The Night Country

by Melissa Albert

  “Let’s ring the doorbell,” she said, giddy. “Let’s put a rock through the fuckin’ glass!”

  As a wingman, she was a mixed bag.

  “Shh,” I hissed, watching his windows. He lived in the garden apartment, where blue TV light played over closed blinds. The house was detached, and it was easy enough to walk around toward the back, climb over the splintery mess of his fence, and drop into the backyard’s itchy overgrowth.

  We didn’t talk about a plan. If we had, I’d have had to admit I was really here, breathless in the metal-scented dark, on the edge of doing something I didn’t want to put words to. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do.

  Better just to let yourself into the unlocked screened porch. Find the cracked-open window. Fit your fingers under its lip, wince as it screeches, and pull till it’s open just wide enough to admit two girls.

  I climbed in first. Adrenaline made it hard to see, my vision popping with anxious flashbulb flowers. The room was dark, tinged with the secretive stink of an animal’s warren. It knocked some of the glitter from my head.

  First I saw the bed, mounded with blankets. Then I saw the sliding stack of magazines against the wall, a hoard of breasts and lips and heat, like he was a time traveler who didn’t know there was porn on the internet. Everything was low to the ground: bed, magazines, drifts of soiled clothes. And just there, lit by an errant fall of porch light: the red coil of a hair tie, the kind of thing Ella left scattered around the house, a fistful of them in every purse she owned.

  A hand on my arm sent lightning up my spine, but it was just Sophia, nodding toward the door. It hung slightly open. Over the submarine chug of my heart, I could hear the rhythms of a game show. Delicately we picked our way across the room. The hall was short, running past the open door of a filthy bathroom and what must have been a linen closet, and opening to the right into an unlit kitchen.

  We had clean sightlines on the back of his head. It was bobbing faintly, like he was listening to music we couldn’t hear. The sight stalled me out. Winnowed my mind from my body. I floated over myself, watching the girl with the steady step and the messy hair walk down that hallway. I almost wanted to stop her, but it was too late. I witnessed the sudden stillness of the man as he heard her, then swung around, face frozen with surprise. It curdled into something worse when he saw who’d come for him.

  Then I snapped back into my body, standing alone in front of him for the first time since I’d left the Hinterland.

  “Hey, asshole,” I said. “Remember me?”

  “You.” He sounded unsurprised. Pleased, even. “My little bride.”

  “Never your bride.”

  “But here you are. Come back to finish our story the right way?” He grinned, his gaze skirting around my face, not quite catching it. “I think we’ll skip the wedding.”

  It was different, seeing him up close. This wasn’t heady or daring, it was something else. I ran his words at the meeting through my fingers, sicker in the remembering. I tasted his mouth on mine, felt his hands on me. And the words came out of me like water from a well I thought had run dry.

  “Look at me,” I told him. “Look at your destruction.”

  His eyes went incredulous, and he started to laugh. Behind him, Sophia stepped lightly out of the kitchen.

  “Listen to you!” he said. “You still think you live in a story.”

  I rose up on my toes, light as air, dense as lead. “You still think you live in a world where girls will lie down for you and show you their throats.”

  He rocketed up from the couch, moving faster than a man that size should be able to move, grabbing the hair at my nape and yanking my head back.

  He had a smashed-flat nose and skin that looked grated. One of his eyes hung a little different than the other, like he was hating you out of two different faces. His face was a history book about violence, and his breath smelled like cooked meat and bad hygiene.

  “Now this feels familiar,” he said.

  “Yes, it does.”

  I darted forward, took his lip between my teeth, and pulled.

  It split like fabric, like pulp, like a blood balloon. He cried out, but he didn’t let go of me.

  “You bitch.” He spat red, laughing. “You don’t win in this one, honey. The Spinner can’t save you now. Oh, I’m so glad you found me.”

  His blood was thick and corn-syrup sweet and it should’ve disgusted me. But its flavor got into my head, mixing with the liquor there, making me dizzy and hungry and very, very cold. My eyes ached with it and my blood leaped so high I couldn’t tell if it was with rage or joy.

  “What’s this?” he said, looking over my head. “We’re making it a party now?”

  Sophia held a butcher’s knife in her hand. I guessed she had found it in the kitchen. Her face was blank and she was twisting the knife’s point on her fingertip.

  His grip on me tightened. “You brought a friend, did you? Do I get to call one, too?” He looked at me full on, still laughing.

  Then his face went hard, the humor dropping away. He shoved me, sent me reeling back into the wall.

  “What’s that?” His voice wavered, his hands rising. “You didn’t tell me you could still do that.”

  I moved closer. I moved fast. It felt like chips of time were being chiseled away, and I was shaking off the bits I didn’t need.

  When Sophia looked at me, her mouth went slack. “Alice,” she breathed. “Your eyes.”

  The man looked back and forth between us, from Sophia with her knife to me with nothing but my two hands. That was all I’d needed in our tale.

  “Look at me,” I said. My head was a howling sea cave and my voice wasn’t my own. “Don’t worry about her. Don’t worry about anything but me.

  “Now lie down and show me your throat.”

  7

  I blinked.

  I closed my eyes and light shifted over my lids, moonlight and lamplight and the delineated scatter of stars fading out as the sun dragged itself over the skyline. Streetlights buzzing, blinking out, headlights white and the yellow flicker of the subway. I knew something, wanted to hold on to something, but it was like clinging to a flashlight’s beam. Another blink, and it was gone.

  I opened my eyes on early morning coming through my bedroom window. A zip line of nightmare slid through me, retreating to its hidden place. For a moment, my head was an empty room. Then the night rushed in.

  Drinking at Robin’s. Walking to Red Hook. Slithering in through the brother’s window. The claustrophobic apartment, the sweet awful rip of his lip. His scorn turning to fear, and Sophia looking at me. Alice. Your eyes.

  There was a weight bearing down on me, making it hard to breathe, and I thought it was panic till my fingers followed the feeling up, to my neck.

  Something was there, wound around my throat, hard and warm and too tight to see. I kicked free of the sheets, tumbled out of bed and ran down the hall. The bathroom mirror reflected the cold hollows of my eyes. The faded eyeliner vines.

  And a necklace of fat red rubies circling my throat.

  I’d bitten the man from my tale. I thought I’d done worse than that, but there was a void in my memories, its borders tidy as an egg’s. His blood made rusty swirls around my lips. It was a slaughterhouse flavor on my tongue. And where the worst of the blood had been, where it ran down my chin and settled in a brutal collar, lay this circle of stones.

  They gripped my neck like a row of ticks. I scratched, frantic, feeling my way to the back. There was a hook under my hair; I unclasped it. The necklace slipped off, coiling over my hands, rubbing red on my skin. I flung it into the sink and turned the water on. The stones bled and ran under its stream, melting away like paste, till there was nothing left of it but the pattern of its claws and catches imprinted in my skin.

  I thought it was a cry, bubbling up in me, but it was laughter. A low sound, boiled thick as campfire coffee.

  This was magic, and it wasn’t benign. It was a world I wanted to forget
and a night I couldn’t remember, and a dark gift left to strangle me. The Hinterland was tugging at me, blowing its breath in my face, wrapping its fingers around my throat. My laugh cut off clean.

  Be sure, Sophia had told me.

  I said I didn’t want to see any lambs. Daphne.

  “What did you do?” I asked the girl in the mirror.

  She looked back at me. She showed her bloody teeth.

  * * *

  I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the shower. The water started out tepid and shifted by degrees to just this side of scalding. When my skin, at least, was clean, I dried off with one of the scratchy towels Ella stole from the pool at the Y, hard decisive strokes that burned. The vines were washed away. The blood, the liquorish sweat, the night.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. I combed my hair back, put on ChapStick. No eyeliner, my face scrubbed. Fresh clothes, old sneakers, my stomach a mess but I ate toast and jam anyway, washing each bite down with a flood of cold tea.

  No missed calls from Sophia. I pulled up the internet and considered it for a moment. A quick news search: red hook.

  I put the phone away. My ChapStick had come off on my toast. I went to the bathroom to put on more, staring at my soft eyes, the eyes of a damsel, circling the stick round and round till my lips were waxy. Then I jerked away sharp from the mirror because—

  No because. No need to think too hard. If you poke around too long in the dark, you’ve only got yourself to blame for what you find. I had a feeling in my chest, a persistent asthmatic ache I couldn’t quite rub away. A walk would help. It was early yet, so early Ella was still sleeping. I didn’t have to be at work for hours.

  I checked my phone again. No texts. I looked toward Ella’s closed door. Typed and deleted, typed and deleted.

  Out getting coffee, I said finally. Have a good day.

  The sidewalk ran with morning commuters holding cups and phones and briefcases, flowing around me like water breaking itself on a rock. A terrier recoiled from my feet, growling through its teeth. Its owner looked up to apologize, then said nothing, his jaw tightening as he sped away.

  I walked for a while without really seeing where I was going. Some uneasy frequency hummed off my skin. Men playing dominoes under awnings looked up warily as I approached, an old woman pushing a shopping cart veered into the gutter to avoid me. When sirens shrilled a block away, my hands went sweaty, my mouth dry.

  Two police cars hurtled around the corner, passed me.

  When they were gone I could breathe again.

  The ache in my chest was climbing, it was a weight in my throat. When I realized I would throw up if I kept walking I dropped onto a stoop and texted Sophia. My fingertips trembled over the screen.

  What happened last night?

  Her reply came almost instantly.

  Wait you don’t remember

  I waited for a follow-up. Waited, waited, unshed tears making rainbows over my sight.

  Nothing to worry about, she said finally. Really. Talk later

  The sounds of the city crashed in on me. Birdsong and morning traffic and children screaming for the sheer joy of having lungs. I wanted to scream, too. For about half a minute all was bright, and the sun on my face felt like a benediction. Then the wicked math came back.

  Three murders. Two hands. One foot.

  Under the industrious light of seven a.m. I felt suddenly exposed. I imagined how I must look from behind: the flapper tangle of my grown-out hair, my sparrow-weight bones, everything about me crushable or ripe to be sliced. I was awash in adrenaline and relief and a jittery fear, and I didn’t want to go home. But I was too edgy to stay out here. I figured there was one place I could hide.

  * * *

  Months ago, when we first moved back to New York, I made a pilgrimage to the coffee shop where I’d worked before leaving town. It was gone, a children’s shoe store sprung up in its wake. More remnants of my old life absorbed into the whirlpool of the city. For a while I’d worked at a co-op, but I wasn’t really the cooperative kind.

  I stumbled into my new job by chance, or luck, or fate. On a wandering evening last winter, I hid out from a snowstorm in a bookshop on Sullivan Street, narrow as a corridor and lit the color of coffee milk by old bulbs. The guy behind the counter had a chin-strap beard and little wire-rims, and was yelling into an ancient flip phone.

  I’d pretended to look at books as I listened to him dress down some guy named Alan.

  “It’s not about their quality, Alan,” he kept saying. “It’s about coming through with what you promised.”

  I pulled an old hardback off the shelf, tea-brown pages and a cover illustration the colors of a heraldic flag. Creatures of the Earth and Air: A Compendium. I flipped gently through it as the man behind the counter became sarcastic.

  “God forbid you waste your time coming to me,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a full-time job burning through your trust fund.”

  I was trying not to laugh when the book I held fell open to a place where something was stuck between its pages.

  My breath caught. I didn’t take lightly things found in the pages of a book. But this was just a playing card. A jack of spades, its back the classic red Maiden design. I flipped it over and back, not noticing the bookseller had hung up till he was standing next to me.

  “Found that in a book?” he asked, taking the card.

  “This one.” I held up Creatures.

  “Huh.” He bent over the playing card, then made a triumphant sound. “There. Look at that.”

  I looked close. The Maiden held up her flowers, and fork-tailed women chilled in the card’s four corners.

  “Her.” He pointed at the mermaid in the upper left. Where the others’ hands reached toward flowers, hers extended toward a spinning wheel. Stylized, but unmistakable. You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking.

  “What does it mean?”

  He looked gratified by my curiosity. “It means it’s from a marked deck.”

  “Like, marked by a gambler?”

  “Or a magician. It’s an odd marking, though, doesn’t really correspond to the suit or number. I tell you, I find the strangest things in books.”

  I’d followed him to the front of the shop, where he brought a cigar box out from under the counter and slipped the card inside. “Like what? What else have you found in a book?”

  “Well…” He looked around, like the walls might have ears, and reopened the cigar box, faced toward him so I couldn’t see its contents. “Things like this.”

  He showed me a pressed blue flower as big as my fist, its stamens flattened in all directions like a fireworks spray. A cookie fortune that read, simply, “Woe betide you.” A neatly clipped page of personal ads dated September 1, 1970, from a paper called the East Village Chronicler.

  “Funny stuff, right?”

  It was. I liked it, the thought that you could find harmless, interesting things tucked inside books. A reminder that the world contained mysteries that didn’t have to write over the entire narrative of your life.

  “Once I found a Polaroid in an old book,” I said, watching his face for a reaction. “A collection of fairy tales. The weird thing was, it was a Polaroid of me.”

  “Holy crap,” he said, his eyes bright with respect. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be lying. I wasn’t, but I could’ve been.

  “Are you guys hiring?” I asked him.

  He’d run a palm over his beard, in a way that made it clear he was proud of it. “We might be. If you like odd hours, I think we are.”

  That’s how I started working at a cramped used and antiquarian bookstore, where the odd hours warning was for real. Beard guy’s name was Edgar, he owned the place, and he never sent my schedule more than a week in advance. My shifts ranged from two hours to ten, and sometimes when I got there the shop was closed without warning. It was the buyers who bought rare books by mail that kept the lights on, not the random college kids popping in to browse and walking away wi
th a five-dollar used copy of Howl.

  The oppressive heat had picked back up after yesterday’s rainstorm, and I was sweating through my T-shirt by the time I hit the shop. It wouldn’t open for a couple of hours yet, but luckily Edgar was a terrible judge of character: I had keys.

  My heart settled as I walked in, breathing coffee and paper and sunburnt dust. Like all good bookshops, Edgar’s was a pocket universe, where time moved slow as clouds. Mainly I read on the clock, or listened to him enumerate his various grievances with the world, or drank coffee in the surreal quiet till my fingers started to quake.

  Edgar and I had a running contest going since the day I’d first come in: whoever found the weirdest thing in a used book wins. Since discovering the marked card that first day, I’d found an extremely formal typed breakup letter, a photo-booth strip featuring a man posing with a pineapple, and a business card for a “Noncorporeal Matchmaker” based out of South Florida (and called her; the number was out of service). Edgar was currently ahead, with the flattened toupee he’d found in a copy of Pamela.

  Today was the day I would win our contest for good, though Edgar would never know it.

  I circled the store when I got in, checking the spaces between shelves, my head full of rubies and blood. I plugged my phone into the bookshop speaker and listened to Pink Moon on repeat, prodding at the missing memories of the night before like a rotten tooth. When Edgar opened the front door a couple of hours later, he made it a few steps into the shop before he saw me, and screamed.

  “What is wrong with you?” he shouted, ripping out his earbuds. “Do you live here now?”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. God bless Edgar, he had no follow-up questions.

  By ten a.m. we were sharing a bag of Swedish licorice in companionable silence, and I was feeling halfway normal. By eleven the bookstore was busyish, my nerves winding tighter with every jingle of the bell. It didn’t feel right, that one city, one life, could hold all these things: A rush of shoppers carrying clever tote bags. A night in Red Hook colored by liquor and blood. And three dead ex-Stories, pieces of them spirited away. Finally, during a lull, I sidled to the front and turned the sign to CLOSED, flipping the lock shut.