Winter Door (6 page)

“Oh my God! Run!” she screamed. She grabbed hold of Logan’s parka, breaking his paralyzed stance as she pulled him toward the school gate. She let go then and ran for the bike shed, praying it would be open. She did not have the slightest doubt that if the nightmarish beasts caught them, they would be killed. Logan passed Rage and slammed his bulk into the shed door so hard that if it had not swung open on impact, he would surely have broken something. The door gave a great metallic clang as it rebounded off the inner wall. They hurled themselves inside and turned to slam the door shut.

“The bar,” Rage gasped, and Logan was beside her, their breaths rasping in unison as they lifted it into place.

A second later the wolves were at the metal door, smashing and snarling as if there were a whole pack of them instead of only three. Fortunately, the door was heavy metal, as were the shed walls and floor. The bluish security light above the door made Logan look pale and ill, and Rage supposed that she looked the same.

“The roof,” Logan hissed, jerking his chin upward.

Rage looked up to see that there was a section of transparent Perspex. She shook her head. “They couldn’t possibly climb—” She stopped because all of a sudden the animals outside had fallen silent. She made a move toward the door, and Logan grabbed convulsively at her arm. She shook him off and pressed her ear against the metal by the crack between door and jamb. The hair on her arms rose as she heard the sound of ragged breathing. A picture came into her mind of a wolf pressing its ear to the door on the other side. She drew back sharply, terror and helplessness rushing through her veins.

“What did—” Logan began, then something landed heavily on the roof. This time it was Logan who moved first, turning and literally dragging Rage after him to the bathroom in the back of the shed. He pushed her in first and shot the bolt behind himself just as the Perspex in the roof cracked with a violent report. Of one accord, they pressed themselves against the wall on either side of the malodorous toilet bowl, as far from the door as possible.

Rage listened so hard her head ached, but she couldn’t hear any movement. Time passed. It grew colder, and the silence went on and on until Rage finally pushed her fear aside and gathered her wits. She knew that wolves were stealthy, clever hunters, but they would not wait long if there was other prey out there, easier to catch. It might even be that she had imagined the cracking sound of the roof giving way. How on earth could wolves leap onto the roof, after all, even if they had been as gigantic as she had imagined? Glancing at Logan’s pale, set face, it occurred to her with a faint sense of hysteria that they were waiting for the surprise terror that always happened in the movies when you thought the characters were safe. The body you thought was dead that leapt up and grabbed the hero. The dragon that had been killed, then opened its maddened eye. The face that suddenly appeared at the window.

The wind moaned. It wasn’t as cold in the shed bathroom as it had been outside, but it was cold enough, and they must have been standing there for an hour. Rage couldn’t feel her toes. She forced herself to stand up.

“What are you doing?” Logan whispered. The white showed all around his green irises.

“We can’t stay in here forever,” Rage whispered. Her voice sounded strange and husky, as if she had screamed for hours.

“What if one of those things is waiting inside?” Logan whispered. He was sweating. Oddly, knowing that Logan was so frightened made Rage feel less so. After all, she had faced some pretty terrifying things in her life already, hadn’t she?

“I’d rather get eaten than freeze to death slowly in a smelly bathroom,” she said in Rue’s stern, no-nonsense voice.

Another silence.

“All right,” Logan said at last. “But don’t blame me if we get eaten.”

This was so completely absurd that, incredibly, Rage started to laugh. It was more than half hysteria, and she was shivering so hard that her laughter sounded like some sort of convulsion. She tried to stifle the sound, but this only made her laugh the harder. She doubled over and tears leaked from her eyes. She saw that after his first look of astonishment, Logan was laughing, too.
Logan Ryder and me are laughing together,
she thought incredulously, which made her laugh even more. They were both hanging on to the cistern, leaning over the pee-smelling toilet, and this seemed the funniest thing of all.

When they managed to gain some measure of control, Logan gasped, “Well, if anything
was
out there, that would have convinced them a couple of maniacs were in here, and they would’ve taken off.”

That broke them both up again, but after a bit, Rage’s stomach hurt so much from laughing that she had to make herself stop. And suddenly she was quite certain that they were safe. She reached for the door and then hesitated and looked at Logan. He sobered and nodded, and they left the bathroom.

Rage’s heart sped up again at the sight of drifts of snow in the shed and great, jagged pieces of shattered Perspex. The skylight had broken but there were no beasts. The Perspex must have collapsed under a load of snow. Most likely the thump they had heard hadn’t been a wolf landing on the roof but the roof buckling a little under its weight of snow. She went to the door and rested her hands on the crossbar. The feel of the chill metal under her fingers was like an icy burn, reminding her of the sheer black malevolence she had felt when she had put her face against the jamb earlier. All her fear flowed back. She might have drawn away, but Logan reached out and put his hands on the bar beside hers. “Okay, let’s do it, then,” he rasped. They lifted the bar smoothly, hooked it back in place, and heaved open the door.

A blast of icy wind clawed at their faces, snatching Rage’s breath away, but there were no growls. No giant wolves leaping at them.

“Gone,” Rage said shakily, pulling her coat around her, half convinced that she had imagined the wolves. Maybe they hadn’t even been anything more than a pack of feral dogs turned vicious by the weather. The door jerked violently and Logan caught hold of it. “We better shut it or the wind will break it right off.”

Rage nodded and they fought to close it. Then they leaned into the wind and went along the track to the outer fence. At the fence gate, Logan pointed to an enormous, smudged footprint. They stared at it in horror for a full three minutes, Rage thinking it looked more like a bear track than a wolf print.

“We better get to the school in case they come back,” she said shakily.

On the other side of the gate, her books and notes lay scattered in a pile, pages fluttering in the wind where the snow had not buried them. Several loose sheets had blown against the fence. Rage stared at them in wonder, feeling as if the tug-of-war with her bag had happened in another life. She noticed absently that Logan’s battered backpack lay beside the fence, where he must have put it to free his hands.

“Blast!” Logan muttered, his voice slurred with cold. He knelt down and began shoveling everything back into her schoolbag.

“Forget them,” Rage said, glancing around.

“You go ahead and I’ll catch up,” he said determinedly.

“You’re mad!” Rage said, falling onto her knees and helping him.

The job was done quickly. Logan zipped the bag and handed it to Rage. He threw his backpack over his shoulder and, side by side, they hurried along the footpath toward the oasis of light ahead that was the school. They did not speak until the doors had hissed shut. Rage turned to see them both reflected in the sheets of glass. Beyond was only the darkness and the flying snow.

“Those things could be through that glass in about a second,” Logan murmured, voicing her own thought.

“We ought to call someone,” Rage said.

“Look,” Logan said in a peculiar voice. She looked at him. “I’m sorry about the books,” he went on. “I’ll tell the library I did it and pay for the ones that are wrecked.”

She shrugged, and her mind stuttered sideways to the call he had made. “I don’t think I’m better than anyone else, Logan. I really don’t. If I seem different sometimes, it’s because of some things that happened to me last summer. Not just my mam being in an accident.”

He gave her a look she could not quite read, and she thought he might ask
What things?
but instead he said, “Maybe we better make it an anonymous call to the cops. We ought to let someone know those things are on the loose. But we’ll have to think of a story. If we say we got chased by giant feral pigs, the police’ll think it’s a hoax and take no notice.”

Rage stared at him. “Pigs? They were wolves.”

Logan frowned at her. “Are you nuts? Didn’t you see the tusks and their red eyes?” He was already headed for the phone beyond the lockers. Rage followed, bemused.

“Logan, I didn’t see pigs, feral or otherwise. I saw wolves!”

Logan turned to her, his face grimly certain. “Look, I know what a boar looks like, all right? One chased me when I was about six. I have a scar from my belly button to my neck to prove it, and I was about three inches from its face when it tried to gut me. I still have nightmares about it sometimes.”

Rage was silenced by the vision this summoned up. Was it possible that she had only imagined seeing wolves? Logan was now dialing triple zero, and putting on a much older voice, he described having seen feral pigs in the school grounds near the lower bike shed. He hung up while the policewoman was in the middle of asking for his name and address.

“That was amazing,” Rage said. “You really sounded older and totally responsible. Like a doctor or something.”

“I can do voices,” Logan said gruffly, but she could see that he was pleased by her praise.

Rage remembered something he had said earlier, and after a slight hesitation, she asked, “Logan, what happened to Mrs. Marren?”

Logan gave a short bark of laughter. “You are a cool one, Rebecca Jane.”

“Rage,” she corrected him automatically, then flushed at what he might say.

But he smiled and made a gesture of surrender with his hands. “Rage, then. I was in the office waiting to get my ear chewed when a phone call came in for you, so I pricked up my ears. It was the Marren woman calling to say she wouldn’t be able to pick you up and bring you home because she’d had an accident.”

“Oh no!” Rage cried.

“It’s okay. It wasn’t bad. She drove into a ditch and needed a tractor to get her out. From what I heard, no one was hurt, but I guess she was freaked by what happened. There was a message for Anabel to go to her aunt’s, and you’re supposed to call that Somersby woman so that she can arrange accommodation for tonight if your uncle can’t come and get you. I offered to give you the message. I figured you’d come back to the school when no one turned up to pick you up, so I waited.”

“What were you going to do?” Rage asked a little stiffly.

He looked sheepish but also slightly belligerent. “I dunno. I meant to scare you, but you wouldn’t scare, so I got mad….” Rage said nothing and he suddenly scowled. “Look, I said I was sorry about the stupid books.”

“They’re not stupid,” Rage said.

“They are if you can’t read!” Logan snarled. Then he whitened. “You better not tell anyone I said that. Anyway, it’s a lie.”

Rage laughed a little. “Logan, tonight we were almost eaten by giant…giant
somethings,
and we hid in a bathroom together, so I think that better count as some sort of truce, don’t you?”

Logan gave a gusty sigh. “Yeah. Sorry. But look, I was only joking about not being able to read.”

“Sure,” Rage said. “Look, I better call my uncle again.” It was a hint but Logan didn’t get it. He stood by while she called and left a message about Mrs. Marren’s accident.

“No one home?”

She shook her head, chewing her lip. “I called already on my way back to the school, so he might have got the first message and already be on his way.”

“Is that your uncle who went exploring in the jungles?”

Rage nodded, startled at how much he knew about her. “He’s taking care of the farm and me while Mam is in hospital. I told him in the message that I’d wait in the library until closing time, so I better go there.”

“I’ll wait with you,” Logan offered. Rage guessed that he wasn’t too keen on the idea of going outside alone, and she could hardly blame him.

“What will you do if your uncle doesn’t turn up?” Logan asked when they were both sitting by the heater in the library.

“He’ll come,” Rage said, taking the wet books from her bag and propping them on the floor by the heater fan so that the pages would dry. Logan began to help her, grimacing at the worst damaged.

“Lucky you to have someone to rely on,” he muttered with some of his old bitterness.

Rage had opened her mouth to say that she was not a bit certain that her uncle could be relied upon, but then she closed it because she hardly knew Logan. Rage noticed that snowflakes were falling and falling through the blue halo of radiance around a light outside.

“Maybe those things were some sort of experiment that escaped,” Logan murmured. “They’d have to be some sort of mutation to be that big.”

“Maybe it will say something about them in the paper tomorrow,” Rage said, remembering how big the wolves had looked. Then she realized Logan was still talking.

“…if you want,” Logan was saying diffidently, his cheeks pink.

“Pardon?” Rage asked.

“Forget it,” Logan said with an angry shrug.

Rage sighed. “Logan, if we are going to be friends, you have to stop taking everything the wrong way. I didn’t hear what you said because almost being eaten has made it hard for me to concentrate.”

He expelled a hissing breath and then looked into her eyes. “
Are
we going to be friends? I’m not that easy to be friends with.”

“Me neither,” Rage said lightly, dabbing at the wetness inside the bag with a balled handkerchief.

Logan hesitated and then said without looking at her, “I was just saying that after the library closes, I can show you this late-night café near the bowling alley that doesn’t close until two a.m. Then there’s an all-night gas station where they don’t mind if you sit, so long as you keep ordering stuff. It doesn’t have to be anything expensive, and there’s a good doughnut place that opens for breakfast at six. Just in case your uncle doesn’t turn up.”