by Bre Hall
“I was just wonderin’ what would possess ‘em in the first place.”
“The Haskell Brothers are our biggest competition,” Helen said. “It’s just a business tactic, that’s all. If we don’t have a product to sell, we’re not a threat.”
Ida stopped the car just short of the gate, an ‘H’ scratched faintly into its face. The Haskell Brothers. Boys they’d grown up with. Played with as children. Sat by in the school house. If circumstance had been different, they’d still be friendly. Maybe more. Ida and Henry, the younger of the two brothers, had been inseparable their eleventh summer. He was the best friend she’d ever had. Then life hit them both and they eventually stopped meeting each other on the edge of the creek that separated their properties.
“Stay with the car,” Helen said, opening the door. The other girls began to pile out, Etta swinging the gun up to her bony shoulder.
Ida watched her sisters climb one by one over the fence, hiking up their long skirts and disappearing into the night. When they were gone, she turned the engine off and slipped outside. It was cold enough to see her breath curl over her bottom lip and twist toward the wide birth of sky. She pulled her ratty old coat tighter around her body.
Ida loved to drive—the bumbling engine beneath her toes—but what she loved even more was the peaceful moments without sisters, without worries. Most people would hate getting left behind while they ran out for deliveries or into the woods for a load. They’d hate not being a part of the action. Not Ida.
The gravel and dead grass crunched beneath her boots as she walked to the fence. She leaned against the rough metal and peered out across the flat land. An owl cooed from the shelter of the trees that flanked the field before her and the wind cried out as it gushed across the land. The moon rose another step above it all.
Damn Haskell brothers.
It was a perfect night for a run and they’d had to ruin it. The brothers had threatened them the last time they met. Said they were selling in their territory. Ida scoffed as she thought back to their meeting. Like Garfield County and the whole city of Enid had been claimed. It was a wide enough area to be shared. Or so Helen had tried to explain. Even Etta, waving her gun, hadn’t swayed them. Ida pictured a shiny bullet lodged in Lou Haskell’s forehead. She suppressed a smile. It wasn’t Christian to think like that.
A twig cracked in the woods beside her and she spun toward it.
“Don’t you be worried, now,” came the twang of a deep, familiar voice. Henry Haskell came into view, his short red hair fiery in the moonlight. As if his hair was really white and the moon had bathed it in red light.
“Ain’t worried,” Ida said, sinking back into her comfortable stance against the fence.
Henry leaned against the metal beams beside her. She could smell the chewing tobacco packed into his cheek, a few days of sweat, and the sour scent of moonshine. He spewed a stream of muck-brown spit across the fence. She wrinkled her nose at it.
“You are trouble, Henry Haskell,” she said.
“That so?”
“Takin’ me and my sisters’ moonshine.” She shook her head. “That weren’t very neighborly of you, now was it?”
“Yeah, well,” Henry grumbled. “Desperate times.”
She stared at him sideways. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you’re just scared,” she said.
“Am not.” He let another whip of spit crack out of his lips.
“Sure about that?” she asked.
“Lou, maybe,” Henry said. “But me? Never.”
Ida turned back to look at the moonlit field. “Whatever you say, bub.”
“You’re kinda cute when you’re perturbed.” He swiped a fingertip across her cheek.
She shrugged. “I ain’t angry. My sisters on the other hand…”
She squinted across the field, waiting for a silhouette of one of her sisters to appear, then another, followed by yet another, until all four of them were running back, ‘shine in hand, and Ida was jumping into the car, flaring up the engine, ready to high-tail it out of there. But there was nothing in sight but the vast openness of the night.
“You remember all them school days?” Henry asked. “Bouncin’ that stupid rubber ball against the back of the school house, catchin’ it, bouncin’ it again, both of us laughin’ at nothing and everything? You remember that, Ida? Back when you wore those God-awful pig tails on top of your big square head.”
“My head is not squared.” She jammed the bony point of her shoulder into Henry’s stocky side.
“Not no more,” he said. “But it used to be. Back when you wore them frilly little dresses and had so many freckles on your cheeks that they looked a whole different shade than the rest of your skin.”
“I still have my freckles,” she said, her jaw clenched. “And I don’t take too kindly to you pokin’ your fun at ‘em. They’re good freckles. Shapely and such.”
“I just wish that we could go back to them days, you know?” Henry gave a long sigh. Spat again. He smacked his lips and lowered his voice. “Ida, you should get out of here.”
“You know I gotta wait on my sisters,” she said.
“Just get in your car and take off,” he said. “Leave this county behind. Hell, leave the whole goddammed state behind.”
“And go where?”
“Wichita.”
“Wichita, Kansas?” She laughed. “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But this ain’t a life for a girl like you.”
She wrinkled her nose again, like his words stank. Then, she relaxed. A laugh built within her. “I know what you’re doin’. You’re tryin’ to scare me out of your territory. Ain’t that right, Henry Haskell?”
He grabbed her by the shoulders gruffly. Spun her toward him so they were nose to nose. “I got a knack for sensin’ the terrible, Ida. Sensed the influenza and the recession. Now, I’m tellin’ you, you’ve gotta go, Ida. Right now. Get outta this place. Leave it behind. Otherwise, something’s gonna happen. Somethin’ just terrible. I feel it, deep down in my gut. Please. Go.”
Her eyebrows stiffened, pulled close together. She searched Henry’s eyes for the faint drizzle of milk chocolate, but all she found was black pupil reflecting the night.
A shriek cut through the air. Sliced through the trees. Then, three sisters tumbled into the open, Helen shouting something so quickly Ida couldn’t understand her. Henry let Ida go and stalked quickly back into the woods, his eyes never leaving her.
Ida shivered and turned back to her sisters. She was just starting to make out their features—open mouths, wide eyes—when she jumped at the sound of a gun. Then, came the steady rapport of Etta’s tommy gun. The missing sister. She too appeared quickly in the clearing, aiming the barrel of her gun back into the trees. A flicker of orange zipped to life with each squeeze of the trigger.
“Ida, start the car,” Helen said as she dropped over the fence and lifted her arms up to take the crate from Wilma as she passed it over. Clinking. Sloshing. They had gotten back the moonshine.
“Etta, come on,” yelled Vera as she heaved herself over the metal gate.
Etta hollered into the wind, a banshee of crazed energy, and started to run, never quite turning her back on the woods. Ida couldn’t take her eyes off her baby sister as she stumbled toward the car. As if her watchful gaze would keep Lou Haskell and his buddies from chasing her. She tracked her movements as she ran for the fence. Etta was fifty yards away when the men cleared the trees, guns drawn, firing blankly in the Weatherby Sisters’ direction.
“Etta run,” Ida hollered.
A bullet dug into a nearby tree branch, shaking a few twigs free. They rained onto the hood of the car. Another shot pinged against the fence and Etta jumped sidewise, startled. Then, the girl hoisted a leg up onto a rung, firing wildly behind her. One man fell, but another man, too short to be a Haskell, fired his gun. The impact was silent and could not have been stopped. Etta, almost halfway
over the fence, folded in half, lost her grip on the top rung, and hit the ground.
“Etta,” Ida whispered.
“Ida, start the car,” Helen shouted.
Ida’s head ripped toward her sister. “We can’t just leave her.”
The men were encroaching, but Ida didn’t care. That was her baby sister, and if there was a chance she was still alive, Ida wouldn’t hesitate. She left the car behind and sprinted for the fence. She cleared it in three, smooth movements.
“Ida, the car,” Helen yelled. “Start the car. The car, dammit, Ida. Come back.”
Ida was just about to reach out and take her baby sister in her arms when the man who had fired the gun closed in. He pulled back the hammer of the pistol and aimed it at Ida. He was close enough for her to see a loose, black curl poking out of the brim of his slouch hat. Close enough to see the rage in his dark eyes.
“I’ll always find you, Samara,” the man said. He fired the gun and the bullet she had imagined sailing through Lou Haskell’s head was zinging through her skull instead.
Ida collapsed instantly, falling over Etta’s limp body at her feet. Her vision was gone, but she could feel her sister beneath her, the ground below that. Hard. Cold. Unforgiving.
Slowly, everything turned to a soft, ashy substance and Ren began to fall.
She crashed quickly through the chasm and came to on the cold metal floor of the safe room, gasping. Alfie was by her side in a moment. He squeezed her arm. She tried to breathe. Rubbed her throbbing head. Each death was becoming more real and never any less shocking. This time she wasn’t just going off of a hunch or Meredith’s word. It was Peter who had killed her. She’d seen him clearly beneath the moonlight. Heard that deep, sandpaper voice of his. And he had called her Samara.
“You okay?” Alfie asked, his voiced pinched with concern.
She leaned away from him, his voice louder than it ever had been before, barreling through her full blast. She could hear something else too, a pounding, like a bass drum. Bum-bum, bum-bum. Steady. She looked at Alfie’s chest. Her eyes widened.
“What?”
“I can hear your heartbeat, Alfie.” She listened more closely. The clocks in the safe room; she could hear their cogs. The snake Meredith kept in the jar, not yet released; she could hear its skin scraping roughly against itself. Then, fainter, but still present, she listened to the sound of dinner dishes clanking in the house, to the static of the television, to Grams humming in her room. Her lips pulled back into a smile as she stared up at Alfie. “I can hear everything.”
chapter
25
LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER DINNER and a long, hot shower, Ren sat on her bed in nothing but an oversized t-shirt. She concentrated on spinning a cluster of random objects—cat’s eye marbles, cassette tapes, shoes, jewelry, school books—above her mattress without lifting a finger. She spun them at the same tempo as the song she could hear Grams playing on the phonograph downstairs.
Footsteps creaked below her, then tapped up the steps. Ren listened to Meredith and her father in the den, talking about some made up class Meredith didn’t teach at the college—keeping up appearances. She heard Grams humming to the music, her long skirts shifting as she bounced across the room to the tune. So, when the footsteps reached her bedroom and a knuckle pounced on the door, Ren knew exactly who it was.
“Come in, Alfie,” she said.
Alfie’s head poked into the room, then the rest of him, all gangly limbs and sharp, skinny edges. “How’d you know it was me?”
“I can hear everything, remember?”
Alfie dug his hands in his pockets and walked silently toward her bed, eyes fixed on the telekinetic tornado swirling over the mattress.
“Neat trick,” he said.
She shrugged. “I was bored. Unfortunately, even my little escape into prohibition era Oklahoma to visit my past life as a bootlegger didn’t stave off my hunger to get out of this stupid house.”
“And this helps?” Alfie nodded to the swirling objects.
“Keeps me focused on something, at least,” she said dully.
“Can I talk to you?” Alfie sat down on the edge of her bed, the objects turning just inches from his head. She sped them up as Grams’ song changed to one Ren imagined the old woman, eighty pounds lighter, jitterbugged to in her youth.
“What’s up?” Ren asked.
“Can you stop that for a minute?” Alfie stared at the objects.
She forced everything to pause, to hang mid-air for a moment before she let it all fall onto the mattress. One marble rolled off the bed, bounced onto the floor, and tumbled across the room. It came to a rest against the baseboard near her open closet.
“You okay?” she asked.
Alfie pulled his hands out of his pockets and clasped them together on his lap. His knuckles quickly turned white from squeezing them so tightly. “I need to tell you something.”
“Shoot,” she said, pulling her legs underneath her. She leaned toward Alfie, her elbows resting gently on her thighs.
“You see,” he began. “Well, it’s just—”
Alfie’s heart was racing. She could hear it. Like a band of horses thundering across an open field, a thousand hooves beating against the raw, open earth. He took a deep breath, started to say something again, but stopped. His eyes flicked rapidly from side to side, as if he were searching the floorboards for the answers.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m not who you think I am,” he spat out quickly. Then he sighed. Spoke slowly. “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Meredith forbid it. She said it would ruin you before we even got started. But seeing as we’ll be going up against Peter soon, I thought I should tell you before you saw what I am. I’m—my—how do I say this exactly?”
There was a pause and Ren interjected. “Just say it.”
Alfie took a deep breath. “I’m not your best friend.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Of course you are, Alfie.”
“That’s just the thing,” he said. “I’m not Alfie.”
“Sure you are,” she said. Was he having some kind of identity crisis? “Bleached haired, lanky boned, intelligent, steady Alfie. Who else would you be?”
“My name is Pike Deacon,” he said quickly. “I’m—I’m like you. I’m a Discentem.”
Now her heart was racing. “What do you mean, you’re a Discentem?”
“You and I are alike,” Alfie—or whatever his name was—said. “Our souls were cursed by Drustan and the Rogues centuries ago. I’m not as important as you are, but I’m proof that the experiments can be successful.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Meredith wouldn’t let me,” he said.
Ren’s mind raced back to her childhood. To a miniature Alfie romping around in the tall grass in the back pasture on lazy afternoons with her, hunting down cowboys and Indians of old. She thought of every secret she’d ever shared with him. Every crazy idea they’d come up with together. All the movies they’d fallen in love with. The countless days spent trolling through Richard’s together, looking for the perfect antique. Had it all been a lie? All for some greater vision? Was their friendship fabricated from the very beginning?
“How long?” she asked, thinking of how Meredith had been deceiving her since she was a girl.
“How long, what?”
“All these years, all this time, me thinking I have this amazing friend who gets me. The real me. Since the beginning,” she said. “Now, I’ve found out you’ve been an imposter? For all of these years. Forever. Just an act.”
“No, no,” he said, looking up at her with those glacial blue eyes that had always belonged to her best friend. They’d calmed her down. Had lit up like she was something special every time she walked in the room. “You misunderstood me. It’s not like that. I’ve only pretended to be Alfie for the past few months. Ever since the car accident at the beginning of the summer.”
“I’m confused.
” She stood up and began to pace between her bed and the closed door. “If you’re Pine—”
“Pike.”
“Whatever,” she said. “If you’re Pike pretending to be Alfie, then the real Alfie must be out there somewhere? What did you do with him? Lock him in his room? Hide him in one of Meredith’s tunnels? Where is he?”
“Sit down,” the Alfie imposter said, patting the bed beside him.
“Just tell me where he is,” she said loudly, her fists on the verge of clenching tightly. She wanted to fry something. Burn the house down. Then she’d be able to get out of it finally.
“He’s gone,” he said.
“Gone? Gone how? Gone where?”
“Gone,” he said, his eyebrows raising, silently trying to signal her. “Ren he’s not coming back. He can’t come back.”
She exhaled a wavering breath as she paced. “You mean…”
“Peter caused the car accident at the start of June, but Meredith got there in time to save you, but Alfie…he was already—I’m so sorry, Ren. I wanted to tell you sooner. I wanted to stop lying to you, but Mer—”
“No.” Ren stood as still as the cemetery flagpole on a rare, windless day. “No, you’re lying. It’s just another rouse. Another trick to stitch my soul back together faster.”
“I’m not lying,” he said.
“It’s the only logical explanation. I would have remembered a world without him, I would have remembered his f-funeral. I would—” Her voice caught in her throat. Flashes of the accident broke through. Her and Alfie in the front seat after the movie. Duran, Duran blasting through the speakers. The bright, white light of the oncoming vehicle flooding the cab of their car. The crunch of the Beetle as it folded in like a compressed slinky. She swallowed. “I would have remembered him dying.”
Alfie/Pike/the thing on the bed shook his head. “Meredith had your memory altered after Alfie’s funeral by a very powerful Discentem named Clarke. Then, Meredith brought me in as a double. I’m a shape shifter, you see. I can turn into anyone and anything. The same Discentem who altered your memory made the town believe they couldn’t see me.”