Nothing to Devour

by Glen Hirshberg

  Like a bird at a fountain, he seemed to twitch, glancing around the empty room as though checking for predators. Then his head dove down, and his mouth was on her. In her. She felt herself gushing out of herself. Thought, hazily, that she had it wrong. She was in him. Her blood disappearing into his veins. She wondered if he ever considered using a bendy straw, sometime, just to change things up. With her eyes closed, she leaned into the wall and listened to him suck.

  It didn’t take long, never did. As usual, he came up chattering.

  “You should have seen it,” he said, wiping his lips with her fish taco napkin, spreading more of her across his mouth. He smiled through the bandages, again reminding her more of a suitor than a monster. “The woods where I found her. That’s the kind of place one would find someone like her, don’t you think? Of course, at the time, I didn’t think anything like that. None of us did, because we didn’t know she was someone like her, or even that there were someones like her. Sally still doesn’t know, how could she? None of us would even have dreamed, not even the girl herself. That’s why Sally did what she did at the last party, at our camp. Do you see? The circus, and the fire? It all makes sense. She thought she understood. But as usual”—and here he looked up, and his smile came slow, shy, and prideful—“only I do. Now. And oh, when I tell her…”

  He was on his feet by this point, the flashlight on the floor, his hands steepled beneath his chin as he paced. He really did seem to glide on his own shadow, his posture perfect but his head bent. At one and the same time, he looked like a figure skater and a recently grounded teenager working through an excuse or apology. “When she understands, too … when I explain, and when she sees what I actually brought her, what I’ve done for her … and what we have, now … what our responsibility is, to the child, above all…”

  Emilia was as surprised as the Invisible Man when she burst out laughing.

  He whirled, and she flinched, cowering deeper into her corner, shivering beneath his gaze like a cotton stalk in a late-summer wind, watching pieces of herself detaching, floating away. All he said was, “I know. Right?”

  That made her laugh harder. The phrase sounded ridiculous in his bandaged, cultured, Faulknerian gentleman’s mouth. He’d have sounded more natural wailing a cumbia.

  She laughed so hard that actual wetness spilled down her cheeks. Sprite-flavored, no doubt, since she couldn’t imagine she had enough of her own fluids left to spill.

  What stopped her laughter, finally, was the tilt to the Invisible Man’s head, the sudden lifting of his eyes. She could feel his gaze penetrate her pupils, twisting and setting like a hook in the softest place in her brain. She stopped shivering, except for occasional, volition-less twitches, like a fish yanked from a river and hoisted in the air.

  “I’ve never actually tried this, you know,” he murmured. His cadence was his own, now, buttery as Gulf Coast moonlight, old as the Delta. “Nightly little tastes, instead of occasional feasting. It feels so much more … civilized. Humane, too, don’t you think? For me, of course, I’m not so insensitive as to imply … I mean, I don’t know how it feels to you. Or what it’s doing to you. Can you tell?” He cocked his head, now, studied her face.

  “Tell?” she managed. She wasn’t sure what either one of them was asking, or whether this even qualified as sentient conversation.

  “Are you different, do you think?” he asked.

  As in, less liquid? Entirely drained of hope? Closer to dead?

  That was the moment she grasped the richest, most appalling irony of all. The curse of her name, bestowed at birth by her father, had come true after all, but in reverse. Apparently, in the Restrepo version of the story, the corpse turned out to be the one walking around chattering. Emily was the motionless thing on the bed. Or, in her case, mattress pad.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said, because the new laugh building in her throat wasn’t one she dared—or could bear—to unleash.

  The Invisible Man nodded thoughtfully, touched her cheek, and smiled again. “I understand. If it helps, I don’t know, either. We’re going to find out together. Isn’t it exciting?”

  Then, abruptly, he was pulling her to her feet and dragging her out of the shelter, up the cement stairs. Emilia kept tripping, not quite getting her feet over the lip of the next step, but he yanked her along anyway. At the mouth of the trapdoor, she had to control an urge to lunge through the opening, though not to escape; even the thought seemed ridiculous. She knew he’d taken something essential from her, or drooled something into her, because she didn’t even want to escape, anymore. She just wanted to clutch carpet in her fingers, cling to the top of the ground. What her captor had really done to her, she realized, was bury her alive. Render her invisible.

  The Invisible Man dropped her on the floor in a heap. Moving to the table next to the microfiche viewer, he started gathering folders and papers. He showed no concern whatsoever about whether she might scramble to her feet or crawl to a computer terminal and alert someone, somehow. He didn’t even glance her way.

  Madre de Dios, was she jealous? Because he was paying more attention to his papers?

  Eventually, he sagged into a chair. When he finally did return his attention to her, he was no longer smiling. His bandaged hands quivered atop the pile of folders, but not with excitement. In their paleness, in the slivers of light from the computers, they reminded Emilia of the wings of a smacked moth. Tiny, desperate things. His gaze slid into hers again, but instead of hooking or smothering her, it just settled in her skull this time, seemed to curl into that soft place like a cat.

  “Five years,” he whispered, and his beautiful voice rippled in the air, swirled the dust motes. “I have so much to tell her. But I’ll never find her again. In the end, all of this…” He tapped the stack of folders, gestured at the machines and reference volumes. “This was easy. Because it had all already happened, do you see? The pieces were all there. I just had to find them, recognize them, figure out whether they fit. And now I have, and they do. And I can’t tell her, because I don’t know where she is. She doesn’t even know I’m…”

  Actual sound drained from his voice, though he went on speaking, his lips still glistening with whatever he’d sucked from her tonight. Eventually, his eyes slid away, too, toward the floor, and his bandaged head sagged into his hands. Her Invisible Man. She was on her knees, then her feet, before she realized what she meant to do.

  Weaving on weakened legs, she settled before the nearest computer and poked it awake.

  Why was she doing this? Not because she wanted to.

  Not quite.

  He wasn’t even watching, was too busy muttering into his lap, tapping his stack of file folders as though they were telegraph keys. It would have been so easy for Emilia to call up her Gmail, snap off a tweet. Check in on Facebook or Google locator. Surely, that alone would have alerted someone. Eventually.

  Yet she didn’t.

  Because she couldn’t.

  Because her hands were his. The impulses directing them were hers, but directed now by other impulses atop them. She could feel them in her head and under her skin, now that she knew they were there, warm like the Invisible Man’s mouth never was, gentler even than his voice. Like her father’s hands curling her finger around the trigger of the pistol he’d taught her to shoot when she was ten, or the handle of the ax he’d taught her to chop firewood with, more because that’s what characters in American novels did than because their cabin was cold. Decades ago, in another life. When she was another person, a dusky-skinned Mississippi girl who’d been christened Emilia after a malevolent story by Colombian parents who loved her.

  Maybe this is me, she thought dully, watching her fingers trigger keys, her browser accessing databases the Invisible Man wouldn’t even know about, so how could he be directing her to them? Despite his clearly formidable research and organizational skills, the Invisible Man would have never have thought to check where she was checking. He had never asked her to connect
the bits she was connecting, which she’d scavenged from all the stories he’d serenaded her with over these past weeks as he slowly, slowly killed her. The “parties” by the river with his Sally, the massacres at Grace Holler, the whistling young fool in the hat who’d fled for the North with his Mother, or someone named Mother. He’d never seen or even looked for the trail there would have to be, wherever these creatures went, once anyone stepped back far enough and realized what they were looking at.

  And now, just like that … there it was.

  There she is, Emilia thought. It could have been any of them, she supposed. Assuming there were more of them, although somehow, she hadn’t gotten the impression there were.

  But this was the one. Her trail. She was sure of it.

  She stared at the screen a little longer, skimming once more through the headlines she’d collected, the snippets of story no one else apparently realized was unfolding. The most recent one, from just a couple days ago, recounted the discovery of a half-decapitated, exsanguinated corpse in a pasture, way out on the Wyoming plains, being nibbled by sheep. The incident was being investigated as a hate crime.

  It wasn’t, she knew. It was worse.

  Or was that better, because at least there was no hate in it? As far as she’d gleaned, there was no feeling involved whatsoever.

  With a smile that didn’t feel like hers, and communicated absolutely nothing she actually felt, Emilia turned the screen to her captor. The motion surprised him, and he jerked up his head. He stared at her, then the computer, her again, before bolting to his feet. He loomed over her with his bandaged hands in the air in the greenish, gloomy Records and Reference light, which made him look like a giant rabbit. His mouth remained satisfyingly agape.

  Emilia felt herself smile. “This her?” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later, as he hustled her out of the library and into the open air for the first time in weeks, the Invisible Man was still atremble, practically bursting from his bandages like a butterfly from its pupa as he muttered and planned and scurried ahead. He did retain enough focus to order Emilia to turn off her monitor as they left.

  But not enough to check whether she’d turned off the computer itself. Which she hadn’t. Just in case the next user—if there was one—actually turned on this machine before the library closed down for good, actually looked at what was on the screen before x-ing out of it, and somehow recognized her little breadcrumb trail—or, single breadcrumb—for what it was.

  8

  Afterward, Rebecca would never shake the idea that Kaylene had caused it all. That she’d gotten careless, let Jess’s Stockade and the San Juan Island mists lull her into believing she was safe or invisible, and so uncovered a little too much of her light. And her light had lured the world back to them, and restarted everything.

  Of course, that was ridiculous, and Rebecca knew it even at the time. Down deep, she knew the world had always been coming, is always coming. And nothing ends until everything does.

  But until that moment, savaging her drums on that garishly green dive-club stage, she’d let them both pretend they’d forgotten. She’d stopped admitting having the dreams, even to Kaylene. She’d never mentioned the three separate instances during the past two years, all on late-night, rain-swept ferry crossings, when the water churned in the wake of their slow passage and the misty, landless night seemed to suspend them in the Strait, when she’d glanced up from the rail or the cabin bench where she’d huddled and saw …

  Thought she saw …

  What?

  A ghost. A hint of wet, blond hair under a hood. A glimpse of a pale, too-wide face, smiling, wreathed in fog, as though hiding behind a curtain. The face she’d smashed to pieces. The one inside the other face she’d smashed to pieces. The face of the woman who’d warned them about monsters, saved them from monsters, and was one.

  But she wasn’t here. She could not be here, even if she’d survived. Which she couldn’t have. Not through the hailstorm Rebecca had unleashed, the back of the shovel slamming down, down, through, smashing and splintering. Mashing and pulping.

  Even if Sophie had survived that, how could she possibly have found them? Why would she want to?

  She couldn’t be here. Rebecca knew that. And so she’d decided that imagining her presence, or worse, admitting those imaginings, naming what she’d imagined, could only give the ghost power. Saying aloud what she thought she’d seen would poison what Jess had so miraculously salvaged. What she’d rebuilt and reclaimed. What they all had. No one in Jess’s compound had ever made a rule about not mentioning monsters. But that was only because none of them imagined it necessary. Because they all understood.

  The Stockade was a Monster-Free Zone. More, actually. It was a zone where monsters had never actually been, or even existed. Joel, Jess, Eddie, Benny, they all instinctively clung to that.

  Kaylene, too. Maybe Kaylene most of all. She’d done battered-women’s shelter work, after all. Gotten training. Kaylene, more than any of them, knew the role of sanctuary space in recovery.

  That was why, at the moment it happened, Rebecca was probably thinking less about Halfmoon Lake woods, or Halfmoon House, or the friends and loved ones she’d lost there, or the creatures she’d killed there, than at any other moment, waking or sleeping, in the five years since.

  They were, mid-show and mid-song at the Caiman Club, way down at the still-ragged edge of the Drive, with the Vancouver rain they could no longer hear battering the roof overhead, and the green and gold Caiman Club lights strobing and spattering the stage. Rebecca had her sticks whirling and pummeling (not like her killing shovel, or just like that shovel, but she wasn’t thinking that), her mouth streaming words Kaylene was shrieking up front in the dry-ice whirl. She was watching the stripes on Kaylene’s dress suck light into themselves, watching Kaylene’s tights pumping like pistons as she caught Rebecca’s rhythm and stomped it down into the stage and through the crowd. There really was a crowd when Sock Puppet played, now, so many wild-eyed teens and Simon Fraser girls and Hewlett-Packard office escapees still in their office wear, almost all of them shrieking along. Some even knew the words, and every single one of them rattled and shuddered and smacked into gobs of light that broke over their faces like eggs, colored them caiman-skinned, remade them new and strong and wild. Like sock puppets Rebecca and Kaylene had knitted out of nothing, out of notes and air, and shaken to life. Like a whole new species, mostly but not entirely female, fierce and armored and numerous enough to be safe, savage and joyful enough to be free.

  Kaylene had brought her bag onstage, but Rebecca hadn’t asked what was in it. She just kept working her arms, driving the drums, herding the beat harder and faster ahead of her. She was hunched low on her stool to ride it harder, still, and when Kaylene spun momentarily out of the lights, the lights followed, chasing, but couldn’t catch her. Rebecca laughed, delivered another cannonade on her snare, shout-sang and laughed as her best friend—the last one she had, the one who’d made it, and with whom she’d made all of this—dropped to her knees.

  In slow motion, it seemed—in jerky, flipbook lurches through the strobing smoke—Kaylene slashed down at the strings on her guitar, freed a buzzcloud of a chord, and fumbled at the mouth of the bag. The bag fell away, spun off on a current of air, and Kaylene rose, her hands rising with her, unfolding as they came, reshaping. Resurrecting.

  The thing in her hands rose on its own. Seemed to. Like a winged thing. It flew up over Kaylene’s head, darting and bobbing through the shafts of light, and settled in her hair. Grabbed hold there.

  The Whistler’s hat.

  Before Kaylene had even straightened her guitar on her shoulders, Rebecca was off her stool, off the ground, sailing through and over her drums, light streaming from her skin and screams from her throat as her hands rose to meet it.

  9

  Another day gone, or at least, Aunt Sally assumed it had gone. This had been an unusual one, because apparently she’d slept. Not just dozed off, but co
nked out. Why? she wondered, twisting deeper into the scratchy motel sheets, trying and failing, as always, to find a warm spot. A spot warm enough.

  Because Ju knew, now? Because Ju had seen? But what did Ju know, and what had she seen? And why that silvery laugh, wild as wind? You think I don’t know? That’s what she’d said.

  Cryptic little witch-girl. Orphan thing, as alone in the world as poor Sally herself.

  My witch-girl, Sally thought, and shivered. Actually shivered. In pleasure. In alarm. Or because she was cold.

  “Shhh,” she heard, as though on wind from far away. “Don’t!” Then came that laugh, so bright Aunt Sally could literally feel it on her skin like a sunrise. Like she imagined a sunrise feeling. Maybe even remembered one feeling. What she remembered next surprised her: the bloom of fire from the circus tent, on her very last Delta summer night, when she’d said good-bye to her monsters and lit out, at last, into the world, with Ju. A girl she hadn’t Made but wanted to be with every waking second, more than she had ever wanted anything in her long, blood-river blur of a life. Just so she could bathe in the shimmer of her laughter.

  What a night that had been! Those first hours gazing at Ju, feeling Ju gaze back, in ways she shouldn’t have dared or been able to. The sunspot eruptions of the fires Sally had set. The screaming, disintegrating souls of her monsters like a penumbra around and over the camp, over the river, distorting the night. Transforming it. Transforming her.

  That had been a sort of dawn, hadn’t it? As near to a sunrise as Aunt Sally was ever likely to experience, and maybe more like a genuine awakening than any other creature on this planet had actually experienced.

  Yes.

  “A hundred Jus between teeth,” she heard now, that singing whisper floating through this grungy, terrible room, this hole in the Wyoming wind, just the latest terrible room of the last five years, complete with burred sheets and heavy blanket-coverings that weren’t ever heavy enough. They lay atop her in the dark like the broken-down sides of cardboard boxes, made her feel cheap and lonely, neither aunt nor queen nor even companion, just a wandering thing. A hobo.