“Come with me,” Reggie says.
Kris rises to his feet. He tries and fails to hold his head up as he steps past his uncle into the hall.
“Where are you taking him?” his father says.
“I’m going to show him something. You’re not coming.”
Together they walk across the lawn. Neither speaks. The setting sun washes the main house’s façade in a smoldering glow and glares off its many windows. Reggie marches him inside and through a series of corridors. Elsewhere, muffled through the walls, Kris hears his aunt and cousins. With the many staircases, hallways and antechambers, he can’t decide where the sounds originate.
They come to Reggie’s office. A dark wooden desk occupies most of the room. Black and white photographs cover the walls. People Kris doesn’t recognize stand beneath silver skies, smiling out with silver faces. Their clothes and haircuts look like they belong in an old movie. All over, he spots familiar details—the main house’s back porch, the gate at Highway 175, the oak tree outside his bedroom window, a creek up in the hills that he’s splashed in a hundred times. All the photos were taken on the ranch. Even ones with no obvious landmarks look like home. More photos stand in upright frames on the desk’s varnished surface. Reggie shoves him down into a leather chair and sits in a matching one across the desk.
“You never met Marcus,” he says. “He was my cousin. Mine and your mom’s. Our uncle Ken’s oldest. You know what that makes him to you?”
Kris doesn’t answer.
“First cousin once removed. Learn these things. They’re important. Your great-grandfather was his grandfather. His dad was my uncle, and your great-uncle. Got it?” His jaw muscles work like snakes struggling in mud. “Marcus was five years older than me. Smart as hell, and plenty tough, too. He was a Marine in Vietnam. Uncle Ken wanted him to be a conscientious objector, like all the men in our family, but that wasn’t for him. He didn’t even get drafted. He volunteered. Pissed Uncle Ken off something terrible, and made the rest of us guys feel like grade-A pussies. But he went, and when his tour ended, he came home, because just as he believed he had a duty to his country, he knew he had one to his family. He was next in line to move into the main house after my dad died, assuming he ever found a wife. He would have. He was a handsome guy.” He opens a drawer and lifts out a photograph, enlarged and without a frame. “Then my little sister changed. Charlotte. She was only thirteen at the time, so no one was expecting it, and anyway, it happened faster than usual. One minute we were all eating Sunday dinner together, and the next… well. Marcus tried to get ahold of her, to restrain her.”
He sets the picture on the desk and pushes it across with his fingertips. Kris inches to the edge of his seat and peers down. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. There are abstract, shapeless blobs of light and dark gray, and a whole lot of black. It looks like candles melted down to nothing, or layers and layers of spilled paint. Then more specific forms begin to emerge from the mottled mess—a hand with fingers twisted like deadwood branches, an eye, a patch of hair. White strips, he realizes, are bones, a ribcage exposed and shattered. The inside of his mouth tastes like batteries.
“Charlotte was still a little girl when she did this to a trained soldier, a man
who outweighed her by over a hundred pounds. A man, by the way, who loved the hell out of her, and who she loved right back.” Reggie leans in and curls his fingers around the armrests. “When her time comes, what do you think your sister’s going to do to a bunch of townies she doesn’t even know?”
***
Once Reggie has the phone number, things don’t take long at all. In a few hours, when the sky has turned a thick purple, a police cruiser passes through the gate, its rack of roof lights perched on top like a bulky, industrial tiara. Kris and his father watch it approach from their front steps. Kris can’t remember the last time they’ve stood so close together for so long. Reggie waits beside his own car, parked on the shoulder, his hands on his hips. Around them, their family gazes down on the scene, shadows framed in the glowing windows of their identical houses.
The cruiser slows to a stop. The door swings open and the driver steps out. He’s tall and angular. A metal badge pinned to his chest catches a flash of moonlight. He walks over to Reggie, and the two men start to whisper. Kris can’t hear what they’re saying, and at the moment, he doesn’t care. His attention is fixed on the dark shape in the back seat. It could be anyone, except that it’s Margaret. He feels sick and ashamed and afraid of what she’ll say to him, but burrowed beneath all of that, straining at his guilt and queasiness, is excitement. He gets to see his sister again. For a while, she’ll be mad at him—she may even hate him—but eventually, she’ll forgive. She’ll have to. Regardless of what her life was like down the Highway, what friend she had and where she lived, here at the ranch, there’s just him. There’s just the two of them.
The sheriff and Reggie walk to the rear door. The sheriff opens it and hauls her out. Kris expects her to be in handcuffs, but her arms hang limp at her sides. Her chin touches her chest and her hair falls around her face. Does she know that he turned her in? Does she know that he didn’t entirely hate doing it? Reggie seizes her by the shoulder. His grip sends mountain ranges of creases puckering across her t-shirt. She doesn’t react. The sheriff says one last thing to Reggie, slams the rear door, and climbs back in behind the wheel. He hooks a three-point turn. The cruiser’s taillights color Reggie and Margaret monochromatic red. Then he’s gone. Reggie looks at Kris’s father.
“Come on.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
“But she’s still her.”
“You sure about that?”
“Reg, please.”
“It’s time. You know it.” His voice is flat.
Kris looks back and forth between them, not understanding, but feeling a gnaw of panic anyway.
His father’s face falls. He says, “I won’t go with you.”
“You sure as hell will. She’s your daughter. You’ve got to be there.”
“I can’t. I can’t do it again.”
“Can’t?” He steps forward, yanking Margaret behind him. Her feet drag in the dirt. “Don’t tell me can’t. You know how many times I’ve been up to that goddamned hole? Seven times. Seven goddamned times. She may have been your wife, but she was my sister. I loved her before you even knew her. Don’t tell me can’t. Get in the goddamned car.”
His father swallows and shakes his head, but goes to his brother-in-law. Burning juices rise up in Kris’s esophagus. That goddamned hole. The ground seems to tilt beneath him, as though gravity suddenly shifted forty-five degrees.
“No, no, wait, no,” Kris stammers. “But she hasn’t changed. She’s still okay. She’s still okay.”
“You too, son,” Reggie says. “You’re old enough. Time to find out what responsibility looks like.”
“No.”
“Get in the car, boy.”
Kris looks to his father, and is startled to find his father looking right back at him. Sharp, precise emotion glistens in his eyes, instead of the fogged-in vacancy that has resided there for so long—resentment, disappointment, disgust. It’s Kris’s fault. This is his fault. It’s too much. He pivots on his left foot, spins around, and runs. Reggie calls after him, but the words get lost beneath the clomping of his feet and the air rushing past his ears. With his legs pumping and his arms flailing, he tumbles more than sprints around the side of the house.
***
He was eight years old when he saw the hole. On a hot, dry summer afternoon, when the air had been thick with gnats that kept getting stuck in the sweat on their skin, he and his cousins were entertaining themselves by daring one another to perform various acts of courage—climb to the highest branch in a dead tree, jump a bike over a dry creek bed, touch a maggot-swarmed rabbit carcass for one full minute. Margaret had tagged along once again, but she hadn’t said a word all day. It surprised them all when she finally spoke
.
“I dare you to knock on the hole,” she said to him.
The cousins gaped.
“I don’t know where it is,” he said.
“I do.”
“Liar.”
“Am not. I found it. I’ll show you.”
His stomach tingled, and his mouth went dry and sticky.
“Fine,” he said.
As a herd, they followed her up a road higher into the hills than Kris had every gone. Tufts of brown grass stuck up from potholes. Leafless branches curled above them, forming a cracked tunnel through which angular shards of sunlight shined. For a while, there was some talking and laughing, but as the strain of the ascent took its toll, voices fell silent. Soon, the only sounds were panting and footsteps. Some of the cousins invented excuses to turn back. Others just retreated down the hill without a word. By the time they reached their destination, the group of twelve had shrunk by half.
Where the road dead-ended at a line of skinny trees was the hole. It could have been mistaken for an old-fashioned water well. A column of stone-packed cement twice as wide as a grown man stuck three feet out of the dirt and descended God knew how far below. Weeds circled it. Mustard-colored moss spread up its side like paint spilling upside-down.
Twenty feet away, they all stopped. Everyone looked at him. He thought of shapes scurrying through cramped tunnels, of hooked fingers scraping at stone, of rotted teeth grinding. Shutting his eyes, he willed the images out of his head, but as soon as he saw the hole again, they surged back in. He started forward. Could they hear him drawing close? Even now, were they racing through their warrens to greet him? When he reached the hole, he glanced over his shoulder. Margaret stood in front of his cousins. Her dark eyes were unreadable.
A metal lid lay over the opening. Rust coated it like powdered sugar. A length of thick chain connected its two handles to a pair of iron rings embedded in the cement. It wrapped its way back and forth and across, twisting and winding over and around itself. A padlock sealed it. He listened for the sound of scratching on the other side and couldn’t decide whether or not he heard it. He curled his right hand into a fist, raised it up—
When someone grabbed his arm from behind, he nearly shrieked. Twisting his head, he saw Margaret.
“Don’t,” she said. “This is stupid.”
There wasn’t much talking as they walked out of the hills. No one mentioned the hole, or the mothers and grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts sealed within.
***
On his hands and knees, he peeks over the tall grass. His father and uncle look out into the field where he’s hidden. They call to him. Kris can’t see Margaret. She must be in the car by now. From within one of the houses, a dog begins to bark. Over and over again, their gazes sweep past him, and each time his heart triples its speed, but they never see him. After a while, Reggie says something inaudible. The two men climb into the front seat of the car. Kris watches it rattle up the dirt road and get swallowed by the hills.
There is no change.
The girl with the bowed head and the sagging shoulders who had looked ready to collapse beneath her own slight weight, could she be the monster that he—that they—have always been told she will inevitably become? The picture the grownups paint is of a feral animal, vicious with rabies. Margaret looked nothing but defeated.
There is no change.
Their mother changed behind a closed bedroom door. Through it, they listened to her muffled sobs and screams, until Reggie emerged and instructed them to spend the night with their cousins in the main house. Margaret had to drag Kris out by the wrist. That night, in a guest bedroom, he fell asleep with her arms around him and her whispers in his ear. When they returned home in the morning, their mother was gone.
There is no change.
He licks his lips, tastes salty snot, and realizes he’s been crying. He clutches at the ground. Dry soil squeezes between his fingers. Whoever Margaret is now, whatever state she’s in, whatever lies he’s been told no longer matter. He can’t be without her. He can’t leave her up there. One by one, the lighted windows in the houses blink out. He pushes himself to his feet. He stops by his house to fetch a flashlight from a kitchen drawer, and then starts up the road.
The ovoid saucer of light that his flashlight casts bounces back and forth, illuminating dirt and tiny rocks. For a while, things are familiar, but it doesn’t last. The shrubs, trees, and boulders assume new forms at night. They loom taller. They twist into reptilian shapes. Their tips and edges come to sharp, angry points, stiletto knives and saw blades. Before long, he passes into the far edges of the ranch, following a faded memory of his only trip out here. Sounds in the tangles on the side of the road—snapping branches, rustling leaves—keep drawing his flashlight beam. Each time, it is greeted only by vacant space. Deer, raccoons, opossums, and even mountain lions prowl these hills. He can sense movement all around. Even as his skin and muscles burn, the chill air pricks at him. He doesn’t sweat.
Time passes strangely. It could be one hour or three before, floating in the night’s black wall up ahead, he spots the twin red rectangles of Reggie’s taillights. He strains to listen and hears nothing. The silence possesses an airy quality, like the inside of a steel drum. He runs his thumb in a circle around his flashlight’s on-off switch, and decides not to flick it off. He would rather see than not be seen. He approaches.
The car is parked a few yards short of the hole. All four doors hang open, and the dome light emits a dull, yellow glow. Someone lies face down in the dirt nearby. Kris aims his flashlight. The trembling of his hands manifests itself as a vibration in the beam. Reggie is curled around himself, his head tucked into his chest, his knees drawn up to his stomach. Ragged holes in his clothes expose patches of pale skin. Dark liquid—blood, more than he’s ever seen, more than when Margaret cut her thumb to the bone while chopping a tomato for sandwiches, more than when he fell off the roof of his house and had to be driven into town for stitches—shines on and around him.
“Uncle Reggie?”
The huddled heap does not stir. A thick, wide trail of blood runs away from his uncle. Kris tracks it with his light across the ground into which it has begun to seep, up the side of the hole, and over its lip. The lid lies nearby, the chain coiled on top like a rattlesnake. The hole yawns wide. He inches over to it. U-shaped metal rungs sunk in the chimney wall run a precarious route down, or a precarious route up. The beam of his flashlight peters out before it reaches the bottom.
Something—a gray mass, only slightly less dense than the darkness all around it—moves.
“Dad?”
Whispers and hisses erupt. More shapes than he can count flutter in the black. He feels as though his skin is tightening around his bones, as though all of his organs have crumpled like wads of paper. Tears fill his eyes. If he lets himself cry, that will be it. He won’t be able to put himself back together.
Something rustles nearby. He spins around. She stands in the trees. Shadows conceal her face, but he would have to have his eyes gouged out not to recognize her. She stands with an impossible stillness. Her breaths are dry and heavy. He tries to raise the flashlight, but it seems to be made of solid granite, and the beam rests on the foliage at her feet.
He made me tell. I didn’t want to. What comes out is, “Is it real? Is the change real?”
His question hangs in the air. Below him, at the bottom of the hole, they growl and mutter. Does he hear fingers curling around a metal rung? A foot stepping up on another? He is too afraid to look. The sun will come up after a time. Night will pull back, and the wooded hills will take shape, changing colors to match the sky. Morning choruses of birds will drown out the sounds from the bottom of the hole. He will remain rooted in place, unable to take so much as a step until he is bathed in fresh daylight, until he is alone. Where his sister now stands, there will only be a sun-spotted gap in the trees. The dirt road will show a way out and away. But that’s still hours off. When Margaret speaks, she does not move a
t all. She says, “What answer would you like more?”
KISS OF DEATH
Jeremy Zimmerman
Armand swallowed hard, hoping that his face did not betray his fear. He glanced over at the withered face of Lucinda, the Lich Queen, trying to gauge her emotions from her body language. But her face remained expressionless, her posture still and serene.
“I am sorry, I was lost in thought. Could you repeat that?”
Lucinda chuckled, a dry and dusty sound. “I had asked if you would like to relocate your residence to my tower.”
“Ah. Yes.” Armand cleared his throat and stared out the window at the moonlit landscape beyond. He could dimly make out the silhouette of his village across the valley. Sweat streamed down his spine in the summer heat, leaving the folds of his flesh feeling sticky. He tugged at the front of his tunic, hoping to fan himself with it. His face felt flushed, but he knew that wasn’t due to the weather. “That would involve a good deal of logistics.”
“Oh? What sort of logistics are worrying you?” she asked, her teeth clacking together as she spoke. Armand wondered how she could speak without lips, but had never broached the subject. It struck him as gauche. He was certain that he possessed a tome on the subject.
“Let us start with food,” he said, feeling more confident with specific points to make. “Since you no longer eat, you often forget that I still require sustenance.”
“This is about the ham, isn’t it?” she said, sorrow creeping into her voice.
Armand felt ill at the memory of the ham that had gone bad while she saved it for a special occasion. “It is not just the ham. There exists an entire continuum of logistics involved in getting food delivered to your remote tower in the midst of a blasted heath instead of my cozy manor in town.”
“But I have gotten better about feeding you. I’ve cooked for the first time in five hundred years just for you, love. And if you are living here, you can be in charge of all the food arrangements. Perhaps you could hire an acolyte to obtain food from the market and pay him with lessons in the dark arts?”
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