Chapter Text
At school today, we had a police officer come round and tell us not to go into the woods after dark, because there had been sightings of wolves.
He gave us a slideshow of the evidence: torn carcasses, bones with the meat still on them, scratches in the bark of trees. He told us to report immediately to an emergency hotline if we were to find anything similar. His head was shaved and he held his peaked cap under his arm, and in his brown flannel shirt and brown flannel trousers, he looked very solemn and serious. He said, ‘It is colder this year, and we believe they are migrating south.’ He said that all Hallowe’en celebrations would have to take place on a smaller scale this year, and that we must plan our route, let our parents know where we were going, travel in pairs, and so on and so forth.
There was some grumbling from the older kids at this, of which I am one, and I knew they would all be thinking about the old gas station, which was well into the woods to the north, about a mile out of town, and was where all the best parties took place, especially on the night of Hallowe’en.
I wasn’t too bothered, though. I liked parties but I wasn’t crazy about them. Nonetheless, I turned to Jenny Mackinnock and said, ‘Screw that.’
Jenny huffed and shook her head. ‘Grace,’ she said. ‘Can you please shut up for just one second? I don’t want to talk to you.’
I had anticipated a response like this, but I really just wanted to say something and Jenny was closest. She’s been being difficult with me ever since we kissed at Archie Mellows’ party last summer, pretending like it didn’t happen, getting in a strop whenever I go near her, which I don’t do often, but with the whole school crammed into the assembly hall we just happened to get stuck with each other and I’d hardly say that’s my fault. Jenny is kind of aggressively straight, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the fact that I’m a girl that’s got her so worked up about the kiss. I think it’s also just that it’s me. But that’s fine, too. I know I’m not for everyone.
At the end of the assembly, the police officer showed a map of the areas that would be off-limits until the following spring, when the wolves ought to have moved on. Sure enough, the site of the old gas station was on there. But that was just one spot in miles and miles of forbidden land.
Then someone asked, ‘How many wolves are there?’, and the police officer ducked his head like he was really, truly ashamed that he couldn’t answer that. ‘At this time,’ he said, ‘we do not have sufficient intelligence to say. Could be just one, could be a whole pack.’ I had to stop myself from giggling, because it sounded like he was describing himself and his colleagues like NPCs in a video game, beings of low intelligence. I imagined him putting on a wizard’s hat with increased stats to boost it, and then a whole station of officers with weird and wacky accessories just like that.
When we were dismissed, Jenny Macinnock shot off like a rocket, almost knocking me off the bench with how sharply she moved, and I wandered over to Archie Mellows, whom I have known since we were toddlers, and commiserated.
‘Sucks, big time,’ he said.
‘That it do,’ I said.
Then I said, ‘Hey, d’you think they’re telling the truth? About it being dangerous.’
Archie cocked his head at me. He had blonde curls and they were stupid bouncy, and they bounced. ‘Why would they lie?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I shrugged pretty hard, to show that I didn’t know. ‘Maybe there’s something in the woods they want to hide.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Russians.’
‘Russians.’
‘Or eldritch beasts.’
‘Goodbye, Grace,’ Archie said, and then suddenly I was alone in the sports hall.
At dinner, I told my parents about it.
‘Can you imagine,’ I said, shovelling a no-chicken kiev into my ample gob, ‘what it would be like to get torn apart by a wolf?’
‘Old Lenny was saying he almost got mauled by a bear last month,’ my father said, ‘up in Cainhurst county.’
Old Lenny, like most of my father’s friends, is a logger. He drives these long trucks up and down the state and smells like an ashtray. I like him, though. I’ve got a couple of things he’s whittled on a bookshelf in my room, rabbits and deer with lopsided antlers. I’ve known him for as long as I’ve been alive, seventeen whole years.
‘Yeah, but that’s bears,’ I said. ‘Wolves sound a lot more gristly.’
‘Bears are grizzly, darling,’ my mother said, spooning extra mash onto her plate even though she hadn’t finished her first lot yet. She sipped her beer. ‘Where did they say you can’t go again?’
‘Mainly north. I guess they’re worried about us getting attacked.’
‘Too right,’ she said. She peered at me over her spectacles. ‘I trust you’ll obey your orders?’
‘Yes, captain.’
My mother was in the army reserves for many years, and we talk like this sometimes. She lost the hearing in her left ear when a shell went off on a training exercise and was discharged with a monster pension, though she spent most of it building the house we now live in. She and my father used to live in the city, but they moved up here because they’re adventurous and wanted to wear their sherpa jackets with some kind of authenticity, I suppose.
Our house was built from the ground up, and took many years before it was completed to the extent it is today. When they had me, they were still using an outhouse. The bathroom was only installed when I was three months old. Two great things happened that year, they liked to say. One was the bathroom, the other was the Mars Spirit Rover. I suppose that’s meant to imply my birth was a bit of a footnote.
After dinner I had homework, and I spent half an hour drawing diagrams of atomic orbitals before getting bored and looking up wolves on the internet. I discovered that in 90 per cent of cases, fatalities among humans caused by wolves were against female victims, and I didn’t like that statistic very much. I learned about alphas and betas, and the very old fashioned human-like social structures they have, and all in all it was very interesting.
Just before bed I opened the window and listened for howls. But all I got was the whispers of pine trees and the occasional shriek of a squirrel.
About a week later, a different police officer came into school to talk about shoplifting.
This one was a woman, and she stood even stiffer than the man from last week. Her hair was pulled so tightly into a bun and was so aggressively blonde that it looked like a swimmers’ cap. She strode back and forth across the sports hall like a drill sergeant, her neat shoes squeaking on the wood.
I was sat next to Douglas O’Brien—“Dougie Dipshit”—from class B, and while the officer talked, he chewed his nails down to the quick, and then further, until they bled. I don’t know why he was so nervous though, because the shoplifter pretty obviously wasn’t him. Nor any of the boys.
Like the wolf officer, the shoplifter officer had some stills of CCTV cameras to show us, from out the back of Robin’s general store. The girl in the photos was tall and slight and was wearing dark clothes with a white mask covering her face, which caused some excited murmurs from the audience. The time stamp said 03:28.
I whispered to Dougie that at that time of the morning it sounded more like burglary than shoplifting, but he hissed back that they were probably trying to play it down in case it turned out to be one of the rich kids, like Annalise Perkins or Sarah “Gucci” Granada. I didn’t think the girl in the photo looked like either of those two, but it was very grainy, so I guess it could well have been anyone. That’s probably what the officer was thinking as well. There are only two high schools in our town, and ours is the larger, so chances are it was one of us.
But things got really interesting when she unbuttoned her breast pocket and took out a purple feather.
‘Over the last few nights, the individual has tried to break into a number of stores,’ she said, ‘and at each one has left a calling card.’
She brandished the “calling card”. I could feel the anticipation in the other students around me.
‘Anyone with any information, no matter how obscurely related, is invited to come forward.’ She swept the whole room from left to right with a horseshoe eyebrow. ‘Need I remind the person, should they be in this room, that there are wolves about. For their own safety, they should not be out at night.’
I thought it was a bit rich to be dropping an accusation like that, even though it was what everyone was thinking, but the effect on the kids, even on myself, was palpable. For a moment I wondered if I had done it.
After assembly we had double maths, but due to a lack of attention brought on by all the speculation, we were kept behind into lunch. In the queue for the cafeteria, I bumped into Archie Mellows again.
‘D’you know who it is?’ I asked.
Archie knows everyone. I was confident his intel would be good.
‘Nope,’ he said. He picked up an apple, then put it back and swapped it for an orange.
‘Come on,’ I said, taking a punnet of raspberries. ‘Who is it?’
‘I’m telling you, Grace, hand on my heart. I don’t know.’
I was disappointed, but as I said I have known Archie for many years, and in all that time he has never been a good liar. If he says he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.
Instead, I asked him where he thought the Hallowe’en party would be held if not in the gas station.
‘Gucci’s garage, probably,’ he said. He was referring to Sarah Granada. “Hand Granada,” I liked sometimes. Her parents were both having affairs with their divorce attorneys in the city, and were rarely at home. Sarah didn’t seem enormously bothered by this, though. She had confided to me, at a gas station party last year, that she enjoyed the peace and quiet.
I’m glad my own parents are never going to get divorced. Of course I can’t say that with any certainty, but I just don’t see it in our future. I’ll look like a right idiot if I’m wrong, though.
The next day was a Saturday. October had just rolled around, and we were having a cold snap. My breath was foggy when I opened my bedroom window, so I quickly shut it again and spent the whole morning under my duvet, furiously messaging people, all speculating on the identity of the girl in the white mask.
At about 4 p.m., while I was emptying the dishwasher of one hundred pint glasses, I asked my dad if the bar had ever been burgled.
‘Only by raccoons, honey,’ he said, slicing open a cardboard box full of wholesale pork crackling packets with his penknife. ‘And even then, only the trash.’
‘What about shoplifting?’ I said.
‘Well, if you count Bill O’Brien’s unpaid tabs,’ he smirked, ‘Every week.’
Bill is Dougie Dipshit’s father, and they are just as nervous and sheepish as each other. But I don’t mean to be harsh. They’re nice, in their own ways.
I piled the pint glasses onto a tray and took them through to the bar, where I spent a while stacking them. Then I started taking the barstools down and arranging them under the tables, doling out drinks mats by the half-dozen.
My father’s job in our town is as barkeep. He keeps a roadside trucker’s inn with a huge parking lot on the north end of the north-south bypass that skims the outskirts of the town. He used to own a hole in the wall nearer the centre but he reckoned he would do better business out here. And he did. He pays me some dollars an hour to work weekends. That’s what he calls it: some dollars an hour. I love to complain about it, but compared to Archie, who still does a paper round, even at seventeen, I’m raking it in.
The loggers start arriving between about 5 and 7 p.m., and that’s when I start pulling pints. I’m like a machine, and tonight’s no different.
Though they’re all men between forty and sixty-five, I’m very keen on the clientele at the bar. They’re what I would describe as manly but in a very unpretentious way. I love listening to their stories of snowdrifts from forty years ago, of trucks that slipped off roads when they froze over. Many of them have stories about animal encounters, including wolves.
When I saw Old Lenny, I asked him if he’d ever seen a wolf.
‘Not in this state,’ he said, ‘but all kinds of things besides. Bears, eagles...’
‘Ever see one with purple feathers?’ I asked.
Old Lenny looked at me then sipped his beer and wiped the froth from his moustache.
‘Only if they got dunked in grape juice,’ he said.
He grinned and held out a packet of pork cracklings to me and I took one, crunching down on it and letting it gunk up my molars. My mum thinks I’m a vegetarian, and I am, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
By about 11 p.m., things were calming down again. My dad was seeing to the last of the tabs out front, and I was rinsing glasses and stacking them in the dishwasher. I had the radio on low, playing a late-night comedy show which had become part of my routine.
Just before I set the machine to start, I remembered I had some plates and glasses of my own from my hasty dinner of no-beef bolognaise (what I like to call “beefn’t”) that I took in the tiny office area, so I went to fetch them. The back door was open, which I didn’t remember doing but figured my dad must have, and I shivered a little as I walked past.
When I had the plates in my hand and was carrying them back to the kitchen, something on the floor caught my eye, and I stooped down to have a look at it.
It was a purple feather.
My heart did a funny thing then, kind of like a hop, skip, and jump, but the jump was another hop and skip. I mean to say it was beating bloody fast. I walked back through to the kitchen, meaning to show the feather to my dad, but then I heard a noise from the far side of the kitchen island.
A tall girl in a white mask with a black beanie on her head was crouching over the box of pork crackling packets my dad had opened earlier and was shoving them hurriedly into a washed-out yellow bag, which I immediately recognised as one from the old gas station, some of which were still hanging up behind the counter, where the DJ normally set up their portable speakers.
‘Hey!’ I called.
The girl froze. She looked round at me, and for a moment I didn’t understand what I was seeing. You couldn’t tell on the black and white CCTV, but the girl’s eyes were bright pink. I couldn’t work out if they were part of the mask or contact lenses or what—not when they blinked—but there were a couple more purple feathers surrounding her on the floor.
In what I’d describe as anti slow-motion, the girl lurched forwards, beating me to the back corridor, plastic bag flapping as she headed for the exit, which I figured now she must have entered by. It sounded like she was wearing tap shoes with the way they clicked on the tiled floor.
‘Dad!’ I called. Then again, ‘Dad!’
But nothing. The roar of engines in the front parking lot was too much. I knew he’d be out there, having a last cigarette with his mates. Without thinking, I grabbed his jacket off the hook and rushed out after the girl.
I was just in time to see her disappear up the verge that ran alongside the road and into the woods. Briefly my mind thought, wolves, but with an obvious destination in mind—the gas station—I reckoned I had no chance of getting lost. I was far too curious for my own good, I see that now.
The ground was covered in damp leaves, and since I was wearing ratty old sneakers, my feet were soon soaked through. But I had too much adrenaline to let that bother me. I just tugged on my dad’s jacket, feeling his heavy wallet bouncing in the right pocket, his car keys in the left, and ran.
I caught glimpses of the girl, galloping between the trunks, scrabbling up ridges, bashing away branches. The one time I lost sight of her I listened for the telltale sound of a polythene bag in the still air, and managed to pick her up again.
Keeping the road on my right, I ran with my head down, too worried about tripping over a root and twisting my ankle. I had left my phone in the office, and it would be a disaster if I got stranded.
Eventually I emerged from the tree line onto the old road which turned off left from the main one, now disused, which, if I followed it away from the main road, would take me to the gas station.
I couldn’t see the girl. She seemed to be faster than me, at least on the flat, but I trusted left was the correct way to go.
I took off at a jog. The road was potholed, but there was just enough moonlight to ensure I didn’t trip over. Within perhaps ten minutes I was approaching the bulky awning of the disused gas station, beneath which the dry pumps stood sentinel, bygone remnants of another age. I could see no lights on inside.
‘Sarah?’ I called out. ‘Annalise?’
Nothing. I tried again.
‘It’s Grace! From class D.’
A breath of wind caused the main door to swing slightly on its hinges. It was not locked, nor had ever been locked as long as I’d been coming here, but usually it was latched by someone as we left, if for no other reason than to prevent critters moving in.
I carefully approached and peered in through the smudged windows. I could see the aisles and the graffiti on the back wall, some of which even featured my name, but no movement. Slipping inside, I felt the sick squelch of damp newspapers from the last decade underfoot, and held my breath while I glanced around. Now that I was in the building, I didn’t dare call out.
I tiptoed between the aisles, empty now but for the odd can. At the end of the fourth aisle I saw the girl, crouching against the far back wall, her mask turned to me, expressionless, with a yellow bag by her side. And then I heard a sound from behind me, like a far-off motorcycle, and felt a shadow lengthening on the wall. A wolf. Had to be.
And I was trapped.
I spun around, and there was the largest animal I had ever seen outside of a zoo, not three feet away from me, until I realised it was on its hind legs. A wolf on its hind legs. A wolf on its hind legs with blood-red eyes.
My heart. Fuck me, my heart. I thought I was about to die. I knew I was about to die.
And then the wolf—against all seventeen years of compulsory eduction and common sense—started—in a voice far more feminine and frankly American than I ever would have imagined—to speak.
‘Make one move, and I will fucking kill you.’