New members were welcome to apply. Any survivor able to make the proper expiatory sacrifices by way of the hefty membership fees, was also welcomed.
Welcome to make a sacrifice, @made2break dissented, or to be one?
Reading this gave me a cramp in my neck. It made my pulse race. Partly at the Gatherum’s snarky dismissal of the unique terror of our reality. Partly at my own desire to believe it. My own desire to magic away everything that I survived into the realm of a good shiver designed to deliver its existential payload and nothing more. Give fear a name and you curse its power. Once upon a time. No one knows that . . .
Once was enough. Except when it wasn’t.
As I tapped away at the computer, my mismatched eyes—Kai’s blue and my brown—stared back at me from the monitor and I saw a bridge of code unreeling between them, fear and love, that two-faced bitched called fate.
The Father came to visit Kai in the infirmary. Took off his Akubra and spun it around on his finger, tears running down his ruddy cheeks. “You’re the daughter I never had,” he said, just like a real dad. “See you in Paradise.”
What I wanted to find out was where the readings were held, so that I could time my arrival and departure. The old me would have been satisfied at having been invited to play a part, and waited for the details as Pagan saw fit to provide them. But I was not that me anymore. Pagan began to strike me as wrong—maybe it was what Marvin had said about her, or maybe it was how, whenever I thought of her now, I saw a statue come to life, a stone angel flown off a Wellsburg rooftop.
Except that I knew that Pagan was no angel.
The readings, I found out eventually, were held in a turret in Younger Wing, named after Sasha’s founding family. During my searches, I came across news of the attack that Lara had told me about. The fourth, it reminded me. I’d lost count. The Made had been lashed across the back as had the others, chunks of flesh hacked from shoulder and buttocks, and was lying in the hospital wrapped in bandages and babbling about a giant killer-bat with prominent red nipples.
And just like that, whatever power memory had given me, it took away. Because it could.
CHAPTER 13
GATHERUM
Fearsome Gatherum was held on Sundays beginning promptly at eleven p.m. The witching hour. That was another problem, which Pagan breezily dispensed with in a text, saying that she’d arrange a special pass, authorized by Sasha Younger herself, for me to cross the bridge after curfew. My first trial was scheduled for tomorrow night. As promised, Pagan had ordered me a new outfit which arrived the morning before. I brought the box in from the hall and determined to return it unopened. But in a moment of doubt, I lifted the lid and there, folded in tissue was a silky black dress in my size. I closed the box and tried to forget about it, spending Saturday night alone with a cup of Narn’s tea and my biology textbook. I selected my outfit from the clothes we had ordered together before I left the Starvelings. A clean skirt just short enough to pass for cute and a blouse with a collar I hated because it made my neck look too skinny. I hardly slept that night at all.
The next day I dressed and stood at the bathroom mirror. My hair out of control, dark puffy half-moons under my mismatched eyes. I heard a low hoarse giggle coming from the hallway or from under the bed, or maybe from somewhere inside my own head. I couldn’t tell anymore. Whatever it was, I tore off my clothes, and lifted Pagan’s gift out of the box.
The dress hugged my flat chest and followed the shy curve of my hips, ending in a split at the back that rose to just below my buttocks. There was more tissue in the gift box and I tore at it. Out came a mass of blue velvet. It was a voluminous coat, more like a cloak. It brushed my ankles. Spit gathered at the corners of my mouth. I had never come close to having anything as delicious. “Kai!” I couldn’t help but say, “Look at me!” And I glanced over my shoulder in the mirror, and there she was.
There were shoes, too, platform brocade pumps in the oily midnight of a raven’s ruff. Everything fit so perfectly that at the last minute I exchanged the brocade shoes for my sister’s old brown blood-spattered boots. Their imperfection suited me better.
I liked the way they pinched.
It was dark when I crossed the bridge, my heart in my mouth. I ignored the guard’s double take of me in my new outfit, concentrating on clocking the clawed smears on the bottom of the rails, as indelible as a shadow.
My thighs rubbed together beneath the tight black sheath, the clump of Kai’s shoes like hooves ringing in my ear. I got to the Quad early and slipped behind the maple tree to avoid being seen, especially by Pagan. I watched one or two Regulars, dressed to party, slip into Old Dorm Hall. My heart was racing, incredulous at what I—crappy Meera—had agreed to. The maple’s leaves were crimson and its roots were as ridged and lumpen as the scar tissue on Narn’s back. A gleam of something caught my eye. It glinted in the reflected light of the lamps around the Quad. Unsteady in my tight dress, I bent down to have a closer look and even reached out my finger to touch it, recoiling in a revulsion all the more horrific for being familiar. It was not one but several pale snake skins tangled around each other in a ball. My skin grew cold, not at the seething knot of skins (impossible to tell where one ended and the other began) but at how they were the same milky white as the snaking braids of the Made being transfused in the infirmary all those years ago. The Made who was not a Made. And I knew that these ghostly sheddings were not from the garter snakes of Upper Slant, but something that slithered in a different place.
I stood up, the base of my neck tingling. I backed away from the snake ball, and I smoothed the grimace from my face, suspecting that I was being watched. Somehow I made it to the door of the building. Beneath a glowing cage light webbed in graceful ivy was a buzzer. I pressed it and a second later, the door clicked open. There was no elevator. I began climbing the steps, my footfall muffled on rose carpet that darkened to a sheep-heart maroon at the edges. Recessed sconces made my shadow flail. I held Marvin’s notebook against my sweating ribs, the ending to Narn’s story conjured from a scrap of dream.
I pressed another buzzer on a modern security console beside the door of a corner suite at one end of the fourth floor. It opened silently, and I was in.
The room was the most beautiful space I had ever seen, like all the Golden Book palaces come to life. Finally, my castle. The guests were all Regulars as far as I could see—all women, dressed in cocktail sheaths or clinging tights and exotic shoes. They lounged on velvet couches, stood in clumps around the oaken mantlepiece cradling golden liquor in cut crystal, or leaned gracefully against stone columns. Waiters moved silently bearing drinks. They had the same ready grins and peachy complexions as the officers from the weapons facility who came to sample the older Mades, the same ice in their stares. I took a glass of champagne from a tray, and it all but slipped through my fingers. Laughter and excited chatter filled the entire suite which looked to be many rooms, although there could not have been more than three or four. Mirrors and candles multiplied everything, including my own reflection—I didn’t know myself in my dress-up clothes and messy lipstick. Through an open door, I glimpsed a four-poster bed piled with coats. I hung onto mine.
Logs popped in a wide stone fireplace. There was a marble bar in a corner and I made for it, exchanged the bubbles for a double vodka and immediately felt more like myself. An antique table was spread with hunks of rare meat at one end, fruit and soft cheeses at the other. Another table was loaded with cakes and crèmes and confectionary. Music played, something sweeping and unobtrusive that I didn’t recognize. Candles everywhere made the walls recede and cheekbones pop. From beveled windows, the moon followed my progress through arches from one room into another until I found myself against a wine-colored wall in the largest room. Against the opposite wall and between two leadlight windows, stood an empty electric chair.
“It’s a relic,” said a voice behind me. I turned to see Pagan dressed in
a black rubber unitard. “Sasha’s old man bought it from a collector.”
I nodded at the chair. “It’s a lot,” I said. The steel cap gleamed and the wooden arms were worn to a soft patina.
“Wait till you sit on it,” Pagan said, her lipstick like some glossy dessert.
We clinked glasses and I noticed that she wore a large ugly ring. It was gold with a lustrous red stone in it, an opal or something similar, green and black markings across its face like an aerial view of a lake or an inland sea. I stared, taken aback at the resemblance to Narn’s eye. Before I could ask about it, Pagan took a short breath and looked over my shoulder. I turned to watch a woman pass through the arches and stop to greet a group of guests. Her scarlet hair radiated light. The wide white planes of her cheekbones spread like wings, and her eyelids were so heavy as to look almost like a disfigurement, and all the more beautiful for that.
Sasha Younger, in the flesh.
She wore an oversized tweed suit, eight-inch heels and nothing else. The jacket fastened at the middle by a single button and gaped to reveal the curve of heavy breasts and a navel ring made of what looked like a tusk, or a tooth.
Sasha Younger. A recent Wellsburg alumna (recent enough), heiress, daughter of the wealthy benefactor Orrin Younger, himself son of a Wellsburg founding father. The notebook jumped from my hands onto the thick rug, and I felt time come to a stop. She had the same ugly ring on her finger as Pagan. Conversation and laughter became muted so that there was only the beating of a hundred hearts in my ear. The presence of this beautiful being made nonsense of my own in a way nothing had since my sister had died.
My thoughts turned to mush. My retrained brain failed me. I felt like I was falling backward. Pagan made hasty introductions while I was scrabbling on the floor for the notebook. And by the time I stood up they had both moved on.
Sometime later, Pagan moved toward the electric chair and tapped on her glass with the blade of a knife. Beneath the reverberating crystal ting, I heard her announce that the readings would begin. She welcomed and thanked everyone for coming and for their cooperation in the collection of their phones—one of the waiters moved among the guests, carefully collecting devices in a shallow tray. Pagan thanked the founder, Ms. Sasha Younger, and waited for the inevitable applause. She introduced the readers—I heard my name as if from a great distance—and the first one took her seat at the chair. Lights went out. Apart from the candles, and the moonlit rectangles of stained glass, the room was in darkness.
Shyly, the first reader offered a story about being turned inside out and pulled through her own navel. Used as a sail on a pirate ship, her ribs were the mast, her veins the rigging. I thought it was a good effort but I did not applaud because Sasha, now lounging on a leather chaise that had been moved in specially, also did not. The next story wasn’t bad either but I forgot everything about it as soon as Pagan, smiling serenely, announced that it was my turn. I was surprised to hear her describe my story as speaking for and to all of the survivors present.
“And aren’t we all survivors of something?” She pressed her hands together in namaste and mock-bowed in my direction. That is when I knew that I was not the only token Made in the room, and that part of me I’d never looked at directly, but had only seen reflected in the dead eyes of a lost witch, once again rose to the smell of a blood bath. To the challenge of a trial by ordeal. The electric chair beckoned. The branches of the maple tapped against the delicate glass, counting me in. Three-two-one.
I opened my mouth and began to read, noticing a Regular check her watch. Another pick a cuticle. Without warning, I heard the voice of my real sister say, “Read the room, idiot!” And in that instant I saw that the hostile bored, entitled faces around me were not my kind. They’d doubled the stakes and the odds were not in favor of a story of beaver babies born from the monstrous imagination of a South Rim virgin. I looked down at the words on the page, the words I’d scrawled after listening to Narn’s story—they’d scrambled into a code I could no longer decipher. But my changing brain could and did, and from between its zeros and ones came something slowly, inexorably remade, a story conjured from my imagination uncoupled from the Father and conjoined, through Narn’s babbled sorcery, to the memories of my dead twin.
“No one knows that once,” I began . . .
There was a house haunted by a mean-spirit, a prank. The house and the prank were one. A joke house, floating above a lake lined with silvery trees. Vacationers rented it and vomited up their own half-digested souls. The joke was on them. A small reunion of college friends cooked and ate their feelings—the last member had none left—she ate herself. A ukulele group thought it would be radical to string their instruments with each other’s guts until they were all strung out. The spirit of a dead serial killer crawled into the walls of the house. An author fell in love with him, wrote him out of the wallpaper and into her life. In return he killed her and shut her up in the wall and wrote himself off at the end. To be continued. Some drunken coworkers played truth or dare using a rubber chicken as the spinner. The chicken lost its head and became an axe—in the end the coworkers were all plucked.
My tongue felt strange. My voice had deepened and began from somewhere near the ceiling, instead of from me—the hearing and speaking of the tale just slightly out of sync. It told itself, doubled back and came out somewhere I didn’t expect. The maple branches stopped their tapping. Regulars sat with varnished fingernails interlaced and their eyes in frozen Os. A token Made clamped her hands over her mouth and puke gushed from between her fingers as she wept silently. Pagan bit her lower lip with lipstick-smeared teeth making her look both goofy and grotesque. But I registered all of this only peripherally. My focus was on Sasha Younger. When her heavy eyelids narrowed to slits over her black contacts and she beckoned me to her with a dip of her head, I felt a kind of love. I left the electric chair, pardoned from my sins, exonerated from my crimes.
“Welcome,” she said. And patted the seat beside her.
And fate laughed with both sides of her face.
* * *
It is two months before Kai digs herself up from beneath the bloodwood tree and wanders into the yard. I hear her before I see her. The ravens, silent since my arrival, begin their slit-throat cries and I look up from the porch and there she is. Limping out from a cloud of black feathers beneath a transparent sky that matches the blue ribbon I have tied in a choker around my neck.
“That’s mine, sister.”
If it weren’t for a puckered eye socket and a begrimed shimmer around the shoulders, she’d look as alive as I do. The thylacine leaps to his feet and his striped hackles rise but he holds his ground—that rigidly pointed tail extended like a spear. I let the ribbon fall to the ground, unable to comprehend, to believe my eyes. Narn is on the porch in an instant, rolling up the sleeves of her tunic. Spittle and invocations fly from her lips. I side-eye Mag creeping around the hut with their shotgun. Kai calmly retrieves the ribbon from the dirt, demands a poultice for her eye. “One of your lungwort specials’ll do the trick, witch.” She twists her neck grotesquely. “Jeez, what a dump!”
Beneath the hysterical screech of the ravens, I am aware of Mag stealthy and watchful around the corner of the hut in their filthy oversized hoody and mud-caked sneakers. And perhaps that is what propels me into my sister’s arms, like a baby, wrapping my legs around her waist. A maggot drops from her lips, and a watery ichor pools behind her toenails. But her hair smells like bloodwood blossoms. It has grown back coarse as a horse’s mane. It is so long that I wind it around both of our necks so she can never leave me again.
* * *
I attended classes the week after the Gatherum, not seeking Marvin out but not deliberately avoiding him either. A misdirected sense of indignation stoked by my niggling sense of shame made me ask, why shouldn’t I do whatever I wanted to? I was in a free country now. Wasn’t I?
But I missed him. I misse
d our talks. I wanted to tell him about my success, to share it with him. But I was worried. Why could I remember the reaction my story caused, but nothing of the words themselves, or the plot, or characters . . . or anything? That was a blank, as though it had happened to someone else. I wondered if Marvin’s coded indentations were responsible for that amnesia, and if so, I wanted to tell him that maybe he’d overstepped. My temples drummed with that old rage. I wanted to remember. I could see myself sitting in the electric chair, but I couldn’t hear the words I’d offered for Sasha’s protection. When I leafed through the notebook, the story seemed tame, even lame—the virgin eventually gave up the search for the image that had raped her, knowing that as soon as she destroyed it, she’d also destroy the bird-beaver-baby whom she’d grown to love—and I couldn’t work out why it had caused the reaction it had. There was a part of me that couldn’t yet acknowledge that although this was what I’d written in the notebook, it was neither the tale that Narn had told me, nor the story that I had “read” at the Gatherum.
I lay awake in my blue-stained Tower room searching my brain, reliving the evening, moment by moment, sucking nectar from the fragments of memory. I smiled in the dark. The triumph. The love. I felt like I was . . . remade. Behind my closed eyelids I conjured the gleaming throats and designer dresses, candlelight lapping at the louche cocktails, and above all Sasha Younger’s approving nod—ever so slight—but a nod nonetheless. Alone in my room in the dark, I made her do it again and again. If the actual details of the tale itself were behind a psychic curtain—a fog of either Narn’s sorcery, or Marvin’s code or both, I didn’t care. I’d found my place.
During my lunch break on Tuesday, there was a text from Pagan: You’re in.
I texted back my thanks. Same time this weekend?
The Bridge Page 17