by Leah Bobet
I’m sworn to be here now.
So, “Why?” I ask.
“Because, Teller,” Whisper says, like I’ve just asked her why rock is hard. She inclines her chin downstairs, touches a finger to her nose. Doctor Marybeth. She doesn’t want Doctor Marybeth knowing.
There’s a tight seam about her eyes that says more: Because I need Atticus.
The frown surfaces before I can turn away. I know she sees it because she draws her shoulders up and looks at me until I close the door behind me. “It’s her house,” I say. Jack keeps up his pacing. He don’t say a word.
“She sent Violet away,” Whisper replies, and Jack’s frowning now too, but he shakes his head once and lets be. I look over Whisper’s head at him. We need to talk, me and Jack. Somewhere we don’t need warnings. Somewhere quiet.
But now he stoops down and moves one last finger of paper just so, and Whisper spreads her hands for us to give her a good lot of room. I back right up to the door, feel for the handle — too high, at my side. If Doctor Marybeth comes upstairs, I can warn them, or her. I can get it open quick, or keep it shut.
There’s a funny feeling in my belly at the thought of the ghost of Atticus.
“Maybe I should go back down —” I say, and Jack quells it with a look. I know he knows what I really mean: I don’t want to be here.
“Need you, Teller,” he says, rough.
I lean back against the door, and Whisper starts to sing.
There ain’t words to this one; not that I can pick. It’s low and keening and roundabout like the way Whisper sings at funerals; the songs she makes when we put our people’s bodies in the ground. It’s a sound that wraps ’round an absence, and the shape of the absence is Atticus, and Whisper sings.
Something answers from the bits and snips and shards of Atticus’s file. It comes like a chill, the chill that hangs in the pipes sometimes and in the Cold Pipes all the time, the one I thought once might mean ghosts though until today, there was no way to prove it. It rises from the floor, a seeping brush of cold painted right in a circle, thus to thus.
Whisper squints, leans in, not breaking the stride of her sweet-wail, mumbling song. “Atticus?” slides swift into it, Atticus-Atticus-Atticus sibilating into her hum and building, drawing circles ’round her circles of paper and blood. The cold gathers in. The cold shimmers.
“I can see it,” Jack says, low and surprised. Nobody ever sees Whisper’s ghosts; nobody would believe in them but for the things they tell her that always prove sound and true. We don’t ask those kinds of questions in Safe. Not against people who’ve earned and kept their Sanctuary.
But: “I see it too,” I say, and Whisper scrunches up her face even further in scolding us to silence.
The ghost looks like a new carving. Its lines are thin and tentative and it’s all washed-out color, scratched on the air so light there’s no saying for sure that it’s really there. It looks like memory badly kept; a six-foot picture from Whisper’s Polaroid, half-developed and wasted. I can’t tell when its mouth sets to moving, but I feel the air change when it speaks.
“Atticus,” Whisper breathes, and falls silent herself to listen.
“What’s he say?” Jack says, and I search it for arms, for lamplit, glowing eyes, to see if they’re red or sun-golden.
“He —” She stops, sits back on her hands. Her face’s gone soft for a moment at the sight of him, the sight that must be so much stronger for her than it is to our stupid, ghostless eyes. And then her voice catches, harsh and broke: “He don’t know who we are.”
It hits me in the belly where my true oaths live.
“How can he not know us?” Jack asks, and his arms hang loose and useless, his mouth open on other words he don’t yet want to say.
“Lost his mind,” I choke out. “Stolen.”
“No,” Whisper breathes. “No. It’s not our Atticus,” and she leans in listening, seeking. Her hand strays to a shard of paper, smudged with Whitecoat notes. “It’s Atticus from Lakeshore. It’s Atticus twenty years past.”
“But he wasn’t dead twenty years past,” I snap too-loud, half not knowing why ’cept that Atticus is gone, real gone and not just dead, and that’s the end. We’re all alone up here.
“He wants his doctor,” Whisper breathes, voice high and cracking. “He thinks he’s dreaming. He … he wants to go home.”
Only then do I look hard, look through the mess of paper and strange-tinged air to the edges, the lines: see how soft the arms, how small the shimmer of claw at the end of them. How skinny and fierce the man is behind them. See the lines, and how they’re drawn with darkness.
Whisper smiles that twisted, sad smile, and drops her hands to her lap. “He wants Corner.”
“Send him back,” Jack snaps.
“Jack —”
“It’s not him.”
Then the bed-dust rustles like a train’s coming through, pushing all the wind in the world ahead of it on its metal cheekbones. The dust builds up and up, pulling into a hand, a small nose, a sharp-boned familiar face.
You said you’d love me, it whispers to the sometime-ghost of Atticus, and its voice is boy-girl and broken and clean as a bell.
Jack shrugs his gloves off and drops them to the floor.
The ghost of Atticus opens its mouth, and closes it, and reaches out one yearning hand.
The lights go wild, sparking and flailing and flickering in their sockets. “Jack, no —” I get out before they blaze bright as high daylight and pop pop pop! go the lamp and bathroom bulbs as their fire flows into his hands. Jack’s fingers spark as he plunges them deep into the heart of the thing that’s not our Atticus and burns it from the chill heart out, touches it with lightning from bone to not-there bone.
The dust-shadow watches.
The dust-shadow screams.
The door bursts open behind me and I yell, grabbing for anything that’ll keep shadows off, bolsters and pillows and the ruined bedside lamp, not thinking ’bout how shadows aren’t big and warm with eyes dark and scared — and then it’s Doctor Marybeth standing in the door, and my arm’s raised up to strike. I throw myself back, stumbling into Whisper’s careful-laid circle, slip on a snip of paper and fall against the bed-mattress hard.
“What’s this?” Doctor Marybeth breathes, faint and still piercing, and then there’s a rush of light, a rush of dark, and the shadow-thing is kneeling in a midnight puddle at her feet, chill arms wrapped ’round her knee-bones, aching with shadow tears.
Doctor give me something give me poison give me pills I can’t bear it, it rolls one word over the other, and buries its face against her, half-solid and strange.
Doctor Marybeth stumbles. “Mare!” Jack yells, and his voice is cold with fear. But the shadow moves with her, fluid and swift, moving not-arm with her leg and not-face with the rest of her, flickering into position knee-bent at her feet. Give me something to sleep tonight, it begs, and flecks of midnight tear-dust scatter on the floor.
Doctor Marybeth breathes once, shallow, her face gone sick underneath her skin. “Corner?” she says small, and the shadow looks up.
That’s not its name, I almost say, but Doctor Marybeth is shivering, shivering blue as she reaches down to lay a finger on that light-mote, broken face. “Oh, little child,” she says, teeth shaking in the way of her words. “Oh, tsujus.”
“Let it go, Mare,” Jack says low, his hands crackling sparks. “It’s nothing real.”
“It’s bewitched her,” Whisper says, and the first shadow-finger sinks into Doctor Marybeth’s skin.
Whisper’s on its back before I draw breath, yanking at its narrow throat before I can yell. Her hands go straight through. Her ghost-talk rises to screaming, the first time I’ve ever heard it not low, not sweet or quiet, and her arms pass through and through again as four more fingers soak through Doctor Marybeth’s slacks. Then an arm, a shoulder.
“Jack, kill it!” Whisper wails, tumbling back on her bottom, panting against the floor.
/> “I can’t, I’ll shock her —” he snaps. My hands are in my pockets looking for fire, but I can’t do nothing with fire. It’ll burn the house and scorch the rugs and take the whole thing down, and we’ve already burned one house today and it was a house we hated.
“My little tsujus,” Doctor Marybeth says, her eyes far away, off in another place or time or maybe just dying of shadow’s-touch. “I’ll go to him. I’ll make it right. Let things calm down; you know he won’t stay angry —”
I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared washes over me like rain, and the shadow’s head sinks into Doctor Marybeth’s belly.
“I’ll take care of you,” she whispers. “You stay here where it’s warm.” Her hand flickers over the shadow-head. Over her own belly.
The hand drops before she drops to the floor.
“Mare!” Jack screams, and scrambles over. I can’t see her chest. I can’t see if it rises or falls. “Teller! Give me wind!”
Flicks of paper scatter as I kick them out of the way, walk and stumble and crawl to Doctor Marybeth’s side. Airway Breathing Circulation I remember from way back, Atticus’s lesson, though delivered by someone else’s hands ’cause Atticus couldn’t clasp without pinching. Soft hands, and firm, grown-up hands. On my little-boy nose and chin to show me how.
Corner’s hands.
I stutter, latch my left hand on to her nose and tilt her chin with my right, far up. “She’s not breathing,” Whisper wails, and I put my lips down to Doctor Marybeth’s and blow.
There’s a rhythm to it. One-two-three up-two-three and then take another breath and blow. I go four times before Doctor Marybeth shivers against my nose-pinch hand and coughs, and I back off fearing she’s going to cough up shadow, like my mouth’s not already been touching it for four breaths, four silent wind-touched three-counts where nothing else moved but the floorboards. But nothing comes back up. Her eyes flutter open instead, and she sucks in a deep, scraping breath.
“Oh God,” Jack says, and collapses back to sitting.
I make it to the bathroom before I sick up. There’s a grace in that.
Doctor Marybeth’s breathing slow on the floor when I get back, my mouth sour and face damp from the cool water from her sink; from tears, from just reaction. I go back to where Whisper’s kneeling, brushing Doctor Marybeth’s hair off her forehead, all that mad and hate and mistrusting between them forgotten.
“Can you feel it inside?” she asks, big-eyed with a mama’s fear.
Doctor Marybeth shakes her head. Her eyes are closed. She looks three-day-duty tired.
Jack says nothing. He kneels drawn-up next to Whisper, hands clasped tight in front of him like a kid expecting to get scolded; eyes heavy, hard, unknowable. His hands flicker with light. “You livin’?” he asks gruffly.
“Jack —” Doctor Marybeth says, hand outstretched to comfort or to take some, just to make sure he’s real.
“Don’t touch,” he snaps, drawing his hands back. His gloves are still across the room. Doctor Marybeth jerks herself back as their hands get too close and spark.
“Sorry,” Jack says, low to the edge of my hearing.
“S’okay,” she says back, automatic, and leans eyes-shut against the floor.
“Let’s get you into bed,” Jack says, and delivers Whisper and me a look you don’t gainsay. We take her by the arms, one each, and help her onto the mattress. She’s cold, cold enough to prickle my fingers, but not blue-lips chill no more. Still, I tuck the blanket up under her arms, careful not to put her in too tight.
“It’s all right,” Doctor Marybeth says. It’s weak enough that no one believes her.
“Hot tea,” Whisper says to me. “Quickly.”
I hurdle down the steps two-three at a time, tumble into the quiet kitchen fumbling for the kettle. It bangs too loud on the stove. My hands are shaking.
By the time I get back upstairs, Whisper’s got a broom in hand. She’s swept all the dust into a crumbling, tiny heap while Jack presses his thick gloves against Doctor Marybeth’s forehead. He reaches for the mug without thinking, awkward; I know enough to hold it back until Doctor Marybeth looks up and takes it in her little, precise, Normal hand.
“Wasn’t Atticus,” Jack says, watching Whisper like he didn’t notice my hand and Doctor Marybeth’s, the clumsiness of his own. His color’s high. I pretend for him too; he’s earned a little pretending.
“Was so,” Whisper says, and bends down with a dust-pan. “It spoke his voice. It knew the way his sentences turned.”
“It was a shadow,” Jack says just in the same tone of voice, flat and factual and feeling just about nothing. “The shadows put on Corner too, just like real.”
We don’t look over our shoulders when we say the name no more.
Whisper gathers up all the little dust motes and takes them down the stairs, a quiet creak at each step telling just how careful she’s walking. The back door opens when Doctor Marybeth’s worked halfway down the mug of tea, and there’s a flicker of flame out the high attic window. Dust doesn’t burn so good. The flame is slow and dim.
When I look back, Doctor Marybeth’s watching me, eyes too steady for almost dying. “Sorry,” I mutter.
“Don’t be,” she says, and my hand starts shaking again, enough that she wraps it around her mug to keep it still as her eyes.
“You’re not dead,” falls out of my mouth. Or lost. Or blank Violet stolen.
But she doesn’t even blink. “I’m not dead,” she agrees, and takes another sip. She licks her lips after. They look cracked; little ridges of dead skin rising out of them. “I saw …”
I take her hand. Breathe in rhythm with the noise of Whisper’s feet coming back up the steps. Put on my best Teller voice. “What did you see?”
She closes her eyes. The better to see it in the dark, maybe. “That last night with Corner.” She licks her lips again. Her voice is all throaty and scraped.
“You remembered it,” I fill in.
She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I saw it how she saw it.”
I’m good and careful. My hand doesn’t slip and spill hot tea all over the quilt Doctor Marybeth’s mama made her.
“I see it,” she finishes, and lets out a breath.
I put the tea down. Just to be careful and sure. Jack’s at the door arguing with Whisper in a voice that’s low, cupped-in, but he’s listening, I think. Jack can’t do nothing in his life if he can’t take in three conversations word for word, strung together, all at once.
“Tell me?” I ask.
She tells me.
Corner’s not scared.
Corner’s got a cool and even calm that comes over its bones when bad things happen (it says in Doctor Marybeth’s voice, through Doctor Marybeth’s lips), and it’s used enough to bad things that the edges of tonight are familiar. The edges of tonight are shadow-dark and worn, like it’s every other bad night away from home.
(Shadow-dark? I ask her, choosing words right careful.
Yes, she whispers, and her eyes go far away again.)
This time, at least it’s warm. This time, it’s safe as safe can be Above, in Marybeth’s attic room, under the quilt Marybeth brought from home in a folded brown-paper parcel after she got out of the Whitecoat school where they dumped all the kids of her kind. Marybeth’s got no claw arms or bloodtouch and never cut herself even once, but she knows what it’s like to be Freak: how the words on your tongue don’t come out quite right to anyone, home or away. Marybeth’s Safe.
(— and I watch Doctor Marybeth for wincing as these words fall from her tongue, but there isn’t none. Just her far-gone eyes and her still small hands and the spirit of Corner telling me dark things, and true.)
It tells me ’bout cool and even calm, the kid-familiar smell of grass and trees; the smell of never too late to blend in, Pass quiet, prove them all wrong and build a life Above that’ll last. Be a rocket scientist. Be a doctor.
Make your mama proud.
(And Doct
or Marybeth’s hand rises, and wipes away the tears.)
So when Marybeth gets back, you’re ready. Ready to say yes to her and take her spare bed and helping hand, be done with him and Safe and all of it. Until you see the slack pallor of her face. The tight fist-curls of her hands.
Because there was a ceremony (you can see it). Because they burned your last year’s offering in a special-made fire. They closed the big door to Safe at the end and it clanged and echoed, blowing out the silence.
Because he did. He led them, start to end.
I’ll find you something, she says, a hand on your back that’s not wanted there no more, breath in your hair where it’s not wanted no more. Her hand and breath both shaking with rage. I’ll find you work. You stay with me. We’ll get you a life that’s real.
But all you can say is Doctor give me something give me poison give me pills, the want to die getting harder and sharper with every breath, sharper than any time before or after Lakeshore. There’s tears hot on your cheeks and it’s shameful, the height of shame. The end of all your plans. Shut door. Unnamed. The Tale of how you came down never told again, and your name turned into Killer.
No no, she whispers. Be strong. I know you’re good and strong.
You’re not. (And here the voice stumbles, the bell-voice, the shadow-voice, tripping over broken-backed regrets.) Atticus is strong for the both of you, and you are —
You’re alone.
And now Corner’s mad.
And now Corner’s scared.
“And she’s gonna run away —” and Doctor Marybeth lets out a sob that ain’t her own, hardly human and half shadow-talk but all real in its weeping. Whisper rushes over at the sound and takes her hand, brushes me aside not thinking, half-thinking.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs, smoothing out Doctor Marybeth’s hair, running her fingers through its strands. “It’s okay, dearie, it’s okay.”
I get up and snug my shoes on, tug the laces up tight. Check my pockets: matches in one, emergency money in the other, twenty-five dollars still secret, still snug. It’s been more than half an hour, and half an hour matters, and I did a wrong thing today and I’ve gotta go fix it now. Before it’s too big to take back. Before we’re all alone, and I’m alone from my Ariel too.