in her throat. I opened my mouth to speak and found, like the magpie, that my voice had been stilled, an invisible hand over my face. My blood became ice, freezing me in place as I tried to turn my head to escape something I couldn’t even see.
“Rutger, go start the van,” Johnny eventually said. Her face had turned a pearlescent grey. “Nick, get Carla inside. Lock the doors.”
I choked on the unseen barrier, straining against it, only a throttled yelp coming from my throat. Her arm snapped out and connected with my chest almost hard enough to stop my heart, knocking me onto the blanket.
“Go! I’ll get the boys. Leave the food, go!”
“Are you crazy? If there’s something out there, I’m twice your size! I’ll get them!”
“No, I will. Go, quick, go on. Get inside.”
She tore off at a dead run, skidding on the grass. Hazily, I hoped the boys hadn’t crossed the water towards the thing in the trees. It skulked there still, drawing the eye and yet impossible to look at, not even following Johnny as she splashed into the shallow water, simply turning to watch her.
But the fall had released me, and I rose to find Rutger already rushing Carla back to the gravel road. I glanced back to see that the dark thing was gone—oh Jesus, where did it go? Was it going for the van?
I ran,half expecting the thing in the trees to flutter up behind me and smother me, all of me, not just my voice, bury me in its light-absorbing blackness, crunch into me with the razor teeth of its skull, yes, that’s what it was that’s why it didn’t look like a face it had no features because it was just a skull—
I fell into the gravel and screamed when something grabbed me by the belt and pulled me up, turned flailing and kicking to see it was just Johnny, easily dodging my panicked blows, the boys behind her. The dark thing was nowhere to be seen.
We packed into the van and Rutger peeled away, throwing me around the back, spattering blood from my skinned palms onto the leather seats.
Everyone was yelling—”What’s wrong? What happened? Nicky? Nick? Johnny?”—and as I scrambled up from the floor, I caught a glimpse of Johnny’s face, which scared me almost as much as seeing that thin black thing. My heart was hammering so hard I wondered whether it was just going to stop, whether Johnny’s push had fucked it up somehow.
“Rutger,” I finally called up front. “Ru! Can we put on a movie?” It was the only thing I could think of, and for a minute, while the screens slid out of their recesses in the ceiling and the opening strains of The Lion King filtered through the van, it seemed like everything was okay. I was panting, drily wheezing as if my throat had been lined with dryer fluff.
“Johnny, what happened?” Carla said. The boys looked up.
“Yellowjacket nest,” Johnny said. “A big one, and they were so mad I couldn’t yell to warn you about it. I’m so sorry about the picnic, guys! Tell you what, let’s go into town and get burgers and shakes, okay?”
She was shaking, despite the cheerful, Mary-Poppins voice that lulled the kids almost visibly as they settled in to watch the movie. I caught her eye in the rear-view mirror, her green irises dull, almost the colour of the sockets around them. We are going to talk about this later, I told the eyes with my eyes.
She nodded.
“WELL, TODAY WAS a goddamn disaster,” I said. “Also. Why are we meeting here?”
“No connection to either of us,” she said. “Harder to find.”
I had to run that through my head a couple of times, rubbing my chest, where the heel of her hand had left a bean-shaped bruise. Wouldn’t have thought she had it in her. Were we harder to find now? By whom?
Rutger had dropped me off at home, but I’d barely managed to get the kids in bed before Johnny had called me demanding, in whispers, that we meet again. And at her insistence we had walked to this park instead of driving, a long way from both our houses. It was almost midnight, no traffic, nothing open, far from cameras and sirens. I hadn’t left a note for Mom, and hoped she wouldn’t freak out at me being out so late. She worried so much now.
I had arrived to find a swing moving apparently on its own, a