“I can show you.” He forms the words carefully and quietly. His smile is shy. I feel his glamour pushing against me like warm air. “Over here.” He offers his hand, and when I take it his smile grows. Were I what I appear to be, my remaining allotment of life would be measured in brief moments.
. . .
It was the first Thomas, the original, the real Thomas who taught me how to escape.
“We’re all called Thomas,” he said. He was not a boy any longer, but had a man’s gaunt face and triangular cheekbones through which I could see the shine of his heart. It was so full of light.
I pressed my back against the rough limestone of my prince’s underground castle, cutting my palms on the edges, and stared. Thomas knelt, and his knees were knobby like a goblin’s under red hose. The strap of a guitar cut across his jerkin, and he shifted so that its head didn’t knock against the stone floor. “Do you remember what you were named before?”
“No,” I whispered. “I don’t remember.”
“Ah, Tom,” he said, shaking his head as if disappointed in me. “No worries, lad, most of us never do. They take us so young, don’t they?”
“You remember yours, though?” I clasped my hands together behind my back and stepped away from the wall to show him I was less afraid. I looked down at his reddish hair, and he raised his chin. I saw how beautiful he was from that angle, and why they’d taken him. All of us were beautiful.
“My name has always been Thomas. I was the first.”
“The first?”
“They’ve always taken children, of course.” He chuckled. “But I was the first they remembered.”
“They think I am you?”
“When they think of us at all.”
. . .
It is a strange sight to the locals: two boys walking hand in hand toward the river. But after a moment their efforts to surreptitiously gawk are thwarted by the water horse’s glamour. Their stares begin to slide off of us until we are as good as invisible.
The river laps calmly here, and the noise of the city behind us overwhelms the calling of gulls and the roar of the interstate zipping by on the bridge overhead. I say, “We’ve passed the boats,” but not as if I care.
The water horse smiles at me. “I know better ones, and you’ll love the water.”
I nod. He takes me to the edge, where the bridge shades us so the sun cannot glare off the river (a milky green-gray that reminds me of my mother’s eyes). I see the rough sand and pebbles spilling under, for almost six feet I can follow the sloping descent. He tugs me, and I resist, but he pulls again. My hand is trapped in his. I frown, but when he grins I pretend to look relieved. [6]As if I cannot see the sharp lines of his teeth or the old meat trapped between them.
. . .
[7]The first Thomas stayed with us for an entire season. It was winter, and that is when the princes conclave, when they stay hidden from the Hunt in their hills and ruined castles, making lights and fire through the dark, dead nights. That winter the Queen had chosen our hill for her revels and treating. I never knew why.
Thomas sought me out frequently, escorting me between bonfires and feasting halls, teaching me the names of his friends and allies and the faces of his enemies. They were all my enemies, I wanted to say. I asked, “Are there others now? Other Thomases?”
“Always, Tom. But none of you ever last.”
I frowned, picked at the skin stretched over the back of my hand. It was pale and soft, and I saw dark veins running below it. Not shining ones like the first Thomas’s. “You lasted,” I said.
“I did.”
“How?”
It was his turn to frown. “Tom,” he said, stopping under the dripping branches of a silver tree. “I chose this place. And that choice made all the difference.”
“They took you. How was that a choice?” My voice cracked. I didn’t even remember what my mother’s voice sounded like. How could I know if I preferred it to the Queen’s?
“Hush,” Thomas said. “Do not draw their attention. Two of us together is like to create a tear in their space-time continuum.” His lip twitched into a grin, but I did not understand the jest.
I quieted, realizing that my cheeks were hot and my chest tight. “How did you choose?”
“I left. I escaped from their hold and wandered the world on my own. I loved and sang. I – ”
He continued, but all I heard was that he had escaped. I interrupted him. “Tell me how. How did you free yourself?”
Pausing, the first Thomas took my face in his hands. “How old are you? Thirteen? Twelve?”
I nodded, although I had no idea.
“Use the weapons you have, Thomas,” he told me.
“I don’t have any.”
[8]He tapped his long fingers against my temples. “You do.” He leaned in and kissed my eyelids. Then he pulled me so that my cheek rested against his.
. . .
I killed Hop with my own salt tears and the hawthorn wand with which it chased off the grims and goblins. I ran away on the longest night, when all the old ones and ugly ones, the shining and dancing ones, huddled away from the Hunt. When it crashed over our hill, I caught onto the edges of the wild magic and sailed away with the howling and screaming.
Since that night I’ve killed five others, though none of the old ones. And until I manage that, the Hops of the world will continue to take children.
. . .
We walk into the river, me slowly, him guiding me. I pretend to panic. He tugs, and muscles stand out on his arm. His glamour is falling away, and his hair looks stringy and coarse. He is taller, longer, and walking on his bare toes. I cry out, and he laughs. It sounds like a horse’s whinny. He dives into the water and drags me under. I hold my breath and don’t have to fake the panic anymore. I dig in with my feet, but his pull is inexorable and we go farther and farther under. My only relief is that I know he will not eat me until I am dead and the water softens me. Water horses are like crocodiles.
I twist, sliding my free hand into my jeans. The salt is soaked but still potent, because this is not truly running water thanks to slow rains and manmade dams. It is gritty between my fingers. My feet leave the bottom of the river as the water horse hauls me into deeper water. I put the grains of salt to the place where our hands touch and he jerks still. I am free, and my lungs burn as I slide the wand out of my sleeve. The water horse’s face lengthens and he snarls at me, bones changing and skin rough with newly sprouting hair. He snaps at me with razor teeth and reaches with his arms, with fingers growing together and thickening into black hooves. I do not swim backwards but dive at him and put the hawthorn wand to his neck. He freezes, and I think for a moment that I might force him to the surface and ask him three questions he’ll have to answer truthfully. It could lead me to the nearest prince. But the risk is too great now that he knows what I am.
I shove the wand up through his throat and into his brain.
Black blood billows out and I wrench my wand free. I kick away, hanging in the water, lungs crushing for air, and watch the water horse die.
I close my eyes then and hang suspended in the cold river, thinking of all the long years of life the creature had had. Since before the city had been built, probably.
It is quiet in the water. But I cannot breathe, so I swim to the surface.
[1]HEART-SHAPED BOX
by Maggie Stiefvater
This is another of those stories that I really wish I’d written. Maggie rarely resorts to full-on bleak, but the world of York St. James is bleak. The thing is, no matter how much I wish this one were mine, I couldn’t have written it. I already know that my attempt would have just turned out sarcastic or overly slick, too pragmatic and mean and sociopathic. [2]The winning component to this is that despite all the griminess and the violence and the selfishness, this story is so unbearably sad. —Brenna
One of the best and worst things about writing a million and one stories in a short period of time is that you have to invent hund
reds more people than you would normally have to in a novel. Even though the characters are only appearing in your life for a few hours and only living on a page for two thousand words, they still have to have entire lives. Friends, families, cars that need oil changes, couches with backstories, reasons for why they turned out the way they did. Moreover, you only have a few paragraphs to establish these facts. You’re a painter doodling angels on the head of a pin, and you need to leave room for the angel’s plot and world as well. Sometimes, in the doodling of these angels, I realize that I’ve hit upon people I want to find out more about. Sometimes I don’t realize it at the time. It’s only months later when they’re still haunting me that I write them into a novel. Sometimes I don’t realize it all, only in retrospect, when I look back at a character and realize that I have used them again in a novel — they were a question that I never answered for myself.
The central relationship in this story — the one between York St. James and Jude — is the direct ancestor of a relationship that I wrote about in Linger, years later (Jude didn’t keep his name, but York St. James nearly did, becoming Cole St. Clair). I’ve always been fascinated by leadership and by power and talent and how that affects the most intense of friendships, how it unbalances them or how it doesn’t. This story was my playground, my workshop, for that. —Maggie
This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of streetlights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.
Sharp as a bloody knife, and I didn’t think there was a place for me in it anymore until someone said my name.
“York St. James?” A hand on my arm made me jerk away, survival instinct kicking in before I could help myself. The guy didn’t seem offended; he just looked at my face like I was his personal Jesus. “Dude. Dude. You’re still alive. York St.-freaking-James is still alive. Is that your freaking guitar? Oh my God. You still have it.”
I cocked my head and looked at him. He wasn’t chubby, but he was soft, softer than me with my tight blue jeans and scar-covered arms and shaved head. My eyes dropped to his nails: smooth, unlined. Then to skin of his hands: pink and healthy. I stopped thinking about the switchblade in my pocket. “Yeah. I’m alive.”
“Dude. You have to play for my club. Tell me yes. Dude, you haven’t been playing, have you? Why haven’t I heard you? Where’s the rest of The Wicked?”
I didn’t know, but I said, “Dead.” It was as good a guess as any.
He made a face, sort of like a snarl, weird in his soft face. “Whatever. We’ll find you a band.”
. . .
That was how it started. He found me a band amongst the sleek survivors, a drummer, a bassist, a keyboardist. And another guitarist, Jude, whose angry chords made my guitar sound like an angel. We rocked even more than [3]The Wicked, because now our sound was the lean, savage sound of the aftermath. And we had what the people wanted, because what they wanted was to escape.
The gigs started to run together like they had before, and onstage it was easy to pretend that the city was almost the same. People knew my face and my name again, and they screamed it when I led the band onto the stage. If the crowd was thinner, well, it was easy to think there were more people waiting beyond the door.
It was only between gigs that the world was changed. Nights without gigs, Jude and I would leave the apartment that the band members shared, and we’d go in search of food and new gigs. We left the Porsches and the Hummers and the Maseratis parked on the street, because the fact that we had them reminded us of the people who used to.
When we walked under orange streetlights, there were the clues to our changed city. There were the cheap cars with flat tires from sitting too long, abandoned for something better by the side of the road. There were the people you saw: they were the strong, the cunning, the wicked, the rich. I hadn’t seen gray hairs in months. I hadn’t seen children in years.
[4]And then there were the locket sellers. They sat on the sidewalk, the streetlights reflecting off the silver boxes at their feet. Lockets, they were called, and the chill from them stretched all the way to the street where Jude and I walked by. On hot nights condensation gathered on the lockets like so many tears.
Jude always looked away, his jaw set. But I didn’t. I always counted the boxes. And when we got back to the apartment, I locked myself in the bathroom and carved a line in my skin for every locket I’d counted. The blood bubbled up behind my razor and streaked down my arm, and I felt less like the walking dead.
I wrote a song about the lockets. I called it “Carnivore.”
. . .
Jude was the first to notice the lines on my fingernails, even before I did. One night at a gig at Club Metallic, I saw him look to my hands during a riff, waiting for his cue. My guitar wailed higher, but his eyes didn’t look away. He missed his cue.
And I knew it had started. The dying.
After the show, in the dark brown room behind the stage, Martin the bass player jerked me aside, his fingers tight around my shoulder. “You didn’t tell us you weren’t Made.”
I shrugged as if his hand didn’t bruise. “You didn’t ask.”
“Hell, man,” said Kell, the drummer. “You’ve got to get a locket.”
Martin rammed a fist into my chest, pushing me up against the wall. My guitar crashed to the ground behind me, the strings ringing dully. “Even York-rich-as-God-St. James doesn’t have the money for a locket. So you gonna come after one of us? We gonna have to sleep with one eye open?”
. . .
“You don’t take your hands off me, slick,” I said, “You won’t live long enough to worry about sleeping.”
[5]Either Martin remembered my police record or he thought that Jude, coming closer with his guitar case held at a warning angle, might come to my defense. We were all of us dangerous these days. In any case, he let me go and flashed me a smile that wasn’t one. “You’re too good at what you do to die, asshole. So find a heart, just not one of ours.”
Jude looked at me as Martin left, saying more with that look than Martin had with all his words. I dropped my eyes to the pale white lines in my fingernails. Innocent-looking half-moons, like the one that hung in the New York sky above the club. But nothing was innocent in this world.
. . .
No one knew where the disease had come from. Well, scientists said birds, later, but they always say birds when they don’t know what they’re talking about. In a month, a hundred thousand people were dead before we even knew they were sick. Fingernails lined with faint moons. Fingertips fading to blue, hands going white.
I’d watched Eva throw up in between gigs, vomiting away her singing voice, and then her smile, and then her guts. I hadn’t kissed her in months, but I knew I’d been exposed, because everyone had been exposed. Everyone had been exposed, and we were all waiting to die.
I drew lines in my skin with my razor, watching my blood escape, wondering if the disease escaped with it.
No one knew who first found out about the hearts. There were cultures that believed to eat your enemy was to conquer him completely and to take on his strength. We were that culture now. They’d found the fountain of youth, and it was a human heart.
Suddenly the survival rate looked better.
I wrote a song. “Fifty Percent.”
. . .
It took weeks for me to realize that I wasn’t the only one throwing up between sets. I walked in on Jude leaning on the toilet after one of our gigs, his eyelids flickering like the fluorescent lights above us.
“Weakling,” I scoffed.
Jude didn’t raise his cheek from the seat, but he smiled at me. “You should know.”
“How long?” I asked.
He shook his head, just a little bit. “I don’t know. York, get a locket.”
I just stared at him. Jude, who couldn’t even look at them. “You said once there were children in those boxes.”
Jude closed his eyes. “I kn
ow I did. But they’re already dead. You’re not.”
“I couldn’t afford one even if I wanted to.” I slid down the wall and leaned back against the tile, watching the pulse in my wrist. “And if I could, you’d deserve it more than me.”
He opened his eyes. “Don’t stop being an asshole now, York.”
. . .
I knew this was my last gig. Club Metallic again, which seemed fitting. My guitar was heavy on my back, sharp against my shoulder blades. In the dirty brown room behind the stage, I leaned it against a wall and drank a bottle of water. Drowning the nausea was the only thing that worked.
The guys who were there already were looking at me, eyes darting to me and away. I was the razor now, cutting them.
“Where’s Jude?” I asked.
Martin knelt to get something from his bass case, and then he turned to me. His voice was strung tight, savage and bitter. “He wanted me to give this to you.”
He held up a silver case, condensation on the outside, and Jude within.
STORIES AS NOVEL PLAYGROUNDS
One of the great things about writing a whole (whole, whole) bunch of stories for Merry Fates is that it occasionally gives a short piece the chance to develop into something bigger. Over the years, the blog has been a place to try out some of my stranger, more complicated ideas, and by actually writing them out I can understand them better and then decide if they have the potential to sustain themselves for the long haul.
In the earliest stages of a novel, my ideas almost never arrive in the form of plot. For me, it’s often just the narrow slice of a world or a set of characters that keeps coming back in various ways. [1]While not directly connected, “The Bone Tender,” “Girls Raised by Wolves,” and “Power of Intent” all take place in a common world, with recurring themes that play out in different ways. This doesn’t mean that every shared character or the storyline is destined to make it into a novel, but it’s a way of figuring out what belongs in the larger story and what’s expendable. —Brenna
The Curiosities Page 16