by Chuck Wendig
Miriam pulls herself free, and then she can’t help it:
She looks back in through the window.
The owl’s wings beat furiously, keeping her aloft as its talons anchor into the meat around Harriet’s eyes. The woman lets out a sound like a teakettle going off full-blast: it’s a high-pitched whine, not of pain but of something greater, something deeper, some ancient frustration.
Miriam puts herself into the owl’s mind. For just a moment. She feels the satisfying urgency of talons easing through human meat. She detects the pleasant plumpness of those claws closing in around two round orbs. And then the owl pulls free, Harriet’s eyeballs clutched in her talons like precious wet pearls. The owl utters a triumphant squawk and returns to the night, taking Harriet’s eyes with her. Miriam blinks and she’s back in her own mind.
She kneels outside the window, breath punching in and out of her lungs. Inside the room, Harriet pirouettes blindly, making wordless, rage-fueled noises. She swings at the open air.
And then she stops.
She focuses.
Her head spins and she orients toward the window. Toward Miriam. She bares her teeth, red with Miriam’s gore, somehow still staring with those great bleeding holes in her skull, the skin around them claw-fringed into red ribbons.
Harriet charges toward the window.
Holy shit.
Miriam turns and drops her ass onto the shingles and slides down, bump, bump, bump. Though she’s never gone out this window, she made a habit in her teenage years of knowing how to get down to the ground. It’s not hard as long as you’re careful, but caution has, like Miriam, gone way the fuck out the window. She bounces down to the gutter, clumsily tries to catch it, misses, and falls. Miriam tumbles down from the end of the roof and into the old flowerbeds around the side of the house. Flowers haven’t grown here in years, and she hits a berm of hard, desiccated mulch. The air blasts out of her. Her hands work furiously through patches of weeds to get her back to standing.
As she does she thinks, This is it, this is over.
But it’s not. Not at all. Above her head, the roof bangs and shakes. Harriet comes hurrying down toward the roof’s edge face first, on all fours, loping more like a dog than a human being. She calls out Miriam’s name in a groaning, grinding, inhuman voice: “Miiiiiiiriaaaaaam.”
Harriet doesn’t stop. She leaps off the edge of the roof. Miriam backpedals, nearly stumbling into the trees as Harriet lands hard, her arm snapping—kkkt!—the bone spearing through the skin. And even that does not stop her. She gets back up, the one arm dangling around the ejected bone, and she fixes those dead sockets right on Miriam. She again roars Miriam’s name—Miiiiiiiriaaaaaam!
That’s all it takes.
Miriam bolts through the trees.
TWENTY-NINE
JESUS FUCK WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK JUST HAPPENED
Time passes. She has no idea how much, and an absurd part of her fears that this night is forever and the sun will never rise.
Miriam is in the woods, and then she’s walking across an open field, behind someone’s barn. And then she’s back in the woods before reaching a crooked gravel road. She’s lost. No idea at all where she is.
This is what she knows.
First, she is being followed. For once, maybe for the first time ever, this gives her comfort. Because what’s following her is an owl.
Miriam can’t see the bird. But she can sense her in the trees. The beast is up there, gliding soundlessly from branch to branch, staying just out of sight a hundred feet back. Once in a while, the owl leaves her, returning minutes later, her beak wet with mouse blood. Miriam blinks sometimes and can taste it: a dead mouse aftertaste clinging to her tongue like a film. She can taste its fur, its fear, can feel its tail whipping about her throat. Her bird mind is hungry and excited, and her human stomach churns with pure quease.
She concentrates on the creature. Sharing space with the owl lets her know the owl. The knowledge she obtains is both general and intimate. She knows about this owl and, by proxy, about all the owls of its kind.
This is the same bird who she called to attack Jack and his “lawyer.” The owl is a great horned owl. This bird is two feet tall, and has a wingspan over twice that. And yet it only weighs as much as the average Chihuahua. She glides silently because she weighs so little, because her bones are hollow. Her feet are zygodactyl—two claws in the front, two in the back. Good for perching on branches. Good for holding food.
Good for plucking out eyeballs.
My, what big eyes you have.
The owl will digest its mouse and regurgitate the parts it did not use—a thick, globby wad of pelt and bones and other biological detritus. Then it will hunt again. The owl is always on the hunt.
This owl had a mate once. A mate struck by a car. A mate gone.
But she is strong and she perseveres. She is large and one day will find another mate. For now, the owl hunts alone.
No . . .
For now, she hunts with me.
Miriam blinks as gravel grinds underneath her boots.
I think I have an owl.
It should comfort her. And it does, in a small way—in the way that it is a fraying rope, a fucking shoelace to which she clings, allowing her to dangle over a very wide and very deep abyss. Grosky is dead. Harriet—somehow!—is not. Images flash in her mind like lightning strikes: Harriet, leg snapped inward. Eyes robbed from her head. Bone sticking out of her arm. And still she kept coming.
Maybe she’s not alive after all.
Maybe she’s dead and her body just doesn’t know it yet.
Or maybe that shadow she spoke of just won’t let her go.
What unholy, unearthly power has resurrected someone like Harriet Adams?
Harriet has a shadow in her, but Miriam has a Trespasser outside of herself, just as Sugar had the Ghost, and just as Wren may have some strange vision of her. Is it the same thing? Ashley Gaynes never spoke much about an external presence—but he did talk about voices.
So did that shooter in the Ship Bottom shop on Long Beach Island. The one Miriam dispatched with a barbecue fork to the neck. He spoke of voices too.
What drove Eleanor Caldecott? Or Karen Key? Were they fate-breakers like her? Or were they on the other side of it? Are there even sides, or are they all products of the same trauma-fucked system? The questions haunt her as she staggers forward, exhaustion dogging her every step. Something larger is going on here, and she has no idea what it is. She can’t get her hands around it. Can’t see the big picture.
Her mind loops and whorls. A snake slurping its own tail like a spaghetti noodle.
Carpet noodle.
The fucked thing is, it seems that these forces are conspiring to get Miriam to stop doing what she’s doing. But she doesn’t want to do it anymore. She wants to stop! That’s why she went after Mary Stitch. The only one who wants her to keep riding this hell-train is her passenger, her plague: the Trespasser. That demon, that ghost, that stain on her wall ever-spreading. The Trespasser is herding her toward something, some outcome she can’t quite see or understand. . . .
Stop thinking about all this. It’s not doing you any good.
She needs to think about the here and the now.
She’s on a gravel road. At night. With an owl.
Focus, you dim bitch.
Where will she go?
She has no phone. She has no car. Her first thought is now and always: Louis. Find him, lie in his lap, beg him to take her away somewhere.
But that just draws him in further. Came a time just like this one where she suffered an attack by Harriet Adams, and she ran right into Louis’s arms—and that led them to him. Ingersoll took him. Cut out his eye. Almost killed him. Miriam’s very presence caused fate to double back on itself, to nearly fulfill the prophecy of his death that she was trying to interrupt in the first place.
She can’t call Grosky. Doesn’t want to drag Gabby into this.
What, then? Her house is an abat
toir. She has a couple bucks on her still. A motel, maybe. Or hitchhike back to Florida. Somewhere to go, to hide, to get her head straight . . .
But then there’s Wren. Wren, the reason for all of this. That girl is caught in the glue, same as Miriam is. Harriet was unknowingly hunting Wren, thinking she was Miriam—that scary bitch just got lucky with Uncle Jack. (Lucky? Or were forces again conspiring against you, Miriam?) If Wren keeps mucking around, Harriet will find her, too. And then what?
Shit, shit, shit.
She is paralyzed by indecision, destroyed by exhaustion.
Ahead, through the trees, the gravel road on which she walks ends, leading out to another road—this one paved. A few headlights spear the night as cars move past. Miriam just wants to find a pile of leaves to curl up in. Above, the owl remains a comforting presence. Her own special shadow.
Miriam walks out to the intersection, unsure whether to turn left, turn right, or walk into the middle of the road and wait for a truck to flatten her like a blood pancake. It’s then that her decision is made for her—
Coming down the road is a police cruiser. And soon as she’s in its sight, the red-and-blues come on, and so does the siren.
THIRTY
PO-PO ROLLIN’ IN
“Hands up.”
Red, blue, red, blue. A carousel of lights, whirling about the black.
The cop stands there. Door open. Him behind it. Gun up. Miriam is pinned by headlights. His service pistol holds firm, its barrel staring her down.
Trembling, she puts her hands up.
He tells her, “Get down on the ground.”
And she gets down on the ground.
Because she’s tired. She thinks, I could call the owl. She could summon the bird, bring it down upon him. Maybe it would claw out his eyes, slash his cheeks, beak-bite the nose clean off his face. But this cop, she doesn’t know who he is. He’s probably just some dumb country buck, doesn’t know anything about her, doesn’t know what she can do or why she can do it. He doesn’t deserve her.
Though the larger question is:
Does she deserve this?
Corralled and arrested? It does not take long for her to realize the ramifications of what has happened—and what could happen next. She’s escaped so many scrapes before, it always felt like she would forever be slipping the leash and running free. But now the rope is tightening. Wren has left a trail. And Wren looks like Miriam now. They tried to catch Wren at the campground, and who did they see running across the paths? Miriam. Who now has a dead ex-FBI agent in her house? Miriam. Who’s been running around this country, probably leaving behind inconclusive serial killer evidence all over the place with wanton disregard? One guess, and her name rhymes with delirium.
They’re going to lock her up.
Maybe for things she did.
Certainly for things she didn’t.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it needs to be over. Suddenly, a long haul in jail sounds almost comforting. What’s the saying? Three hots and a cot? I could be good in prison. I’ll be the wild-ass queen of Cell Block Nine. All the bitches will give me their cigarettes and their toilet wine, and I’ll tell them how they meet their well-deserved maker and we’ll all laugh and give each other tattoos.
They could form a club. Wait, no, a gang. A proper gang.
She presses her forehead against the asphalt. It’s cool. It’s calming. She concentrates on her breathing, in and out, in and out. Tinnitus rings in her ear and she focuses on that, too. Behind her comes the scuff of shoes. The cop is coming toward her. He has trepidation in his steps, like he’s not sure what he’s dealing with.
No need to be scared of me, man. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.
Her mind wanders to Louis killing Samantha. And Wren out there on her own. A surge inside Miriam says, These are your people, you have to do something, you’re obligated and responsible, you can’t give up now. But she drowns that in a tide of exhaustion. Because to hell with all that. She doesn’t need to be responsible to anyone but herself. At least in jail she’ll get a fucking nap.
She winds her hands behind her back, crosses one wrist over the next.
“I’m ready,” she says. Her voice sounds tired. Raw, like her vocal cords have been run over a cheese grater. “I’m okay. I’m cool.”
But the cop isn’t coming any closer. She hears a buzzing sound—
And then he’s on the phone.
“Yeah,” he’s saying. “It’s her. It has to be her.”
Who is he talking to? He’s not on the radio. Which means he’s not talking to the police. Harriet. Could it be? Maybe he’s not police at all. Or maybe he’s on the take—in her pocket. She said she had rebuilt Ingersoll’s empire . . .
Miriam suddenly pushes herself up. But she hears the hammer of the gun click into place as he hurries forward, and the gun barrel presses hard into the back of her skull, the pistol’s sights digging into the skin and the bone beneath.
Her mind wanders out now to find the owl, but she can’t see the bird at all—has it gone hunting? Has it given up on her? The owl is not a carrion bird, and perhaps now that she’s dead meat, it cares nothing for her. Please . . .
“You’re not a cop,” she says.
“I was,” he answers, digging his gun into the back of her head. “Still got the uniform. Still got the car.”
“You’re with her.”
He laughs softly. “Harriet. Yeah. She’s got a real thing for you, Miss Black. But good news: she wants you alive. Says she needs something from you.”
Then comes the jingle-jangle of handcuffs and the buzzy sound of him opening one cuff, then the next. Metal touches her left wrist, and she feels tears at her eyes. I’m not going to jail. I’m going back to Harriet. As he closes the first cuff on her wrist, his thumb grazes her skin—
The vision is fast.
The lights. The horn. The crashing of metal.
“Ten seconds,” she says without meaning to.
“What?” the cop asks, pausing.
The ground throbs beneath her.
Lights, new lights, bathe the space. White pushing back the red and blue.
She counts aloud:
“Nine, eight, seven—”
Miriam yanks her hand away, spinning around and whipping the not-cop in the face with the one free cuff—only her one wrist is bound, and so the other becomes a weapon. He cries out, the gun going off, she ducks it—
“Six, five—”
His face is bleeding. His face is alive with rage.
And now, the side of his face is bathed in white light. Miriam’s mind flits to the owl’s mind, too—the owl sees the light, feels the rumble of rubber on road.
Four, three, two—
Miriam kicks out, catching the not-cop in the stomach. He staggers backward, away from the cruiser, into the middle of the road—
Lights bathe him. Almost erase him.
A little hatchback car plows into him.
The cop doesn’t even have the chance to cry out—he’s sucked under the front tire, then the back, before the car skids to a halt and he’s thrown up back onto the road, a dead and crumpled mess. In the vision she had, she felt all his bones break like old, rotten broomsticks over a firm knee. Snap, crackle, pop. He was dead before the hatchback stopped moving.
The hatchback’s horn is on permanent honk now. Bwahhhhh. Miriam stands, the cuff dangling from one wrist. She tries to shake it off like it’s a wasp, but of course that doesn’t work and she feels stupid for even trying. She looks up, dizzy and dazed, as the driver of the car steps out. A woman. Heavyset. Hair all mussed up in a tower of panic and chaos. Her jaw is slacked in horror as she sees what she’s done. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” Tears shine in her eyes.
Miriam says, “He wasn’t a cop.”
“You . . . Cuffs . . . He was a cop.”
“I just said he wasn’t a cop.” But the woman is blinking, hands waving in the air like she’s trying to deny that any of this has happened or is happening st
ill. Fuck it. Shock has taken the woman. A line of blood is snaking down from the lady’s scalp—she must’ve hit her head on the steering wheel. No airbag. Looks like an older model Honda. Whatever. “You got a phone?”
“Phone. Phone . . .” The woman says it like she doesn’t even know what it is. Maybe she doesn’t. Could be she’s got a concussion.
One broken cookie . . .
Miriam takes the initiative, heading over to the car—stepping past the pile of death that was the not-cop—and throwing open the passenger-side door.
There. A cell phone sitting in the cup holder. Miriam reaches in and snatches it up. She makes the one call she can make.
Louis answers.
“I need you,” she says.
And that’s all it takes.
PART FOUR
* * *
THE BLACK MARK
THIRTY-ONE
A CABIN IN THE WOODS
Midnight.
A night in early December.
Blue moonlight cuts across the middle of the bed like the blade of a straight razor. Miriam sucks in a sharp gasp of breath, panic suddenly whirring through her veins like the bit on a power drill. It’s cold, but she’s sweat-slick. She feels beset from all sides—shadows pressing in, hands reaching for her, shapes at the window. Pure evil with many eyes, many hands. For a moment, she has no idea where she is—
And then she looks over. A shape lies next to her—the familiar human topography, a mountain range formed by a man’s body. The quilt is wound around Louis’s feet in a tangle. The white sheets are pulled up to that space below those two perfect lines that angle downward from his hips to his cock. His chest rises and falls, slow and steady, his breath soft and with the faint whistle of air between half-open lips. He moans a little.
Miriam gets up. She knows the score. When sleep hits the wall and she can’t help but awaken, the only recourse is to get her ass up and moving.