Let me know if you get a response, kiddo, Rebecca thought, and squeezed her arms tight around Trudi’s back, though not nearly as hard as Trudi was squeezing—clinging to—Rebecca’s leg. She should have been more afraid. But whatever had just stepped out of the woods, it could have her if it wanted her. Rebecca was too tired, too heartbroken to run from anything else. Using her knee as a nudge, letting Trudi cling, Rebecca eased herself around and saw Kaylene.
She was swaying, leaning sideways in the center of the path—Jack and the ’Lenes, Rebecca thought, as she clutched Trudi harder—with her beautiful nose smashed flat on her face and pearls of blood strung like beads through her long, matted hair. There was so much red all over her, even in the shadowed forest dark, that she looked as though she’d been turned inside out.
Rebecca tried to ease Trudi back, just enough so they could move toward Kaylene. But Trudi grabbed tight and dug her nails into Rebecca’s shoulders, clinging and kneading like a cat caught in a screen. She was also pleading, without language, just pure, anguished sound. “Nnnnnnn…”
“Okay,” Rebecca whispered down to her, while looking at Kaylene through a veil of tears that already—had always—felt permanent and part of her. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s…”
Then Kaylene’s eyes met hers. For one moment, Rebecca almost smiled. “You’re okay.”
“He killed Jack.” Kaylene’s voice came out metallic, a digital sample of Kaylene’s voice. “The guy in the sombrero.”
“I know. I’ve seen. He killed Oscar, too,” said Rebecca. “The grounds-crew guy I always … my friend from campus.”
From deep in Kaylene’s throat came a grating sound, scraped and awful: bottom-of-the-tear-barrel tears, the kind that come after crying. Rebecca knew those tears well. Kaylene wiped at her face, even though there was no new wetness there. “And Marlene.”
“No,” Rebecca whimpered, although she realized she had already assumed that.
Marlene.
Standing there amid the shuddering trees, fighting to hold position as Trudi pressed into her, Rebecca could feel herself shredding. She was a little sapling, peeling apart, its buds and blossoms plucked away, one by one.
“I saw it happen, Rebecca. I watched it happen.”
Another sound scraped from Kaylene’s throat. That one was familiar to Rebecca, too, though not so much from her own life. She recognized it from Crisis Center phone calls. That terrible, guilty tremor.
“It wasn’t your fault, Kaylene. You couldn’t have done anything. I’ve seen him, too. There’s nothing you—”
“You’re wrong about that,” Kaylene muttered. Behind her, the pines started shaking.
Run, Rebecca thought, stirring inside herself. We have to run. And then she thought again of Marlene. Twinkies in her bag, squashed under her chem books.
Somehow, without letting Trudi go, Rebecca grabbed Kaylene and pulled her close. Kaylene was still shuddering even harder than the trees, in abrupt, violent gusts. Instantly, her hands were in Rebecca’s hair, and she was clinging, too, like a drowning person dragged from the water.
But onto nothing, Rebecca thought. There’s no life raft here. I have nothing, for anyone.
“Kaylene, we’ve got to go. Kaylene! Help me. We’ve got to go.”
“I could have saved her. Rebecca. I could have saved her.”
“Then save her,” Rebecca snapped, and ripped free of both Kaylene and Trudi, left them clutching each other. “Kaylene. Save this girl. Save Trudi.”
“NNNNNN,” Trudi grunted, wriggling awake. She almost bit Kaylene’s arm as she tried to squirm back to Rebecca. At least that finally stirred Kaylene. She held tight, tugged Trudi close, glanced up at the rustling in the trees around them.
“It’s okay,” Rebecca said, though she had no idea to whom. She watched Kaylene surface again behind her face. There she was: Dig Dug Girl.
“Rebecca. What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“I’ll be right back.”
In the trees—not too close, from the direction of the clearing with the trailers, and maybe not even headed this way—footsteps sounded amid the scurries and rustling. For a moment, the sound seemed as deceptively peaceful as bubbles on the surface of Halfmoon Lake. The ones that told you something living was lurking underneath.
“You can’t fight that guy,” Kaylene said. “We’ve got to go. You said it yourself. Please. I can’t lose you, too.”
Rebecca nodded, knew Kaylene was right. But what she said was, “I can’t let them die.”
“They’re already dead. All of them. And if they’re not, and they live, it won’t be because of anything you do.”
That was right, of course. Rebecca reached out abruptly and touched her friend’s hair. This was very possibly her last living friend, she realized. Then she looked down at the little girl in Kaylene’s arms, who suddenly—it had literally just happened—wasn’t little anymore. Trudi was simply staring up at her.
“I’m going back anyway,” Rebecca said, and went.
* * *
In his excitement—in the sheer, slippery, wildwoods glee of the moment—the Whistler almost didn’t notice, almost didn’t hear, as he leapt off the neck of the tall guy (like a little boy jumping from a tree stump into leaves or a lake), the telltale tap of a single finger against one of the trailers. That almost-soft-enough not-quite-sound of a barely lifted toe sliding over tiny twigs.
Coming from …
Yes. The sounds came from around the side of that tilted-over trailer, with its screen door dangling like a torn-out rib cage.
He didn’t stop running after his new, Still One, didn’t even break his stride. He was far, far too clever a Whistler for that. Instead, he ducked into the trees, all the way into the shadows, and continued quite a ways down the path. Only then did he stop, turn, and listen. He lifted his own foot, in what he was sure was a precise parody of the movement his Destiny’s mother must be making at this very moment, just back there on the other side of that trailer, scant moments away from her destiny, though she did not know it yet.
Anything you can do, he thought. He threw his hands up in front of his face, sucked in the smell, licked up the taste. Then he started back the way he had come, quietly, quietly, like a cat, only quieter, like a wind with nothing to resist it, and so nothing to sound it. He was trying to decide if, right at the end, he would prefer if his Destiny’s mother did or did not feel him coming.
* * *
Rebecca had slipped well off the path, forcing herself to move slowly. Now, approaching the clearing and the trailers, she slowed even more. She stayed way back amid the bristling, prickling ground cover, not exactly picking her way, not bothering to try not making sound, because she suspected that would only give her away. She had some vague notion of trying to make natural sound, becoming just one more forest-noise amid all the stirred-up chirring and hooting and crackling and rustling all around her.
What she had no notion about was what she would do when she actually reached the clearing. If she did. She had heard, all too well, the sounds behind her as she’d fled with Trudi a few minutes earlier: the sounds of something—someone—being sucked into an industrial fan.
Someone she had loved. Very possibly several someones. Or all of them.
Or not. Not yet.
When had she dropped to her hands and knees? And why was she crouching lower still, now, into the dirt, the broken bits of branch and honeycomb and seed and soil, all of it so cool and crawly and soft against her stomach as she slithered slowly, steadily forward? She could see the side and roof of one of the trailers straight ahead: the American flag trailer, hulking, dark, and sad, as always, about as haunted as a toy truck left out in long grass. Beyond that, she could see the fire pit, now, and curled flat on the ground against it—and moving!—Joel. His body seemed to push up against itself, uncoil, push together, uncoil, like a caterpillar pulsing over a leaf, except he wasn’t going anywhere. Rebecca couldn’t see his face. That was proba
bly for the best. Less chance of either one of them calling out.
But the sight, awful as it was, steadied her, made her feel as though there might be something left to do, after all, just maybe. Something other than die. And dying had never been her plan, just a possibility.
Like it always is, she thought. She had always thought that, always known it. She kept crawling, eyes fixed on the fire pit and away from the tipped-over trailer, not because she was scared of it, but because of what she feared—almost knew—she would see beside or inside it. Those bodies, she knew, would not be moving.
Then she was at the edge of the clearing, and she had no choice but to look.
At first, what she saw looked less like bodies than a collection of raked-together bits: Danni’s surprisingly thin arm flung out toward the fire pit; Danni’s blond hair splayed across the dirt, almost artistically, like a child’s drawing of the rays of a fallen star, still glinting; Joel’s curled back, pulsing, without any appearance of volition or consciousness, his jeans and work shirt spattered with what Rebecca thought was dirt and only slowly—as shapes coalesced out of shadows, became shapes once more—realized was pieces of Amanda.
How did she know it was Amanda? By the stubbiness of the lobe on that section of ear atop Joel’s hip. By the pale pallor of the shreds of skin everywhere, like rind from a peeled orange. The blue of the eye leaning out of that smashed-apart skull against the stump where the Whistler had stood. Somehow, that eye was like a whole face all by itself, a face at the window of a collapsing building. The eye of someone considering jumping. Which was how Amanda’s eyes had always looked.
I’m so sorry, Rebecca was murmuring without actually speaking, exploding into tears but moving only her mouth, nothing else. Amanda. The words swelled inside her, filled her throat, ballooned toward her mouth, where she would have no choice but to scream them, sing them. She glanced to her left and saw Jess.
Jess—upright, still moving—was crouching low, creeping around the side of the tipped-over trailer toward that dangling door. Rebecca watched her gather Joel’s discarded shovel to her, peer around the clearing. For one moment, Rebecca almost forgot the Whistler entirely, transformed back into her kid-self, terrified only of this trailer and the creature she’d always imagined coiled inside it like an eel, all face and mouth.
Jess, she was thinking, wanting to scream. Don’t turn your back.
Jess seemed to sense something, too. She stopped in her tracks, glanced sideways, hunched even lower. And that was why she didn’t see the Whistler—grinning, arms extended, legs lifting high as he tiptoed, his every movement a parody of a child sneaking up on a parent—when he appeared behind her.
Shoving to her knees, rattling branches, Rebecca threw out her hands, sucked in breath to shout one last useless warning, and stopped once more, this time in disbelief: another face had appeared, not inside the tipped-over trailer but atop it, on what had once been its side wall and was now its roof. This face leered as it leaned, not more than two feet above Jess, who still hadn’t seen it or the Whistler, either. The Whistler, too, seemed oblivious; he was too intent on his prey, on the play he was making of preying,
But that face noticed Rebecca, glanced toward her. And so Rebecca got a full blast of Sophie’s excitement, her flat-out, fascinated glee as she pulled herself to the edge of the tipped-over roof, gazing back and forth between Jess’s head and the Whistler’s like a little girl watching an ant farm. Her excitement was way too much like the Whistler’s, Rebecca thought, shuddering through her sorrow and her fury. For Sophie, too, this was far too much like play.
And then Rebecca realized she had a choice to make: she could shout a warning, and so save Jess for a little longer, give her a fighting chance or at least one good swing of the spade; or she could stay silent, trust Sophie to choose correctly between the woman who had cared for her all her life and never loved her enough—and would never, ever love her now—and the Sombrero-Thing that didn’t love anyone, but was now more like her than anyone else in this world.
Rebecca’s whole life, it turned out, had been preparation for this moment. All that practice on Crisis Center phone calls and in grief-counseling groups and foster homes full of resentful not-siblings and not-parents, all those years of reading people, knowing whom to trust and when to stay and when to run, intuiting whether someone was really jumping, really going to hurt someone else, all this time sorting monsters from mothers, had led her to this. Because everything she had left in her world depended on who Sophie was, right this second, and what she wanted, and whether Rebecca read that correctly, and guessed right.
She guessed.
* * *
He almost didn’t want it to end. A few weeks ago, he had met his Destiny, courted her, abandoned his Mother for her, and lost them both. So tragic. Tonight, he had taken his revenge—that’s what it had been, surely, there’d been such marvelous intensity in his actions, such ferocity—on his Destiny’s murderer-mother’s minions. That, after all, was what they were. And now, at last, he would have his revenge on the murderer herself.
And just when he thought the whole experience could not get any more exquisite, any more inspiring, he realized he had an audience, a proper one. His new, Still One had popped up in the bushes as though he’d planted her there, sprung her at just this precise moment, so she could watch. That was her job, her very purpose on this earth, after all.
He didn’t look at her, not directly. She mustn’t know that he knew. He wanted her right where she was, in her place, on her knees with her mouth open, unable to speak, poor thing, unable to do anything but marvel. She had been born to be audience, his audience, like all of them. The ones he let live, anyway.
The Whistle inside him roared up his windpipe, uncontainable, as irresistible to him as it was to them. But it was for them, all his poor, pitiful little creatures.
He coiled to strike, opened his mouth to unleash his Whistle. And right at that moment, out of the very air, came …
Came …
* * *
Jess heard it too, of course. She jolted, quivered, stood shuddering in place as though she’d been hit by lightning, She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or do anything but listen as her daughter’s voice—Natalie’s voice—filled the clearing.
“HEY bay-beee…” it was saying. Chanting. “You look … GOOOOOD…”
* * *
Almost, Sophie waited too long, held the moment too tightly, couldn’t stop savoring: Jess the Righteous at the instant of her extinguishing, and the Whistling Fuck, oblivious to the end, both of them rooted so firmly in place, it was as though she’d bewitched them, turned them to stone.
And because she waited so long, and also got startled—though she shouldn’t have been—by the sheer speed with which the Whistler snapped back to himself, snarled like a rabid thing, and threw himself forward, she had no choice, in the end; she couldn’t think, only lunge. And so she got her timing exactly right.
At the very instant the Whistler’s hands gripped Jess’s shoulders, Sophie slammed down on his back. The impact sent Jess and her steak knife flying and drove the Whistler’s sombrero into the air but the Whistler himself toward the ground. By the time he hit it, Sophie had her teeth in the back of his neck. She snapped her jaws all the way shut. Given that the blood in there didn’t actually circulate, the explosion in her mouth was remarkable, viscous and cold—which, again, shouldn’t have surprised her, and did—like the gel in the middle of that gum she’d always hated and chewed anyway, made Natalie chew anyway, just so she could watch Natalie’s face.
Freshen-Up. That was it.
She ground her teeth harder, drove her whole head into the hole she’d made at the base of the Whistler’s skull while he flailed, trying to punch or rip at her. He was whistling out both sides of his face, now. Kind of cool, that. Bits of vein-thread sliced up between Sophie’s teeth like dental floss, straight into her gums. Every inch of this asshole was sharp, spiky, horrible.
And I, she t
hought, am the tick on your back. The thing you cannot shake. You ripped away my body, killed my son, tore out my heart. And so, here I am, burrowing into you.
* * *
Rebecca kept thinking it would stop, had to stop. But it didn’t. It just kept going. The Sombrero-Man—stripped of his sombrero—flailed and bucked but couldn’t get up, jerked around like a chicken with its head cut off, only his head wasn’t all the way off. Sophie stayed clamped to his shoulders, ears-deep in the back of his skull, a cartoon badger gnawing out a tree trunk. Both of them just went on screaming, whistling, howling, roaring.
Like cats in heat, Rebecca thought, swaying in the bushes. Like wild things, mating.
Some of the screaming, she realized, was her own. There was a whispering from somewhere, too. Her own name, in whispers. That was coming from Jess, she realized, from over where Jess had crumpled after slamming her head against the side of the tipped-over trailer.
Then, with a screech that seemed to shoot up the surrounding pines like lightning in reverse, the Sombrero-Man suddenly humped up and flipped over, slamming Sophie to the ground underneath him, both of them faceup. Rebecca got a momentary glimpse of his eyes, which seemed to be draining into the bones underneath as Sophie sucked out everything behind them. But his smile …
That stayed put.
This time, Rebecca’s decision was immediate, instinctive; it was also the only choice. Darting forward, eyes never leaving the Whistler as he humped up, slammed down, humped up, slammed down, and, Jesus Christ, started to sing, Rebecca grabbed the shovel that had flown out of Jess’s hands and landed right by Joel. He, too, had rolled over and regained some sort of consciousness. Enough, apparently, to remember what had happened to his wife. He was blinking, bloody, staring up through a well of tears, and he had his mouth open as though he were about to call something ridiculous up the stairs of Halfmoon House, something to wake his orphans up laughing one more time.
“Hang on,” she told him.
In two steps, she was over the Sombrero-Man and Sophie. Both of them stared straight up, too, but not at her, not at anyone, as they yowled and slammed and bit and wrecked. She watched the Sombrero-Man register her, saw that awful smile spread. He never stopped singing, high and keening. Birdsong. “The cuckoo … she’s a pretty bird…” The words rang her, the voice itself roaring down her veins straight for her heart.
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