at least.”
He thought of the stakes behind their need for data. He wondered who else might be heading their direction while he chewed his toast, traveling for a fishing trip or a school hike. He wondered what they might meet when they arrived.
“Teacher…we don’t need to stay in camp for me. I mean, I think we need to do whatever we can to protect people. Right? I don’t think the wolf is going to go away just because I’m…struggling a bit.”
“Admirable, but there is only so much we can do. Our power is in information. Knowledge is our best protection.”
She left him to finish his breakfast.
Green dressed and Valentina led him to the makeshift structure she called “the laboratory.” Its walls were part corrugated metal, part wooden siding, part roofing shingles.
It fit in with the rest of the camp insomuch as it didn’t break the pattern of vastly diverse, mismatched structures laid out like spilled Lego bricks in front of the library tree.
They entered and he was surprised by the sparse orderliness of the interior.
A large steel L-shaped worktable occupied a third of the space, surrounded by tall cabinets full of labeled drawers, glass vessels, and equipment Green couldn’t identify.
The room was uncomfortably hot. A little electric heater whispered to itself in one corner.
“Why is it so hot in here?”
Valentina paused by a cloth-covered tray on the table.
“Close the door behind you. Are you squeamish about anatomy, Mr. Green?”
He honestly wasn’t sure. It had been many years since he dissected a frog in high school biology.
“Can I turn that heater off?”
“Just a moment.”
She removed the cloth to display several birds in different stages of dissection.
They didn’t look real. A cardinal, pinned to the work surface, was opened to display its vital organs. The bird’s internal structures gleamed pink and ocher, musculature peeled back, heart and liver framed by delicate white bone.
Green furrowed his brow and looked at the tray. His memory flashed to an afternoon dismantling bargain-buy clocks with Mr. Reynard.
“Did you learn anything?”
“Yes, but not from the dissection. Touch them.”
He looked to the birds, then back to Valentina.
“Really?”
“Yes. Just for a moment.”
Green licked his lips and summoned courage.
Reaching out, he rested two fingertips on the cardinal’s prominent exposed sternum.
It was ice-cold, smooth, and dry.
“It’s cold…That makes sense, right? Dead things are cold.”
“Dead things are the temperature of their surroundings. What is the temperature in this room?”
He understood.
He stepped closer to the table and this time rested his entire palm against the cardinal. He placed his other palm over the body of an adjacent chickadee. It was like resting his hands on a snowbank.
“They’re…frozen,” he said.
“Correct. And yet, it is nearly eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit in this room and has been for several hours. The birds show no sign of thawing.”
Green took his hands from the birds and rubbed them together to banish the chill.
“Is that why they didn’t decompose?”
“I expect so.”
“And…the people who have died?”
“I have put in an information request to the rangers. They have ways of finding out what the local police know, though it will take time. It is also quite possible that if the bodies were transported from the outdoors to some form of refrigeration, the temperature anomalies might not have been discovered.”
Green felt sweat run from his hairline down his cheek and wiped his face on his sleeve.
The cardinal’s eye, a glassy black pearl, reflected the rectangular fluorescent light above the table.
He sensed a rebuke in that eye, in those fragile, unbroken bones gleaming from the center of that blossom of red feathers.
“What about other injuries,” he asked. “What else is damaged?”
“Other than their temperature, the birds appear normal. There is no other sign of lethal injury.”
A wolf’s skull spoke from a fading dream.
Whose work is this?
The horned wolf stood like a statue just behind his eyes.
Is this how I would kill, not-man? Frozen songbirds?
Green gritted his teeth.
“As I recall,” Valentina said, “you mentioned some feeling of localized cold when you first saw the glass fawn, correct?”
He recalled the numbness that came with the glowing deer, that first night in his car, the way his breath fogged the window. It hadn’t seemed important before, not when such minor details sat in the shadow of what followed moments after.
But the fawn didn’t invade my thoughts and threaten me.
And the fawn isn’t monstrous in the same way as the damn wolf.
And the fawn hasn’t been visiting my dreams and keeping me from rest.
“Yes. Sort of, but it was the horned wolf that attacked us at Kinkaid Cabins.”
“Was that an attack?”
Anger erupted.
“Are you joking? Yes! Obviously it was!”
The birds watched his outburst with dead eyes.
Valentina stood like a stone. Her expression did not move.
Green mopped more sweat from his face and collected himself.
“I’m sorry. It’s just…”
“I know,” Valentina said. “You have made your feelings clear. I wasn’t there. I haven’t seen it. I appreciate your perspective, but I think you need to step outside your assumptions and consider that the horned wolf has visited you more than once and you are still whole and very much alive.”
“I need air.”
He brushed past Valentina and went out, wiping sweat with one hand and clutching the acorn in his pocket with the other.