Fauna (32 page)

The paperback came out downy with dust. Grandmother blew across it, sneezed and blew again. Darius looked down on the book’s cover. A face like a gold medallion, dark, sparkling eyes above a broad, majestic snout.

“It was her favourite,” Grandmother said, stroking the lion’s face. “She’d have taken it with her, I’m sure, if she
hadn’t left in such a rush.” She looked up at him. “Shall I read it to you?”

Darius wasn’t sure what to say. He was ten—plenty old enough to read for himself.

“He’d kill me,” she added quietly. “He’d kill us both if he knew.”

Darius bit his lip. “Okay.”

He sat on the bed while she took the small, hard chair that belonged to the desk. He had questions, the first uttered before she could even open the book.

“What’s a wardrobe?”

She thought for a moment. “It’s like a closet, only it stands on its own.” She turned to the beginning. “You be sure and listen for the truck.”

They weren’t far into the story—the four children had arrived at the professor’s country house and were upstairs talking—when Grandmother glanced up from the page.

“I’ve just remembered something.”

“What?”

“Your mother—she used to like me to say her name in place of Lucy’s. Lucy was Faye.”

Her face was soft as an old pillow, puffy and creased. Darius looked down at his hands, lying separate from each other in his lap. “Read it like that.”

“You want me to?”

“Yes.”

She took a breath. “‘“What’s that noise?” said Faye suddenly. It was a far larger house than she had ever been in before and the thought of all those long passages—’”

“Grandmother?”

“Yes, Darius?”

“Can I be—” He wanted to say Peter, the older brother who referred to the professor as
that old chap
, but it didn’t seem right somehow. Not when Lucy-Faye was the youngest. “Can I be Edmund?”

“Edmund? Are you sure? He has a pretty rough time of it.”

Darius nodded.

“All right.” She read on. “‘—the thought of all those long passages and rows of doors leading into empty rooms was beginning to make her feel a little creepy. “It’s only a bird, silly,” said Darius.’”

She read the whole first chapter: the children stuck indoors because it rained; the huge house offering up hallway after hallway, room after room. Darius had trouble imagining it—even school had only the one floor. Several rooms in the professor’s house were
lined
with books. Faye had sometimes flicked through the magazines at the laundromat, but she’d never brought any of them home. Grandmother had a few
Reader’s Digests
in her knitting basket and the heavy blue book of recipes on the kitchen counter; Grandfather had only the newspaper and the black leather bible beside his chair.

The idea of empty, extra rooms was bewildering. One had nothing in it but a wardrobe, which Lucy-Faye looked into on her own. She rubbed her face against the fur coats it held, then passed through them into a snowy wood. The little man she met there had the legs of a goat and, sticking up through his curly hair, a pair of pointy horns.

“Horns?”

“Yes, Darius.” Grandmother met his eye. “Not like that, though. You’ll see.”

They kept to a single chapter a day; anything more made Grandmother jumpy. She wouldn’t chance it on weekends, when they could never be sure of the old man’s movements. On Saturdays he might make a quick trip for supplies, or he might stop in at the mill to check up on the relief foreman and be gone for hours. On Sundays, after they’d sat down to buckwheat pancakes and ham, he would read to them from Leviticus or Proverbs or Romans I, often carrying on where the Scriptures left off. The weekend paper supplied no end of inspiration, stories about heathens who had no business coming over here in the first place, government money-grubbers and women who thought they were men. When Grandfather ran out of words, he generally filled his vest pocket with shells and took the twelve-gauge out for a walk. He might be back with a grouse slung over his shoulder in no time, or they might not see him again until Darius was laying the table for four.

All in all, it took them most of October to make their way through the book. Darius could see why Grandmother had warned him against being Edmund, and yet his name grafted easily onto the character’s back, as though they were made of the same poor stuff. He understood perfectly when Edmund-Darius couldn’t help being spiteful to Lucy-Faye—and later, when the boy in the book followed his sister through the wardrobe and stood calling her name in that unfamiliar world, Darius too grew sullen when she failed to reply.

It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine being impressed by the White Witch when she drew up in her sledge. Of course he accepted her gift of Turkish delight, whatever that might be. Of course he told her everything about himself and his siblings—even going so far as to offer them up in exchange for more of the magical treat. Never mind that it had turned him into a red-faced, sticky-fingered thing.

With the passing of every chapter, things grew worse for the little boy. Darius might not have had any brothers or sisters, but he knew well enough what it felt like to be left out. When Peter called his younger brother a
poisonous little beast
, Darius felt the injury keenly and shared in the dark fantasies it spawned.

It wasn’t until all four children came upon a talking beaver, though, that Darius slipped entirely under the story’s skin. Much of the tale had been foreign to him until then—the endless country house and its treasures, the odd, stilted manner in which the children spoke—but the beaver was Canada’s creature. He’d learned all about it in school, even before he came to live in the mountains and saw a dam with his own two eyes. How many times had he dreamt of entering a lodge via its secret underwater passage, of folding his flat tail and curling up wet yet somehow warm? And now he could—only this lodge had a door and a stove and a kitchen table, and it turned out to be another place Edmund-Darius didn’t belong.

The beaver lodge was where the children learned about the third element of the book’s title. Darius hadn’t realized he’d been waiting for the lion on the cover to appear until the beavers brought up his name. He felt a little nervous, like Lucy-Faye and Susan, but at the same time, like Peter, he longed for
the King of Beasts to appear. In his heart of hearts, though, like Edmund, he felt compelled to run.

When Edmund-Darius did make a break for it, no one noticed for the longest time. He got a good lead on them, making straight for the White Witch’s distant house. Darius felt the saliva well up under his tongue at the thought of the coming reward. It hurt to learn Lucy-Faye and the others never doubted the news that he’d betrayed them; it made betraying them the right choice.

Or if not right, then at least inevitable. Just as it was inevitable that he should grow colder and more miserable and more alone as he approached his protector’s house, and that it should turn out to be not so much a house as a castle surrounded by frightening statues—one of which turned out to be a living, breathing wolf—and that the wolf should lead him to the White Witch who, instead of welcoming him like the prince he might have been, mistreated him like the wicked little boy he was.

Edmund-Darius missed the visit of Father Christmas and the picnic of ham sandwiches and tea. Instead he got hard bread and water, and was forced to jam in alongside the witch in her sledge, and ride with no coat through the frozen dark. There was no fooling himself that she was a good queen anymore. You could still try when someone had only yelled at you and called you names, but not once they’d hit you. Not once they’d tied your small hands behind your back.

Lucy-Faye and the rest of them carried on without him, passing out of the witch’s winter into the lion’s gift of spring. Together they mounted the hill to the great stone table, where they met a host of well-meaning creatures, including the great beast himself.

Meanwhile, the witch had Edmund-Darius lashed to a tree. It came as a relief when she showed him her terrible white arms; the whiz of her knife against the whetstone was like a comforting sigh. He would be out of it now. No matter what else happened, none of it would be his fault. But this was a storybook, so instead of having his throat slit, he was rescued and reunited with Lucy-Faye and the others. Even less credible, he was forgiven by them all.

It was then that the story took a turn. Edmund-Darius was a traitor, and according to the deep magic, the White Witch was owed his blood. The witch knew it, and the lion knew it too. Darius nodded and began believing again.

When the story turned back on itself, and it seemed his character would be saved a second time, Darius wasn’t fooled. If he wasn’t going to die, it could only mean something worse was bound to occur. Right again. The lion had bought the little traitor’s freedom at a terrible price. He would lie down in Edmund-Darius’s place and let the White Witch have her way.

She could have done things quickly, cleanly, but Darius wouldn’t have bought it if she had. His own character was back at the camp with Peter, so he watched the scene of sacrifice through Lucy-Faye’s streaming eyes. Though the lion didn’t struggle, the witch had him bound. And shaved. And muzzled.

Again the witch bared her pale, pale arms. Grandmother read the closing lines of that chapter quietly: “‘The children did not see the actual moment of the killing. They couldn’t bear to look and had covered their eyes.’”

When the witch and her minions left to do battle, Darius assumed the story would follow them back to Edmund. Instead, it held vigil with the girls. Grandmother read slowly,
as though she never wanted that sad night to end. At one point she left such a long pause, Darius wondered if she’d slipped into an open-eyed nap. He was about to speak up when she read on.

“‘I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Faye were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness.’”

The story was real now, so real it threatened to drag Darius down and hold him under. And then the lion came back to life. It was worse somehow than when he’d been killed—the surge in Darius’s chest felt dangerous.

He wanted the reading to stop then, but Grandmother kept on, soft and unrelenting, through the part where the lion—his mane magically regrown—stooped to lick Susan’s brow, then on to the passage where he romped around madly with both girls,
tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws
. Darius was a stranger to such abandoned play. Son of a careless mother, he’d started out careful, watching his step long before he came to live under Grandfather’s roof.

Grandmother paused to smile at him, and he did his best to smile back. Then she bent her head and gave voice to the sweetest, most painful scene in the book. “‘Have you ever had a gallop on a horse?’”

Darius hadn’t, of course, but it scarcely mattered; the words made space for him to climb on.

“‘Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws …’”

The story should have ended when the ride on the lion’s back was done. True, the statues in the witch’s courtyard had to be brought back to life, and there was still the great battle to be fought, but Darius heard that chapter only distantly. Edmund had come good by then. He fought alongside Peter, but Darius found he couldn’t leave Lucy-Faye, so he watched with her from the sidelines like the coward he was. There was bloodletting, but not the particular blood Darius longed for. The lion simply rolled over the witch and she was dead.

His own character was gravely wounded. Again he should’ve died, and again the story saved him—this time by having Lucy-Faye drip cordial into his mouth with trembling hands. The thought of it made Darius’s stomach turn over beneath his heart.

Of course the good side won. Of course the four children became kings and queens, and threw a big party for all their new friends. The lion didn’t come, but nobody seemed to care. Lucy-Faye and Edmund-Darius and Susan and Peter got to live both lives—the royal one and the regular one they’d left behind in the professor’s home.

Darius was barely listening by then. The story had let him loose, and he’d bobbed back up to the surface of his own life—the room, cramped and brown around him, Grandmother with her grey head bent, the old man out there somewhere, due home soon.

T
he coyote is the first one Lily’s seen in the valley. She’s had hints of their presence before now—twists of hair-and-bone shit on the footpaths, the occasional shortlived howl—but they seem to keep a low profile in the city. And now she can see why.

Billy found the body, veering off the footpath with a jerk and crashing into the brush. Lily raised a hand to whistle him back but let it drop. There was something in there. Chances were it wasn’t good, but it had to be significant to work on him like that. She stood on the path for several seconds, then ducked to enter the twig tunnel he’d made.

It was dense but passable, patterned shadows and viscous light. She hadn’t far to go before she saw Billy humped over whatever it was. For a moment the tail was a ponytail, fluffy and blond. A girl, she thought, jeans down around her ankles—because that’s what you find in the bushes, isn’t it? Sooner or later, that’s what you find.

Now, as Billy noses over the body, hindquarters to head, Lily stands twisting her hands, a fellow mourner watching the widow weep over the corpse. Not that Billy was ever partial to the living article. She can remember standing at her bedroom window one fall evening and seeing him emerge from his doghouse, snout lifting to the breeze. Moments later, a high, mad song came floating. Billy bristled. Watching him, Lily felt her own hair—natural then, long and honey blond—felt it too rise up in its roots.

One coyote, then another, loped into view on the neighbouring field. The first came to a halt, tilting its head back as though its neck were a well-oiled hinge. The sound it offered up was unearthly; Lily felt the thrill run through her, heard it echo in the second coyote’s response. Giving voice, it leapt spine-first like a frightened cat. Landed and yelped and leapt again, this time rearing up on its hind legs like a man. The first sprang and gambolled, yodelling. Together they paused, together they broke into movement again, passing the song between them like a bone. Billy kept quiet, puffed and rigid out front of his little plywood house, but Lily pressed her forehead to the glass and whispered along.
Owooo, ow-ow-owooooo
.