by Carrie Laben
Time for lunch. Past time. She felt herself weakening and losing will from hunger. It was no good.
She didn’t want to leave the room and look at Martha. That was a hell of a thing to get hung up on, after she’d done all this work. So close to the end.
If only she could use someone else, anyone. But she’d thought it over and over and the things that Briggs and Enoch had said (but hadn’t said, now, but she’d still heard them) were true. Holding onto someone who wasn’t family, who she didn’t know with her own blood, it wouldn’t stick or it would fall apart. That was why Grandfather and Mom both kept coming at Martha, instead of picking on one of the duck-people who would have been easier, unprepared, undefended, with no Abbys in their lives. That was what the notebooks claimed, and in the notebooks Grandfather only lied to himself. It might be true that Grandfather wanted the power to bend time as well—and would she still have that, in Martha’s body? That would be pretty cool, she had to admit—but Mom didn’t care, Abby was almost sure of that. Mom just wanted to have the teenage years back, with Grandfather dead and gone. And Martha was her only opportunity for those years.
Abby tried to convince herself that it was anything else, that she didn’t feel guilty, that she wouldn’t even enjoy being anyone else—and she wouldn’t, that was true—and most of all that she was not afraid. But she was. If she failed now, for love of Martha or any other reason, she was never any better than Grandfather or Mom. She would die like they did, but even younger, and all that would be left was Martha. And it wouldn’t even do Martha any good because without Abby, Martha would be easy pickings and end up in that hawk in the woods, just like the damn song said.
So it wouldn’t be a kindness to Martha, to sacrifice herself, would it.
If she failed now, she was nothing. Oh, she’d jump out of the grave once or twice, if anyone wandered by, because Martha wouldn’t think to pour salt on her and wouldn’t know the words to scratch in the dirt. But she’d end up falling back. Eventually no one would even remember her, someone else would repost one of her pithy tweets perhaps and get the credit or someone would find a picture of a dead hawk and wonder why it was taken and then there’d be a slow long nothing. She felt heavy-legged, tired. She could go to the kitchen and get lunch, but she just wanted to rest here for a moment.
She should have understood. She should have been paying attention, should have figured it out. But she didn’t until the night when she turned off the television at midnight and heard a thin scream, almost more a gasp, from outside. It sounded like it came from the back yard on the flat of grass between the house and the burned pit of the barn. She would have sworn it wasn’t three months later.
It happened only once and she tried to ignore it for maybe an hour or so, following the cue of Mom, who didn’t even stir to it. Mom was full of pills a lot of the time now even when she wasn’t in Martha. But Abby couldn’t sleep and Martha didn’t come back inside and eventually she couldn’t tell herself it was a rabbit or a neighbor. So finally she went out.
Martha was in the back yard, at the foot of the old maple tree, her jeans discarded in a bloody damp mess by her side. The first one had been born by the time Abby got there, in another bloody damp mess in the grass, and Martha was holding her hand over its mouth and nose. Her own mouth looked as though she were biting off her lips from the inside, she was so determined not to make another sound.
“Martha!”
Martha looked at her but her eyes were a dog’s eyes for all they had in them. The spark in the infant faded as Abby watched but Martha didn’t move her hand even as her teeth clenched and her body cramped and she pressed her back against the tree.
“Why didn’t you tell me? We could have fixed this.”
Martha shook her head and Abby couldn’t argue with the message, “What would you have done?” But still. She hadn’t even been given a chance.
She turned to walk away and Martha finally opened her mouth to whisper, “Don’t leave me.” But she did leave, just as far as the kitchen, to take a carving knife from the drawer and leave the light on as she came back outside.
The second one was born as she crossed back to the maple in the light from the window. She bent down by the thing. It was bloody and pink and wrinkled and covered with a sort of wax; there was nothing going on with its face that looked human, and its intentions were all inward, towards hunger, endless need, a gigantic sucking vortex not much different than the tentacles and mouths in the shadows. She was careful not to touch it. The intentions were enormous. It would be powerful if it was allowed. No wonder the first one had scared Martha so badly.
“Fuck you,” she said, holding the steel point to pink flesh. “Fuck you for hurting my sister.” And she pressed down. She was surprised how satisfying it felt to pierce the skin.
When Martha stopped sobbing and shuddering, Abby sent her inside to take a shower and rest. She buried the mess in the yard herself. Maybe that was the last really kind thing she could remember doing for her sister. But she hadn’t known the lines to draw then, and she’d screwed it up. She hadn’t brought salt. She didn’t know.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It didn’t feel like she slept—it didn’t feel like she was sleepy, just tired in a sore, sick way. But when she opened her eyes again, it was dark.
Her first thought was goddammit Martha. But getting antagonistic wouldn’t help. Instead she sat up, got her feet to the floor, made it to a standing position. Christ, she couldn’t have actually slept. She still felt like she’d had her marrow sucked out.
Through the curtains, a sharp sliver of light, then a crack and roll of noise. Abby flinched involuntarily, but she also thought, not Martha then. Good. Just a storm. Just a normal summer storm and nothing to do with anything, anyone in their family, dead or alive, because she really couldn’t deal with that right now. Warm front, cold front, something for the weather guy to worry about and not her.
Just to be sure she peered through the curtains. The rain was pounding, bending the branches—she thought she saw small pellets of hail but it was hard to tell in the maelstrom. The light was greenish-black. The graves, well, the grave singular with the three bodies, was carved with rivulets, the symbols completely washed away no doubt but if she did it right it shouldn’t matter now. So long as enough dirt didn’t erode away to actually expose the corpses.
Abby dropped the curtain and made her way back across the room, half by feel. The lightning flashed twice more as she did so, the second time with thunder so close at its tail that they might have been the same animal. It was hard not to be afraid when it was that close, though she knew the cabin was perfectly safe.
Martha always used to freak out during storms. She should go and check in on her. Do something nice. Take care of her, at least, until the last.
Martha wasn’t in her room, or the bedroom that had once been Mom’s, and she wasn’t in the kitchen. Not in the bathroom. Abby headed down into the last room then. It was a sunken living room, or that’s what they’d called it; with hindsight it was more like a den. At any rate it was a place they’d never spent much time because Grandfather liked to spread his books out there and work in the glow from the fireplace, even on hot days. Sometimes in the evenings Mom would corral them all together and insist on a few rounds of cards or a board game, or once an abortive attempt to make S’mores that ended with shouting and tears and chocolate stains and scorch marks on the rug. Abby always thought it was because Mom didn’t want to feel stupid for having packed those things in the first place, camouflage meant to convince herself and nonexistent observers that they were having a normal vacation.
The scorched carpet was long replaced but the living room still felt half-forbidden, and even more dangerous in the darkness with the rain pinging off the windows. Abby found it thrilling to enter, understood at once why Grandfather had claimed it, but she would be surprised if Martha would take refuge here.
She was even more surprised, though, to find the living room empty but
for Buddy. He was crouched low to the floor between sofa and coffee table, not even whimpering but panting so fast and shallow that it was like a rabbit’s breath, a mouse’s.
“Martha?” Raising her voice felt risky, in this light and in this place, but there was nowhere left to look. There was no reply. Goddamn, but the rain was loud. She wasn’t sure she’d hear an answer in Martha’s voice if it came.
Abby made her way back to the kitchen, though you couldn’t miss a grown woman in a kitchen that size. Maybe Martha stepped into the pantry for… some reason. Maybe she’d lost it completely and Abby would find her crouched down behind the island, panting with fear like Buddy, or crawled and curled into a cupboard. Maybe she was sick and passed out on the floor, or she was also overcome by that strange sleepiness.
Or maybe something far worse had gone wrong. Maybe, despite Mom’s and Abby’s confidence that the place could take care of itself and bear the steps of outsiders, something on this land was left too long untended. Maybe something had been too recently disturbed. Maybe by drawing her adversary here she’d empowered him, as much as herself. Maybe the power was in the air as well as the earth, and even a hawk could find it.
This was what she must not do. Lose confidence. Start dwelling on all the things that could go wrong and she’d never surface again, no one would, the mind can’t hold so many possibilities and stay able. Confidence, pride, knowing that she was strong even when she wasn’t, that was all that held the world in the correct shape. She would find Martha and whatever was wrong with Martha, keeping Martha from answering her, she’d fix, and move on with her plan. That was the only problem to think about right now. Then she’d worry about everything else.
The lightning and thunder came again all at once. Abby, tense and focused as she was, noticed the flash where it shouldn’t be, and then the shadows moving slightly as the wind gusted and fell. The front door was wide open.
Outside, Martha had made it about halfway across the lawn. The hawk strutted ahead of her like a big angry chicken. It was a slow process, and Martha was shuffling in the soaked grass not to overtake the bird, but it looked too soaked and matted to fly.
Idiot, Abby thought. If it wasn’t someone easy like Martha he could blow it just by looking that ridiculous. He should have waited until the rain let up, and soared around being magnificent—but he wanted to move while Abby was asleep, probably.
Abby hesitated, just for an instant, trying to judge if the rain was turning to hail again. It wasn’t, or she hoped it wasn’t. She was soaked the instant she stepped out from under the roof of the porch, straight to the socks and underwear.
At least now it didn’t matter what she did next, she’d be wet regardless. So she ran across the lawn, the grass squishing and streaming like a sponge underneath her, and grabbed Martha by the shoulder at the same moment that she grabbed the focus of Martha’s attention and wrenched it away from the bedraggled hawk. Martha turned, frowning at first, but when she recognized Abby she hugged her tight and buried her face against her sister’s soaked left shoulder.
The hawk shrieked and beat its wings, but there was nothing he could do. It couldn’t even take off. It sort of marched towards them, rolling from side to side, but a harsh stare from Abby was enough to remind him of how helpless he was in that soaked body, what happened last time he tried to take her on physically.
After minutes, when her shoulder felt like it was beginning to steam with Martha’s breath and she was almost headachy from staring down the hawk, Abby shrugged Martha off. Before her sister could interpret that as rejection, she grabbed her hand, lacing their fingers together.
Something struck her hard on the back, with a sharp burning pain, and she and Martha fell heavily together onto the grass. Abby managed to stay on her knees but Martha was flat on her face for a moment before she scrambled and rolled and screamed and pointed. Abby turned to see a fresher, drier hawk circling down for a second blow and threw her hand up only just in time. Talons slashed deep into the meat of her forearm.
He was in two separate birds, holding one in reserve someplace sheltered… No, she realized. They were in two separate birds. There was a separation that one mind could never achieve no matter how sophisticated or how maddened. They both survived, they both still existed somehow.
The one on the ground was the weaker of the two so she grabbed at his intentions blindly and sent him fluttering. As she hoped, this distracted the flying bird and he turned his attention from her and Martha for a moment. She pulled her sister to her feet and they lurched back towards the door, but the hawk in the air was too fast for them and came down in front, trying to drive them back towards its twin, towards the graves, towards the woods… which? Or all of those things?
She tried to reach for both of them at once but that was too much, she lost her hold on the grounded bird and couldn’t catch the other. Martha started to let go of her hand so Abby clenched her fingers tighter to keep her sister from panicking and bolting. They both backed up a step instinctively, away from the beating wings and grasping claws of the swooping bird, towards whatever it was that the hawks wanted them to go towards. That was the first mistake, to do what they wanted for any reason was a crack they could pry at, she’d done it herself. She felt the push of the stronger one, finally realizing that getting at her was the key to getting at Martha, telling her to just let her sister go and save herself.
Little fools didn’t realize that she couldn’t save herself without Martha. They’d stuck together themselves down the years, from some kind of instinct or simply not to be alone, but they couldn’t reason, so they couldn’t apply their own behavior to others. Maybe they took after Grandfather at that, Abby thought spitefully, using sarcasm and contempt to close off the soft spot in her mind from their pressure.
She had to do this. She knew she could. They were both focused on her now, not on Martha, and though they were strong and fast they were not smart, not canny, not experienced, still babies really. And most of all, they didn’t know what they actually wanted. To kill, to possess, to keep alive and suffering, they wanted it all and there was no way they could have it so they weren’t acting in unison, not really. She drew deep, pulling strength from them while they focused on her unguarded, and they didn’t realize she was doing it until it was too late for them and she could throw her mind over both of them like a net. The flying bird tumbled to the ground just before he could reach them. The other let out a weak scream.
She didn’t dare let go of Martha’s hand so she stepped on the bird at her feet, one foot on its wing and then the other deliberately and firmly on its neck. The spine was stronger than she thought it would be—they were supposed to be hollow, weren’t they? The bones. It wasn’t this hard when she was hitting it with the wine bottle. She leaned forward with all her weight and there was a crunch. The other bird beat its wings but still couldn’t get off the ground.
“Come on,” Abby said, lifting her foot, tugging Martha towards the door. “They’ll find new birds as soon as the rain stops. We have to get under cover.”
Martha, before they’d walked more than three steps, began to cry. That was okay, though. It wouldn’t get them any wetter.
Mom said nothing for days, pretending not to notice as Abby tried to keep Martha out of sight, tried to keep her eyes or her mind from resting on the little patch of disturbed soil behind the maple. Maybe she really didn’t notice, at first—the pills and the wine and all—or maybe she’d been planning to bring the hammer down in some elaborate, unbalancing way. Abby could never have asked her, after, and if she had asked she could never have trusted her answer.
It was a week, maybe, that they all lived like that, like they were inside a bag of broken glass trying not to move or rub up against each other. Abby and Martha went to school and they came home, they ate dinner and they washed dishes, and Abby had just enough time to go from This is finally it, finally now we’ll have to fight her head-on to Even this changes nothing, even this wasn’t that big a deal
. If Martha felt sad or sick or scared of what Mom might do, she didn’t show it any more than usual.
Then one night while Abby was finishing up the dishes flashing lights broke up the darkness of the road outside and sirens wailed in from the west. Even that didn’t seem so odd until the police cars pulled into their driveway. Mom slammed a book shut in the living room and swore, rattling off to the bathroom to hide her pills. Abby ran for Martha’s room, but Martha wasn’t there. She wasn’t in Abby’s room either. When Abby found her she was downstairs opening the door to two police officers with thoughts much darker and harder than the ones who’d brought Mom home in her body.
Abby’s only excuse for not doing more was that she simply could not understand what she was seeing. Martha was Martha and Mom was just emerging from the bathroom, smiling and trying to placate, by the time Martha led the officers out the back door and to the foot of the tree and undid all Abby’s handiwork. Dark hard thoughts, dark hard nods, another man came forward with a shovel. What they found was nothing so awful, not for someone who’d seen the last of Grandfather, but it upset the duck-people into a frenzy. And for a moment Abby froze and wanted to scream as the police looked at her and Mom and asked, “Did they know?”
But Martha said no without pushing or so much as a scowl from either of them.
The police questioned Abby anyway, of course, and that was giddy, terrifying fun, being the subject of so much focus. But after a while all the questions were about Martha—had she acted weird before? After? Had she done anything else wrong? Oh, cutting a lot of school and running around with older boys? Was she on drugs? Abby thought about narcing on Mom for a moment, she deserved it, but getting put in foster care seemed like more trouble than it was worth. And then the questions ended but she still wasn’t allowed to go up to bed, just had to sit in the living room with Mom, both of them staring at the floor while strangers bagged their kitchen knives and Martha’s bedsheets and dug up more of the yard than they needed to.