Creatures of the Night

Chapter One
The slip of green between the gate and the palisade made
Miss Laura forget about trying to remember her real
name. She stalled her walk through the carrot tops and
stared, heart aflutter. The gate was open, and no one was
watching over her. Voices carried. A rough and voluminous
sound. Beneath her brown jumper dress quaked a yet unfamiliar
desire to be seen. Men. The delivery men. One, the object of
many dreams, with the gentle politeness and trembling nervousness
of youth. The other dulled and wearied by the passing of
years. Miss Laura looked back at the closed door into the vast
scullery of the orphanage. She trembled.
The kitchen garden was the only place where the girl the
Sisters named Miss Laura could linger unsupervised and try to
remember her real name. Dawdling whenever sent to pick more
herb or root vegetables, she’d stand between the dirt mounds and
listen to the birdsong or the tapping of a woodpecker or the sigh
of wind passing through trees she could not see. In summer, the
hum of insects. One winter morning, before the dawn had scattered
the night creatures to their hidden places, the mournful
keening of wolf song. Now the last V of geese had passed across
the sky, and the northerlies carried orange leaves and scattered
them over the gardens and along the rooftops. Now the sight of
heath grass. Just a hint. Morning mists rose as heralds to the
white mantle that soon would cover the hills. Worlds beyond. All
the turning world. Miss Laura’s pulse raced. Another glance
around the surrounding garden walls and the pink-hued
windows of the towering school. She was alone. The men’s voices
were interrupted by short intervals of the firm and crackling
timbre of the Mother Superior. Now a call. A need. Urging and
daunting at the same time. Miss Laura’s mouth dried. The basket
for whatever they’d sent her to get bounced off the hardening
dirt beside her boot. Longing. Fly into forever and seek among
its sparseness and endless variety. The certainty of recapture.
What grasp she had on the shrinking remnants of any life before
further darkened by the punishment. The grating of busywork
and flagellation against her spirit. The hot sensation. Memory of
past canings tightened her back.
Miss Laura stooped to pick up the basket. Still alone. The gate
was still ajar. Miss Laura stood upright. The basket remained
tilted in the dirt. Miss Laura ran. Before fear’s hands could trip
her, she bounded over the concentric mounds that in their
seasons would yield the vegetables of so many more watery
broths. Though the thrill of passing across the stone threshold
urged her to look back and see the towering wall, now useless to
hold her, she did not. Though pricks of fear that pinched at her
nape urged her to see if the men pursued her upon their horses,
loosed from the delivery wagon, under the patient watch of
Mother Superior, she did not. There was no rumbling of hoofs.
There was only the swishing of her footfalls in the leaning grass
as she ran into distances immeasurable and unwalled.
She crested a rise crowned with jutting grey rock and sheltered
behind it. Thistle and thorn had snatched at the hems of
her jumper dress and pinafore and stuck in the threads. Miss
Laura panted for air. She peeked over the rock. Her white
wimple lay steadily wafting atop the grass midway back toward
the gate of the kitchen garden. The horses ducked and raised
their heads, and still were yoked. Through the gate was visible
the scullery door. A now unsealed edifice, black with a heart of
throbbing amber. The steps to the main entrance were vacant.
The big double doors were closed. The windows were curtained
and vacuous as dead eyes.
Across the heaths the forest waited. The bristly pines. The
billowing orange canopies of maple, ash, and oak receding and
showing the networks of their boughs beneath. Phalanxes of
conifer undergrowth offered shelter. Their long morning
shadows shrank across the rocky heaths toward their eaves as
though they devoured the darkness. Thick tree trunks, dense and
scattered in nature’s disorder.
A breeze picked up. The crumpling leaves rustled and
swarmed and twirled and scattered over the grass and the long
gravel road that cleaved a path from the open world to the prison
of stone and mortar and lumber.
Miss Laura pulled the pins from her hair and discarded them
among the twisting thorns. The trembling of her knees and the
panting for air were eased by waves of ecstasy that coursed
through her whole body. The wind worked its cold, caressing
fingers through her golden hair, and it raised and fanned around
her head. Miss Laura peeked over the rocks once more. The
service door on the main building beside the curving palisade of
the kitchen garden was guarded by black habits upon steady
figures. A man stood before the horses. He held a hessian sack
into which one horse plunged its snout while the other raised
and lowered its head and stomped one hoof with growing enthusiasm.
The man was broad. A dense body poised for aggression.
The stark white of his hair showed beneath the brim of his
bowler hat. A taller and slimmer man crossed upon long strides
from the back of the cart to the ladder up to the front boot and
sat upon the jockey box and his clothes better showed his figure
than the other man’s and he touched the edge of his toque and
the older man touched the brim of his bowler and gave a short
bow to the sisters and Miss Laura tore her eyes away.
Miss Laura wove her path between rocky protrusions and
snaring burrows and grasping brush. She clambered through the
growth that gathered in the troughs. Atop the next hill she risked
a glance over her shoulder. The hooded wagon moved from the
looming façade of the school, and the distant rhythmic squeak of
its iron-skein started along the road. Miss Laura hurried. On the
blind, windward downslopes where loose rocks and brush were
scattered, she slowed. At last, she pressed sideways through the
conifers. Drew long breaths to ease the flushing of her face and
tightness in her lungs. A sheen of sweat chilled against her brow.
Miss Laura staggered through the conifers. Prickly boughs
tugged at her hair and made her sticky. Deeper, the conifers
thinned and scattered among the trees. The lighter air and
cooling shadows of the forest lifted the weight off her shoulders.
Though fear taunted her with visions of sisters and of faceless
hunters with dense male bodies reaching to seize her from
behind or from inside every brush, the silence soothed the fright.
Miss Laura walked deeper into the endless labyrinth of wood
and bark and green and orange and earth. Every footfall
squelched into a bedding of dead leaves, and her heart steadied.
She tracked her way around the heathlands toward the road
while the conifers stood guard and sheltered her from view.
The ground tilted and dipped. Sharp rocks hid beneath the
leaves and tripped her steps. The cold numbed her nose and
brow. Small creatures darted from her invisible path, and
sunlight pooled beneath gaps in the canopy. Fractured and scattered
gold flakes atop the sea of fallen leaves. Running water
babbled somewhere. A deep gully, walled in moss-grown rock
and floored with fallen logs and harsh brush. A clearing. A mossy
log made a bridge across a clear stream in which sunlight danced,
ghostly over the smoothed pebble bed. Miss Laura stalled to dip
her hands and drink. Then walked. Hunger now lanced her belly,
and she had not yet found the road. Rocky diversions and fences
of fallen tree and brush altered her course, and stands of conifer
looked like those that edged the heaths, but were not. Tears of
doubt stung in her eyes. She walked. Soon. Surely soon.
The forest answered her with a faint scent of woodsmoke that
stole the freshness from the air. No reckoning of terrors could
stay the compulsion of hunger, so Miss Laura followed the scent
though it lured her deeper into the forest and away from what
she’d thought had been the way to the road. Down a steep path
between high banks of flowery brush. The trees thinned and then
yielded to a clearing where a wispy column of white smoke rose
into the haze from within a loose circle of bonnet-topped
wagons and the roofs of ornate vardos. A rip gouged the side of
one wagon’s bonnet.
Miss Laura approached. The high brush left behind her
rustled. Miss Laura froze. Her legs and arms locked. A twig
snapped, and Miss Laura ran.
She charged for the torn wagon and dropped and crawled
between the wide, wooden wheels and huddled on the other side
against the felly rim. Rapid footfalls thumped toward her. Wideeyed
and breathless, Miss Laura looked under the wagon. The
footfalls ceased. On the far side was only the fallen leaves and the
brush and the rocky gully she’d left behind. Heart beating hard,
Miss Laura sought with gathering fever the sight of the hunter’s
boots and legs beneath the encircling wagons and vardos or
within the circle and closing upon her.
Nothing surrounded her but the other wagons and vardos,
the wild and denuding canopy, and the stone-ringed pit of ashen
and skeletal tinder that gently hissed and issued its translucent
serpent of smoke. Somewhere, flies buzzed. Two of the vardos
listed with their wheels missing, and one was turned outward
with its back door open and facing her as though an invitation.
The shadows stretched. Night chill prickled the air. Miss
Laura caught her breath and listened. The only thumping now
was her pulse pounding in her ears. Somewhere, a bird mewled.
Hunger groaned. Weakened her and brought tears. Miss Laura
parted her arms from binding her curled legs. Footfalls shattered
the quiet and tore across the fallen leaves toward her, and Miss
Laura flung herself from beside the wagon wheel and turned
upon her back and screamed in terror. There was only the wagon
wheel. Its hub was like a pupil with the spokes the iris staring
back at her. The footfalls faded. Going and then gone over the
high rocky shelf that walled the gully.
Miss Laura lay and trembled until the hunger could allow her
no more. She stood. Legs, arms, and back still tensed at every
sound, real or imagined. The shadows stretched and melted
together and formed a darkening blanket that drained the forest
colors into tones of grey and blue and, in the fire pit, flecks of
bright orange peeked up from the pallid latticework of burned
tinder. Damp cold set in. Miss Laura crossed to the open vardo.
Trinkets were hung on the solid wood door with rawhide straps.
Something in the woods snapped and stopped her. A stride from
the step, she listened. A gentle padding on the bed of leaves just
beyond the wagons. She turned her head while a dark stirring
taunted her with fanciful terror that was more than the shape of
mere man. Darkness had much veiled the forest beyond the
circle. Like velvet walls closing in. The scraps of visible sky were
now the deep blue of the sea. Miss Laura uprooted her numb feet
and climbed into the dark and dry confines of the vardo. She
pulled the door shut behind her and blindly slid the latch home,
and pinched the base of her thumb in the metal. Smell of planed
oak and old fleece.
Miss Laura fumbled around in the darkness, blind and
knowing not what she sought among the folded stacks of thick
cloth and the hard edges of wooden boxes. The rounded side of a
small cask. There were no seats. The windows were boarded, and
a straw mattress was the floor. Miss Laura tucked her knees underneath her, lifted the cask, and found the top covered only
with rawhide, pulled taut like a drum. On her knees, she carried
the cask and felt for the other end of the coach. Here she set the
cask between her knees and felt out the edges of another crate.
Miss Laura looked over her shoulder. The deepest blue of day’s
dying light made a thin outline, broken by the hinges and the
latch of the door. Outside, a rustling. A breeze in the treetops. As
it passed off into the distance, a low, tapering howl followed it.
Chills crawled up Miss Laura’s spine. The sound’s mournfulness
was so human, and its power to rise and follow the breeze
through the sky was so animal, and all of it so was unlike any
sound yet described to her. A deep moan that despaired. Miss
Laura waited to hear it again, but there was only silence.
Miss Laura gripped the cask, inverted it, and slammed it
down onto the corner of the crate. Then she stopped. Listened.
No sound. She slammed the cask seal thrice more before a
hollow crack, and things pattered onto the crate top and mattress
and tapped her knees. Miss Laura turned the cask upright. Felt
around with her hands the dark of the floor first and gathered
what had fallen. The leathery feel of jerky beef. Feeling around
on the mattress, she found blocks bound in cloth and shakily
unwrapped them while ravenously chewing the tough beef.
Bread in one. Butter or cheese, the other. She bit into it. Cheese.
Hard lessons in dignity and manner taught by the strikes of
the Sisters’ canes were forgone as Miss Laura blindly gorged
herself until a knot in her stomach stopped her, and heavy waves
of fatigue belabored her every movement.
Another long stare toward the vardo door until the weight of
her eyes dragged Miss Laura down among the crumbs. She
placed the cask aside and lay with her head toward the vardo
door. No light at all peered through its cracks and nothing was
visible. A silence so great that her breathing seemed loud. Her
fingers found the edges of a heavy fleece and pulled it over her
body. Her muscles throbbed with the labors of the day. Her mind
could not even batter her with anxieties over every word spoken
and action made since sunrise, as was its ritual every night since
she could remember.
A shudder awoke Miss Laura to the same dark. She grasped
for the hands that shook her and sought the kerosene lamp held
by the sister at the dormitory door. Neither were there. Another
wave of terror lurched. Where was she? What had she done? Miss
Laura lay while her thoughts and senses regathered.
Another sound in the dark. A snort. Deep and heavy. Hard
against her little wooden shelter. Miss Laura tried to bring her
legs up under her, but she was powerless to defy the primal fear
that held her still and shallowed her breathing. Something
outside moved. It breathed deep and long through no human
nose. Sucking and expelling. So great the creature’s weight,
though its steps were measured and soft, there seemed to be a
displacement of the night the beast moved through. A shifting of
the air. It tracked along the side of the vardo from the front, soon
parallel to her feet and the open cask. Something thudded against
the wood. Another rush of air right against the boards of the
wall. Sniffing. A snout bigger than a dog’s or a wolf’s.
Tears ran from Miss Laura’s eyes. Silent tears that cooled
against her temples. Her body contracted as though trying to
shrink itself with convulsive shudders. Miss Laura waited, trembling
and quietly crying, for the bear to rip through the thin walls
and drag her out. Visions of fangs slobbering and closing on her
weak and soft little flesh. What such agony could be like. How
long it would go on for. A jolt shot through the vardo. A weak
wail escaped Miss Laura’s throat. Then nothing. Then a sound
poured like molasses into the quiet that she could not place to
any beast she knew. A guttural rumble. Deep and gargling. It
escalated until it erupted in a ragged blast, both high-pitched and
resonant, and Miss Laura cried for she thought it had rendered
her insides to gelatin. Another moment of silence and the crash
again. The wooden frame crackled, the floor tilted, and the beast
blasted its high ragged roar and slammed again and again the
sides of the vardo and cracking wood was everywhere and the
floor tipped and flung Miss Laura and blankets and crates came
hammering down and knocked the air from her and beat against
arms and legs and chest and head until lights swam before her
eyes. Pain that made her skull and bones screech inside her.

Chapter Two
Miss Laura lay on the inside wall of the vardo with the
straw of the mattress strewn about and wooden
boxes scattered on top of and around her and a tinny
screeching in her ears. Light. The door had fallen open and the
campsite, and the surrounding forest were all in their serene hues
while coppery morning light spilt through the canopy. Seized in
terror, Miss Laura burst from the grips of the pain that held her
all over and scrambled to the front of the vardo and bunched
herself against the far wall. Bile churned in her gullet. Her
stomach heaved in protest, and Miss Laura coughed and vomited
over her arms and legs. Whether hours passed or minutes, she’d
never know. The light had not much dulled its cold morning brilliance
when a detached voice from inside her aching head
warned her that she did not want to be near this place when
night fell again.
Miss Laura crawled across the wall to the sideways door.
Peeked out. Birdsong twinkled for the coming day, and leaves
twirled toward the forest floor. Stabs of pain pierced every
muscle. She stood outside the door and tensely inspected the
stony gully, the brush atop it, and the watchful trees footed by