“If you’re Amber Barrow, you’re too early,” she told me. She opened the wrought iron gate just enough so that the bars framed us.
“My last flight had a tailwind,” I said, but my heart sank. I’d flown across the country, gambled hard-won grant money on this trip, and she looked like a bad joke.
Witch, I’d expected.
Cartoonish black hat, green face makeup with purple glitter eye shadow and hot pink braids; a short black dress and striped leggings over tall black boots … that was something else.
“You’ll have to wait,” she said. She opened the gate the rest of the way. “But you might as well wait inside.”
I hesitated. The flight costs were spent–$5k for the series of lurching flights from airport remnant to airport remnant–but I could still save myself the rest. It had seemed hard enough to believe that she could help me before I’d laid eyes on her. After?
A night in Rina Conroy’s zoo was going to cost me almost a thousand dollars an hour, my entire grant gone for one event. But I’d sent the hire car away, water sloshed around my ankles, and my bag of equipment was a lead weight on my arm.
“If you want to get eaten by the mosquitoes—”
“I’m coming,” I said. I didn’t know how traversing an abandoned zoo was going to help prevent mosquitoes, but it seemed easier than admitting defeat. My advisor already thought my research was a fool’s game and a waste of perfectly good grant money that could have gone to better students.
I couldn’t imagine telling her that I didn’t care about my research at all. That I had chosen my entire area of study just for the chance to get here–five years of desultory research for this moment. That I would gladly drop my research, and walk away from school afterwards.
Rina shut the gate behind me with a clang. My ears popped.
The quiet was intense and sudden. Like all the usual ambient world noise was muffled and shut away. Like I’d had scraps of warmed velvet shoved into my ears. I moved my hands through the air; the masses of silver bangles on my wrists clicked dully instead of ringing. My skin felt shrouded, stiff, more distant from me than ever.
Rina watched me, dark eyes cautious beneath the glitter. “All right?”
“Are people sometimes not all right when they enter?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she allowed. “This is a dead place. If you’re closer to death than to life… well, there is a reason I made sure you were young and in good health before accepting your petition.” She gestured toward the old gift shop, its windows grey-green with lichen. “I’m going to get changed. You can wait in my kitchen.”
I followed her. The gift shop had been turned into living quarters, but haphazardly. Couldn’t really do it any other way when the shop was built of three open rectangular rooms slanted into each other. Great for nooks for merchandise; weird for living.
“Drop your bag. It looks heavy,” she suggested.
It clanked as I set it down. I rolled my strained shoulder with a mixture of relief and exasperation. The equipment was heavy, but I should be stronger than that. I was supposed to be stronger than that.
Rina managed to keep the risen waters out, but only by simply laying a new floor of concrete bricks over the old. Moisture seeped upward, carrying the dusty green scent of more lichen. My nose itched and my eyes started to stream.
She tossed the witch hat onto a remnant of a cash register counter; the pink braids came off with it, revealing a tousled crop of mousy curls, sweat-dampened. At my evident surprise, she said, “I was at a costume party. I hadn’t expected you until full dark.”
“I’m not that early.” I felt cringe-embarrassed, like I’d pushed my way into someone’s house, unasked, which I guess I had. The pictures of her family pointed that out—groups of smiling or serious women all different, yet stamped with a recognizable likeness. Generation after generation after generation, all mixed together. I glanced away, bitterness swelling. Lucky her.
She pushed deeper into the second room and toward three rolling racks of clothes. She angled them like a screen and ducked behind them to change. “Well, make yourself useful, and turn on the kettle, yeah?”
Another shop counter served as Rina’s kitchenette, the glass shelves holding vacuum-packed foods and her kitchenware. The top had a hot plate and an electric kettle. A gallon of clean water was set nearby. I filled the kettle halfway, flipped the switch, and watched the water simmer. Something reflected in the glass and shimmered like a twist of heat haze. I glanced up into the stained pine rafters. Nothing. But in the glass of the counter, in the shine of the water… something coiled lazily beneath the ceiling—a ghost, a strong enough presence to be nearly visible even before dark.
“You know there isn’t a guarantee,” Rina said, coming out of her makeshift changing room. She wore khaki shorts, a lilac long-sleeved tee, and had put her black boots back on. “Some people just can’t see—”
I pointed upward at the ghost in the rafters. “That’s a reticulated python. At least twelve feet long, and you sleep in here with it? At night?”
“So seeing ghosts is not going to be a problem for you,” Rina said. She sounded relieved. “And Quincy is fine. She’s too heavy for the hammock so if she tries to eat me while I sleep, we both come crashing down, and if I’m awake, I’m more than a match for her.”
“Sure,” I said. I glanced up at the rafters again, and now the snake—Quincy—was a sinuous fog in the darkness. I moved out of striking range just in case.
A witch’s presence could strengthen ghosts to near flesh. It was why I was here, but reptiles made bad ghosts. Creatures of utter instinct; they came back striking or biting.
She made herself a cup of tea that smelled strongly of mint and sage and dirt. When she waved another cup in my direction, I said, “I’m fine.”
I checked my gear and she drank her tea, both of us carefully drawing our tasks out. It was easier than making conversation, but she kept glancing my way. I wondered what she was seeing. An intrusive grad student, itchy and uncomfortable in her skin? Or did she see deeper, beneath my stacked silver bracelets?
When Quincy dropped out of the rafters with an almost-there thud, Rina said, “It’s time.”
My heart lurched. Sundown. Tonight or maybe never.
Rina turned chatty the moment we stepped outside, falling into tour guide patter more appropriate for the original zoo keepers. “The zoo was over 700 acres when the big one hit, but lucky for you, the gibbons were close to the front of the zoo. Some of the other exhibits take more than a bit of walking to get to.”
The ghosts were most definitely up. Ducks squabbled as they paddled through the ankle-deep water over the footpaths, but left no wake. Their voices were clear, but weirdly distant from their sources, leaving me with the disconcerting feeling that their lip syncing was off.
Partially translucent flamingos picked their way through weedy waterbeds as if they were still clear shallows, dipping their beaks over and over again. A herd of tiny deer ran in the long narrow field to our left, pale grey, then ruddy red brown, their dark eyes liquid, their noses quivering, then fading to the color of dirty glass.
I’d read up on the ghosts, looked at the grainy pictures, watched videos ever since I was a teen. I knew what to expect, and I was still trembling by the time we’d walked past the first exhibits of ghostly macaws and the tortoises.
Here, the uncanniness of it all was overwhelming. The zoo was full of movement, but without scent or impact on the world. No matter how hard I breathed, I could only smell dank water, the taste of stone and clay, the lingering mint tea on Rina’s breath, and the soapy scent of her makeup remover.
The zoo looked alive, but was so clearly not. My stomach twisted and hurt. This wasn’t what I wanted at all.
“It wasn’t the storm winds that killed them,” Rina said. “Afterwards, people were so angry at the zoo’s ‘malfeasance’, but the animals had all been put into their safe houses. A dozen members of the staff stayed behind. But the storm surge…. The safe houses were proof against winds up to 180 miles per hour. Everything drowned. Zookeepers, too.”
“Even the birds?”
“Birds couldn’t fly in that wind.”
I swallowed hard, my eyes burning. I was walking on a mass graveyard.
Rina said, “When they knew the water was coming, they got desperate. One of the zoo keepers was a weather witch; she cast a spell fueled by the winds and the waves, but…”
“Something went wrong?” I said.
“Something went wrong, or it failed, or she started too late…. It’s still under debate, even thirty years later.” Rina cast me a quick grin, the remnants of glitter sparking on her face. “It’s pretty much comparable to graduate level witch research. What did she do, how did she do it, and what was her intent, exactly? But beyond that, we take care of the place.”
“What worse can happen to it?” I asked.
“What worse can it do if it spreads?” Rina countered. “Too much we don’t know. So I stay here. And give tours. People come, they see, they get freaked out, they leave. Nothing changes. It’s kind of a death watch, really.” Her lips were chapped, bitten often, like she chewed at them when she wasn’t talking.
“So why do you stay?”
“Witch graduate school,” Rina enunciated. “Seriously, if I can figure out what she did and how… it’s like figuring out a theorem. A chance to put things right. Lots of acclaim. I could move somewhere that wasn’t flooded all the time.”
I almost believed her, except when I’d researched the zoo, I researched her by proxy. She’d been here three times as long as any other witch keeper. When I pointed that out, she scraped her lips with her teeth and said, “Fine, the weather witch was my aunt. I have a stake in finding a purpose for this… monstrosity she created. Your gibbons are around the curve.”
I heard them before I saw them. Same as if they were alive. Their calls were always the first thing you heard, and the sound—even the ghost version of it—echoed throughout the park. In the darkness, they were more ghostly than most, athletic stretches of moonlit shadow sailing through their exhibit, catching at branches that were as long gone as they were.
For a moment, I watched, taking heart. I’d been afraid that the zoo ghosts would all be traumatized, injured animals, but they weren’t: they seemed playful, confident, utterly unaware of us.
I almost said, “Forget the gibbons.” But Rina seemed annoyed enough that I didn’t need her realizing I had come under false pretenses. Maybe I would try to slip away, make her follow me to where I needed to go. Or maybe I would grow a spine and broach the subject.
In the meantime, I got the tangle of spell-enabled recorders out, and set up.
Rina said, “You need me to adjust the days?”
“Please,” I said. “They have language, but it’s subtle. I want to get the variants over time from the day to day and to the hurricane day. We’re hoping to get a full vocabulary from them.”
“That’s what you said in your application, but why?”
“To see if they knew before we did. We’re looking for the canary in the coalmine, the thing that gives us better tools than our broken algorithms. The big one shouldn’t have been so big, but the wave—”
“Sea quake at the same time as the hurricane.”
“Right. Maybe they sensed it coming; maybe if we’d been able to understand…. Maybe we’ll know to start listening before it’s too late for the rest of us. Before anything else has to go extinct.”
Rina raised her hands, and twisted time. Here in the ghost zoo, time was a strange, malleable concept. Things were living and dead; the night was a set number of hours, yet endless; and it could be then as easily as now.
As the sweat beaded along Rina’s hairline, I doubted ‘easy’ really came into it. I recorded their voices, hearing them whoop and howl, then make those same noises more frantically as the ghost tides poured over us, drowning them.
We cycled through a whole series of days, hunting important weather moments: the big one, of course, but also a microburst, the regular rains, the tropical storms. I recorded it all. Even if my advisor doubted the utility of it, at least no one could say I hadn’t done what I came here to do.
“I’m taking a break,” Rina said. Time snapped back into place.
She scrubbed at her eyes. They were reddened with more than effort. Her lips were swelling and blotchy like she’d been biting at them.
I said, “You stay here because you love the animals. Being around them. Even if they’re dead.” I’d made her relive their traumatic moments. The gibbons swung casually across their platforms again, passing a treat back and forth like the world’s most ridiculous trapeze artists.
Rina’s shoulders hunched defensively, then collapsed all at once. “Dead, and so many of them are gone forever. The tigers, the rhinos, sixteen species of the frogs, the gorillas—”
“The Cape Hunting Dogs,” I added, my voice hoarse.
She nodded. “But here, they live. Sort of. I can see them. Where else is that possible?”
I packed up my recorders.
Her jaw firmed. “You have four hours left of my time and effort. Don’t stop just because you feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t.”
She put her hands on her hips. “What do you want, Amber Barrow? You came here for the gibbon language, but you don’t care about it. Not really.”
My heart thudded dully in my chest like her question was dangerous. “I want to see the Cape Hunting Dogs,” I said. “I want you to bring them so much to life that they can see us. Can you do that?” My voice trembled.
She glanced at the silver bangles along my wrists and pained understanding bloomed. “Yes.”
The Cape Hunting Dog exhibit was more than halfway across the park, and my thighs were trembling from fording through the ankle deep water, from keeping myself to a pace that Rina could match. I didn’t want to be alone in this place, a mute witness, unable to be seen or heard by the dead.
Unlike the gibbons, there was no animal chatter to tell me when we were close. We just turned past a tumble of fallen masonry and fake rocks and found ourselves there.
The dogs lounged in a ghostly sea of sand and scrub, spotted ears flicking imaginary flies, their bodies lazy, their eyes alert. Their dappled fur brought sunlight back into the darkness, a collected ripple of moving sun and shadow.
I pushed up against the edge of the exhibit, the dank gap of the broken moat at my toes. “How many of them are there?”
Rina said, “The zoo acknowledged a pack of nineteen. But ghost-wise I’ve counted as many as thirty.”
“In the wild, they had family units up in the forties. Big families, while the hunting was good. We’re supposed to have big families.” And I just had my tiny, fragmented line: my father had died young of heart-break, my grandmother was too frail to even breathe without effort.
“Are you going to take your shackles off?”
“Wake them, first,” I said. “I want them to see me. I want to be seen. I need to be seen.”
Rina tilted her head, inviting explanation, and I said, “It’s… we’re not who we are without the pack. I’ve been less my whole life, because only three of us remained. We had a tradition of going into the wild to run with our smaller brothers. We didn’t realize that tradition was essential until they were all gone, and we started to fade and fail. Bring them back to me, Rina.”
She sat on an upturned chunk of concrete. Before, she had twisted her hands about as if she’d been manipulating the threads of time. Here, she just sat, cross-legged and somehow became … heavy. She looked heavy. Like a weight dragging every scrap of time and life toward her. The dogs, already brightly patterned, took on a new clarity. I could see individual fur on their muzzles, smelled the heat of their toe pads, coated in dust and dirt. Taste the blood of their last meal, sharp in the air. These weren’t my wild brothers, weren’t even truly alive, but maybe they would be enough.
The pack leader paced toward the edge of the exhibit, ears twisting and twitched, her mouth gaping in a grin, her dark eyes fixed on mine in challenge and in question. Do you dare?
I let my bracelets fall. Shackles, Rina had called them, but I had always thought of them as reminders that I wasn’t whole in the way my father had been. In the way Grandmother was, even with her fragile bones. I could change my shape, but the result felt like wearing a costume—no more real than Rina’s pointed hat and green makeup.
I shrugged my shoulders, and changed, shaking off my human skin, adding dark twists and light spots and golden fur. The other hunting dogs rose, tails held loosely behind them, moving forward with that jaunty delicate trot. Their chatter filled my ears like music; interested, cautiously welcoming. I struggled over the rocks, the remnants of wire and leaped the broken moat. I landed badly and the female alpha laughed, “Clumsier than a cub! And for one so old.”
Shock took my breath away. I understood. I hadn’t expected to understand.
“Two-foot, four-foot,” she said. “Bigger brethren that never knows how to hunt. Come and learn. Come and play.”
The youngest ones leaped forward, shoving their muzzles against mine, sniffing and licking, wiping away the lingering traces of human smell on me. “Do you want to chase? We will chase with you.”
Chase, yes, run, yes, leap, yes, all of it yes. We streamed, tumbling and agile, through the exhibit, the alpha pair watching it all. I climbed and fell, and nipped ears that left fur in my mouth, and felt sharp teeth close gently on my hocks and tail, tugging and pushing.
A squirrel ran through the enclosure and the pack wheeled as one. I staggered gamely after them, off-balance, ungainly, falling behind, until the alpha female shoved her weight against mine. Then suddenly, I wasn’t staggering after them but was a part of the pack. I could see the lines drawn, the plan of attack—not serious, the squirrel was too small to be a meal for the pack and the pack fed together—but for practice and sport….
“Amber!” someone called. “Amber!”
Oh, that was me. Some part of me at any rate. But a boring, familiar part, why would I care to respond?
A spark of lightning twisted through the air, drawing our game to a halt.
The witch stood on the other side of the moat, her eyes glowing green, gold twining through her fingers. “Wouldn’t you all like to really run?” She made a single out-flung gesture and golden-green vines bridged the moat.
The alpha male approached cautiously, legs stiff like stilts, then lowered his head and leaped. We flowed after him, racing through the entire zoo. The pack grew; generations of dogs running—small brethren and bigger, yipping and chattering. Some of them had human eyes that laughed in delight. One of them knocked me over and licked my face. “We still live? We still live! Run with us, last daughter.”
And we ran, a glorious tangle of teeth and limbs and white-tipped tails, and we chased the tiny deer, and we stalked ducks in their ponds and we pestered the zebras and taunted the ostriches until the first gold edge touched the sky.
Beneath that sunlit line, their fur turned grey, then misty. By the time the sun turned pink, I was alone. But changed. Better. Whole. I took in a breath of dawn, and saw a single crumpled form lying in the mud. Rina.
She still breathed, but was exhausted to the point of passing out.
“You ran with us,” I said. “On two legs. You could have drained yourself dry if the night had been any longer.”
“Would have been worth it,” she gasped. “You made this dead place feel alive.”
I picked her up—so easy now that I’d connected with my strength—and took her back to her living space. I tucked her into her hammock, and put another cup of her dirt-smelling tea near her. I felt like I’d been feasting all night, felt like I could devour the world. My skin tingled and hummed and my bracelets were scattered over 700 acres of wrecked zoo.
“You should come back,” Rina said, quietly, words half swallowed with her tea.
My heart sank. “I don’t want to leave. Are you going to make me leave?”
Rina said, “I want you to go out and bring others like you back.” Hope burned in her eyes. She bit her lip, but it looked less like self-punishment and more like she was biting back a plea.
“I’m the last of my line.” The knowledge didn’t feel like a burning brand any longer. I was the last, but my family still ran and always would.
“Not just cape dogs,” she said. “Other shifters. I could help you all.”
The idea calmed the jittery edges of my skin, the fluttering that kept wanting to change back to spotted fur and four clawed feet. “I could.” I took a considering breath. “I will.” Tracking the others wouldn’t be easy; there were so very few of us left, but it was a task worth doing.
“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
Lane Robins’s books include the dark fantasy Maledicte, and an urban fantasy series written as Lyn Benedict. Her short fiction can be found in Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, New Myths and others. Occasionally, she can be found on social media, liking posts about books and animals.
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