WHO: Kaden, Hecate WHEN: A little before dawn WHERE: The Hole WHAT: A little visit WARNINGS: Spoopyness
Night deepened as the hour grew later. The fog outside had started creeping down into the hollow of the Hole after midnight, and now was so thick it was strangling streetlights. Kaden couldn’t sleep, sitting awake in bed with his headphones in. He couldn’t fight the memory of the gun in his hand with his eyes closed, so he kept them open. He couldn’t fight the memory of the sound of the gun while there was silence so he kept his music playing. He didn’t want to lie down because he was afraid if he did, all he would see was the woman in the green coat, lying on the ground.
Tragos was curled up with his back to Kaden, one arm wrapped around the back of his head. He’d had an awful lot to drink. Kaden wanted to kick him awake, make him suffer the way Kaden was suffering, but the way his hand clutched his head convinced Kaden he was tormented in his own way. If he woke up, the room would be thick with it. Thicker than the fog outside.
Barak had taken Cin out for some kind of celebration and they’d come home a while ago, thumped their way to Barak’s bedroom and made Kaden glad of his headphones, but the rest of the house was quiet, now. How dare Barak celebrate, thought Kaden, with a surge of rage. How COULD he?
Kaden pushed the thin curtain back from the window, watching the way the orange streetlights stained the fog, considering slipping outside and going for a run, try and shed this house, shed his whole life. Maybe he could run and run and never come back… but Kaden had seen enough homeless teenagers to know he didn’t want that fate.
The fog swirled, the streetlights dim, but bright enough that the intersection outside Kaden’s window was illuminated.
He stopped breathing. Froze.
Sitting on the other side of the intersection was the dog. Kaden made a dog like whimper himself, scared and high in the back of his throat. Eyes wide, he couldn’t tear them away from the animal.
It was huge. Unmistakably the woman’s dog. It had followed them to the junkyard and it had followed them here. These things should have been impossible, but he stared at the dog, and the dog turned its head to stare back at him, and Kaden discovered a whole new kind of scared.
He thought he was old hat at fear but this was something else. How could a dog follow a car across town on its own? His mind offered no solid answers, but as the minutes ticked on, the questions grew louder and louder, and the dog did not move, and Kaden couldn’t bear it. It seemed wrong to turn his back on this animal, and Kaden couldn’t handle the idea of introducing any more wrong into the messed up world.
He slid his legs out of bed and pushed his feet into his shoes, pulling on a pair of jeans so cold they felt damp, and a hoodie over his pyjamas. From the fridge, he scavenged a couple of sausages, and, careful of every creak in the house, crept outside.
Kaden figured: if he was going to be mauled by a dog then perhaps he deserved to be mauled by a dog.
He stepped out onto the corner, opposite the dog. “Hi?” he said, his voice coming out high, again like a whimper of a dog, not a boy. He swallowed, and stepped off the kerb, and the dog finally stood, and stepped off her kerb too, moving toward him till they met in the middle, where the roads crossed. Kaden’s mind was screaming but he broke one of the sausages in half, and placed it on the ground between them.
The dog dropped her head, sniffed the sausage, and solemnly accepted the offering. Kaden watched as her mammoth jaws made short work of it.
“I’m really sorry,” he couldn’t seem to do more than whisper, and two tears escaped from his eyes when he did. “I’m really, really sorry.” His hand shook as he held out the second half of the sausage, but the dog shifted before he could place it on the ground, sniffing at his hand around the sausage. Kaden flattened his palm, and sobbed as the dogs tongue swept over his hand, taking the meat with a gentleness Kaden knew he didn’t deserve.
“I don’t know how to help you,” Kaden whispered through his tears. “Do you want to live with us? I don’t think my brothers would treat you right. But I could bring you sausages? I could buy you some proper food, I have a little money. I could set you up a nice den somewhere round here and bring you food and make sure you’re okay, but you have to be careful okay? You have to be careful because there’s barbed wire all around, and bits of metal, and you could get hurt, so if you stay you have to promise to be careful, okay?” He found himself on his knees in front of the dog, which put him at eye level with her big, watchful eyes, and then he was bending forward, one hand across his face to catch his tears and the other braced against the road, body wracked with sobs.
The dog nosed his hand away from his face and licked up his tears, and after a short moment of surprise, Kaden tumbled forward and wrapped his arms around her huge shoulders. He clung: the best physical comfort he ever got from Tragos was an awkward pat on the back, and no one had held him while he sobbed since his mother died when he was seven.
There was a crackling sound overhead which made Kaden look up, in time to see the streetlights, one by one, blaze a butter yellow like a low full moon, then flash brightly, and blink out. Sniffing, Kaden hurriedly wiped his tears from his face, and the dog climbed to her feet, though carefully, so she didn’t dislodge Kaden’s arm.
It was pitch black, but through the thick fog he could see a light approaching, too slow to be a car. Kaden stilled in terror, fearing that it was one of his brothers, but as the figure stepped out of the fog this fear was replaced by an entirely new type of fear. Layers upon layers of shiny, new fears.
It was the woman. He hadn’t seen her face before but he knew it must be her. She was no longer wearing her green coat, but she was clothed in black, strange robes that seemed to shift around her as the fog shifted around the streetlights, he could not see where the clothes ended and the night began. Above her head she held a torch, the old, old kind, the kind that used actual fire. He could smell it, hot and fresh and… impossible, because the fire was not real.
The fire could not be real because the woman could not be real, because he could see through her. Fog moved through her body. Fog moved through the fire. Kaden covered his mouth with the back of his hand and stared.
She was transparent, a ghost. Dead. It was as impossible as the dog, but the dog had eaten a sausage from his hand and that was not an impossible thing.
Kaden believed in both, the dog and the ghost woman.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered up at her from his knees. Beyond her, in the fog, he could see figures of people waiting. He couldn’t tell if they faced him or if they’d all turned their backs. The light flickered and the figures were pillars, the shadow between them deep. The light changed again and there was no one and nothing out there beyond the firelight. Kaden’s face crumbled. “I’m so sorry I nearly killed you,” he rasped, thinking of how close he’d been to doing it, how petrified. “I’m so sorry my brother did.”
The woman stepped forward, and the dog shifted to stand by her side. She reached down to fondle an ear, and, again impossibly, Kaden saw the ear move beneath her touch.
“Why did he do it?” the woman’s voice was a miracle. Husky and gentle and strange, there was something about it that reminded him of his mother, though her voice was rarely a gentle one.
Maybe it was death he was hearing. Maybe the dead had an accent.
Kaden swallowed hard and choked on his answer: “Because our other brother told him to.”
The woman lifted her head toward Kaden’s house, and the torch blazed a little brighter.
“Please don’t hurt him,” Kaden begged frantically. “They had orders. I know that’s not an excuse but he didn’t want to and I need him, please, please, don’t hurt him.” The woman did not turn her face away from their house, and yet suddenly she was looking at him at the same time. Kaden’s eyes struggled to interpret what he was seeing but… she had more than one face… and then she didn’t… but she did…
He had to close his eyes. His mind didn’t understand. His blood felt cold, and he had chicken skin all over.
Her voice said, “Hecuba thanks you for the sausage.”
And when he opened his eyes again she was gone.
Suddenly aware of how freezing it was, Kaden scrambled to his feet, hands tucked under his arms and hot breath puffing out of his mouth, visible, adding to the foggy, pre-dawn atmosphere. The dog – Hecuba – was gone too, and the streetlights were still dead.
For a second Kaden stood in the middle of the intersection, his heartbeat shaking his body, and then the fear caught up with him for real. Unbelievably afraid, Kaden raced back into his house and locked the door behind him, then raced back to his bed and pulled all the covers up over himself, making sure that the curtain was firmly closed. He was shaking, and shaking, and shaking.
But his hand smelled like sausages and dog breath, and Kaden curled that fist close to his face, holding onto that smell like it was his last fragment of reality. For now, he held onto nothing but that smell, and eventually, exhaustion overtook him.