by Chuck Wendig
She sees signs for 422 ahead, and Louis guns the engine.
PART FIVE
* * *
THE ROOST
THIRTY-EIGHT
EXILE, REVISITED
The truck judders over the uneven gravel drive. It’s morning, but early enough that the dark is still over the world like a hand pressed across its eyes and its mouth, keeping it silent and blind. Ahead is the cabin.
Their escape from Reading was easier than expected—Louis zigzagging from highway to back road and back to highway again. Nobody stopped them. No red-and-blue lights. No Harriet descending from the dark, eyeless and mad.
A half hour in, he pulled over, and Wren crawled into the cab with them. The owl joined them, too, which made for less than comfortable conditions. The two hours back north were spent in silence. The owl occasionally tilted its head and glared at everyone, its expression both murderous and bewildered.
And now they’re back. Back to the forest, the snow, the cabin. Back into exile, back to the snow globe. But Miriam knows that the globe is still cracked, and that everything it contained is leaking out. Drip by bloody drip.
THIRTY-NINE
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
Louis says, “I think we’ve all had a long night—”
“No.” One word, sharp as a stabbing knife. Miriam points to Wren with a single finger gun, drops the hammer, bang. “I want to know.”
Wren blinks. Just looking at her is throwing Miriam for a bowel-churning mental loop—she looks like Miriam did when she first started out on the run from her mother, her power, her life. The black knife-slash hair, the dark eyes, the white T-shirt, the denim run ragged. This is a girl on the edge. Miriam knows, because she too was on the edge. Did I ever leave the edge? Or did I just buy real estate here, right on the razor’s line?
Shit.
The girl’s face twists up. A sneer tugs at her lips and defiance shines on her face like lightning. She looks to Miriam, but then she looks to Louis, too. Staring at him hard. Not just at him—through him. Like she’s pinning him to the wall with spears. Is she afraid of him? Miriam gives him a nod and he eases backward into the cabin, pressing himself into the corner, where a small chair waits near the bed. He melts into it, lost to shadow.
Wren’s swagger and anger fall away. The girl looks tired. Her voice is weary and older than it should be when she answers, “Fine. I can tell you whatever. What do you wanna know, psycho?” Even that word, psycho, it’s lost its teeth. Just hollow bluster, rote.
“I . . .” Miriam flounders, flopping around in her own uncertainty. “I don’t know. Something. Anything. Everything.”
“Got a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke anymore.”
Wren gives her a look like she’s a space alien with a pair of rubber dicks for antennae. “Oooookay.” Her fingers fidget, dancing like spider legs. “I thought you were dead. I really did. I was told . . .” The words die in her mouth.
“It was me that told you. Or something that looked like me.”
Wren hesitates. “Yeah.”
“Said I was dead.”
“Uh-huh.” The girl licks her lips, nervous.
“The Trespasser.”
“What?”
“I have one. In my head. I see it sometimes. I call him the Trespasser. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a phantom and it’s there when I don’t want it and not there when I want it. And it’s always pushing me. Pushing me toward some new bullshit. Some death. Some twist of fate that I’m supposed to fix. Or break.” She hears the desperation in her own voice, and it mirrors Wren’s. Maybe not a mirror at all. Maybe it’s like looking through a window. “I don’t know. I know you have a power, though. Right?”
“It’s a curse.”
“I know it is.” She leans forward, eager. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s like yours. But different.”
“How?”
“I don’t see how people are going to die.”
“What do you see?”
“I see people who are going to kill.”
INTERLUDE
WREN
She sees them a lot. Since her time in the river, in fact. For a while when she was younger, she thought of them as the Silver Lining People, because that’s how it looked, right? There they are, plain as day, but around them is this bright, shining line. Like light flashing off a knife. But that kind of ruined the idea of a silver lining for her. A silver lining was supposed to be a good thing, and she knew that these people were bad. Knew it down in her gut. How bad, or what that badness meant, Wren didn’t know.
Then she thought it looked almost like liquid metal. Sliding around their margins. Like the metal of a gun, melted. Like mercury.
So, that’s how she thinks of them now. Mercury Men. Even when they’re women. In a crowd, there’s always at least one. Standing out from the rest, popping out like the image in a Magic Eye painting. The Mercury Men look 3-D in a 2-D world. Raised up, embossed, above and beyond the others.
When she sees one, her stomach goes sour. Her chest burns and her heartbeat quickens. At her temples, she feels this pressure, like a pair of thumbs pushing in hard, real hard, like they’re trying to pop her head like a zit.
For years, she’s been seeing them and she doesn’t know why, and now she’s sitting outside a truck stop near to midnight, and she sees one get out of his truck. It’s dead here mostly, just a couple truckers in and out of the place, but this one stands out. He’s got sludgy shoulders, a broad chest, and a wide gut. Hair shorn tight to his scalp, a head the shape of a pencil eraser. Dopey-looking. And yet, there it is—that shining line drawn around him. Mercury Man.
“You see him?” comes a voice to her right. Wren is sitting there alone with an empty French fry carton in her hand—one she fished out of a trashcan so she could swab salt out of it with a wet finger—and the voice is instantly familiar. She wheels on it, surprised.
“It’s you,” Wren says, her voice small and breathless.
“Hey, See You Next Tuesday,” Miriam says. Cigarette dangling from her lips. Eyes rimmed with makeup and shadow. She hooks a nearby stool with the toe of her boot and drags it noisily over before sitting down. “Been a while.”
“How the—where the—” Wren looks around, bewildered. She’s out here in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Pennsylvania, and somehow Miriam Black just zeroes in on her like a sniper’s bullet? She blinks, thinking this isn’t real. But it’s real. There she sits. Puffing on her cigarette. Anger bores through Wren like the bit on a power drill. “You abandoned me.”
Miriam shrugs. “Pfft. It’s what I do, doll.”
The Mercury Man crosses the lot and heads toward the truck stop. All the little fast food places in there are closed, but the gas station is open, as are the bathrooms and the vending machines. He steps inside, and Wren lets out the breath she was keeping in her chest. He’s gone.
She turns to Miriam.
“You were supposed to look out for me.”
“I tend to look out for me first. But whatever. I’m here now.”
Memories whip through Wren’s head. All this time on the road. Hitchhiking. Homeless. Hooking up with whoever she has to hook up with just to survive. She’s slept in Porta-Johns, she’s had to fight off truckers and bikers and cops who wanted something from her she wasn’t willing to give, she’s been chased by dogs and stalked by drunken college assholes in pickup trucks. Just this week, she got into a real claws-out fight with Vic, the Oxy dealer she’d been living with up in Scranton for the last couple months. He punched her in the stomach. She slammed a door on his hand, broke his fingers. He punched her in the face, and now the cut over her right eye is crusted over but sometimes still bleeds. Wren stole his wallet on the way out, but turns out he didn’t have any cash, the fucker. Everything sucks. And all the while, she’s been waiting for someone to come to her, to offer her a hand and say, Come with me.
She’s been waiting for Miriam.
“You said
you’d come back for me.”
“I said I’d come check on you in a few years.” Miriam shrugs, ditches her cigarette—the bright cherry pinwheels through the dark before it hits a puddle left there by spring rains. “It’s been a few years. Ta-fucking-da.”
“I thought I’d see you sooner.”
“I was busy.”
“I was busy too.”
Miriam looks at her, eyebrow raised. “No kidding. You look like road trash. You look like me. Except for the being-dead part.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’m dead.”
“You’re an asshole, because you’re right here. Alive.”
Miriam holds up her hand. “High-five me.”
Wren wrinkles her nose but whatever, fine, she does it. She raises her hand and slaps it against Miriam’s—
Except it doesn’t slap. It goes clean through. Whiff.
Reality feels like it flips upside-down. A sense of disconnectedness runs through her, like all of what she knows and believes is sliding through her hands like a slicked-up rope.
Wren turns and throws up. She doesn’t have much food in her, so what comes out is just a spittle-stream of what feels like battery acid. It burns her stomach as her gut cinches in again and again until she’s heaving up nothing.
A man’s voice asks: “You okay?”
She startles, looking up—
A trucker stands nearby. Not the Mercury Man—this one with a big beard and a bald head. Chapped lips, pockmarked face, but kind eyes. She doesn’t see many kind eyes out here, so when she sees them, she remembers.
“I . . . I’m fine.”
“Okay.” But he’s still standing there, unsure.
“Am I alone?”
He gives her a look like she’s lost her damn mind. “What?”
Wren is about to say, Do you see this woman here? But when she turns, Miriam is already gone.
(The smell of her cigarette remains.)
The man says, “There’s a clinic nearby.” He must see the look of confusion on her face, so he explains: “North River Street in Wilkes-Barre. Alcohol but methadone, too, if you need that. And I think you might.”
He thinks I’m an addict. “Fuck you,” she says, suddenly venomous. “I’m fine. Just please go away.”
He holds up both hands in surrender. But those kind eyes of his hold true. He slides a twenty-dollar bill under a nearby napkin holder. “God bless,” he says, walking backward a few steps before turning around and heading toward a nearby Peterbilt.
Wren stares suspiciously at the twenty.
“Take it,” Miriam says, suddenly back. She lights another cigarette with a Bic lighter. Click, click, sizzle and puff. “You need it.”
Wren takes the money but fixes her eyes to Miriam. “You’re dead.”
“Dead as the American Dream, baby.”
“You’re a ghost.”
“We can go with that, sure.”
“You’re not real.”
Miriam talks around the cigarette, juggling the cancer stick between her lips. “If that’s what helps you sleep at night.”
“Fuck off. Go away. I don’t want you here.”
“A crude exorcism. Usually there’s a young priest and an old priest and some loftier words, but hey, cool. If that’s what you want, I’m outtie like a belly button, bitch.” Miriam kicks the stool backward, standing up. “I’ll see you in a few more years, and maybe then you’ll be willing to hear what I have to tell you.”
Miriam takes a few steps.
“Wait,” Wren says.
A small smile haunts Miriam’s face. “Do I have your attention?”
“What do you need to tell me?”
“Say pretty please.”
“I don’t beg.”
“Of course you don’t. I wouldn’t either. You’re defiant like me.” Miriam turns, wets her lips as the cigarette perches in the softly closed scissor-grip of her fingers and she says, “Here it is. I can tell you what the Silver Lining is about. I can tell you who the Mercury Men are.”
“Tell me.”
“They’re monsters.”
Suddenly, there it is: the pressure at her temples, the snare-drum roll of her pulse, the dry mouth, the high-pitched whine in her ears. She knows what it means: here comes the Mercury Man back out of the truck stop. He’s got a coffee in one hand, a couple candy bars held in the other. He heads back to his truck.
The light around him gleams like chrome.
“I don’t understand.”
Miriam points with her cigarette, the ember drawing searing circles around the Mercury Man. “That fella there? His name is Robert Bender. Bob. Bobby, Bobbo, Bobbing-for-Apples. Bob is a monster. But you already knew that.”
I did, Wren thinks. Or if she didn’t know it, she damn sure felt it.
She wants to puke again. Or cry.
But a little part of her feels good, too. Like this is a puzzle piece she’s long been missing. An answer to a riddle she didn’t know she was asking.
Miriam continues, even as Wren watches Bob juggle his drink and his candy and now his keys as he tries to get into his truck. “Bob is a monster, but not of the supernatural variety. Bob is no vampire, no werewolf, no sexy Frankenstein. Bob is the most mundane kind of monster. He is human. And he is a murderer.” Miriam shrugs. “Or at least he will be. He has not killed yet. But he will. Soon.”
Across the lot, Bob finally gets his door open and starts to slide his butt into the seat. Wren says, “How do you know?”
“It is my job to know.”
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”
“You don’t. You feel it in here—” Miriam reaches out and knocks on Wren’s breastbone like it’s a door. Wren startles—the touch is physical, unlike the spectral high-five. She feels it echo, thud, thud, thud. “But the only way you really know is you find out on your own. Watch him. Follow him.”
The truck’s headlights come on. Bright spears of bold light.
“Hunt the monster,” Miriam says—and Wren looks to her, but she’s already gone. Only thing left is a serpent of smoke still in the air, slithering before fading to nothing as Miriam herself has done.
Wren stands up as the truck starts to pull away.
She runs over, stepping in front of the truck, waving her hands.
The brakes squeal. The man leans his head out. “Get out of the way.”
“I need a ride.”
He waits a moment. Like he’s chewing it over.
But then he waves his hand. “All right. Come on. Let’s go.”
That’s how Wren meets Bob Bender, soon-to-be murderer.
FORTY
SWEET CHILD OF MINE
It’s 4:15 AM when Miriam says, “So you killed him with a knife. A fillet knife.” Like the one used on Louis. “You put his eye out with it.”
Hesitantly, Wren nods. She’s not proud of it. That’s good. If she were proud of it, if she wore it like a badge, then she’d be too far gone.
The girl looks to Louis. He remains awake but stays seated and quiet in the dark corner of the cabin. Miriam wants to go to him, crawl into his lap, and have him help her through this. But even though he was the one who fished her and Wren out of that river, he isn’t obligated to do this.
Not like Miriam is.
“Where’d you get that knife?” Miriam asks.
“It was there. At his house.”
It’s here that Louis speaks up. “I thought he was a trucker. How long did you stay with him?”
Wren flashes Louis a cold stare. It’s one shot through with fear. She stammers, “I don’t know. I just know his house was nearby.”
“Not a long-haul trucker,” Louis says with a small, soft grunt. Like he understands now. “Must’ve been a driver for local routes only.”
“The knife,” Miriam says. “You found it there.”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Someone showed it to me.”
&nb
sp; “Bender?”
“You.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. A long, exasperated sigh escapes her lips. “Not you-you. The other you. The ghost you.”
“Trespasser Miriam showed you the knife?”
“Yeah. I was sleeping on his couch. That’s where he let me crash. And the basement door opened up and I saw a face hidden there in the darkness. It was you. Her. It. Whatever. It whispered to me to come downstairs, and I did. And there I found the wall of knives.”
“How many knives?”
“I dunno. Like, dozens. The way some guys might have tools on the wall, Bender had knives. All kinds. Hunting knives, diving knives, machetes, skinning knives, and then the fishing knife. Miriam told me to take that one.”
“So you did. Then you went upstairs and killed him?”
“He found me downstairs. He was . . .” She shudders. “He had on a dirty white T-shirt, but he was fucking naked below that. He had a stun gun in his hand. I knew what was going to happen.”
Miriam’s jaw clenches. She knows too. She’s seen it. She’s been there. It’s not that every man is a monster, but there are enough out there hiding in plain sight, wolves wearing the skin of the sheep, hoping to take a bite out of Little Bo Peep. “What happened?”
“I killed him.”
“Why in the eye?”
“You—she—told me to. Guided my hand and everything.”
“Is it like that every time?”
“More or less. I see one of the Mercury Men. She’s there. She pushes me.”
“Ever try not to listen? Not to do what Trespasser Miriam wants?”
Wren swallows. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“I always end up there anyway.”
Miriam thinks to keep probing, to keep asking about all of it—every murder, every weapon, every last drop of blood spilled. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Wren is just a pawn in a game Miriam doesn’t yet understand. Is Wren’s Trespasser the same as Miriam’s? Are they different? Do their agendas connect or clash?