Nothing to Devour

by Glen Hirshberg

  I have so loved being here, she thought, as the shadow-woman seized her, still mouthing those words, shouting without sound, whereisshewhereisshewhereisshe?

  I have so loved being here, Kaylene thought again. Then she wasn’t anymore.

  22

  Deep in the cave, Trudi crouched on a ledge and watched the darkness coming. Actually, that was wrong. The darkness wasn’t doing anything. The daylight was drawing up, pulling back like curtains rising, revealing the black sky and blacker ocean.

  Showtime.

  How long have we been here? she wondered vaguely. She was also hungry, vaguely. That made some sense, considering that they’d been here all fucking day.

  Don’t go, day, she thought, then expelled the thought like a smoke ring and watched it hover in the air in front of her, framing the two figures at the mouth of the cave. Eddie and the green-eyed girl. Ju.

  Don’t go …

  At first, when they’d headed up there, Eddie had done lots of pointing and jabbering, hopping around like a yappy little dog happy to have someone new to show things to. Ju had settled again into that weird stand-and-sway thing she did, making no move to corral Eddie. Eventually, the boy bounded away from her side and onto the rocks, scuttling after some stone or crab or shell.

  At that moment, Trudi almost leapt to her feet and screamed, Go, kid! Run! But the second she started to move, she forgot why she wanted to. Then her eyes fixed on Ju at the edge of the light, limned like a paper cutout. Shadow puppet. Except so much more beautiful, flexible, and strange than any puppet Trudi had ever seen or made. So much closer to actually alive.

  Trudi recognized the strangeness of that idea even as it filled her with pity and, even more strangely, desire. She managed to pretend for a few seconds that the desire was ill-defined, general, confusing. But it was actually fairly explicit: what she apparently wanted to do was slip inside that girl’s shadow and limn her properly.

  What the fuck did that even mean?

  Trudi didn’t know. But the desire kept her pinned to the rocks as effectively as if she’d been chained there.

  Eddie was back, now. He had a crab or rock or shell in his hand, and was holding it up to the last of the light. Ju knelt, sliding her shadow over him. Their heads leaned together, and they whispered to one another. Trudi watched, mesmerized, beset by a confusing feeling. This one wasn’t totally unfamiliar, at least. She’d experienced something like it at Eliana’s swim meets, watching from the stands as her friend stood and chattered with her teammate-friends next to their starting blocks at the edge of the pool. Somehow, even though those kids were all people Trudi knew, their conversations seemed unimaginable at that distance. Like the conversations of teachers in break rooms, glimpsed through frosted-glass windows but never heard, on the other side of a door in their lives, where Trudi could never go.

  She would have liked to have gone, just once, to the world where pretty much everyone else seemed to live. So she could know what everyone was actually talking about.

  Would have liked to? Why was she thinking that?

  As if in answer, Ju’s head swiveled in Trudi’s direction. It didn’t actually turn all the way around, just a little farther than seemed possible or comfortable. Ju looked nothing like an owl awakening, though there was definitely something quicker, more birdlike in her movements as darkness fell.

  The green-eyed girl smiled.

  Run, Trudi thought, to Eddie, to herself. Instead, she clambered to her feet and shuffled in Ju’s direction. She felt dazed, but almost pleasantly so. She felt alive but trapped in herself, a barnacle torn loose from a perch. The tide she now rode was going to deliver her straight into Ju’s smile.

  Reaching the mouth of the cave, she settled on her haunches on the other side of Ju from Eddie.

  So Eddie can’t see, she thought. So he won’t have to see.

  See what?

  After a whole day in the cave, she felt exposed on the rocky cliff-side. Mist rode the sea air, unexpectedly icy. After a few seconds, Trudi realized Ju was shivering. The girl had been shivering all day, but not this hard. With a careful finger, Trudi touched the skin of Ju’s arm, which looked almost as green as her eyes under the cascade of hair. It felt waxy, gossamer. Made of moonlight.

  Which is really sunlight, Trudi told herself dreamily, in Raj’s voice, because he was the one she’d had this conversation with. By text, like most of their conversations. She’d never actually heard him say it, yet it was his voice in her head. It’s just sunlight ricocheting off dead rock. Moonlight is as made up as moon men, bitches. As moon cheese!

  The thought proved oddly comforting. Or maybe it was just Raj’s imagined voice comforting her.

  Ju leaned her head onto Trudi’s shoulder. Instantly, all other thoughts, imagined voices, and sensations fell from Trudi as though dragged off by the same tide that had swept her here. She held still while Ju shivered against her, felt and watched the girl’s hair spilling over her own arms like lava. Except cold.

  “Why are you so damn cold?” Trudi murmured.

  “I just am.” Ju’s voice came out childlike, full of wonder. “You’re not.”

  “I am, actually. A little.”

  “You get warmer than this?”

  A chilly arm encircled Trudi’s waist like a squid tentacle, and Ju’s face nuzzled deeper into the hollow of her throat. Trudi could feel lips there, and then, finally, after a long time, a whisper of air. Even that was cold. As though in a dream—or current—Trudi felt her own arm lift, start to draw Ju even more closely against her. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her own breath until she hiccoughed violently and her vision exploded with stars.

  Ju laughed and wriggled closer. On her other side, Eddie yawned and laid the shells and shards he’d gathered on the rocks. His head sank toward Ju’s lap.

  This is it, then, Trudi thought. Right now. “Nnh,” she managed, the words fuzzy and thick on her lips, as though she were spitting out a gag. “Want to … Let’s go back to Hornby Camp.”

  It shouldn’t have been possible for Ju to get any closer without climbing inside Trudi. But somehow, she managed, and some part of her, possibly her lips, pressed right at the curve of Trudi’s neck. The pulsing point. What Trudi first took for another shudder turned out to be giggling.

  “Hey,” Trudi said, fighting hard now, shoving words from her mouth as though dropping rocks down a fortress wall to repel invaders. “Or. Let’s go to my house. The Stockade, that’s what we call it. I’ll introduce you to Rebecca. And Jess. And Jess’s … guy. Benny. The world’s hairiest man … Also best cook. Hey, Eddie…”

  She was running out of words. And Eddie’s head had finished sagging into Ju’s lap. He lay there limp as a sock with no one puppeting.

  “Eddie, please. Wake up.”

  “Up,” he murmured.

  “Don’t go to sleep.”

  He was already sleeping, though. Ju’s frozen hand had crawled up Trudi’s back and was sliding now into the kinks of her hair. It will disappear there, Trudi thought, wondering if the tears now welling in her eyes were for herself or for Ju’s hand. They’ll never find it.

  Then Ju really kissed her throat. Giggling.

  Soft lips, damp-not-wet. Hard teeth, just touching, not biting. Cave wall. Cave kiss.

  Trudi curled her fists and closed her eyes.

  23

  What had made Sophie stop squirming? Which sound, exactly?

  Even in the midst of being chained and dragged up here, she’d tracked the other noises in the house. Her screaming had mostly been for show; her eye burned, all right, but she could see out of it. The oil had mostly tinted her vision cheap-sunglasses-red, and that was kind of nifty. Meanwhile, she’d identified and catalogued everything she heard: rattling knives, boards being nailed, oil heating, footsteps, incongruous bursts of chatter and song. Alertness to everything was a permanent state for Sophie now, a sense she could no more switch off than she could smell.

  The Little Drummer Girl,
Rebecca, was still prattling away on her chair next to the bed. She hadn’t heard her stripy-dress friend creeping onto the hallway landing and crouching at the door. She also hadn’t noticed when Stripy-dress abruptly stopped. Rebecca was simply too busy accusing, berating, recriminating, probing. Probably, she was working herself back up to killing, or maybe, to be fair, she was still trying to understand. Even more than Natalie, this poor girl was the try-to-understand type.

  Seeing Sophie squirm appeared to calm Rebecca, to give her that sense they all craved that they had any say in or control over what was coming. So Sophie squirmed against the chains. No one in this house actually knew how to use the chains, so they were already loosening.

  At this new sound, however, Sophie stopped. Even the Little Drummer noticed that.

  “What?” Rebecca said. “Look. You may not get this. I sure as hell don’t. But I’m trying to…”

  The new sound came again. This time, Sophie recognized it.

  “What?” Rebecca snapped. Apparently, she did have some sort of intuition after all. Not enough to get her to shut up and listen, but some, anyway.

  Sophie didn’t really mean to smile. If she was right, there wasn’t anything funny about that sound, for any of them. Smiling was simply her instinctive response to almost everything. It was just what Sophies did. No sense fighting it. “You don’t hear that?”

  At that, Rebecca did turn around, which bought Sophie the precious seconds she needed to listen harder, make sure.

  How did she recognize that noise? By its quiet, mostly. By its very-hardly thereness. People get so used to other people coming toward them, flowing around and about them, their fellow drone bees in a hive they never even realize they’re in.

  But me, Sophie thought. I have lain all day in rocky fields and stirred with the snakes. I have prowled nighttime alleys with the cats, erupted into evenings with the fireflies, surfaced in a gaggle of seagulls whose mouths were too stuffed with fish to shriek. I have been stalked by Whistlers and stalked them. And I know the sound of hunting feet.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. Still smiling.

  Was she warning? Had she meant to? Certainly, just that word—was uh-oh one word or two?—proved warning enough. The Little Drummer glanced again at the door, then down at her hands in her lap, then at the chains on the bed, which Sophie had started to work loose.

  “Don’t,” Sophie said. “Don’t you dare.”

  Snaking out those deceptive little hands, the Drummer grabbed the chains right at thigh level, at the precise point where the Whistler had once separated Sophie’s legs from the rest of her, and yanked down.

  Even as her scars split and she started screaming again—for real, this time—Sophie listened. She also marveled. How did this little bitch always seem to know? Or remember?

  Rebecca yanked again. At least she had the grace to wince as the chains bit through Sophie’s skin.

  “Stay put,” she hissed.

  Swallowing her scream, Sophie wriggled savagely toward upright. But that just set a thousand little skin threads popping along the lips of her wounds. Her legs yawned open, sucking the chain deeper. She made herself keep going anyway, twisting and bucking as five years’ worth of screams filled her mouth.

  The bedroom door swung open.

  Instantly, instinctively, Sophie dropped prone, went dead-possum still. She had met the Whistler, and his Mother. She had killed the Mother-fucking Whistler.

  The thing in the doorway was not like the Whistler. It was wondrous, beautiful, towering and untouchable as the night sky. The night sky walking, winking with stars, all of which were people—whole worlds—she’d devoured.

  “Where is she?” said the Night Sky Walking. She took no step into the room, yet permeated it completely. “Where is she?”

  The Little Drummer really was remarkable, too, in a more earthly sense: resilient, determined, like a scrambling beetle with nowhere to go. Sophie watched her jerk, writhe, try so hard not to turn all the way around. But the chains around her were infinitely stronger than the ones that held Sophie, and wielded by a creature who knew what to do with them. Somehow, as her body betrayed her and turned her all the way into that basilisk gaze, Rebecca got her mouth open and some breath gathered. For one moment, Sophie actually thought she might be able to shout, to alert her housemates, for whatever good that was going to do.

  But the Night Sky stopped her just by cocking her head.

  “I’ll ask once more,” the Night Sky said. “Where is she?”

  And Rebecca—clever little killer, or maybe she really was confused—knitted her brow and nodded toward Sophie. “She’s right here.”

  If Rebecca had winked, Sophie would have saved the Night Sky the trouble. Burst from her chains and silenced the Little Drummer once and for all. But the girl looked genuinely baffled. And why not, come to think of it? Sophie had no idea what the thing in the doorway wanted, either.

  Should I ask, Sophie thought? Excuse me, Night Sky Walking. About this she …

  Ah, well. Too late, now. The Night Sky had already stepped back, not retreating, just drifting in its orbit, pulling everything loose on the surface of the Earth with it like the moon dragging tides. Rebecca stumbled off her chair to her feet, her fists falling open as she staggered toward the doorway. She was still fighting, or at least her mouth was still working. Poor little drummer skeleton, with drumsticks for bones.

  Out the door they went onto the landing, the Drummer still fighting, the Night Sky murmuring, “Where is she? Where is she?”

  The chains around Sophie’s chest had simply slid down her when she sat up. But the ones around her legs dug deeper every time she twitched, slicing through scar tissue, muscle, probably some tendon. Sophie lost valuable seconds fumbling to unhook and untangle her inside-self from the metal before she could lift the chains away. Worse, she had to watch what she was doing. The sight probably would have made her gag, once, and it did make her think about the Whistler’s last moments. The shrieking sort of singing he’d done as she punctured and chewed through his cranium, sucked out his brains like the meat of an oyster.

  Such fun.

  Once she was free, she leapt to her feet, which turned out to be a mistake. Her legs, especially the left, didn’t so much buckle as slide from underneath. She had to grab her thighs and clutch them, as though clinging to a cliff edge.

  Vicious little Drummer Girl.

  Dead Drummer Girl, by now? Not yet, apparently, because the Night Sky was still murmuring out there on the landing. “Where is she?”

  Carefully this time, pinching her wounds closed, Sophie shuffled forward. The shuffling made too much noise in the carpet. That is, it made almost none at all, but more than she usually made. Enough for Sophie to notice, which meant it was more than enough to alert the thing on the landing.

  Assuming it was listening.

  Reaching the door, Sophie leaned against the frame, tucking herself as deeply in shadow as she could manage. She pinched harder along the seams in her thighs. Of their own volition, her index fingertips had found their way into the gashes and started toying with the dead, cold tendons and veins in there, like cat claws kneading yarn. So stringy-squishy.

  “Where is she,” the Night Sky said, but not like she expected an answer, anymore. When Sophie edged forward just enough to see what was happening, she was unsurprised to find the Night Sky almost on top of Rebecca, settling over her. Claiming. Reclaiming. There was nothing gentle about the movement. It was just slow.

  To maximize the dread, Sophie immediately understood. Amplify the sheer, soul-shredding terror of it.

  So that’s what it looks like, Sophie thought. Is that what they see when I end them?

  She didn’t want it to be. She’d imagined their ends differently.

  The Night Sky was holding Rebecca’s shoulders, now, and moving her beautiful, starry-eyed face toward Rebecca’s throat. Or maybe her mouth.

  Was that an actual feeling I just had? Sophie wondered. She thought it mus
t have been, though it seemed to come from far away and in blinking signal bursts. Semaphore from some other Sophie.

  Maybe the Whistling Fuckbomb had been right after all, and whether she wanted to or not, she was still gradually detaching from the Sophie she’d been.

  Or maybe she still had no idea what she was supposed to feel in this specific instant. Sympathy for the girl who’d smashed her face in with a shovel and left her for dead? Kinship with the murderous, miraculous Night Sky? Relief at being alive for at least a little longer? Sorrow for never quite having lived, at least not how she and Natalie had planned? Or for never getting to live like that with Natalie?

  She had no answers. She had never had answers, before the Whistler or after. So she made the same decision she always had, in both her lives:

  In the absence of answers … how about more fun?

  The snarl she unleashed was purely theatrical and completely unnecessary. She needed no psyching up, and she didn’t need to announce herself; the Night Sky had to have known Sophie was there the whole time, must have heard her stumble out of bed. Possibly she assumed Sophie was … well, who even knew what the Night Sky thought?

  But the lunge. Sophie judged that perfectly.

  She caught them both dead center, waist high, at the exact instant the Night Sky’s hands tightened on Rebecca’s shoulders. The force of the blow did surprise the Night Sky, because when Rebecca tumbled backward straight off the landing and then elbows-over-face down the stairs, the Night Sky tumbled right along with her.

  Like derailed train cars off a trestle, Sophie thought, barely stopping her own momentum by grabbing the banister, gasping as her torso continued forward, slammed into the wall, and miraculously stayed attached to her legs.

  Rebecca and the Night Sky hit the ground heads first, so hard that Sophie half expected them to stick where they’d landed like axes thunked into chopping stumps. For a second, not only the two of them but everyone else down there hung motionless. Like bowling pins in midair, Sophie thought, caught in the moment right after impact.