Charles Grant - The Pet

When he pushed her away, she didn’t argue; when he snapped up a hand to stop her, she did; when he smiled at her to prove he was under control and she didn’t have to be afraid, the smile he received in return was rigid and pale.

“All right,” he said.

The wind strengthened, and above them, around them, branches clattered, leaves scraped, the surface of the pond distorted their reflections. West of town there was thunder.

He looked across the water and up the path, into the dark lane that led to the ball field. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to do this, but it was too late to stop it. Tracey had to know or she would run away like the others, run back to Jeff and leave him alone.

“Come here,” he said gently, as if talking to a friend too shy to leave the night for the light that began to sparkle in the cold air.

Tracey glanced toward the exit, her weight shifting to run in case he took a step nearer.

“Come on,” he said gently. “It’s me, remember?”

White globes danced in the pool to the wind, and there was a moment when the water turned in a circle, stretching his face and chest, merging his body with hers, vanishing in an explosion of pale blue when lightning forked above the trees.

He waited.

Tracey reached out a hand.

“Come on, boy,” he whispered, as if talking to a pet.

Tracey blinked back a tear.

It began in the thunder and he wasn’t sure he heard it, not until he felt her suddenly at his side, gripping his arm tightly and looking wonderingly at his face.

Slow and steady hoofbeats at the far end of the tunnel lane, part of the thunder and continuing after, unhurried and hollow, iron striking iron.

Tracey pressed her mouth against his arm when she saw it pass through the farthest pool of white. Darker than shadow. Sleek head bobbing, legs lifting as if prancing, fog and greenfire swarming up its flanks.

“Don,” she said.

But he was too intent on watching the stallion, seeing it move through its own billowing cloud, seeing the curls and streams of greenfire from its hooves, seeing the greeneyes seeing him and knowing.

The hooves echoed.

The fog thickened.

And when it reached the opposite end of the pool, it stopped and snorted and stamped a foot that lanced flame toward the lightning.

“It’s not a trick, is it,” Tracey said, shifting until she was partly behind him.

The thunder was louder, nearer, rustling the leaves.

Don shook his head.

It was there, and it was waiting, and it wouldn’t take its eyes from him, didn’t move a muscle, its mane untouched though the wind blew his hair like needles into his eyes.

“Oh, my god … Tar,” Tracey whispered, a cry caught in the name. “Oh, god, Don, you weren’t lying.”

“And I’m not crazy either.”

The fog.

Greenfire.

“I wished him dead,” Don told her without looking away from the horse. “I wished Tar dead.”

Tracey’s eyes closed. “Don, tell it to go away.”

“It helps me,” he said. “It hears me and it helps me.”

“Don?”

He smiled, open-mouthed and suddenly. “Damn, Tracey, do you have any idea what this means?”

The horse backed off, into the fog that streamed from its nostrils as it breathed and moved, until its outline was a shadowed blur and its eyes were slanted green.

Then it vanished when an explosion of sirens erupted behind them. They whirled, whirled back and the fog was snaking off into the trees, the pool raising wavelets that slapped against the apron, and they spun about a second time when they heard footsteps racing toward them.

It was Luis Quintero, revolver drawn and followed by three other men. When he saw the two standing next to the water, he slowed and holstered his weapon, but didn’t stop until he reached them and grabbed Tracey’s arms.

“Are you all right?” he demanded. Then he looked hard at Don. “You. Are you all right?”

“Dad!”

“You told me you would come here. When …” He looked at Don and gestured to one of the men. “Take my daughter home at once.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“Don, please come with me.” The voice was rough and solicitous, and Don looked over his shoulder at the empty dark path. “Please, Donald, we have to hurry.”

“What?” he asked.

More sirens, and the thunder, and the first spatter of rain.

“No more until we get you home.”

He balked, suddenly panicked. “Home? Mom? Is it Mom? My father?”

“Until we get you there,” Quintero repeated. “Be patient. I will help you.”

A patrol car was parked askew at the boulevard exit, and Don started for it at Quintero’s gentle urging. Tracey was already gone, looking through the rear window of a departing cruiser, one palm pressed against the glass, her face obscured in glaring fragments by the streetlights sweeping over it. Then, as a patrolman opened the door and gestured him in, he looked up the avenue and saw two other police cars angled across the mouth of his street, lights spinning while three officers put up a sawhorse barricade.

“Mr. Quintero, what’s going on?”

“Don, please,” Quintero said.

Don gaped, then looked in the opposite direction and saw the cars, the lights, a handful of people walking hurriedly toward his block. With a cry no one heard he yanked his arm free and started to run, heedless of the traffic as he bolted across to the islands, crashed through the shrubs and out the other side. A bus swerved barely in time to avoid him. Quintero shouted several yards behind.

At the mouth of the street he vaulted the barricade and ran a dozen feet before slowing and taking to the right-hand pavement, walking stiff-legged, his arms flapping at his sides.

In the yards his neighbors were standing alone and in small groups, porch lights brightly white behind them and masking their faces; in the street was a fire engine angled in toward his driveway, and at the curb were two cruisers whose radios filled the air with abrupt bursts of static, whose lights bounced off the dead branches, flared off the windows, while an ambulance van backed onto the lawn.

He walked on, half-stumbled, until a policeman grabbed his arm and tried to turn him around. He protested and was released when Quintero barked an order; he breathed through his mouth as he stepped off the curb and stared at his house — at the ragged hole of the bay window, at the lamps on in every room with shadows on the walls, in the garage, at the roof bleached by spotlights on the sides of the cruisers.

“What?” he gasped to Quintero when the man reached his side and laid a hand on his shoulder. “What?”

A siren. Firemen standing around the engine, smoking while they waited for the word to go home. Flashlights. Voices in raised-whisper instructions.

“What, Mr. Quintero?” he said, turning to Tracey’s father with anguish in his eyes.

“It is all still very confused,” the man said, trying to watch Don and the house at the same time. “Someone — Mr. Delfield, you know him, I think — saw smoke coming out of the house a little while ago. He called us, he called the fire department.”

White-jacketed men backed out the front door, stretcher in hand, on the stretcher a green plastic bag tied shut at the top.

“Oh, my god!” Don sobbed, and took a step to run.

“No!” Quintero snapped. “Not your mother, Don.”

It was the voice, not the hand, that stopped him again; it was the voice, not the hand that told him who it was.

In his house. That bastard had been with his mother, in his house.

“H-how?”

Quintero scratched his thick mustache nervously. “I don’t know. Sergeant Verona is inside. I was for a while, and I saw no fire, nothing charred. Just …” He gestured toward the body being loaded into the van. As it pulled away and another took its place, he said, “Do you know about Tar?”