by Carrie Laben
Ryan nodded, and glanced uncomfortably in the direction of the restrooms.
“She’s totally harmless,” Abby said, and reached out to pat his hand. “I just didn’t want you to not know.”
“Thanks for telling me,” he said. Abby felt a small part of his attention dart towards the door as though he was considering ditching them right then and there, but as she’d hoped, he was more scared of being rude than he was of a maybe-crazy girl.
Martha came back to the table a moment later, and didn’t seem to notice the change in mood. Abby smiled broadly at her until Ryan got the message and smiled too.
“What’s good?” Martha asked, and that spiraled into a discussion of the four kinds of sausage, the fifteen kinds of jam. Ryan went from acting like nothing was wrong to really relaxing in short order.
They’d gotten lucky, really. She should be happy.
Abby ordered an egg-white omelet, and then reconsidered and changed her order to a regular one. Martha got the French toast and didn’t change her order even when Abby pinched her again. The temptation to push her popped up out of nowhere but Abby pushed it away, annoyed with herself—one meal wasn’t worth it. And by the time Abby had the argument in her head the waitress had taken Ryan’s order too, and was gone.
It was while watching the waitress disappear that Abby noticed the television above the counter. It was tuned to Fox, and though she couldn’t hear a word the blond anchor was saying, Abby could see the way the old men in their Carharts stared up at her. Even people who insisted they didn’t care a bit about the news would stop what they were doing and watch the flickering life on a screen. Even people who claimed to ‘never watch TV.’ Especially people who ‘never watch TV.’ You couldn’t ignore movement and colors at the edge of your vision—humans weren’t built that way.
Martha noticed her line of sight and smirked at her. “Must be driving you crazy,” she said.
“What’s that?” Ryan said.
“Oh, Abby is a news junkie,” Martha said lightly. Under the table Abby could tell that she was rubbing the spot on her leg where Abby had been pinching. “Whenever we go on vacation she gets crabby because she’s away from the boob tube and the Internet.”
Who even said boob tube anymore?
Ryan laughed. “I never watch that stuff. It doesn’t mean anything for regular people, anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s what I think too.” Martha smiled harder. It suddenly occurred to Abby, with forehead-smacking clarity, that it had been a long time since Martha had interacted with a man who wasn’t telling her what to do or when to go back to her cell or worse. She hadn’t had the opportunities Abby had to grow jaded about nice boys with nice eyes, wearing nice clean baseball caps. And Ryan was thick with nice.
“Well, someone has to pay attention to what’s going on,” she rejoined, but with a smile, a little duck of the head, telling them that she was on their side still and willing to take a bit of gentle ribbing. She didn’t want to argue, not now; she needed to concentrate. She’d just seen the name “Bonetrager” scroll by in the crawler.
“I promise the world will still be terrible when we get back,” Martha said.
“Ah, the world’s not terrible,” Ryan said. “A few people are, that’s all. If we didn’t watch the news, most of us wouldn’t even know that serial killers exist, or wars, or anything.”
God, what a holy fucking innocent. Abby started reassessing how lucky they were to find this guy. He might annoy her to death before she could get the truck off of him. And that’s if it wasn’t a cover for something worse, which niceness so often was.
The waitress came by with coffee in a carafe from a cheap drip machine. Ryan put cream and sugar in his and now, suddenly, Martha did too. More useless calories. Abby didn’t even bother pinching her this time, it was obviously making her contrary. Instead, she kept her attention on the screen, but tried not to make it too obvious. A mere silver alert wouldn’t have made the news all the way out here. Bonetrager wasn’t a cute kid or a pretty blond woman.
The waitress blocked her view bringing the food and she missed the crawler the first time it repeated, but it came around again soon enough. Three dead, no names, Bonetrager and his teenage grandson missing.
Abby lost what little appetite she had. She didn’t give a damn about Bonetrager or any of the neighbors, and she’d known this would happen eventually, but it shouldn’t be happening this fast. She’d miscalculated something, overlooked something. And that suggested that she might be wrong about the birds too, and worse forces were in play than she’d thought. It didn’t line up, not the way she understood it.
Or this was a coincidence, the kid had snapped and annihilated his family over some real or perceived abuse, and the world was just continuing to be the normal amount of terrible despite what Ryan said. She made herself chew and swallow a small bite of omelet. Either way, she needed to keep up her strength. The waitress wandered by with more coffee and a diffident “Everything okay?” and Martha’s sincere-sounding “wonderful!” covered for Abby’s lack of enthusiasm.
By the time breakfast was over, Martha had devoured not only every single bite of the French toast soaked in cheap fake syrup, but two refills of the cream-and-sugared coffee. She even managed to snag several bites of Ryan’s home fries. Whether that was flirting or greed, it was deftly done. Ryan seemed flattered and paid their bill without prompting. Abby, nagged by worry and by the need to wave off the waitress’s repeated offers of a box for the abandoned half of her omelet, had to wonder if it was her own damn fault—some guys thought broken and crazy was just a more interesting form of cute and helpless. She’d assumed he was too salt-of-the-earth for that.
As they went back to the car she made sure to walk a little faster so she could take the seat between the lovebirds.
She’d never asked Grandfather about her new-found power, this ability to absorb energy from others. He was too busy, too angry, too besieged. Besides, she’d find out more about it in his notebooks, she was sure. That was the good thing about the shadow over their home that autumn, it meant that she was able to raid Grandfather’s room in peace while he and Mom shouted in the basement and threw salt around in the attic. She hadn’t found the secret stash yet, but there were still a lot of his more recent notebooks to get through.
In his notebooks, he lost interest in things every few years. He’d lost interest in Mom when she was eight or so, changed his focus to his money worries. Then he’d gone back to Mass, to Salem, though he didn’t take Grandma with him. He was very successful there, he wrote, coming back with several trunks full of material for his experiments. A few months after that Grandma came into an inheritance that let him buy a John Deere and several more books that he’d had his eye on. And a very promising piece of property in Minnesota.
It got so bad that Abby resorted to skimming before very long. Grandfather had project after project after project, most of them dull or elusive in his hints, pointless meanderings about the positions of the stars, occasional entertaining obsessions, and again and again schemes to raise more money or ghosts or ghosts who knew where money was hidden. He almost seemed to see power as a way of getting money sometimes, and not just as something that you wanted for itself.
Abby slowed down only when she caught a reference to Mom—“S. starting to show Akashik shielding”, “S. reported dream about sunken city last night”—or the barn, or anything that hinted at moving body to body, invading, stealing, draining energy one to the other.
One spring when, by Abby’s count, Mom would have been twelve or maybe just thirteen, she found the line “Tried transference on S. Satisfactory. Fem. brain structure not as limiting as I feared. She kicks a bit though—would have to, wouldn’t she, that’s my girl.”
It was all true, then. Of course she’d already known, but he’d written it down, it was truly, truly, true and not a bad dream.
She cracked down. No more skimming. Every word of Grandfather’s ancient nattering, despite t
he need for secrecy, despite meals, despite Mom’s haphazard attempts at keeping up normalcy through lessons and chores, despite Grandfather in the flesh still carrying on at war with the thing in the mirrors. If she’d been coming home from school ground down from the hostility instead of glutted on the energy she was now absorbing—a few times it made her almost sick to her stomach like too much sponge candy—she’d never have been able to do it.
Three days later she was reading a page where Grandfather noted that Elaine—Grandma—knew, that he was almost sure she was helping Mom shake him off, to spite him. He had a test planned to see if that was the case. But before she could get through his astronomical notes to find out what that test was, Martha came dashing through the half-closed door.
Abby slammed the notebook shut and shoved it under her desk, angry with the awareness that she’d been too slow, too wrapped up in her reading. If that had been Mom or Grandfather she would have been caught.
Martha was panting, and her voice came out squeaky. “Mom says you have to come right away.” Abby didn’t ask questions, just got up and followed her sister—but she didn’t run, either.
By the time they got down to the basement Grandfather was gurgling and bluish, worse than his body had looked even with Martha trapped inside. Mom was standing over him with hair all wild and her arms thrown up, screaming words that Abby knew. Not the words Grandfather had been yelling for weeks, but a more elaborate variation of them.
In the corner behind the hot water heater, the dark had gone solid and was sending out tendrils of intention as thick and material as Abby’s leg. Most of them lashed blindly in empty space, but one had found Grandfather’s ankle, and that one had grown what looked like a mouth or a suction cup full of teeth on the end.
Mom didn’t take her eyes off the dark, but gestured toward Abby. “Get down here. Don’t let it touch you. Martha, you go back upstairs.”
The sentence had barely ended when the cellar door slammed, with Martha on the other side.
Abby eyed the tentacles. They were reaching out close to the bottom of the stairs; she’d have to step over them. She wasn’t going to risk it. She pushed at one but it was immovable and icy-cold, something she’d never felt before.
“Hurry up!”
She jumped. Mom caught her by the arm as she was landing and she stumbled, but away from the darkness.
Mom continued to grip her arm, and in that moment for the first time she felt the pressure at the edges of her mind. Startled, she resisted by instinct, but Mom squeezed and twisted her arm and she was distracted by pain, her vision doubled—she was Abby and she was looking at Abby, who looked small with big cartoony eyes; she was Mom and she was looking at Mom, glaring with concentration.
Both mouths took up the chant again, and Abby could feel two throats burn from screaming but she was powerless to stop either of them.
The dark tendrils slowed their sweeping, then fell still. The volume and pitch of the chanting rose, frantic, the pain increased. Abby pushed at the mind behind the eyes that saw Mom, scrabbling to get back into her own place. Her grip on her arm grew tighter, and Abby saw the tendril at Grandfather’s leg detach and flop back, and stopped struggling, because the tentacles were everywhere falling back but also because the mark the thing had left on Grandfather’s bare ankle was so ugly she couldn’t look at or think of anything else, the edge of the wound shredded and the inside like raw meat already growing rotten, sheened with iridescence.
As soon as she stopped resisting their voices got even louder, firmer, and the darkness retreated faster and that in turn made the voices get louder still and it was like a thin sheet of ice melting away in the sun.
When there was no darkness but the legitimate shadow of the water heater, Mom dropped her arm. Abby felt her mind snap back into place, her vision clear, but she stood stunned and unmoving while Mom lurched forward to grab the dropped cane at Grandfather’s side.
Her whole body was tingling like a foot that had gone to sleep. Mom was using the end of the cane to scratch in the dirt on the floor.
“Okay,” Mom snapped, before Abby was sure that she could move again. “Help me get him up the stairs.”
Abby wasn’t tall enough to do much, and the stairs were too narrow for the three of them to go up at once anyway, so Mom ended up dragging Grandfather by the shoulders while Abby made a token attempt to help by holding up his feet. She kept her fingers away from the wound, which looked even more rotten up close and smelled that way too. She tried to feel her way into her body again, stretching, letting the tingle fade.
Martha was sitting slumped against the wall at the top of the stairs. She’d obviously been listening and she didn’t even try to hide it. Abby didn’t meet her eyes.
They laid Grandfather on the couch. He was still lying there three hours later when Martha came into the kitchen, where Abby was drinking a Coke and still trying to shake off what had happened, and tugged nervously on her sleeve.
“He’s not breathing.”
Abby stood and wobbled into the living room. Martha was right. Grandfather was not breathing. His face was gray, and his mouth open, a thin trickle of drool hanging down onto the couch-arm where they’d propped his head. And the smell of rot was stronger.
Reluctantly, Abby reached out and let her hand hover over his wrist as though she were touching him. Martha looked at her. Abby shrugged.
“Should we tell Mom?”
“She’ll be angry if we wake her up.”
“But I think he’s dead.”
“There’s nothing Mom can do about that.” This was a place, she had to admit later, where her instinct for secrecy led her wrong. Mom could have done a few things to make sure he was dead. Mom had only just then showed she could do something that Grandfather couldn’t.
With Abby’s help. And Abby didn’t want to be grabbed and split and trapped in the back of her own mind again, any more than she wanted to wake Mom up and get yelled at.
Martha looked at her for a moment, as though expecting Abby to solve the problem right there. Then she left. In a moment she was back with a blanket from the hall closet, which she tucked over Grandfather’s still form.
Then they went upstairs to do their homework.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Abby let Ryan get out of sight of the diner, make a few turns, before she started pressing his attention. All she wanted in the world was just to pull out her phone and get more details about what was going on back in Alden but she needed to take care of this first.
“Hey, are you ladies in a hurry?” he asked after only a few seconds’ effort.
Martha glanced anxiously at Abby, who was already saying, “Not at all. Why?”
“I was thinking you might like to see the World’s Largest Concrete Duck,” he said, pronouncing the capitals. “It’s pretty much the only thing around here that tourists might like to see.”
“That sounds neat,” Abby said, even though it sounded horrible. The Martha thing wasn’t all bad. He thought he was coming up with reasons to spend more time with them on his own.
They made another left, and it wasn’t very long before the storefronts turned to houses, the yards got bigger. Garages looked more and more like barns, until they passed one with a horse grazing on the parched lawn outside of it. Cornfields began.
“It’s not that far now,” Ryan said. “They built it back in the fifties—it used to have a burger restaurant inside but now they just sell T-shirts and stuff, when Bob is around to open it up.”
“Sounds neat,” Martha repeated before Abby could come up with something that wouldn’t sound sarcastic. “Why a duck?”
“Bob’s grandfather liked ducks, and he was the one that built the place. People used to use this road a lot more before the Interstate was built.”
“Sort of like Route 66?”
“Exactly. But no one ever wrote a song about us.”
Why would they, Abby thought irritably. She wanted to press him to shut up, but making him un
comfortable would be counterproductive.
The dog nuzzled the back of her neck, and it felt comforting despite being cold and damp. Not a bad dog, really. It hadn’t made much noise and unlike Martha it didn’t smell too awful. Sometimes Abby was still a little angry at Grandfather for never letting them have pets growing up, even though it would have been impossible. She could have gotten a cat when she moved back to Buffalo, or even while she was in college. But it was just as well she didn’t.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “If you look over there at about eleven o’clock you can see the head just up above the trees now.”
“Eleven o’clock?” Martha tapped the clock on the dashboard. “It’s only like nine-thirty.”
“No,” Ryan said, and chuckled. “I mean if the world were a clock and straight ahead was noon, the duck’s right over…” He squinted, and Abby followed his gaze. A fingernail clipping of white concrete was visible over the tree line. “There. Not far now.”
Abby couldn’t help but wonder what kind of idiot Bob’s grandfather was. The whole point of a roadside attraction was to be visible from a long way off. The trees had wrecked any chance of success for him well before the Interstate could have.
Then again, it was a duck. Even if people could see it, why would they care? Only these local people, who were almost like ducks themselves, would think it was special.
They didn’t get a good view of the duck, two stories tall and decorated with a structurally improbable blue bow around its concrete neck, until they’d pulled into the parking lot. There were spaces for at least a dozen cars, most with strands of dry brown grass in the cracks of the pavement. Ryan pulled into the spot closest to the door and they climbed out of the truck. It was already a lot warmer than it had been when Abby woke up, but still just as humid. A shitty day to not be in a nice new air-conditioned vehicle.
Ryan gestured up at the sun-faded, crackled curve of the duck’s breast and neck. “It was in Ripley’s Believe It or Not once,” he said, and Abby ignored the rest of what was coming out of his mouth because a hawk soared over as he spoke.