by Chuck Wendig
Miriam doesn't know what to say. She can only swallow hard and ask, "How did you find them?"
"The smartest girl in the room is never the one who thinks she's the smartest girl in the room," her mother says. "Thought you were clever. Didn't you? You know what I found? I was walking underneath the attic and saw something on the pull-down cord. A little smudge of something red, something sticky. Jam. Strawberry jam. And I said to myself, 'Well, who is it that eats toast with jam every morning before school?' It's not me. I don't like sweet things. And there's only one other person in the house. So I wondered, 'What would my little Miriam be doing up in the attic?' And I found these. Under a box of old clothes."
"I'm sorry, Mother."
"You've been hiding things from me, Miriam. You've been lying to cover up this filth. This is not God's work in this box. This is not how your mother raised you." She picks up a pile of pop culture, lets it fall back through her hands into the box with a thump and clamor. "Sex and perversion and horror. All of it."
Miriam wants to stand up and say none of it is hurting her, none of it calls her stupid or fat or questions whether or not she's going to go to Heaven. Each song of an album, each page of a book, every panel of every comic, they're all doorways, little escape hatches where Miriam can flee the sad shadows of this life.
She wants to say worse things, too – mean things, sharp words, insults like little knives. Cunt, whore, bitch, fuck you, fuck everything, her mouth brimming with foulness the way a soup can bulges with botulism. A little voice inside asks: What would Uncle Jack say?
But that thought and all the others die back like dead vines.
She's not the type to talk back. She's a quiet girl. A well-mannered mouse who dreams of being a rat.
"I really don't know anymore," her mother says, shaking her head, the candy clicking against her teeth, the cloying butterscotch breath turning Miriam's stomach. "I don't know how you're going to turn out. I don't think well. I think you're a bad girl destined for bad things. A worthless girl. Bringing nothing to God's creation but misery and mayhem. What do you say?"
"I'll be better. I'll get better."
"We'll start tonight. Bring that box. Take it outside to the stone circle. I'll meet you out there."
And an hour later the box sits in the circle of stones – an old planter her mother has forsaken in order to make it a fire pit during fall and winter, and that's how it's used tonight. Her mother empties a can of lighter fluid. Flings a match.
Bright light. Hot wave. A plume of fire that dies back.
It burns. Black smoke from melting plastic. It reeks. Words and images caught on the heat waves, lost and gone but not forgotten.
Miriam thinks idly about shoving her mother into the fire. Like shoving a witch into her own oven inside the kitchen of a candy house.
But she doesn't. Instead she just cries, feeling worthless like her mother says, and she goes inside to pray for God to make her a better girl.
FORTY
Wicked Polly, Wicked Polly
The taste of dust and mud on her tongue.
Pressure. Her skull in a vice. She can almost hear it cracking like a frozen lake beneath her feet.
Her hearing roves wildly between ringing and pulsing: a high-pitched whine that segues into the sound of a blood river rushing behind her eardrums.
She plants her hands beneath her – and a sharp pain bites into her palms. She drops back to the ground, head against earth, not even sure where she is.
Deep breath.
Head turn. Cheek on cold dirt.
Where is she?
She sees rock walls. Wooden shelves bolted to them. All empty. Above, a bare bulb hanging from a fraying cord, casting a diseased glow but not much more.
Cellar. She's in some kind of cellar. Dirt floor? It's a root cellar.
She turns her head the other way, and then she sees the other girl.
Annie Valentine.
Annie's huddled up against a bare spot on the wall. Head down on her knees. Pale naked body shivering. Body striated with dirt and bruises.
And sores. Some fresh. Some not.
Her hair, grungy and sweat-slick, hangs down over her legs like the strands of a filth-caked mop.
Miriam rolls to her side. Her head feels like it's inflated to the size of a balloon (a red Mylar balloon), and the ringing in her ears spikes sharply.
With her hands in front of her, she can see: Two Xs. Carved into her palms.
Slowly, glacially, she sits up.
She feels along her bare feet. One X on each foot. Blood dry. Wounds puffy.
She, too, is naked. No pants, which means no phone, no knife. Behind her, an old water heater on cement blocks. Beyond that, another smaller room – an antechamber filled with what looks to be remnants of old coal.
Opposite that: rickety steps up, lead paint flaking off like strips of leper skin. The door at the top is shut. A line of light frames the edge.
That door is surely locked. But that doesn't mean it can't be gotten through.
"Hey," Miriam says, her voice a tattered remnant. "Valentine."
The girl looks up but says nothing.
"Where are we?" Miriam asks. "Are we in Keener's house? How long have you been here?"
Still nothing.
"Do you know anything?"
Annie Valentine is worthless. She's been traumabombed, her mind a chalkboard wiped clean of its writing.
"There's two of us," Miriam says. "We can fight him." Right now she doesn't feel like she could fight off a drooling baby, much less a serial killer with a fire axe, but this is all they have. "The two of us together can get out of this. Okay? Look at me. Please. Valentine. Look at me."
The girl looks toward her but it's like her gaze is sliding off the edges, slipping on the ice of troubled thoughts. Her stare is dead, empty. It's driftwood.
Miriam stands. The process is slow and wretched.
Her feet touch the floor and she has to stand on the balls of her feet to avoid the pain of her injured soles.
A head rush – the pain churning into her skull – almost brings her low again.
Miriam does a spot check. Feels her body – no cracked ribs, no additional cuts. No sores like Valentine has, which makes Miriam wonder.
She feels down below. Between her legs. No blood, no pain. She's woozy and right now the whole world feels like it's gone ass-up, but she takes the small elation this news gives her.
Her head, though – her pink-and-bleach hair is matted to her skull with a lacquering of dried blood. This injury sits on the opposite side from her bullet furrow, (which is now mostly healed over, though the hair still hasn't grown back).
A matching set.
She hopes the autopsy technician will note that.
Don't think like that.
You'll get out of this.
Move. Look. Find.
Above her head, the floorboards groan and bang – footsteps. Keener's up there. Something heavy – a piece of furniture – drags across the wood with a grinding stutter.
Hurry.
She hobbles into the old coal room. No heater here, but she can see the concrete pad where one once sat. A pair of cellar doors looks old, weak, just a series of half-rotten wooden barn-boards lashed together. But when she tries to open them they don't budge, and she hears a metal clanging on the other side.
Miriam leaves behind footprints in coal dust, the soot grinding into the slashes on the bottoms of her feet. If Keener doesn't kill you, an infection from this will.
Back into the other room. She creeps up the steps, trying to be silent – an impossible task. The stairway shifts, squeaks, moans like an old woman on her deathbed. Miriam drops to her hands and knees.
At the top of the stairway, she stares through the bright crack under the door. It's there she sees her exit. The dimensions of the cellar and what she saw when she was in the junkyard make this a one-bedroom cottage at best, and the door she sees must be the doorway out.
It's a
wooden door with an old warped glass window. Beyond it, a screen door.
Through the window, she sees that night has fallen.
But her view is suddenly blocked.
Two black pillars, two dark boots.
Keener.
Keys rattle. She hears a padlock thunking dully against the door as she hurries down the steps – almost slipping and falling and breaking her damn fool neck in the process.
She stands by Annie Valentine, who's begun to rock back and forth. The sound coming out of the girl's throat is that of a wounded animal, its leg caught and mangled in a trap.
"I'll get us out of this," Miriam says. She hurries into the coal room. Grabs a palmful of coal dust from the ground. Goes and stands beneath the bulb. She steadies herself, a near-impossible task – her whole body feels like a little ship on a storm-fucked sea.
Keener opens the door. Walks slow down the steps.
He's got an old wooden baton in his hand, the leather cord wrapped around his wrist. At the end of the baton are two metal probes.
Sparking and snapping.
A 1950's-era cattle prod.
Worse, he wears the mask: the guise of the beak doctor, here to cleanse them. Light smoke drifts from the beak and Miriam catches the smell of burning herbs and flowers – Wren, Tavena, Valentine, me, strapped to tables, barbed wire gags, heads on the block, tongues in the hand – and she has to fight back the darkness that threatens to drop her.
The mask's eyeholes are covered in glass. Goggles retrofitted on the outside of the leather and affixed with brass bolts.
Defiant, Miriam blows the coal dust.
It coats the goggles. Keener wipes them away.
He thrusts the cattle prod into her stomach.
Everything lights up. It feels like the bare bulb above suddenly goes supernova: the room hot and white like she's trapped by a bolt of lightning.
And then she's on the floor – she doesn't remember how she got here – her extremities twitching, fingers and toes curling inward.
That wounded animal sound rises in volume, a dread yowl: a cat with four legs broken, a rabbit in the teeth of the fox.
It's Annie Valentine.
Keener's dragging her by her hair up the steps.
The girl's legs kick, and he jams the cattle prod right under her collarbone. Miriam reaches, and finds that all her synapses and circuits are still misfiring. All she can do is curl into a fetal ball.
Keener hauls Annie up the steps, through the door. Slams it. The whole house shakes.
She can hear his footsteps tromping above. The slide of the body behind.
Did he lock the door?
She doesn't hear the lock re-engage.
Miriam tries to find her bearing. Hell, she tries to find her soul inside her body. It's like the strings and tendons that connect her willpower to her muscles, her mind to her limbs, have all been cut or frayed. Her jaw won't unclench. Her fingers are bent so that her hands look like animal paws. Miriam feels like she might piss herself.
It's then she sees Annie Valentine. Sitting where she just was.
Curled up.
Staring off at nothing.
How?
Was all that a dream? Is she just waking? The Trespasser giving her a vision?
But then Annie's mouth opens, and a raven's head – slick with blood and mucus – slides forth from her lips, and squawks at her. That wasn't the Trespasser before. This is.
"No t-t-trespassing," Miriam babbles. She laughs a little. But the laugh melts away and turns to crying. Tears clean dirt from her cheeks.
"The river is rising," the raven says.
"F-fuck you."
"You've got work to do."
"Did I st-st-stutter? I said, fuck you." Everything is spit and snot and tears.
"He breathes in the smoke of those flowers because he does not want to be tainted by your impurity." The raven cocks its head this-a-way and that-a-way. Like it's studying an escaping worm. "He believes you are not only sick but a sickness, and he is the surgeon cleaning the world's wound of your foulness."
Miriam wipes her face and hisses. "That's helpful. And since three times is a charm: fuck you."
"The river is rising."
"Fuck. You."
"You've got work to do."
"Fu–" But before she can get it out, Annie Valentine and the raven are gone.
Upstairs, though, the real Annie Valentine screams.
A scream swiftly muted. It turns into a gurgle.
Footsteps cross the floor above.
Is she dead?
Then Miriam hears him start to sing. She can't make out the words, but she hears that grim, sing-songy quality. The song of "Wicked Polly" again?
The mockingbird's song? Or the song stolen from the swallow so that it can no longer sing?
Get up.
She tries to move. Her body is not cooperating. An elbow slips out from under her.
Get up!
Her legs feel like meat without bones, tendons like blown elastic. She can't get them to comply. They move, but not as she wishes.
GET UP.
Miriam rolls over. Hands beneath her. Knees, too. Prop up. Body a bridge.
She sees the water heater.
Propped up, like her. Not on hands and knees. On short cement blocks.
Miriam crawls over. Wraps her hands behind one of those blocks. Pulls.
It doesn't budge.
Pull, pull, pull–
The porous cement bites into her palms, and she feels fresh blood from the slash-marks in her hands opening up. It lubricates her grip and that's not helpful, not at all–
You stupid twat, if you can't pull this out everybody dies.
Valentine.
Tavena.
Wren.
You.
How many others?
Above, the song continues. The smell of ashen roses clings inside her nose. She hears him crossing back the other way. Probably with the axe.
She loops her right arm around the block, squeezing it under the water heater. She knows it could crush her arm if she does this too slow.
She squeezes her eyes shut.
Finds herself praying. Not to God. But to the Trespasser.
Miriam gives it her all – puts all her energy into the shoulder, tugs the arm. The concrete block scrapes against the bottom of the heater, which suddenly tilts and dips –
But does not hit the ground and does not make a sound. The other blocks support it.
She lets go a relieved breath, almost cries. At least one thing went right.
And now, Miriam holds the concrete block
Hefts it with both bloody hands.
It's time to kill Carl Keener. Time to silence the Mockingbird's song.
FORTY-ONE
Turn From Your Sins,
Lest you Despair
The door swings open. It's blessedly silent, as if doing Miriam some kind of favor, a favor of objects granted by the parliament of doors.
An absurd thought. But that's how everything feels. Crossed wires. Synaptic misfires. Skull pulsing so hard it feels like her heart is now in her head.
The cement block, the gray streaked with red, her red, sits comfortably in her grip.
Ahead of her, the door. The exit.
She could just go.
Go and leave and come back another day.
Or don't. It doesn't matter.
These girls don't matter. Miriam is a selfish creature. Designed to survive. The cockroach. The crow. The hungry vulture.
Miriam goes to the door.
Stares out. The hard rain is hissing. Urging her outside.
Cleansing. Baptismal. A hymn sung by the heavens.
To her right, here somewhere in this house, another song. Floating. Shrill and trilling. With it, a chorus of whimpers, the miserable cries of Annie Valentine.
That, and the mockingbird's own ditty.
"Your counsels I have slighted all, my carnal appetite shall fall…"
Miriam turns away from the door. Her path chosen.
She creeps deeper into the house. A house without decoration. Water-stained wallpaper. Mid-century furniture gone to pot. Not dirty like she expects. Clean. No television. No books. Unadorned by anything: an eerily sterile environment. As though anything else would be an affront, would be a corruption, a filthy poison. Her mother's voice rises to greet her–