by M. R. Carey
She went inside! Jinx wept. She went inside and she hasn’t come out.
Fran had no idea what that meant. The room was thick with smoke now. The air she was breathing was as warm as soup and stank like barbecued garbage. She looked around again to try to find the knife, but now she couldn’t even see Beth lying right beside her.
Because Beth wasn’t on the floor anymore. She was standing up.
Fran scrambled back as Beth leaned down, both hands groping blindly. She readied herself to claw at Beth’s eyes if she only came within range. She would have to do it one-handed. Her left arm didn’t seem to be working anymore.
Don’t, Jinx yipped. Don’t, Fran! It’s the good one! It’s Liz!
Liz was looking around her with a dazed, myopic stare. It wasn’t just the smoke: she seemed to have forgotten where she was and how her body worked. Blood dripped freely from her lacerated wrists. Her upper body slumped at an angle as if someone was lifting her up from behind with a hand around her waist.
Fran ripped the duct tape from her mouth, sticky shreds of it still holding her lips together at the corners.
“There,” she gasped. She pointed with her one free hand to Zac and Molly. She was trying not to breathe in because breathing was like sipping coffee that turned out to be fresh out of the machine, bitter and boiling hot and once it was in your mouth impossible either to swallow or to spit out. She jabbed her finger urgently at the two prone bodies. “Over there. Go. Go!”
Liz turned and saw. Eventually. Everything seemed to be happening too slowly now, while the world consumed itself like kindling around them. She staggered away at last, shifting her weight carefully with each step as if she was walking a tightrope. But at least she was heading in the right direction.
Fran tried to pull herself on her good arm toward the open doorway, but she didn’t get far. The pain from her side and stomach when she moved was awful, and it made her think she might faint. She didn’t want that. Conscious, there were still things she could do.
And here was one of them. The X-Acto knife had fallen half in and half out of the flames. She tried to pick it up, but dropped it again with a yelp of shock and pain. It was already too hot to touch.
Liz staggered and stumbled out through the door, cradling a tiny, shapeless burden. Molly. After a long moment she came back inside, ducking her head away from the door’s flaming lintel.
Fran found Beth’s discarded jacket. There was a splash of bright red on the sleeve that looked a little like blood, and for a moment she was confused. She had wounded Beth in the leg, and anyway it had been after she took off the jacket. Then she saw the puddle of red plastic on the carpet. Molly’s dragon had melted, and the molten goop had splashed Beth’s sleeve.
Liz went out again for a second time. More slowly this time. She was pulling Zac by his shoulders, a few inches at a time, with agonizingly long rests in between. The blood from her slashed wrists still flowed freely over everything she touched, forced out by her exertions and by the heat of the blaze. She was all but used up now, forcing herself to move.
Fran slipped her hand partway into the sleeve of Beth’s jacket. She used it like an oven glove to pick up the knife which was now glowing red-hot in places. It still hurt, even through the leather, but she made herself hold on to it. She wouldn’t need it for long.
She didn’t have to cut through the duct tape on her legs and left arm. It vanished at the touch of the hot blade like a magic trick. She managed to get back up on her knees, maneuvering her unwilling body with terrible care and patience. The wounds were like an internal maze she was threading as she moved.
When Liz came back for her, Fran had the X-Acto knife in her hand, the jacket wound around her wrists about a hundred times to keep out the worst of the heat.
“Your wrists,” she croaked.
Liz didn’t seem to realize what she meant until Fran touched the flat of the blade to the deep wound on the heel of her left hand.
There was a sizzling sound, like bacon on a griddle. Liz gave an anguished grunt, the rush of her out-breath punching a brief hole in the roiling smoke. But when Fran stopped she held up the other hand. Fran cauterized that wound too, holding the knife hard against it until the flesh blistered.
They staggered out of the Perry Friendly together, holding each other up like soldiers in the First World War who had survived a charge across no-man’s-land. The ceiling fell in right behind them, sending gusts of sparks twisting and eddying around their ankles.
There was darkness for a little while. It was very welcome. Liz wrapped it around her like a blanket and prepared to sleep.
But she was shaken awake again, repeatedly. Someone was calling her name again and again, louder and more urgently each time.
“Liz,” she confirmed. “Yes. Here.” One word at a time was all she could manage. There were jagged splinters in her throat, a taste in her mouth like soot and rancid oil.
She lifted up her bleared and sticky eyelids, blinked until she could see halfway clear. Actually a little less than halfway. Smoke hung in the air in horizontal layers like badly folded blankets. It was the acrid taste of it that was in her mouth.
She was lying in the courtyard of the Perry Friendly on a bed of wet weeds. Fran was sitting beside her, one hand pressed to her own stomach. It was Fran who was shaking her and shouting at her. She looked like she was coming home from a hard day at the abattoir, the whole front of her sweatshirt dark with blood.
And the Perry Friendly was burning, thousands of sparks rising up out of the roof to pour like an inverted waterfall into the midnight sky. Their collective radiance was what made details like the blood visible, even though it was the middle of the night.
It hurt to move, but Fran was insisting that she had to. “Now, Liz. Before they come.”
Liz looked down at her wrists. The pain was worst there, and she could see why. The burns that ran from the heels of her hands to halfway up her forearms were still fresh enough that the blisters were forming and bursting as she watched.
Fran Watts had cauterized the wounds on her wrists with the blade of a knife. That one fact brought an avalanche of memories down on her all at once.
“Molly!” she panted. “Zac!” The smoke had got to her throat. She couldn’t shape the words properly. But Fran understood, and pointed. The kids were lying a little way away. Their eyes were closed.
“They’re breathing,” Fran said, her voice a wheezing whisper. “I checked. I think they’re going to be okay. Ms. Kendall. Liz. You’ve got to go. Someone will have seen the flames by now. You can’t be here when they come.”
She told Liz what she meant to do. Told her more than once, because it was hard for Liz to make her mind work. But she got it, finally. And Fran was right: there really was no other way. Or at least, the other way was a lot worse for all of them. Especially Liz herself.
She carried the kids to the car. She did it alone; Fran couldn’t stand. It was harder this time because she was that much weaker now and because there was nothing to shield her blistered hands and arms. Every contact sent a paralyzing shock of agony through her and lit up her head with synesthetic lightning bolts.
Would she even be able to drive the car? Her hands felt like dead weights. Her fingers, when she made them move, bent halfway and then stopped. Her thumbs didn’t move at all.
She returned to Fran, who was still lying exactly where she had left her. Her hands were pressed to the wounds in her shoulder and side. The drying blood on them made it look as though she was wearing black gloves. Liz knelt beside her, or rather fell down onto her knees.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asked. Her voice was ugly, a dry rasp with barely enough breath to carry it. “What if they don’t come?”
“They’re coming now,” Fran said. She raised a gory finger. A single siren was already whooping, still distant but getting closer. “That one’s a fire truck, but the police will be right behind it. Go!”
Liz went.
Getti
ng the car started was an ordeal that went on forever. She had to use both hands to turn the key, again and again until the engine caught. She could barely see, partly because of the smoke and partly because her eyes kept trying to close. When she finally started moving, she put too much of her clumsy weight down on the accelerator and launched the car straight at the Perry Friendly’s gatepost. She swerved at the last moment and only raked the side of the car along the post. It made a sound like a scream, unless that sound was inside Liz’s head. Either way, she kept right on going.
As she turned onto Washington Avenue, Molly rolled over in her sleep and coughed.
The story Fran told had the virtue of simplicity. It had very few moving parts.
She had been feeling restless and unhappy after her encounter with Bruno Picota, she said. Unable to put him out of her mind, she decided to go for a late-night walk. She wasn’t thinking about where she was going. She crossed the bridge into Homewood and found herself, completely to her surprise, in front of the Perry Friendly Motel.
Curious, she went inside to see what the place looked like at night. She hadn’t thought to tell anyone what she was doing. She hadn’t suspected any danger.
But a man came out of nowhere and attacked her. He must have been living in one of the rooms of the boarded-up motel, and Fran had surprised him. He was either high or crazy or maybe both. Thinking that Fran was threatening him, he stabbed her three times with a stubby little knife of some kind. Maybe a box-cutter or something like that.
Fran passed out, and when she woke up the motel was on fire. She got outside into the courtyard just as the first fire engines were rolling up.
That was all of it. To any questions outside of that threadbare scenario she answered, “I don’t remember.” She said the same thing when the police officers who came to the hospital to interview her asked for a description of her nonexistent attacker, and when they asked her about the fresh tire tracks on the motel’s driveway. No, Fran said, she hadn’t seen any cars. If a car had been there, it had nothing to do with what had happened to her.
She was in hospital for nine days. None of her wounds had punctured an organ or a major artery, but even so she had lost more blood than she could easily spare and suffered a lot of general bruising and battering. Plus, although nobody exactly came out and said this, they were concerned about her mental state, which was known to be fragile. She was a kidnap survivor, after all, the victim of a prior trauma whose relationship to this present trauma was complicated and concerning.
Perhaps for that reason, the solemn-faced officers stopped pressing her after a while when she told them her mind was blank. Blank was far from the worst thing it could be.
Her dad was similarly tentative, and gentle to a fault. He tried his best not to let Fran see how much this fresh catastrophe was tearing him up. Though his eyes were bloodshot most of the time, she never saw him cry. It was hard to lie to him. Almost unbearable. But Fran didn’t think she could ever make him believe, or understand. If she told him the truth, he would call the cops and tell them to arrest Liz Kendall.
When she got better, she told herself, he would stop grieving. And she would get better now. The Perry Friendly was ash on the wind. She had faced Bruno Picota and seen how small and sad he was, then she had faced down a bigger, badder monster by far. The world’s relentless changes held no fears for her now.
Zac Kendall was the only one who got the whole truth. Fran had made him a promise, after all. He came to visit her every day, bringing something different each time: red grapes, gummy worms, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collected short stories. But it wasn’t until her third day in the hospital that Fran felt up to telling him exactly what had happened. He’d already heard a lot of it from his mom by this time, but Fran was able to fill in some of the missing details. Most importantly, she was able to explain to him how her own story and Liz’s came to intersect. How so many of the things that seemed like coincidences were nothing of the kind.
“It was the place. The Perry Friendly. It got hold of all of us, just in different ways. Bruno Picota worked there for years, so I think he got it worse than anyone. Your mom and me, we only got the edge of it, but it changed us just the same.”
Zac was still having a hard time with this stuff. He looked as though he was biting down on something sour. “Changed you, meaning …?”
“We’re just a looser fit than most people. We’re still in the world, but we’re loose. Sometimes we see the worlds on either side. Sometimes we can even go there. That’s what Beth did. She kept on looking until she found a world where she was still alive, and then she moved in. Jinx did the same, but she was sweet and gentle and she didn’t try to hurt me. She stayed with me because … well, because I was the life she knew. I was her, the way she used to be.”
Zac nodded slowly, almost reluctantly. “I think I understand that part. Well, kind of. Most of it. But there’s something that doesn’t make any sense to me at all, even if I believe everything you and Mom have told me.”
“Share your thoughts, Mr. Holmes.”
Fran was trying to make a joke out of it, as far as she could, but Zac didn’t smile. “Okay,” he said. “It’s this. The first time Bruno Picota ever met you, he already saw something weird about you. Extra shadows, whatever. You were already different. But that was before the other you—Jinx?—came along. It was before you’d even seen the Perry Friendly. In fact, you only went there because he took you there. How does that make any sense?”
Fran fished two gummy worms out of the packet, a red one and a green one, and twined them together. Actually, you could make an Ouroboros out of just one, but it was cooler if two snakes chased each other round the circle, each eating its own tail. “It’s like this,” she said. “I guess.”
She couldn’t explain it any better. She and Liz and Bruno Picota were a loose fit in time, as well as space. When you looked into the next world along, you saw things at a weird angle. And when it looked back into you …
Fran remembered Picota’s knife entering her heart. Picota remembered killing her—some of the time, at least. Liz had told Fran she used to stay at the motel back when it was still open, and one time she heard what sounded like an argument going on in the next room. She was pretty sure now that what she had heard that time was their showdown with Beth. A fight that wasn’t going to happen for another twenty years.
In the light of all that, it didn’t strike Fran as weird that Picota had seen Jinx inside her before Jinx ever came to live with her. What was weird, maybe, was how the dream and the reality slotted together like two halves of the same thing. How the things Picota did to her, in this world and the other, had made what he saw come true.
Ouroboros.
But there was one other thing that had come back to her, as she lay in the hospital bed with nothing else to do besides think. “You remember that public speaking competition?” she asked Zac. “In sixth grade?”
“The one where we got to the semi-finals? What about it?”
“The hall was in Homewood. On the same street as the Perry Friendly. Right next door, in fact.”
Zac looked sick. “What, so we’ve got another evil building to worry about?”
Fran shook her head slowly. “I don’t think it’s the building, exactly. It’s … the place. The place was always there, Zac. When the Abenaki Indians told their stories about the skadegamutc, there wasn’t any Perry Friendly. No Larimer, no Homewood, no Pittsburgh. There was just a place, and some bad things that happened there. And I guess they never stopped happening.”
Zac was still looking troubled. “It’s best not to think about it too much,” Fran told him. What she didn’t say was: because you’ve been there too, and so has Molly. Maybe it’s in you. Maybe you’ll meet some other Zac down the road somewhere, and either be best friends or try to kill each other. I’d recommend the first of those options, but you might not get to choose.
Jinx only came in the middle of the night when all the other visitors were gon
e. She was still a little skittish around Fran, and Fran knew why.
“The holes in my memories were you, weren’t they?” she asked on the night of the fifth day. “Tell me, Jinx. A knight of the woodland table is honest, brave and true. You can’t lie.”
I’m sorry, Jinx said, hanging her head. I thought I was protecting you from things that would hurt you.
“Sometimes things that are gonna hurt you are still things you need. Like, I needed to remember the time when my mom was dying.”
I know. Please don’t be mad with me.
“And the time when Picota took me, and right after. When you came. If I’d remembered that stuff I might have known who you were.”
I thought if you knew, you might be scared of me. I was a ghost, after all.
“Yeah, you were my ghost. And there I was, living your life, having everything you’d lost. You should have hated me. But instead you became my best friend. The best friend anyone has ever had.”
I couldn’t ever hate you.
“I’d understand if you did. I’m living the life you were meant to live.”
I want this life. I want to be with you.
“I want that too, Jinx. But let’s get a few things straight. No more sleeping at the foot of the bed. You live in here now.” Fran pointed to her own forehead. “We’ll work out the details later. Like, there might be times when one of us wants a little peace and quiet and the other one has to take a walk around the block. Or go hang out in the den for a while, if you don’t mind showing me where that is. But apart from that it’s share and share alike, always. Deal?”
Deal, Jinx whispered.
Her heart was singing as Fran welcomed her in.
It took Liz a long time to find her life again. Most of it was where she had left it, but the pieces didn’t always fit together in quite the way they should.
The Sethis were cool to her, bordering on frigid, presumably on account of something that Beth had said or done. It was clear that they no longer saw her as a friend. She had to win them back a little bit at a time, with small courtesies and kindnesses. More than a year passed before they all sat down at the same table again.