Blood of The Pale Moon

The phone rang at 11:47 p.m., which in Nora Calloway’s experience was the hour when nothing good happened to anything with a heartbeat. She had been asleep on the couch with one boot still on, a mug of tea gone cold on the armrest, and a veterinary journal open across her chest to an article on bovine mastitis that she had read four times without absorbing a single word. The phone buzzed against the coffee table, skated toward the edge, and she caught it a half second before it hit the floor. “Calloway Veterinary,” she said, and immediately winced. It was a reflex. Her mother had answered every call that way for thirty years, and eight months after the funeral Nora still did it, as though the clinic’s ghost had learned to borrow her mouth. “Doc.” The voice on the other end was old and thin and rough with something more than age. “It’s Walt Hargrove. I need you out here. Now, if you can.” Nora sat up, and the journal slid to the floor. Walt Hargrove was seventy-eight years old and had once driven himself to the county hospital with a broken wrist because he didn’t want to “trouble anybody.” He did not call at midnight. He did not call at all, unless something was seriously wrong. “What’s happened?” “One of the Holsteins. Bessie. She’s torn up bad.” He stopped. She heard him breathing, slow and careful, the way a person breathes when he is trying not to let his voice shake. “I don’t know what got at her, Nora. I’ve been running this farm fifty-one years. I never saw anything like it.” “Is she still standing?” “Barely.” “Is anything else hurt? Any other animals?” “The others are fine. Scared half out of their skins, but fine.” Another pause. “Just come. Please.” Please. That was the word that got her onto her feet. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Keep her calm, keep the lights low, and don’t try to move her. Do you have clean towels?” “I’ve got towels.” “Put pressure on the worst of it. Not too hard. I’m on my way.” She hung up and stood in the dark living room for a moment, listening to the old house settle around her. The radiator ticked. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Overhead, faint but familiar, came the creak of a floorboard as her seventeen-year-old sister turned over in bed, dreaming of whatever a seventeen-year-old dreamed of when her whole world had been quietly rearranged by grief. Nora pulled on her second boot, grabbed her canvas coat from the hook by the door, and scribbled a note on the pad by the phone in handwriting that had never once been legible at midnight. Emergency call, Hargrove farm. Back by 3. Don’t wait up. Lock the door. Love you. —N She looked at it, then added a line beneath, because it never hurt to add a line. There’s leftover lasagna. Eat something that isn’t cereal. She taped the note to the front door, where June would see it on her way out to school, and stepped into the cold. * * * October in Marrowfell did not so much arrive as settle, like sediment in a glass of water. The mountains pressed down on the valley from three sides, and by the second week of the month the fog came off the river every evening and did not leave until mid-morning. It swallowed the streetlights one by one. It softened the edges of the old logging-company buildings on Main Street and turned the neon sign of the Red Pine Tavern into a smear of pink in the dark. Nora’s truck, a white Ford with CALLOWAY VETERINARY SERVICES peeling off both doors, coughed twice before it caught. The heater blew cold air for a full minute, and then, grudgingly, warm. She backed out of the driveway with the wipers on low, watching the fog part around her headlights and close again behind her. The town slid past. The hardware store with its hand-lettered sign. The diner, dark and empty, its chairs stacked on the tables. The white steeple of the Methodist church, which the fog had cut off at the middle so that the cross seemed to float in nothing. In the whole length of Main Street she saw no other car, no other person, only a single porch light burning outside the sheriff’s office, where she knew Tommy Reyes was probably asleep at his desk with his boots up and a bag of sunflower seeds in his lap. She thought about calling him. Then she thought about how it would sound. Hey, Tommy, a cow got hurt, want to come look at it? He’d only tease her about it for a week. Beyond the last streetlight the road narrowed and began to climb. The pavement gave way to the cracked asphalt of Old Mill Road, which followed the river for six miles before splitting off toward the farms in the upper valley. Trees crowded in on both sides, black firs and pale birches, their branches meeting overhead like the ribs of a great animal. The headlights carved a tunnel through them. She turned on the radio for company. A static-soaked country station was playing something slow and mournful, and she turned it down until it was little more than a murmur. Her mother had driven this road a thousand times. Nora had ridden shotgun for half of them, first as a small, wide-eyed child with her nose pressed to the glass, then as a sullen teenager, then as a vet student home for the summer, learning to hold a flashlight steady while Dr. Anne Calloway delivered a foal in the dark. Steady hands, Nora Jane, she would say. The animal knows if you’re frightened. So keep your hands steady, and let the rest of you be as scared as you like. Nora tightened her grip on the wheel. On a thin silver chain beneath her shirt, her mother’s wedding ring lay warm against her breastbone. She had worn it since the funeral. It was too small for any of her fingers, and she couldn’t stand to leave it in a drawer. Through a break in the trees, she caught a glimpse of the sky. The moon hung low over the ridge, a thin pale fingernail cut from the dark. Two weeks from full. She barely noticed it. She had a cow to save. * * * The Hargrove farm sat at the very end of the valley road, where the pavement gave up entirely and the land tilted toward the wilderness. A hundred and twenty acres of pasture ran up to the tree line, and beyond that lay nothing but forest and mountain for a very long way. The farmhouse was white and square and tired-looking, with a porch that sagged on the left. The barn, a great red hulk of a building with a rusted tin roof, stood forty yards behind it. A single yellow bulb burned above the barn door. Beneath it stood a man in a flannel coat and rubber boots, one hand braced on the frame as though the building itself might fall over without him. Nora pulled up close, killed the engine, and got out. The cold hit her at once, sharper than it had been in town. The air smelled of wet earth, woodsmoke, and hay. Beneath that lay something else, something metallic and warm that she recognized before she could name it. Blood. “Walt.” She grabbed her kit from the truck bed and crossed the gravel quickly. “How is she?” “Not good.” Up close, Walt Hargrove looked ten years older than he had at the church potluck in September. His white hair stood up in tufts. His hands were rust-colored to the wrists, and his eyes had the flat, unfocused stare of a man who had been awake too long and seen too much. “She’s down now. Went down about ten minutes ago. I can’t get her up.” “Okay. That’s okay. Let me see.” He hauled the door open on its rollers, and she stepped inside. The barn was warm and dim and thick with the smell of animals: hay, manure, the sweet grassy breath of thirty milk cows. Rows of them stood along both sides in their stanchions, and they were not asleep. That was the first thing Nora noticed. In her experience a barn at midnight was full of soft, shifting sounds, the slow chew of cud, the occasional snort. Now there was only silence and the whites of eyes. Every cow in the building had turned her head toward the same corner of the barn. Not one of them made a sound. “They’ve been like that since it happened,” Walt said quietly. “Won’t settle.” “What time was it?” “About ten. I heard a racket out here. Thought maybe a coyote had got in. By the time I got out here with the shotgun, it was gone. And she was...” He gestured toward the end of the aisle. Nora walked toward it, her boots quiet on the concrete. Her heart had picked up a little, and she reminded herself sternly that it was only a cow. Bessie lay on her side in the straw at the far end of the barn, a huge black-and-white Holstein whose flanks rose and fell too fast. Her tongue lolled. Blood soaked the straw beneath her in a dark, spreading fan. Nora knelt at her shoulder, set her kit down, and put a hand on the animal’s neck. “Hey, girl,” she murmured. “Hey, Bessie. I’ve got you.” The cow rolled a terrified eye at her and let out a low, wet groan. Nora clicked on her penlight and looked at the wounds. There were four of them. Deep, parallel gashes ran across the cow’s left shoulder and down the ribs, each one as long as Nora’s forearm and spaced neatly apart. She knew the look of coyote bites, of dog bites, of the ragged chaos of a barbed-wire injury. She had once treated a heifer after a black bear had taken a swipe at her. This was none of those things. The edges of the wounds were clean, almost surgical. Whatever made them had been very strong, and very sure of itself. “Walt, did you see anything at all?” “Just a shape. Big. Faster than it had any right to be.” He rubbed his face. “I thought bear at first, but the tracks... Doc, there aren’t any tracks. I looked. I went all the way around the barn with a flashlight. Nothing in the mud.” Nora frowned and looked more closely at the gashes. Her gaze drifted to the cow’s ear, where a bright yellow plastic tag hung from the cartilage. The usual Hargrove tags were green. She had seen them a hundred times. This one was yellow, small, stamped with a number and a tiny logo she didn’t recognize, a stylized circle with a line through it. She filed the detail away for later, and the thought slipped from her mind almost at once, the way small strange things do when there is a bleeding animal in front of you. “Let’s get a line in her,” she said. “I’ll need you to hold her head and keep talking to her. Can you do that?” “I can do that.” She worked fast. She flushed each wound with saline, and the cow shuddered and bawled. She clamped, packed, and stitched. She set an IV and hung a bag of fluids from a nail in the beam above them. She gave a shot of antibiotics and a dose of pain relief and checked the pupils, the gums, the breathing. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. Walt murmured to Bessie in a low, steady stream, the endearments of a man who had talked to animals all his life. There now, old girl. There’s my girl. You’re all right. Slowly the cow’s breathing eased. “She’s stable,” Nora said at last, sitting back on her heels. Her hands were slick to the elbow. “For now. The bleeding’s under control, and I don’t think anything vital was hit. But I want to keep her on fluids for another hour at least. If she doesn’t crash, she might pull through.” Walt closed his eyes. His shoulders sagged, and for a moment she thought he might cry. “Thank you, Nora.” “Don’t thank me yet.” “I mean it. Your mother would’ve been proud of you.” Something tightened in her throat. She looked down at her hands and said nothing. “You want coffee?” he asked after a moment. “I’ve got a pot going in the house. Might be strong enough to strip paint.” “That sounds perfect, actually.” “I’ll bring you a cup. And a blanket, you’re shaking.” She hadn’t realized she was. He heaved himself upright with a grunt, one hand on his back. “Ten minutes. Don’t let her get up.” “I won’t.” His boots crunched away across the gravel. The barn door rolled shut behind him, and the sound of it echoed strangely in the long, dim space. Nora stayed where she was, one palm resting on Bessie’s warm neck, and let out a long breath. It was very quiet. She had always liked barns at night. That was the truth of it, and no one else in her life quite understood. They were the one place where the world made sense to her, where all the small chaos of grief and bills and unanswered questions fell away and left only the simple business of keeping something alive. But tonight the quiet had a different texture. It was too complete. Thirty cows stood in their stalls and not one of them shifted, not one of them chewed or breathed loudly or lowed. They stood like statues, and every one of them was looking at the same place. She followed their gaze. At the far end of the barn, the back wall was hung with old tools and coils of rope. Beside it stood a tall stack of hay bales, three or four high, throwing a deep shadow against the boards. The single overhead bulb didn’t reach that far. Beyond the bales the darkness looked thick, almost solid. Nora stared at it. “Hello?” she said, and felt ridiculous. Nothing answered. She told herself it was the cow. It was the blood and the adrenaline and the hour, and the fact that she’d slept badly for the better part of eight months. She told herself she was a rational person, a scientist, a woman with a doctorate and student loans. She was not the sort of person who felt watched in an empty barn. But the skin on the back of her neck had drawn tight, and a slow, cold prickle was creeping down her arms. The cow beneath her hand began to tremble. Bessie’s whole body shivered, a long shudder that ran from her flank to her jaw, and her eyes rolled white. She made a sound Nora had never heard from a cow before, a thin, high, keening noise like a child’s whimper. “Easy,” Nora whispered. “Easy, girl.” Something shifted in the dark behind the hay bales. It was a tiny sound, hardly more than the whisper of straw. Nora’s heart slammed once against her ribs. She stayed absolutely still, her hand frozen on the cow’s neck, her breath caught somewhere in her chest. Rats, she told herself. A barn cat. Walt’s dog. But Walt didn’t have a dog. She realized it in the same instant. In all the years she had visited this farm, she had never once seen a dog. The overhead bulb flickered. It dimmed, brightened, and dimmed again, and in the long slow pulse of the failing light she saw something she would spend the rest of her life trying to unsee. Behind the hay bales, at about the height of her own shoulders, two points of pale gold light opened in the dark. They were eyes. They were looking directly at her. And they were not, she understood with a slow, sick certainty, the eyes of any animal she had ever studied. The bulb went out.