A Different Kingdom(22)

AUNT RACHEL KEPT out of Michael's way for days afterward, and was tight-lipped in general. He shrugged it off as one of the countless idiosyncrasies common to grown-ups. He was not yet old enough to bear grudges or to understand exactly what they were.

He wanted to go back to the river and take another look at the site of the Fox-People's grisly feast, partly to assure himself that he had not been dreaming, and partly out of morbid curiosity. But he found that the shortening days, combined with the drudgery of school, homework and the 'wee jobs' that his grandparents set for him conspired to keep him in the immediate vicinity of the farm. Mullan, too, off-loaded his unfair share of tasks, from grooming Felix (the old man spent too much time by half currying that fancy bloody chestnut, Michael thought) to soaping rarely used tack and harness. Mullan would sit in the tack room smoking sometimes, and stare at nothing for minutes on end, explaining only when Michael asked him what he was about that he was having a last look. 'This sort of stuff'll soon only be in museums, Mike.' It made Michael scoff, but the old man would not be budged out of his fit of melancholy, until, perhaps, he had the chestnut harnessed to the light trap when something like a gleam would appear in his eyes again.

It was over a week after his last visit, then, that Michael finally got away to the woods and the river hollow. A Saturday, the absence of school meaning he could go in the middle of the day instead of creeping along in the half-dark. He had grown less fond of the dark since he had seen the fox man transformed into an animal on the ground. A wolf. So he was a werewolf. And the realization was like a sliver of ice in Michael's gut. He should tell someone, a grown up. Mullan, maybe. Yet again he felt an ache at the memory of Rose. She would have believed him, or if she hadn't she would at least have been willing to wait in the wood with him, and watch. Maybe then she would have been convinced. Why had there been no funeral, no wake? Not even a mass to go to. Unless she were not dead after all.

The wood was filled with a faint rushing of air, the creak of tree limbs, forlorn birdsong. A blackbird burst out chittering in front of his knees. Hysterical birds, he often thought, always pitching about in a panic. But he moved more warily after that.

The wood changed. It happened often when he was in it, usually when he was about to see something unusual, something from what he had come to call the Other Place. The trees seemed older, though they were no larger, and there was a different feel to the air, cleaner and sharper. His nose seemed to take on a new sensitivity, twitching at the sour mould and wild garlic, the green tree smell which he found impossible to define, but which was like a vastly subtler version of new-cut grass. And he was able to note the holed hazel shells where a squirrel had had a snack, the peeled bark where a deer had feasted, the bony, crumbling pellets of an owl.

And there, in the soft earth, the imprint of a padded paw. He straightened, but the wood was quiet, and there were hours of daylight left, even if it were only a dull, late autumn daylight. He considered breaking himself a staff from the ruler-straight hazel, then thought better of it. Before him was the river, still full, white between its banks.

He stepped on stones this time, at leisure and unwilling to wet his toes. Then he was across, leaving the roar of the water behind, moving deeper into the wood. The river coursed in a horseshoe here, enclosing a great arc of trees. If he carried on he would find it again eventually, more sedate as it ambled into the mouth of the old bridge where he and Rose had fished.

He stumbled across the ruins of the fire without effort, footing the ashes almost before he was aware he had found them. Bones, here, amid the black butts of sticks. Ribs, they looked like, a heap of them. Longer ones split for the marrow.

He looked up suddenly. The wood was silent, eventhe birds quiet. But then they usually were around this place. They seemed to shun it. He thought he could hear the faint rushing of the river, but that was all. The wind had fallen. He poked with the remains of the spit and dug at the fire scar. More bones, buried in loose earth and ash, wood burned to charcoal.

He picked up a stick of charcoal and then, half smiling, scored a thick-line across his face with it, streaking his cheeks and nose. He was a savage now. He wondered what Aunt Rachel would say if she could see him.

Wild.

He dug deeper, levering out earth and bones with his makeshift pick. The point jarred on something like a large stone, and he discarded it, scooping and scrabbling with his hands.

The skull.

He heaved it out with his fingers in the eye sockets. There were shreds of blackened gristle clinging to it, long, coarse black hairs stuck in the clay, and what might have been the withered, leathery remnant of one ear, sharp as a horn.