Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “And how many of them we’ve found in the last few days?”

  “It’s a rare talent we have. Wait, hang on.”

  Zoey had found a computer. Not a particularly nice one, but then, Ed Harlow was not known for his technological savvy.

  Above it, nailed to the carpeted wall, hung an enormous map of the world.

  And beside the keyboard sat her father’s black book.

  She stared at it, a tight, squeamish feeling blocking up her throat.

  “Zoey?” Marion asked tensely. “Say something. Are you okay? What is it?” Zoey heard rustling. “I’m coming over there.”

  “No, wait.” Zoey sat down in a swiveling desk chair. She switched on the desk lamp, turned on the computer. It whirred softly to life. Zoey touched her fingers to the black book’s soft leather cover. She would deal with that in a second.

  First: the map. She snapped a photo of it.

  “There’s a map of the world in here,” Zoey told Marion. “And it’s covered by a grid.”

  “A grid? What do you mean?”

  Zoey wasn’t sure. Red lines divided the map into sectors, each of them numbered in her father’s meticulous hand. Red dots scattered across the map like drops of blood.

  “He’s divided the whole thing into numbered sections,” Zoey whispered. “And there are these red dots all over. Hundreds of them. They’re marking . . . cities, I guess? But not all of them are on cities.” She squinted, stretched up on her toes. There were too many details to absorb. She was standing in a secret room beneath her house. Her eyes glossed over the map like she had fallen into a dream. “Some of the dots are in the middle of nowhere. Some are in the ocean? There’s even one in Antarctica.”

  Marion’s quiet question came like an explosion: “Is there one on Sawkill?”

  Zoey’s eyes flew to the northeastern coast of the United States, to the patch of water that hugged Sawkill Rock.

  A red dot stared back at her—bright and round in the island’s heart.

  “Zoey?”

  “Yeah.” Zoey shook her head, hand over her mouth. “Yes. There is one. There’s one on Sawkill.”

  Marion exhaled. “But what does that mean?”

  Zoey glanced at her phone and saw a notification:

  A text from her father.

  At Windham and Irongate, it read. Be ready to leave. We’re going to the police station.

  “Shit,” Zoey spat. “Shit.”

  “What is it? Zoey—”

  “My dad will be home in two minutes. I’ve gotta go.”

  Zoey hung up, turned off the computer and the lamp, ran for the stairs. She remembered that the desk chair had been pushed in, turned back, and shoved it into place.

  The black book.

  She hesitated, then grabbed it and tucked it into her pants, beneath her shirt. She fled up the stairs, ducked out the door, slammed it shut, and locked it.

  The dresser.

  If she took too long to move it, if her father came inside looking for her, how would she possibly explain this?

  “Goddamn it,” she gasped, pushing the stupid ancient thing as hard as she could. The books fell over once more. She stepped back, sucked in a breath, and surged forward, prepared to ram her whole body into the dresser.

  But it moved on its own, before she could reach it.

  It slid across the carpet a good six inches, with Zoey still a foot away.

  Zoey, expecting to hit the dresser, hit nothing instead, and stumbled forward until she caught herself on the dresser’s edge. A bookend crashed to the floor, and more books slid off right after it.

  Her fingers tingled, hot and ready. Twin cords of energy thrummed up the back of her legs, joining at the dip of her spine and stretching like a single rushing current all the way up to the crown of her skull. She was on fire, but in a good way. She’d been ignited. She was sizzling.

  Breathless, laughing a little, tearing up a little, she grinned down at her hands.

  Then, from outside, a car door slammed.

  Her ribs clamped around her lungs in sudden panic. She grabbed the toppled books, shoved them back into place, straightened them, turned, and ran.

  Wait.

  She froze at the bedroom door.

  The books hadn’t been orderly. They’d been in a messy pile, which was the thing that had caught her attention in the first place. One had been on the floor. But which one?

  She riffled furiously through her memory until the image of the fallen book returned to her, settling back into place like a key into a lock.

  Down the hall and around the corner, the front door opened. “Zo? Did you get my text?”

  “Yeah, one sec!” Zoey cried. “Putting away the towels!”

  She untidied the books, hoped they looked right, then arranged the one that had fallen on the floor: A Wrinkle in Time. One of Zoey’s all-time favorites. She had endlessly bugged her father about reading it until, finally, about a month ago, he’d thrown up his hands and said with an aggrieved sigh, “Okay, fine, I’ll read it. But, Zo, please don’t be mad if I don’t like it.”

  She had thrust the book into his hands. “I can’t promise that, my dude.”

  Zoey wiped her forehead, took three deep breaths to try to calm down, then sauntered out of her father’s bedroom and around the corner, dusting off her hands with a flourish.

  “Towels clean and folded and returned to their nests,” she proclaimed. “Who’s the best daughter in the world?”

  Then she froze. Her father was standing at the front door, looking stricken. A hot prickly rush flooded her body. “Dad?”

  “Another girl’s gone missing.” Every uttered word seemed to tug harder on the tired lines of his face. “Jane Fitzgerald.”

  A flash—Jane under the Droop with Harry Windemeier, spiders dropping like dark snowflakes onto her skin.

  Zoey stood in shocked silence, adrift, then distantly heard the crisp drum of her heartbeat and followed it back into herself.

  “Oh, Dad.” She didn’t want to do it, not really, not now, but she would have, before discovering her father’s lair. It’s what he would expect, what he would hope for. Part of her wanted to confront him anyway, throw the book in his face and yell at him until he explained why he had a secret room, what the map meant, and why he was keeping it all from her.

  Instead, she hurried forward, flung her arms around him. At least she didn’t have to fake the tremor in her voice. “Holy shit. What’s going on?”

  “I wish I knew, Zo,” he whispered, and when his arms came around her, Zoey had to fight the urge to flinch away from his touch.

  Val

  The Reckless

  After Jane, he recovered in two and a half hours.

  His form shifted, in half-second flashes—Dr. Wayland to boy-child to shadow-splatter to their old groundskeeper with the midnight-black skin and cloud of white hair to Val’s own grandmother, and back into the gloom of the woods. Then the cycle began again, and again—a horrifying movie on a rapid-fire loop.

  And Val realized, with a sinking-stone feeling, that he was playing.

  He could change forms easily now, like snapping one’s fingers and suddenly donning a new outfit in the blink of an eye, and clearly this delighted him. As the towheaded boy, he crawled happily out of the trees, laughing so hard his face turned red. He collapsed in the center of the stones, clutching his stomach and wriggling in delight.

  Gritting her teeth, grasping for calm that wouldn’t come, Val began cleaning up the evidence of his feeding. It was a process that would take days to complete, but she liked to get started right away.

  Besides, she wanted to see how long he would require, this time, to regain control over his body. Once, he would have needed hours, days, weeks.

  He caught her sneaking glances at him.

  “Do you see something you like, Val?” he asked her, as Dr. Wayland now, lying in the mud with glazed eyes, blood-caked lips, a round belly. He picked his teeth with one long white finger. Then he st
ood up, stretched, flexed his muscles, popped the joints in his neck and shoulders. The air around him seemed to quiver. A ripple of movement passed underneath his pale skin, like his bones were rearranging themselves.

  “I was just making sure you’ve had all you need,” Val answered smoothly, gathering the shreds of Jane’s torn clothing from the undergrowth, trying not to think about Jane, trying not to think about Zoey throwing her behind the police station, trying not to think about anything but her own two feet on the solid ground, and her own two blood-spattered hands.

  “You’re worried this will all end soon,” he replied. “That I won’t need you.”

  Val did not trust her voice enough to answer him. Her stomach jerked, as though he’d hooked his claws in her innards and given them a tug, just to remind her that he could.

  When his hands cupped her shoulders—warm, paternal, slick—she flinched. A chittering, wet-throated noise crept through the clearing like the flap of shining dark wings.

  “You’re right to be worried,” he said at last, his voice clear and crisp. He’d lost the glutted slur; he had recovered himself, and so quickly that it made Val want to crawl into the trees and never come out. “Soon everything will change.”

  It took Val ten seconds to find her voice. “How long?” she croaked. “How much longer do we have?”

  He did not answer.

  She turned to find him and saw only a wicked black crown of branches, nodding mournfully in the wind.

  Val didn’t usually care about the blood on her hands, but this time it was different. This time she couldn’t get it off, no matter how fiercely she scrubbed under the scalding faucet.

  “I don’t understand it,” she whispered, staring at her reddened palms.

  “Don’t understand what?”

  Val’s head snapped up. She was sitting on the floor, her back pressed against her white ruffled bedspread, and there was her mother, standing at the threshold to her bedroom, crisp white blouse and crisp navy-blue pencil skirt and crisp coils of blond hair pinned at her nape.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it this time,” Val explained, and realized too late that it was stupid to confess such weakness, but she couldn’t seem to shut her mouth. “I can’t stop seeing her face.” She raised her hands and stared at her mother through shaking red fingers. Was it burned skin, or was it Jane’s blood? “I can’t get it off. I can’t get Jane off of me.”

  For a long moment, Lucy Mortimer stood at the door and considered her daughter. Then she moved swiftly across the room, heels silent on the thick rug, and slapped Val so hard her head nearly flew off her neck. It wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, to lose her head. She’d considered it before—provoking her mother to such anger that she would do to Val what Val couldn’t find the guts to do to herself.

  Val stared up at her. The slap had knocked tears from her eyes. She couldn’t find the will to hide them.

  “He told me we don’t have long,” she whispered. “He said we should be worried.”

  Her mother’s face was a porcelain mask with one too many cracks in it, too haggard for cosmetics to hide. She always looked this way as he digested, while he was at his most vulnerable and drew upon her own life force to steady himself. She held one hand flat against her abdomen, as if to soothe cramps. Val’s own stomach twinged in sympathy; she didn’t feel the drain on her strength as keenly as her mother did, but she felt enough to dread the future.

  “He’ll need one more, I think,” her mother said, her voice tight and clipped. “Maybe two. Three, if we’re lucky.”

  Val laughed, which hurt her tender cheek. “When have we ever been lucky?”

  But Val’s mother was not moved. “Pull yourself together, Valerie,” she said, her jaw working, and then she straightened her shirt and left the room without a backward glance.

  So Val did. She pulled herself together.

  She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin and undressed. She took a shower in silence, the scalding water battering her body, which hadn’t truly belonged to Val since she’d been born, not even for a second.

  He owns your body, her grandmother had told her, and your mind, but he doesn’t own your soul, Val. Not all of it.

  Her grandmother had been a goddamn liar.

  Val conditioned her long golden hair, moisturized the sweet turn of her jaw and the high planes of her cheekbones, and then stretched on the rug in her bedroom. She dressed in exercise pants and a sports bra and a loose gray tank top. When she got outside she pulled on her muck boots and went to the stables to work. She hardly noticed how her body ached, tender from the punishing shower. She hardly noticed the whuffing of the horses in their stalls as she shoveled out the old straw and the dung, and shoveled in new, fresh straw that smelled of summertime and horses and fresh growth. The exact opposite of the rot and ruin stewing inside her.

  She hardly noticed anything at all.

  Which was why she didn’t realize anyone had entered the stables until she felt a gentle hand on her arm.

  Val whirled, sweaty hair clinging to her flushed cheeks, ready to swing her shovel and take the head off anyone who looked at her funny.

  But it was only Marion.

  At the sight of her, Val’s heart split in two. One half went floating and quietly giddy, like she’d dropped down a roller-coaster hill she hadn’t been expecting to ride.

  The other half plunged to her toes, drawing sick fault lines down her body.

  She resisted the urge to hide her hands behind her back. She wore work gloves, but still, she hadn’t scrubbed her fingers well enough, not by far. If Marion took one look at them, she’d see those stubborn clinging bits of gore and know them for what they were:

  Jane residue. Lingering Thora.

  The echoes of Charlotte.

  “Marion,” Val said softly, taking a step back. “Hey.”

  “I wanted to see if you were okay,” said Marion, steady gray eyes fixed on Val’s face.

  “If I was . . . okay? You mean . . .”

  “Jane.” Marion’s pale face was so pinched and tense that it made Val’s stomach knot up. “I heard about Jane.”

  Val leaned heavily against her shovel. Her mouth and nose were full of familiar horse smells that suddenly made her want to gag. Did his own beastly scent linger upon her? Could Marion sense his ravenous appetite?

  “Hey.” Marion moved closer, took the shovel from Val and set it aside. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . Why don’t you sit down for a second?”

  “I don’t want to sit down.” Val felt unsteady on her legs, out of place and ill-fitting. She had always pulled it together just fine, just as her mother wanted her to, just as she had been taught, and now nothing was working as it should.

  Girl-ghosts swarmed Val’s brain. She could hear nothing but their wails, calling for her damnation.

  Marion hovered close, hands twisting at her waist. “I’m so sorry about Jane. I don’t know what to say. Everyone’s freaking out, I . . . God, Val, what are we all going to do?”

  “I’m trying not to think about it,” said Val shortly.

  Think about what, exactly, Val?

  About what had happened.

  About what she had done.

  Oh, how terribly Jane had screamed. Twenty-three times she’d called Val’s name, begging her for help, for mercy.

  Well. Twenty-three and a half. And then . . .

  “Val.” Marion stepped closer, searching Val’s face. “You’re crying.”

  Val turned away, ripping off her gloves. Would Marion see the blood, the flesh scraps and girl-bits? Val didn’t care. She couldn’t wear those gloves for one more second, couldn’t stand the sensation of the stiff fabric imprisoning her fingers. She glanced at her nails—clean and gleaming, long enough to gouge. Maybe if she scratched out her eyes, she would stop seeing Jane’s face.

  It had hardly looked like a face, at the end.

  “I’m not,” Val said, her body so rigid it felt ready to snap.

>   Marion caught Val’s fingers in her own. “What can I do?”

  “You?” Val’s laugh was bitter. “You’ve lost your sister. I should be the one helping you.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Val. I don’t buy it.”

  Val froze. She turned, saw Marion’s breath catch a little. Val had practiced crying in her mirror enough times to know that she was one of the fortunate few who looked even lovelier when weeping.

  “Jane was your friend. Pain is pain. It’s not a contest.” Marion shook her head, her gaze bright. “I never feel like I can freak out around my mom because of everything that’s happened. She needs me to be strong. I look at her, and I think to myself, Pull it together, Marion.”

  Val watched Marion, hardly daring to breathe. Pull yourself together, Valerie.

  “I don’t want you to feel that way around me, Val,” said Marion, with a shy smile. “You don’t have to be strong. You can be what you need to be.”

  And suddenly Val knew exactly what she needed.

  “Say my name again,” Val breathed. Warmth uncoiled in her gut; a tingling ache spread from her belly to her spine to her fingers. This was reckless, this was not what she had been instructed to do. She was meant for Collin Hawthorne. He was a solid, respectable match and would serve her well. Someday he would plant a daughter in her, and the line would continue.

  Or at least, that had been the plan.

  But now? Now, soon enough, he would break free of Val and her mother, and they would no longer be needed.

  Maybe then he would kill Val, just because he could.

  Maybe then he would ignore her, let her do as she pleased.

  Let her kiss who she pleased?

  When Marion stepped closer, and said once again, “Val,” so close that her lips brushed Val’s cheek, Val let her eyes fall shut, and hooked her arms around Marion’s shoulders, and couldn’t bring herself to care about anything but the soft press of Marion’s lips, Marion’s warm thigh wedged between her own, the solid stretch of the wall against her back.

  With Marion’s hands cupping her cheeks, Val forgot that her blood ran black and vile.