The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

THE FOX Conrad Williams

The wind came for us as soon as we laid our heads on the pillows, as if it had been waiting for that moment. It spanked against the canvas, testing the guy ropes that were meant to keep the tent grounded. I kept thinking it would tear free at any moment and sail off into the sky. Kit was sleeping. Perhaps the weather didn’t affect her as much as it did me, or maybe she was able to shut it out; she was often talking to me about the powers of meditation. I concentrated on sleep but succeeded only in detecting another sound scampering around beneath the howl of the wind. It overcame the squeak of the tyre on the rope hanging from the oak branch, and the lowing of the cows in the next field, aggrieved at being out in such violent weather. It was something stealthier than that. Something that I almost dismissed as nothing, but for the way it kept coming back, like a heartbeat; trotting, slick. It might have been my wife’s breathing, and I might have believed that had I been tired enough.

I got out of bed and stumbled in the dark for the torch that I realised was still in the car down by the farmhouse. I checked on the children, Megan and Lucy, but they were softly snoring. You could always tell Lucy was deep because she would be murmuring, babbling, sometimes even laughing in her sleep. Her eyes were wide open. I was exactly the same when I was a baby. I bent over her and kissed her but she did not respond. There was a moment of panic when I thought that there would be something wrong, but she was breathing; she blinked when I brushed a fingertip against her eyelashes. It was as if she were doing what I had been doing, minutes before, listening intently to the scream of the weather, studying it almost, maybe identifying something that shifted beneath the patterns that were laid over the countryside. And I heard it again now. A beat against the flow; an anti-rhythm.

I went to the entrance that I had assiduously tied down not two hours previously, and started unpicking the knots. The tent smelled of old smoke from the stove that had been forced back down the flue by the wind. I paused as the last loop slipped free of the toggles. It was weird, feeling on the threshold between comfort and open miles of thrashing wild. Quickly, I ducked outside and loosely tethered the tent flaps. I could see nothing: cloud cover prevented any moonlight from picking out the shape of the farmhouse or the trees, though I could hear them hissing their shock over the ferocity in the sky. I felt afraid in that moment, at the glib way in which we had pitched ourselves against nature; thrown ourselves into the pit of the dark, separated from all it contained by one thin, trembling wall of canvas. It taught me, in a second, how dependent I was on light, and how the absence of it, rather than call to any base instincts in me, showed me how far removed I was from the wild. We’d come out here to connect, or reconnect, with nature. But that wasn’t quite it. We were finding the version of nature we expected: the field of sunflowers or rapeseed; scores of sullen, jawing cows; clean, clear lakes. Real nature, though, wasn’t about some plot of land set out of sight of the main road and an axe for you to chop your supplied share of logs to size. It was this anti-rhythm and the movement of things best suited to darkness.

I heard, as I was fussing with the tent ties, the slide of grass against something more substantial than wind. I got myself back inside, feeling under scrutiny, feeling the skin on my back tighten. I picked my way to the bedroom where the walls were heaving like bellows, and Kit was a pale shape on the bed, uncertain, ill-defined, something being dissolved. I lay next to her and, risking her anger at being woken up by my cold body, held on to her. She moaned, and shifted away slightly, but did not stir. I listened to the snuffling and scuffling around the fringes of the tent and I wished I had tied down the knots in the flap more tightly.

I dream of russet flames flickering over white, and black slashes through amber. Do you keep secrets from your wife? I do … Christ, I do …

When I woke up, the bed next to me was empty. The wind had died down and there was a familiarity to the silence; it seemed settled, steeled somehow. There was a note on the dining table: Gone to see if there are any eggs for breakfast. Can you get a fire going? Need coffee! I swept open the tent flap and was shocked by what I saw. Snow everywhere; a good couple of inches of it. I was struck by the bizarre notion that the blustery weather had been pinned down by it, like something nasty swept under a rug. It was so expansive, so unbroken, I had to shield my eyes to be able to see anything within it. I stood and rubbed my arms, wishing I’d brought an extra sweater and trying to understand what exactly was “glamorous” about “glamping.”

My wife was on maternity leave from her job as a primary school teacher, but I work in academic publishing (lots of dry articles, punctuated by occasionally fascinating pieces on art or literature or history) and a slew of deadlines over the summer meant we’d been unable to get away for any kind of family break until the autumn half term. A “staycation” in a tent — albeit a very upmarket one — near the New Forest had not been my idea of a holiday. I was angling more for a week in a bustling city that also had some nice beaches — Barcelona, say, or Tunis — but Kit had demanded something flight-free. I was trying to understand how it was that we’d ended up on a posh camping trip to Siberia when I spotted the girls, a couple of hundred yards away, hunched over the chicken coop. Something wasn’t right about their shape. I saw Kit trying to move Megan away from the chicken-wire fence; Lucy lolling around in the carrier strapped to Mum’s shoulders. I saw Kit’s face as she turned back towards the tent, a white oval, but at this distance I could see the concern stitched into it. I knew my wife, and her postures of defence. I hurriedly pulled on my jogging bottoms and ran barefoot down the hill, wondering how far it was to the nearest hospital. But Kit would have started to move, wouldn’t she? She’d be calling out to me, or hurrying the girls down to the house, where we had parked the car.

Megan was trying to push past her mother and now I was able to breathe more easily. Kit was just trying to shield Lucy from what was inside the coop. Or rather, what wasn’t. The chicken-wire had been torn open. All four chickens were gone. No feathers, no signs of a fight whatsoever. Just one spot of blood on the ramp leading into what Megan had been referring to as the “chook-chook’s bunga-oh.”

“Kit?” I called out.

“Can you take Megan back up to the tent?” Kit’s voice was taut, flustered.

I took Megan by the hand and gently drew her away. I was thinking about foxes, but they didn’t kill and eat things on the spot, did they? Didn’t they take them away to eat? And didn’t they just take one? Four chickens, there had been. I’d counted them with the girls on our arrival. Foxes didn’t hunt in packs.

“I’m going down to the house,” Kit said. “To let them know.” She moved away with Lucy when she was sure Megan was no longer able to see the blood. Megan didn’t understand what the big deal was and, to be honest, neither did I.

“I know the chickens is being deaded,” she said. “I could see the blood comed out.”

“We don’t know what happened,” I said. “There was only a little bit of blood. Maybe one of the chickens had a nosebleed. Or a beakbleed.”

“Or maybe it was hurted by something that wanted to eat it all up.”

“You could be right,” I said. “Sometimes, in the countryside, there are animals that want to eat other animals.”

“Then why did it eat all of the chickens?”

“Maybe it was hungry. Really starving hungry. Or maybe the chickens escaped. Maybe whatever it was got scared away. The farmer might find them later.”

We walked back to the tent and I persuaded Megan to stop talking about the chickens and do something else until Kit and Lucy returned. “Look,” I said, “you brought a big pile of books. Read something. Or draw a picture.”

I cajoled a small fire out of the kindling and newspaper and was waiting for the right time to add one of the halved logs when Kit and Lucy pushed through the tent flap, dragging the cold with them. The baby’s smell was in it; sharpened, cleaned. I went over and kissed her velvet head as she goggled at me from the carrier. She was gumming at one of Kit’s knuckles — she was probably cutting a tooth — and Kit used her free hand to flick at the strands of brown hair that fell across her vision, something she often did, even when it was too short to hinder her sight, when she was annoyed or nervous.

“The farmer’s utterly perplexed. He said they’ve not had a fox problem here for years. He’s out of his head with worry. Says it’s not good for business.”

“Us, he means. Paying guests.”

“I suppose so. At least it shows he’s concerned.”

“Will he do anything about it though?”

Kit sat down and started unclipping Lucy, her fingers spooling with drool. “What can he do? It’s nature. We don’t get free eggs in the morning, that’s all.”

“But it just gives carte blanche to any meat-eating animal out there to come and attack our holiday site. Bears. Tigers. Velociraptors.”

“Oh, you’re making light of the situation. That’s good, I suppose. Is Daddy being silly? Is he?”

I had to turn away because I didn’t want her to see the sweat building up on my face. I had done it with my own hands and I had smiled while doing it. Fourteen then, just. Old enough to know better, I suppose. And now, over forty, I couldn’t think about it without feeling horribly nauseous. The child is father to the man. Well, yeah, maybe. The child is also a hideous, bastard stranger.

I concentrated on the fire while Kit changed Lucy and Megan showed us the picture she’d drawn of the chicken coop, which was little more than a mass of red felt tip. We had breakfast and while Megan cleaned up the dishes, I eyed the edge of the field, wondering what we were supposed to do now. The planned cycle ride looked unlikely; I doubted these secluded roads had ever encountered anything as exotic as a council gritter. Similarly, the fields, which had appeared so inviting on the day of our arrival, were now forlorn and desolate. I knew from bitter experience that there was nothing so dispiriting as a forced march across wintry countryside. It was to the blanket box that I turned; inside, on top of the extra bedclothes, were a number of stacked, worn cardboard boxes. Board games and jigsaw puzzles. The puzzles were serious affairs; I couldn’t see Megan sustaining her interest in completing a picture of the Swiss Alps from ten thousand pieces. The board games were hardly better. Players’ tokens and dice were missing; the lack of instruction manuals meant some games were impenetrable. But we bumbled through it all until lunch. Megan seemed happy enough just playing with some of the plastic tokens.

I put together a table of salad and cold meats and we ate the food without the same fervour as we might if it had been warm outside. Soup or something hot on toast seemed the more suitable meal. Bolstered by fuel, however ill-fitting, I felt freshly determined to make something of the day, especially as the leaden sky was breaking up and patches of blue were appearing. I chased the girls into their boots and wrapped Lucy warm before getting her into the sling that I’d positioned around my shoulders. Every time I secured her there, and then stood up, I was shocked by how heavy she was getting. It would be hard work — my back would be damp, my shoulders sore by the time we finished our walk — but I would be rewarded by being able to nuzzle her head and feel the strong grip of her tiny fingers upon my own.

I loaded the stove with a couple more logs in the hope that the fire would keep going until we got back and then we were out in the fresh air, shocked by the cutting attack of it. It was like jumping into icy water. Lucy giggled as she snatched at gasps the wind was trying to steal back from her mouth. Megan went on ahead as we made our way down to where the narrow path that ran alongside a stark, weather-blackened fence (now concealed by a good foot of snow) led to a pond and a play area. You could just make out the shapes through the trees, maybe half a mile away. I’d brought along a few plastic bags and a towel to clear away the snow and dry off the seating areas, knowing that Megan would want to have a go on the swings and the slide. Kit fell into step by my side and clutched at me. Already the deep cold had stiffened her hands. She suffers from Raynaud’s phenomenon, which causes her fingers and toes to become discoloured and inflexible in cold weather. In serious cases it can bring about gangrene, but luckily, Kit’s symptoms ran only to a paling of the skin and a little numbness.

She lifted her head to smile at Lucy and a fan of her brown hair fell from the hem of her woollen hat, sweeping across her sight to isolate her eye so that it seemed strangely dislocated from her. There was a lack of colour to her eye, shaded as she was both from the growing light, and that small, protective curtain of hair. It was more like a black hole, unresponsive, lifeless. For a brief second, I was looking into the face of a person I did not know at all, despite ten years of marriage. The jolt that I got from that was disguised by our unsure tramping over uneven ground, and when she shifted her gaze and her smile to favour me, she was Kit again — filled with vim and the combative teasing I found so alluring — and the moment was gone.

The smell of woodsmoke drifted down from the tent.

“How are your fingers?” I asked.

“Like a bundle of sticks,” she said. “If we get low on kindling later, just ask me and I’ll snap a couple off for you.”

I winced, but she was smiling. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s not as if we’re on our way to have a crack at the north face of the Eiger, is it?”

We watched Megan enter the circular paddock that contained all the playground rides. Emptiness was developing a theme with me; with her hood up, and for as long as she didn’t turn around (her legs and feet, in white stockings and Wellington boots were lost to the background), you might almost believe her coat was being animated by the wind and nothing else. It was an observation I’d normally have shared with Kit, but coming so soon after the illusion of her eye, I wasn’t confident I could keep the edge from my voice. Anyway, Lucy had spotted the rides too by now and she was reaching out to them, making little cooing noises in her throat.

I called out to Megan to wait while I dusted off the snow with the towels — Lucy jiggling around and yelling in the carrier as I did so — and then suggested using the bin bags as makeshift sacks to sit in once she’d climbed to the top of the slide. Holding on to Lucy as I pushed her on the swing, I could see Kit huddled into her coat as she watched Megan repeat the journey from the bottom to the top to the bottom again, each trip accompanied by her laughter, which was distorted within the rustling of the bin bag.

And then, as Lucy was beginning to get upset by the cold her motion was creating, Megan’s clockwork descent failed to occur. I could just see the tips of her boots sticking out from the metal guard flanking the slide’s top deck. “What’s up, Meg?” I called, as I lifted Lucy from the swing and began the arduous task of strapping her back into her pouch. “Have you frozen up there?”

Kit strode to the slide and reached out her arms. “What is it, chick?”

Megan was crying. Now that we’d spotted something wrong, the tears came harder, her upset suddenly more audible. “Thuh-thuh-puh, poor chu-chicken,” she was saying, over and over. I went up the ladder and coaxed her down the slide to her mum. Kit held her while she stuttered and hitched. She was worried the fox, or whatever it had been, would come back for the rest of them, once the farmer had rounded them up.

I stood up and banged my head on the slide roof. Biting down hard on the stream of swear words queuing to be aired, I turned around and saw a red stain in the snow, about six feet shy of the water’s edge. Jesus, I thought. What now?

“Wait here,” I called to Kit, jumping to the ground. Entwined with Megan, she gave me a look as if to say, Where do you think I’m going to go? I tramped out of the paddock and south, my eyes fixed on that patch of red. I found myself thinking: please let it just be blood.

It was a fox, lying on its flank, nose pointing towards the pond, legs arranged as if in mid-trot. It had recently died, I guessed, although with the drop in temperature and the lack of flies, it was difficult to tell. Its eye stared in accusation but whatever had killed it was no longer in evidence. Poison, I thought, but would that be likely on a farm where children were given free rein? I thought it might have been shot, but there was no blood, no sign of ballistics. Which didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, of course. The cold had got inside me, despite the fleece-lined jacket; despite the insane baby-heat of Lucy.

I was going to leave it but a voice in my head told me to wait. Turn it over. Make sure.

It was preposterous. Twenty-five years had gone by. It was time to walk away; I didn’t need Lucy spending any more time with a dead animal. What if it was diseased, for Christ’s sake? But in spite of myself I pressed my boot into the stiff curve of its gut and toed it over. The bright green of the grass it revealed was as much a shock as finding its other eye absent. I stalked back to Kit and Megan. Megan had rallied somewhat, perhaps persuaded that there were going to be no more chicken murders, but truth be told, I was feeling a little ragged and emotional. A dead body is a dead body, no matter what species. Never nice to see. At least, that’s what I was choosing to blame my quickening breath and sweaty palms upon. It was an excuse, at least, to call time on our little expedition and we hurried back to the tent where the wood in the stove was burning ferociously. I warmed up some milk from the cool chest and made hot chocolate.

I finished mine first and started pulling my boots back on.

“What now?” Kit said.

“It’s my turn to break the news to the farmer. He needs to know his charming little couple of acres is turning into a slaughterhouse.”

“It’s just a dead fox,” she whispered.

“It could have been poisoned,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of our kids skipping gaily through the daisies and kicking up lethal pellets in their wake. Or it could have died from some nasty ailment. What if it’s contagious?”

I took Kit’s silence for agreement and got myself outside before she could throw up any more barriers.

If you’re a parent, especially of young children, you’ll appreciate how rare it is to find yourself on your own. There’s always some task involved, whether it be the school run, playtimes, bath-times, or meals and all those bits in between, which usually involve nappies from hell and the kind of weird conversations you imagine could only ever happen elsewhere if you were behind the walls of a prison for the mentally deficient.

Being back outside in that crystallised air felt suddenly different because of the solitude, even though it had only been a matter of half an hour since our visit to the playground. It was strange. I understood, a little, what it must be like to be a wild animal mooching around in open countryside. I felt hunted, exposed. Guarded. I walked by the tyre swing, kicking off its cap of snow, and enjoyed the dissonance between the creak of the rope and the crunch of my boots in the white. I glanced over at the slide, and to the right, the pond. I stopped. The green patch was there: a weird, bucolic fox-ghost, but the fox itself was gone. I thought about that for some time. A good thing, obviously. You don’t want corpses lying around a child-friendly campsite. Obviously the farmer was up and about, perhaps alarmed into action by that morning’s incident at the coop. But it all seemed very … swift. And it bothered me slightly that the farmer, if he had retrieved the fox, hadn’t come to let us know. I couldn’t believe that he’d just want to sweep it under the carpet; he surely would have seen my footprints and we were the only people staying on his land. A hired hand, then. Someone who didn’t know that we knew the chickens had been attacked. Well, I’d soon find out.

The main living quarters of the farmhouse was a long building with a low roof. Part of it had been turned into an honesty shop; you went along and stocked up on whatever you needed — bread, bacon, pasta and the like — writing down what you’d taken in a large ledger, and at the end of the week it was totted up and added to your bill. Further along were some centrally-heated showers for those guests who didn’t want to trust themselves to the tepid showers running off the heat from the stoves in the tents. Across the way was a large barn filled with bales of hay wrapped in black polythene to feed livestock over the winter months. I drove Kit nuts whenever we saw them in the fields because I would always be compelled to say: “Big rabbits around here.”

The farmer lived at the end of the row; his car, a BMW, was parked next to ours. It hadn’t been anywhere for a while. Snow still covered the bonnet. I took the opportunity to rescue our torch from the glove compartment just as a pink oval slid across the inside of a kitchen window hung with pretty, blue curtains. There was the chunk of a heavy lock sliding back and the farmer appeared at the door, wiping his mouth with a black napkin. “All okay?” he asked. “Do you need more wood?”

“No thanks,” I said. “We’re okay for wood. I was going to tell you, in light of what happened this morning with the chickens … we found a fox up by the pond. It was dead. But it’s gone now. I just looked. I guess you must have found it.”

His face had changed from polite curiosity to alarm, his skin colouring all the while.

“I didn’t move anything,” he said, with a force to suggest he would otherwise have left it there to rot. It was beginning to snow again: big, serious flakes. If it carried on for much longer, getting home would become a problem.

“Then you have some pretty efficient scavengers knocking about,” I said.

“Show me,” he said, and held up his finger to indicate I should wait. A minute later he reappeared wearing a dark green windcheater and a woolen hat.

I took him back the way I’d come and pointed beyond the fence at the pond. Immediately, he climbed over and started striding through the thigh-high grass, snow shivering and tumbling in his wake. He cast glances back over his shoulder as we came around the lower edge of the pond. It was only as we were nearing the fence on the other side that I realised he was asking me silent questions: we’d bypassed the body’s location. Snow had erased the green patch. No amount of kicking through the ground layer would reveal the fox’s final resting place now.

“Do you have an assistant?” I asked. “A lad?”

“I do. But he’s not in today. It’s just me.”

“What could have taken it?”

The farmer shrugged and eyed the clouds. “Hawk?”

“Another fox?” I said.

“I bloody well hope not,” he said. “I spent an age on that coop today, reinforcing it. Two chickens in there now. Anyway, foxes aren’t social. They’re lone wolves, if you see what I mean.”

“I hope you’re right. I’ll keep an eye out, anyway.”

The farmer nodded. “You’re staying on then?”

“Of course. The weather’s a bit grim, and we’ve got an upset daughter, but this is our holiday. We’ll make the best of it.”

“Well, thank you. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this in any online reviews you might write. Quite up to you, of course, but … well, people come from the towns and the cities to the countryside and it can … surprise them now and again. Nature. You can’t control it, can you?”

What a day. Little had happened, really, but what had was intense, memorable, life-changing perhaps. There was plenty to talk about but Kit and I did everything we could to steer the obvious discussions towards safer waters. We got Megan into her pyjamas and stroked her hair and reassured her. We promised her that no matter what the weather was like in the morning we’d go for a trip out somewhere special. Horse riding maybe.

Once Megan was in bed, I asked her what story she wanted me to read to her.

“The Hungry Ghosts,” she said.

“What?”

“The Hungry Goats.”

I flipped through the pile of books, unnerved and not fully understanding why. Here it was: The Hungry Goats. The cover showed a picture of a goat happily munching on clothes hanging from a washing line. I read her the story, delivering the lines with more gusto than usual, and tucked her in.

Kit accepted a small glass of red wine from me and settled into the rocking chair with Lucy for her evening feed. Kit seemed swollen and in pain, the milk dripping from her nipple even as Lucy’s mouth sought it. I watched my daughter suckle at that heavy breast, never failing to be fascinated by her appetite, and the way she stared, wide-eyed and curious, up at Kit’s face as she guzzled her meal. Despite myself, I was getting aroused. My wife had embodied the blossoming cliché in pregnancy. Her skin glowed. Her hair was so soft.

Nature. The hungry ghosts.

“I’m going to check the ties,” I said. Kit was smiling at me, one eyebrow arched. She knew me so well. I slipped from the tent, trying to hide my erection and served only to draw attention to myself.

You can’t control it, can you? I had tried. Many years before.

I went out into a cold that was fierce enough to draw tears from my eyes; it was being stirred by a restless wind. At least the snow had stopped. I went around the perimeter of the tent, checking knots and listening for sounds beneath the howl of the wind. I thought I could hear the chickens sounding rattled in their coop, perhaps because of the repairs the farmer had made, or a memory of the traumatic event that morning, if poultry even had memories. Well, here was one chicken who could remember. In detail so vivid it was like flicking through a catalogue of photographs.

That day. I was fourteen years old. I’d gone out feeling torn up inside as if someone had injected a million pieces of hot glass into my lower abdomen. I’d been seeing a girl. Alice, her name was. We used to kiss and fondle each other through our clothing for hours, and then she’d go home, leaving me feeling congested and annoyed. Masturbating was a poor substitute. Although I was a virgin, I knew I wanted to go all the way with Alice, who was a year older. She’d already done it with a previous boyfriend, but she said I was too young and she didn’t want to take the risk. If I made her pregnant, that would be both our lives ruined, and if anybody found out she was sleeping with a fourteen-year-old, she’d be arrested. Not to mention the social stigma. She’d be torn apart.

So we got flustered and sticky in her room one afternoon when her parents were at work and we should have been in school. It was winter; it was cold. We clung to each other as much to try to get warm as for any hope of progressing from fingers under jumpers and French kisses which left our mouths sore. Then she pushed me away; I think I’d put my hand down the back of her knickers.

“You can’t do that,” she said, as if it was a game of Scrabble and I’d submitted a proper noun. By that time I was resigned to another evening of blue balls so I allowed my temper to come through and I told her to fuck off and I left. She didn’t come after me, which I’d secretly been hoping for, and I walked all the way home expecting the truancy officer to jump me at any minute. Only I didn’t make it back. I would have done, had I taken the route I followed ninety-nine times out of a hundred; right at the Horse & Jockey, over the railway bridge by the scrap-iron yard, along Folly Lane and right into the street where I lived. But this time I went down Hawley’s Lane, past the gasworks and under the railway, turning left towards the road that ran parallel to Folly Lane, but on the south side of the school rather than the north; the better to avoid any staff.

I was dawdling, trying to time it so I’d get home at the time I usually arrived after school finished. The edge of the school fields came down to the corner of that road; later it would all be sold for the inevitable march of cheap housing. We were spoilt, back then, for green spaces.

I saw Beaky and Hardman, two lads from my year. The teachers probably didn’t even know their given names. They might as well have been christened Ne’er-do-well Beak and Trouble-maker Hardman, rather than Anthony and Charlie. They weren’t solid mates of mine, but we were on nodding terms and back then that was good enough to merit passing half an hour in someone’s company. Sometimes I let them see my homework book, in return for chocolate or cans of pop.

Charlie was carrying something.

“What have you got there?” I asked him.

“It’s our kid’s,” he said, as if I’d accused him of thieving it. It was an air rifle. A handsome one.

“Give us a go.”

“Knob off,” Charlie said. “We’re going down the woods, see if we can bag us a jay. Ant’s granddad wants a blue feather for his hat. Said he’d give him a tenner if he got him one.”

I fell into step with them though I hadn’t been invited along. I asked them if I’d been missed at school and neither of them said they’d heard anything. Beaky asked me where I’d been and I curried favour by giving them some juicy details of my time with Alice, much of it fabricated.

By the time we got to the clearing in the woods, the sky had become close and metallic; it was March and the weather would not improve for at least another month. Beaky set up some targets on the old collapsed tree trunk: a discarded Barratt’s Shandy can, a bottle filled with earth, a polystyrene cup. Charlie went first, pumping the action to load the gun with compressed air and loading the breech with a tiny metal pellet from a tin in his pocket. He missed every time.

“We’re only twenty feet away,” I said.

“Do you want a go, or not?”

Beaky went next. I could tell he was pissed off that I was there, and that they’d have to share the pellets. At least he hit something; the glass bottle. But because it was full of soil it didn’t shatter in the satisfying way we’d expected. It just made a kind of dull noise and split in two. He was happy enough, though. I accepted the rifle from him, along with his cocky rejoinder that he’d like to see me beat his so-called “high score.”

“Just imagine Alice’s fanny instead of the target and you’ll nail all of ’em,” Charlie said. And though I didn’t want her to be there, Alice slipped into my thoughts in her tight T-shirt and short-shorts, her hair tied back, her lips shiny with gloss. I felt heat for her in the centre of my belly and busied myself getting a decent stance and shutting out all the chatter from the boys.

I pumped the action and raised the sight to my eye. I blinked, and there was fire.

I daren’t breathe. The fox came out from behind the tree like something made from the space it occupied; it didn’t seem real. This wood was too dull and lustreless for it. I actually thought that, once it saw us and scampered away, its flicking tail would paint glorious colour into every dark grey or dark green niche it passed in front of.

“Shoot it,” Beaky said.

I didn’t hesitate.

I don’t know why I did it. I was blinded by its sinuous beauty, smiling at the everyday miracle of it — we’d often heard urban foxes, these known and yet utterly alien creatures, loosing their banshee screams in the winter streets, on the prowl for something tasty hanging from an overloaded dustbin — even as I pulled the trigger. The noise of the air gun, an ugly spit of violence, did not cause the fox to flinch and scamper away; I doubt it even heard the retort. It went down as though it had been instantaneously filleted of every bone in its body.

“Bastardo!” Charlie laughed. “Clint Eastwood or what? You coldblooded killer.”

We went to inspect the body. The pellet had taken its eye out. I felt queasy. I had a hard-on for the vestiges of Alice in my memory, and now this. It didn’t feel right.

“What are you going to do?” Charlie asked. “You should skin the fucker. Take its head off. Have it as a trophy.”

“It’s a fox,” I said. “It’s not a rhino.”

“Bury it, then,” Beaky said. He was reaching for the rifle.

“You bury it.”

“Not my mess.”

I placed a hand against the fox’s flank. It was warm and soft. I felt something moving through it. The last pulse of blood, maybe. Muscle memory. Something. I half expected the colour of it to come away on my skin when I lifted my hand clear.

Boredom was setting in. Beaky and Charlie ended up taking pot shots at the sky. They asked if I was coming and I said no. They wandered off. Charlie said something hilarious about fox AIDS and wearing a condom, and then it was just me and the fox and the closing of the day. I stayed for another hour, until it started to rain. I’d left my coat at Alice’s. I felt myself shiver and I could no longer look at the fox because with every tremor of cold it felt as though it was the fox, and not me, that was moving.

I wanted to bury it, but the ground was too hard. In the end I toed a stack of leaf mould over the body. I said I was sorry. And I left.

That night I came down with the shittiest cold I’d ever had. I remember Mum sitting with me for some of it, though I can’t remember what she said at the time. She was holding my hand. Sweat was lashing off me. With the coming of dawn, it seemed to just vanish, as if it was something that could only exist at night-time. Since then we always referred to it as my vampire flu. Mum said she was worried I might have contracted pneumonia and she was dithering over a call to the emergency services on a couple of occasions when my breath turned shallow, but Dad stayed her hand and told her to wait.

I ate an enormous breakfast and slept all day. My dreams were filled with red. I was well enough to go out that evening, a Saturday, and Alice had called, but I put her off. I took Dad’s raincoat and went back to the woods on my own. The fox was gone from the mound of leaves. I’d kind of expected that. I was getting a sore on my palm from where I kept rubbing it against my jeans. I felt the same movement I’d felt within the dwindling fox echoed in my own chest.

I went a bit nuts then, thrashing around in the rain and mould, kicking over the targets from the day before, to the point where I was exhausted with panic, little yelps rising from my throat. And when I’d stopped having my self-indulgent fit, the yelps continued. I went behind the huge banks of rhododendron bushes that surrounded the clearing and was hit by the cold, damp smell of musk just before I saw a litter of fox pups; I counted six of them. Somehow they’d climbed out of their earth, but they were tiny and blind, still. They were cold and starving. I was too wiped out by my outburst, and the aftershock of the flu, to feel anything but dismay. I moved as though someone else was controlling me. I took off the raincoat and tied its sleeves together to form a handle. I picked up the fox cubs and placed them inside, trying to ignore the little nips and licks they gave to my knuckles. I knelt down close to the entrance to the earth and listened but it was quiet in there now. I zipped up the coat and pulled the toggles shut at the bottom, creating a loop with the ends, then drew the hood down over the coat and tucked it through the loop, tying it off tightly. In the rain, I hurried home, pausing on the way to dump the fox cubs in the canal. I never went back to the wood again.

In the dark, a bleating.

I had stayed up late, reading. I spend so much of my waking day poring over dry texts that it’s something of a blessed relief to have some time to wallow in a bestseller so purple you have to check your fingers afterwards in case they’ve been dyed beetroot. The girls had gone to bed a couple of hours previously. I’d worked my way through half a bottle of merlot and I was approaching a state of relaxation where I thought I might be able to sleep. No gales tonight.

I found myself reading the same line over and over. Tiredness. But there was something wrong. Something I’d read. Tonight? A feature I’d worked on in the past? Something nagged at me like a child prodding a worm with a stick. Something to do with foxes. Or maybe it was just that I’d seen only chickens and cows at the farm. No sheep. Which didn’t mean there weren’t any, of course. It was a big farm, and we hadn’t explored as fully as we might.

Again, bleating, in the distance. It sounded all wrong. It sounded horrible. Was it a sheep trapped or injured? A sheep giving birth? Wasn’t it a bit early in the year for lambing season?

I thought about heading down to the farmer but what if he didn’t have any sheep? I could imagine the disdain, like something tangible, pouring off him. Not you again. And another fruitless quest to find an animal that wasn’t anything to do with him. No. But it was under my skin now and I had to check it out. I’d be listening out for that bleat all night otherwise.

I pulled on my boots and coat and reached for the torch. A quick check on the tribe — Kit out for the count, Megan and Lucy safe and warm, curled up with each other in their secret den — and I let myself out. Clear sky, big moon. The snow had developed a thin crust, and my boots made a satisfying crunch through it as I headed down past the chicken coop and the two unoccupied glamping tents to the far edge of the field. The bleating came again. It sounded desperate; reconciled, even, to its fate. At least it seemed as though I was heading in the right direction.

I came to the edge of the field and negotiated a collapsed portion of wooden fencing mired with rusty barbed wire. Moonlight picked out a set of tracks in snow that had otherwise remained untouched since it settled. They weren’t sheep tracks, though. These were shallow, made by something small and fleet. I breathed deeply and felt the cold scour away all the torpor that had draped over my limbs earlier. I felt fresh and alive, alert. Wildness awaking in the lizard part of the brain. I felt I could sense sap shifting through the smallest netted veins of a leaf; trace the course of a money spider’s journey through the air on gossamer strands. Or it might just have been the merlot.

Another bleat. A low, end-of-tether sound, just ahead. But I couldn’t see anything. Just the ongoing reach of snow. I kept walking, listening for more signals of distress, but they did not come. Confounded, I turned to go back and saw more tracks, criss-crossing those that had gone before. Some busy creature, making mischief while my back was turned. There was nature in a nutshell, I supposed: small things tip-toeing around behind the big things. Again I was haunted by some detail I had missed, a warning in text form, but I read millions of words each year, and anyway, what link could there be between my job and a tent holiday in the middle of nowhere?

Suddenly, fatigue slipped back through the cracks. My feet were aching and the cold was turning my face stiff. I wanted bed. I wanted to spoon with Kit and feel the curve of her belly under my fingers. I headed back to the fence and edged through the riot of wood and wire. A length of it snagged in my jeans, another on the hood of my coat. Great. I tried to extricate myself without pricking my legs/body on those sharp knots; how long it had been since my last tetanus injection?

Trapped, flailing, I nevertheless snapped bolt upright at the sudden scream. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal; it had some weird glassy quality, as if the temperature in the air had shaped it into something brittle and fine. But then words began to form out of that mindless howling: my name.

Kit, calling my name.

I thrashed at the wire, no longer caring if I sliced myself open on it, and stumbled into the snow as I sprang clear. I ran as fast as I could and there was heat in my chest and I was crying, I could barely see where I was going, and all I could see through the tears was a sheep’s head with fox’s eyes, and I remembered what I’d read, in this piece about legend and lore in the animal kingdom, about the way that a fox will sometimes lure its prey to a position of vulnerability by disguising its voice, pretending to be an injured lamb.

I got to the tent and all the gas lamps were on. Kit was pacing back and forth, her fists clenched by her sides. She was screaming unintelligibly now, just animal noises of distress, her mouth wide, spit hanging off her teeth. She looked as if she’d gone mad. My own voice underneath hers—What is it? What is it? — sounded panic-weak, far away, unattached to me at all. But maybe I wasn’t saying anything, and I was only thinking it, because I knew the answer to my own question. I pushed by Kit and threw myself at the children’s bed to find the girls gone and nothing remaining but a single spot of blood.