by Anna Roberts
“I need help,” he says.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, you do.”
*
Gabe sat on the edge of the motel bed. Joe was in the bathroom, talking to someone on the phone – Grayson, probably, judging by his soft, tired tone.
“...he’s okay. He’s been banged up pretty bad but he’s in one piece...I know...”
The sudden wave of envy caught Gabe off guard; he would have done anything to be talking to Blue in that way right now, like he had her to come home to and there was no hurt in the world that couldn’t be healed in one another’s arms.
Joe had been through so much, and all he knew right now was that Yael had taken control of Blue somehow. And that was enough. That was all Gabe was willing to explain, because anything else would make it real, make it too fucking horrible to deal with, like it wasn’t bad enough already.
No, this thing had left enough ripples. Let Joe have his peace; Gabe would do this alone.
Gabe took out his phone, awkwardly holding it in the exposed fingertips of his plastered arm. His left, thank God. There was a message from Ruby and he opened it, his heart jumping half out of his chest when he saw the picture attachment, a derelict house somewhere in the Ninth Ward. Good girl. She’d Google-Earthed her previous flight path.
He opened the text.
he did that black smoke thing again but i got him
A street name. An address.
“...I think he’s asleep again, they gave him a lot of painkillers...no, you’re right...it’s better he gets some rest before we do anything else...”
Gabe got to his feet. His legs still felt frail and soft from lying around in a hospital bed for over a week, but he knew he couldn’t just pop another pill and go to sleep. While he understood the logic of being fresh for whatever fight came next, he had no more patience, not now that he knew where she was.
He crept past the bathroom door, praying Joe’s nose wouldn’t catch the whiff of dried blood and the sour, medical smell of Gabe’s lightweight cast.
But Joe was still talking. “...I know. Me, too...I’m so tired...no, don’t be silly. I’m not gonna do anything stupid. Believe me, I don’t want another one of those things in my head...once was more than enough...”
“Sorry,” said Gabe, under his breath, and slipped out, closing the door behind him.
Outside was a breezy fall dusk, birds singing beneath a windblown sky in shades of pink, scarlet and pewter. He walked on shaky legs past old graffiti (Make Levees Not War. For Those In Peril From The Sea) his heart unsteady in his chest and his head half adrift from drugged sleep and no sleep. Nothing seemed real any more. He was the first to admit his life had never been exactly normal, but the last few months had taken on the blurred, half-remembered quality of a dream.
We are of such stuff as dreams are made on – where was that from? Something Gloria used to say.
He was about to give up and hail a cab when he saw the street sign. This was it. This was the one. It was a shabby block, the houses scarred and half empty, weeds grown high in the yards and between the cracks in the road and the sidewalks. A car passed him in a thunder of angry music. A dog barked. He had the strange sense of walking on hallowed ground, feeling the weird neck-prickle that came of walking across a battlefield, or anywhere else where you knew that too many people had died all at once. As he rounded the corner he almost expected to see some new cloud louring over the Ninth Ward, some kind of warning that there was a different kind of monster in town, in his own way as ruthless as the tempest that had torn this place apart.
But there was nothing. Just tires on old roads, birds chirping into the gathering dark. He stumbled a little as he approached the house, and took out his phone to compare. Yes, it was right. This was the one, the blue paint all but peeled off the siding, the porch sagging over the door like a frown. One whole side of the house was engulfed in some great, green vine, and he couldn’t see how anyone could possibly be living in there, least of all her, who was so fastidious around the house. It looked like it had been abandoned since Katrina.
The porch creaked perilously under his feet. The door had been opened recently, and took only a slight shove.
It opened directly into what might once have been a living room, the cracked mantel the only indication that people once lived here. But there was a candle burning, a little red wax thing in a glass holder.
“Blue?” he said, tasting mold on his tongue. This place had been empty of humans for a while, but it was alive with all kinds of other living things.
The shadows stirred, and then she stepped out, looking so wild-haired and crazy that he hardly recognized her. He rushed towards her, like she was a mirage that might melt away if he didn’t grab her now, but she was all wrong in his arms. Her cheekbones looked sharper, but her waist had gone, and when he looked down he saw it. She was massively pregnant.
He stared down at it and shook his head. He’d been prepared for something like this, and it was then he realized why he hadn’t wanted Joe here. He didn’t want Joe to see her like this, and he had no idea why exactly, but it was part sparing her blushes and part something worse, some dumb, primal chest-beating instinct that said he’d failed as a man for letting this happen to her.
“That’s impossible,” he said, because it was the only thing that made sense right now. She looked fit to burst and it had barely been the space of a single full moon.
“Welcome to my life,” said Blue, in a flat, broken voice so unlike her that he wanted to shake her, to scream. When he’d held her she’d stood stiff with her hands by her sides. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll make us some tea.”
Gabe glanced around the wreck of the room. “Where? Blue, we have to get out of here. There’s nowhere to make tea here. It’s a dump.”
She raised her eyebrows, offense smoothing the corners of her nostrils in a way that was her, so prim and proper that there was no question of this being some phantom chased up to trick him. And all of this horror was on her. In her. Oh God, what had that thing done to her?
“This is where I grew up,” she said. “And I’ll thank you to notice I cleaned up real nice.”
“No, Blue. Look around you. There are mushrooms growing between the floorboards, for fuck’s sake. You can’t be here, not with...” He waved a hand at her swollen midriff, appalled that this was even real. She looked fit to burst and he was acutely conscious of how many microbes were swarming in this place. They needed to be somewhere clean, somewhere with hot running water, not hanging around some house so derelict that it was an echo of a not-so-long-ago time when dying in childbirth was just about as easy as falling off a log.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You need help.”
She let out a wry laugh and waved a hand over her bump. “Little too late for that, wouldn’t you say?”
Gabe forced himself to stare at it. He could have sworn it had grown bigger since he walked into the house. Her t-shirt was pushed up almost under her breasts, like she’d had no time to find anything that fit, because she’d swelled faster than a pumpkin. Her belly was scarred with dozen of raw, new stretchmarks, her navel turned clean inside out. “How is this even possible?” he said.
“He’s been waiting a long time,” said Blue. “Hundreds of years. And he’s been thwarted so many times that he wants it now.”
He looked at the bulge again, but it still didn’t make sense. “But that’s...”
“...ours,” she said. “He just...hurried things along a little.”
The room seemed to spin and he couldn’t be sure if it was just his tired legs threatening to quit or his brain and guts doing flip-flops over the thought of it. That fucker, that bodyless bastard thing had taken his child, their child, a hypothetical probably-not child that he thought he’d never have in case it turned out to be another cursed boy like himself.
Who would have thought inheriting the werewolf gene would be the least awful thing that could happen?
Blue stood with her hands o
n the small of her back, like she couldn’t stand to touch the thing swelling out in front of her. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” she said, in a wincing, breath-held voice like it was kicking her apart from the inside. “It’s a good thing you’re not really here.”
“Blue, what are you talking about? I’m here. I’m right here.”
She flinched away as he moved closer, her eyes wide and more than a little crazy. Figured; if she had that thing in her body then he was probably in her head as well, and look what he’d done to Gloria over the years. “You can’t be,” she said. “This isn’t real. Like when I was on the ocean, but I was on the kitchen floor the whole time.” She pointed to an empty, grimy corner. “You see my dollhouse there? The one I had when I was five. It can’t be there, because I gave it to the Goodwill when I was ten, maybe nine.”
“There’s nothing there,” he said, reaching out to touch her hair. “Blue, look at me. It’s me. I’m here. I found you.”
Her breath came hard and fast, then she looked at him like she was seeing him for the first time. She stretched out a hand, her eyes filling. “Gabe?”
“Yes. I’m here. It’s okay.”
“Wh...what happened to your face? Your arm?”
He shook his head, elated in spite of everything. “Long story. Doesn’t matter.” Her hands were on his face and his on hers, like they had to touch to confirm the truth because seeing wasn’t enough. Doubting Thomas all over again. She sobbed as she fell forward into his embrace, and he cried along with her, his hands full of her hair. “It’s okay,” he said, even though it wasn’t. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No,” she said, wet and muffled in his shoulder. “It’s not. It can’t be. You have to go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t be here, Gabe. Please – just go. You have to go.”
He held her tight and she tried to push, but it was a half hearted effort. Then he felt it, the strangest sensation. Her belly hardened against him and something inside there moved. She caught her breath in a gasp.
“Blue?”
“It’s okay. It’ll pass in a minute. You have to go, please. Just go.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Blue, was that a contraction?”
She stepped back, panting. “Yeah,” she said, and he’d never seen her look more afraid in his life. “That’s exactly why you have to go.”
13
He comes singing, like he always does. Tiny Tim this time, warbling Tiptoe Through The Tulips. Tip toe through your back brain, through your cortex, through your frontal lobe. Trailing bloody footprints. He’s telling tales out of school and Gloria frowns in her sleep.
You know that wasn’t me. The cat was all him. It’s one of the warning signs, they say.
But then so is bedwetting and poor dumb Frankie Cobb soaked the mattress every night, and he never grew up to kill anyone. They say he wet his pants as he pointed the gun at that gas station clerk; thing wasn’t even loaded, but the owner shot him anyway. Right in the face. No open casket for Frankie, but at least he never went to prison. There’s that, at least.
Don’t change the subject.
Smash, flash. A shotgun butt to the face. So he’s killed people, and yes, it’s bad, but they weren’t exactly on the side of the angels either.
You have to get me out of him, Gloria. He’s a monster.
Monster is as monster does. Donna Patinsky took an ice-pick to the eyeball, Freeman style. They pushed the point up under her upper eyelid and tapped it crunch through the fragile bone, into her frontal lobes. She came out with a black eye and a slack jaw and a song still in her head, but after the procedure – and there’s a fancy word for a brain swirlie – she found she could just about drown it out with the sound of her jaws, so long as she kept on chewing all the time. Her heart gave out in 1982, two weeks shy of her thirty-eighth birthday. It took four strong men to lift her body into the ambulance, and when they looked in her mouth they found she’d chewed her own tongue off because she couldn’t get to the refrigerator for more ice-cream.
You got what you wanted.
And so did you. My firstborn son. No takey-backsies, no mulligans, what’s done is done.
She doesn’t have enough cheek to tell him that her fifteen year old self would regret Donna’s fate had she known; kids are cruel little bastards and half the business of growing up is learning that you can’t just smash things apart when they piss you off.
And some never learn. Just look at your mooncalf.
She sees three young girls huddled naked in a corner of a dirty basement, crying and promising to do all kinds of dirty things and never tell a soul, if he’ll only let them go. But he didn’t. He stripped them to the bone and piled the flesh in a big plastic bucket for when the wolf came.
A cheap source of protein, I guess. But it was the quiet he craved.
“The quiet?” Gloria asks out loud. If she doesn’t feel her lips form the words she knows she’ll never ask; she doesn’t really want to hear the answer.
There’s a moment when a life leaves a body. Like that breath you took in when you were waiting to hear him cry for the very first time, remember? Only the breath is going out this time, and it’s never coming back. It’s a sigh into a silence that lasts forever, and forever is such a long time, so big and dark and endless that little things like us can only stare into it and wonder. I guess when you stare into it enough times you can start to go all sorts of crazy.
“And yet all these years you went along with it,” says Gloria. “And never once tried to leave.”
Yael sighs, tickling the inside of her brain. No, I tried. It wasn’t like I had a shortage of bodies.
She sits up in bed, afraid she’ll puke if she thinks much harder about what he just said. “You sonofabitch.” For a second there she almost believed he valued human life, but he doesn’t, not as much as he covets it.
I do what I do because I have to. He does what he does because he likes it.
Yael’s a world class liar, but she knows he’s telling the truth this time. A mother knows; she’s had her eyes trained on that little creature since she saw him hoisted, bloody and squalling, between her open legs. She’s watched his eyes learn to focus, watched his lips start to form words, watched his bandy baby legs firm up as he waddles and stumbles from room to room. And she’s seen the blank spaces, the brief moments where he’s looking straight through her, the dark spots where he holds himself as if other people aren’t people at all.
And they’re not, not to him. Not if he can do all the things she knows he’s done.
“How many?” she says. “Do you think?”
I don’t know. Triple figures, for sure.
Gloria covers her hand with her mouth. For some reason – some old guilt, perhaps – its those three girls that hurt the most. Daughters, sisters, girlfriends, snatched up and subjected to every awful thing young women are taught to dread, before being slaughtered like lambs and fed to a hungry werewolf. Triple figures. Over a hundred living people who were now dead just because she couldn’t keep her legs shut back in 1964.
She swallows, feels the cool of the floor under her bare feet. “So kill him,” she says.
Can’t.
“Can’t or won’t?”
I’m still your servant, Gloria. After all these years. When you handed him over you were handing over a part of yourself –
“ – you shut your lying mouth. I never handed him over –”
- now, now. Are we really going to have this fight again?
She stares into the dark, tries to think of nothing.
I’m bound not to harm him. It’s going to have to be you.
“I’m his mother.”
All the more reason to do it, says Yael, and he’s thinking of someone – some Roman lady whose baby grew up to be one of those monstrous emperors. Agrippina – that was her. The poisoner, the mother of Nero. He tried to off the old lady in a collapsible boat, but she swam all
the way to shore, and when he went the direct route and sent the Praetorian Guard round with their swords she held her hands to her womb and said ‘Strike here’.
She brought him into this world; for that she deserves the pain of taking him out of it.
Gloria pictures the dark, cold waters, the woman assured of her betrayal, the screams of the drowning. That’s where you ended up in this part in the world, if you pissed off the wrong people. Either fed to the gators in the humid swamp or full fathom five, your bones crusted with coral and your eyes picked out by fishes.
“And then what?” she says, not wanting to finish the thought aloud. She kills West and Yael retains sole residency. Oh boy – there was a whole fresh crock of horror.
That won’t happen. The brains always die too fast; I can never keep them alive.
She swallows hard. “What is it that you want, Yael?”
I want this to be over. I want you to set me free.
She gets up from the bed and opens the door. The house is silent, sleeping. Free. And then what? If she set him free now he could do the thing she doesn’t want to do. He’s always talking about bursting blood vessels and stopping hearts. But then where would he go? What would he do? Whose head would he leap into next? What scores would he settle?
No wonder Celeste locked him up tight in the old Keane house.
Gloria tiptoes down the creaking stairs. West is sound asleep on the sofa, as deep in dreams as a monster like him never ought to be. Her gaze lingers too long on a throw pillow but she knows that’s not going to cut it; he’s nearly twice her weight.
Once again she sees dark waters, and a thin thread of a plan unspools through her mind. Quickly she turns on the light and her son wakes, wincing, his forearm over his face.
“Ah. What the fuck?”
And just like that Yael’s sucked back into his head, leaving her to concoct her plan in secret. “Sorry, baby,” she says. “I guess my mind was elsewhere.”