She climbs over the railing on the edge of the overpass, watching the cars whizz by on the dark road underneath them. Timothy wonders if she’ll jump. It won’t hurt her much if she does, though if she hits a car it’ll cause quite a scene. She clipped her hair shorter, earlier in the night, and the strands brush her face as she stands there, feathers tossed by the wind. Her eyes are closed and she is statue-still; a haunting monument to something unknown.
“Bette?” Timothy asks quietly, and the moment breaks as she turns to look at him and give him a smile.
“Yeah, I’m here,” she assures him, as if both of them need confirmation of that fact. She climbs back over the rail and plants her feet on the solid road of the overpass. “Come on, let’s go kill some people.”
~
Even obsessive hindsight hasn’t given Timothy any satisfactory answers as to why he went into the woods with Ledishka. Maybe it was because they were both young, and everyone young—even those who have seen death firsthand, and grieved, and grown the wiser for it—believes, in their heart of hearts, that they are invincible and immortal.
Maybe it was because he, like Ledishka, wanted to see what would happen.
Or maybe he never had a good reason for it at all.
Regardless of motive, the pair of them went out into the woods. Unlike the siblings of fairy-tales with similar beginnings, they did not need to leave a trail of stones or crumbs behind them. They’d lived in those woods the whole of their short lives, and knew them as well as kids like Bette and Jay now know the skyline and layout of their home city.
They went into the woods and waited, but nothing came to pounce on them. Nothing stirred the bracken, save for the usual small snuffling animals which lived there. Eventually, dawn arrived.
“I knew there was no such thing,” Ledishka said, dusting her hands off and standing up. “I’m hungry. Do you think Zoscya will make sausages if I promise to do all her mending for her?”
“Why do you think there’s no such thing? If we’d seen it, that would be evidence that it were true, but not seeing it isn’t evidence that it’s not true. That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Timothy objected, following her back down the high hill toward the village. The golden windows and curling smoke from the night fires filled him with a sense of comfort and of home—even children with desperate wanderlust can still love the place they come from, especially after a night out in the cold.
“If the monsters in the old wives’ stories really existed, you don’t think they would have come to eat us up?” Ledishka pointed out, a note of disappointment present under her sensible words. “If I was a monster, that’s what I’d do, and I’m sure I’m much cleverer than any monster living in the woods.”
“Maybe that’s how they get you,” pondered Timothy. “They make you think you’re smarter. That’s how the confidence men from the big towns trick the drunkards and the fools with schemes. They make you think you’re cleverer than they are.”
Ledishka shook her head. “You’re wrong. There’s nothing in the woods as clever as we are.”
~
Sometimes Timothy tells Alexander stories about the village. Never about his own family or history; that’s a part of him that seems sealed off from the English that Timothy now speaks, and so he doesn’t have the language to share it. But he can tell other stories, about the way the winter sky looked in the morning after snowfall, or how sweet the first fresh meat tasted after months of salted, cured strips at every meal. About the stories the children of the village used to tell each other while they shelled and peeled vegetables for stew.
“If Baba Yaha flies over your house in her mortar and pestle, your stepmother will miscarry.”
“If Baba Yaha gives you a skull, don’t let it look at anybody you love who is wicked, because Baba Yaha knows the red rider who we call Sun, and Sun’s light will stare out of the skull and burn anybody wicked that it can see.”
“If Baba Yaha invites you into her house on chicken legs to be her servant, only go if your mother is dead, because you need a ghost’s blessing at your back to get out alive.”
“If Baba Yaha invites you to be her servant, and you are a young girl, you will learn wonderful and terrible things. But never take your brother with you, because she will keep him in a cage and try to make him fat for her dinner.”
So Timothy tells Alexander all those stories, and more, as they lie awake behind their dark thick curtains away from the sunlight and wait for evening to fall again.
In return, Alexander tells him fragments of the past. Not Timothy’s own past, the past he can’t remember, but little shards of memory that Alexander alone is keeper of.
“We went our different ways in the early years of the twentieth century. It was rather the grand drama, at least on your part—you wouldn’t believe me when I promised that our lives were bound to end up tangled again sooner or later, even though I was certain in my heart of hearts that the promise was a true one. Come hell, high water, or the end of the world, a thread will always tie us, and lead us back together.
“But eventually you gave in, and we parted, and I set off to seek my fortune. Or, all right, yes, another fortune. The American Dream is a flimsy dream at best, a lie we tell ourselves, but it was the lie I was born to. There would never be any frontiers at all if hopeless romantics didn’t hold fast the hope that the dream is real. And though you may laugh at this suggestion, I suspect I have always been a hopeless romantic at heart.
“Yes, all right, that’s enough laughing, it’s not that funny.
“I didn’t actually stay long in America. I went to Australia first, because I’d heard wonderful things about the library in Melbourne. It had just been added to—stealing a design from a British building, in the great tradition of both colonies and convicts—and I wanted to see the room which was said to be dazzling when the light streamed in through its great glass dome of a roof. It was still very impressive at night, its green glass lamps and lovingly carved furniture of heavy wood, and level after level of shelves all around the open floor. It was built as a panopticon, and from the centre you could see clearly every edge and corner of the walls, every chair and table all around. There were stained glass windows, art nouveau—which really was nouveau, in those days. I remember wishing that you were there with me, so you could see…
“Anyway, after Australia I considered seeing China, as I never had, but that was a bad time to visit China and so I held off. Of course, it continued to be a bad time to visit China for most of the following century, but I didn’t know that then. I thought to put it off for just a decade or two. And so, instead, I went to Europe.
“Berlin was so alive in those days. America was too, because by now the roaring twenties had begun, but Berlin… between the Dadaists creating their strange manifestos—which were the grandparent of the punk zines you love—and the street theatre, and the cabarets where women smoked and wore their hair short, and jazz, and modern art… well, between all that, who cared about vampires? Everyone interesting seemed to live only at night anyway, so nobody cared if you never saw the sun, if you never ate, if your skin was pale and cool and you left little bites on the throats of all your lovers.
“And evil. Well. Evil, even if you take the argument that there is such a thing as an objective ‘evil’ in the universe… evil was not in short supply among the people of Germany in those days. By the scale such things were measured, in that place and time, a few deaths seemed very small. The century had already seen so much spilled German blood, and it was barely into the 1930s. The people thought they knew what pain was, and guilt. They thought they had perspective. We all did. We all know better now: things can always get worse. Suffering never has an upper limit.
“But that’s enough talk of that. The worst of the shadows came later. At the height of all that flash and laughter and life, it seemed impossible to think that war could ever come again. Not when there was so much love and creation and decadence and joy at hand.
“
I met Anastasja shortly after I moved from Berlin to Dresden. I was always hungry for new places, in those days, and all of Europe had been born anew. She looked younger than me, by just a few years, but I suspect she was far older. She’d never tell me how long she’d lived; the answers she gave me were always fanciful lies. I think I found it so easy to love her because her face reminded me of yours. She has the same eyes as you… yes, yes, I know all vampires have the same eyes. I don’t mean the colour. There’s an intelligence, a brightness, that’s common to you and Ana… Gretchen. She’s Gretchen now, and I should learn to know her by that. Reinvention only works if we allow each other that freedom to rebuild ourselves into new people.
“She was reinventing herself then, too. Renate, the girl she’d been before, had outlived her usefulness—the birthdate was getting too old, the family history falling out of credibility. So Renate was out, and Anastasja was in. Someone new to be. Someone to build up. A young girl from somewhere nobody had ever heard of, trying to find a place in the big city. It’s an old story, but it always works. There are always young people coming to cities, like flies to meat-flowers.
“Over the years that I knew her, she built herself a little family. Humans that she loved, who loved her. I told her it was pitiful, that she was selling out and playing into a pathetic charade of what happiness was meant to look like. Part of my disgust came from all the bohemian strangeness I had lived amongst since arriving in Europe—why choose the old, dowdy way of living, the soap-opera of domestic pettiness, when there was so much more out there to choose instead?
“Some of it ran deeper than that. There’s a part of me that’s always loathed seeing those who are different try to scrub difference away, even when they truly feel that they do it from a place of honesty and personal truth. I hate to see women who have adopted the worst habits of men in an effort to excel in their world. I hate to see gay people who think that widespread marriage for them would be any kind of victory, rather than a crippling defeat to the stifling life-corsetry of the straights. I hate the way Blake’s Lily tortures her hair with a straightener until the tight curl of it lies flat, because dark girls with straight hair look less different than those who wear it curled. I hate the way stores selling clothes to fat girls use euphemisms like ‘curvy’ and ‘voluptuous’ and ‘real women’, because those words will teach them to be ashamed of their fat. I hate anything which encourages shame in difference. I hate anything that offers anyone strange an opportunity to pass as someone normal. Normal is disgusting. Normal is flesh that doesn’t rouse from sluggish slumber even when it’s slapped. Normal is death.
“I couldn’t understand why Anastasja would want that. I still don’t understand. I don’t understand why Lily and Will play pretend that they’re no different from any young couple, with Rose there to be their adopted daughter in the ludicrous tableau. Lily and Will are vampires, that means they can be anything. Why opt for that?
“Anastasja just laughed at me. She said I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that love was never wrong and that there was love to be found in all kinds of places, even inside silly little marriages. She said that there was no reason that genuine happiness—and not just the well-worn dance steps of complacency which most people mistake for happiness—couldn’t be found with a human family, at least for a little while. She said that vampire gangs were families of a sort, too, and I shouldn’t be such a snob as to think that humans couldn’t be as impassioned and as loyal in their little groups as we are in ours.
“It was an argument we had many times. We never resolved it, and I doubt that we ever will without life teaching one or the other of us the value in the other’s wisdom. But we were friends. We both loved music, and there was so much music to love, so many little clubs to fund and own and visit. And then the bad things got worse, and the good things began to fade, and when it became obvious that the world had begun another phase of madness I left. Anastasja and I wished each other the best, which really meant we wished each other survival through the dark we could sense coming. And then I came back to America, and found you again, just as I had promised.”
BETTE
Some days, when Bette is especially sleepless, she gives up on even trying and goes down to the studio level. There’s a full home theatre system in one of the rooms there, with lush leather recliners and a projection screen that covers a wall and surround sound and everything. It makes her kind of bummed that she doesn’t eat anymore, because a big bowl of popcorn would make the whole thing perfect.
She sticks The Bride of Frankenstein in the DVD player and settles in the front row of chairs, wriggling her toes in comfortable anticipation as the copyright warning comes up.
She knows that most people think her obsession is sort of random and weird—doubly so, now that she’s a vampire, because it’s almost like she’s rooting for the other team. Bette can’t help it if she genuinely thinks that Frankenstein is a more interesting monster than Dracula, but she can see how that’s sort of disloyal to her species.
It all started when she was a little kid. She can’t remember how old she was exactly, but her dad was already spending a lot of time in hospital by then, and Bette was trying to comprehend stuff like death and illness and that bodies could fail and fall apart and stop working properly and betray themselves with cancers. It all felt way too big for her, like how she’d hated swimming at the deep end of her grandparents’ swimming pool because the bottom was too far down for her toes to touch it, and so it seemed that the water must go down and down and down forever, and if she started sinking she’d never stop.
Bette’s cousin Darcy said Bette was a baby for not swimming in the deep end. Darcy could do dives and somersaults already, and couldn’t understand why Bette was hesitant to learn these new tricks. But then, Darcy’s father wasn’t going in for scans and x-rays and things all the time. Bette had enough things in her life that were scary already, without adding in swimming lessons.
One day Bette was at the hospital with her mom, visiting her dad while he was in for observation. She can remember telling a nurse that her mommy and her could observe him just fine at home, but the nurse had only laughed kindly and told Bette she could go play in the playroom near the children’s wards if she wanted.
Bette had thought about going to the playroom like the nurse suggested, but then decided not to. She’d been there a few times, and it had always made her feel uncomfortable and guilty, because there was usually another kid in there, or a few other kids, and sometimes parents, and when the kids asked Bette what she was sick with, she’d have to answer that it wasn’t her, it was her dad. And then the moms and dads who were in the playroom with their kids would look at her with an angry kind of envy, as if they couldn’t understand why they hadn’t had the chance to be the sick one rather than their child, as Bette’s father had.
Instead of the playroom, she went down to Accident and Emergency, because there were toys in the waiting room there, as well, and a TV on the wall, and sometimes there’d be gross gory blood all over someone else waiting in the waiting room. Bette thought blood and guts and stuff was all great. She and Rose had both made cuts on their fingers—though Rose had complained and sooked over having to do it, the big baby—and pressed them together, so that they would be blood sisters forever and ever. At first Bette had thought it was a little unfair that Rose got to have a sister and a brother, since she already had Tommy, but then Rose pointed out that if Bette was her blood sister now that meant Bette and Tommy were related too, obviously. So that was okay.
There wasn’t any blood and guts in the Accident and Emergency room that time, but there was the sound of a lot of commotion going on just down the hall from the waiting room. Bette, who felt at ease almost anywhere and was always curious to find out new things, followed the noise to its origin.
It was one of the trauma rooms, and there were lots of doctors and nurses and other hospital people all crowded around the bed. There was a monitor with a shaky line on it m
aking a beep-beep-beepbeepbeep whining sound. Bette remembers that monitor better than she remembers all the other equipment in the room, because unlike the rest of the equipment she knew what that one meant. Her father sometimes had one hooked up to him, with his heartbeat making little jagged blips go across the screen. A flat line meant no heartbeat. No heartbeat meant dead. Bette had never heard about a shaky line before.
“V-fib’s back. Trying paddles!” One of the doctors said, and everyone else stepped away from the stretcher, and that’s the moment when Bette saw the most amazing thing she’d ever seen in her life.
There was a girl on the bed, a teenager, and her ribcage was opened up like her skin was just another layer of clothing that could be unzipped. The doctor who had spoken was leaning in over her with a pair of what looked like flattened spoons, gleaming silver circles that he was putting into her open chest.
For a moment the room seemed to freeze, everything going as still as the sprawled girl on the table. Then she jolted violently, like she’d been hit hard by some huge invisible force, and the line on the monitor jolted with her and then settled into a blip-blip rhythm that Bette knew was made by a normal heart.
The doctors and nurses and other hospital people all crowded in around the girl again, concealing her from Bette’s line of sight. Darting back down the hall, Bette made it back to the waiting room area before anybody noticed her.
A few days later, Bette and Darcy were swimming at their grandparents’ house again, splashing and floating and giggling. Bette liked the afternoons at her grandparents’ house. Back then, it had always felt like nothing bad could ever happen while she was there. Now her grandparents are old and frail, and that safety vanished long before Bette herself became an unsafe thing.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 43