A Hawk in the Woods Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Carrie Laben’s A Hawk in the Woods

  A Hawk in the Woods

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Praise for Carrie Laben’s A Hawk in the Woods

  “A Hawk in the Woods is wonderfully dark and spellbinding, mixing the road novel, family drama, time travel, cosmic horror, and maybe even a little Heathers. Carrie Laben is an original, compelling new voice. Consider me a fan for life.”

  —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and

  The Cabin at the End of the World

  “A Hawk in the Woods is a stunning, chilling masterpiece by one of the best new voices in literary horror. Searingly intelligent, gorgeously wrought, this gripping tale of two gifted, haunted sisters begins as a classic get-away story and soon unfolds into a terrifying excavation of the American dream of unbridled power. Carrie Laben writes with a ferocious grace; a master of the gothic pastoral, of the slow burn, of surprise. Carrie Laben is a monster—they don’t even make writers like this anymore. You will be reading her name for decades to come.”

  —Cara Hoffman, Author of Running and So Much Pretty

  “Ride or die sisterhood, conjured from the bones of H. P. Lovecraft.”

  —Molly Tanzer, author of Vermilion and Creatures of Will & Temper

  “In this uncanny world, the darkest moments don’t come from the supernatural horror but from the realization that the Waites’ underlying dysfunction is a near and dear part of our own.”

  —Foreword Reviews (Starred Review)

  “At once sly and grim, soberingly real and darkly fantastical, the story of the Waite sisters will haunt readers like an eerie old folk song.”

  —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

  A HAWK IN

  THE WOODS

  Carrie Laben

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  A Hawk in the Woods © 2019 by Carrie Laben

  This edition of A Hawk in the Woods © 2019 by Word Horde

  Cover art and design by Matthew Revert

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-939905-46-8

  A Word Horde Book

  www.wordhorde.com

  For my family

  CHAPTER ONE

  Prelude

  “Ab… Abihail Waite?” Abby saw the receptionist’s confusion and even though it was a bit annoying, simply because it was so routine, she couldn’t blame the older woman. She shot out an embarrassment-smoothing smile as she unfolded from the slightly-too-low waiting room seat.

  “Abby’s fine,” she said, and waited, but the curiosity remained. It was gratifying. “It’s an old family name and I guess no one told my mom that it would just weird everybody out.”

  The receptionist return-volleyed a smile, this one grateful, and entered a few brisk keystrokes into her computer—a note for later, or for whoever had to deal with Abby next. “Very good. You can go right in; Dr. Tremblay’s in the first examining room on the left.”

  Abby saw as soon as she walked into the room, before the doctor even looked up from her chart to face her, that his thoughts were downcast and dark. When he faced her, concern poured over her, and he swept the papers up in one hand as though he was worried that she would see them, even though they were about her and in a few minutes she’d know what they said.

  Well, shit.

  “Please sit down,” he said, gesturing to the smaller and starker of the room’s two chairs with the hand that held her file. “How are you feeling?”

  She was feeling better from the minute she walked in and felt herself the subject of so much worry, but that wasn’t something to say out loud. “About the same. Nervous, of course. And the biopsy sites itch a bit.”

  “Of course. That’s very normal.” He said it in an abstract way. How she was feeling didn’t really matter, from his point of view, compared to what was printed on those papers. And he didn’t want to talk about that, although he must see bad biopsy results all the time.

  “The results are in?” she prompted.

  “They are. I’m afraid it’s not the news that we were hoping for.” He was afraid, at that. Of what? Of her reaction, she supposed. He seemed to realize then that he was holding the papers, and laid them back down on his desk. “It’s cancer. And it’s fairly advanced.”

  The words hit her even though she’d already known in her heart. She squeezed the arm of the chair but there was no padding to dig her nails into, nothing to tear a hole in. No way to escape.

  “I can’t say for certain without further testing exactly how far it’s spread, but given the thickness and ulceration of the original tumor and the fact that we found satellite tumors, we’re looking at a late stage III, at best.” He locked eyes with her, and she pulled strength from that. “Now, the thing to understand is that the science of melanoma has advanced very rapidly in the past decade and although stage III sounds bad, you could still have a better than even chance to come out of this cancer-free with aggressive treatment.”

  This was not a dark basement full of monsters; there was no reason to put on a brave face and suppress any hitch of fear in her voice, but she did it anyway, running on instinct. “How much better than an even chance?”

  “Depending on how far it’s spread, maybe fifty-six, fifty-seven percent.”

  So not really better than even, then. Abby didn’t realize that she’d stood up from the chair but maybe she was going to try to escape after all. The doctor stood too, and she was nearly eye-to-eye with him although he was not a short man.

  “Please, sit down,” he said, and she did, and he handed her a box of tissues even though she wasn’t crying.

  “You probably think I’m an idiot for not coming to see you sooner,” she said, because she thought that herself.

  “Oh no, oh no,” he said quickly, as though his opinion would make her feel better. “That’s exactly the problem. Melanoma takes healthy young people, because those are exactly the people who don’t realize they’re sick until it’s too late.”

  She was almost certain that he was thinking about her funeral in that moment, about how sad it would be to see a pretty young girl go down in the dirt, which told her exactly what fifty-six percent was. She nodded slowly, to show that she understood, not that she agreed to any of this.

  “We won’t know for sure until we do further testing,” he said, “which we’ll do as soon as possible, of course. And then we can decide on a line of attack. You’re lucky to be in Buffalo, really,” he said, which couldn’t possibly be true. “Roswell Park is running some very promising clinical trials
right now, in the event that it’s spread further than we’d like.”

  “Okay,” she said, more to test her voice than anything. She sounded good. Normal. Okay.

  “Myrrah at the front desk will set you up with your follow-up appointments,” he said. “Do you have anyone to drive you home?”

  She just stared at him blankly, giving nothing, until he got uncomfortable.

  “And whatever you do, try to stay positive. People fight this thing and beat it all the time.”

  She made it through setting the follow-up appointments in a daze, half-conscious that it didn’t really matter when they were. She made it out to her car. She locked herself in, turned on the AC, and screamed “Motherfucker!” at the top of her lungs. It helped a little.

  Then she started to think about what to do next. She’d hoped to have decades to get a plan in place before it came to this. Hell, like anyone on the uphill side of middle age, she’d secretly harbored a hope that she was unique in all the world and the day would never come for her. Grandfather hadn’t had to worry about this shit until he’d crested ninety—but then again, Grandfather wasn’t a good example of how to handle these things.

  Well, whatever she was going to do, the next step at least was clear. The next step was to go get Martha. She needed her sister.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The road to Wende was dull, and got duller as you got closer to the prison. Squat buildings that housed self-storage units, auto mechanics, a pool supply store. Scrubby woodlots and fields of timothy hay. Blue chicory and goldenrod. Occasional ranch houses, their yards beginning to brown with midsummer, furnished with a rusty swing set or a driveway basketball hoop or an ATV parked out front with a For Sale sign leaned against it. Roadkill, mostly bloated woodchucks and raccoons this time of year, the occasional smeared barn cat.

  The house that always had the sign out front saying “Be not deceived, God is not mocked” still did, and the Gator Bar and Grill at the crossroad a little further on was still having a special on wings and pitchers of Labatt.

  The car Abby was driving was a rental, her own Miata left behind in her driveway, not up to the job without a few hundred bucks in repairs that she didn’t have time for. Her impulse had been to trade up, go for a Jag or a Mustang convertible, something glamorous, something that would turn heads. Seeking anonymity didn’t come naturally to her. But in the end she’d talked herself into a Jeep Grand Cherokee, dark blue, a model from a couple years back. She hadn’t even bothered figuring out how to plug her iPhone in yet, so she poked at the dashboard until the radio came on.

  There was supposed to be Sirius but somehow she’d gotten an old radio instead and it didn’t offer much—Lite 97 and Kiss 98.5, NPR and country and a bunch of religious crap. Why did they even put this shit in newer cars? She hit Scan and let the numbers drift away to the staticky end of the dial while she imagined Martha’s face, the gratitude and wonder.

  Like a stab from a knife the static yielded to a clean, clear voice—a woman accompanied by something folky—a mandolin? A zither? And the singing was just chanting really, a series of nonsense syllables. Seven years a hawk in the woods. All alone and so lonely-o. Some college kids at GC3 pouring authenticity into the air on a weak beam that no one ever listened to.

  It wasn’t driving music—no beat, and the scattered lyrics she could make out didn’t make her want to fly or run or fuck or anything like that, they didn’t even make her mad. She hit Scan again and got nothing for her trouble but more static, then turned the radio off.

  She was running late, too. Visiting hours would be almost over by the time she got there; the last thing she needed was to get stuck behind some drug addict’s devoted grandma’s half-broken-down Pontiac on the way out of the parking lot. The shortest jailbreak in history. It’d make a good story, but she wouldn’t be tweeting about it. She stepped on the gas.

  At the gates, the guard in the little box smiled and she smiled back hard and tangled his thoughts and he waved her in, no checking her ID, no hassles. He was a tall older man with a crew cut and glasses, a little pasty and a little paunchy, maybe a dad or even a grandfather if he or his kids had been a little too precocious. Far too sympathetic-looking for her to get away with running him over or shooting him with the gun she didn’t have or need. People hated cop-killers, except from time to time when they turned around and loved them. She could pull that off, the folk-hero schtick, Pretty Boy Floyd or Dillinger but as a photogenic woman so even better. Hell, maybe she should have done that. Too late now. Unless she…

  There, just outside that door that seemed to be clanging even when it was shut, stood Martha.

  Abby waited for the woman to turn or gesture and be someone else, someone who just happened to resemble the two of them in passing, but she didn’t. It wasn’t possible to mistake her own eyes, even when they were set in the rough un-made-up face of a woman standing alone on the pavement. Abby had never met anyone else out in the world who looked quite like herself and her twin, tall and slightly tan even in winter, pointed noses, pointed chins—striking not cute, queens not princesses.

  Martha wasn’t looking very queenly right now though, leaning a little, letting the duffel bag she held rest on the ground even though there was no way it could be heavy; it slumped in on itself, half-empty. Her gaze scanned the parking lot and the fence and the world as a whole without any evidence of either desire or fear. That blank look on Martha’s face always used to annoy Abby, but it wasn’t worth being annoyed about now. It would change soon enough.

  An elderly Hispanic woman carrying a thick black book glanced at Martha as she passed, and that evidence that her twin existed to other people too jolted Abby into action. She threw the car into neutral, leaned across to the passenger door. She could barely open it, let alone reach out and gesture, but Martha looked up and noticed her anyhow. Her eyes got a little wider.

  Martha didn’t seem to hurry, but in an instant the duffel bag was in the back and she was in the shotgun seat. As soon as Abby heard the door slam she was accelerating, lurching through the parking lot and blasting by the pillbox where the crew-cut guard waved.

  The prison receded in the distance and the car reached seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred and three miles an hour. This was the critical moment, the only time she really needed to worry about pursuit; she couldn’t handle too many of them at once, not if they were focused, full of rage and bravado. Abby clutched the wheel, her shoulders up as if she could physically ward off the sirens when they came. She took a corner and felt the Cherokee wobble a little, its center of gravity nosing off the road towards the cornfields like a wayward beagle, but she didn’t touch the brake. They weren’t going to get Martha back, and they sure as shit weren’t going to get Abby.

  The sirens didn’t come. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was no one behind her. Not a single other vehicle on the road except, in the distance, a lumbering John Deere crossing from one field to another with a wagon-load of hay.

  Were they still getting their asses sorted from their elbows back there? Or had they gone ahead to set up a roadblock? If so, where? How many cars, how many men, how many guns? She glanced back again, just to make sure they weren’t gaining on her.

  “I knew you’d come,” Martha said softly.

  “I’m sorry it took so long,” Abby answered, not taking her eyes off the road. She should have gone for the sports car.

  “They offered to put me on a bus, but I said no, my sister will come for me.”

  “Of course I came… A bus?”

  “When they release you they pay for a bus ticket to somewhere, in case you haven’t got anyone coming for you. A lot of the girls don’t. But I said, my sister will come.”

  Abby had the presence of mind to decelerate slowly. “I know math was never my strong subject, but it sure hasn’t been thirty years.”

  “They gave me time off for good behavior, I guess.”

  “You guess? You haven’t been keeping track?” She locked the rage
out of her voice as best she could.

  “It all gets to be one big day after a while,” Martha said meekly. And then, some time later, “Can we stop at a Dairy Queen or something? I could kill for a sundae about now.”

  Abby’s first clear memory is of…

  No, actually, her first clear memory is of feeding the crusts from her sandwich to the ducks in the pond behind the next-door neighbor’s house, where she wasn’t supposed to go but went anyway until they gave up telling her not to. The ducks were shiny green-black with bright orange feet and sometimes when they got excited they nipped Martha with their bright orange bills. They never nipped Abby, though, because she could see in the energy and direction of their thoughts when they were getting too worked up, and she used her brain to shove them back. She’d always known how to do that, the same as she knew how to shove things with her hands.

  This time she didn’t see their thoughts, though, because they barely had time to think. Suddenly, the ducks were all around them, a thunder of laboring dusty wings, a mad ripple of quacking, the rich-smelling splat as the birds with full guts jettisoned the extra weight. Two that were too fat to fly were still as rocks at Abby’s feet.

  Martha gasped and pointed. At the far edge of the pond a huge brown bird mantled over a smaller, slower duck. The predator fixed them briefly with a single yellow eye, then decided they were far enough away to ignore and bent to rip into the duck.

  “Hey!” Abby yelled out loud as she pushed at the hawk’s mind. “Get out of here!” She was upset about the duck, bloody and dead now, but almost more offended. The hawk’s mind, tiny and focused as hard as a walnut, did nothing but drive the beak harder into flesh and pull up a wad of red-stained feathers.