“Remember when we were courting?” Sarah’s voice was soft and quiet, as if she were afraid to break the memory. “When we went for long drives in that old banger you used to own?”
Robert smiled in the darkness. “Yes, of course. How could I ever forget?”
“We used to come to places like this and park up, have a bit of a kiss and a cuddle.”
“Oh, Mum. Please.” Connor’s voice held the faintest trace of laughter.
Molly chuckled softly.
“They were good times,” said Sarah, ignoring her children’s rebukes. “Real times.”
“What do you mean, real?” Robert slowed down, tipping his head to watch her.
“None of this feels real. It’s like a story I remember from childhood, when a family was banished to the woods and started killing strangers so they could steal their money and their goods. All that before: us, when we were first together, the kids being born, all the strains and struggles we had with our careers. All that was real. This…it’s just a dark fantasy or a fairy tale, part of somebody else’s twisted dream.”
Robert wished with all his heart he could feel the same way, but the truth was he felt the exact opposite. None of his memories felt real; only this, only now, seemed real in any way. He anticipated the smell of blood, the taste of death, and it promised more reality than anything he had ever experienced—or thought he had experienced. Everything else was mere background material…
“I know,” he said, lying again; always, always lying. He wondered if any of them had ever told the truth, even once. Everyone in the world was lying, they all constructed their own experiences, picking and choosing from barely recalled memories, rewriting history, reducing the facts to slim pickings through which they rummaged like coyotes in the belly of a corpse. Why should he be any different? Why should he be any better?
This situation was like the logical extension of that theory, the living end.
Something moved through the air to his right, and when he turned to see, he caught sight of the two crows from the tree as they flew in a jagged line toward the house on Oval Lane. If he allowed his mind to wander, and gave vent to his imagination, he could pretend the birds were in fact Nathan and Monica Corbeau, and they were heading back to defend the ground they had stolen.
More lies. More fiction.
The access lane came into view, and they all slowed their movements, desperate to make their approach a stealthy one. Robert unconsciously ducked his body, bending both legs at the knee, and his family copied the posture.
“This is it,” he whispered. “Are we ready?”
They nodded, unwilling to speak.
“You wait here, at the entrance, and I’ll go up there first to make sure everything’s okay. Keep an eye out; I’ll signal when you can follow me up.” His lips were dry and his eyes prickled.
“Why don’t we all go up there together?” Sarah was reluctant to break up the team. Robert knew she viewed their unity as their main strength.
“Just in case we’re expected,” he answered, shrugging and backing away. “That way they’ll think I’ve come alone.”
He moved slowly up the incline, being careful not to make too much noise as he trod on the loose stones, gravel and chippings. The trees and bushes on either side of him whispered softly in the slight breeze, and he heard small animals shifting though the undergrowth. The darkness was more intense here, as if clustered, and he began to doubt they could win this war. The moon was a smudge in the sky, and very few stars were visible in the surrounding blackness.
Robert was almost at the top of the access road. He shifted his grip on the knife, his palm slick with sweat. There came a sound from up ahead: a shifting of stones, a low hissing or panting that sounded somehow familiar. When the dog appeared, he was taken completely by surprise. It was big—probably a mastiff, or a derivation thereof—and it moved with silent speed. Its firm, muscled body hit him so hard it knocked the breath from his lungs. He went down like a bag of rocks, and the knife flew from his hand, skittering across the stones.
The dog had given him a glancing blow, bouncing off him as he fell, but it was up on its feet and heading once more toward him, this time slower, and with grim intent. A low growl sounded in the dog’s throat, and Robert suspected he was done for. The animal lunged, snapping its teeth, as Robert reached for the knife. He snatched back his hand, terrified of losing a few fingers, and reconsidered the direct approach.
“Easy boy,” he said, through gritted teeth. There was a pain in his side; it was huge and heavy, like broken bones rattling in a bag. “Get back!”
The dog leapt at him, and he had no time to act, only to react. No time to hope or to pray (despite his admitted disbelief in God) and no time to contemplate. The dog’s jaws latched onto his shoulder, its teeth going in deep, and he struggled to hold back a scream. The dog’s head moved from side to side, working at the meat, and he felt muscle tearing away from bone.
He had rolled closer to the knife, and as the dog concentrated on tearing off a piece of him, he reached out…reached out…farther, farther. Suddenly, his fingers fell upon the blade, and he scrabbled across the gravel to snatch it up. He found he was holding the knife the wrong way, by the sharp end, and he had to pause to switch his grip. The dog kept gnawing at his shoulder. Hot blood sprayed the side of his neck and his face.
Swiftly, and without thought, he brought the knife round in a wide arc and shoved it under the dog’s belly, feeling the blade sink in and tearing his arm across, to open up its stomach. He felt the contents of the stomach sac erupt onto his hand and run down his arm; stringy intestines wrapped around his forearm, trapping it against the side of the wound. There were also soft fibers in there, not dissimilar to the padding Corbeau’s wife had been pulling from the cushions when he’d seen her earlier. It was as if the dog was part flesh and part puppet: a construct. The dog struggled madly, and for a moment he thought he would black out from the pain, but then it relaxed its grip, the jaws opening slightly, and he was able to kick the body away and crawl a few yards across the stony ground.
He threw up on the ground, but vomiting was the only thing that kept him conscious. After lying back for precious seconds, sharp stones pressing into the rear of his skull, he sat back up and looked around. He could see the house from here, and the upstairs lights were blazing. The lower floor was in darkness. Silhouettes moved stiffly across the upstairs glass, as if he were watching a stylized dance of mummers or Japanese shadow puppets.
After he had regained his breath, Robert stood and staggered back a short way down the access road. He clasped his shoulder to stem the flow of blood, but the intense pain told him some serious damage had been done. The area was going numb; the pain was receding. That, too, felt like trouble.
He peered down and caught sight of Sarah’s outline. “Come on!” He tried to whisper loudly, aware if his family could hear him, there was a good chance other ears might also pick up on his signal. His only hope was that loud music was playing inside the house, or the Corbeaus were so confident that they had become blasé. “Come up!”
Sarah twitched; then she gathered the children together and jogged up the rise. Her face paled when she saw him, covered in blood, with guts knotted around his arm, and holding on to the knife with a force that made his hand shake. “I’m fine,” he whispered. “A dog attacked me.”