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His jaw dropped open. That was when Rosie slammed down a length of rusty chain onto Grahame Coats’s wrist, sending the gun flying across the room.
With the enthusiasm and accuracy of a much younger woman, Rosie’s mother kicked Grahame Coats in the groin, and as he clutched his crotch and doubled up, making noises pitched at a level that only dogs and bats could hear, Rosie and her mother stumbled out of the meat locker.
They pushed the door closed and Rosie pushed shut one of the bolts. They hugged.
They were still in the wine cellar when all the lights went off.
“It’s just the fuses,” said Rosie, to reassure her mother. She was not certain that she believed it, but she had no other explanation.
“You should have locked both bolts,” said her mother. And then, “Ow,” as she stubbed her toe on something, and cursed.
“On the bright side,” said Rosie, “He can’t see in the dark either. Just hold my hand. I think the stairs are up this way.”
Grahame Coats was down on all fours on the concrete floor of the meat cellar, in the darkness, when the lights went out. There was something hot dripping down his leg. He thought for one uncomfortable moment that he had wet himself, before he understood that the blade of one of the knives he had pushed into his belt had cut deeply into the top of his leg.
He stopped moving and lay on the floor. He decided that he had been very sensible to have drunk so much: it was practically an anaesthetic. He decided to go to sleep.
He was not alone in the meat locker. There was someone in there with him. Something that moved on four legs.
Somebody growled, “Get up.”
“Can’t get up. I’m hurt. Want to go to bed.”
“You’re a pitiful little creature and you destroy everything you touch. Now get up.”
“Would love to,” said Grahame Coats in the reasonable tones of a drunk. “Can’t. Just going to lie on the floor for a bit. Anyway. She bolted the door. I heard her.”
He heard a scraping from the other side of the door, as if a bolt was slowly being released.
“The door is open. Now: if you stay here, you’ll die.” An impatient rustling; the swish of a tail; a roar, half-muffled in the back of a throat. “Give me your hand and your allegiance. Invite me inside you.”
“I don’t underst—”
“Give me your hand, or bleed to death.”
In the black of the meat cellar, Grahame Coats put out his hand. Someone—something—took it and held it, reassuringly. “Now, are you willing to invite me in?”
A moment of cold sobriety touched Grahame Coats then. He had already gone too far. Nothing he did would make matters worse, after all.
“Absatively,” whispered Grahame Coats, and as he said it he began to change. He could see through the darkness easy as daylight. He thought, but only for a moment, that he saw something beside him, bigger than a man, with sharp, sharp teeth. And then it was gone, and Grahame Coats felt wonderful. The blood no longer spurted from his leg.
He could see clearly in the darkness. He pulled the knives from his belt, dropped them onto the floor. He pulled off his shoes, too. There was a gun on the ground, but he left it there. Tools were for apes and crows and weaklings. He was no ape.
He was a hunter.
He pulled himself up onto his hands and his knees, and then he padded, four-footed, out into the wine cellar.
He could see the women. They had found the steps up to the house, and they were edging up them blindly, hand-in-hand in the darkness.
One of them was old and stringy. The other was young and tender. The mouth salivated in something that was only partly Grahame Coats.
FAT CHARLIE LEFT THE BRIDGE, WITH HIS FATHER’S GREEN FEDORA pushed back on his head, and he walked into the dusk. He walked up the rocky beach, slipping on the rocks, splashing into pools. Then he trod on something that moved. A stumble, and he stepped off it.
It rose into the air, and it kept rising. Whatever it was, it was enormous: he thought at first that it was the size of an elephant, but it grew bigger still.
Light, thought Fat Charlie. He sang aloud, and all the lightning bugs, the fireflies of that place, clustered around him, flickering off and on with their cold green luminescence, and in their light he could make out two eyes, bigger than dinner plates, staring down at him from a supercilious reptilian face.
He stared back. “Evening,” he said, cheerfully.
