Page 197 of The End of the World As We Know It

After a moment, the little girl extended a trembling, sticklike arm from her blanket nest, pointing at the front door.

“It’s all right,” Val said. “We’re safe in here. I guess it was pretty scary, all those folks yelling, huh?”

The child shook her head, dark hair clinging to the wool around her face. She pointed at the bandaged scrapes on her arm, then pointed at the door again.

“I… did the person… did those animals… hurt you?”

Nod, nod.

“Who was it? Can you tell us?”

Shake, shake.

Val felt woozy for a second—supposing thiswasthe only child in the world, maybe a murderer didn’t know that and the animals couldn’t, but logic did not abate the wave of killing rage that washed over her. When it ebbed, Val gripped the child’s blanketed shoulders. “We’re safe,” she said again. “Nothing’s getting in. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

The child stared at her, the hope on her face heartbreaking. Val swallowed thickly. “I won’t,” she said. “You should eat. Come on.”

She held out her hand, and the child took it.

Val did not offer for anyone to stay the night; she simply dragged blankets and pillows out of the linen closet, and made Ethan pull out the sofa bed in the main room. Every light in the cabin blazed, picking out the glass of framed photographs, glinting on the nails in the faux-timbered walls. It had been decorated to look rustic, like a log cabin outside and in. Part of nature, Val thought bitterly.

But nothing natural had killed Dean Monahan.

The child had been put to bed in the loft once she’d proven she could manage the stairs. After checking on her, Val folded herself into the overstuffed green corduroy chair next to the sofa, studying the others. Willa’s face was the same color as her flaxen hair; at her request, Bash had given her a Valium, and Val had thought that thesingle pill would knock the teetotaler off her feet like a right hook, but she was still awake and did not look especially calm. Lois, swaying. Martin, looking longingly at the liquor cabinet in the corner. Big, dark Ethan huddled like a bear in his blankets next to the bow and full quiver of arrows Val had placed near the door.

If asked, she would not have been able to tell them why. It wasn’t like she intended to open a window and pick the creatures off as if the cabin were a medieval castle under siege. Val was not tall, not strong-looking; her mother had always jokingly saidrobust, built precisely like her Ukrainian peasant ancestors. As a child she had fixated on a history book with a little throwaway fact about the English longbow, and how training took so long that you had to start when you were seven years old. Now, after decades of indulging the childhood obsession, she startled people when she demonstrated the bow, revealing her powerful torso like a plastic action figure. She estimated her draw weight slightly less than her own hundred and forty pounds; she could put an arrow through a medium-sized tree.

Folks smiled and nodded when she went out to hunt. It was fine, it was just Prince Val, ha ha, out in the woods again with her rocket launcher. She certainly believed shecouldkill the creatures. She just hadn’t gotten the bow down with the intent. Something specific about them made her uneasy, something that reminded her of the morning—she had told herself to remember it, but in the tangle and chaos of recovering the child from the ravine, she had forgotten.

“I dreamed of her last night,” Bashir said, his voice nearly inaudible below the hiss of the stove. “The little girl… she was whole again, healed. She wore a dress of deer leather. And she was with my parents.” Val winced; his parents had died in an accident when he was in his teens, only a few years after immigrating to Canada. In a way, he’d always said, that was a blessing: more merciful than the flu.

He added, “She did not speak. But my father said she wanted me to come with them, because they had a surprise—a present—for me. We would go together, he said. All of us, walking.”

For a few minutes no one spoke. Val studied her friend’s drawn, tired face, the two dull spots under his eyes where the few seconds of exposure this morning had given him frostbite. They all had it. She said, “I didn’t dream of her. I dreamt about hunting. A big stag with blue eyes.”

It was not as if a dam broke then, but the dreams did trickle out, with great reluctance. Ethan had dreamt of being chased by wolves, strange ones, glossy blue-black like magpie feathers.

Lois spoke in a weepy murmur, as if ashamed: the child atop a mountain, but the mountain wasn’t insensible stone. It was alive and obedient to her every word, waiting only for her to speak. And the child’s father stood behind her, smiling with beautiful white teeth, the only thing visible in a face not shadowed but made of shadow.

Val twitched; Bashir gave her a curious look, and she pretended she hadn’t seen it. “Anybody else?” she croaked.

Willa said she hadn’t dreamt of the child at all, and Val believed her; Martin said he hadn’t either, but she didn’t believe him, and that was strange. She had known Martin for years, worked side by side with him at the plant till he had been transferred out of her team. She had never seen anything that rang the smallest alarm bell in her head. Was one ringing now? She hated the idea that the dreams were scrambling her gut feelings.

“It’s nothing,” Val said, since everyone was looking at her. “It’s just… brains, it’s just dreams. If we had come across a whale washed up from the lake, we’d all be dreaming about whales.”

That got a few weak laughs. No one spoke of the search party again, or a serial killer; no one asked what they would do with Dean Monahan’s body. It was not something Willa should hear even with a full Valium under her belt. That would be for tomorrow, in the daylight.

Val checked on the little girl, whispered some reassurances, and wrapped herself in her last, most threadbare blanket on the floor next to the cot.

Now there was no trusting dreams, there was no distinguishing the dream from the real. Someone was telling Val aboutfaces, and how the word did not mean simply the material that covered the front of a skull. Faces were something else, came from somewhere else, and no one could see a true face here, not here.Why not here?she asked, disliking that she could not see the speaker.

She woke abruptly, and lay in the darkness for several heart-racing minutes, deciding whether she was awake or not. Eventually her eyes adjusted and she decided somethinghadwoken her, and it had not been the dream. The house was quiet and cold below her, the only sound that of the sleepers.

And the cot at her side was empty.

She was up with a speed she did not believe possible, scrambling down the ladder, half falling the last three rungs. No light in the bathroom, lumps on the floor still asleep, the correct number. Had the child crawled in with one of the others? Check the rest of the house first, panic after that. Maybe it was for nothing.

Something moved in the gap under the office door; Val thought she would pass out from relief. Okay. Kid went back to the first place she had slept in, that was all. Maybe it felt safer down here. Okay, okay. The sound of the girl climbing out of her cot must have woken her, the creak of the floor.