Linny Marsh's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

The ridge road climbed through gray light. Linny walked with the bundle on her back and the journal against her chest. She had gone maybe a mile past the last fence when she heard the first crack behind her. A twig. Then nothing. She kept walking. A stone shifted somewhere in the brush. She kept walking. She told herself it was a fox. She told herself it was Lena, come to drag her home. She hoped it was Lena. She stopped in the middle of the road and turned. The path was empty. Pines held the wind above her. Snow dusted their tops where the ridge rose ahead, steep gray stone crowned in white. "Come out," Linny said. "I'll go home if it's you." Nothing answered. She waited a long count. Then she turned and walked again, faster now. The steps started again behind her. Light. Short. She thought of the boy who begged for bread outside the square, small and thin. A child could follow a person for miles without being seen. A child she could handle. A child she could send back with a coin. She stepped off the road behind a boulder and crouched. She set the bundle down. She picked up a fist-sized rock and waited. The steps came closer. Slow. Then quiet. Then a shape moved past the boulder at knee height, and it was not a child. It was long and low, gray as the stone, with a narrow back and a flat head that turned the wrong way on its neck. Its eyes found her before its body did. They were pale and wet. It did not blink. It smelled like cold water and iron. Linny did not throw the rock. Her hand would not move. The thing lifted its nose and drew a slow breath through her, taking her in. Then it stepped once toward her, careful, testing the ground. She ran. She ran off the road and up the slope, boots skidding on frost, the bundle beating against her spine. She did not look back. She did not need to. She heard it on the scree behind her, patient, keeping her pace. It was not trying to catch her yet. It was walking her. She crashed into a stand of pines above the road and pressed her back to a trunk. Her breath tore. Below her the shape climbed without hurry, weaving between rocks. She understood then that it had picked her up long before the first twig. It had let her hear it. The woods were still three ridges off. She could not go back down. She could not stay here. She dug in her coat until her fingers closed on the stub of charcoal and the journal. She pulled the journal out and tore a page. She wrote one line for Lena, in case someone found it. Then she pushed off the tree and climbed.