“Look at what the cat dragged in,” she said.
Michael closed the door behind him, caught for a long second between two images: the girl he had left in a field outside Eccleston, her jumper soaked red and her mouth full of pansies, and the three women in the campervan, as they appeared to him then—Colleen the maiden, biting her pink lower lip, the unknown pregnant woman on the cusp of motherhood, and the Bickerstaff sister, her face young and unlined yet as knowing as any crone. The girl’s heart was in the wood now at least. He reminded himself of that, and it calmed him.
“Mike, I didn’t think you were coming back tonight.” Colleen stood and came over to him awkwardly, slipping her arms around his waist and squeezing him. “We were just having a girl’s night in.”
“How nice.” It was difficult to speak, the words lodged and dry in his throat. It always was after he had returned someone to the woods, as though part of him had gone back to the cupboard, to the time when he did not utter any words.
“Have you seen the news?” The Bickerstaff woman—her name was Lizbet or Beryl—slid a folded newspaper toward him. It was one of the red tops, the headline screaming “FIFTH SUSPECTED VICTIM OF THE RED WOLF” and underneath it was a fuzzy photograph of a stocky woman with thick, curly hair. The photo had been taken at a wedding, and she was dressed in a particularly unflattering peach-colored bridesmaid dress. She hadn’t been wearing that when Michael saw her last. Lizbet or Beryl turned her lips down at the corners. “Nasty stuff, isn’t it? What a monster he must be. What do you think, Janie?”
She elbowed the pregnant woman next to her, who took a good three seconds to react. Her head wobbled up, and she struggled to focus on the newsprint. Michael watched her trying to figure it out, and eventually she shrugged and turned away, stubbing out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. Drugs.
“It’s scary,” said Colleen, with feeling. “I wish they wouldn’t use these names for them, it just makes it all seem, I don’t know, glamorous or something.”
“The Red Wolf,” repeated the Bickerstaff woman. Then she grinned, and leaning over suddenly, rubbed at the pregnant woman’s distended belly. “No big bad wolves in your bedtime stories, little one?”
This seemed to wake the girl in the yellow t-shirt up a little. “Do you have anything for me, Beryl?”
“Beryl and Lizbet are nurses,” said Colleen. She looked up at Michael, as though trying to convince him of something. “They’re keeping a special eye on Janie.”
“A natural birth,” said Beryl, gazing fondly at Janie. “A child born under the stars. Won’t that be something?”
Michael shrugged. He knew already that the Bickerstaffs were providing the contraceptive pill to many women in the commune, knew that Colleen was diligently taking it. He didn’t ask what other drugs the Bickerstaff sisters were doling out, or why the pregnant Janie was clearly chain-smoking her way through packets of Lambert and Butler. Instead he gently unhooked Colleen’s arms from his waist and stepped back toward the flimsy door.
“Don’t go,” said Colleen quickly. “We were just …”
“I’ll be back in a little bit, I just need some more fresh air.” He didn’t miss the look Beryl Bickerstaff gave him as he stepped out—flat and calculating, like a cat trying to decide if a mouse was worth the effort.
After just a few minutes inside the smoky campervan the night air tasted sweet and welcoming, and he walked back toward the house gratefully even as he felt a pang of regret at leaving Colleen behind. She did not like the big house, wouldn’t stay in it overnight, although she’d never been especially clear on why—it was an attitude that mystified Michael. After all, it wasn’t a run-down farmhouse surrounded by bleak fields, it wasn’t a suffocating cupboard. Halfway up the hill he came across the man coming down. The dog was nowhere to be seen.
“Good night, lad?” It was too dark to see his face clearly, but Michael heard the grin in his voice all the same.
“The Bickerstaff sisters. What do they know?”
The man turned away, and a slither of moonlight picked out his features in beaten silver; the big nose, an old man’s expansive ears, the dull sheen of his false eye. He was still grinning.
“They’re useful,” was all he said.
Michael nodded, although he didn’t agree. After a moment he said, “I wish you hadn’t made me leave that note.”
“Why not? Why shouldn’t they know your name?”
“The Red Wolf.” Speaking it aloud was thrilling, but it also gave him a deeper, unhappier ache that he couldn’t explain. It was coming too close to talking about the things they never talked about, and once they named it, he felt certain everything would vanish, like a soap bubble. “The papers have taken it. And they don’t understand. Not really.”
The man snorted. “That’s our burden, lad. To never be understood.”
For some time, Michael didn’t move or speak. He could hear voices laughing and talking some distance away, and there were points of orange light from campfires away to his right, but up here on the hill it was cold, and the darkness of Fiddler’s Woods seemed to tug at him eagerly. He longed to go there with the images that were still fresh in
