Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (81 page)

He was close enough to the house for its silhouette to block most of the three figures who ran onto the bottom of the screen, one to collapse onto his hands and knees, another to drop his shotgun and tug a revolver out of his belt, the third to use his good hand to drag the blade of his hatchet against his jeans’ leg. The crab paid no more attention to the aurora’s display than it ever did; it was occupied withdrawing one of the red slugs from a beer trap. Ransom cleared his throat. “Heather said she never noticed William Harrow until his work boots were clomping on the front stairs. She looked up from her book, and there was this guy climbing to meet her. He must have been around our age, which is to say, late thirties. Tall, thin, not especially remarkable looking one way or the other. Beard, mustache…when I saw the guy, he struck me as guarded; to be fair, that could have been because he and Heather were already pretty far into a heated exchange. At the sound of the guy’s feet on the stairs, Bruce had stood; by the time I joined the conversation, the dog was trembling.

“The first words out of Harrow’s mouth were,
That’s my dog
. Maybe things would have proceeded along a different course…maybe we could have reached, I don’t know, some kind of agreement with the guy, if Heather hadn’t said,
Oh? Prove it.
Because he did; he said,
Noble, sit
, and Bruce did exactly that.
There you go
, Harrow said. I might have argued that that didn’t prove anything, that we had trained the dog to sit, ourselves, and it was the command he was responding to, not the name, but Heather saw no point in ducking the issue. She said,
Do you know what shape this animal was in when we found him? Were you responsible for that?
and the mercury plummeted.

“Matt came for me in the kitchen. He said,
Mom’s arguing with some guy. I think he might be Bruce’s owner.

“
All right
, I said,
hold on.
I turned off the burners under the scrambled eggs and home fries. As I was untying my apron, Matt said,
Is he gonna take Bruce with him?

“
Of course not
, I said.

“But I could see…as soon as I understood the situation, I knew Bruce’s time with us was over, felt the same lightness high in the chest I’d known sitting in the doctor’s office with Heather a year and half before, that seems to be my body’s reaction to bad news. It was…when Matt—when I…”

From either end of the plaza, from between two of the truncated buildings on its far side, what might have been torrents of black water rushed onto and over the concrete. There was no way for the streams to have been water: each would have required a hose the width of a train, pumps the size of houses, a score of workers to operate it, but the way they surged towards the trio occluded by the house suggested a river set loose from its banks and given free rein to speed across the land. The color of spent motor oil, they moved so fast that the objects studding their lengths were almost impossible to distinguish; after his initial viewing, it took Ransom another two before he realized that they were eyes, that each black tumult was the setting for a host of eyes, eyes of all sizes, shapes, and colors, eyes defining strange constellations. He had no similar trouble identifying the mouths into which the streams opened, tunnels gated by great cracked and jagged teeth.

Ransom said, “Heather’s approach…you might say that she combined shame with the threat of legal action. Harrow was impervious to both. As far as he was concerned, the dog looked fine, and he was the registered owner, so there was nothing to be worried about.
Of course he looks good
, Heather said,
he’s been getting fed!

“If the dog had been in such awful shape, Harrow wanted to know, then how had he come all the way from his home up here? That didn’t sound like a trip an animal as severely-abused as Heather was claiming could make.

“He was trying to get as far away as he could, she said. Had he been in better condition, he probably wouldn’t have stopped here.

“This was getting us nowhere—had gotten us nowhere.
Look
, I said.
Mr. Harrow. My family and I have become awfully attached to this dog. I understand that you’ve probably spent quite a bit on him. I would be willing to reimburse you for that, in addition to whatever you think is fair for the dog.
Here I was, pretty much offering the guy a blank check. Money, right? It may be the root of all evil, but it’s solved more than a few problems.

“William Harrow, though…he refused my offer straight away. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him. Maybe he was trying to prove a point. I didn’t know what else to do. We could have stood our ground, insisted we were keeping Bruce, but if he had the law on his side, then we would only be delaying the inevitable. He could call the cops on us, the prospect of which made me queasy. As for escalating the situation, trying to get tough with him, intimidate him…that wasn’t me. I mean, really.”

With the house in the way, Ransom didn’t have to watch as the trio of dark torrents converged on the trio of men. He didn’t have to see the man who had not risen from his hands and knees scooped into a mouth that did not close so much as constrict. He didn’t have to see the man with the pistol empty it into the teeth that bit him in half. And he did not have to watch again as the third figure—he should call him a man; he had earned it—sidestepped the bite aimed at him and slashed a groove in the rubbery skin that caused the behemoth to veer away from him. He did not have to see the hatchet, raised for a second strike, spin off into the air, along with the hand that gripped it and most of the accompanying arm, as the mouth that had taken the man with the pistol sliced away the rest of the third man. Ransom did not have to see any of it.

(At the last moment, even though Ransom had sworn to himself he wouldn’t, he had pleaded with Matt not to leave.
You could help me with the garden
, he had said.
You’ll manage
, Matt had answered.
Who will I talk to?
Ransom had asked.
Who will I tell things to?
Write it all down
, Matt had said,
for when we get back.
His throat tight with dread, Ransom had said,
You don’t know what they’ll do to you.
Matt had not argued with him.)

Its rounds of the garden completed, the crab was waiting at the gate. Ransom prodded the top of a carrot with the blunt end of the spear. “I want to say,” he said, “that, had Heather been in better health, she would have gone toe-to-toe with Harrow herself… weak as she was, she was ready to take a swing at him. To be on the safe side, I stepped between them.
All right
, I said.
If that’s what you want to do, then I guess there isn’t any more to say.
I gestured at Bruce, who had returned to his feet. From his jeans pocket, Harrow withdrew another blue collar and a short lead. Bruce saw them, and it was like he understood what had happened. The holiday was over; it was back to the place he’d tried to escape. Head lowered, he crossed the porch to Harrow.

“I don’t know if Harrow intended to say anything else, but Heather did. Before he started down the stairs with Bruce, Heather said,
Just remember, William Harrow: I know your name. It won’t be any difficulty finding out where you live, where you’re taking that dog. I’m making it my duty to watch you—I’m going to watch you like a hawk, and the first hint I see that you aren’t treating that dog right, I am going to bring the cops down on you like a hammer. You look at me and tell me I’m lying.

“He did look at her. His lip trembled; I was sure he was going to speak, answer her threat with one of his own…warn her that he shot trespassers, something like that, but he left without another word.

“Of course Heather went inside to track down his address right away. He lived off Main Street, on Farrell Drive, a cul-de-sac about a quarter of a mile that way.” Ransom nodded towards the stone expanse. “Heather was all for walking up there after him, as was Matt, who had eavesdropped on our confrontation with Harrow from inside the front door. The expression on his face…It was all I could do to persuade the two of them that chasing Harrow would only antagonize him, which wouldn’t be good for Bruce, would it? They agreed to wait a day, during which time neither spoke to me more than was absolutely necessary. As it turned out, though, Heather was feeling worse the next day, and then the day after that was Monday and I had work and Matt had school, so it wasn’t until Monday evening that we were able to visit Farrell Drive. To be honest, I didn’t think there’d be anything for us to see.

“I was wrong. William Harrow lived in a raised ranch set back about fifty yards from the road, at the top of a slight hill. Ten feet into his lawn, there was a cage, a wood frame walled and ceilinged with heavy wire mesh. It was maybe six feet high by twelve feet long by six feet deep. There was a large dog house at one end with a food and water dish beside it. The whole thing…everything was brand new. The serial numbers stenciled on the wood beams were dark and distinct; the mesh was bright; the dog house—the dog house was made out of some kind of heavy plastic, and it was shiny. Lying half-in the dog house was Bruce, who, when he heard us pull up, raised his head, then the rest of himself, and trotted over to the side of the cage, his tongue hanging out, his tail wagging.

“Heather and Matt were desperate to rush out of the car, but none of us could avoid the signs, also new, that lined the edge of the property: NO TRESPASSING, day-glo orange on a black background. Matt was all for ignoring them, a sentiment for which Heather had not a little sympathy. But—and I tried to explain this to the two of them—if we were going to have any hope of freeing Bruce, we had to be above reproach. If there were a record of Harrow having called the police on us, it would make our reporting him to the cops appear so much payback. Neither of them was happy, but they had to agree, what I was saying made sense.

“All the same, the second we were back home, Heather had the phone in her hand. The cop she talked to was pretty agreeable, although she cautioned Heather that as long as the dog wasn’t being obviously maltreated, there wasn’t anything that could be done. The cop agreed to drive along Farrell the next time she was on patrol, and Heather thanked her for the offer. When she hung up the phone, though, her face showed how satisfied she was with our local law enforcement.”

Beyond the house, the scene at the Empire State Plaza had faded to pale light. Finished checking the carrots and potatoes, Ransom crossed to the gate. The crab backed up to allow him to unlatch and swing it in. As the crab hurried out, he gave the garden a final look over, searching for anything he might have missed. Although he did not linger on the apple trees, they appeared quiet.

On the way back around the yard, the crab kept pace with him. Ransom said, “For the next month, Heather walked to Farrell Drive once a day, twice when she was well enough. During that time, Bruce did not leave his cage. Sometimes, she would find him racing around the place, growling. Other times, he would be leaping up against one wall of the pen and using it to flip himself over. As often as not, he would be lying half-in the doghouse, his head on his paws. That she could tell—and believe you me, she studied that dog, his cage, as if his life depended on it (which, as far as she was concerned, it did)—Harrow kept the pen tidy and Bruce’s dishes full. While she was careful not to set foot on the property, she stood beside it for half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. One afternoon, she left our house after lunch and did not return till dinner. When Bruce heard her footsteps, he would stop whatever he was doing, run to the nearest corner of the cage, and stand there wagging his tail. He would voice a series of low barks that Heather said sounded as if he were telling her something, updating the situation.
No change. Still here.

“She saw Harrow only once. It was during the third-to-last visit she made to Bruce. After a few minutes of standing at the edge of the road, talking to the dog, she noticed a figure in the ranch’s doorway. She tensed, ready for him to storm out to her, but he remained where he was. So did Heather. If this guy thought he could scare her, he had another thing coming. Although she wasn’t feeling well, she maintained her post for an hour, as did Harrow. When she turned home, he didn’t move. The strange thing was, she said to me that night, that the look on his face—granted, he wasn’t exactly close to her, and she hadn’t wanted him to catch her staring at him, but she was pretty sure he’d looked profoundly unhappy.”

The crab scrambled up the stairs to the porch. His foot on the lowest step, Ransom paused. “Then Heather was back in the hospital, and Matt and I had other things on our minds beside Bruce. Afterwards…not long, actually, I think it was the day before the funeral, I drove by William Harrow’s house, and there was the cage, still there, and Bruce, still in it. For a second, I was as angry as I’d ever been; I wanted nothing more than to stomp the gas to the floor and crash into that thing, and if Bruce were killed in the process, so be it. Let Harrow emerge from his house, and I would give him the beating I should have that September morning.

“I didn’t, though. The emotion passed, and I kept on driving.”

Ransom climbed the rest of the stairs. At the top, he said, “Matt used to say to me,
Who wants to stay in the shallows their whole life?
It was his little dig at his mother and me, at the life we’d chosen. Most of the time, I left his question rhetorical, but when he asked it that afternoon, I answered him; I said,
There are sharks in the shallows, too.
He didn’t know what to make of that. Neither did I.” Ransom went to say something more, hesitated, decided against it. He opened the door to the house, let the crab run in, followed. The door shut behind them with a solid
thunk
.

At the top of the garden, dangling from the boughs of the apple trees there, the fruit that had ripened into a score, two, of red replicas of Matt’s face, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth stretched in a scream of unbearable pain, swung in a sudden breeze.