Take Jess, for example, who had shot the same glances at Sophie since she’d been small enough to bounce, with Natalie, on a trailer pull-down bed without breaking it. Who had secretly—or not at all secretly—believed Sophie to be the corrupting element in her brooding, precious daughter’s life. Where did Sophie keep getting the idea that Jess would ever be happy to see her face?
Or the Little Drummer, Rebecca, whose life Sophie had saved or at least prolonged—twice, now. As a thank-you, Rebecca had given her shovel smashes to the face, tire chains yanked through thighs. How had Sophie ever come to believe that declaring someone a friend actually made them one?
What a sucker she was.
Her right leg was still capable of movement, and was already working its monster-Sophie magic: self-stitching the wound, autocauterizing. Stat. At the edge of the woods, on the lip of the long, wide-open sea of grass she would still have to cross, Sophie managed to wedge her back against the trunk of a tree and push herself upright.
She took just a moment to survey the night. The fog looked thin, transparent, more a ripple in the air than a curtain, and the stars sparkled on the Strait like a thousand million eyes. The blue rye stems trembled in the night breeze, reminding Sophie of those little garden eels she’d seen once in an aquarium somewhere, that planted themselves in sand and waited for passing minimorsels. A lawn of mouths.
There was nothing for it, Sophie knew. She was going to have to hop or crawl out there and cross along the exposed edge of the cliffs. And there was no time to lose or waste, either, not with the Night Sky raging back at Jess’s stockade, doing whatever it was the Night Sky did.
Off Sophie went.
Fast. Faster than she expected. She thought about dropping back to her haunches, scuttling like a shrew so that less of her lay open and vulnerable to the air. But during those years of half-functioning lower limbs, she’d gotten remarkably good at hopping. So she hopped instead, hurling herself forward, and the twinkling mist fled before her. In her head, she hummed. Not a Natalie song, but a Jess one, from ages and ages ago. It wasn’t even a song, really, but her personalized version of a nursery-rhyme chant. Jess had murmured this over Sophie and Natalie in that pull-down bed in her trailer when they were very young.
Little Rabbit Sophie, hopping through the forest. Scooping up the whole world and bopping it on the head.
World … I gave you threeeeeeeeeeee chances …
She got in such a rhythm, hopping and chanting, that she almost danced right past the path that switched down the cliff face to the cave. Dropping to her hands and knees, wincing as her left leg buckled in one too many places and threatened to split again along its extra seam, she dragged herself to the edge of the rocks and peered down. Briefly, she wondered what she’d do if they’d gone. If that new walking willow of a girl or the Sock Puppeteer decided they’d had enough orcas and Sophies and just set off back for the Stockade or some other refuge of their own.
Would Sophie go after them, in that case? And if so, to do what?
Fun to think about, but irrelevant, because there was Eddie, tidepooling away, sticking his hands or face in crevices, calling or reaching out to everything living. Somehow still believing everything living would listen, if it had a choice.
And there was the Walking Willow—Ju—swaying at the mouth of the cave with the Sock Puppeteer at her feet, seemingly just sitting there. Quieter than Sophie had ever seen her.
Hilariously—bizarrely—Sophie felt herself crouch lower, actually go still for a second. As if—even one-legged—she needed any sort of plan to deal with this lot, no matter what she decided deal with meant. And yet, caution felt advisable, possibly even necessary.
But caution was not how she rolled.
Grunting in pain, she pushed to her feet, let the wind catch in her skin and fill her. She felt herself unfurling into the night, as though she’d had a secret dinosaur crest hidden between her shoulders all these years. Her first instinct was to swoop down there, grab Eddie—for whom she could imagine several uses over the next few hours or maybe years—and vanish with him. But her leg wasn’t going to allow much swooping for at least another few days, yet. And anyway, she didn’t need to swoop. She just needed him to look up.
He did. And the second he did, she had him.
She grinned her Cheshire cat grin, her Secret Aunt Sophie grin. Down on the rocks, Eddie shuddered, leaned in place on his sneakered feet (which were already three times the size of her little Roo’s feet), eyes wide. His head seemed to stretch on its pale neck, as though it might float off his shoulders and up to her like a balloon.
An unpopped balloon-head. As opposed to her Roo’s, which had burst against the piling of a pier at the edge of a whole other ocean. Because that’s what her “friends” had allowed to happen. That’s what the world had decided Roos and Sophies deserved, long before either of them had even been born.
Slowly, still smiling, Sophie lifted a finger to her lips, formed her lips into a kiss against it, and made a silent shushing sound. She hopped to the cliff edge, then a couple steps down the path. Even hopping, she kept so quiet, her toes barely grazing the ground. Not fairy godmother, but Ferry Godmother once more. And so she was surprised to glance sidelong and find Ju staring right back up at her.
Not swaying. Not caught. Just watching.
With those eyes, Sophie thought. And then, Wait! Am I caught?
And then, finally, she had it. She understood. The truth had been staring her in the face all along, from right behind those glowy green eyes, which weren’t flat or expressionless and never had been.
They were screaming. All the time.
And the reason Sophie hadn’t realized … hadn’t seen … was because looking at Ju was a little too much like looking in a mirror.
A million questions bubbled up in Sophie’s brain. None of them mattered. Raising her finger once more, Sophie gestured at the Sock Puppeteer. That one at least still looked appropriately dazed and oblivious, staring out over the Strait at nothing.
Then she pressed the finger to her lips again, made her kissing-shushing silent motion.
Slowly, as though miming her, Ju lifted her own pale finger to her lips and kiss-shushed back.
26
For a long, suspended moment after the second blow fell, the whole house seemed engulfed in a cavernous silence. It was as though Emilia’s ax had cleaved not just through the skull and spinal column of the creature who’d come for them but all the way to the bottom of the world. As though she’d smashed open Pandora’s box, but what had spilled out wasn’t monsters or bad dreams—those were already loose, had hounded the living since the beginning of living—but the end of dreams entirely. Now everyone left on Earth was free, for the first time, to float forever in a terrible but peaceful hereness.
To Rebecca, it almost seemed her skin had lost its porousness, become not membrane but lid, sealing whatever constituted her inside. She could drift here above the wood floor of the Stockade, among windows and walls, occasionally bump the drifting, lidded bodies of her fellow survivors, as though they were all moored boats in a marina. But she could never again get topside, call out to her companions. Certainly not invite anyone else aboard, or leave.
Then Jess, of all people, burst out screaming. Scrambling out from the side of the creature’s sprawling corpse—like a foal squirming free of its mother, Rebecca thought, then gagged—Jess lurched away, kicking. One foot caught Rebecca in the cheek and knocked her head back, and the other plunged right into the mess of the corpse’s head, and it came out streaming a brownish ooze whose viscosity was more old mud than brain matter. Working her own jaw, feeling the sting of returning sensation in her fingers, Rebecca began pushing, clawing, trying to get out from underneath all this terrible weight and away from the racket.
Jess kept screaming. For a time, there weren’t even words in that noise, until Jess finally managed to work her mouth into a semblance of shape, encircle the sound she was making and form it.
&n
bsp; “Get it out!” she was shrieking. “Get it out, get it out, GET IT OUT!”
That seemed to trigger everyone else. Benny, badly hurt yet again, managed to roll to his left, clutching one dead-weight arm to his chest and crying out every time that arm touched floor. Bleeding scratches were etched down Joel’s throat, and when he touched them, his fingers seemed to sink, as though into marshy grass. Pushing to his feet, he staggered and wound up leaning against the couch, breathing hard. Hopefully, the whistling sound he made wasn’t coming through the rips in his neck.
Behind them, silhouetted against her own shadow, stood Emilia, ax half raised, staring at Rebecca through the thing she’d killed. Shudders racked her, in gusts that faded quickly and left her stone still. In her dark eyes was a glint Rebecca was almost sure hadn’t been there before.
“Thank you,” Rebecca mouthed, pushing herself warily, carefully, to a sitting position. The gash in her side was only a gash, apparently. Already clotting. She thought Emilia might drop the ax and keel over, or else hoist it again and slam it down on anything that got near her.
Instead, Emilia laid it gently on the floor, moved back into the corner from which she’d emerged, and wrapped herself in the blanket.
“Come on, ’Bec,” grunted Joel, peeling his fingers from the scratches in his throat and touching her head as though anointing her. “Let’s … It’s the ’Bec and Joel Show again. Let’s do what we do.” Then he shook his head, almost tilted over again.
Hi, Dad, she thought, though she’d never have said it, not now. She didn’t even mean it, really. But it had been so long. Five years. And suddenly, here Joel was. This was the Joel she’d known her whole time at Halfmoon House. She even felt a flicker of a smile through the tears she hadn’t realized were already welling.
For Kaylene, of course.
Kaylene, Kaylene, Kaylene …
“I’m pretty sure you’re not going to be doing much,” she said, listening to him wheeze.
“I can do some.”
“Not with that neck.”
“Problem’s not the neck. I think I’m concussed.” Weirdly, as though he thought he was making a Joel-joke, he smiled.
“Oh. Well, that’s okay, then,” Rebecca murmured, and made herself smile back.
Back on her feet, Rebecca surveyed the room, the mess beneath her. When Emilia’s ax had bit through skull, Rebecca had half expected beetles to fly out. Horseflies to erupt into the air. As it turned out, though, there was nothing so strange inside this creature. Just cold, dead slush.
It wasn’t even spilling out, just pooling and sinking into the wood. The corpse looked too dry, somehow, papery dust rather than skin and guts. And yet—unlike the Whistler, once Sophie and Rebecca had finished with him—this corpse had lost none of its menace. If anything, it seemed to be spreading across the floor toward their feet. More kudzu vine than spider, but still a threat.
“Get it out,” Jess said, clutching the arm she hadn’t popped back into its socket to her chest.
With Joel barely able to stand, what they eventually did involved more rolling than lifting. More contact with that icy, dead skin—which was weirdly dry, like tree-stump bark—than Rebecca would have liked. And it took too long, so long that Rebecca kept glancing up mid-roll just to make sure that skull wasn’t fitting itself back together. The worst part was that there were things moving inside it. Hair-thin strands of gray pulp that stretched free of gray pulp mass, wriggled onto the floor or under Joel’s shoes, curled up, and twitched. But they did that without volition or effect. Just a few million more living cells grasping desperately at life as it left them, the way everything that ever lived couldn’t help but do.
Why, Rebecca wondered, does life always feel like it’s leaving?
How was it possible that she was still here? There were so many ways she should have died by now. Today’s biggest threat—so far—had turned out not to be the monster that had come for all of them but Emilia’s ax plummeting toward her head. Somehow, Emilia had stopped the blade just in time (or almost in time; there was a nick or, worse, gash still pumping blood down Rebecca’s left cheek). At least now, she really could claim to know how Sophie must have felt on the day Rebecca had accidentally—no, incidentally—driven a shovel through her face.
Jess had somehow stayed standing long enough to drag open the garage door. As Joel and Rebecca shoved and nudged the creature’s corpse through it, Rebecca glanced back toward Emilia’s corner. The woman was sitting up with her hands at her cheeks and her mouth wide open. But she wasn’t crying and hadn’t retreated under her blanket. So that was all right, in the same way Rebecca supposed she herself must be all right or still might be, someday, if only life—meaning death—could leave her the fuck alone just for a few years.
With a grunt, she dropped to her haunches and grabbed the corpse under the shoulders. The movement caught Joel by surprise, and he almost let go completely as Rebecca tugged the creature all the way out of the house. The body proved surprisingly light once Rebecca had its full weight on her. This woman—thing—had seemed so massive while it was alive. But the massiveness had been in her person, in the rage and hunger of her being. The body was already as empty as one of Eddie’s shells. Dry as a bundle of newsprint.
Joel caught the corpse’s feet again and helped Rebecca tug it to the middle of the floor. Behind them, Jess flicked on the overhead light. Rebecca looked up, saw Joel bent to his work, and was suddenly overwhelmed by memories of him in his shed at Halfmoon Lake. Except there, he’d always been singing.
But even ripped open and tilting, he looked so steady, standing there. Like the Joel who kept almost becoming her dad. Working with him in this garage really wasn’t so different than raking leaves at Halfmoon House, back when he’d bobbed and weaved around her, singing “Tongue-Tied Jill” and strumming his hoe while his haunted wife watched from the window, took no part, and loved that he and Rebecca loved each other.
Abruptly, without intention, Joel sat down. The way his hand cupped his throat made him look like Rodin’s Thinker, except bloodier. And tilted. “I think I’m done,” he said.
“Just stay there,” said Rebecca, and went to fetch the lighter fluid.
When she’d finished coating it, she and Joel stared a little longer at the corpse. Its skin looked pitch-black and yet aglow like the surface of a lake. When Rebecca finally glanced up again, she found Joel smiling at her. Holding his throat and smiling.
“Think this will work?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She feels like leaves.”
“Really old ones,” Joel murmured. “Sorry I’ve been away a while, Rebecca. I’m sorry I left you.”
“What are you even talking about?” Rebecca wanted to hug him, and also to stand right here and stare at this creature’s beautiful skin until her own face surfaced inside it.
“I don’t know,” said Joel.
“See?” Suddenly, Rebecca didn’t want to look at the corpse anymore. For one moment, she was so, so close to smiling again. A smile from a long time ago. “Same old, same old.” Even she wasn’t sure what that meant.
Where had the match in his fingers come from? Rebecca didn’t know or care. Joel watched her as he struck it, as though waiting for words, some kind of ceremony. But there was nothing worth saying. She winced at the whoosh of the corpse’s skin catching. Like burning a wasps’ nest, she thought, once again expecting creatures to erupt into the air instead of smoke.
So much smoke. So fast, this woman burned. Almost as though she’d never actually been there. As if they were burning a shadow.
“I’ll stay here until she’s done,” Joel murmured. “There’s one thing I can do. You go.”
Rebecca couldn’t think of one good reason to protest. Turning away, she started back into the house and stopped when she heard the whispering.
“Papá?”
There was a pause. Then an explosion of Spanish, the words unfurling into the night like flags waving. “Soy yo. Soy yo. Estoy bien. Estoy ll
egando a casa. Estoy … Dile a mamá…”
Stepping back inside, Rebecca found Emilia on a phone, tears pouring down her face. She could hear buzzing and sobbing on the other end but couldn’t make out words, and Emilia never really stopped talking, anyway. She’d laid her glasses on the counter, was holding the phone in both hands, and the same words kept spilling from her lips. “Estoy bien. Soy yo. Soy yo. Estoy bien…”
The swelling in her own chest caught Rebecca by surprise. For one insane second, she caught herself patting her pockets, swinging toward the stairs as though she might rush up to her room (through the mess that had been Kaylene) to grab her phone from the stand by the bed (where, not fifteen minutes ago, they’d had Sophie chained), and punch the phone awake so she could … do what, exactly? Dial whom?
Her parents? Amanda? Jack and the ’Lenes?
Any ’Lene?
Kaylene …
Even as new tears boiled from her eyes, Joel’s arms encircled her from behind. He hugged her against him, the way he hadn’t since their arrival on this coast, and she almost kicked him away but didn’t. She let herself stay, eyes watering at the smell of the creature burning to ash behind them. She didn’t collapse against Joel, couldn’t make herself do that. But she let him hold her. After a few seconds, she even hugged him back. Held on to this other person passing through her life, for as long as life would let her do that, which was never long enough.
They listened to Emilia talk to her mother and father in a language neither of them knew. Across the room, even Jess seemed to be taking a breath from prying the boards off the back sliding door—with a broom handle and one useful hand—and letting herself listen. She was bent against the counter, one injured arm tucked tight against her chest and the other reaching to pet Benny, who knelt at her feet. His breathing sounded saw-edged, harsh, but he kept doing it. For that long, rare moment, they all just stayed still. Held on.
Then Joel’s knees buckled, and he almost bowled Rebecca over as he grunted in surprise and sagged against her.
Nothing to Devour Page 22