by Carrie Laben
As Abby and Martha trekked towards Housewares, a small child started howling in the distance.
“Damn,” Martha said, twisting her neck as she gazed from the display of bright blue and purple tights to the great wall of cereal boxes and back again.
Yeah, Abby didn’t say, I suppose that if you just got out of prison this place doesn’t look like such a dump. “I covered the grand opening,” she offered instead. “It was a mob scene. And at Christmas a couple of years ago there was a stampede that killed a seventy-two-year-old lady.”
Another baby’s wailing voice joined the first; the sound moved through the aisles like a flash flood. Martha winced.
“Come on, it’ll be over in the Kitchen Utensils aisle. Aisles.” Abby turned left at the display of clever little citrus zesters, only to find that this was actually cookware, the endcap a tease. And now Martha had vanished.
She backtracked and found Martha staring up—in wonder? In dismay?—at a tower of orange and green South Beach blenders.
“Shake it. We don’t have all night.”
“Something moved up there.”
“A pigeon probably got in, or a bat. That happens sometimes.”
Martha didn’t move. “It looked big.”
“Whatever it is, I care about my corkscrew more.” Abby stared down the back of Martha’s head, wishing she was impatient enough to break her own long-held rule and push her sister into obedience. Before she quite resolved to walk away, though, Martha turned to follow her.
Turning at that moment probably saved Martha’s face. Abby saw the hurtling shape a moment later and ducked, pulling her sister with her into a crouch, and the hawk passed just over Martha’s shoulder and circled away.
“Holy fucking shit!” Abby had never seen a bird that size that close, not where she could feel the air moving under its wings and see its pupils dilate. And yet as big as it was, it had vanished like it came.
Martha lurched upright. “What the hell was that?”
“Some kind of goddamned eagle or something.”
“Where did it go?”
Abby scanned the far-away beams of the ceiling and the fluorescent lights. There was nothing up there that could possibly hide a bird the size of an English bulldog. “It must have landed somewhere…” she said, gesturing vaguely upward, trying to project unconcern so her sister would stop hyperventilating.
“We need to get out of here.”
“We need the corkscrew. And forks for your tiramisu.”
“A giant bird just tried to scalp me. I’ll eat the tiramisu with my hands, I don’t care.”
A few aisles away, the crying babies started a crescendo, a note of rage entering their voices. A tantrum.
“Shut up,” Abby muttered. “I wish the damn hawk would eat you.”
“I’m serious, Abby. I want to go back to the hotel.”
“It was probably just as freaked out as you were once it realized you aren’t a mouse.” Martha almost looked like she might believe it. She hadn’t been facing the bird, so she hadn’t seen the claws, or the implacable golden eyes. And she could never see the bizarre tangle of hate around its head.
“Come on,” Abby said, after a moment, and Martha finally obeyed.
They found the corkscrews behind a display of disposable plastic martini glasses with slogans like “Golddigger” and “Bitch on Wheels” printed on them in pink glitter. Forks were easier, and before long they were being checked out by the near-comatose cashier. The babies were still howling behind them, but that didn’t seem to strike anyone else as unusual.
Abby kept one eye on the sky as they crossed the parking lot, but any birds that might have been out there stayed blended with the encroaching night.
An outside observer might have thought Grandfather was suffering from grief that summer, if any outside observer had cared.
He got skinnier, more stooped; his hair and beard thinned to wisps; his skin dried. And yes, in the nonexistent outside observer’s defense, he was rarely seen outside anymore. His weekly trips to the library and the liquor store ended, and then his daily routine of front porch sitting dwindled to an hour, to fifteen minutes. He abdicated opportunities to supervise the mowing of the lawn and Abby and Martha’s work in the garden.
But Abby knew better. He was still giving her lessons and lectures. He was still staying up until well after her bedtime, light shining through the space beneath his door when she took furtive trips to the bathroom or kitchen. He was still yelling at Mom, only to abruptly shut up when Abby or Martha made a noise that told him they’d come back into the house. He was still Grandfather. And Martha wasn’t getting as many odd mean spells. Mom was out of bed and normal-ish again, yelling back at Grandfather, making Martha take off the locket and give it to her for safe-keeping, because Martha was so scatterbrained she’d just lose it in the creek. The family got so tantalizingly close to righting itself, for a few months.
As July fourth—when they always started the trip to Minnesota—approached, Abby started dropping hints to Mom about packing. Hints were a better bet than direct questions, when it came to Mom and Grandfather. Direct questions opened the door to direct refusals, and refusals, unlike permissions and promises, were never reversed later.
“Your grandfather’s too sick to travel right now,” Mom said, louder than necessary, and that was too close to a full-fledged ‘no’ for Abby’s comfort.
“Why do you care so much?” Martha asked her later, when she complained about it. “You always say you’re bored when we’re there.”
“I’m bored here, too,” Abby said. Martha wouldn’t understand Abby’s suspicions that the change in routine was a sign, like a certain smell to the milk that wasn’t expired quite yet, like a hairline fracture that meant she should let Martha wash that particular plate and get the blame when it broke.
The holiday came and went. Martha and Abby watched as distant driveways along the street filled up with cars and the sweet-smelling smoke from the barbecues drifted over them. When it got dark, they walked to the top of the neighbor’s hill to watch the fireworks exploding, small and muffled, above the theme park miles away. Mom and Grandfather ignored the day, going about their normal routines so hard and so silent that it was obvious they were inches from screaming in each others’ faces, even if you couldn’t see the little daggers of attention stabbing out at each other and then, after a moment’s application of willpower, retracting.
The morning of the fifth, Abby woke up early. In a normal year, she would have been squashed against Martha or Grandma, or at worst between both. She could read in the car without getting sick, so sometimes she took the middle before Mom or Grandfather made her, to get credit for being a good girl later. These last few years Grandma had smelled funny, though, and Martha was getting big enough to elbow Abby without meaning to when she turned to look at the horses or deer or funny signs for diners along the road.
Abby had decided that once she learned to drive, she’d never, ever put up with being a passenger again.
Now she had space, and time, and she could go read her books in the old barn if she wanted to or on the front porch where Grandfather used to sit. But she didn’t. She lay in bed for a long time, half-convinced that if she just waited Mom would come along and yell at her for being lazy when she knew they needed to get packed and into the car.
No trip. No stops at Dairy Queen along the road for sundae battles, no playing cows-and-cemeteries, no slugging Martha in the arm when she spotted a Volkswagen Beetle. But that wasn’t why she was upset, because those things only ended in mosquitoes and mooching around outside the cabin while Mom and Grandfather worked on whatever it was they were working on. She was upset because the feeling like a bad milk smell was worse than ever.
She sat up, swung her legs out of bed. She was going to find Martha, and they were going to go catch newts all day. Out of sight, out of mind, whatever was going on that was safest.
Abby went downstairs, and to her surprise found the ground
floor silent and empty. She glanced out the window, and the car was gone, and for a moment she had a pang—but no, a roast was thawing on the kitchen counter, they hadn’t gone far. Someone was probably around. Certainly Martha, Mom never took her anywhere that she didn’t also take Abby, and probably Grandfather behind the closed door of his always-shadowed bedroom. He was just keeping quiet.
Martha wasn’t in the apple orchard. She wasn’t in the garden shed. She wasn’t in the big hayloft or the stalls in the old barn, which wasn’t surprising—Martha hated the bloodstained floors and even though Mom and Grandfather said it was impossible, that animals didn’t work like that, she insisted that she could hear the long-gone pigs and cows crying in fear.
It was impossible that Abby was hearing them now, too. She’d never heard them before. They were faint, but there were sounds of pain. She held her breath and tried to be too still to make her own noise, closed her eyes against the distraction of shadows and dust motes, and turned slowly in a circle as she tried to figure out where the sounds were coming from.
Northeast. The little grain shed built right up against the far wall. She moved towards it with short one-at-a-time steps, to stay quiet of course and not because she was afraid. The moaning never broke, but she was almost sure that there was only one of—of whatever was making the noise. She couldn’t tell if it was human or not. It wasn’t Martha’s ghost pigs, she knew that, even though she’d never heard a pig in real life. Something alive was making that sound. Something alive and in pain. Something that still had a will, and wanted to get out.
The grain-shed door was closed, but the old, dry wood was full of knotholes and cracks she could peek through. For a moment she imagined a claw poking back to put out her eye, but she shook her head and made herself lean down. That was horror movies, not real life.
They hadn’t kept grain in the grain shed since Mom was a little girl, but there were still a few old empty sacks scattered around, draped over bins, undisturbed for decades because the mice never came. Now the sacks had been pulled down and used to cover the moaning thing from head to foot, without a gap. If not for the moaning she would not have known it was alive—any movement it made was too slight to be sure of in the dusty, dim light from one small dirty window.
It could be a trick, she thought. It might not be weak at all. If I go inside, it could turn on me.
There was a pitchfork near the barn door, and she backed up in her own footsteps until she was able to reach behind her and grasp it. It was heavy, and when she tried to hold it out in front of her the tines wobbled loose on the handle, so she held it at her side where it might look more intimidating.
The moaning finally stopped as she dragged the door of the grain shed open. The bags stirred and slid away as the moaning thing reached out a hand and tried to lift its head.
It might have looked like Grandfather, if something had hollowed out Grandfather’s bones and sucked the flesh from beneath his skin and somehow rusted away his will to a few weak, quivering strands. Even then, though, Abby couldn’t believe that Grandfather would ever make that high, whimpering moan she’d heard. This wasn’t Grandfather. It couldn’t be.
She’d pointed her pitchfork at it without thinking, and it had lifted its head enough to see that she was armed. Even so, the wisps of intent focused on her. “Help,” it said, still in a whiny treble. “Help me, Abby.”
She wanted to step forward. She wanted to back away. She just stared at it.
“Please,” it said. “It’s me, it’s Martha. Help me.”
Abby dropped the pitchfork and ran, slamming the door behind her, not stopping until she was out of the barn and on the other side of the house in the bright sunlight.
Whatever it was, it knew her weaknesses.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Martha somehow managed to fall asleep in the passenger seat on the way back to the Best Western, and barely stumbled through the door, and then fell asleep again at once, on top of the comforter, with her shoes on. Abby put the tiramisu in the fridge, and then looked sadly at the magnum of Moscato and put it away as well.
In the morning, though, she was grateful. The room was too bright to bear. She tweeted something sardonic about mornings before she took her head off the pillow just to get the boost she needed to get out of bed. A hangover to top it off would have been too perfect.
She turned to shake Martha, but her sister was already awake, staring into space like a passive lump of meat. Great. Some things would never change with Martha, obviously.
“Tiramisu for breakfast,” Abby announced, “and I call first shower. And then we need to get a move on.”
“We’ve got plenty of time,” Martha said just as Abby slammed the bathroom door.
Out in the parking lot, the car was already roasting with the sun; Abby felt the sweat start to trickle down her back as she pulled out, despite the AC turned up as high as it would go. “Find us something to listen to,” she told Martha, and then remembered what the radio did yesterday, the confluence between the lyrics and last night’s incident. “You can plug in my iPhone, my workout mix is on there.”
Martha picked up the iPhone and looked at it for a minute as though she had no idea what to do with it. Of course she didn’t. She shrugged and said, “I said I have a headache,” and dropped it again without even trying. Abby, irritated, sped up.
Soon they’d moved from the area that Abby knew like the back of her hand to the area she knew more like… well, the back of her shoulder, not as well as she should, not from direct observation. It wasn’t a direction that had anything interesting in it, not until you got well beyond the boundaries of the local news; even when people shot their lovers and exploded their meth labs in this neighborhood, it only merited a few minutes of coverage. No one bothered to do ground-breaking stories about children slipping through the cracks out here. The whole place was a crack, and the best thing to do was just slip on through as fast as they could.
But then Martha sat up straighter and made a little noise of distress. She choked it off immediately, but Abby couldn’t have missed it if she’d tried. And the worried glance after to see if she’d noticed would have tipped her off anyway.
“What’s wrong?” She looked right at Martha, long enough to make sure that she wasn’t going to try to lie.
“I’ve been here before. I was lost here once. Please watch the road.”
There was nothing in the road. Abby turned her head all the way and surveyed the roadside with renewed attention. No, she’d never seen it. Although it did look like the right sort of place; lonely, boggy, the trees half-drowned and burdened with wild grape and poison ivy. And there was a feeling that she hadn’t felt in years, half-memory and half a living thing. She slammed the brakes and reversed.
“What the hell, Abby?”
“Just checking something.”
There was no shoulder really, but there was a place where they could pull off far enough that they probably wouldn’t get hit if someone came down the road, assuming that someone was more or less sober and traveling in the general vicinity of the speed limit. A chance they’d have to take.
She stepped out of the car, left the door hanging open behind her, not looking at Martha. Normally it would all be swamp here, but it had been a dry summer. It was walkable, though the sedge was almost up to her knees. Black flies swarmed around, and somewhere nearby she heard the drone of a horsefly.
Bug spray. She’d forgotten to fucking bring any. They’d have to pick some up.
It would be a lot easier if Martha would quit curling into a pill bug in the passenger seat and come help her. But she saw from here what Mom would have seen. The lone oak she would have put to her left hand, and… yes. Directly in her sight line, a tree that had been struck by lightning despite being shorter than the others all around it.
The horsefly closed in on the back of her neck, and she smacked it, not hard enough to kill but at least it was stunned and tumbled away. She wouldn’t have time to dig deep, but Mom
wouldn’t have either.
But Mom would have had a shovel. Abby turned back to the car, ignored Martha and tried to think. Under the driver’s seat, in the trunk… there had to be an ice scraper somewhere. She almost snapped at Martha to come help her look, but that wasn’t ignoring and Martha’s help was unlikely to be worth much. Anyway, she found the scraper under the spare tire (half deflated, and of course she wouldn’t have a chance to get her money back for that either) in the back. It was cheap and flimsy, but it was better than scratching in the dirt with her fingernails.
As she stood up, she spotted a hawk perched on a telephone pole a few yards away. It didn’t mean anything, necessarily. There were always hawks along the roads, looking for careless woodchucks and stupid mice and basking snakes, she remembered that from their drives to Minnesota all those years ago. But she closed the driver’s-side door as she walked by. The hawk lifted off and flew away. It was startled by the noise. It didn’t mean anything.
Heartened by the sound of the slamming door and the hawk’s reaction—she was the dominant species here, not any bird—she walked towards the lightning-struck tree. The serrations on the sedge grabbed her legs and sliced her skin as she pulled free—slices that hurt, and worse, would turn into red itchy welts in a little while. She lengthened her stride, trying to get across as quickly as possible, jumped over the remaining puddle at the center of the marsh, sank into the rot-smelling mud on the other side and sent a few terrified frogs scattering. But then she’d reached her goal.
Even looming above her, the tree was objectively shrimpy. A black mark ran down one side of the trunk where the heavens burned the old life out of it. Woodpeckers had been at it, and the bark had flaked away. She reached out and touched the gray, weathered-smooth wood; she could feel a tingle, like static on a dress coming out of the dryer. She couldn’t miss it any more than she could miss the smell of her mother’s face cream or the timbre of her grandfather’s voice. If anyone had actually been paying attention, if anyone wasn’t too damn dumb to notice, they might have wondered why a dead tree kept growing.