by Carrie Laben
“The fools and weaklings who couldn’t hack it at home and ran away inland. Weaklings like your grandfather, and fools like his descendants.”
They would have seen her anger flare at that, but what did it matter? Ignoring people like this, contrary to legend, never worked. Anyway, the thing was that their attention—even their scorn—was delicious. Briggs was speaking the truth about being powered up from the deaths they’d left behind them (an interesting technique, one that Grandfather would have appreciated, but it struck Abby as incredibly wasteful—you could only kill a person once) and he didn’t even seem to notice her drawing him down bit by bit.
“Didn’t you realize that setting the shoggoth loose would draw us from wherever we were?”
“Like it did last time,” Martha said, and there was a note of reproach in her voice.
“Nathaniel wasn’t ready to make use of the opportunity,” Briggs said. “He took too long.”
“Or his messenger did,” Enoch said quickly. “Or he decided you and your halfbreed mother weren’t what he wanted at the time.
“The point is,” Enoch said firmly, “we knew what we wanted and we were waiting.”
“Don’t you have any cousins closer to home?”
Both Enoch and Briggs looked sour at this, and neither responded. After a few seconds of silence Enoch sighed and aimed the pistol back at Martha. “Hold your tongues,” he said to Abby and Martha both. “The last thing I want to hear is you squawking for the next hour.”
Twenty minutes, Abby thought. I’ll let it rest for twenty minutes or half an hour and then I’ll get Briggs going again and wind them both up. She glanced in the rear-view mirror, saw the imprint of a sucker there, and put her eyes back on the road ahead.
Neither Abby nor Martha said anything to Mom about the weird pop-eyed young man when she got home from work; that went without saying. Mom didn’t like to be bothered with problems when she came home from work, even if she made it while they were still up. Over breakfast the next morning, though, Abby still intended to keep silent. She didn’t say anything to Martha. She thought that the rightness of it would be obvious.
“There was a guy staring in the windows last night,” Martha blurted as Mom sipped coffee and Abby had her mouth full of Frosted Flakes. At least, Abby thought as she swallowed frantically, Martha had the presence of mind to make it sound like they’d had the curtains open.
“A perv?” Mom said, with an odd note to her voice. She didn’t sound mad at least.
“He didn’t have his thingy out or anything like that,” Abby said. “He just tapped on the windows a couple of times and then ran away when I turned the porch light on.”
“Around what time?”
“A little after dark. Eight-thirty? Maybe nine?” They were supposed to be in bed by nine-fifteen but Mom seemed okay with them breaking that rule when she wasn’t around to see it.
Mom nodded firmly and didn’t say anything else except “Hurry up, you’re going to be late.”
That day Mom came home early, or maybe she called in sick and never went in to work at all. At any rate, she was home when Abby and Martha got off the school bus, drinking a glass of wine in the living room with the curtains wide open.
“Nothing yet, girls, but we’ll get him.” She smiled. She sounded pretty excited about getting him, actually.
Abby had to admit that it was nice to have Mom cook dinner again for a change, something that wasn’t just spaghetti and sauce from a jar, but it was annoying not to be able to go read in her room when dinner was over. Mom insisted that they stay downstairs with her, curtains wide open, night pressing in outside.
“Don’t stare,” Mom scolded when Abby snuck nervous glances at the reflecting windows. “We don’t want to tip him off.” Abby was more worried about him not tipping them off, not until it was too late. She wasn’t sure why but since yesterday his pop-eyes had grown in her mind, and being looked at by them seemed more and more dangerous. She tried to concentrate on the TV show Mom had picked but it was stupid and didn’t make sense; invisible people laughed at the wrong times and the family acted like no family ever, the kids telling the parents their secrets without even being threatened and the parents responding like Muppets or cartoons, all smiles.
During the third commercial break he tapped at the window again. Mom looked up and Abby could see she was pushing him; her eyes went a little wider when she hit the shell. I could have told you that it wouldn’t work, Abby thought. But Mom adjusted quickly, standing up and smiling, her eyes locked on his creepier ones as she moved to the door.
To Abby’s surprise he didn’t run this time, although he looked like he wanted to. When Mom opened the door he just stood swaying slightly until she gestured at him to come inside. Then he obeyed, straight into the living room and through to the kitchen where Mom poured him a glass of water without a word. He drank it down and held out his hand for another, and Mom gave it to him as though there was nothing odd about this about it at all.
After the third glass of water he began to pant, hands to his knees, and Mom dropped the glass into the sink with a clank. And then he straightened out.
“You only had girls,” he said, like he was someone and wasn’t half fainting in their kitchen. “You thought that would protect you.”
Mom gave him a look of the most perfect scorn, and Abby had never loved or admired her more than in that moment, and would never again. “That’s not what’s protecting me,” she said, and her tone matched her face. “But yes. I have two beautiful girls, and they’re mine.”
Behind Abby, Martha crept into her shadow, as though she could disappear and they could become one.
“It’s not 1937. We can use girls.”
“So you can. But not if I don’t let you, so you might as well go crawl back home.”
He glared at her, his eyes looking like they’d come out and fly around the room if they could, tiny UFOs. His whole neck was heaving with his breath and he licked his lips until Abby wanted to offer him chapstick. “Give them to me. My master has need of them.”
“The hell with you and the hell with your master. Do you think you’ll compel me?”
He stopped a moment then and Abby saw his thoughts reach out towards her mother and then draw back in disarray.
“The shoggoth’s locked in its place,” Mom said mockingly. “The ground is mine, the house is mine, the girls are mine. You have nothing. No crack through which to creep to me, and no lever by which to compel.”
The pop-eyed man, who was the pop-eyed boy in Abby’s eyes now, seemed to crumple in on himself. He looked longingly at the sink and the glass.
“I gave you water already,” Mom said. “You can’t say I treated you with anything less than perfect hospitality.”
“I cannot,” he rasped.
“You might as well go,” she said, letting the repetition hang.
“I might as well.” He began to walk back to the front door, and Abby and Martha shifted out of his way. He never made it out of the kitchen.
Mom bent over him where he lay on the linoleum. “They didn’t give you very much to go on, did they? Was it worth it?”
His voice came out a sob. “What choice did I have? There aren’t Waites to spare, and Uncle Nathaniel is growing old.”
“You could tell them no. As base a man as my father did.” There was something in Mom’s voice then, a species of regret. She ran her fingers across the pop-eyed boy’s forehead as he gasped on the floor.
“You say that as though it’s easy.”
He died on the kitchen floor in the night, and Mom brought the cleaver out again in the morning. There was no further trouble with him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Twenty-two minutes later, out of an abundance of caution, Abby started talking again. “So,” she said casually. “What relation are you to our uncle Nathaniel?”
Enoch started laughing and didn’t stop for a solid thirty seconds. “My god, you holy innocent. They taught you nothing, di
d they? Nathaniel is and was and will be uncle to all of us.”
Abby, who knew quite well from her reading that Nathaniel was Grandfather’s first cousin through his mother’s side, kept quiet.
“He’s bringing eternal life,” Briggs said, as though he were reciting in church, going by what Abby had seen of church, which was not so much. But it had that solemn empty rote sound. “No more hopping body to body, eternal life in one form, perfected, and total power over all humankind.”
“And that’s so great?” Abby said lightly, as though it weren’t blasphemous.
They both opened up to her then, their energy spilling out like they didn’t know it was leaving. “Hard-water Waites couldn’t understand, hard-water Waites don’t know a thing about power,” Briggs said, while Enoch said “what is WRONG with you,” as though that explained anything.
She’d confused them. As proof, she was drawing down on their emotion like they were a couple of teenagers she’d tricked into arguing about politics. She didn’t let on, though. She acted impressed by their sudden loudness, oblivious to their underlying fear.
In the driver’s seat, the cop twitched. You couldn’t hold someone like that down for so long by main force, though you could fool her a lot longer. They’d overestimated themselves that way too, even before they got distracted, and now they were barely trying. No need to draw their attention to it. Quite the opposite.
“We must be getting close to Shepherdstown,” she said, though they’d only been going a bit above the speed limit and they should have been forty minutes out or more. She just wanted to sound dumb and in the dark about what awaited them, keep the confusion going. But Enoch tilted his head again and said, “Yes. Just a few more minutes.”
Abby caught herself before she glared at Martha. They wouldn’t know anything about Martha’s powers, Grandma’s powers, which were from the rocky hills and barely-fertile farms of inland Mass, not from the sea coast where the Waites had always remained if they could. That had been Grandfather’s ace in the hole all those years, the power of last resort to protect himself if more powerful, hungrier cousins came calling. He’d never had to use it, as things turned out. Abby had wanted to save it as an ace in the hole too, but that was all shot to shit if Martha was going off on her own recognizance while sitting right next to her.
Fine then. She’d take care of it herself, like always.
“If you’re getting eternal life in one body, what do you need us for?” she asked, trying a different tack to playing dumb. “You’ve got a couple of strong young bodies right now. Fine-looking, too,” she added in case that was the kind of sop they’d take. They should be ready to take any sop, honestly. There was no saying what kind of body Enoch had left behind to burn in Daines, but she thought of the sketch of the old man they’d found on the Bonetragers’ floor and shuddered as inwardly as she could, hoping the cousins wouldn’t see. It was almost enough to make her feel bad for Briggs. The thought of ending up in there, even temporarily, made her stomach feel rotted. Getting out of it, in turn… they should be pleased as two well-fed kittens right now, not as fierce and determined as they were.
Enoch glared at her, but Briggs remained reliably loquacious. “These? Feh.” He gestured at #findCaiden’s wiry torso. “These bodies won’t last. You need bodies with the Waite blood in them to hold up to our level of power. The others go bad on you in a few years, a decade or two tops.”
“Even a mixed-breed girl Waite is better than a strapping young fool like this,” Enoch added. He sounded a little bitter. Abby suspected that Great-Uncle Nathaniel hadn’t ended up in the body of a distaff half-Waite daughter.
She also suspected that they’d forgotten that the cop was listening entirely. Indeed, they seemed to have forgotten that the car wasn’t driving itself.
It was a good few days after the pop-eyed boy died that the whole school was called together in an assembly; it might even have been the following week. Mrs. Grant seemed as surprised as anyone when she read the announcement to the class. That fact alone made the prospect exciting and worrying, knocked it out of the routine. They filed into the auditorium single-file and were herded to the front, the fashion when the assembly was for stern purposes; when it was for fun the kindergartners got these seats, because there was less chance that the fifth graders would try to escape.
The principal, Mr. Langan, came from the side of the stage to stand in the spotlight in all his balding lack of magnificence; one of Abby’s favorite things, at most school assemblies where he spoke, was to watch the weird attention-waves he drew, fear and respect all braided together with contempt and near-rage and even a few strands of amused, head-pat condescension from the teachers who knew their way around him or were lucky enough to be related to his wife. Today things were different. Today even his in-laws were confused, on the wrong foot, and therefore a little fearful. Today that fear and attention, as much as a touch of extra yellow in the lights, was making him look stronger and taller than usual, and Abby was determined to pay closer attention than ever to figuring out where that energy came from and where it went.
He held a sheaf of papers in his hand, but he only glanced at it before he started speaking seemingly by heart. “I’m very disappointed to have to hold this assembly,” he said, and the wave of attention shimmered and hardened, especially from the teachers, but from the oldest and the youngest of the kids as well. “I’ve always expected the highest levels of responsibility from every student at this school, always expected you to be good ambassadors for our community, good citizens, good Americans.” There was a fringed and drooping flag by the side of the stage, as there’d always been, always ignored, but now a few strands of attention darted towards it before circling back to Mr. Langan. “And for most of my twenty years here, class after class has met my expectations.”
He paused. It worked, and it annoyed Abby, even as young as she was, that it worked. People should know better. He held up the sheets of paper, and Abby was almost surprised that they didn’t catch fire from the intensity they drew. She wished they would, and he would yelp and drop them and be a cartoon to everyone and this would stop.
“These are the messages I’ve been getting. Phone calls, faxes, even people walking in and leaving messages in person with Mrs. Barron,” he said, inclining his head in the vague direction of his office where even now the matriarch secretary was probably sitting and filing mail. “Not just parents, either. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, people who live in Alden and care about you children. The whole town cares very much. As they should.
“But that means that you also have to be responsible. You can’t abuse people’s caring for you the way you have.”
The threads of attention were growing confused, now. Whatever trouble they’d been expecting—bomb threat, bathroom vandalism, maybe even something as exotic and citified as drugs or sex—this didn’t map to any of them, or anything they’d ever been told not to do before.
“I don’t know how many of you went home and spread the rumor that a strange man was standing outside the playground, watching you.” He paused again, but it was less effective this time, they were not waiting on his next. Abby wondered if he knew, if he could feel it in some sort of strange muted way, like a blind man feeling how he’s standing a patch of sun. “Each and every one of you who did should be ashamed of yourselves.”
A flare of rage from Mrs. Grant that would have gratified Abby on any other day. A similar, smaller one from Mr. Berman. A horrible miasma of stinking self-doubt from Nicole, sitting in the row ahead of her, and the same—it almost made Abby sad to see it—up in front from the kindergarten teacher who’d gone to confront the pop-eyed boy first.
“Rumor-mongering is cruel. You made the people who care about you worry for no reason, and you accused an innocent man of something awful.” You would think he meant the pop-eyed boy—Abby was sure he thought he meant the pop-eyed boy. But his thoughts were all in a defensive bubble around himself. An innocent man had been accused of faili
ng to protect the school from capital-S Strangers.
“I’m very disappointed in all of you, and there will be no outdoor recess for the rest of the quarter.”
A groan went up across the hall, but there was no real energy of rebellion in it.
“Maybe next time you’ll think about this before you start to cry wolf.”
Looking back, it was one of the strangest things ever to happen in Abby’s childhood—at least, one of the things that confused her most. For years and years, even into adulthood whenever she happened to remember it, she’d wonder—had Mom somehow had a hand in it, had she gone in and pushed a few more minds to make sure no one would ever again compare notes about the pop-eyed boy and his sudden appearance and disappearance? Had she known that being told they had lied would make most of the kids think it was a lie, the thing they’d really seen? Or had it all just been a particularly weird working-out of Mr. Langan’s wounded duck-person pride against the weight of the era’s fear?
CHAPTER TWENTY
They pulled up to a rest stop on an outcropping with a scenic view before she could think much further, and rolled into the parking spot furthest away from the interpretive sign. She didn’t have to be told twice to get out of the car, step onto the blacktop. She could feel the power below the tree-sprigged bluff and the river, deep in the bedrock. It wasn’t as good as Minnesota, no, but she understood why this was what they’d looked for, understood as well or better than they had themselves. She drew as much strength from it as they did. Or at least she hoped she did.
They were all out now, Abby and Martha, Enoch and Briggs, the cop. Enoch and Briggs both looked taller than they’d been when they got into the car, longer-limbed, less firmly jointed together. No wonder bodies don’t last for them, Abby thought, if the idiots run them ragged like that.