by Rose Szabo
“I am still not free,” he said. “You, like every other Zarrin before you, have broken your promise to me. I suppose I should not be surprised.”
“But you’re angry.”
“What do you care how I feel?”
“I…”
I felt silly. The home I had once loved was stitched up in Grandmere’s plans. Luma and Grandpa Miklos hated me and were living off of squirrels in the woods. My father was dead, my mother a prisoner. Everything that mattered was lost. But still when I looked at Arthur I felt some little warm point of hope.
“Because I love you,” I said.
He shook his head.
“That’s an empty sentiment,” he said. “I’m yours, inherited along with the house, so I suppose you can do what you want with me. If you say you love me, all you mean is that you like that I belong to you.”
“It’s not like that.”
He spun and dipped me, bending me back until our spines were parallel to the floor. Close to me now, I could see the stitches that held him together, little threads shoring up rips in the fabric of his thin body.
“If I could kill you, do you think I would?” he asked.
I stared past my own reflection in his dark glasses. I could see the sunken sockets of his eyes through them; I’d just never bothered to look before. I forced myself to really look.
Yes, I thought he would kill me if he could. For months I’d studied him, wondering what kind of man he was. But he wasn’t a man. The schoolteacher of Winterport had been vacated, a series of empty rooms leading only to other empty rooms. In trying to know him, in trying to solve him, I’d only ever seen what was left from the disaster. And meanwhile, he’d been elsewhere; maybe I’d never seen him. Or maybe only in moments: the part of him that had taught me piano when Grandma Persephone wasn’t looking, or sat with me in the dining room after everyone else had left. He was that anger I’d seen in the cellar. He was the question he’d just asked me. He was a carefully nurtured spark of defiance. He was what happened when you cornered someone, when they had nowhere left to go. I remembered Grandpa Miklos saying, “The wolf could move when I could not.”
How could I help Arthur? There was no Arthur. When I’d said, “You’re free, Arthur,” I’d been talking to no one at all.
“You’re not Arthur Knox,” I said.
He paused for a moment. “Don’t play games with me.”
“No, really,” I said. “You’re what was born when he died. Arthur is just a name for your body.”
What had Luma said about changing shape? That it was like turning yourself inside out. Underneath yourself, another self. As close as skin, always there, whether you used it or not. I took a deep breath.
“Somewhere inside of you there’s someone else,” I said. “You just have to reach in and pull it out.”
He stopped stock still, as though listening for a distant sound. Around us, I felt the villagers grind to a halt, too. I reached up and touched his face; it twitched under my fingertips. It felt warm—soon, almost hot.
“You aren’t the man who died on this hill,” I said. “You’re something else. And that something is already free.”
A shiver ran through him. Dimly, I was aware that we were being watched. Arthur reached up to his face and took off his glasses.
Where his eyes had once been, now there was a red glow along the line of stitches, a sourceless bright light that seemed to press outward. He gleamed and burned from the inside, as though his body were a paper lantern. He opened his mouth and grinned at me, and light poured out from the gaps in his teeth. A gleaming clear spirit, wearing his body loosely, like a skin that might be shed.
“I see now,” he said.
He turned and the crowd gasped.
He began wading through them, toward the door. Some of them screamed and jostled. People fainted. Father Thomas stepped between Arthur and the doorway and put up a hand. Arthur picked him up by the waist, as though waltzing with him, twirled him lightly through the air, and set him aside. The man who had been Arthur leaped out of the house and into the night. His outline shone through the spaces between the trees as he ran.
I wanted to watch him until I couldn’t see him anymore. But I didn’t have time. I needed to make my move.
I pushed my way upstream through the crowd. Grandmere was on the other side of the hall, in the dining room, pushing her way toward the center, too. She sounded weary and irritable. Good, I thought. I started making my way toward her. “Rhys,” I said, just before she reached me.
“Grandmere,” I said, when she got close, “Arthur’s gone! He turned into a monster!”
She rushed to my side and grabbed me in her arms. Her whole body rippled, as though something very large had just passed beneath her skin. “I’ll keep you safe,” she said. “Everyone stay put!”
Behind me, I heard the back door slam. Rhys had made it outside.
I looked up to the ceiling. I wondered if Grandma Persephone was here. “Help me,” I whispered. And I felt the air around me grow cold.
* * *
When I manage to climb my way back to my family, the house is full of people—a party, from the looks of it. In the kitchen, Margaret is weaving in and out of the cooks who have been hired to cater. She is keeping them busy, undoing parts of their work, staying underfoot. Then Eleanor appears in the doorway, and I see a look pass between them. Margaret hugs her. There are tears in her eyes. Eleanor disappears back into the party.
I follow Margaret into the recesses of the kitchen. She’s staring out the back door. At the tree line, I can see the wolves. The bright white of my granddaughter’s fur points them out to me, and only then can I make out Miklos’s shaggy gray coat.
They’re waiting.
Margaret starts packing up her set of kitchen knives. She casts a long look back toward the parlor as she clicks the lid shut on a suitcase stamped with the letter Z. Her eyes flick to the tree line, back to the parlor.
They’re going to abandon her, then. Eleanor is alone. Why should she not be, I think briefly. Was I ever not alone at her age?
But why should she have to be, when she has us?
When Margaret opens the door, I shove it shut. Only an inch or two, but it’s enough. She looks up at the empty air, touches the doorknob gingerly again. I shut it again.
She nods. She puts on her boots, but she leaves the suitcase behind. Soon she is striding across the lawn, her hands raised as she pantomimes a story about a girl who wants to save her family.
A dark shape rushes through me and follows her out the door. Rhys! He bounds across the lawn to catch up to them. Eleanor is working hard tonight. Maybe there’s something I can do for her. I flit into the main hall. It’s a teeming crowd, re-expanding after parting to let Rhys through. It’s a riot about to happen. How can I make this worse? The front door is gaping open; I fling it shut on some poor fisherman’s fingers. I rattle the windowpanes. I turn off the lights.
THIRTEEN
There were enough guests that they couldn’t all be controlled. Some of them stood stock-still in the front hall in whatever poses they were in when Grandmere told us not to move. But others were bolting for the doors. And I realized that I could help the chaos. She’d told me not to move, but she had said nothing about speaking.
“Everybody panic!” I yelled, and the air filled with screaming. People were running, trampling. Someone grabbed the coat rack from the front hall and charged at Grandmere with it. It happened in slow motion, while she was screaming at me, and I had time to wish I panicked like that. The prongs of the coat rack went into her, and I watched them come out her front, bent and distorted. “Run,” I whispered at the man, and he bolted into the night. I hoped he would stop running eventually.
Grandmere stared down at her chest for a moment. Then, arms bending backward, she reached behind her and grabbed the coat rack. She yanked it from her back, and a little torrent of creatures came out of her: the rabbit, a pair of spotted hunting dogs, a fistful of snakes.
Eventually, she was ringed by a ragged cadre of animals, growling and snapping at anyone who came near her. From the other room, I could see the red-haired girl with the double row of teeth, pushing her way toward us.
And then the lights went out. People running past jostled me, but I couldn’t move from the spot. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the dim shape in front of me that was Grandmere.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I am not angry with you. But I am very disappointed. Don’t you love me? Don’t you care what happens to me?”
I felt like crying. “I do love you,” I said. “But I can’t let you keep doing this to people. They don’t belong to you.”
It was suddenly quiet and echoey around us. I realized the guests had fled. It was just Grandmere and me, and her cadre, a gathered assembly that looked almost like one mass in the dark.
“I don’t want to fight you,” she said. “You would be utterly destroyed.”
I tried again to move. I still couldn’t. The matches were tucked in the palm of my hand. The hall closet was not so far away, if I could only have made a run for it. But I was glued to the spot.
“I must remind myself that you are young,” Grandmere said. “That you may someday not be as hopeless as you are now. We will have to leave this place, of course. I will have to find us another household.”
This was how it ended. She wouldn’t even kill me. She was going to take me away somewhere and make me eat someone else. At least my family was safe, what was left of them. They shouldn’t have sent me away to school, I thought. Lusitania was right. They should have killed me the night I ate the banker’s boy.
And then, I had an idea.
“Grandmere,” I said. “Please.” I was already on the edge of tears. It wasn’t hard to cry. Her face softened a little, and she took a step toward me. I opened my mouth.
The boy’s body slid out onto the floor with a thud. It was my body. I could steer it as easily as my own. I let go of the book of matches, and he caught them as easily as if I’d passed them from one hand to another.
“What?” Grandmere shouted.
I got him scrambling to his feet. He was small, maybe eight or nine, and quick. He darted easily around Grandmere’s pile of bodies. She was tired and wounded. The snakes lunged for him, the hunting dogs sprang up and trotted after him, but he was fast. It was too dark to see, but I knew the way. I got him to the closet, threw open the door, struck a match, and tossed it in. It blazed for a second. And then, I felt that second body of mine erupt into fire. The pain was indescribable. I screamed, and I would have fallen down if I could.
The staircase was burning now, a great waterfall of fire at our sides. Grandmere and her creatures were illuminated by the flames.
“That was clever,” she said. “I admire that. I was wrong to call you hopeless. But you must come to see the futility of fighting me. There is too much of me. And I suspect,” she said, “that that was your last trick. Unless you want to throw a rabbit at me—”
It took me a second to hear it, over the roar of the fire. A steady growl coming from the kitchen.
And then, the pack lunged.
Grandpa Miklos fell on the hunting dogs, while Rhys leaped at Father. Luma, on two legs, took a run at the girl with her piranhalike teeth, and then slashed a handful of dagger claws across her throat.
It was seamless, beautiful, like a dance. Luma dropped to the ground, and by the time she landed she was a white wolf of enormous size. She snarled at Grandmere, sprang up lightly on her paws, and leaped through the air and into Grandmere’s face. Luma tore Grandmere’s dress, her skin, her flesh on her way past. She landed and turned, ready to strike again.
Grandmere stood suddenly still. She clutched at her neck and face. A gash on her cheek split open. A hard ridge of black bone came out, and slick, oily pinfeathers, and a red-black eye. The crow wriggled out of her cheek, tearing as it went, and when it burst forth, it uncorked the wound and a torrent of black birds flew screaming into the burning hall. The beating of their wings turned the room into a black cacophony, until I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me.
Grandmere reached up to her ruined face and took the edges of the wound in her lavender gloves. She grabbed and pulled.
And darkness poured out.
The room filled with crows, more than I could possibly count. Wings and beaks and eyes, shrieking, tearing at my face and hands. When they cleared, I saw what Grandmere really was.
The soft old woman who smelled of violets lay crumpled in a heap on the floor, and the thing that lived inside that body had poured out into the hall. There were tentacles and beaks and fins and human arms and legs, the paws of a lion, and those malicious slit eyes I’d seen on the card. But all of this was just a corona circling a purple-black hole in the air. I felt my feet slip on the carpet, dragged in by the magnetic pull of that rip in the world.
“I’ve done this more often than you have,” she said. “If you want to learn, I can help you.”
Scattering crows in his wake, Rhys lunged at her. “Stop!” I yelled, but it was too late. His momentum carried him forward even as he turned to try to obey me. Grandmere lashed out a tentacle, snatched him up, and flung him toward the maw.
Without thinking, I opened my mouth and breathed in.
He hung, for a moment, suspended between us. And then Grandmere let go, and Rhys was flung backward. Before I knew what had happened, he disappeared.
I yelped and spat him back out. He lay on the floor unmoving. I was still rooted to the spot; I couldn’t run to him. I couldn’t tell if he was still Rhys, or a thing.
“See?” Grandmere said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
My whole body was shaking. I stared at her with all the fury I could manage.
“Oh, don’t be sad,” she said. “What would he ever have done with his life? You’ll make better use of him than he ever would have.”
Luma and Grandpa were still here somewhere, buried under the torrent of crows. “Don’t touch her,” I said, not knowing where to direct my voice. “She’ll pull you in.”
“Why help them?” she asked. “What have they ever done for you?”
It was then that I saw the torches appearing in the yard.
The townspeople of Winterport had panicked. And they’d done what townspeople did, in a panic. They’d gone home, and prepared, and gathered their forces. The torches bobbed and swayed as they got closer to the house. Their flickering light gleamed off of scythes and the barrels of hunting rifles. And in the midst of them was a strange shape, like a moving pillar of flame. I squinted at it, not understanding what I saw.
Grandmere noticed it at the same time as I did. “Oh, foolishness,” she said. She bubbled and writhed past me toward the door.
Luma darted out of the cloud of crows and grabbed Rhys under the arms. As she did, she looked up at me. “You can do it,” she said. “I love you, Ellie.” And then she was gone, dragging Rhys’s body away into the shadows.
“Grandmere,” I said. “Forget the townspeople. Talk to me.”
She turned, and a thousand mouths opened and showed teeth.
“Do you really think you can command me so easily?” she said. “I have business to attend to. I’ll deal with you later.”
“Leave us,” I said. “This is your last warning.”
Her many voices cackled.
“We’re leaving together,” Grandmere said. “And only after you help me eat this awful little mob.”
“That’s not happening.”
“But why?” she asked. “Why be alone when you could be with someone who loves you?”
I knew she meant it. I couldn’t move toward her, but I held out my hands.
“I love you, too, Grandmere,” I said. “I mean it. I hope you know that.”
I was crying as I opened my mouth wide.
First a crow flew backward into my mouth, struggling and flapping its wings. Then, from somewhere in her mass, a handful of mice broke loose, and they too car
eened across the space between us and disappeared. Grandmere seemed to feel it and turned the bulk of her body toward me.
“You think you’re clever,” she said. “I—”
I pulled harder. She pulled back. But she’d been spreading herself thin all day, and she’d lost the skin that usually held her together. I yanked, and a pile of soldiers in brown uniforms spilled out onto the floor, stumbling backward into the black hole in the middle of me. Grandmere howled and screamed and sent a torrent of crows toward me. They pecked me, tore at me, and I couldn’t move to stop them. But eventually, they too were swallowed, and as they began to vanish into me I could see that we were ringed with fire. There was nowhere to go.
It was horrible, the feeling as I devoured her—exactly as horrible as it would have been to do it at a table with a knife and fork. The hundreds of twisting limbs stretched and contorted as they were dragged toward me, and she screamed and begged and fought. As I worked my way through the limbs of all those creatures, I felt the void at her center begin to tug at me. But it was just nothing, I told myself, vast empty nothing. There was room inside of nothing for more nothing.
And so my nothing devoured her nothing and then it was over, and I felt heavy, and expansive, like I’d been swollen up with things that were not me. And I wondered briefly if this was what she’d been pushing me toward, what she’d wanted to happen.
And then I fainted.
* * *
When I opened my eyes again, the house was burning down.
I could see people from Winterport running back and forth across the floor. They were stomping around, throwing things for the sheer joy of throwing them. They knocked down the cut glass candy dish and it smashed to pieces, scattering peppermints. The stairs still blazed, and people were lighting smaller fires in the dining room and the parlor. Others ran past me into the night with beautiful things from the house. They grabbed our silver coffee service, our dining chairs, and any paintings that weren’t of us. The portraits of the family made their own bonfire just a few feet from me.