“I could pull a boy without using hypno-mojo, if I wanted,” she usually teases Timothy, when Timothy offers, and Timothy’s a decent enough guy that he never points out that everyone knows Bette will never want a boy, not so long as Rose is around.
Bette knocks on the bedroom door and then opens it, not bothering to wait for the drowsy ‘come in’ that she knows she’ll get.
“Nightmare?” Timothy asks quietly as Bette crawls into bed beside him. Alexander gives a small sleepy grunt and turns over, making more room on the wide mattress.
“’m cold,” Bette whispers in reply to Timothy, tucking her hands inside the sleeves of her hoodie. Timothy spoons against her back, slipping one arm around Bette’s waist and pulling her body close.
“No you’re not,” he whispers in her ear. “You’re warm. Can’t you feel it? Warm and pliant. I could almost mistake you for someone alive.”
And Bette knows it’s just a trick, just Timothy’s powers of persuasion. But even knowing that, she still feels the heat uncoil in her chest and spread down to her fingertips and toes. She sighs, giving in to the lie.
“Warm,” Timothy whispers again, and now Bette can sleep.
~
She’s cold again when she wakes up, but this time it’s because she can sense the snow that’s fallen on the city beyond the thick brown brick walls of the house. The sun has set, but Timothy and Alexander sleep on beside her. The days are shorter now, but their rhythms haven’t quite caught up yet.
Bette goes back to her own room and turns on every light, the bright overhead and the two lamps which flank her bedsides and the string of tiny stars draped around her window frame. The only decoration she’s got up on her walls so far is a framed poster of the 1931 version of Frankenstein. It’s an original, with tiny tack-holes in the corners from when it was pinned up outside a theatre more than sixty years before Bette was born.
Blake gave it to her a week after she moved in, on Jay’s suggestion, and Bette is pretty sure that it’s worth hundreds of dollars, which is totally crazy because a reproduction version would be just as cool as an original. But Blake’s mind works in a particular way, and Bette’s way too grateful to him to protest the choices he wants to make.
The clothes in her closet are mostly gifts, as well. She brought some from home, of course, to add credence to the lie they’d made up for her mom about Bette getting accepted into some big-deal science scholarship course. As if she’d have accepted an offer like that. As if she’d ever have left her life behind so easily if she’d had a choice.
She doesn’t wear the clothes she brought with her very much, though. She sleeps in a hoodie that belonged to Rose a million years ago, and sometimes she wears other bits and pieces, but most of the time she leaves them in their suitcase in the bottom of her closet. Wearing them reminds her too much of the life she used to have, and that in turn reminds her of the death which that life led her to. So she leaves those clothes unworn.
The clothes she does wear, bought with Blake’s money and generosity on Jay’s suggestions, are simple and expensive and pretty things which she probably never would have looked at twice when she was alive. Soft sheer skirts in dusky pinks and midnight blues, with creamy satin petticoats and embroidered camisoles underneath, blouses shaded like robin eggshells or sepia photographs or pale ivy green. She’s got whisper-thin stockings held up by lace suspenders and gloves made of the butteriest leather she’s ever seen, stilettos so glossy she can see her reflection in the patent leather, boots with dozens of eyelets so they can be laced right up to her knee.
Despite the snow, she chooses a knee-length dress of lavender silk and a plum-coloured velvet coat. The good part of always feeling cold is that she can’t get colder. Her stockings are dark purple fishnet, her boots dark gray. Her hair’s getting long-ish—vampire hair grows faster than human hair, because vampire bodies are more efficient at processing dead cells—so she knots it loosely at the nape of her neck, tying the haphazard bun in place with a piece of black ribbon.
Bette isn’t in the habit yet of calling private cars when she wants to go someplace, so she catches the train out to her old neighbourhood and then walks round to Tommy and Rose’s house. The tree outside Tommy’s window is slick with ice, but she scrambles up it without a problem, the frost tingling the tips of her fingers in a way that’s almost nice. She raps on the glass with her knuckles and waits.
Tommy gives her a grieved expression as he pushes the window up, ushering her inside quickly. “If I die of pneumonia because you made me let all the cold air in, you have to pay for my headstone.”
Bette rolls her eyes. “Baby.”
She knows the others, especially Timothy, don’t really like her hanging out at Tommy’s as much as she does. They think she’s trying to go through the motions of the things she used to do, the life she used to have. But it’s not like that. So much of who Bette used to be has gotten all fucked up or twisted around or stopped mattering, but she still loves this. Just sitting around with Tommy watching stupid shit from the internet and talking about stuff and playing video games. It still feels like home.
They used to mostly do this down in the basement, where Rose lives, but they don’t now. Bette hasn’t been down there since before she died. She’s pretty sure Tommy thinks that staying upstairs is part of the whole avoiding-each-other thing Rose and Bette do now, but it’s even worse than that. Bette’s terrified of going into the basement. She thinks she might actually freak the fuck out if she had to face up to the basement still existing without her. Of life going on, and her not being allowed to be a part of it anymore.
After she’s been there for about an hour, Tommy gets called downstairs for dinner. Rose is already out for the night, so it’s just Tommy and his parents. Bette doesn’t know if she’s supposed to feel jealous or weird or whatever, but even if she’s supposed to, she doesn’t. Maybe it’s because she and her mom never did the sit-down-to-a-roast thing as part of their evening routine, or because drinking blood is way more fun than even the best dinner food ever could be, but Bette doesn’t feel any sort of envy at Tommy for having a meal with his family. The smell of cooked meat is just as gross to her now as it was when she was alive and an avowed vegetarian.
Acting on a sudden impulse, Bette slips back out the window and down the tree, moving around to where the wintry bareness of the rose bushes cover the basement windows. It’s easy for her to pry a pane open, even though it’s ice-locked and swollen from the damp. She hesitates, just for a second, but now that the worst thing in the world has already happened to her she refuses to be afraid of anything. Bette climbs through the window, down into the basement.
It stinks, worse to her more sensitive nose than it used to be. Rose has been using varnish again, and oil paints, and maybe solvents too. The cigarette butts overflowing in the ashtray and the giant pile of dirty teenage clothes are actually a welcome note in the mix of smells.
Bette leaves the lights off, not needing them to see and not wanting anyone upstairs to notice that someone’s down here. This isn’t so bad. Her heart hasn’t spontaneously shattered into a million jagged pieces, and she doesn’t even feel like crying. In fact, she doesn’t feel like this is a world she’s been shut out of. The basement feels as comfortable around her as it ever has.
She knows it would be different if Rose were here. But Rose isn’t here; Rose is out killing vampires. And so there’s nobody here with Bette, nobody telling her that she doesn’t belong here anymore.
The broad canvas currently propped on Rose’s easel is covered in abstract shards of colour, the textures running riot over one another and the clash of shades making everything even more uneasy. Rose has always been a very literal artist, or at least she used to be. Often her subject matter would be weird, or creepy, or just plain gross, but it was invariably easy to tell what she was depicting.
“I’m not deep enough for abstract,” she’d say, only half-joking, and add more shading to the gnarls of a dark tree in a
nightmarish forest.
But the pain in the picture—and there’s no question that the picture is of pain—is as deep as anything Bette’s ever known. And her life, while short, didn’t lack for pain. It’s strange how all that’s faded now. She can remember how terrible it was to lose her father, how the hurt was too deep-down inside who she was to ever really heal over with time, but the feeling itself is numbed now. She can still read the written notation of the mourning, but the music’s stopped, and now it’s quiet inside her.
She doesn’t bother to go back up to Tommy’s room after she climbs out of the basement. He’s used to her vanishing without a goodbye. Bette’s got no time for goodbyes anymore. There’s never a chance to say them when they really matter, she knows now, and so they never matter at all.
There’s a coffee shop she likes, an old house renovated into warm rooms of soft chairs and high windows. She sits in a chair, teacup in her hands as if the warmth could warm her skin, and watches the world go by outside. The sidewalks are dark and shiny and the cars going past on the road paint lines of light against the slick black in front of them. Pedestrians hurry past in heavy coats, some carrying umbrellas, others tucked up in hats and mittens. In moments like this, Bette feels as if the city around her is alive, really alive, and she’s just another blood cell caught up in the web of nerves and veins and vessels, the streets and roads all moving to the slow beat of an old, old heart.
When she’s grown tired of sitting and staring, Bette wanders. She ends up outside one of the old theaters that litter the city, converted into auditoriums for concerts when the seats stopped filling up. Kids dressed in the kinds of clothes Bette used to wear are filing out, chattering excitedly about the bands that’ve just finished playing. Bette slips through the crowd, pushing against the tide of bodies, into the hall itself. Nobody stops her. There’s no reason to check for a ticket after the show’s already done.
The stage is crawling with techs and roadies, dismantling the drum kit and the microphone and amp setups, packing all the magic away in its boxes so it can travel onto the next city and the next crowd. Bette used to dream of being a tech, after she’d left school and made at least a perfunctory effort at college for her mom’s sake.
She’d had it all planned out: she’d be a tech, and then a tour manager, and then she’d fall in love with some bad-boy tattooed guy with piercings and a tragic past who worked as another tech or at a merchandise table or on security at a venue somewhere. They’d have a big punk wedding and maybe later they’d have a couple of baby punklings, and she’d bring them all back to the city and set up a club of her own, somewhere for bands to play and kids to hang out, and she’d be the cool lady that everybody in the scene knew and she’d have perfect rockabilly makeup and the most fabulous clothes and excellent hair.
Bette smiles a little, crookedly, for the future she doesn’t have, and then shakes herself and lets it go.
There’s another girl, around Bette’s age but human, hanging around the empty theater too. She’s got straggly straight red hair and too much eye makeup. Her clothes look like the sort of thing that might happen if a teenage DKNY model slept in an outfit for a week and then did three rounds in a circle pit.
“I know you. Jay’s friend,” the girl says. “Beth, right?”
“Bette. You’re Ashley?”
“Just Ash is fine,” the girl corrects, and Bette thinks that the shorter name is a better fit for her. This girl is what’s left when ‘Ashley’ has been burned away.
“Where are you headed now?” Bette asks.
Ash shrugs. “I don’t know. Not home. Somewhere.”
“Sounds good to me,” Bette agrees, and offers Ash a smile.
TIMOTHY
When Ledishka was born, the midwife had to cut her free. It’s called a caesarian now. Shakespeare put it in a play, as an origin story for a character’s powers, like a gorier version of a radioactive spider bite. But when Timothy was four years old and it was his little sister’s birth, there wasn’t any kingly name or poetic meaning. It was just his mother, unconscious already, too much blood lost to be saved, and the midwife’s apprentice leading Timothy over to the hearth and telling him to watch the fire for his mother’s spirit and to tell her goodbye, and not to turn around to look at the bed.
None of the men had been allowed in the birthing room, but a little boy didn’t count as a man, so he’d been there since it began, wide-eyed, holding his mother’s pain-white hand and patting her cheek as she sobbed, trying to be a comfort in his young small way.
The midwife’s apprentice—just a girl, really, helping her mother in the family trade—led him away from the bed when things went bad, and Timothy went willingly, because his mother had stopped crying. Her face was calm and still, and he thought that she was sleeping. He watched the fire, as instructed, and told his mother good-bye, because death was no mystery to even the youngest of children in those days and in that place.
His baby sister had their father’s crow-black hair, her skin blood-slick from the bad birth, the colour of her face the white-blue of milk after the cream has been skimmed off. Her little gulping breaths were quiet and surprised, as if being introduced to the world was far too strange and interesting for her to spend her first hours in it crying. The midwife’s daughter handed the little fur-bundled creature to Timothy, going back to help her mother clean up as best as able before they let the menfolk see the body.
The baby’s skin was cool despite the warmth of the little firelit room, so Timothy edged closer to the flames, just a little, and unwrapped the fur just enough for the baby’s tiny ugly wrinkled curious face to be properly visible. The midwife and her daughter were murmuring prayers. Timothy ignored them, his gaze locked on the face of his sister.
“Ledyshki,” he whispered quietly, which was the word for the little ice chips which sparkled in springtime, on the water of the narrow river by the forest. Timothy had always loved those little bits of ice, and his mother had told him what the name for them was, and so it seemed right to call his new sister that, something Timothy could pass on from a mother she would never know. “Hello, Ledyshki. I’m your brother.”
It was a fanciful name, not the sort which the villagers gave their children, or had ever given their children in the past. But their father had other things to think about, a baby and a child to care for with no wife to help him do it, and so the name was never replaced with a more suitable one. The best the more practical villagers could manage was to convince Timothy to use Ledishka, which was at least a real name and not a word for little chips of ice on springtime water.
When Timothy first read the modern versions of fairy stories, he couldn’t help but feel that much of their meaning was lost with their old contexts. Because while many children alive in the world now know what it is to have a stepmother, stepmothers were a fact of life in his little village, like harvests and wolves and all the rest. Wives died, and husbands needed help with the babies left behind, and so the men would find new women to step into the role left empty by the death. Step-mothers. The stories reflected the world which the children knew.
And Little Red Riding Hood, too, saved when she’s sliced free from the belly of the wolf, lying bloated in grandmother’s bloody bed—that could never mean the same thing to a child now as it did to Timothy and Ledishka, who’d listen to the story on winter nights and shiver out of horror at the nightmare of things which weren’t so far from the everyday.
Ledishka and her brother had a stepmother before Ledishka was two weeks old, for their father was desperate enough to be quick about it, and well-off enough that he had no trouble finding a new bride. Zoscya was a grown-up lady, and children have little sense of the age of adults beyond that perception, but with hindsight and memory Timothy can see how young she must have been, how very young, sixteen or seventeen and suddenly the wife of a man twice that, and a mother twice over.
She was a kind mother, and a good cook, and kept both rooms of the little house scrubbed and w
arm. Maybe because of these reasons, and maybe too because she found reasons to make them laugh on even the darkest of the winter nights, Timothy and Ledishka loved her very very much. They did not even mind that when Ledishka was six and Timothy was ten, Zoscya had a baby, though Ledishka and Timothy had almost no interest whatsoever in babies as a general rule.
Tiny Stasja was lovely from the first, as pink and noisy as Ledishka had been white and quiet.
“You were lovelier,” Timothy declared anyway, in case Ledishka minded that she had been strange when she was small. She was strange when she was bigger, too, of course, but Timothy already knew she didn’t mind that. She seemed to consider it her natural birthright to be a dreamer and to be fanciful and strange. Perhaps it was. He’d given her a dreamer’s name, after all.
Once, years ago now, Timothy paid the Cultural History department of a large university a considerable amount of money to find out what had happened to her. They hadn’t even been able to definitively locate where the village had once been, much less the fate of one freckled girl named for the glint of springtime ice. Timothy has tried to accept this.
He has tried to forgive himself for never telling Alexander or Blake what became of his little sister, for assuming that his own thin skull would keep the memories preserved. He’s tried. He hasn’t succeeded, though. He never will.
Jumbled memories of his long-ago life swirl and fade as Timothy wakes up, his face burrowed in the crook of Alexander’s neck, seeking warmth in another’s skin from skin as cool as his own.
“Nightmare?” Alexander asks quietly, curling an arm against Timothy’s back. Timothy wants to make a wisecrack about how they sleep in the day, so it can’t have been a nightmare, but he feels far too rattled by the dream to do so. Instead he just nods, face still pressed to Alexander’s shoulder.
“You’ve always had bad nightmares,” Alexander tells him. “Usually worse in winter. I’ve never convinced you to tell me what they’re about, though.” There’s a hopeful, hinting note to the statement, a cue for Timothy to open up about what’s bothering him. Timothy knows that he should, that perhaps his lost centuries of memory are the price of a costly lesson and he should share his thoughts when presented with the opportunity.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 36