He was so quick. Jan touched her shoulder bag, but didn’t open it. “I’ve gotten some pictures from the police. I’d like to have your opinion on them. Now, if that’s possible.”
Harrison glanced over his shoulder. Greta hovered twenty feet away. Waiting for him.
“Greta can come too,” Jan said. “But she may not want to see them.”
They walked a block to a small park and found a bench. Jan sat beside Harrison, while Greta stood by nervously, hands in pockets. “Barbara wasn’t found immediately,” Jan said. “The police think that by the time her husband got into the apartment, she’d been dead at least twenty-four hours.”
“You talked to the police?” Greta said.
Jan realized that what she meant was, You talked to the police about us?
“Before I met with them and told them anything, I got permission from Stephen, Barbara’s husband. Client confidentiality still holds for me, even after death.” Jan lifted her iPad from her handbag and turned it on. “I wouldn’t share these if I didn’t think it was vitally important.”
Greta moved behind Harrison’s shoulder. Jan watched their faces as Harrison flipped through the pictures.
“The detective told me he’d never seen anything like it,” Jan said. “She’d cut open each thigh without breaking a major artery. Then she’d had the strength to cut open her left arm along the bicep. She tried to cut the right arm too, but she couldn’t hold the razor with her arm damaged like that.”
They came to one of the worst pictures and Greta turned away. Harrison took a breath.
“The police just gave these to you?” he asked.
“The detective owed me a favor,” Jan said.
Harrison said, “I don’t see how I can help you with this. It looks like she cut along the scars she showed us. Re-creating what the Scrimshander did to her.”
“She’s not re-creating anything,” Jan said. “Keep going.”
After the crime scene pictures were the autopsy pictures. “I told them to take these pictures. They didn’t want to. They didn’t know her history, didn’t have her on file. I shouldn’t have been surprised—she was attacked so long ago, in a different state. I told them to google her maiden name. Then they understood.”
The first several pictures were too messy to make much sense of; it wasn’t clear which limb, which wound was being photographed. In each of them, though, white bone glinted from between the tissue.
“Fuck,” Harrison said. “She was trying to see them.”
“Yes.”
He stared at the screen. “That last meeting, she asked me if I’d seen the scrimshaw. I said it was beautiful.”
“Oh please,” Greta said to Harrison. “She had this planned for a long time. One comment didn’t send her over the edge.”
Jan said, “I didn’t bring you here just to see the wounds.” She took the tablet from him and flipped ahead. “I asked the police to take pictures of what the Scrimshander had carved into her. I wanted them to open all the scars, but they wouldn’t do that. The family would have a fit. So, we just have whatever Barbara got to. Here’s the first image, from her left humerus.”
The photo was at high zoom. The actual size of the etching was about an inch wide and four inches long, stretching down the bone. The picture was a bit hazy: the head and torso of a man, looking up and to his left. A crosshatch of curved lines radiated from him. The next picture was an even tighter close-up of the face.
“What the fuck?” Harrison said.
“That’s you,” Greta said, amazed.
It was Harrison. Not as a boy, but as he was now. He even seemed to be wearing a suit jacket, his uniform for the meetings.
“How is that possible?” Greta asked. “The Scrimshander drew this, what, twenty years ago?”
“Barbara was nineteen,” Jan said.
Harrison flipped to the next image, and the next, each one an alternate shot of his portrait. Then he reached the first photo of the next series, Barbara’s left femur.
Greta stepped back, her hand covering her mouth.
“I know, I know,” Jan said.
“I was a kid when he did this!” Greta said. “How could he—?”
There were two figures in the picture. One was of Greta, crouching, holding what looked like a thread in each hand. The other was of a young girl, who stood with her hand on Greta’s shoulder.
“That younger girl—is that you?” Harrison said.
“I thought it might be a before and after picture,” Jan said.
Greta shook her head. “No. That’s not me.”
“But look at her neck,” Harrison said. “She’s scarred like you.”
“I told you, that’s not me.”
Curved lines, similar to the background in Harrison’s portrait, radiated behind the two figures. The threads in Greta’s hands seemed to be the same width as the lines in the background, giving the impression that the hatchwork was not mere decoration, but something three-dimensional, like a net, or the rigging of a pirate ship.
“There’s more,” Jan said. “Martin is there, wearing the frames. And on her right arm, where Barbara stopped, there’s a part of a wheel visible. I think it’s Stan’s wheelchair.”
Harrison jumped up from the bench. “I hate this shit!”
“It’s prophecy,” Greta said.
Harrison wheeled about. “No! This is just . . . time shit. Time isn’t running parallel on the other side. The two universes bump up against each other. You get thin spots at random places. Space, time, it’s all different parts of the same bubble. Sometimes they look through and they see the future of our side. And sometimes we see the future of theirs.”
“That’s what prophecy is,” Greta said. “Seeing the future.”
“That doesn’t mean it has to happen,” Harrison said. “It’s not predestined.”
“You’re lying to yourself,” Greta said. “Listen to what you were just saying. The bubbles intersect. What they see has already happened. We just haven’t got there yet.”
“No, that’s not how it works,” he said. “There’s still free will and—”
“You can’t stop it!”
Jan stood up. “Greta, Harrison, please.”
Greta growled and threw up her hands.
“Please,” Jan said. “This may be important. We don’t know what the Scrimshander’s drawings mean, but Barbara thought he’d left her a message. She died to see it. That’s what I would like to figure out now.”
“Okay, we need all the pictures,” Harrison said. “We need to see everything the Scrimshander put on her.”
“We don’t have that,” Jan said. “The Scrimshander cut into Barbara in five locations. We have only three places Barbara was able to get to—three and a half perhaps, counting the glimpse of Stan. And we already know that x-rays and MRIs don’t work.”
“Then what do you want from me?” Harrison asked.
Greta started to say something, then shook her head.
Jan said, “I was hoping you could see something in these pictures that I didn’t. You’ve dealt with the Scrimshander. You’ve dealt with . . . lots of things that I haven’t.”
“Okay,” Harrison said after a moment. “Email them to me and I’ll take a look.”
Jan reached into her bag and fished out a small white thumb drive. “They’re all on here. High-res.”
Harrison took it from her. “And what if you don’t like the message?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s not good news.”
Greta said she knew nothing about computers, and seemed content to walk around Harrison’s apartment while he fiddled with his laptop. He paged through the pictures again and again, but kept coming back to the collection of portraits: of himself, Greta and the young girl, Martin, and Stan—or at least that wheel that suggested Stan. He had to assume that Barbara’s portrait was on her sternum, the only scar she had not opened. Would that have been the nineteen-yearold Barbara, or the forty-year-old woman they’d just bu
ried?
He arranged the pictures according to their location on Barbara’s body. Harrison on the left arm; Greta and the mystery girl below him on the left thigh, clutching those threads; Martin on the right thigh. They were all facing inward or upward, as if gazing at the last scar on Barbara’s chest. There was not enough of Stan visible on the right arm to know where he was looking, but the orientation of the legs and wheel suggested he was looking at that blank spot in the middle of the table. Harrison wanted badly to know what was hidden there.
He kept poring over the pictures, looking for clues. It was evident that the crosshatching behind each portrait was not just decoration. Greta’s portrait, in which she clutched those lines as if they were cables, proved that. The lines curved, and by fiddling in Photoshop he could imagine them meeting up at the center of her body, the same point in space where all the portraits were gazing.
“Holy shit,” Harrison said. “It’s a spider web.”
Greta put away her phone and looked over his shoulder at the screen. “And we’re all in it.”
“Us, and that girl,” he said. She could have been any age from seven to fourteen. “You don’t have any idea who she is?”
She didn’t answer. He started to turn, and she said, “Who’s in the center of the web?”
“Barbara, I guess. I don’t know.”
Greta straightened. “You need the actual bones.”
“Yeah,” he said absently.
“You could go dig them up.”
He turned in his chair. “What? No.”
“She didn’t get cremated,” Greta said. “That’s on purpose. She wanted us to dig them up.”
“We are not going to go grave-robbing.”
“It’s not robbing if Barbara wanted you to have them. She died to find out what was in there. You can’t just pussy out of this.”
He squinted at her and gave her a slight smile. “You keep saying ‘you.’ Not ‘we.’ Are you in the group or not?”
She walked to the window and pushed aside the curtain. “Jesus, Harrison.”
“So what’s the deal?” he said. “You’ve been gone for weeks. You haven’t even called me. And now you’re in my house.”
“This is not what I planned for today,” she said. “All this . . . photo stuff.”
“What was on the agenda?”
“I came to thank you. For keeping my secrets.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “You didn’t tell them, did you?”
She was talking about the fire. “It’s your story,” he said. “Your choice about what to say or not say.”
She let the curtain fall back. “But you figured out what really happened.”
“They didn’t fuck up the ritual,” he said “Not completely. It worked in the end. The Hidden One got into you. How could it not? You were designed for it.”
“The prettiest little bottle on the shelf,” she said.
“There’s another secret I’ve kept,” he said. “This one from you.”
“Oh?”
“I can read you. Those designs on your skin—they’re not just pictures. It’s a kind of language.” He could see that she didn’t believe him. “When I was a kid, I got . . . infected with something from the other side. It did something to my head.”
“So now you can read their language.”
“Kinda.”
“And what do my scars tell you?”
“Warning. Danger. Keep out.”
She nodded as if she suspected this all along.
“You’re irresistible to the Hidden Ones,” he said. “But once you have one inside you, you’re a lockbox. A prison cell. And the warnings tell everybody else to stay away.”
“You should listen to them,” she said. She flicked a hand toward the laptop. “Look at the web. I’m tearing it apart. If I stay I’ll kill you.”
“That’s not what those mean,” Harrison said.
She shook her head. “Oh, Harrison. You’re the optimist.”
“Listen to me—”
“Martin was right,” she said. “The Sisters had come back for me. I knew you’d figured that out.”
“Aunty Siddra’s group couldn’t be the only one living outside the farm,” he said. “Did you know they were following you then? Following us?”
“No!” she said. “I mean, they’d tried to reach me before. In New York. I moved and I thought I’d lost them. Then—I never intended for anyone to get hurt. Not even Martin. But they’re so protective . . .”
“I’m surprised they haven’t come after me,” he said.
She looked up sharply.
“What did you do?” Harrison said. “Why didn’t they come after me, Greta?”
“I made a deal,” she said.
He got up from the chair. “You’re not supposed to make deals with the devil.”
“But that’s what I was raised to do. It’s all I ever wanted to do—clinch that deal.” She turned back to the window and moved the curtain aside. “Growing up, I prayed every day to be worthy of a Hidden One. Regular men were abusers or liars or . . . useless. But these creatures were divine beings. Cousins to angels.”
She pressed her forehead to the window. “But then, when it finally entered me, I realized it wasn’t divine at all. It was nothing but rage and need.” Her voice resonated strangely against the glass. “It hated me. It hated Aunty Siddra. All of us. And I thought, everything I’ve suffered, the years of pain, all that was to make a home for this? To put this sick thing inside me, just so it could walk around in our world?
“My holy purpose was a sham. My great honor was to keep this thing inside me like a loaded gun. I wasn’t a bride, I was a receptacle. A fucking missile silo.
“I’d been such an obedient girl. Such an idiot. And that moment I did what I had never done before. I said no. I cast it out of me, and I said, Do what you want.”
Greta said nothing for half a minute. Harrison took a step closer. The streetlights made her face glow, and when she opened her mouth it seemed to be her reflection that spoke.
“Aunty Siddra burned first. She went up like kindling. And then the other women inside the bus, the dark-haired women who’d come with her. I walked down the steps to the yard. I was only a dozen feet away when the gas tank blew, but I was unharmed. Metal and glass flew around me, but the Hidden One kept it all from touching my skin.
“I turned to watch them burn. And you know what?” She kept her eyes pointed down, into the street. “I liked it.”
Harrison said nothing.
“But my mate wasn’t done yet. There were so many Sisters in the yard, crying or bleeding from the explosion. He started . . . jumping, from woman to woman, lighting their clothes on fire. He landed on the roof of the farmhouse and set the shingles on fire, then leaped over to the next camper. Hopping and skipping through all our crappy, makeshift homes. Dancing around me with joy in his molten heart. He didn’t hurt me. He loved me now, because I’d set him free.
“Then I heard the women. It was like waking up. You know how when you’re first coming awake, there’s nothing but silence? But then you wake up a little more and you can hear a radio playing in another room, the sound of voices? Suddenly I could hear the screams. Women were burning all around me, and burning alive inside the house. One of them was my mother.”
Harrison took another step forward, and she put out her hand.
“Then it came to me,” she said. “The Hidden One. It wanted more.” She shook her head. “If I hadn’t been raised like I was, if I hadn’t spent most of my life in pain and under the knife, I might have been overwhelmed. But I’d learned detachment, right? Control. So I spoke to it. I said to him, There’s a place I want us to go. But we can’t go like this. Come to me. Hide inside me.” She shook her head. “I don’t think they understand humans. It loved me, and I’d just done this wonderful thing for it, so it believed me. It slipped down my throat. I could feel it churning inside me. Eager.”
“I’m so sorry,” Harrison said.
&
nbsp; She seemed not to hear him. “When it was inside me, I sealed myself shut. I didn’t need the final mark on my forehead. I could hold it in through force of will. I was the cork.”
She turned from the window. “Oh, it howled. It hasn’t stopped since.”
“We can fix this,” Harrison said.
“There’s nothing to fix,” she said. “Barbara and I understand that. The Sisters aren’t going to stop. I just have to do what I was born to do.” She tilted her head almost apologetically. “I’m their queen. They want me to lead them.”
“That’s the deal?” Harrison asked. “To go back to them? Greta, you can’t do that. You don’t have to protect me. Protect the others. We can figure out a way to get them to back off.”
“I have to do this.”
“No. There’s no such thing as fucking destiny. We’ve talked about this.”
“They’ve got a new bottle, Harrison. If I won’t serve, they’ve got someone who will.”
And then he got it. “The girl. You know who she is.”
“Her name’s Alia. She’s younger than I was when I went up.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” She glanced back toward the window. “I’ve got to go now.”
The whole time she’d been telling him her story, she’d been watching for them to arrive. “Are they out there?” he asked.
She started toward the front door. “I’m just so tired, Harrison. And they’re going to stay after me until I give in.”
“You can’t respond to this,” he said. “They’re just using the girl like a hostage. Let me think. Maybe we can . . . I don’t know. Something.”
She stopped. Her smile was wistful. “You know, I kept thinking you were going to solve my problem for me. You’re the monster killer. The hero. But I guess . . . kids’ books, right?” She shrugged and continued toward the door.
He grabbed her by the elbow—and jerked his hand back. It felt as if he’d grabbed a hot steam pipe.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve thought this through. I’ve got one play.”
Pain throbbed in his hand and radiated up his arm. The skin, however, looked normal. Did he need ice, or was this some kind of psychosomatic shit?
She unlatched the door and opened it. Two women stood in the hallway. One of them tall, almost six feet, with thick dark hair like a Cherokee. The other was shorter, and wore a kind of scarf sweater that covered her head. Her lips were a shade of bright pink.
We Are All Completely Fine Page 10