Advent

  Not tonight, though. She couldn’t get comfortable. Mom wasn’t back yet, which wasn’t a good sign.

  She checked the clock with the glow-in-the-dark Mickey Mouse hands. Two in the morning, they said. Mickey pointed up like he was doing a cheesy disco number. Over in the proper bed, Carl was doing that snore that was like a panting dog mixed with a stalling engine. The excuse was that he got the proper bed because he was the biggest. Actually he got the bed because he said so, even though she was older. He got plenty of use out of it too. Not just sleeping, though he was lazy as a piece of wood. Whenever Mom flipped the TV around to her channels instead of his, up he’d come and in he’d go, and if it wasn’t to sleep, then he’d push Jen and Cody out and shut the door and do whatever it was he did on his own. Playing with himself. He left the magazines lying around. Some of the pages stuck together. Jen tried to stuff them back under the mattress before Cody saw them. It was the only mattress in the room – she slept on an old couch – and she didn’t think it was going to last much longer, what with Carl getting almost too fat to put his own shoes on.

  Cody slept noiselessly on a camp bed near the windows. He’d built his barricade next to it, as usual, between him and the door. It was only piled blankets and clothes and some other crap, cast-off hockey pads and empty cigarette boxes and things like that, but he built it up anyway, every night. He waited for Carl to fall asleep before making his little wall and then woke up before him so he could take it down again secretly. He was learning to hide his weaknesses, though Jen thought it was kind of a bit late for that.

  As well as her two brothers there was baby Crystal, asleep in the folding cot. If she woke up, it would be Jen who’d have to try to keep her quiet. Or if Cody woke up with one of his screaming fits, it would be Jen who’d hold his hand and curl up with him until he stopped, and then walk him all around the house to show him Andy wasn’t home, and then take him outside whatever time of night it was to prove that Andy’s truck wasn’t anywhere near the house and he really didn’t live with them any more. If they both woke up at the same time, it would be up to Jen to combine the two jobs, crooking the baby in one arm while she led Cody around with the other. If Mom came back late and happened to be in one of her moods when she wanted to talk, it would be Jen who’d have to intercept her at the door before she set Cody off, and steer her to her own room and listen to the weeping and mumbling for however long it took that particular night until her bloodshot eyes went glassy and she tipped over and passed out.

  Between one thing and another, Jen spent a lot of time awake in the night.

  To make matters worse, she’d developed a pretty good sense of when these things were likely to happen. She’d learned to read the signs. These days she even had an idea of when the baby was gearing up for a bad night. Not so surprising, since she was the one who kept an eye on Crystal every afternoon and evening. When Mom got going she liked to whine about how hard it was looking after all the kids. Jen thought that was pretty funny, since she usually came back from school to find Mom downstairs with beer and smokes and the TV on loud and Crystal cooped up in a playpen in a different room with a big wet diaper. Come to that, Jen thought it was pretty hilarious that any of them complained to her about anything. They were the ones who dropped their burdens on her like she was paid to carry them. She made half an exception for Cody, who’d had a bad time when Andy’d lived with them, but she still reckoned she’d been in more trouble than he had, in the last few months of Andy’s stay. She’d seen that new look on his face each time he barged in the bedroom to take it out on Cody. Those wolf eyes of his would roam over her way. Taking a long hard look, before he got started on her little brother. She was sixteen; she was getting her boobs; the way they were coming along, she’d end up fitted out like the pink-fleshed girls in the magazines. That was why Mom had finally kicked Andy out. Not because he bullied and hurt Cody – she pretended not to notice that – but because she got jealous. She couldn’t stand him looking at someone else.

  Jen had got into the habit of going to bed with her coat on and zippered up anyway. But the rest of the time she was actually pretty happy about the boobs. They were her ticket out. Mom would never let her go away, so her only chance was to get someone to take her. There’d be a white guy in town someday with a stack of cash, an address way down island and an eye for the boobs. Wham, bang, see ya later. All the girls at school agreed she’d be the first to make it.

  There was a loud crash outside.

  Jen’s eyes opened very wide.

  It sounded like someone had gone through the woodpile. If Mom was so drunk she’d missed the house by that much, she’d probably crash out as soon as she got in the door. She’d still be in the chair in front of the TV when the kids went down in the morning. That was good; it meant a quiet night was more likely. But – Jen’s eyes flicked nervously from side to side, though her head stayed still, nestled in the hood – she hadn’t heard the sound of the truck coming back. She was sure of it.

  Another clatter. They called it the woodpile because a guy up the road came three or four times a year and cleared out dead wood behind their lot for them, split it and stacked it neatly and covered it with a tarp. He did it just to be helpful. Jen liked watching him work. He took his shirt off when he was busy with the axe, even in winter. He had muscles all over his back and shoulders, not boy-muscles, not puffy gym-muscles like the jock kids at school, but man-muscles, stringy and supple and useful-looking. Mom tried to get him to come in for a beer but he always smiled and said no. It was never the nice guys who fell for Mom. Funny, that.

  Jen wondered why he bothered coming back anyway, since all they ever did after he’d gone was toss their own sad ugly garbage around his craftsman-like stack. Their yard was an arrangement of junk heaps. You left anything out there more than a week, it became the bottom of a new pile. Mom kept everything. She had this idea that time would turn it all into money. ‘We could sell that someday,’ she always said. ‘Someone’s going to want that someday.’ Empty canisters, lengths of pipe, mower parts, fishing nets, old toys, a broken fridge, window frames, a boat trailer, tyres, outgrown bikes. All time ever did was rot it or rust it, whatever it was.

  Something was climbing around in it. She heard glass breaking. Not Mom; it couldn’t be. Not drunk kids screwing around or she’d be hearing voices too. An animal?

  A thunderous clang: something must have been knocked over against the old truck. Could an animal have come down out of the woods and got tangled in the junk? It sounded like a big one, elk or bear. But animals didn’t clatter around in people garbage unless there was food involved, and even Mom wasn’t stupid enough to leave anything out there that smelled. There was a lolling, clumsy rhythm to the sound of the thing’s progress through the yard. Animals didn’t get drunk, did they?

  Her breath caught.

  Andy?

  She’d have heard a truck; surely she’d have heard a truck. Unless he’d got some scary idea about sneaking up along the road on foot. Maybe he knew Mom was still out.

  The baby squirmed. That baby could be half a Carney, Jen thought, as she pushed back the blankets. Could be Andy’s child. We could be rearing a wolf cub right in this room.

  She tiptoed to the bathroom and looked out of the window.

  She thought at first it was a bear. Something dark and shambling was pushing through the scattered junk. Then she saw that the dark was some kind of big coat, and the shambling was two-legged. In the shadows cast by the single outside light it looked like a moving tent.

  Noises came from it, smothered wheezy grumbling sounds. It got clear of the pile and shuffled towards the house.

  It stopped. There was a shaggy head on top, which till then had been bent like it was rooting through garbage bags. The head lifted, twisted round and then looked straight up at the bathroom window.

  Jen felt a queasy mix of relief and fear. She’d been so sure it was Andy sneaking back, wasted or high, a thirst for revenge boiling behind his hard ey
es, that she couldn’t help smirking at the sight of some old bum blundering out of the woods and getting caught up in the woodpile. But this one seemed to have brought the woods with him. He was big, really big, wide like a bear, a big head hunched on heavy shoulders. And the coat was . . . She squinted. The coat was covered in stuff. Like leaves and twigs, except they clinked, and bits reflected the light.

  The face was completely hidden in shadow.

  A voice called out to the window where Jen watched. A crabbed voice, an angry old woman voice. She shrank back into the bathroom.

  Now she was only frightened.

  She could cope with Mom, pathetic as her mother was. She could cope with her brothers and her baby sister. She could even cope with Andy drooling over her boobs like a dog in heat. What frightened her – really frightened her – was new stuff. When things changed they got worse.

  The front door shook.

  Crystal began to grizzle, but Jen ignored the baby. She headed for the phone in Mom’s room, trying to remember whether she’d seen Mom using it recently, which would mean the bill had been paid.

  There was a tinkle of glass and the porch light went out.

  The house was suddenly pitch dark. Panicking, Jen grabbed for the phone. She knocked some stuff over onto the floor. The phone went down with it. She knelt and scrabbled around. The door downstairs banged hard, and there was a rough shout.

  In the kids’ bedroom Cody began screaming.

  Jen swept her arms over the floor, scattering empty cans. She found a cord and hauled on it. A shape that felt like half the phone came into her hands.

  The bum was kicking the door. Each kick made the whole house shake. Window screens rattled. Cody’s screaming drilled through her head like a car alarm. She fumbled at the thing that might have been the phone and dropped it.

  There was a mighty crack from downstairs, the sound of the door breaking open. Jen cringed on the floor. Carl was awake now too. Through the wall she heard him yell at Cody to shut the fuck up. Get the phone, just get the phone, Jen thought, though now the shouting and the screaming and the banging made it too loud to think straight. The crotchety old voice was shouting as well, shouting up the stairs. Things crashed around in the front hall like a moose was stuck in there. The whole house was coming down around her ears.

  She gagged as an unbelievable reek flowed into the room, a stench of rotting fish and sea-filth. The bum was shambling up the stairs and the fouled air flowed in front like a bow-wave. Next door Carl was yelling at Cody. ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ freak!’ He always tried to shout louder than the other kids could scream, as if that would stop them. ‘Jen!’ She heard him roll out of bed. Her hands were twisting round and round the cord that might have been attached to the phone.

  ‘Hey fat boy!’ croaked the stranger’s voice, mean and mocking, at the same time as Jen heard Carl open their bedroom door and holler, ‘Mom! What the fuck are you doing down there? Jen!’ She put her hands over her ears and curled up on the floor. The smell was like sharing the hood of her coat with a dead bird.

  ‘You! Fat kid! You listening? You got ears on you?’

  It was a woman’s voice for sure, a big, bullying cackle. It had a husky, old-fashioned accent to it. Somehow Carl was totally ignoring it, all of it, the smell, the rattle, the huge thing in the stairway, he didn’t seem to know it was happening. She heard him go into the bathroom, still shouting for her, looking for her to clean up the mess, to get everything straight, but this time she couldn’t. She was holding the phone to her chest like a doll. She no longer had any idea what it was for.

  ‘You deaf, asshole?’ the voice spat. ‘You!’ It was upstairs now, right outside the bedroom door. Carl came thumping to the top of the stairs and yelled, ‘Jen! What the fuck! Jen!’

  ‘Asshole’s deaf as a brick,’ growled the voice, and then shouted, ‘Who’s listening? Someone here’s listening. Hey! Out of my way, asshole.’ Carl’s shouts changed to a screech, and with a sound like the roof falling in he tumbled down the stairs. Jen couldn’t stop herself letting out a horrified cry.

  ‘Who’s that?’ the voice barked. Cody went on screaming. Jen could picture him, sitting up, knees hugged to his chest, banging his head with his hand, screeching, screeching, while the baby squalled beside him. She curled tighter.

  Slats of light swung through the room. Headlights turning into the yard. They let Jen see that the bedroom door was opening.

  ‘Oho!’ A massive shadow filled the doorway. ‘Oho! Hey! Look what I found.’

  From outside, Mom’s shout, shrill with stupid panic: ‘Jen!’

  The shadow mumbled. Its coat clicked and rustled as if it were alive, like rats in the roof. A sharp hiss, a flare. It had struck a match.

  The invader was a huge old woman with sneaky little eyes like a whale’s set in a cracked face the colour of mahogany. Her cheeks were chalked a smudgy white. She rattled as she moved because her coat was sewn all over with beads, bones, feathers, copper discs, knots of deer hooves bunched like tassels; so were her stiff hide leggings. A ring of bone pierced her nose. The miasma radiated out from her, rancid, blubbery, unspeakably foul. She hunched, holding the match out in fingers so filthy they looked completely black.

  ‘This one’s not deaf and blind, huh? Hey? Oho! A girlie!’ She grinned, exposing brown teeth tumbled around as if there’d been a landslide in her mouth.

  ‘Jen!’ Mom cried out from downstairs. Then she shrieked. She must have seen where Carl had fallen. The chorus of screaming vibrated in Jen’s head.

  ‘Wasn’t looking for a girlie,’ the crone cackled, apparently pleased. ‘But I guess the girlie come looking for me! Come up off there, girlie.’ She motioned. ‘You found what you looking for.’

  ‘Jen! Cody!’

  Jen found her tongue. ‘Mom! I’m here!’

  The crone pushed further into the room, reached out and slammed the door shut behind her.

  ‘Just you and me, girlie,’ she said, backing against the door. The match had burned right down to her fingers. She hissed in surprise and spat on them, then scraped around somewhere in the flaps of her coat and lit another.

  ‘Jen!’ Mom was running up the stairs.

  ‘Mom!’

  The bedroom door shook, but the crone had got her bulk against it. ‘Let me in!’ Mom cried. She slapped on the door. ‘Open it!’

  ‘You gonna listen to me, or you gonna listen to that?’ the old woman said, her eyes glinting. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I can’t, Mom!’ Jen shouted.

  ‘What’s going on? Open up! Jen!’

  ‘You gonna crawl around here an’ let these assholes keep you down, girlie? You gonna live your days eating up their shit? Or you gonna learn killer-whale dance and go dancing away? Get on your feet!’

  ‘Jen!’ Both palms pounding on the other side of the door. ‘Jen!’

  ‘You got white-girl name, girlie? You got white-girl spirit? You wanna go deaf and blind like the fat asshole?’ Her face creased with disgust. ‘Up!’ she barked.

  Jen stood up.

  ‘Gotta stand on your feet for killer-whale dance.’ The reek and the shouting and banging chaos made Jen’s head swim. The second match burned out and in the darkness she thought the shape blocking the door had become a whale, a massive domed whale head thrusting up from the floor. She staggered to one side.

  ‘Gotta open your mouth to sing killer-whale song. Open your mouth, girlie.’

  ‘Huh?’ she said.

  ‘Open your other mouth, girlie. Not the one you use for eating shit. Open it. Gotta say my name. What’s my name, girlie?’ Everyone was shouting; everything was shouting. She squeezed her hands over her ears but none of it would stop. ‘What’s my name? You know it, girlie. I don’ come here otherwise. I don’ come out to your shithole unless there’s killer-whale dancer here. Firs’ time in a hundred years! What’s my name?’

  ‘Ma’chinu’ch!’ Jen screamed, her ears ringing.

  The shadow screeched delightedly. ‘Killer
-whale girlie!’ It swayed, waking the skeletal music in its coat. ‘You own the clan house! You gonna dance the dance!’ The dried hooves clacked, the strings of beads skittered together. ‘You better learn it quick, girlie!’

  ‘Ma’chinu’ch!’ Jen shouted. People were shouting back at her from the other side of the door, but she couldn’t hear them. ‘Ma’chinu’ch!’

  The vast shadow whooped. ‘Not anyone sees me but you! Not anyone hears me but you! You finished eating shit, girlie. Killer-whale song come down your mouth. You gonna tell them all what’s coming.’

  ‘It’s coming!’ Jen cried. ‘It’s coming!’

  The blind darkness filled with dead things chattering. ‘Orca boy coming! Coming the long way round. Orca boy got oceans to cross. But he’s coming, and he’s bringing the world.’

  ‘Orca boy’s coming!’ The ocean girl threw back her head and ululated to the stained ceiling. ‘Orca boy’s bringing us the world!’ Her mother and her brother heaved at the door, crying and hammering. The prophecy soared above their pandemonium, an eagle over a churning sea. ‘He’s finding his way home. Light the hearth. Open the door of the house. Let the ancestors in. The world’s coming back! The world, the world!’

  Author’s Note

  Like the tale of King Arthur, the Faust legend is one of those stories that exists mostly in outline. All they need are a few essentials: in Arthur’s case, the sword in the stone and the Round Table and Guinevere and Lancelot and Merlin. The bones of the Faust legend are even simpler: the bargain, the interval, the final payment coming due. All the rest is flexible, which is why Arthur stories range from Le Morte d’Arthur to Excalibur, and why the two best-known Fausts – Goethe’s and Marlowe’s – are likewise about as spectacularly different-looking as Malory’s romance and John Boorman’s film.