Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Yes, you’re right,” Sadie says, cradling her bad arm, and she nods at the Scrabble box on a bookshelf in the corner. “But if it’s Scrabble you want, it’s Scrabble you’ll get, even though we both know you’ll only kick my ass again.”

  “Maybe not if you’d pay better attention and stop thinking about the locks and about dogs down on the street,” Emmie says, immediately wishing that she hadn’t, wishing she knew some trick for taking words back. She looks up from the magazine lying open on her lap, and Sadie is staring down at the hardwood floor now, still cradling her crippled left arm.

  “I’ll spot you,” Emmie says, hoping maybe that’s the right thing to say now that she’s screwed everything up. She tosses the magazine onto the floor and gets up off the sofa, stepping quickly around the corners of the coffee table and a tall stack of books on the floor. “Fifty points. I always spot Deacon fifty points.”

  “Was that his idea or yours?”

  “His,” Emmie admits. “He wanted me to spot him a hundred, but I said, ‘Uh-uh, no damn way am I spotting you a whole hundred points, Mr. Deacon Silvey.’”

  “Good for you.” Sadie laughs, and Emmie’s relieved. She can tell the laughter is more honest than the forced smile was, that the laugh is real, something that Sadie feels instead of just something she wants Emmie to think she feels. Emmie’s at the bookshelf now, standing on tiptoe, fishing the Scrabble box down from the shelf where her stepmother keeps all her tarot cards, copies of the books she’s written and a couple more that she hasn’t finished yet, a soapstone scarab that she brought back from a trip to Egypt, three blue glass bottles, and her Book of Shadows. Emmie knows about the Book of Shadows—that it’s filled with Sadie’s spells and rituals—though she’s never taken it down, never opened it, has never even touched it. She knows that her stepmother is a witch, has known that for as long as she can remember. Not the sort of witch you see on television shows or in the movies, of course, but the sort that’s real, not make-believe. Deacon says it’s all a load of horseshit and superstitious nonsense, but Sadie told her that she should wait and decide for herself when she’s older. Seeing the Book of Shadows, Emmie’s reminded of the strange woman on the train and the Seal of Solomon tattooed on her skin. Perhaps, she thinks, the woman on the train was also a witch.

  “Have you ever heard of something called the Seal of Solomon?” Emmie asks, managing to wiggle the Scrabble box out from under several heavy books without knocking anything over.

  “Sure,” Sadie replies and sits down on the sofa. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, mostly I was wondering if it really has an invisible point on it somewhere?”

  Her stepmother glances towards the door, and suddenly she has that anxious expression she gets that Emmie knows means she wants to check all the locks again, that she’s afraid she might have missed one, maybe that dead bolt up high that’s a bit temperamental sometimes.

  “That’s what someone told me,” Emmie says, “that the Seal of Solomon has seven points, even though you can only see six of them.”

  “Some things are like that,” Sadie tells her, but doesn’t look away from the door. “Sometimes you can only see part of a thing, even though it seems like it’s all right there in front of you. Sometimes things will seem plain as day, and that’s not what they are at all.”

  “So, it’s something magick, like your tarot cards?”

  “Everything’s magick, Emmie, in one way or another. I’ve told you that before.”

  “But you know what I mean. Is it some sort of magickal symbol?” Emmie carries the Scrabble set back over to the coffee table, quickly clearing away all the magazines and papers and books cluttering the table, then sits down on the floor, opens the box, and begins to set up the game.

  “Who told you about the Seal of Solomon?” Sadie asks her, finally looking away from the apartment door.

  “Someone at school,” Emmie says, pausing only a moment before deciding that the lie’s probably better than telling Sadie about the woman on the train. “Do you want me to keep score?”

  “Sure. You’re better at it than me.”

  “Does it protect people?”

  “That depends who and what you believe. Some people think it does.”

  “The Jews?” Emmie asks, choosing a pencil from the assortment of yellow and black stubs inside the box. She picks the sharpest of the bunch, one that even has a ragged pinkish stump of eraser left on one end.

  “Some Jews, yes, and some other people, too. King Solomon is said to have had the star engraved on an iron ring. It gave him the power to command demons.”

  “I’m not sure I believe in demons,” Emmie says and shrugs again. She writes her name at the top of a blank page in the notepad that Sadie keeps inside the Scrabble box with everything else. Then she draws a vertical line, dividing the page neatly in two, and she writes Sadie’s name on the other side of the line opposite her own.

  “It’s just a word,” Sadie tells her, and then her stepmother selects a wooden tile from the lid of the box where Emmie has laid them all facedown. “And like all words, it can mean a lot of different things—”

  “To different people,” Emmie says, and she points at the tile her stepmother has drawn from the box. “What did you get?”

  “I got a P. Three points. Let’s see you beat that.”

  Emmie draws a tile, but it’s only an E, and she shakes her head and sighs. “Crap. I shouldn’t have spotted you anything at all,” she says, but she doesn’t really care about not getting the first turn. At least Sadie seems to have forgotten about the doors and the locks and the windows for the time being.

  “That’ll teach you not to underestimate your elders,” her stepmother says. Emmie draws six more tiles from the lid of the box and sets them up on the rack so that Sadie can’t see what they are. They spell out POCSLEI, and she immediately begins rearranging them in her head, searching for something that will equal a halfway decent score.

  “Maybe we should have played chess, instead,” she says. “Or Chinese checkers.”

  “No, no. I’m feeling lucky,” Sadie says, but her eyes have drifted back to the apartment door. This time Emmie looks, too, and sees that her stepmother forgot to reset the alarm when they came home from dinner. Emmie was talking, telling Sadie about a new video game. “Tonight I’m gonna take you down,” Sadie adds, but the tone in her voice tells Emmie that she’s no longer thinking about Scrabble.

  “Then you can give me a word. A new word. One that I don’t already know. That’ll make it fair.”

  Sadie’s pale blue eyes dart back to the game board, then nervously up at Emmie, as though she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. “It’s already fair, you little brat,” she says. “I don’t have to give you a word. You’re too damned smart as it is.”

  “And it has to be a magickal word,” Emmie adds, then begins rearranging her Scrabble tiles. She doesn’t like it when Sadie’s eyes look that way, like she’s frightened and confused and trying too hard to seem like she’s neither one. Now Emmie’s tiles spell out IEPOCLS, so she starts over. She glances up at Sadie, and sees that her stepmother’s staring at the door again, the red door painted almost the same shade as a ripe pomegranate, festooned with dead bolts and chain locks, the black steel rod she keeps wedged firmly between the door and a thick block of wood nailed directly to the apartment floor. The security pad is mounted just to the right of the door, beneath a framed black-and-white photograph of the three of them taken one summer day at Scarborough Beach, back when Emmie was hardly more than a baby. The alarm’s ready light is green, but the armed light is glowing a bright, accusatory red.

  “And, also, it has to be a real word,” Emmie says, looking away from the door and the neglected alarm, back to her stepmother’s face. “No made-up words. It has to be a word I could use to beat you.”

  “Tetragrammaton,” Sadie says. “That’s a real word.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve never heard i
t before.”

  “Well, if you’d heard it, Emmie, then it wouldn’t be a new word, now, would it?”

  “So, what’s it mean?” Emmie asks her, sounding as skeptical as she can manage, hoping to distract her stepmother from the door again.

  “It’s the Hebrew name for god,” Sadie says and chews at her lower lip. “It’s supposed to have been part of the Seal of Solomon.”

  “Well, it has too many letters. You should have given me a shorter word. I’ll never have all the letters I need to spell that.”

  “You didn’t say it had to be a short word.”

  “I should have. I didn’t think you’d take advantage of a kid. How do you spell it, anyway?”

  And then her stepmother opens her mouth, like she’s about to tell Emmie how to spell tetragrammaton, like Emmie’s not smart enough to figure it out for herself. But then her eyes move rapidly from the door to the twice-locked windows and back to the keypad beneath the photograph again, and Emmie knows that they’ve both lost this round. For a second or two, it doesn’t matter what Deacon’s told her, and she almost asks Sadie why she’s so afraid, what it was that ruined her hand and scared her so badly that she’s still scared all these years later.

  “Hold on,” her stepmother says. “I’m sorry. This will only take me a second.” And Emmie lets the questions dissolve, unasked, on her tongue while Sadie goes to set the burglar alarm.

  “Do you still miss her?” Emmie asked Deacon one day in September, the last day of her vacation before third grade began. They were sitting at the kitchen table, eating the sloppy peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches that Deacon had made for lunch, and she’d been thinking about school, because she’d been thinking about hardly anything else for a week, when Deacon had said something about the table being too big for only two people. She always sat at the chair beneath the window, and he always sat directly across from her. When Sadie had lived with them, she’d sat in the chair at Emmie’s left. There was a stack of telephone books and old newspapers there now.

  Deacon stopped chewing and stared at his plate a moment before answering her. “Sometimes worse than others,” he said, and took another bite of his sandwich.

  “And this is one of the worse times?” she asked, knowing the answer, and her father nodded his head.

  “Don’t you mind me,” Deacon said, after he’d swallowed and washed down the peanut butter and jelly and white bread with a mouthful of milk. “Now and then I just think too much for my own good, that’s all.”

  “Well, you know, it’s not like she was my real mother,” Emmie said, though, in fact, she thought it was exactly like that. It seemed like the sort of thing Deacon would want to hear, like something that might make him feel better and get him to thinking about something else.

  “She did the best she could,” Deacon told her, “under the circumstances. She did a hell of a lot better than—” But then he stopped, took another drink of milk, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Emmie said, realizing that she’d only managed to make things worse. “I just meant, well, I meant—”

  “Finish your lunch,” her father said and stood up. “I need to get back to the shop,” and then he took his saucer and empty glass over to the sink and rinsed them. Emmie sat looking at the uneaten half of her sandwich, wondering if third grade was when you finally learned when to keep your mouth shut.

  Emmie lays her last five tiles down in a vertical line ending at the lower right-hand corner of the Scrabble board. R-E-D-C-A-P, and the P lands on “Triple Word Score.” She grins triumphantly at her stepmother and taps her fingers loudly on the edge of the coffee table.

  “Emmie, that’s two words, not one,” Sadie says, licking at her lips and already reaching for the paperback Merriam-Webster’s dictionary because they’ve been playing Scrabble long enough that she knows Emmie won’t ever just take her word on these things.

  “No, it’s not. It’s only one word. Go ahead. Look it up. ‘Redcap.’ It’s a sort of mushroom.”

  “Yeah, and it’s also a sort of a fairie,” Sadie adds. “I know that, but it’s spelled as two words.”

  “It’s also what they used to call Little Red Riding Hood,” Emmie says, and Sadie stops turning pages and glances up from the dictionary at Emmie, who’s still grinning.

  “Go ahead. Look it up. But you’re wasting your time. You’ll just see that I’m right.”

  “You don’t have to be a snot about it,” Sadie tells her.

  “Read me what it says. ‘A poisonous species of toadstool.’ I bet that’s exactly what it says.”

  “Why don’t you look it up,” Sadie replies and hands her the dictionary. “I’d rather we wasted your time than mine.”

  “Fine,” and Emmie takes the dictionary, which is already turned to the RE’s, and she ticks off the words one after another—redbreast, redbrick, redbud, redbug—and there it is, just like she knew it would be, redcap, one word, two syllables. “Redcap,” she says. “One word.”

  Sadie takes the dictionary back and frowns at the page as she reads it. “Okay, but you’re wrong about the definition,” she tells Emmie, then reads it aloud. “‘A baggage porter, as at a railroad station.’”

  “I can still use it,” Emmie says, adding up her score. “And I’m not wrong, because it is too a kind of mushroom. That dictionary just isn’t very good. Maybe you should get a new one, one that knows about mushrooms and fairies.”

  “Yeah, maybe I should,” and Sadie closes the dictionary and sets it aside. “Emmie, why even bother adding the score. We both know you won.”

  “It’s still important. It’s still important to know exactly how it turned out.”

  “Fine, but I have to go to the bathroom right this minute, or I’m gonna pop.”

  “Yeah, your eyes are starting to turn kind of yellow. Soon they’ll be just like mine.”

  “Your eyes aren’t yellow,” Sadie says, standing up. “They’re amber.”

  “Wrong,” Emmie says. “They’re yellow as butter. They’re yellow as sunflowers.” It’s an old argument, one that Emmie’s never really understood the reason for. Her eyes are not amber; she’s seen amber at the museum, polished chunks of it with ants and ticks and flies trapped inside for millions and millions of years, and that’s not the color of her eyes at all. And they aren’t golden brown, either, or champagne, or any of the other things that Sadie has tried to call them so that she doesn’t have to call them yellow, which is what they actually are. “Yel-low,” Emmie says, and then realizes that she’s made a mistake in her arithmetic and begins rubbing hard at the notepad with the last stingy scrap of the pencil stub’s eraser.

  “Whatever. I’m going to pee now,” Sadie sighs, sounding a little annoyed, and Emmie watches as she tries to make it past the front door without stopping to check the locks.

  And later on, after Emmie has beaten Sadie again and the Scrabble set has finally been put away for the night, after a snack of Double Stuf Oreos and A&W cream soda, after Emmie’s brushed her teeth and flossed and washed her hands and face and changed into one of Sadie’s T-shirts that she likes to sleep in whenever she visits—after all these things, her stepmother sits on the edge of Emmie’s bed in the narrow space between the kitchenette and bathroom. Emmie’s bedroom, whenever she comes to Manhattan. It’s hardly wider than a large closet, but Emmie likes the closeness. It makes the tiny room feel safe, makes it cozy, and sometimes she thinks she prefers it to her big room upstairs on Angell Street in Providence. A room this small has fewer shadows to wonder about when the lights are out, and there’s still a place for her bed and a small chest of drawers, two red plastic milk crates stacked one atop the other to make a combination bookshelf and toy box. There are a couple of posters on the wall, Hello Kitty and a Japanese girl band, and Sadie has painted golden stars on the midnight-blue ceiling, one for each of her stepdaughter’s birthdays.

  “Do you want a story?” Sadie asks, and Emmie nods yes, beca
use she doesn’t want to be sleepy just yet, wants to lie there awake beneath the golden stars listening to Sadie read to her; Sadie reads aloud almost as good as Deacon.

  “Read me the end of The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader,’” Emmie says. “Read me ‘The Very End of the World.’”

  “Are you sure? I’ve read you that one at least a dozen times already.”

  “Not a dozen. Not that many times.”

  “At least that many times,” Sadie says, but she’s already taking the paperback copy of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” from its place in the topmost milk crate.

  “Right near the end,” Emmie tells her, “after Reepicheep has gone, when Aslan makes a hole in the sky. I think it’s on page two forty-seven.”

  “You’ve memorized the page numbers?” Sadie asks, incredulous, and Emmie smiles a hesitant, flustered smile, wondering if maybe she should say it was just a lucky guess.

  “Only a few of them,” she says instead. “Only for the parts I like the most.”

  Sadie shakes her head and flips quickly through the dog-eared pages until she comes to page two forty-seven. When her stepmother begins to read, Emmie fixes on the largest of the painted stars, the one that stands for her birthday before last. It has seven points, but none of them are invisible.

  “‘Oh, Aslan,’ said Lucy. ‘Will you tell us how to get to your country from our world?’

  “‘I shall be telling you all the time,’ said Aslan. ‘But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder. And now come; I will open the door in the sky and send you to your own land.’”

  “Do you think it was like a black hole?” Emmie asks, but doesn’t take her eyes off the star on the ceiling.

  “No,” Sadie replies. “I think you mean a wormhole. I think maybe Aslan’s hole between worlds was more like a wormhole than a black hole. Hardly anything ever escapes a black hole.”

  “I know that, Sadie,” Emmie says, annoyed at being corrected and embarrassed that she didn’t get it right in the first place. “I forgot, but you know I know that. I read a book by Stephen Hawking.”