Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(21)

The moon hangs in the sky like a skull. In its pale light he circles the barn. Its panels shake, as if the building is stirring to life, from where the horses kick in their stalls. The noise—a zoo of noise—is such that he cannot think, can concentrate only on dragging his feet forward, maintaining his grip on the revolver. The air smells like alfalfa and musk and something sharper: copper.

Next to the holding pen, a forty-by-forty-foot square encased by a split-rail fence, the sodium-vapor lamp hangs in the sky like a second moon. He lifts the bar to the gate and pushes his way into the holding pen and stumbles across the uneven, hoof-pocked ground. Earlier today he left behind a red heifer with a pale face who is too old to calf and who will be trucked off tomorrow to slaughter. No longer. Now, against the far edge of the pen, she lies on her side, her broad back to him. The ground is soft and steaming with her blood. His bare feet squelch through the mud to examine her. Two hundred and fifty pounds of packaged beef—gone.

Walt has always been sensitive to high-pitched sounds. The coyotes are howling, their howls merging into one distressing note that trembles the air and sends Walt reeling. He drops to one knee to observe the heifer’s torso rent open, her slatted ribs like long teeth grinning at him from a bloody mouth. He remembers one afternoon when—after he lifted her tail and pushed his gloved hand into her, after he reached around the hot emptiness and determined she wasn’t carrying again, after he released her—she kicked the sidebars hard enough to dent the metal. No matter how old she was, she still had fight in her. A pack of coyotes couldn’t have done this.

To steady himself he rests a hand on her sledgehammer-shaped head. The fading warmth of it makes him realize for the first time the cold. Maybe it is this that makes the revolver shake in his hand when he aims it into the darkness. His breath puffs out of him in white scarves. And he realizes that the night has gone quiet except for the lamp buzzing overhead.

He does not hear the whispering tread of footsteps moving through cheatgrass or the groaning complaint of wood as something large clambers up the side of the corral, but he notices the shift in the light, and when he finally turns, the last thing he will see is the creature balanced on the fence post, like a gargoyle, its shape occulting the moon behind it.





Chapter 8



SOMETIMES PATRICK PLAYS this game when he is bored. He will doodle a shape. Say, a hand. And then he will transform it, see what else might come out of it, whether a turkey or the starburst of a gunshot window. Now, in third-period English, in the margins of his notebook, he draws a circle. The circle becomes the moon—pocked with shadowy craters. The moon becomes a face with wild eyes, a nose and mouth. Then he fills the mouth with fangs and draws black squiggles through the eyes.

An aisle runs down the middle of the room with three tables to either side of it. He hides in the back right corner. Next to him sits a girl—he noticed her earlier when she sat down, smelling of raspberries—and he realizes that she is now leaning toward him, peering at his notebook. He slides his hand over the drawing, which makes it especially obvious how empty the page is, void of any notes except for the title of the play, Othello, also scrawled on the chalkboard in looping script.

The teacher, Mrs. O’Neil, has squinty eyes, an embarrassed smile, and a gray helmet of hair. With her hands clasped, she paces back and forth before the chalkboard, and whatever she says—something about betrayal and “the Other”—everyone scribbles into their notebooks. She makes her fingers into quotation marks whenever she says “the Other.”

He tries to pay attention, but then he glances at the girl and loses the lecture once more. Her hair is cut short, ending at her ears in curling points that frame her face like a pair of red wings. She doesn’t move her head, but her eyes dart sideways and catch him. She gives him a small smile that doesn’t go away, even as her attention returns to the front of the room.

Mrs. O’Neil is droning on about the film they’ll watch next week, the one directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, who plays the moor as a lycan. “Won’t that be interesting?” she says. Someone’s phone goes off—and just as suddenly goes silent. Mrs. O’Neil smiles in a way that makes many more wrinkles appear like fissures on her face. Everyone, she says, please turn to act two, scene one.

It is then, when the room fills with the flutter and slash of turned pages, that the girl draws her chair toward Patrick with a screech. He smells again her raspberry shampoo—the smell of red, the color of her hair—and breathes deeply of it, his breath catching when her hand finds his thigh beneath the table.

The weight of it is tremendous. He does not move. All of his blood seems to rush to the center of his body. He cannot look at her and he cannot look at the teacher, so he looks to the classroom’s east-facing windows, ablaze with light.

Her fingers are moving. A gentle clawing, prying, as though trying to find the softest spot on him to pierce. His mouth is full of saliva and he swallows it in a gulp. The chalk screeches when Mrs. O’Neil writes, in block capital letters, the word LUST on the board.

The windows. Patrick tries to concentrate on the windows. They glow orange, as though made of fire, as though the sun has pinpointed the room to burn through a magnifying glass. It is hot in here, terribly hot. And her hand, so dexterous, is unbuttoning his jeans, unzipping his fly, grabbing hold of him—he has never felt so hard, as if his skin might split, when she gives him first an appreciative squeeze and then a caress that takes in the length of him.