The Tent: A Novella (5 page)

He turns his head and looks at the tent. “It didn’t just pop up out of the ground,” he mumbles.

Emma draws closer to him, her fingers finding the crook of his arm in a tenderness borne of anxiety, not love, from the accurate assumption that he has become just as fragile as she has. “What?”

“The tent. It’d be one thing if we just stumbled upon somebody’s old abandoned camping ground, but the tent’s in pretty good shape from what I can see, and there’s a light on, which means somebody used it, and recently. And people don’t just walk off and leave their stuff behind, right?”
Unless they’re people like us
, he thinks miserably, picturing the backpack he left by the boulder somewhere down there at the foot of the hill, and the tent they abandoned, though technically the tent abandoned
them
. “So there’s a good chance whoever owns this thing will come back, and they can help us.”

Encouraged, Emma
nods. “Okay, that makes sense.”

In the distance, thunder rumbles. A light rain starts to fall, pattering like insis
tent fingers on their slickers.

“Shit,” Mike says, feeling his spirits fall in time with the silvery threads. “Loo
ks like the dry spell is over.”

“Should we wait inside
it?” Emma asks, training her flashlight beam at the side of the tent and bleaching out the interior amber glow. “I mean, you don’t think whoever owns it would mind, do you? Considering the circumstances? At least we’d be out of the rain.”

For a moment,
Mike doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know what to say other than that he doesn’t think that’s a good idea at all. Considering all that’s gone wrong this night, the strange little tent is a godsend. And yet, for no reason he can express in words, the more he looks at it, the more he realizes that he would rather continue to brave the storm than crawl inside it. It’s a preposterous thing to feel, and he knows this, and yet the potency of his sudden, inexplicable aversion to the tent seems justification enough.

You’re being ridiculous
.

This he knows, but still…

“I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” he says.

“For Heaven’s sake, why?”

“I don’t know, just a feeling. We don’t know who owns it, or how they might react to finding us inside. Could be a hunter’s camp.”

“So?”

“The kind of hunter who might mistake us for scavengers and shoot before asking questions.”

“Like
it or not, we
are
scavengers now, Mike. And if there’s food in there, I don’t mind telling you, I’m going to help myself. Coffee, the same.”

He has
to admit the idea of sustenance sounds tempting. They haven’t eaten anything since stopping at a Wendy’s on their way to the hills. When was that? Five, six, hours ago? His mouth waters, his body prematurely warming to the thought of hot coffee gushing down his throat, melting the ice inside him and chasing away some of the dread.

And ye
t it is that same dread that holds him in place as he studies the yellow object with the odd branch-like trim. He notices it doesn’t move, seems resistant to the wind.

Which is perhaps what a good, expensive, reliable tent
does
, Mike, not that you’d know anything about it
.
Yours was a discount item because you were more concerned with your bank balance than the safety of your family. It’s a
tent
, for God’s sake, nothing more, and all you’re doing now is all you’ve ever done: making dubious choices and stalling when affirmative action would yield a more sensible result
, chides the voice of reason, a voice that might have made Mike’s life a whole lot better if he had acknowledged its counsel even once over the years. But instinct will not allow him to heed it now.

“Let’s just wait a while, okay? Out here.”

He knows she’s going to argue, and doesn’t blame her. The woods are getting to him. The cold and the rain and the hunger and the desperation have combined to make a scrambled mess of his brains. The enormity of what has happened to them, of what his misguided need to bond with his family has caused to happen is debilitating. The thought of waiting here while Cody wanders the woods alone and frightened is enough to make him want to tear his own heart out, but he doesn’t know what else to do. His wife, like his own inner voice, will argue that he’s circumventing wisdom, as always, making the situation more difficult than it already is. And she’ll be right, and he will have no comeback. Because the only thing he can think to say will only make him appear insane, and even more pathetic than his actions thus far have allowed:
I’m afraid of it, Emma. The tent. I can’t explain why so please don’t ask me. It just feels wrong, feels like someone drew us here on purpose. One light in the whole damn woods, in a part of the woods nobody’s supposed to go, and it leads us
here
, to a tent with nobody in it. It just feels
wrong
.

“Out here?” Emma says. “So we can get soaked all over agai
n. What’s the matter with you?”

To give him time to compose a reply good enough to placate her—assuming
such an reply exists—he carefully makes his way to the nearest one of the small boulders. He needs to sit down, to take the weight off his feet, because it feels as if the backs of his hiking boots have eaten their way clean through to the bone. But as he nears the boulder, he sees that it is not a boulder at all, but some kind of shrub. Closer still and his light reveals that it is more like tumbleweed, though more densely constructed and much bigger than any he has ever seen. It reaches almost to his waist.

“Emma
, come take a look at this,” he says, raising his light to shoulder height and aiming the beam downward like a mechanic inspecting the guts of a troublesome vehicle.

“What now?”

Despite the cold sensation of dread that crawls like the rain down the back of his neck, Mike is fascinated at his discovery.

The
object before him is a rough oval composite of grass, sticks, and coarse thin fibers he identifies as animal hair, and as he runs a tentative hand over the top of the tightly woven mass, the twigs like hard, slick tendrils in the rain, he is once again transported via memory back to his youth, this time to Mrs. Edgerton’s biology class on the day when she got them all to study owl pellets. He recalls being repulsed as he pulled apart the small, hairy brown orb of compacted waste matter, only to find his sense of wonder inflamed at the sight of what was revealed to him: several smooth tiny stones, desiccated insect remains, and the skeleton of a mouse.
Indigestible material,
Mrs. Edgerton had informed the class with her trademark haughty, holier-than-thou delivery
, which in its excretion also helps cleanse the gullet of the animal.

Mike sha
kes his head. What he is looking at couldn’t possibly be the same manner of thing, could it?
Not unless they have birds the size of my Toyota up here
. Deferring to that sense of childhood wonder again, he pins the flashlight under his chin, the light angled toward the top of the tumbleweed-thing, and braces his knees against the object for support—thereby discovering that it is heavy enough to resist being moved by his weight—and, carefully slipping his fingers into the latticework of branches of which the outer shell is composed, pulls the thing apart. It opens easily, the top portion splitting wide with the sound of firecrackers, and Mike stumbles back a step as a noxious smell of methane rises in an invisible cloud to envelop him. Coughing, he waves a hand before his face, eyes wide with incredulity, and, the flashlight trembling in his hand from the cocktail of cold, fatigue, and terror, leans over to inspect his handiwork.

“Honey…” he says, his voice very small. “You
’re not going to believe this…”

His efforts have not sundered the object enough for him to see straight down into its center. He has only managed to yank open
an upper section of its bulk, but it’s enough. On the tightly woven bed of straw, wiry animal hair, and undigested plant matter he has exposed, the light shows a large portion of bone, and perhaps it is only because he has already summoned the memory of his high school biology class that he understands that the bone, scratched and striated and shiny in the rain, does not belong to an animal.

But the red collar with the little silver bell most certainly does.

He straightens, moves away from the giant pellet-thing and slowly sweeps his juddering flashlight beam to his left, to the three other “boulders” he registered on the way in, then to his right, where there are two more, laying on their sides like giant, dark Easter eggs. From one of them pokes what he earlier took to be the dead branch of a silver birch and now acknowledges is more likely the leg-bone of an animal, probably a deer. A cold current floods his body. And in his shock, the only thing that runs through his mind is a simple, logical fact, a ridiculously obvious observation that nonetheless terrifies him to his core.

Waste follows feeding
.

He takes another step backward, his throat clenching against the magnificently irresistible need to scream until his lungs burst, because now he knows something else. Cavemen did not need prior knowledge or textbooks or common sense to know when they were being hunted. They felt it on an instinctual, primal level. And that, he concludes, even as his
composure threatens to collapse like a shoddily built wall, is what
he
felt as soon as they stepped foot into the clearing.

“Hello?” he hears his wife ask, and knows
it is not directed at him. The sound of that word paints a picture of what he’s going to see when he turns around and his body goes rigid. Because even though what he has just found is not sufficient evidence to identify the tent as the source of the danger he feels crawling all over him now like an army of fire ants, instinct tells him it is, and it is on this instinct he realizes he should have relied.

“Emma,” he says. “Don’t.”

“I found the opening,” she replies.

His paralysis breaks and he turns, his flashlight sweeping an arc of luminescence
through the rain. “Emma, no!”

She is down on her haunches, pulling back a
large leathery flap at the far end of the tent, the end that was hidden from them when they entered the clearing. The look on her face as she does so does nothing to assuage his dread. It is a look of repulsion, one he has come to know very well for all the wrong reasons during the course of his marriage to this woman, and when she releases the flap, it remains connected to her fingers by long thick translucent strands of mucous. And although he feels himself running to her, reaching out to grab her and yank her away from there, he can’t move. In what is perhaps a sign of impending insanity, the voice inside his head becomes that of the marriage counselor, that enviably handsome Doctor White, with the perfect teeth and expensive clothes, who probably never had problems with a woman, or a man, for that matter, in his whole damn life, saying words he never would have said out loud:

You’ve wanted to run
for years, haven’t you Mike. You’ve just never had the courage.

No, that isn’t—

And now you can. Because this situation doesn’t require courage. Just the opposite. All you need to do here is give in to your instinctual need for self-preservation, and run. Problem solved.

No. I won’t. I ca
n’t.

Sure you can. Because as much
an outsider as you may have always felt, you’re out of your element for real right here. This isn’t your world. People are forbidden from coming here for a very good reason. And right now, you’re looking at it. This, Mikey, is most definitely Not Your Department.

Mike drops the flashlight and
, screaming his wife’s name, runs toward the tent, his heels and shins raging with pain, the panic in his throat threatening to strangle him. And as he closes the distance, he sees Emma, the woman he knows he loves despite her doubts, the counselor’s doubts, and even his own, look up at him in confusion, her hands still held out before her in disgust, the glistening mess dripping from between her fingers. In an instant, at the sight of him, his primal terror is transferred to her eyes. Swallowing, unwilling to wait to find out why her husband is hobbling toward her in insane panic, she starts to stand.

“Mike, what
—?”

The back end of the tent deflates as if crushed under the foot of an invisible giant. At the same time, the ridged spine, so like a thorny branch, arches itself and the flaps at the front snap open like batwings, partially obscuring what happens next.

Emma screams; Mike stumbles over a knotted mess of branches and goes down, badly scraping his hands and knees, and the tent begins to shudder.

Up on his tortured feet again and he’s
alongside the thing, almost within grabbing distance of his wife, close enough now to see that the soft light inside the tent-that-is-not-a-tent is glowing like a sun, close enough to see the network of thin, dark blue veins threading like worms through its vellum-like skin, close enough to hear his wife draw in a breath to scream.