“You’re Alice, right?”
She was even more startling up close. Her eyes were the silver-blue of shallow water, like the Spinner’s had been. More than one ex-Story had those eyes.
“Nice show,” I told her. “Very dramatic. You make all that wolf shit up on the spot?”
She wrinkled her nose a little, like we were just teasing each other. “I’ve heard about you. The girl with the ice. The one who broke us free.”
She said it so slyly I couldn’t tell how she meant it. I’d been the first one out of the Hinterland, yeah. The one, I’d learned, whose escape left a snag in the weave, allowing the other Stories to crawl out after me. Not that they thanked me for it.
“That’s right. You’re welcome.” I made to elbow past her.
“Is it true what I heard, that you live with some woman?”
I paused. Some of the hypnotic hum had gone out of her voice; I realized she could turn it on and off.
“In Brooklyn, right—cute place on the second story? I like it. I like the blue curtains on your woman’s bedroom window.”
I grabbed her arm. Half to hold her there, and half to steady myself. “What are you getting at?”
She looked at my hand, then up at my eyes.
“It’s all gone, isn’t it? The ice?” The wicked lightness had left her voice. She looked at me with something like disgust, speaking loud enough that all the stragglers could hear it.
“I said I didn’t want to see any lambs here.”
Her name, I later learned, was Daphne. She was the very last Hinterlander to come through. The one who tightened the ranks and broke all attempts at assimilation against the rocks. Within weeks, according to Sophia, she had all of them on a string. Even Soph, I think. Though she wouldn’t tell me much.
I didn’t stick around for it. Till graduation I hadn’t seen Daphne again in the flesh, but she visited me sometimes in dreams. There was a night I woke up panting, my chest feeling crushed and tight, like the devil was sitting on it. I swear I saw her standing by the bed, streetlight catching on her pointed teeth and red hair. But when I turned on the lamp there was nothing there.
Daphne’s threats were a good thing in the end: they made me do what I should’ve done ages ago. I gave the Hinterland up for good, and set about making my life an entirely human one.
* * *
It was half past eleven on a Sunday. If Daphne wasn’t waiting for me, I knew where to find her: packed into the muggy air of the psychic’s shop, along with Sophia and the rest of them. It was meeting day.
Something in my stomach twanged as I approached the building for the first time in months. It was shabby brick and a foggy glass door, with a palmist’s sign above it and a staircase just behind. But all I could see as I walked up was Daphne. Leaning against the brick with her legs crossed, her eyes hidden by the smoky circles of street-vendor shades. When she saw me coming she gestured at me to hurry up.
“Hey, you,” she said in that smoky, bullshit voice. “It’s been a minute.”
I approached slowly, stopped a few squares of sidewalk away. “What do you want?”
“I want to make amends,” she said. “I think you got the wrong idea about me.”
“I’m pretty sure I got the right one. Tell me what you actually want.”
“That was a nice ceremony. Is Ella real proud?”
That dark thing that lived below my sternum stirred. “Get my mother’s name out of your mouth. If you want something, want to talk to me, want anything from me, you don’t mention her again. You don’t go near her again. Ever. Got it?”
Quick as a whip, she grabbed my hand. Squeezed it once, then dropped it. Checking, I think. I shouldn’t have cared what she thought, but for a minute I wished I was what I used to be: full of ice to my fingernails, and ready to bury her in it.
“If you were my daughter,” she said, “here’s what I’d teach you first: never let ’em know how to hit you where it hurts.”
I felt my cheeks going hot. “Fuck’s sake, you’ve won. You warned me off. I stayed away. Why are you still bothering with me?”
She lifted her sunglasses, trapping me in the twin tractor beams of her eyes. “Oh, sweetie. What makes you think watching out for you is any bother?”
A man walking by us slowed, turning so he could keep staring at Daphne as he went. She kept her shades up, smiled at him sweetly, and popped off her top veneers, revealing a double-row of filed-down shark teeth.
“Mother of God!” the man yelped, half stumbling over a stoop, then sprinting away.
She used a pinky to push the veneers delicately into place, turning her attention back on me. “Let me start again. I’m not trying to make an enemy of you. I want you here because Hinterland blood is precious, more now than ever. Despite what you might think, you’re still a part of us. And I need you here for us, the way we’re here for you.”
I stared at her. Half the creatures gathered up those stairs would knife me for a hot dog. “Where is this coming from? Why now?”
“There’ve been some deaths lately.”
“Some … deaths?” She said it like you’d say, Some rain.
“Three since the beginning of spring.”
“Who died? How did they—”
“Killed. The Prince of the Wood first. Then Abigail.”
The prince I’d known a little. Aggressively handsome, with hair like a pony’s mane and a brick of urgently white teeth. Abigail, though. I felt shitty that I couldn’t even put a face to the name.
“And a third was killed last night: Hansa the Traveler.”
I startled. I’d met Hansa in the Hinterland. I knew she was in New York, but the last I’d heard she was living with two older ex-Stories, attending a charter school on the Lower East Side. The news shocked me into forgetting who I was talking to. “But Hansa’s a kid. And she’s actually got—she had a chance. Who would hurt Hansa?”
“What does being a kid have to do with it?”
“It’s horrible,” I said quietly. Hansa had been a little girl when I met her in the Halfway Wood. The moon’s granddaughter. “What happened? How did they die?”
Shadows moved beneath the blue of Daphne’s eyes. Looking at them too long felt like staring into infested water. “Death is death.”
“What does that mean?”
She ignored me, turning toward the door, imperious. “Now you know. And now we’ve made peace. Come on, come be with your people.”
I peered through the glass at the staircase behind it, water-stained and disappearing into the shadows of the second floor. With a longing as palpable as thirst, I did not want to go up there.
“Thanks for telling me. But I can’t right now. I’ve gotta work.” I tried out the lie for the second time that day.
“No, you don’t.” She opened the door. “Your last shift was Thursday, and you work again tomorrow. But you don’t work today.”
I couldn’t say what my face looked like when she turned around to smile at me.
“I take care of my people, even the prodigal ones. Don’t worry about a thing, princess. I’ve always got eyes on you.”
3
I followed her upstairs, because what else could I do?
Run. Hide. The thoughts were listless.
There is nowhere I am free from them.
The words came unbidden, a hard spike of realization that set my blood to humming. Nauseous with nerves, I walked into the tea-scented air of the psychic’s shop.
I’d learned quickly who to avoid back when I was coming here each week. The scary ones weren’t the ones covered in ink to their eyes, or flipping a knife over their knuckles like they were in a bad prison movie. They were that kind-eyed man in the well-cut suit, the faintest tint of blue in his cropped black beard. That boy with the hard-baked smile, no taller than me. The steel-haired woman who whispered that she had a telephone line open to the Spinner, who was going to let us back in any day.
My heart squeezed when I saw Sophia sitting cross-
legged on a window seat in the back, next to a guy with the prettiest lips I’d ever seen. I’d been kind of a shit friend since spring: giving up the Hinterland meant pulling away from her, too. Being here after months away felt the same, but different. The air was lightly electrified, bodies shifting like cattle before a storm. Heads dipped, mouths pressed close to ears to whisper.
They were looking at me. Flatly, or with suspicion. I didn’t think I was imagining it. When I reached Sophia, she did a double take.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she muttered.
I blinked, surprised. “Hi to you, too.”
Her eyes stayed hard, but she linked an arm through mine.
“What’s with everyone?” I asked, low. “What did I do?”
“Most things have nothing to do with you.”
After talking to Daphne I was uneasy; now my skin was starting to crawl. “You heard about the deaths?”
“Later.” She spat the word like a bullet.
I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. I looked to the front of the room, where a fortyish guy had taken the floor. I guess Hansa had been the first order of business; the rest of the meeting would play out like they always did, like any support group meeting anywhere.
The man up front was a stranger, but I could tell at a glance he was one of the scary ones. He was the exact size and shape of a nightmare: the man in the alley, the body crouched over yours in the dark. It was hot up here but he wore a dirty stocking cap anyway, and too-big overalls.
“That’s how I ended up here again,” he was saying. “Another woman—it’s always a damned woman. It becomes hard to hide it, too. Every time one of them makes me do it, it’s move on, start again. I want to live somewhere small, somewhere I can be alone. Like it was back home. Just me, and a woman when I want one. But they’re different here, everything’s different here, and every time I have to hide it.”
I looked around the room. Most everyone had their backs to me now, watching him, and the faces I could see held their secrets.
“So I thought I’d come back,” he went on. “To a place where no one notices no one. The women here are even worse, but they’re easier to get rid of when you’re through. Less to take care of. I don’t even have to leave, I can stay in one place.”
I could’ve misread his words, if I’d wanted to. But I was a Hinterland woman listening to a Hinterland man. I understood that he’d hurt women, and would continue to hurt them if he could. When I looked at Daphne her face was easy. Still. She could’ve been listening to anything.
“I’m glad to be back,” he said, shifting in his overalls and slicing his face into an ugly grin. “They’re pretty here, I’ll give them that. And it feels like a bit of home, in this room.”
Nobody clapped, or said anything, but he whipped off his hat anyway, giving a little bow. As he leaned over, dirty red hair flopped over his forehead.
And I tasted again, with perfect clarity, the rot of his mouth in the Hinterland. The taste of death and hate and the rancid leavings of his last meal.
I knew this man, because his tale had been my own.
* * *
“Alice-Three-Times,” the tale had been called. Again and again I’d lived through it in the Hinterland, a place that ran on the telling of tales. It was written down decades ago by my mother’s mother, Althea Proserpine, and bound within the pages of a book: Tales from the Hinterland. I’d been the princess in the story, this man the suitor who’d won me. To be his wife, or his servant, or worse. In the tale, I killed him before we got far enough to find out, tipping ice into his veins with a kiss. I didn’t know any more than that, because someone had made it his mission to free me from the story.
But in this world, outside the broken borders of the place that bonded me and this violent man, I ran. Crouching down so he wouldn’t see me, I shoved through the crowd of my kin. Past Daphne, who looked at me sharp, then pounding down the steps to the street.
The low gray sky had finally broken. Clouds slopped loose of each other like soaked-through paper, letting in a steady rain. I kept running when I hit the sidewalk. Maybe the raindrops should’ve felt cleansing, but they were warm as tongues, warm as blood. I stopped under a bodega’s green awning and tried to pull myself together.
I’d fought for this life. Normal. Boring. All the days proceeding in an orderly fashion. I’d been imprisoned fighting for it, broken my mother’s heart on my way to it, ripped through cosmic walls to win it. I hated all of them for reminding me how flimsy my normal could be: Daphne. That awful man. Whoever had killed poor Hansa.
What if it was the man from my tale who’d done it? It seemed possible. I’d only met one figure from my story in this world before: the man’s younger, better brother. Once when I was six years old, and he coaxed me into a stolen car, and again when I was seventeen. But I hadn’t seen him since. Not all of us had left the Hinterland after my broken tale tipped over like a domino, knocking the rest of the world askew. After I got out—after someone long gone helped break me out—the tales fell apart faster than the Spinner could spin them. There was a time I’d thought the Hinterland was gone completely, but I learned that it was still out there, still bleeding, like a slashed-up magical apple dripping its juice. Only its doors were now closed.
I stood beside a cooler of watermelon halves stuck like oysters in ice, smelling rain and exhaust and cut tulips. I closed my eyes just long enough to trace the memory of his face: the boy who helped me break free.
When this place felt too hot and bright, too busy too angry too iced with electric lights, I thought of Ellery Finch, traveling through other worlds. Finding them behind hidden doors, under acorn caps, inside steamer trunks. It was nice in there, inside this daydream. I used to never let myself think of him, but lately I figured, what’s the harm? It’s better than a meditation app.
When I was calm again, when I’d hardened my skin against the trio of deaths, against the man’s words and the violence inside them, I started walking. When I was sure nobody from the meeting had followed me, I got on the subway.
And I wondered. I wondered what it said about me now that I’d run from the man in the meeting, when in the Hinterland, I’d killed him.
4
Ella wasn’t home when I let myself in. Our AC was broken and she kept insisting she could fix it, which meant there was a scatter of tools by the overturned window unit and the air was so hot it practically wobbled. I stood in front of the fridge in rain-soaked clothes and ate a slice of leftover pizza, fanning the freezer door back and forth. I’d moved on to gelato out of the tub when something made me stop: from the back of the apartment, a quiet creak. The singular sound of a foot placed carefully on old floorboards.
I put the ice cream down. Behind me, the fridge strained and settled. Outside, a mockingbird imitated a cell phone. And from the back of the apartment came another creak.
My breath switched from automatic to manual. I walked down the hall, peering into the quiet rooms. Mine, Ella’s, our bathroom the size of a crow’s nest.
“Hello?”
My voice dropped like a pebble into the quiet, and I knew I was alone. A shaken-up idiot in an empty apartment, hallucinating the thing I was always waiting for: the return of bad luck.
In the bathroom I washed my face, splashing water into my eyes, my mouth, swishing the ice cream off my tongue. My heart was still banging like an offbeat drum. When I came up dripping I saw a face in the mirror behind me.
I saw the blue and white and black of it, the pale smear of teeth. I stopped breathing, and didn’t breathe again till I had them pinned to the bathroom wall, my hands pressed like butterfly wings over their throat.
Ella’s throat. Her blue eyes and black hair. Skin pearling up with sun freckles. It happened so fast she didn’t look shocked till I’d already pulled away.
We stared at each other. I heard a dog barking through the open windows, and a child’s cut-glass scream.
“I snuck up,” she said, a littl
e breathless. “I startled you.”
We nodded in unison, like a pair of metronomes. “Sorry,” I said, then coughed and tried again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was.”
She reversed her way out of the bathroom, like she didn’t want to turn her back on me. “You’re home early. You didn’t have to work after all?”
It took me a second to remember, to understand. “I didn’t,” I said. “I got it wrong.”
* * *
We waded through dinner, through small talk of graduation and Ella’s coworkers at her nonprofit gig, eating to the sound of one of our old car tapes. I’d gotten her a vintage cassette deck for her birthday so she could play the music she loved to listen to on the road: PJ Harvey and Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and bands with names like paint colors—Smog, Pavement, Gabardine. We stayed at the table long enough to pretend the thing in the bathroom hadn’t happened. She’d put my graduation flowers in an empty pickle jar. I kissed her cheek and made a big thing about carrying them to my room.
I tried to lose myself in the solitary mysteries of A Wild Sheep Chase, but my eyes kept going to the door. To the window. Around midnight I heard Ella’s radio go quiet. At one I finally got up, giving in to the itch running under my skin.
I moved through the house like a thief. Ella was breathing easy in her bed, and the front door locks held. Nobody hid behind the shower curtain, or in the shadows of the couch. Hansa was still dead somewhere, and the awful man from my tale wasn’t, because no world ever balanced itself just right.
In the kitchen I brewed coffee by the city’s borrowed lights, sweetened it with honey and cooled it with milk, then dropped in ice. June came in through the windows, slinky and edged with a gasoline tang. There was a mimosa tree in the yard; when I pressed my forehead to the screen I could see breeze pouring itself through the blossoms.
In my fairy tale I’d been a black-eyed princess, unloved. My hands were filled with a killing cold, my touch was death. When I left the Hinterland I took the barest chip of it with me. But I’d let that last little bit melt away.
The Night Country Page 2