Other Words for Smoke

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  “Maybe I will.”

  She leapt off the stool and walked across the tiles, smoke rolling down by her ankles, like she was wading through a shallow, dangerous pool. The bird in the cage had not chirped since the shadow show had ended. The door unfolded in the paneling and swung open before Mae even touched it. She walked back into her own world—thick, foul-smelling haze in the air, yellow flame licking the corner of her vision. Mae was not just a score in a game, she was whole and alive and human—greater than any monster. She was going to run through the fire.

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  The hallway was mineshaft dark and mostly on fire, but Mae could tell she was at the top of the stairs. At least fire made sense. Fire would let you go if you moved fast enough. Behind her, the door to the bar ceased to be. Just wallpaper, now curling at the edges. The heat and smoke in her nose and eyes and throat were quicksilver hot as she bounded down the stairs. She stumbled down the last few steps, careless. She had to get out of this house.

  She landed in the hallway, her breath short, the air filth in her mouth. Mae clamored towards the front door, her arms outstretched. She grieved the kitchen as toxic belches of smoke poured through a crack in the door, half of it already eaten by the flames, like they were taking some strange pleasure from the consumption of this haunted place.

  Mae would never see that kitchen again. The holy stove, the crystals scattered on the table, Rita’s carved-glass ashtrays littered here and there, Bevan taking up too much air, lighting incense, boiling the kettle. Towering, like a suburban colossus. Bobby lying on the floor, belly to the sunlight. Grief twisted in her gut. Bobby, he’d betrayed them all. He’d only been playing a game, and she’d let him feed, again and again.

  She bumped face-first into the hall door, which hung, thankfully, ever so slightly ajar. Rita and Rossa had left it open for her. She put her hand on the doorknob and the heat scorched her, but the momentum was enough to nudge the door wide and escape into the summer evening. She left the door ajar (for Bevan, just in case) praying nothing bad would escape.

  Though, she supposed, as she rounded the house to the gate that led to the back garden, the bad things had their own doors. What use had they for any other?

  From the outside, the house was painfully ordinary; the only tell of the carnage within was a plume of black, spiraling smoke from the chimney. When would the fire department come? Nobody outside that house could see how bad the danger was on the inside. She climbed awkwardly over the back gate, a graceless leg up on a bin and over the top, the clumsy landing sending a shock wave of pain through her knees. It wasn’t until she landed on the other side that she saw how badly burned the palm of her left hand was from her exit of the house. The scorching brass handle had ripped the skin right off her palm. How had she not noticed she was bleeding? In the small alley beside the house, Mae tore a strip from her shirt and wrapped her hand. She couldn’t feel anything, but red pooled into the denim blue and turned it a wet, violent purple.

  She turned the corner and came upon the back garden—but now it was large enough to be a meadow. Standing in the center were Rita and Rossa. She sprinted, her legs bright agony and the long grass tearing at her then, at last, pounced on them, sobbing their names. They stood there clutching one another, watching the windows of the house turn black.

  “What’ll you do, Rita?” Mae cried. “Your house, your house!”

  Rossa said nothing, only held his sister as shock overtook her.

  Rita ran a long hand over Mae’s hair and said, “That was never my house. First it belonged to my parents. Then it belonged to James and Bobby. I just lived there.”

  Her serenity in the face of this horror did nothing to quell the blaring alarm running through Mae. “But they were using you, Rita! They were feeding off us, like a game between them!”

  “I know. And I made sure they never went hungry.” Rita should not have been smiling, but she was, thin and long.

  “What do you mean?” Mae asked, a terrible logic unfolding.

  “I mean, if those who came to my house were full enough of love, or full enough of fear, or young enough that they were experiencing both for the first time—it helped Sweet James, it helped Bobby Dearest. It made them strong and warm, and in turn, they kept me strong and warm. Think of all the things I can do because of that power. They gave me so much.”

  Mae had no idea who this woman was, for a second. Her jaw was hard and her eyes were cold and Mae almost had to take a step back from her, recoiling from the embrace she had only moments ago leapt into. Rita had been poaching monsters and using Mae and her brother as bait. The witch had known. Worse than known. She’d run the show. Honey in the trap.

  “Is that why you took us in?”

  Rita nodded, slightly weary. “And Imelda, but she was a tough one. Had no idea how to love anyone and wasn’t afraid of a damn thing. Thankfully, Bevan made up for that in spades. It was never going to work out neatly, but I came as far as I could manage.”

  “Why? Why did you—”

  “For her.” Rita pointed into the wood. “For Audrey. I needed time. I took time, I took strength. When we are together again I will protect her, I will see all of the possibilities of the things out there that could hurt her. I was not brave or strong or wise enough when I was young. And now I am. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”

  Mae’s heart faltered. All this horror, all this brutality, just so Rita could find a way to Audrey again.

  Rossa said, “All along. You’ve known all along.”

  Rita tossed her hair over her shoulder, grazed her fingertips across the bark of the trees she passed, said, “You’d have known that from the beginning if you’d been listening harder.”

  “We need to call the fire brigade, the whole house will come down!”

  Rita sighed deep, and Mae’s eyes threatened tears but she rubbed them away with her hand of denim and blood. She opened her mouth to explain now, to tell her brother everything, ready to denounce Bobby for what he had done to them all, when Rita cut in, sharp, casual. “I have seen all of this, time and again in my dreams, but the clocks are always covered. Someone will eventually call the fire service, but until then, flame will continue to clean the house. Until that ground is razed, until the weak point Sweet James left has no wall left to hang on to. This is a boiling flood, and this place will be pure in its wake. You can come to the cut with me, or you can say goodbye to me now.”

  Rita was magnificent and undeniable in her power. Ageless. Mae still, despite it all, would have followed her anywhere. Rossa wasn’t so sure, Mae could tell by his face. The boy always had had trouble with magic.

  “I’ll come with you,” Mae said. “I want to see—” She stopped. “Do you think Bevan will be there?”

  Rita’s thin smile again. “You might get to see her one last time.”

  Mae didn’t bother trying to conceal the need she had to see Bevan again. To, perhaps, convince Bevan to come out of the other side. To stay here, with her.

  Rita thumbed Mae’s face with an off-tenderness, and the love in her voice was at odds with the ordeal she had orchestrated. “You’re covered in soot. That’ll look proper, I suppose, when the police pick you up.”

  Mae and Rossa followed after Rita down the meadow sloping toward the garden wall, which, when Rita raised her arm, crumbled away like chalk.

  Down through the grass and over the deconstructed stone that was once the garden wall, past ridges of bush pocked with white roses that Mae had never seen before. Over her shoulder, the gushing wisteria fluttered a goodbye in the breeze over the disused shed. Farther over her shoulder, flames had begun to lick out of the windows of the house, scorch marks bleeding down onto the outside brick. Smudged mascara at the end of a long, long night.

  Rita stepped over the skinny river and into the trees. Rossa, too, seemed to know where he was going in the labyrinthine corridors of nature. Mae followed him closely, listening to air in the woods. On the breeze she cou
ld hear a high, glowering sound.

  “I want you to know that despite everything, I love you both more than words can say,” Rita began, not looking at either of them, still making her way surefootedly through the forest. “You have given me far more than you know. I come from a time when big houses held old secrets, and that’s just the way our people were. I became an old house full of big secrets, and I wish there had been a way for me to share them all with you. But secrets are kept, sometimes, for good reason. And you have to believe me when I say that, and you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about what happened this summer.”

  She didn’t look over her shoulder as she spoke. Her tone didn’t have a soft inflection of question: Rita wasn’t asking them to keep it secret. She was telling them to keep it secret. Commanding them. And they were going to do it.

  “What you can do here is preserve legacy. You can protect my good name. Bevan’s good name. She has a mother out there in the world who, God love her, knew nothing of how corrupted her daughter became, knew nothing of what I was when I invited her into my house. If there is one thing I have learned through all my years with my hands in other people’s futures and pasts, it’s that nobody ever really believes in magic. We are but one room in a grand cosmic hotel, and if you try to tell them, they will call you crazy, call you liars.”

  Mae mourned as they walked. How could she ever tell anybody this story, how could she build enough rooms inside of her for it to live in?

  “Silence isn’t that high a cost, really,” Rita says. “For survival. For who you will become as a result of all of this, after I have gone.”

  A terrible hex. Mae’s tongue cut out. A last bodily theft.

  “Does that mean you’re just going to leave us? Let us go back to our parents alone?” Rossa’s grip on Mae’s hand was a vise. “You can’t just leave us. We wanted to stay.”

  “This was only ever temporary. There is no respite that lasts forever. This is not how either of you will leave your home. Though it will give you the courage to try.” Her regal tone faltered a second. “I will give you this truth. Just once, just this last time, in exchange for your promise of silence. I have allowed the cat and the owl to take from you, and I have given you nothing in return, so I will give you something priceless. Proof that you will survive this. A prophecy, each.” Rita turned. Her eyes bright, mad jewels in her hard, gorgeous face.

  “But first I want you to promise me.”

  Silence landed in the forest for a beat too long, but Rossa broke it in his most serious of voices.

  “I promise,” he said—but Mae could tell his uncertainty, and so could Rita. Mae held her silence.

  Their great-aunt shook her head. “A verbal promise is not enough. Mae, take that bandage off your hand.”

  From the forest floor, Rita picked a sharp rock, and without pause or reflection, dragged it down the center of her palm. A red shock of fresh blood there; she did not even flinch. She handed it to Rossa. “If you like, I can do it for you.”

  The boy offered his palm and the crone marked it open. Mae unspooled her denim bandage, wincing at the pain. Each twin held forth a wounded hand, side by side, a mismatched pair. Rita, whispering low, placed her long, bleeding palm down, and neither twin felt anything at all but the sting: an ordinary pain contrasted starkly with the sheer paganism of Rita’s murmuring. She was spellcasting there in the narrow corridor of trees, as in the distance, sirens began to wail.

  She looked up at Mae and Rossa and for a second. Mae could have sworn she saw a glittering flash of triangles in her pupils: unmistakable wrong in her face. But it was too late by then. The reek of copper rolled over them, and the twins withdrew their hands. Rossa wiped his on his shirt. Mae wrapped hers in her soiled bandage.

  Rita said, “You may speak to each other about this summer, and the last—but nobody else. And in return for your silence and for what I allowed Bobby and James to take from you, I will tell each of you one thing that will give you hope.”

  How could one thing make up for all that Rita had stolen? Mae thought. But nothing more would be offered. She knew that. So when the old woman leaned in to whisper in her ear, she listened hard. She needed hope like air.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  The remaining walk to the cut was spent in a holy silence. Rossa clutched his hand, stinging in the sleeve of his hoodie, the scarlet of his blood turning copper in the air. Rita’s prediction sank into him. The brief glimpse into the future was reassuring, certainly, but what would tomorrow look like? What has this time done to him, and his sister? Would they ever be the same again?

  These women had a capacity for pain that he wasn’t sure he could even imagine. Whatever it was that Bevan had tried to do to him in that bedroom with the owl—Christ, even the thought of it threatened to lock his joints with terror. The undergrowth of the forest crunched beneath his sneakers, but there was grass in sight. The glade was just ahead of them. Rita seemed to hover above the ground, such was the force and determination that led her. She was hard to look at, full of some new fury.

  Rossa could smell smoke in the air. That was the reek of a home destroyed. All of his things—his gut flipped suddenly. His notebooks. His drawings. The preparation he’d done for college, all gone. Eaten up by fire. He would be seeing his parents tonight. How would they react to this? Mae’s face was streaked with black, around her nose charred from breathing in destruction. Her wounded hand was a sick thing to look at.

  His twin. The other half of him. This could have been the end of them, and he felt his eyes prickle with tears. He blinked them away.

  The forest split open into the strange, evening-light majesty of the glade. Thin, dark-bodied trees with splintering arms and thick crowns of green were a somber crowd of bystanders, rustling low in what felt like anticipation. The cut hung there in the air, glassy and static, not beautiful enough to be crystalline but shining all the same. Below it, the grotto holding the stone Virgin. The plaque at her feet shone in the strange light. Rossa, without thinking, reached his uninjured hand out to take Mae’s, a silent plea to not be in this alone. Mae flinched, but then squeezed back.

  Rita walked toward the cut, arms raised, antigravity buoying her hair like a cloud as she approached. Rossa expected her to sweep it open like a curtain in reality, revealing another place just hanging there in the forest, like how there had been a pink-lit room on the other side of Bevan’s bedroom wall, like no big deal, like this is here and always has been. But she didn’t. She just stood, looking up at it, in silence, as voltage rippled through the air. It hit Rossa almost in a rhythm; the old woman—or was she young, he couldn’t tell—was spellcasting, and the weight of it through the air was vertigo. He had seen some bad things in the house, and lately, from Bevan—but what was happening before him now was different. Bigger.

  Something moved behind him and he clenched Mae’s hand so tightly she yelped and pulled away. An owl as big as a five-year-old child. A cat the size of a golden retriever. Both all wrong. Both more oil than hair, more bone than feather. Four yellow orbs that could have been eyes if Rossa had known less, or if their pupils were circles rather than three-pointed triangles. Two vile beasts. Two hungry things.

  “Bobby, how could you?” Mae was on her knees in the grass before Rossa could stop her, her bloodied hand a fist against the earth. “How could you have done this to me? To us?”

  The butter-yellow eyes on the cat thing flickered, and it padded towards Mae. Rossa braced himself. If the creature attacked her, he would throw himself between them. He would defend her at all costs. An ache in the bridge of his nose resurfaced—the unmistakable sour of blood in his nostrils.

  Mae extended her arms to Bobby, fresh tears leaving tracks of almost clean down her filthy face. The thing walked right up to her and let her hold it, for a moment flickering to something more domestic, something like soft white fur, and then back to the shadow-slick impression of its truer form.

  You are an uncommon creature,
Mae, he said to her. There is so much love in you, I could have drunk it for the rest of time.

  “I love you, Bobby,” she whispered. “Even though you’re bad. Even though you did all this.”

  We are leaving the same way we came in. We have a course to follow. I cannot apologize, but I will not forget you, he said, and Mae leaned her face into the otherworld soft of his body.

  The owl thing made a noise, a clicking and breaking that rounded out into a deep, human laugh. Rossa’s stomach lurched.

  you’re welcome, he said. you’re welcome, mae, you’re welcome, rossa, you’re welcome, rita. we took, yes, but we gave and gave, too. what would your lives have been otherwise, without us?

  “You should have burned!” hissed Mae. “You and that house are one and the same.”

  no bricks can contain me. that site is corrupted now, unstable. a cut all its own. two so near each other spells trouble for whoever comes here next. clever rita finally knows when to run.

  The crone turned toward the twins and the beasts. She was a house on fire, ablaze with what she had cultivated, year after year under the same roof as these calamities. All she had sacrificed at the altar of Sweet James and Bobby Dear rushed back here, in a burning flood.

  “Would you like me to open this door for you, then?” Rita asked the calamities before her, almost mocking them.

  The owl clicked and let out an ugly laugh, and Bobby shook his head, chuckling.

  do you really think you can do that all by yourself?

  Come on, Rita. Don’t be silly.

  Rita moved toward the blue-gray grotto, the smallness of it striking in this cosmic spin. She knelt there, spine curled over, praying, summoning all the love and agony she had felt, that she had harvested. She was still a moment too long,27 and Rossa felt like maybe nothing would happen after all. He was afraid, for her, for him, for his sister. For a moment Rita was just an old woman, praying at the feet of a false idol.