THE BEAST ─ five hargreeves

LX.

p r e t t y w o r d s
a n d n i g h t m a r e s
i n t h e d a r k

10:57 p.m.

—ZARA WAS DREAMING of home.

She felt it all. The sun, hot against the side of her face. The breeze in her hair. The smell of dust and heat and saltwater. She was on a boat. And there, stretching out before her, was a river.

Suddenly, the river began to boil with shapes . . .

The shapes of crocodiles.

Everywhere she looked, there were the ripples in the water where a scaled back would break the surface; there were churning pockets in the reeds. Along the mudbanks they were lined up, some yawning and exposing gleaming curved teeth. They thrashed their tails slowly, and wriggled in the mud to settle themselves.

"Look!" A sandy-haired man stood beside her on the deck. Zara could see him, could feel his presence, but she was invisible to him. The man picked up his daughter in his arms for her to see. "Have you ever seen so many?"

The little girl's eyes went wide at the sight. She was not more than four, and her dark hair was tied in two pigtails at the back of her head. "Crocodiles, Papa! All the crocodiles in the world are here!"

What was this? Zara wondered. A dream? A memory? Or neither?

In fascination they watched while a dog came down to drink at a place on the bank that looked deserted.

He approached warily, but thirst was his master and he had to drink. Gingerly he lowered his muzzle down to the surface of the empty-seeming water. He had barely touched it when an enormous shape rose up and snatched him, so quickly that the eye could barely follow it. A crocodile had been waiting, submerged.

A women watching in the periphery of the dream screamed and took the child in her arms, shielding her eyes. The little girl buried her face in her mother's arms and began to cry.

The water frothed and the dog, yelping, shot above it, held in the grip of a crocodile jaw the size of a motorcar. The crocodile plunged him beneath the water and held him there until he drowned. Then the outsized jaw surfaced, its maw open, gulping down globs of flesh that had been alive only minutes ago. Blood spread out over the water and a flotilla of crocodiles rushed toward it, attacking the first crocodile and trying to wrench his meal from his jaws. Limbs and scaled tails lashed in the bloody water.

Pieces of the dog, its ears and tail, floated free, but were soon snatched by other waiting crocodiles.

The dream shifted, blurred. Now Zara was standing in a room. The little girl was sniffling loudly into a handkerchief as her father comforted her.

"You mustn't cry, kiddo," said the man gently, wiping tears from the girl's eyes. "To love nature is to understand that the crocodile wants to live just as much as the dog."

"But it isn't fair."

"Of course it isn't. That's the most important thing to remember about life, little one. You know what it is?"

"That . . . all crocodiles are mean and awful and evil and really, really mean?"

The man sighed and tucked a lock of dark hair behind the girl's ear.