Nothing. And nothing.
Lisa’s sister knows things we don’t. Lisa says. I wonder if she knows, if the man outside knows I’ve killed three people, all in a row, in just under a year: one for autumn, two for spring. That’s serial killer numbers. Who’d ever believe how it happened? You’d have to be crazy, snapped, to think any of it was true. And it’s all true.
“Three,” I told Nick, a soft murmur though this was a confession he’d already heard over and over again, before ever I spoke it aloud. “An ex and two humans makes three.”
He stretched his head up toward my palm and I stroked his fur, ran a hand up and down his snout.
People aren’t very imaginative, really; they like stories best when they know they’re true. And what I know to be true, is this: like everyone else’s, my own flesh and blood is just a statue, a stand-in for what I really am, but I don’t know what that real thing is. I never have. I confessed it to Stephen, that feeling of unoccupied housing and hollow plaster-space all inside me—inside him too, just like me, such an overpowering rush of love and relief when he said Then it’s not just me—but the spaces don’t magically fill up just because a mother, a lover, a sort-of older sister come to help you, listen to you, try and save you. There’s something inside me that was never human, never right, long before any of this happened, and I could blame it for making me a killer, but I chose that fate. A choice made from rage or fear or a warped notion of justice is still choosing. The hollowness inside me didn’t make me evil. I did that. I chose.
No matter where I am, whatever I do or think or feel, it’s always like I’m somewhere else at the same time, the way Nick is flesh but still a ghost, the way the man outside is following our path but on his own road entirely. Life hits me in the face, overpowers me physically or psychically like it hasn’t stopped doing since I thought my mother died, but even as every part of me feels it, even as it thuds through me like my one truest heartbeat and I choke on it all, drown in my own blood, somehow I’m always somewhere else, standing aside, forever watching the watcher inside me. Depressed, I bet someone would say (had said and said and said, after my mother disappeared, tone-deaf broken records all). No. That’s such a useful word, depression, a damp musty flattened-fleece blanket to throw over anything someone else doesn’t want to think is real. I might very well be depressed but I’m much more than that: I’m absent. Absentminded, but also absent-bodied; here, and not. Living in the moment, as everyone does because they have to—and yet, I’ve never been here. I never have, all my life, been entirely here.
Is that why it seems like I can see things, sometimes, before anyone else can? Jenny-Jessie-Ginny-Lisa’s sister, whatever her name is, does that happen to her too? Nick, Death himself, they weren’t even the half of it. Though I knew now it had really happened, that I hadn’t imagined it, what it meant I didn’t know at all. You, outside, you faceless thin-fingered slab-footed thing only yards away, but still somewhere I can’t follow—do you know? You must. I’ve died once already, walked unknowing straight to my own execution. Is it happening again, are you taking me there again? Taking all of us? Stephen’s right: if you are, then just walk right in and do it now.
Come on. Do it. You can hear me. I know I don’t have to say a word for you to hear what I’m thinking.
The spring that had started off so hot, dry and hot, was rolling over itself and going cold; the wind outside picked up, rattling the shattered door’s metal frame, rushing up the legs of my jeans, whipping the blanket-edges hard around my ears. The man outside was still. Even as the tree branches bent and twisted under the assault, his sickly-pale moonlight hair, the hem of his long black coat, they merely stirred, ruffled faintly, and then subsided.
What are you?
He uncurled his fingers. Stretched them out, long and straight. Then folded them again, resting so decorous against his coatfront.
What am I?
Still and decorous, like prayer. I don’t pray. Not like Lisa. There’s nothing out there that wants to hear it.
Where are you taking us? And wherever it is, will I end up back where I was, all alone?
The moonlight dimmed and faded as the wind increased, the clouds growing thicker in preparation for rain. Whatever fell from the sky, however furious the rush of water, he’d never soak to the skin, it’d never touch him. As the first large, fat drops came down, I went as close to the doorway as I dared, stretching a hand outside just to watch the water roll down my palm, my sleeve go damp and then dark, clinging to me saturated and wet; not like him, never like him. No matter what I was, not him.
I wrung the cloth out as best I could and retreated inside, to try and sleep.
TWO
NATALIE
They were gone.
Everyone was gone!
It wasn’t fair, I didn’t plan it this way—I was going to stay at Paradise City long enough I’d get to be Amy’s friend, I’d explain things to her. Where she really came from. Where her mother really came from (I couldn’t believe it, how much they both looked alike, I’d searched months and months for anyone else from my real family, my lab family, and here they just fell right into my lap). We were going to be friends. She’d bring Stephen along, of course. I was so happy when they fell in love but of course they would, they’re the same type, same blood, how would they not fall in love forever? How could she not see right away we were supposed to be friends?
But I couldn’t stand how they treated me in Paradise. I couldn’t take it anymore, humans treating me like dirt when it’s folks like me who should be telling them what to do, so I left early and then Phoebe, that rotten crazy bitch Phoebe, she jumped the gun and told the lab workers, my workers, about who Amy really was. She guessed it, she turned them in.
If I ever found Phoebe, I’d kill her. I sat there rocking back and forth, under the big pine tree in the woods behind the lab where I’d gone to cry, and I prayed and hoped that she’d died in that fire. I kept hearing that the humans set Paradise City on fire—they couldn’t stand things there anymore either. I hoped they all died in it.
It wasn’t my fault things turned out this way!
I was going to show Amy everything, the laboratory space, the dissection rooms, the rooms where I grew up. Where her mother stayed, all that time, when they were experimenting on her. I saw Amy sneaking around looking, the nosy bitch who thought her shit doesn’t stink—except he wouldn’t want her if she were that kind of virgin, the kind who never did anything wrong and never had any dirt on her. Smile and smile and pretend that blood on your teeth is just a little old lipstick smear. I made her just like Stephen, like her mother, like me. I did!
I did it, and why wasn’t she happy? How could she not be happy! I killed her, dropped her like a stone sinking-drowning in a sea no one but us can cross, and then I dove right in and retrieved her from the full-fathom-five bottom where no one but us can dive. I brought her back from all that brand new and one of us. I made her what she was always supposed to be and gave her a mother, a boyfriend, a best friend just like her. We could’ve been best friends, if she’d just let me explain! She was always inside out all her life, without ever knowing it, and I turned her true face out to the world and if I could’ve just explained that, if she’d just shut up and let me talk, she’d have understood and been happy about it. She’d be my best friend.
And she would have talked to him about me. Death, the Friendly Man, who came and went and was there for me and loved me all the time I was growing up and then he was gone, he just vanished—I was always so good, but he left me. I loved him and it turned out he was nothing. It was like thinking you had a pet bird, a big beautiful black bird strutting along on a pure-white parapet right outside your window, back and forth, any time day or night you cared to look, and then he collapses into a heap of black feathers and falls like a stone and when you rush to catch him you realize, he never was: it was always a heap of rotten feathers, a dirty discarded rag, an old leather boot squashed and huddled up on itself like
something nesting. What a joke. What a nasty trick—
I had to stop crying so hard, I felt sick. Choking on snot like some nasty lab bitty-baby. It was usually so pretty up here on the ridge, the white gravel road winding outside the lab and the whole sweep of dunes and water right in front of you, the woods and the lab yard dark green shadows behind. It was like having your own country estate and I would’ve shown Amy the Aquatorium, its columns concrete gray instead of marble white but still like a pretty little Greek temple cake-crumbling into the sands. Up on the second floor where it’s all open space you can see the whole horizon, all the way out across the lake to Chicago. Chicago’s gone now, I suppose. I never even got to see it.
It was nice here, though. Didn’t need Chicago. The lab would have beach parties here and I got to go too, for summer solstice and the Fourth of July and Labor Day and Birth-Day, the day they found out one of their experiments could bear a living child—did you know that, Amy? Did you know dozens, hundreds of people you never even knew gathered here for your birthday with barbecue and sparklers and cake and you got everything, you always got everything. Your mom might’ve run away but she was still contributing, they were still researching her in the wild. You too. I could’ve showed them to you, all the files and field notes they kept on you and your mother. I even saved some of them after the plague hit and the sick people were looting the lab, so hungry they were eating paper. I was saving them for you, Amy! All of it!
I decided to burn them. Never mind Birth-Day, you all could go ahead and die out there without my secret of what could bring you back, and I’d have a Death-Day, I’d take everything about you and burn it all up. Right away. I crawled out from under the pine tree, trudged over the weed-gone lawn and through the back door, and I was home. My home.
There were rusty red streaks still smearing the floor, my floor, where I’d fought with that filthy thing Amy called a pet dog, but here were all my drawings, my desk with the special locked drawer she didn’t open, my little filing cabinet. My doll. There’d been boxes of files about Amy and her mother but what I’d salvaged just filled up that one little desk drawer. The thought of how she hadn’t even thought to look in there, passed right over herself by spying on me, it made me feel even better as I jabbed the drawer-key into the lock.
Bent warped key, soft cheap metal, the lock rattling loose in its base—it was all so cheap, all the used-up banged-up things they gave me, not like precious Amy’s barbeque-sparklers-layer cake Birth-Day with no expense spared. Didn’t matter, not anymore, what I had here was worth ten thousand parties. I had everything that was left: her mother’s real name, experiment logs, some of those reports Amy’s pediatrician and her dad’s sister and a couple of neighbors sent in because humans really are tattling scum who’ll do anything for a little money, hospital records—the damn drawer stuck halfway open; I’d stuffed too many papers inside. I snaked fingers in to try and edge the papers away from the drawer seams, ease them out—
Cold in here, like those high-up windows I could never force open had suddenly broken, given way in a storm, letting early March air rush in. But it was almost May. I’d been sweating trying to break open my own stupid lock but my arms and back went tense with the chill, a fresh strong punishing breeze with a damp green smell of springtime, and then I started to shiver. So cold, even in dead January this room never got so cold. The drawer wouldn’t move, I couldn’t get my fingers far enough in to grab. I hated this desk, I hated this room, I was such a special-special experiment but not like that bitch Amy, who got her own white desk with flowers on it and a chair to match when she was twelve (her aunt tattled about the birthday, her aunt tattled about everything), all I ever got was this gray metal ugliness with a shortened leg they were going to throw away—
“Turn around,” he said, behind me.
His voice was soft, quiet, velvety-damp just like the air: sharp and freezing as all of January, rich and scent-filled like the middle of May. It made my head spin. You, again. After all this time. Go away, it was Amy you really loved. All the work we did here, the work I was still doing, was so I never had to love you again.
“Turn around, Miss Beach,” he said. Even quieter.
Natalie Beach. That was how we got written up in the files, us lab rats, like medieval people whose last names were all Of-The-Nearest-Village. I never found out what my parents were really called, or what happened to them. I yanked two-handed at the drawer, felt its frame buckle and warp.
“You can leave now,” I said. Cool as March, keeping all my love to myself. My fear. “I don’t need you anymore.” Let the drawer snap loose from the frame, go flying from the desk like a tooth pulled from a mouth with twine and a slamming door. “You only ever pretended to be my friend, go talk to precious Amy if that’s who you—”
“Amy will die soon.” Soft as soft now, a sneering croon, like a lullaby for a baby its mother hates from birth. “That much, at least, will make you happy. Be a polite little freak of nature and turn around.”
My teeth banged together with the cold, clicking sharp and hard like the teeth of the zombie I’d seen die out in the woods when I was six or seven: it succumbed to old age, rotted and crumbled down to a walking skeleton, shaking itself to powder there in the April violets and needle-stick beach grass. I’d never be warm again, I’d never—I threaded my hands into my sleeves, sweatshirt fleece spotted and ruined with dog’s blood and mine, and cringing and shivering in all my love and fear, I turned around.
Death can take on any face he wants, when he calls on you, the face of any dead person he’s already claimed as his. Gray hair, this time. Little wire-rimmed glasses. Khakis and neatly tucked-in flannel shirt, the clothes of a lab man heading out for field work. A nasty, torn-up nylon backpack, bulging and stained dark brown with something’s old blood, slung easy over one shoulder. He smiled at me and my skin went numb with the encroaching ice.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said.
Feeling your heart leap up and dance for someone you’d sworn to hate is like hurting so much you pass out, your own insides tormenting you into oblivion, and then getting hauled upright and forced awake so the torture can start all over again. His colorless eyes saw straight through me and into my jumped-up heart and my fingers were tinged blue; it wasn’t him doing that, this part of the world was well used to frost in May. I shoved my hands in my pockets and clenched my fingers, rubbing against the cloth to try and coax them back to life.
“Hell of a greeting,” he said, “after so long away.”
His voice had a weight that stretched out its softness, distorted it, like fistfuls of coins in a sock. “I called and called for you and you never came,” I said, backed against the warped desk drawer like he’d come for my papers, Amy’s papers. Like he gave a damn about things like that. “When I was younger, and they were still experimenting on me. After the plague, when I was the only one left here. After I started our experiments again. All that time.” I laughed. “We’re getting rid of you, that’s the whole point. We’re figuring out how to control when life ends, how to keep folks from dying at all. And I, me, I’ve found out how to make it happen, what the real secret is to cheat death—and it’s right here, on this beach. It’s right here. So I don’t need you anymore.”
He was standing across the room and then suddenly he was right next to me, inches away, and I never saw him move. Nose to nose, no human breath from him to warm my freezing face, and his raised-up hands didn’t touch me but somehow I still went stumbling backwards grabbing at the air, clutching the desk for balance as he pulled the broken drawer out so smooth and light. He didn’t touch my papers but they spilled out anyway, of their own accord, fluttering all over the floor in a dry drifting snow.
“Well?” he said, and slammed the drawer shut so hard the whole desk, my arms gripping it, shuddered. “Aren’t you happy you’ve got your Friendly Man back? Here-boy good-boy coming running whenever you want him?” Smiling, smiling wider, his words a throaty hiss. “Baby cried and cried for
papa, now baby’s got him back.”
This wasn’t his house, he couldn’t talk to me like this. This was my house, all my laboratory now. He’d always been so nice to me before. “I told you, I know what you’re about.” Stronger, louder than that, dammit, Grandma who ran all the scientific testing on me always said to straighten up and look people in the eye. I’m using my loudest straighten-up voice right now and I still sound like a weak little girl. “I know what your secret is, I know why this beach is so important to you. We found it, all of us here, the lab found out how to control life and death. It’s right here in the sands. I’ve killed two people, with my own hands, and brought them back alive. I don’t need you anymore—”
“Baby’s got papa back and if she’s very, very good, he’ll swear never, ever to leave her again, no matter what she does. Isn’t that just what you always wanted, deep down in your rotten dragged-back stinking dead insides? Or maybe there’s some second thoughts now, rattling around that tiny little mind?” Slam, went the drawer, slam again, his stretched-out arm shoving and banging it shut. Again. Again. “Aren’t you glad you’ve got me?” Again. “How d’you like me?” Again. “D’you like your blue-eyed boy?”
That slamming drawer vibrated all through me like a blow, a hard bruising fist, but I couldn’t let go of the desk. No matter where I turned my head, we were face to face and his light clear eyes, stolen human-mask eyes, they tugged at something in me like I really was rotten inside, rotten as the dead things that survived the autumn sickness, and that was the part of me that yearned to have him back. “I think you have to go away now,” I said, and something dragged the words out of me, in a whisper, like they were all flattened and scraped against a cold concrete floor. “This isn’t your house anymore. We dug up your secret. We know how to make dead people live again—not as zombies. As people. You can’t stop it. And you have to leave.”
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