For a few minutes, we’re all silent, slurping potatoes and broth, listening to Dove’s teeth grinding up the expensive hay and the sound of the light rain whispering across the metal roof of the lean-to. Finn piles more hay across his legs for insulation. Outside, the sky is going blue-brown and black at the edges.
“She looks faster already,” Finn says. He slurps the bottom of his soup to annoy me, and then smacks his lips to make sure he’s succeeded.
I set my own empty bowl on the hay bale behind me and take a piece of bread. My stomach still feels empty. “Can you come at me again with that sound? I don’t think I heard you.”
“You’re in a black mood,” Finn says.
I think of three things I could reply to that and in the end just shake my head. If I say it out loud, it will only make it harder to forget.
Finn is enough of a private creature that he doesn’t try to make me speak. He spreads the hay thin and then thick again over his legs, trying to make it even. After a long pause, he says, “What do you think will happen?”
“Happen when?”
“With the race. And with Gabe. What do you think will happen to us?”
Crossly, I throw a stick of hay toward Dove. “Dove will eat her expensive food and the capaill uisce will eat beef liver and the bets will all be against us, but on the day of the race it’ll be warm and windy and Dove will go straight while the others go right, and we’ll be the richest people on the island. You’ll drive three cars at the same time and Gabe will decide to stay and we’ll never have to eat beans again.”
“Not that one,” Finn says, like he’d asked for a story and I’d picked the wrong one. “What will really happen.”
“I’m not a fortune-teller.”
“What about if you don’t win? I’m not saying anything bad about Dove. But what if she doesn’t make any money?”
I glance at him to see if he’s picking at his arms yet, but he’s just mutilating a piece of hay. “We lose the house. Benjamin Malvern kicks us out.”
Finn nods at his hands, like he’d guessed this before. Gabe had underestimated both of us.
“And then I guess …” I try to imagine what it will look like if I fail. “I guess I will have to sell Dove. And we’d have to find someplace to live. If we got a job, the living could come with it, if it was something like … cleaning. Or at the mill. There’s mill housing.”
No one wants a life at the mill.
I try to think of something else truthful but not so dire. “Gratton said he was eyeing you as an apprentice. I know you couldn’t, but maybe he’d consider me instead….”
Finn says, “I’d do it.”
“You couldn’t bear it.”
He’s demolished the hay in his hands; it’s just dust. “You couldn’t bear to ride in the race, either, but you are. I reckon I could learn to bear it, if I had to.”
I don’t want him to learn to bear it, though. I want to keep my sweet, innocent brother the way he is, and I want to keep my best friend Dove here beside me and I don’t want to trade the house I grew up in for a tiny flat and a mill job.
“But it won’t happen that way,” I say. “The first way is how it’s going to happen.”
Finn shreds another piece of hay. So does Dove.
And, just then, there’s an odd creak.
The lean-to’s metal roof is old, so there’s plenty to creak there, and its one wall forms part of the fence, so where the boards meet the posts of the lean-to, there’s yet another chance of creaking. And the fence itself is not the youngest thing on the island, so, really, it could creak anywhere there’s a joint.
But this isn’t that sort of creak.
It’s more like a creak plus a knock. Not quite a knock. Softer. A pat. I can’t think of how I even heard it, really, once I think about it, until I see Finn looking at me, completely still, and realize I didn’t just hear it — I felt it.
Finn and I both turn our heads toward the lean-to wall that we lean against.
I want to say, Maybe it was Puffin. But Dove has stopped chewing and has pricked her ears toward the sound, though of course there’s nothing to see. I don’t think she’d prick them for a cat.
Finn and I sit motionless. The drizzle goes ssssss on the roof. We’re trying not to look at each other, because looking would make it harder to hear. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the rain on the roof. Dove’s still listening, but there’s nothing to hear. It was just the lean-to settling. Our little electric lantern makes a circle of yellow up on the ceiling. The world is quiet.
Then:
Whuff
And the unmistakable sounds of slow steps on the other side of the wall.
It’s not the sound of feet.
It’s the sound of hooves.
We stare at each other.
There is the creak-pat again, and this time, we both know what it is. I feel the experimental push on the other side of the wall and I bite my lip, hard. With a questioning expression, Finn puts a finger on the switch to the electric light. I shake my head furiously. The only thing I can think of that’s worse than facing a capall uisce in this drizzly night is to do it without light.
Instead, I start to burrow down into the hay blanket I’ve made; slowly, to keep the pieces from making noise. Finn immediately follows my lead. Dove’s ears swivel to follow an invisible signal on the other side of the wall. If I strain my ears, I can hear the sound of a hoof hitting the ground, then another. Another exhale of breath, no louder than the rain on the roof.
I don’t know what the capall uisce is doing. Maybe it’ll lose interest. Maybe it’ll be discouraged by the fence between it and us. In my head, I trace the steps we’d have to take to get back to the house: around the other side of the lean-to, down two sections of fence, over the metal-tube gate, then fifteen feet to the door.
Maybe one of us would get over the gate in time. That’s not enough.
The night is dark and silent. I strain my ears for another hoofstep. Dove’s attention remains fixed on the last point where the sound came from. Finn, mostly covered in hay, meets my gaze. His jaw’s clenched.
The mist hisses over the roof. Water drips down off the edge of the metal, one drop, two drops at a time, making a soft, barely audible sound when it lands on the ground. Somewhere far away, I hear what sounds like a car engine, maybe. The wind teases the hay. There’s nothing from the other side of the wall.
Dove jerks to attention.
Looking in the side of the lean-to is a long black face.
It is the devil.
It takes everything in me not to whimper. The creature is black as peat at midnight, and its lips are pulled back into a fearsome grin. The ears are long and wickedly pointed toward each other, less like a horse and more like a demon. They remind me of shark egg pouches. The nostrils are long and thin to keep the sea out. Eyes black and slick: a fish’s eyes.
It still stinks like the ocean. Like low tide and things caught on rocks. It’s barely a horse.
It’s hungry.
The capall uisce has hooked its head around the side of the lean-to, over the fence. All that stands between us and its strangely light grin is three boards that I nailed up myself while Mum watched. Three nails, not two, into each, because ponies, she said, will test everything.
And now this night-black horse presses its chest against them. Not hard. Only as hard as it had pushed against the lean-to wall.
The nails creak.
I can hear my heart or Finn’s heart or maybe the both of them, and it’s going so fast and loud that I can’t breathe. My hands are fisted over the hay, the nails biting into my palms.
We’re hidden, you can’t see us, go away.
Dove is utterly still.
The capall uisce looks at her and opens its jaw, and then it makes a sound that turns my blood into ice. It’s a hissed exhalation with low clucks behind it, clicking from somewhere deep in its throat: kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.
Dove flattens her ears back to her head but doesn’t move. How many times had we been told that the capaill uisce want a moving target? That to move is to die?
Dove is a statue.
The capall uisce pushes again. The boards creak again.
I hear Finn sigh. It’s so quiet that I know no one but me could’ve heard it, and only me because I’ve spent my whole life listening to every sound that my brothers could possibly make. It’s a soft, scared little noise that I haven’t heard him make in a long time.
Then I hear a wail.
It’s coming from out in the pasture. Both Dove and the capall uisce flick an ear toward it.
It comes again, and my stomach is an endless pit. It’s another one, I think, that’s pushed down the fence on the other side, that’s in the pasture with us, not even three nails a board to keep us alive.
The black monster swivels its strange long ears again.
The wail, again. It sounds a little like a baby crying, and then I see Finn’s mouth moving. It’s about all I can see of him.
He mouths at me with exaggerated syllables: Puffin.
The sound, again, and this time, I recognize it immediately. Puffin the barn cat, always in search of Finn, back from her travels and drawn by our light. She wails again, her baby-cry meow that she uses to call him. When he’s feeling indulgent, he’ll repeat it back to her and she’ll use the sound as a homing beacon.
Now she cries again, closer, and the capall uisce shifts its weight away from the fence.
In the gray light of the mist that the rain drives up from the ground, I see Puffin’s form, trotting toward us, her tail a question mark. Wow? she asks.
The capall uisce’s grin closes.
Puffin sees the capall uisce only when it moves. The fence tears like paper, the boards exploding off with a sound like the world being destroyed.
She bolts and the capall uisce charges after her, made hungrier by the chase. They both vanish into the mist, and the last thing I hear is hooves scrabbling, frenzied, and then Puffin wailing.
Finn covers his face, the hay falling from his hands, and I see his shoulders shake.
I can’t think about that, though. I think about this: the capall uisce coming back and killing my brother.
I grab his shoulder. “Come on.”
I don’t have a plan yet, but I know we can’t stay.
From behind me, I hear a sound, and I jerk so hard my muscles hurt. It takes a full second for me to realize it’s a voice, saying my name.
“Puck!”
It’s Gabe, stepping through the ruined bit of fence the horse has just plunged through. His voice is a hiss as he takes my arm. “Hurry up. It’ll come back.”
I’m so shocked to see him — now, now of all times — that at first I can’t get the words out. “Dove. What about Dove?”
“Bring her,” snaps Gabriel, just audible. “Finn. Wake up. Come on.”
I snatch up Dove’s halter; she tosses her head in the air and jerks my arm at the shoulder. She’s trembling like she was on the cliff top. “Puffin,” I tell Gabe.
“She’s a cat. I’m sorry, but come on.” Gabe pulls at Finn. “There’s two others. They’re coming.”
