David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

“Shhh!” said Wallace. He planted himself beside Rupert, and motioned with his good hand for the two to come over.

They bent down around the shrubbery and lowered themselves into the ditch — beside Wallace, Rupert noted.

“We saw you heading off from school,” Joan explained as she flattened out her skirts in front of her, and added: “I remembered this place.” Rupert looked at his hands, which had drawn closed into fists.

Nancy looked at his sleeve, which was now brown with old blood.

“Holy cow!” she said. “What’d you do?”

“Were you fighting again?” Joan, for the first time, looked at Rupert — a little accusingly, he thought.

“No,” said Wallace. “We—”

And Wallace paused, and thought about it for a few seconds, and he explained himself to the Waite sisters.

First, he described the dog, in such a way that Nancy made fists herself, and held them to her mouth, and even elder sister Joan gasped and looked away. He related the encounter of the day before so that Joan declared his survival a miracle. Then he got to the battle.

“Me and the dog sized each other up. It wasn’t like before, where the dog figured it could just take me. It knew I came ready. So it kept back — in behind the railings of the porch, where I couldn’t get a clear shot.”

“Did you shoot it?” asked Nancy, aghast. She seemed to relax when he shook his head.

“I couldn’t get a shot. I just kept looking at it, sitting there in front of the door. And then I saw it.”

“What’d you see?” asked Joan.

Wallace had developed dark rings around his eyes. The effect was chilling when he opened them wide. “There was a dead man,” he said, and added — before Rupert could say anything — “I was trying to figure it out. That was the smell. Death .”

The Waite sisters sat rapt, staring at Wallace. Joan’s lips parted and she clutched at her skirts in her lap. Nancy held her sister’s shoulder.

“I didn’t see a dead man,” said Rupert quietly. Nancy spared him a glance; Wallace and Joan ignored him, and Wallace continued:

“You could see his legs through the door. They were skinny. Like a skeleton’s. He was lying on the floor of the living room, where he died .”

“Do you think the dog killed him?”

Joan asked it softly. Wallace shrugged, and winced.

“You should get a bandage,” said Nancy. “And go see a doctor. Maybe you got rabies.”

“We can’t do that,” said Rupert, his voice louder than he intended. “Wallace lost the Webley when he got scared and dropped it without even shooting.”

“I was bit!” said Wallace, and Rupert said, “… after you dropped the gun,” and Joan said, “That’s enough,” and they all sat quiet a moment.

“We have to get the gun back,” said Rupert finally. “Wallace’ll get a beating if we don’t. So we’re resting up.”

“When are you going to go?” asked Nancy.

Rupert started to say, When Wallace is good and ready , but Wallace cut him off. “Right now,” he said. “Wanna come?”

“We’ve only got ten minutes until recess is finished,” said Joan. But she sounded uncertain.

“Someone might pick up the gun if we wait,” said Wallace. Silently, Rupert admitted that he was right.

Nancy opened up the bag she was clutching, reached in, and handed Wallace a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. She gave Rupert another one. The smell of peanut butter was thick.

“We thought you must be hungry,” explained Nancy, and Joan said, “That’s why we came.”

“We can eat on the way,” said Wallace. Taking the sandwich in his bad hand, he used his good arm to push himself up, and stumbling barely at all, he headed along the ditch, in the direction of home, of the dog’s house.

The Waite girls looked at one another; Rupert looked at both of them.

“We have to get the gun,” said Rupert.

Nancy nodded; Joan shrugged. “Might as well,” she said, and Rupert felt his heart race.

They walked in a line down the ditch: Wallace first, the Waite sisters following, first Joan and then Nancy, hanging close. At the back, Rupert. The ditch was excellent for their purpose, running deeper as it left the town, so that by the time they were past the business section and behind houses it was almost a gully. They bent low as they passed a lady hanging sheets in her back garden. But they needn’t have; she hummed around a mouthful of clothes-pegs as though she were alone in the world. When they were past, Nancy Waite giggled, and Wallace shot a glare back over his shoulder.

“Sorry, Wallace,” said Joan, drawing out his name like it was “Mother,” and laughing. Rupert laughed too, but he made a point of keeping it down.

There came a point where the walls were nearly cliffs, huge round rocks covered in slick moss; long pools of green-slicked water spread still in the shade of bent willow trees that towered at the edge, dangled roots in the air above their heads. Somewhere in the shadows, something splashed.

Had the Waite girls ever been down here? Rupert thought not; they both stayed quiet as they walked along this section. Because Rupert had been here before, he knew where they were: just a dozen yards from the main road to town, maybe a quarter mile from the concession road that would take him and Wallace home. Where the dog and its house were.

But the Waites lived in town — on Ruggles Street, in a red brick house that climbed up two storeys with awnings painted white — on the other side of town. They were going into strange territory. Rupert’s territory. Wallace’s. They didn’t become talkative until the trees spread, and they came back into the hot light of morning.

Nancy slowed, so she and Rupert walked side by side. “There’s not a dead body there, is there?” She asked the question as they climbed up a slide of sharp gravel, around a steel culvert and onto the concession road. Rupert’s breath was hot and dry in his throat; he had a hard time getting out what should have been a simple answer.

“I — I didn’t see one,” he said, then — afraid if he said no, Wallace made that up, she and Joan would just leave them and go back to school — added: “But there could have been.”

“Wallace wouldn’t lie.”

She reached the top just before him, and skipped off to join her sister, who was walking beside Wallace now. A scent, of soap and sweat and something else, lingered in his nostrils. Rupert crested the top and ran to catch up with the three of them.

“It’s not far now,” said Wallace, and that at least was true.

But they dawdled, so it took longer than it should have to reach the house where the dog lived. By the time they got to the top of the driveway, there was no getting around it: they were all four truant now.

Joan peered at the house. It was still, and very bright now that the sun was high. The front door was a rectangle of perfect black.

“It looks like nobody lives there,” she said. “It looks abandoned.”

“We should just get the gun,” said Rupert. “You remember where you dropped it?”

Wallace pointed in a general way to the left of the house. “Over there.”

“Where was the body?” asked Nancy.

“Inside.”

Rupert studied the yard. A breeze came up, carrying a sweet smell of fresh hay from somewhere beyond this place. It tickled the high grass. “I saw it fall,” said Rupert finally. He headed up the driveway a few steps and pointed to a spot. “Maybe here.”

“What about the dog?”

The question barely registered; Rupert couldn’t even say who asked it. As he moved closer to the house, it seemed as though he were moving in his own quiet world — as though he were following a thread of raw instinct, some part of his mind that didn’t think in words or even pictures, but just compelled. He almost could have closed his eyes as he stepped off the driveway into the grass, and kept on his course. Eyes open, eyes closed: the memory of the gun tumbling through the air just here, just so — landing in this place, not that or that — was just as vivid one way or the other.