Excerpt: Vulpes vulpes

Chapter One

Lester MacGillivray sounded older than he was. He lived in the haunted house on the top of the hill, just outside town so no one could appropriate his land for anything official. He lived alone. Forty years of cigarettes and ten years of grief had transformed his once easy Glaswegian accent into something hoarse and more alien than the Old World should have allowed. And he scared children, for God’s sake. Kids smoking marijuana, drinking Jack Daniels, staggering up to trespass on his land and maybe have sex in the garden— the one place not filled with brambles and blackberries, but still, was that an excuse to crush his daffodils? Kids, breaking the law a dozen ways, proud if they broke a window and he was forced to board out the light until a new one could be delivered, and they were afraid of him.

He would laugh, if he ever really laughed. But it had been a long time since he’d had company. A long time since there had been a friendly face to react with, to share the moments. So the laughter percolated up through his stomach into his throat, tickled there, and subsided. What was the point of laughing to an empty house? He’d sound mad. And Lester was not mad, no matter what the kids said.