Lost Among the Living(59)

There was no answer. Slowly, my clenched muscles protesting, I twisted my body and looked back over my shoulder at the path into the woods.

There was nothing there.

As I gripped the camera and stood, pain stung my knee where it had been pressed into the hard ground. I turned and faced the path, my back to the water now. Still there was no sound, no movement, but I sensed her watching me. I took a few cautious steps, my breath held in my chest, my boots quiet against the damp ground.

She was not on the path. I had nearly reached the first bend when it occurred to me to raise the camera to my eye and look through it.

I held the camera unsteadily to my face and squinted through the eyepiece. I saw the path, the woods around it, the tatters of mist. Nothing else appeared. Slowly, I pivoted on my heel, my damp, icy hands gripping the leather of the camera, my arms shaking as I held it in place at my eye. My breath was loud in my ears as I swiveled carefully, my lens taking in the pattern of tree trunks, turning back to look at the clearing and the water. The wind kicked up, and I heard the rustle of dead leaves.

She was there. Standing where I had just been, her skin the color of parchment, her eyes watching me from their dark recesses, staring, the hem of her dress unnaturally still in the rising wind.

I made a strangled sound in my throat and jerked my face back from the camera, my slick hands nearly letting go. I blinked and stared at the space I’d just seen through the lens, my vision clearing. There was nothing there.

“Frances?” I whispered.

Before I could lower my eye to the camera again, the leaves in the clearing kicked up in the wind, swirling. I stood hypnotized as dead leaves funneled up from the ground and down from the branches overhead, moving like motes of light. It was beautiful and terrible, unnatural. The icy wind howled.

High over the trees, shrill and imperious, came a long, unearthly whistle.

I turned on the path and ran.

I pounded over the muddy path, my clumsy boots slipping. I still carried the camera, held close to my chest in both hands. My fingers struggled to keep their grip and my breath came in gasps as the camera banged clumsily against my body.

The whistle sounded again—it split my brain, like a long-ago train whistle had on the worst day of my life—and a bolt of panic shot down my spine. She is calling him, I thought. I changed direction and left the path, scrambling down an incline tangled with brush, no longer aware of my direction or which way led back to Wych Elm House. I hit the bottom of the incline, the thorns of something in the underbrush tearing my stockings above the top of my boot, and kept running.

Far behind me in the woods, the birds went silent, as if they sensed something coming.

I staggered down another incline and found myself on a dirt path, wide and flat, bordered by thick brush. I could see no distance either up or down it—the fog was too heavy. In the spin of my panic I realized this was the same path I had stood on the morning I had met Robert. I was at the other end of it, far on the opposite side of the woods that spanned the Forsyths’ property.

I jogged along its easy length for a moment, feeling the jagged pinch inside my rubber boots and a trickle of blood warm on my calf. Cold rain had begun, dripping in the trees and spattering my mackintosh. My breath was sawing in my lungs, and cold sweat slicked down my back beneath my layers, but I did not stop. If I could take the road far enough to get back toward the house, to familiar ground—

Something moved in the trees far behind me. Without thinking, I ducked off the road, struggling through sticky underbrush again. My hands slipped on the camera, but I did not let it go. I slid down an incline into a valley of dead leaves, then scrambled up the other side.

From the road came a heavy scrabbling sound of claws in the dirt. There was a rushing overhead—the birds, this time, still silent, flying upward en masse. The entire woods denuded of birds in a single, soundless exodus. Over the roar of my own pounding heart in my ears, I heard something breathe—the harsh rasp of panting, deep and throaty.

My foot in its clumsy boot slipped, and I fell, bumping and careening into a low, wet ditch, the mackintosh acting like a slick toboggan. I came to rest on my back in a puddle of cold water, staring up into the rainy trees.

There was no time to escape, not now. I froze by instinct, going still, my breath stopping, like a mouse or a shrew when it feels an owl fly overhead. My legs clenched; my mind went white. All thought stopped, all motion, as I lay and waited.

The smell came first. An overpowering rotten stench, damp and greasy. The bushes shifted and tore as something large came through them, up the rise, the heavy grind of paws gaining purchase in the loamy earth. There was a gasp and a growl, and the thing hit the top of the rise and launched itself over me.

I could not scream. A whistle of air squeezed through the back of my throat, its sound lost.

I could not see all of the creature in the fog. I glimpsed long, sprawled legs, muscled almost like a human’s, and vicious paws like hands. A chest thick as a barrel, covered in a ruff of long, filthy fur. And a long body, leaping over me in my icy ditch in a single, soundless move, the belly passing within arm’s reach of my face. Its head was lost in the white mist, though a vicious, drawled growl came from its unseen throat and trailed after it in the air.

I pressed myself into the puddle of water and watched in terrorized silence as Princer’s stomach, matted and foul with a coppery stench like blood, passed before my eyes. Of their own accord, my hands gripped the camera pressed to my chest, and my finger clicked the shutter.