The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(16)

Now I walked its paths alone, breathing the sweet and toxic city air. Along the water a while, then down toward the lawn. Couples kissed on benches, or poked at their phones. A little girl too young to be alone watched me from atop a rocky embankment. When a jogger zipped past, I whipped around without thinking, to see who was chasing them.

There was music coming from somewhere. Silvery champagne-glass music, combing itself into the breeze. I followed it a long while, expecting at any moment to come upon a late-night wedding party, a dance floor lined with lights. But I never could trace it to its source.

It was so late now it was early, the park long since closed. My body felt heavy, full of too many things, more than I could possibly contain. A little grief gnawed at me, and fear I held off with one arm, and my brain kept circling back to the question of what I’d really done last night, what Sophia called nothing to worry about. I tried to float over it all, but the crash was coming. I wanted to be home before it happened.

I made my way back to the subway. It was late, the train to Brooklyn took forever to come. When it did, the car was almost empty. A few stragglers spread out among seats: a teenage boy playing hip-hop on his phone, a man in scrubs, and a woman with an old-fashioned pram, sleeping with her head against the window. The pram was pink and lace-trimmed and way too big to be hauling down the subway steps. There was a woven blanket inside it, but I couldn’t see the baby.

Everyone looked sickly under the lights. I closed my eyes and listened to tinny cell phone hip-hop flicker and pulse. The guy in scrubs was watching me, I was sure of it, but every time I checked, he’d just looked away. The air smelled vaguely of weed and French fries.

We were rolling slowly between stations when I heard a noise coming from the pram. Something like a huff, something like a whine.

I looked at the mother again. She was in her early twenties, her closed lids frosty with shadow. Her hands were hidden in hoodie pockets and there was a collapsed purse on the seat next to her, its top spilling over. Nothing about her said Hinterland, but. But. The train inched along, the kind of slow frictionless roll that feels like falling. Then the sound repeated itself. Doubled up, a huff huff whine.

We were underground and suddenly I felt it, the weight of pavement and dirt and city pressing down. I stood. The guy in scrubs looked at me again, and this time I caught him. The mother was still sleeping, one of her feet propped up on the pram’s front wheel.

I moved closer, making like I was looking at the map behind her head. My brain spat awful images at me as I edged toward the pram, hair and tooth and bone and blood, all of it wiped away when I got near enough to see inside.

A baby lay in a cocoon of blanket, snuffling its odd animal breaths. It was so new it looked uncooked, its face as sweet and secret as something found inside a seashell. I exhaled hard, starting to back away, but my nearness had woken its mother. She blinked up at me like I was inside her house, standing over her bed. Like I was the nightmare.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She opened her mouth to say something back, and the lights went out.

All the way out, all of them. No safety lights, no lights in the tunnel. The car stopped moving. The music had cut out, too.

The dark weighed more than the light. A three-point constellation came out, almost in unison: phone lights, illuminating nothing. They were bright, but they didn’t bend the dark.

“Dude.” The man in scrubs. “I can’t see shit. What’s wrong with the lights?”

Instinct kept me from taking out my phone. Made me move away from the mother and child. I burrowed through the blackness, toward the door at the far end of the car, feeling my way from pole to pole. The skunky scent of cheap weed was heightening, sharpening, becoming an impossible breeze. It ghosted through the closed car, touching my face with cold fingers.

Behind me, on the far end of the train, the door to the next car slid open.

“Is that the conductor?” someone said hopefully.

The door banged shut. The silence that followed stretched so long I started to hallucinate other sounds: scratching. My blood pumping triple time. Something outside the windows, beating itself against the black.

Whoever had let themselves in started walking. The dark heightened the sound of their shoes trudging over the floor. As they passed the baby, it let out a cry, hopeless and thin. The walker paused.

“Shh,” the mother said, urgent. “Baby, shhhh.”

“Who’s hiding there?” said the hip-hop kid, his voice high and younger than I thought it’d be. “Yeah, asshole, I’m talking to you.”

I think he was trying to draw them away from the baby. But when the steps resumed, moving toward him, he sucked in a breath and went quiet.

The step was a steady shush shush, mocking and slow. It moved past the boy, past the man in scrubs, and on toward me.

When I reached the door at the end of the car, the latch wouldn’t turn. The baby had hushed, the car was filled with frightened breathing and the slide of someone’s shoes. I was scared, too, but the fear was changing: chilling, hardening, making my fingers flex and my head fill up with a cold white hum.

The person stopped an arm’s length away. The locked door was at my back and my vision was pulsing, fracturing the dark into purples and reds. They were so close we could’ve touched.

“Who’s there?” I said.

They took a breath, and sang in a whisper.

Little mouse