“Okay,” Katters said, “I’ve got one.”

She leaned forward and the oil lamp threw light against her pale throat and too-sharp teeth, highlighting her scales and scars. Her shadow loomed against the ceiling, towering over Zebra and Sor.

“My—”

“It’s not the one with the dog, again?” Zebra asked.

“No. My—”

“You always tell the one with the dog.”

“It’s not the one with the dog.”

“Well, then tell it already.”

Katters glared at him. He didn’t notice, leaning casually against the upturned table. The light was softer over there, painted a more even glow across his skin.

When she’d decided he was done, she took a breath and continued. “My ma used to tell this one, when I was a small thing. She’ll swear up and down it happened, and if you knew my ma, you’d be inclined to believe her.”

“Not inclined to believe you, though,” Zebra muttered over his wineglass.

Sor shoved his shoulder and he dropped the drink. It splashed over the floor between Katters and himself, running between the boards and chasing after their legs.

“Shit,” Katters said.

Zebra forgot himself and started to stand — “Hold on,” — before Katters tugged him back down by his sleeve.

“Leave it. It’ll be fine for one night.”

“Oh. Right.” He folded his legs back under him, settling further from the puddle and closer to Sor.

She passed him a bottle. “Here, get another. We’ve got plenty.”

Katters leaned back over the lamp. “Are we done? Are we sitting pretty and ready to listen? Good. So, my ma told me this one.”

~*~

I grew up on an orchard, and so did my ma, and so did her ma, though what great-gram grew up on, I couldn’t tell you. It wasn’t an orchard, because great-gram won that in a bet in eighteen-fifty-something and didn’t have the slightest what to do with it.

Ma always liked to say her gram actually lost that bet, though of course she didn’t know it at the time. And don’t mishear me, the orchard was fine. It kept us all clothed and fed for two hundred years — it did its job and well, too. But there was something off about it.

Something made a home in that orchard.

You could hear it in the deep of winter, when everything else had gone dormant. It moved between the trees with slow, heavy steps, brushing against bark and branches. At night, you could hear it breathing. Huffing and snorting.

Needless to say, Ma wasn’t allowed in the orchard at night, and needless to say she wasn’t keen on obeying that particular rule. We wouldn’t have a story if she was.

She’d sneak out her window after everyone else had gone to bed, slip into her boots and jacket, and then slip into the trees with a flashlight and no sense at all. She’d track the thing, following the prints it left in the frost and listening for its movements. But she’d lose the trail, and get turned around, and hear the thing off in some other direction, what seemed like miles from where she expected it to be — until the morning crept between the trees and she had to hurry back to her cold bed.

She’d get a couple hours of sleep — there wasn’t anything needed done before morning in the winter — and the thing would roam through her dreams: twenty feet tall; dragging shaggy, matted fur behind it; and panting clouds of steam.

Eventually, it would get too cold for traipsing about in the dead of night, and Ma would give up and stop sneaking out for another year. And that would be that, except that Ma had this friend, Ainsley.

Ainsley was something of a tomboy, and when Ma told her about the thing that lived in the orchard, Ainsley was downright offended that Ma had given up on finding it just because the air had gotten a bit nippy.

They were going to find that thing, Ainsley decided, come hell or high water. They were going to catch it somehow, and then they were going to sell it to a museum and become famous and go on to catch other things that lived in other places — the Loch Ness Monster, the Jersey Devil, Bigfoot, so on and et cetera. When Ma told Ainsley about the thing, Ainsley realised her true calling, or so you’d believe to hear her talk that night.

It happened that she was sleeping over, and the two of them fleshed out a plan in hushed voices while they waited for the rest of the house to go to sleep. They would tie jump-ropes together and make a snare, and they would sneak leftovers out of the fridge to use as bait, and maybe there was a net packed away with the fishing gear. Ainsley was really good at animal calls, maybe she could lure the thing into their trap. Ma had learnt all manner of knot-tying from the scouts, so she should be able to restrain it once they had it. They would surely at least see the thing before sun-up, and if they didn’t catch it, they would just have to come back and try again, and again, and again.

The house settled around them, and they put their plan into action, gathering their tools and sneaking outside. It was fierce cold, but neither of them would let the other live it down if they chickened out, now.

Their boots crunched and scuffed against the dirt, and for a while that was all they could hear. They started to worry that mayhap it was too cold for the thing, too — that maybe it had gone into hibernation, and maybe they would have to wait a year to catch it, after all. Soon they could also hear each other shivering, their breaths stuttering against the chill and frost, and Ma was about to suggest they give up and start heading back when there was something else.

They heard voices.

~*~

They heard voices. Katters’ mouth snapped shut and the three of them stared at the front of the house. Sor even went so far as to peek over the upturned table they’d hidden behind. Her ears were perked forward, attentively, while Katters’ folded back and Zebra’s sat dumbly on the side of his head like any other human’s.

People were outside, on the street. Their drunken song carried through the dark, reaching Katters, Sor, and Zebra as an incomprehensible mush. Their existence was equally incomprehensible.

Zebra started to whisper a question: “Where—”

“Shh!” Sor whirled on him and fixed him with a glare.

They waited. The voices moved on, taking their song with them, and silence settled around the house again. They kept waiting.

Eventually, Katters broke the tension with a sigh. “Tourists.”

“Idiots,” Zebra corrected. “They’ll get someone killed.”

“Or worse,” Sor added.

“Yeah, let’s not with that.” Katters selected a bottle of clear liquor from their collection and poured herself a drink. “It’s tradition to not think about those things.”

“Good tradition. Sensible.”

Zebra snapped a pocket-watch open and angled it toward the lamp. “Finish the story,” he said. “We’ve still got hours to go.”

“’Course. Let me just—” She knocked the drink back, shuddered, and set her empty glass on the floor. “Right. So, Ma was about to give up, when…”

~*~

The voices were hushed, urgent. The voices of people on a mission. The voices, perhaps, of parents in search of their missing children — children who should have been snug and safe in their beds. Of course, that was the conclusion the girls jumped to: that they had been found out, and were in trouble, and would be scolded and lectured and punished.

It did not occur to them that, were that so, their parents would surely be calling for them. Shouting — not speaking, not whispering. The girls were too preoccupied with what they thought was the worst case scenario to think of anything worse.

Ainsley turned their flashlight off and as their eyes adjusted, they spotted a glow off in the trees. Shapes moved around it, but the light itself was stationary. A fixed, golden point on the ground. A beacon, drawing the girls to it through a sea of darkness.