Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“We’re not alone,” Dunk told him. “Our fathers are coming soon.”

“You mean your father the cheater ? Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater?” The man diddled his earlobe. “The woods have ears and so do I.”

“What are you doing here?” said Dunk.

“Do you own this fuckin’ cave, kid?” The man thrust his sick-looking face forward. Bands of brown gunk edged each of his teeth. “Is this your forest?”

“I’m just asking if you’re lost,” Dunk said.

The man laughed. A dark chattering sound full of razor blades, broken bones and crawly things.

“Me? I’m never lost. Wherever I go, there I am!”

At first I’d been glad to see this man. He was an adult. He could get us out of here. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about our next-door neighbour’s dog.

Finnegan was a beagle. Mr. Trowbridge, our neighbour, would let me take him for walks. Poor Finnegan got bit by a raccoon and got rabies. Contracted was the word my mother used, as if rabies was something you’d sign for on a dotted line. The disease raced into his brain and made him go mad. Not angry-mad: mad -mad, like the old man at the bus station who yelled at pigeons. Mr. Trowbridge had to lock Finnegan in the backyard. I watched him through a knothole in the fence. Finnegan’s muzzle was caked with yellow foam and there were squiggly veins shot through his eyes. He walked in dopey circles, head swinging side to side. “Finnegan,” I called. He tore across the grass, growling and slobbering, hurling himself at the fence so hard the slats splintered. He smelled of vomit and of the shit caked in his fur. The dog catcher slid a dart gun through the fence and shot Finnegan. The dog lay down and died with a little shudder. Mr. Trowbridge cried in the driveway.

This man reminded me of Finnegan. The eyes. The stink . But Finnegan was a dog driven mad by disease. This man may have been born that way.

He threw his arm over me. A cold python slipping across my shoulders. “Now you —you tell great stories. Will you tell me another?”

Dunk grabbed my leg, pulled on it. “Sit over here,” he said.

The man let his arm slide off me the way a child will let go of a toy he knows he can get back any time he wishes.

“So you’re lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God. But He can’t hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody’ll ever hear you.”

The man threw his head back and howled. “Aaaah -whoooo !” Tendons cabled on his neck as his voice echoed out and out into the night. “That isn’t going to touch one set of ears.” A wink. “Human ones, anyway.”

He reached into his pack and pulled out a can of beans. Saliva squirted into my mouth at the sight. He set it in the V of his split legs.

“You must be starved enough to eat a bear’s asshole. Or maybe any old asshole, huh?”

He tapped the tin with one finger, ran his ragged fingernail around the rim. He rucked up his jeans and took a knife out of his boot. The blade was thick, sharpened on both sides. It looked about a foot long.

“Don’t got no can opener.” He slid the blade into the banked coals. “Want some?”

“Yes,” I said, unable to help myself.

The man cocked his head, staring at me. His tongue flicked out of the wet cave of his mouth, snakelike, to caress his canine tooth. “Well okay, but I can’t just give it to you. It’s worth something — a lot, by the looks of you. So you do for me and I’ll do for you.”

“Do what?”

“Oh, I dunno … You a dancer? Stand up and give me a twirl.” He adjusted his position, pressing on his crotch with the heel of his palm. “I bet you just strut , don’t you? Take your shirt off and swing it over your head. Twitch them hips. Tease me.”

Dunk said, “No.”

Their gazes fought above the fire. The man threw up his rubber-band arms in mock defeat.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying, right? Jeez, it’s not like I can make you do anything you don’t want to … right ?”

“You sure do look lost,” Dunk said.

The man’s gaze narrowed. A vein pulsed along his jaw.

“Ever play hide-and-seek, kid? I’m hiding now. Sometimes you’ve got to hide for a while. That’s okay. I’m good at it. You know what else I’m good at? Seeking .” He covered his eyes with his hands. Opened them like cupboard doors. “Peek-a-boo. I see you.”

His knife slid through the coals, its tip glowing like magma. I wondered how it’d feel sinking into my stomach: would I feel much at all or would I only watch, dumbfounded, as the moon-sheened quicksilver slid into me, my skin parting like curtains? This man might not think two ways about it; he could have been sticking the knife into a brick of butter. He chewed the air, snapping big bites out of the darkness. His teeth snicked shut, opened, snicked again.

“I’m the rogue wolf. Know what a rogue is, kiddies? A wolf that doesn’t play by the rules of the pack. He does what he likes. What feels gooood . Now the pack, they don’t like the rogue. They try to pull the rogue in line.” His lips twisted into an exaggerated pout. “ Waaah . So the rogue, he takes five. Hits the powder room. But that’s just fine and dandy, because a rogue doesn’t need much … But even a wolf’s got needs , yeah? His little taste of meat .”

A knot of terror seized my stomach. I was prepared to die at nature’s unfeeling hands; Mother Nature was unforgiving but at least she carried no agenda. But this man … if he hurt us, it would be brutal, careless, and he’d show no regard for our bodies. I’d be okay dying of frostbite or by falling off some rocks and snapping my spine, but not at this man’s hands.

Wind whipped into the cave, howling round our shoulders and exiting with an outrush that batted down the fire: only trembling fingerlings of flame licked from the charred logs. In that instant I saw the man change form. His face elongated, nose and mouth pushing out from the windburnt flatness of his face, nostrils arching upwards before spreading and blackening into a rubbery texture. His face made awful noises as it melted and lengthened — the splinter of ice cubes in a glass — his skin stretching like fairground taffy. His hands curled into solid masses bristling with coarse dark fur; black claws slit through, each as wicked as a crow’s beak. His skull crumpled into his forehead, deflating like an inner tube packed with shattering light bulbs, the bone solidifying again, as sleek and aerodynamic as a bullet. His ears crept up the side of his head, tapering into arrowheads fuzzed in grey fur. His jaw unhinged with the crack of a starter’s pistol, mouth widening down each side as the skin tore across his muzzle with a silken noise, the edges upturned to make room for the new teeth crowding his mouth. Fangs pierced through his gums, as sharp and pale as bleached bone. The man was a wolf in all ways but his eyes: his sockets were empty, withered like two cored-out tomatoes.

When the flames kicked up, the gun was in Dunk’s hand.

The man saw it pointed at his chest. He blinked, as if that might make it go away. When it remained in Dunk’s hand he seemed baffled, an emotion that darkened into annoyance, then shaded into restrained anger.

“Where did you get that?”

“I took it off a dead wrestler.”

The man laughed but stopped when neither of us joined in.

“You did, did you? You even know how to shoot it?”

“Is there that much to it?” said Dunk with a tilt of his head.

“Give it here. Let me see if the safety’s on.”

“No thanks.”