The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (21 page)

    "Been having strange dreams," Miranda said. "Most of them are blurry. Last one I remember was about the people who used to live around here, a long time ago. They weren't gentle folks, that's for sure."

    "Well, of course not," Lorna said. "They stuck a deer head over the fireplace and skinned poor hapless woodland critters and hung them in the trees."

    "Yeah," Miranda said. She lighted a cigarette. "Want one?"

    "No."

    Miranda smoked most of her cigarette before she spoke again. "In the latest dream it was winter, frost thick on the windows. I sat on the bearskin rug. Late at night, a big fire crackling away, and an old man, I mean old as dirt, was kicked back in a rocker, talking to me, telling me stuff. I couldn't see his face because he sat in the shadows. He wore old-timey clothes and a fur jacket, and a hat made out of an animal head. Coyote or wolf. He explained how to set a snare for rabbits, how to skin a deer. The dream changed and jumped around, like dreams do, and we were kneeling on the floor by the carcass of, I dunno what. A possum, I think. The meat was green and soft; it had been dead a while. The old man told me a survivor eats what's around. Then he stuck his face into that mess of stinking meat and took a bite."

    "That's a message," Lorna said. "The great universal consciousness is trying to tell you, us, to adapt. Adapt or die."

    "Or it could be a dream, full stop."

    "Is that what you think?"

    "I think it's time to get our minds right. Face the inevitable."

    "The inevitable?"

    "We're never going to get away," Miranda said.

    "Well, that's a hell of an attitude."

    "I saw that van again. Parked in that gravel pit just down the road. They're watching us, Lorna."

    "Oh, Jesus."

    "Don't worry about those bastards. They'll be dealt with."

    "Dealt with? Dealt with how?" Lorna's mind flashed to the revolver. The notion of Miranda shooting anyone in cold blood was ridiculous. Yet, here in the dark beyond the reach of rule or reason, such far-fetched notions bore weight. "Don't get any crazy ideas."

    "I mean, don't worry yourself sick over the help. Nah, the bigger problem is your husband. How much time is Bruce going to get? A few months? A year? Talk about your lawyer.
Bruce's
lawyer is slick. He might not get anything. Community service, a stern admonition from the judge to go forth and sin no more."

    Lorna winced. Stress caused her leg to throb. The cigarette smoke drove her mad with desire. She stifled a sharp response and regarded the moon instead. Her frustration dissolved in the presence of cold, implacable majesty. She said, "I know. It's the way of the world. People like Bruce always win." She'd called Orillia earlier that evening, asked her how things were going at the new school. Orillia didn't want to talk about school; she wanted to know when she could see Daddy again, worried that he was lonely. Lorna had tried to keep emotion from her voice when she answered that Mom and Dad were working through some issues and everything would soon be sorted. Bruce was careful to not hit Lorna in front of their daughter, and though Orillia witnessed the bruises and the breaks, the sobbing aftermath, she seemed to disassociate these from her father's actions.

    "There are other ways to win." Miranda was a black shadow against the dead silver grass. "Like you said-adapt or die. The old man showed me. In the beginning you need a prop, but it gets easier when you realize it's all in your head."

    It was a long walk back through the woods. Dry leaves crunched beneath their shoes. They locked themselves into the cabin and got ready for bed.

    Lorna's dreams had been strange as well, but she'd kept quiet. She wasn't open about such things, not even with Miranda. The ghost of old man Haugstad didn't speak to Lorna; instead, her dreams transported her to the barren slopes above the tree line of the valley. The moon fumed and boiled. She was a passenger in another's body, a body that seethed with profound vitality. The moon's yellow glow stirred her blood and she raced down the slope and into the trees. She smelled the land, tasted it on her lolling tongue, drawing in the scent of every green deer spoor, every droplet of coyote musk, every spackling of piss on rock or shrub. She smelled fresh blood and meat-blacked bone. There were many, many bones scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them-ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches and among the high rocks.

    Lorna stroked Miranda's belly. Miranda's excess had melted away in recent days. She was lean from day-long hikes and skipped meals and her scent was different, almost gamey, her hair lank and coarse. She was restless and she whined in her sleep. She bit too hard when they made love.

    Miranda took Lorna's hand and said, "What is it?"

    "I'm afraid you're going to leave."

    "Oh, where the fuck is this coming from?"

    "Something's different. Something's changed. You weren't honest about where you found the coat. The skin."

    Miranda chuckled without humor. "Let sleeping dogs lie."

    "I'm not in the mood for cute," Lorna said.

    "My sweet one. I left out the part that might…frighten you. You're skittish enough."

    "I'm also not in the mood for Twenty Questions. What did you mean earlier-the old man showed you?"

    "Old man Haugstad told me where to look, what I needed to do."

    "In a dream."

    "Not in a dream. The day I discovered the blind, a coyote skulked out of the bushes and led me along the path. It was the size of a mastiff, blizzard white on the muzzle and crisscrossed with scars."

    "I don't understand," Lorna said, but was afraid she might.

    "We're here for a reason. Can't you feel the power all around us? After I lost Jack, after I finally accepted he was gone, I pretty much decided to off myself. If I hadn't met you at that party I probably would've died within a few days. I'd picked out the pills, the clothes I intended to wear, knew exactly where it was going to happen. When was the only question."

    Lorna began to cry.

    "I won't leave you. But it's possible you might decide not to come with me." Miranda rolled to her opposite side and said nothing more. Lorna slowly drifted to sleep. She woke later while it was still dark. Miranda's side of the bed was a cold blank space. Her clothes were still piled on the floor. In a moment of sublimely morbid intuition, Lorna clicked on a flashlight and checked the spare bedroom where Miranda had taken to hanging the fur cloak from a hook on the door. Of course the cloak was missing.

    She gathered her robe tightly, sparing a moment to reflect upon her resemblance to the doomed heroines on any number of lurid gothic horror novel covers and went outdoors into the freezing night. Her teeth chattered and her fear became indistinguishable from the chill. She poked around the cabin, occasionally calling her lover's name, although in a soft tone, afraid to attract the attention of the wolves, the coyotes, or whatever else might roam the forest at night.

    Eventually she approached the woodshed and saw the door was cracked open by several inches. She stepped inside. Miranda crouched on the dirt floor. The flashlight was weak and its flickering cone only hinted and suggested. The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took notice of the pallid light, and as she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda's musculature.

    The flashlight glass cracked and imploded. The shed lay in utter darkness except for a thin sliver of moonlight that burned yellow in Miranda's eyes. Lorna's mouth was dry. She said, "Sweetheart?"

    Miranda said in a voice rusty and drugged, "Why don't you… go on to bed. I'll be along. I'll come see you real soon." She stood, a ponderous yet lithe, uncoiling motion, and her head scraped the low ceiling.

    Lorna got out fast and stumbled toward the cabin. She didn't look over her shoulder even though she felt hot breath on the back of her neck.

***

    They didn't speak of the incident. For a couple of days they hardly spoke at all. Miranda drifted in and out of the cabin like a ghost and Lorna dreaded to ask where she went in the dead of night, why she wore the hide and nothing else. Evening temperatures dipped below freezing, yet Miranda didn't appear to suffer, on the contrary, she thrived. She hadn't eaten a bite from their store of canned goods, hadn't taken a meal all week. Lorna lay awake staring at the ceiling as the autumn rains rattled the windows.

    On the fifth or sixth afternoon, she sat alone at the kitchen table downing the last of the Old Crow. The previous evening she'd experienced two visceral and disturbing dreams. In the first she was serving drinks at a barbeque. There were dozens of guests. Bruce flipped burgers and hob-knobbed with his office chums. Orillia darted through the crowd with a water pistol, zapping hapless adults before dashing away. The mystery woman Beth, and a bearded man in a track suit she introduced as her husband, came over and told her what a lovely party, what a lovely house, what a lovely family, and Lorna handed them drinks and smiled a big dumb smile as Miranda stood to the side and winked, nodding toward a panel van parked nearby on the grass. The van rocked and a coyote emerged from beneath the vehicle, growling and slobbering and snapping at the air. Grease slicked the animal's fur black, made its yellow eyes bright as flames.

    A moment later, Lorna was in the woods and chasing the bearded man from the party. His track suit flapped in shreds, stained with blood and dirt. The man tripped and fell over a cliff. He crashed in a sprawl of broken limbs, his mouth full of shattered teeth and black gore. He raised a mutilated hand toward her in supplication. She bounded down and mounted him, licked the blood from him, then chewed off his face. She'd awakened with a cry, bile in her throat.

    Lorna set aside the empty bottle. She put on her coat and got the revolver from the dresser where Miranda had stashed it for safekeeping. Lorna hadn't fired the gun despite Miranda's offer to practice. However, she'd seen her lover go through the routine-cock the hammer, pull the trigger, click, no real trick. She didn't need the gun, wouldn't use the gun, but somehow its weight in her pocket felt good. She walked down the driveway, moving gingerly to protect her bum knee, then followed the road to the gravel pit where the van was allegedly parked. The rain slackened to drizzle. Patches of mist swirled in the hollows and the canyons and crept along fern beds at the edges of the road. The valley lay hushed, a brooding giant.

    The gravel pit was empty. A handful of charred wood and some squashed beer cans confirmed someone had definitely camped there in the not so distant past. She breathed heavily, partially from the incessant throb in her knee, partially from relief. What the hell would she have done if the assholes her husband sent were on the spot roasting wienies? Did she really think people like that would evaporate upon being subjected to harsh language? Did she really have the backbone to flash the gun and send them packing John Wayne style?

    She thought the first muffled cry was the screech of a bird, but the second shout got her attention. Her heart was pounding when she finally located the source about a hundred yards farther along the road. Tire tracks veered from the narrow lane toward a forty foot drop into a gulch of trees and boulders. The van had landed on its side. The rear doors were sprung, the glass busted. She wouldn't have noticed it all the way down there if not for the woman crying for help. Her voice sounded weak. But that made sense-Beth had been trapped in the wreck for several days, hadn't she? One snip of the brake line and on these hills it'd be all over but the crying. Miranda surely didn't fuck around, did she? Lorna bit the palm of her hand to stifle a scream.

    "Hey," Miranda said. She'd come along as stealthily as the mist and lurked a few paces away near a thicket of brambles. She wore the mangy cloak with the predator's skull covering her own, rendering her features inscrutable. Her feet were bare. She was naked beneath the pelt, her lovely flesh streaked with dirt and blood. Her mouth was stained wine-dark. "Sorry, honeybunch. I really thought they'd have given up the ghost by now. Alas, alack. Don't worry. It won't be long. The birds are here."

    Crows hopped among the limbs and drifted in looping patterns above the ruined van. They squawked and squabbled. The woman yelled something unintelligible. She wailed and fell silent. Lorna's lip trembled and her nose ran with snot. She swept her arm to indicate their surroundings. "Why did you bring me here?"

    Miranda tilted her misshapen head and smiled a sad, cruel smile. "I want to save you, baby. You're weak."

    Lorna stared into the gulch. The mist thickened and began to fill in the cracks and crevices and covered the van and its occupants. There was no way she could navigate the steep bank, not with her injury. Her cell was at the cabin on the table. She could almost hear the clockwork gears of the universe clicking into alignment, a great dark spotlight shifting across the cosmic stage to center upon her at this moment in time. She said, "I don't know how to do what you've done. To change. Unless that hide is built for two."

    "Don't worry, baby." Miranda took her hand and led her back to the cabin. and tenderly undressed her. She smiled faintly when she retrieved the revolver and set it on the table. She kissed Lorna and her breath was hot and foul. Then she stepped back and began to pull the hide away from her body and as it lifted so did the underlying skin, peeling like a scab. Blood poured down Miranda's chest and belly and pattered on the floorboards. The muscles of her cheeks and jaw bunched and she hissed, eyes rolling, and then it was done and the dripping bundle was free of her red-slicked flesh. Lorna was paralyzed with horror and awe, but finally stirred and tried to resist what her lover proffered. Miranda cuffed her temple, stunning her. She said, "Hold still, baby. You're gonna thank me," and draped the cloak across Lorna's shoulders and pulled the skullcap of the beast over Lorna's eyes.