The Dark Magazine
Page 2
Everyone stares at her. Then they turn to Harper.
“Mike Kaminsky died in 1987,” Harper says. She doesn’t even have to think about it. “The Camp Chastain killer was a disfigured lunatic who escaped from a mental asylum and murdered eight people, including Heather and Mike.”
“Lunatic?” Abby asks. “Isn’t that kind of—”
“The ’80s were big on mommy issues, deformities, and revenge,” Harper says. “A compassionate understanding of mental illness, not so much.”
“So maybe this guy didn’t do it,” Megan says. “Maybe the research is wrong.”
“Hey. Do I tell you how to spell things or kick really high? My research is solid.”
Megan shrugs. “It’s been wrong before.”
Harper resists the urge to throw her oatmeal at Megan’s indifferent face. It’s not like she’s just casually insulting Harper’s life’s work or anything. “Okay, maybe I missed that your BFF was some secret slut—”
“Harper,” Cindy chides, presumably because only the angel gets to call anyone a slut.
“—but missing a frame-up job? That’s something else. Trust me: this guy was guilty as hell.”
“Well, maybe Mike was in on it,” Abby suggests. “Maybe they were partners?”
And Harper likes Abby, she really does, but who even thinks like that? How would a stoner jock with no tragic backstory or otherwise notable family history somehow team up with a random mental patient who only happened to escape that night because of a freak electrical storm, anyway?
“Serial killers didn’t start teaming up until the ’90s,” Harper says, instead of calling her childhood crush an idiot. “And Mike wasn’t evil. He just . . . died.”
“Well, he seems pretty fucking evil now,” Heather says. Mascara drips down her face, and it looks like war paint. “If he wasn’t the killer then, why is he the killer now ?”
“Maybe he wasn’t,” Megan says.
“Fuck you. I know what I saw. I’m not crazy.”
“I’m sure that’s not what Megan meant,” Harper says, even though that’s obviously what Megan meant. “He did act like an ’80s slasher. Maybe it’s generational, a learned behavior. Kill as you saw others killed. Kill as you yourself were killed. And it’s obviously not Mike every night, so maybe . . . well, we’ve all wondered, haven’t we? Where the dead boys go?”
“You think they become killers?” Abby asked. “ Why ?”
“Well,” Heather says, pushing up from the table, hands shaking but jaw set. “There’s someone we can ask about that.”
Heather attacks the angel like she does pretty much everything: whole-heartedly, and without much forethought. In all the years Megan’s been here, she’s never seen anyone try to hurt him before. Try to run, yes. Attempt suicide, yes. But no one has ever punched the angel, has thrown their entire body into it, screaming with thirty years worth of accumulated fury and grief. There’s something almost . . . religious . . . about the experience.
Of course, the angel is still made from marble, so he barely sways back, while Heather breaks her hand.
Cindy pulls her away. Heather’s bent over, cradling broken, bleeding fingers. Red drips over the autumn leaves. “Who are the killers?”
“They are servants of God, as are we—”
“Bullshit. Was it Mike, last night?”
“Their mortal lives are unimpor—”
“ Was it Mike ?”
The angel looks at her calmly. “Yes.”
“He—what about Steve? Rick—”
“Will a list help you achieve redemption?” The angel begins reciting names, although Megan doesn’t recognize any at first, not until Jesse.
Jesse.
The first time he’d kissed her, it had been under the full moon. She wonders how he’d killed her, when he’d killed her. How many times he had killed her.
“So, it’s true,” Megan says. Her voice sounds distant to her own ears. “The boys are always killers, and the girls are always killed.”
“Different punishments must be given,” the angel says. “Different lessons must be learned.”
Heather laughs. “Yeah? What’s Mike’s lesson? How to kill efficiently? Creatively?” She tugs her ear. “Nostalgically?”
“Mike’s penance is not your penance,” the angel says, and turns back to the open graves. “You will learn nothing from this, any of you. We will speak of your sins at Contrition.”
He moves towards the shovel, and Heather breaks free, grabbing it first and throwing it behind her. “I think we should talk about sin now.”
The angel tilts his head. “Do you wish to confess?”
“No, I know why I’m here, and fuck you, fuck you if you think you can make me sorry.” Heather spits in his face, and then blinks. Grins viciously and does it again.
The angel ignores the saliva dripping down his stone cheek. “If you do not wish to—”
“I want you to tell me why they’re here.” Heather looks around wildly, points at Abby. “That bitch, start with her. She was good enough to survive Round 1. Why not Round 2? What sin did she commit to condemn her to this ?”
Abby shrinks back. She looks at Harper, then away.
“You left her,” Megan says. She’s surprised it took her so long to realize it. “You left Harper behind, didn’t you?”
“No,” Harper says, stepping forward. “No, I pushed her out of the way. I did that. That’s not on her.”
Abby doesn’t look up. “You died because—”
“No,” Harper says again. “Look, the other night, I didn’t mean it, okay? I don’t regret it, saving you. I loved you. Since, like, second grade and macaroni necklaces, I loved you, or, or something like love, anyway. You know that, right? You know how I felt?”
Abby nods. “I know, I knew. But I’m not, I’m sorry—”
“I know,” Harper says. “That’s okay. You don’t owe me for that.”
Abby finally meets her eyes. “You died for me.”
Harper shrugs. “If it makes you feel better, I was always going to die.”
“Oh, I didn’t—you were sick?”
Harper closes her eyes, probably so she doesn’t roll them. “I’m talking statistics, Abby, not disease. Research doesn’t lie. Geeks are more mainstream these days, and a dead mom, well, that gets you a little leeway to be weird. But a lesbian, you know. That’s just not survivor girl material.”
“Harper—”
Harper keeps trying to smile. “I always knew. I tried not to be one, for a while, and then I thought maybe I could live some other kind of story. But stats don’t lie.”
“They lie,” Megan says. “Harper, they lie all the time.”
Harper looks at her, tired. “You keep insulting my research.”
“Not your research,” Megan says. “The facts.”
“Facts are facts.”
“Not if you know how to spin them. Not if there aren’t any witnesses left behind.”
“What—”
“She left me,” Megan says. “Jen left me behind.”
They’d been friends since fifth grade. No one was the bad girl. No one was the good girl. Megan was a cheerleader, a reader. She’d lost her virginity at fifteen. She sang, mostly at church. Jen didn’t go to church. She wasn’t a morning person. She ran canned food drives at the school, and had sex with her boyfriend in the boy’s locker room. Jen gave Megan a friendship bracelet when they were twelve, and Megan wore it every day.
Megan fell by the pool, while the killer was chasing them, and Jen looked back, and there was time, there was time.
But the instinct took over. Jen ran, and Megan died.
“I don’t blame her,” Megan says, even though she had, bitterly, for the first few years. “But they said she was a hero, right? Brave, you said. I think that’s just what everyone needed her to be. And the dead—you know who Brad Marsh was?”
“Jen’s classmate,” Harper says.
“Mr. Gunn?”
“He
r cheerleading coach.”
“What about me?”
“You’re Megan King.”
“But who was I?”
Harper inhales. “Jen Markham’s best friend.”
Megan smiles. Fingers the bloody, yellow bracelet around her wrist. “And all this time,” she says, “I thought she was my best friend.”
For a long moment, there’s silence, only the rustling of dead leaves and white feathers in the wind. Cindy looks to the angel for guidance, but he only watches them impassively, unfeeling. Unconcerned.
No, she reminds herself. No, he only wants us to discover our own answers, our own Redemption. He watches us with love.
Because he has to love them, he has to, or else—
Heather turns on Abby. “Is that what they said about you, princess? That you were somehow better ?”
Abby begins to cry, and Harper steps in front of her, a knight clad in a plaid shirt and tight, ripped jeans. “Jesus, would you stop being a bitch for two seconds and listen ?”
Heather grins. Cindy knows that grin. She steps between them, squeezing Heather’s shoulder gently.
“Enough,” she says. “Who are you trying to hurt?”
Heather’s mouth opens, but she doesn’t answer, which is answer enough. Heather has never known herself.
“You must be calm,” Cindy says. “This is not the way we find Redemption.”
Abruptly, Heather pushes Cindy off. “We? We ? The fuck you even need redemption for, Cindy?”
Cindy looks down. “You’ve heard my Contrition many times.”
Heather snorts. “Yeah, yeah. Big Bad Cindy has sex on the couch while the kids are asleep. So the fuck what?”
“It was wrong, ” Cindy hisses.
“Yeah,” Heather agrees. “You’re a lousy fucking babysitter. You definitely deserved to get fired. Getting murdered, though? Getting murdered for forty fucking years?”
“Seems like overkill,” Harper says, and a few other girls nod.
It’s—no. No, they’re wrong, of course they’re wrong. If she didn’t deserve to be here, then she wouldn’t be here. Maybe she’d thought differently once, that she’d been punished enough for such a simple sin—but that was just the Devil in her mind again, traitorous as her lungs. She belongs here. She has to.
“I was irresponsible,” Cindy says. “Wicked. I was—”
“Sixteen,” Megan says.
“No,” Cindy says, even though that’s true. “I’m—I’m—”
“Bad?” Heather asks. “Please. You don’t know the first thing about being a bad girl.”
“You do,” Megan says, and Heather laughs.
“Oh yeah. Drinking, drugs . . . I was a total mega slut, sucked and fucked my way through the football team, the hockey team, hell, the debate team. I’m not sorry for any of it.” She turns to the angel. “You hear me? I’m not sorry for shit!”
“You need redemption, Heather,” the angel says.
“Bullshit.”
But it’s Megan, not Heather, who says it.
Heather laughs uneasily. “Look, I appreciate this whole dead sisterhood solidarity, or whatever, but I’m not like you guys, okay? I get why I’m here.”
“You’re here to be forgiven,” Cindy says. “We’re all—”
“You don’t need forgiveness, you fucking cow, don’t you get that yet ?”
“ You don’t get it,” Harper says, sounding stunned. “Both of you. All of us.”
“The fuck are you—”
“Why did you save my life last night?” Megan asks.
Heather blinks. “Because—because to survive the—”
“No,” Megan says. “You don’t want forgiveness, remember? You have nothing to prove, so why the sacrifice? Why the bravery?”
“What’s to fear?” Heather’s grin keeps slipping at the edges. “It’s not bravery if you’re guaranteed resurrection.”
But she’s wrong about that, Cindy knows. The fear stays in your bones. Your body knows to be afraid. Your body remembers everything.
“You saved someone else, right?” Abby asks, and Beth nods. In fact, all the girls do. “Sounds like the kind of thing a final girl does.”
“Or is supposed to,” Megan says.
“I didn’t save anyone, ” Heather reminds them.
Cindy looks at Heather’s ruined ear and realizes, “You didn’t get the chance.”
But if Heather hadn’t died so quickly, wouldn’t she have tried? Cindy thinks maybe she would have—and that means something, that’s important, surely that’s more important to God than sex or drugs or whatever else Heather had done wrong. What if Cindy has been wrong all these years? What if she’s been the weak one, the wicked one, all along?
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know. She looks to the angel, but he’s still just standing there, removed, unmoved.
“I’m not a good girl,” Heather says, shaking. “I’m not. ”
“What’s a good girl?” Abby asks, and for the first time in years, Cindy isn’t sure.
“If you’re trying to make a point,” Heather says, “why don’t you just fucking make it?”
Abby isn’t trying to make a point. She honestly doesn’t know. The qualifications keep shifting. At first, she’d been a good girl: that poor thing, that brave thing, what a dreadful tragedy to befall her, and then—
“Why did you love me?” she asks Harper.
“Because . . . I don’t know.” Harper shrugs. “You helped me with that necklace, and you have red hair and freckles, and you thought Hufflepuff was superior to Gryffindor, even though Ravenclaw clearly trumps all, and you, you’re you. I don’t know, I don’t really understand what you’re asking.”
“You died because you loved me.”
“Look, we already—”
“You didn’t kill anyone because you loved me,” Abby says.
What a tragedy, they said, but what causes something like that, what so drastically changes a good, young man—someone with a top GPA, someone going places—into a killer? Why was he so obsessed with his ex-girlfriend? How did he fall so desperately in love? She was pretty, but she wasn’t beautiful. She was nice, but she wasn’t a saint. All those people he killed for her. What did she do to him? What did she do ?
“Is that my contrition?” Abby asks the angel. “Am I being punished for Ethan’s sins?”
“Ethan’s penance is not your penance.”
“But that’s why I’m here, right?” There’s something inside Abby now, something shaking, impatiently waiting to explode. “Because I led him down the dark path, because I tempted him to sin, because he killed all those people for me?”
“That’s stupid,” Harper says, even as the angel says, “Yes.”
Different lessons must be learned, the angel had said.
Harper can’t stop thinking it; everything else around her is a sort of buzz, a white noise that she can feel just underneath her skin. Different lessons must be learned, and Harper, she must be a pretty slow learner after all, because only now does she finally, finally understand what the angel has been trying to teach her all along: that being selfless is meaningless if you’re a slut, that it’s more important to be white than to be brave, that a girl will be punished and repent for a boy’s sins, that the boy is never to blame. And this whole thing, this WHOLE THING—
“It’s fucking Adam and Eve,” Harper breathes, and then she’s crying, and Cindy’s on her knees, and Megan’s making the first real facial expression Harper’s ever seen her make. And then Abby’s screaming, something wordless and furious.
Abby is launching herself at the angel, swinging the shovel at his head.
White slivers of stone fly through the air, barely more than a small handful of dust . . . but that dust is wet, and coated with blood. The angel lifts his hand to the thin crack in his cheek, and his lips part as his fingertips come away red.
“But . . . ” the angel says, and winces.
Heather inhales, or gasps, or chokes.
The angel can bleed, so long as you hit hard enough. He can feel. He can feel pain.
And he didn’t know—
—But Heather does.
Now she does, and now they do too. She can see it on the dead girls’ faces. They know what it means, to feel pain. They know what they have the power to do.
No one is kneeling in the yard anymore.
“You can’t,” the angel says, but Heather can, so she takes the shovel and slams it straight into his face.
Blood bursts from his nose. He staggers back, and makes a sound from the back of his throat like glass shattering into pieces. “You can’t,” he says again. “Another will come. This isn’t the way to Redemption—”
But then they’re on him, the shovel passing from girl to girl, slamming it into his throat and chest and kneecaps, everywhere blood and chunks of stone. They’re speaking, sometimes screaming, out of breath and overlapping one another, their voices individual and somehow one.
“We are not your fucking cloth girls.”
Heather slams the shovel down, shattering the angel’s wings.
“Our penance is now your penance. But we’re teaching you something new.”
Harper shoves the angel, off-balance, into one of the open graves.
“We reject your Kingdom of God, your Redemption. We will not repent.”
Cindy shovels dirt and listens, unmoved, to the angel’s glass screams.
“We’re done paying for someone else’s sins. It’s your turn to seek salvation.”
Abby stays the shovel, and forces the angel to climb out of the grave on crumbling hands and knees.
“When the dead boys come, when your friends come, when God comes, don’t fight the instinct.”
Megan pushes the angel forward through the autumn leaves and raises the shovel over her head.
“Now, angel. Now, it’s your turn. Go. Run. ”
* * *
About the Author
Carlie St. George is a Clarion West graduate whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, and other publications. When not watching horror movies and wishing for more surprising final girls, she can be found over-analyzing TV and movies at her blog My Geek Blasphemy.