by Anna Roberts
Knock. Knock. It did it again.
“Nox, quit it,” said Ruby, and Gabe watched in astonishment as the hand went limp once more, fingers settling into the red.
He pulled her into the kitchen and closed the door, conscious that someone might see the light from it and peer in, the way you sometimes did when you passed a lit window at night. Some kind of instinctive curiosity.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Came to see if you needed any help cleaning up,” she said.
“Big of you. This is all your fucking fault.”
“I know it.”
She looked around the mess without flinching, but she was a swamp wolf, after all. And she had Charlie had been...something. If not official then at least knocking boots in a way neither of them had denied. Gabe wasn’t sure he wanted to think too hard about what swamp wolves did with the bodies of those they loved, but the words came out all the same.
“So what?” he said. “You swung by for a doggie bag? And what the hell was that? With the fingers? Was that you?”
“Nox,” she said, slipping off her shoes on a corner of the doormat, one of the last few unbloodied spots on the floor. “He’s a spirit.”
Holy Christ. Blue had always worried about just how stupid Ruby could get, and Gabe had sometimes thought she was borrowing trouble. But now it seemed like Blue hadn’t worried enough.
“A spirit?” he said. “Like Yael?”
“I guess,” she said, and reached out to take the ax from him.
“And what? You call it Nox because it...it knocks?”
“Why not?” she said, and tugged at the ax handle.
He pulled it away from her. “Why not? Oh, I don’t know, Ruby. Maybe because the last one you thought you could make friends with is the reason why your boyfriend’s head is in that garbage bag over there? Did you learn fucking anything?”
“This is different,” she said. “I sent him in here to check if you were alone in your skin, and it seems like you are, so –”
“- different, my ass. If that thing’s like Yael then it leaves now. I don’t care if it does cute little tricks like Thing from the goddamn Addams Family –”
“ – he’s curious about bodies is all,” she said. “They all are. The bold ones, anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s fucking fascinating, Ruby. Why are you here again?”
Ruby pulled back her hair and tied it with a band around her wrist. “Your friends are in trouble.”
“Which ones?” said Gabe, trying very hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice this time. Jesus, it seemed like everyone he’d ever known was either dead, disappeared or in some kind of shit.
“Up north,” she said. “My husband’s dead, and his kin are gonna want blood. They’re probably already champing at the bit over Jared and Kaiden.”
“Who’s...no. Fuck it. Never mind. And what exactly am I supposed to do about it from here?”
“I called them,” said Ruby. “I told them to get out, but they’d do better hearing it from you. Blue left her phone and –”
“ – wait.” He grabbed Ruby’s shoulders. “You’ve seen her? Where is she? Did she say where she was going?”
“No,” she said. “She just...”
“Just what, Ruby?”
He hated the look on her face in that moment. It said things were going to get worse, and he had no idea how that was even possible.
“I think you’d better sit down,” she said, and then she started talking.
When she was done Gabe wished she had never even opened her mouth.
*
Blue sat stiff on the hard stool, too afraid to even put her elbows on the counter. It was like having a gun to your head, only the gun was on the inside and there was nothing you could say or do to stop it going off. She could hear the voice in her head so clearly that she wanted to scream, but she knew if she started she would never, ever be able to stop.
Where’s a nice place to be born? said Yael. I’m sick of fucking Florida. If you could be born anywhere in the world, where would you choose?
She tried to tune it out, listened to the clatter of the diner around her – two steak sandwiches, check for table two, Rihanna on the radio. The waitress was saying something to her, but her head was full of his voice.
...no, don’t tell me. Home is where the heart is, and I know you know what it means to miss New Orleans...
“Hon? Can I help you?” The waitress was frowning now.
“I’d like a hamburger, please,” said Blue, trying not to shout over the swelling music in her head. It was as clear as if she’d popped in earbuds, Billie Holliday’s rich, world-weary voice drowning out Rihanna and her diamonds. Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans, and miss it each night and day?
“How’d you like it?”
“Rare,” said Blue, and she felt a jab at the base of her spine, a warning nudge from Yael. “Medium.” Ow. “No...I guess well done. Hold the onions.”
So it goes, she thought. Pregnant women so often had to go without what they liked for the good of the baby. Rare meat, soft cheese, booze and sushi. Only she had to get a fetus that threatened her when she stepped out of line.
The music was so clear. She shouldn’t have been able to hear it so well. This was what going crazy felt like.
It’s more than just music, Baby Blue. I can give you more. Full surround sound IMAX experience. Everything she’s seen I’ve seen. And Charlie, too.
“Show me,” she said, and couldn’t even be sure if she said it out loud. Or even if she cared at that point. The more she could learn about Yael the better.
You don’t know what you’re asking, he said, in that smug I-know-something-you-don’t-know way that she already hated like poison.
“Don’t dick with me, Yael,” she said, and this time she knew she said it in her head because she could hear the surfaces of her molars grind against one another with the force of holding her mouth still. “I’m asking.”
So much to see. Where would you like to start?
“Where else? Start at the beginning.”
*
Three girls stand in a huddle by the lockers, books clasped to their chests, ponytails tilted at confidential angles. They wear wide skirts puffed with petticoats, one of the many things that tell Blue that if they’re still alive somewhere then they’re old women now. Class of ‘61.
Blue knows their names, too. Another one of those things that tells her this is not just another Yael-flavored dream.
This happened.
“Ugh,” says Donna Patinsky – dark blonde, sky blue ribbon in her hair to match her skirt. “You have got to be kidding.”
“It might be fun,” says Carol George, who has raven hair and eyes that boys tell her are just like Elizabeth Taylor’s. “I heard Warren tell Jackie Keane that he might be going.”
“It’s for babies, Carol. They’re probably going to make people put on blindfolds and stick their hands in handfuls of noodles, for God’s sake. They’ll probably even play that stupid Witch Doctor record; if I never hear that dumb tune again it’ll be way too soon.”
The frothy edges of Carol’s peony-pink skirt shiver with suppressed laughter; they all know Donna came close to going crazy up in Vermont when that record was all her little brother wanted to play all summer. And that she’d eventually taken a hammer to it in despair and has only just now finished her punishment; all the more reason to go to a decent Halloween party.
“They probably even invited Gloria McCormick.” That’s Sadie Roan, with the sallow complexion, the too-lustrous dark hair and the constant knowledge that if circumstances had been slightly different, if she’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time or not got in good with the right people – like Donna and Carol – then they might have been talking about her in this way, instead of Gloria McCormick.
“Nobody ever invited Gloria McCormick to anything,” says Donna. “Nobody needs to. She shows up on her own and stinks up the joint like a pa
lmetto bug.”
There she is, right on time to overhear the insult. Gloria.
She’s not even fifteen yet, a reedy girl whose straight blonde hair still has the whitish gleam of childhood, even though she’s old enough to bleed and old enough to know that puberty is a damn sight worse for her than it is for the likes of Donna Patinsky. Donna worries about pimples. Gloria worries about brain damage, accidentally eating her family or her knees not going back on the right way.
And they’re good knees. Somewhere tangled in all that teenage gawk and feet and awkwardness is the shape of the beautiful woman Blue saw in the photographs, but Gloria can’t even get showing leg right. The weather is too cool for shorts, but Gloria’s wearing them anyway, even though she hates them now. Last May before school let out she trimmed the pockets with a pretty red-print fabric like the popular girls were doing. She even made a matching bow for her hair and went off certain that she’d grasped it now; if she dressed like them then maybe she’d stick out less.
She may as well have just stitched a target to the back of her shirt.
Gloria has unpicked the trim from her pockets, but the shorts remain a source of sour memories and humiliation, of Donna Patinsky shrieking, “What on earth is that thing on your head, Gloria?” and making everyone laugh. Especially Sadie Roan. God damn, that dumb bitch does nothing but hang around laughing like some kiss-ass hyena.
She’s laughing now, and that’s enough. Usually Gloria would slink past, forced to run the gauntlet of laughs and whispers, but something about seeing Sadie Roan’s back-teeth bared for the millionth time puts the devil in Gloria.
Gloria marches right up to them, further emboldened by the look on Donna’s snotty little face, like the expression of a princess unexpectedly approached by a peasant.
“Who gave you the right, Donna?” says Gloria.
“Um...excuse me?” Giggle. Oh, it would be a joy to tear her flesh from her rotten bones.
“Who gave you the right to treat people like that?” says Gloria. Maybe she gets it, a little. Meanness is like tears, or chocolate. Once you get started it’s so hard to stop. “I get it, okay. You don’t like me, and that’s fine. I don’t like you either. So why don’t we just leave one another alone?”
Donna still looks like the Queen of Sheba, but it’s a reasonable question. It’s not the first time Gloria has wanted to ask it. She had stopped eating her lunch in the cafeteria because of Donna; Donna threw bits of bread rolls at her and then made comic innocent faces when Gloria turned around to see who had done it. And then when Gloria had started sneaking her lunch into abandoned classrooms and even the locker room, Donna and her flunkies had followed.
Gloria knows there is no way this is her fault; ever since she realized there was no way she could ever join them she has avoided them.
“Well, I don’t know, Gloria,” says Donna. “Have you maybe considered being less...” She waves a hand up and down. “...ugh.”
More giggles. Surely it’s not possible for human beings to be this hateful.
“I mean to say,” says Donna. “You kind of sign up for it by being so weird. Like eating your lunch in the locker rooms, Gloria. That’s not normal.”
“You made me do that,” says Gloria, and she feels like her rage might carry her feet clean off the floor. “You made me leave the cafeteria.”
“In all fairness,” says Sadie Roan. “It was probably some kind of food hygiene violation.”
They shriek with laughter and Sadie looks like she won the state lottery; wounded animals are always the meanest.
The last time Gloria fought back Miss Sanderson gave her a stern lecture about how young ladies never got into fisticuffs, and that biting and scratching were ‘dreadful vixenish things’. So Gloria walks away, before she gives in to the desire to gouge some eyes and pull some hair. She’s no vixen; she’s a young she-wolf and she knows that at the wrong time of the month – or the right, depending on your perspective – she could eat these bitches for breakfast and spit out the bones.
“You have no idea how weird I really am,” she mutters, and stomps off out of sight.
She is going to that party, now that Donna Patinsky has all but told her she can’t. Besides, Jackie Keane is her second cousin or some such, and that gives her more right than Donna, even if Jackie avoids Gloria for fear of getting the stink of her unpopularity on him.
Like Sadie Roan, Jackie needs to keep in good with the cool kids. He’s close to a case of the weirdo cooties. His mother went to a mental institution last year because she kept talking to people who weren’t there. The Keanes are from Boston originally, and they don’t hold with the southern tradition of rolling out the family crazy on the lawn and dressing it up in ruffles for all to see. Ma Keane went off under the threat of ice picks to the brain and came back with a lot fewer invisible friends. She returned to a brand new house, one that – unlike the old Keane residence – was not occupied by a bevy of rowdy Irish ghosts who wanted to be drinking buddies with the lady of the house. According to the rumors mother’s real ruin was not so much the contents of her head as the contents of a bottle.
The old Keane place stands empty; nobody wants to buy it. There’s rot in the basement and a sinkhole opened up just down the street, cutting off the water pipeline and making the electrics even more temperamental than they were before. In the meantime it makes a great haunted house for kids to throw rocks at, and for all fancy Miss Donna Patinsky turns up her tip-tilted nose at the idea of holding a party there, she’d follow Warren Yates into Hell if she thought it would get her a ring and a promise that much sooner.
Gloria is still enough of a child to remember how to sneak into forbidden places and to know the delight of a den or a secret clubhouse. She might be a lot larger than she was five years ago, but she still has a nose for loose boards, shaky screen doors and broken windows.
There’s a basement window out in the Keane place, the kind of small window that’s kept bricked up tight in her own home, for obvious reasons. She slinks around the back and carefully – wearing gardening gloves filched from her mother – removes the broken glass around the edges of the window. Everyone coming to the party is too old for the noodle trick, but that’s no reason they can’t enjoy the authentic smell of death. Gloria has a bag full of chicken giblets, heads and feet, bought from the butcher at next to no expense. The things that nobody else wants are always cheap to buy, and nobody bats an eyelid at a McCormick buying them.
The basement smells so musty that she can almost taste the spores on her tongue. As her eyes acclimatize to the dark she sees strange pale shapes, swollen like sickness. She almost takes fright and crawls right back through the hole she came through, but then she sees that the pale shapes are nothing more than some kind of giant fungus. Huge bracket mushroom things thrust forth from the cracked old brick, and Gloria remembers - not so long ago - how she had used to wear a band in her hair and play at being Alice all day, talking to imaginary caterpillars and vanishing cats.
Funny how play turns into crazy after a certain age. Poor old Ma Keane never stood a chance.
Gloria goes carefully up the basement stairs. The damp wood bows under her feet. Good. Maybe Donna Patinsky will put a foot through a stair tread and then fall and break her neck. It would be poetic justice for a girl who had everything in her life brand new and had never learned to watch for broken stairs or skin the rabbits she shot in the vegetable garden.
Or maybe Donna will switch on a light and get the full force of the mains up her ass from the malfunctioning electrics. Gloria giggles, unable to resist the picture of Donna with her hair standing on end and smoke pouring out of her ears. Still with the glove on, Gloria throws the switch in the kitchen, and a dull dirty glow lights up the empty room.
There are pipes sticking out of the wall where the gas stove once went, bare patches where the counters once stood. The old linoleum is curling at the corners and the overall impression is one of a house scooped hollow, like a deer carcass whe
n you’d pulled all the stuff out, leaving the ends of mysterious tubes and the rib bones grinning like teeth.
Sure, she’s beyond the age where play crosses over into crazy, but you get a pass on crazy when you’re a werewolf standing in a haunted house.
Deep down Gloria knows that Ma Keane may have been drunk or even stone cold crazy, but while these things often rule out the possibility of ghosts, they don’t necessarily cancel it out altogether. She reaches for the light switch to shut it out, but as she does so the bare bulb begins to swing above her head.
Strange. Another sinkhole?
Perhaps the basement is caving in under her feet, although she doesn’t think so. The light swings round and round in a widening circle, big as the beat of her heart.
She shuts off the light and stands in the dark, dropping the bag of chicken parts at her feet. It’s so quiet that she can hear the wet dead things rustle and settle inside the bag.
The light comes back on.
Gloria reaches for the switch, flicking it frantically back and forth. Impossible - she turned it on and then she turned it off again. She’s sure of it, so sure that she knows the only way this is happening is if she’s going insane. She’s too old to play pretend and anyway, when you played pretend those things weren’t supposed to happen in real life.
At first she thinks the basement is on fire. It looks like smoke, curling up through the gaps in the bare boards where the linoleum has peeled back. She waits for the smell to sting her nostrils, but it doesn’t come. Instead there’s a sticky film on her tongue, like the mold spores in the basement had turned to some kind of oozy liquid and painted themselves inside of her mouth. The world blinks out, black as pitch, and she’d scream if she could, but it’s like someone is holding her jaw open, filling her head and her body with a dark that is formless at first, so black that she’s blind.
But then she sees and it’s wonderful. She sees herself walking unmolested through the halls at school. She’s walking free and clear and there is no sting of mean gazes on her hands and face and bare legs. She’s eating unhindered in the cafeteria and doesn’t even have to check her hair for breadcrumbs when she leaves, because nobody would ever dare do such a thing to her. They know what she can do to them if they do.