Something is wrong, the brown girl thinks, but Emmie can hear it just as clearly as if she’d said the words aloud. Something’s terribly wrong, and we need to hurry.
“That’s proof I’m hallucinating you,” Emmie says, and then she switches on the old floor lamp near her father’s chair, making a small pool of safe cream-colored light, before she follows the girl upstairs.
“Why do you have yellow eyes?” the boy asked, and Emmie told him she didn’t know why, that they’d just always been that way, and she didn’t have any idea why. She’d been asked the same question lots of times, and sometimes she’d been taunted and called names—yellow eyes, yellow eyes—lots more times than she could remember or cared to ever try. Sometimes, she made up elaborate stories to account for her yellow eyes, or told whoever was asking or bullying her that she had a contagious disease, like hepatitis or the plague, and they really shouldn’t come too close. That was usually enough to make them leave her alone. But the day that this boy asked—which was the last day she went to the public elementary school on Camp Street, the last time someone asked before Deacon and Sadie finally moved her to the Wheeler School where hardly anyone ever asks about her eyes—that day, she didn’t feel like lying, so she just told him the truth, that she didn’t know why her eyes were yellow.
“I used to have an old tomcat with yellow eyes,” the boy said. “Maybe you’re part cat.”
“I’m not part cat,” Emmie replied. She was waiting out front, sitting on the stone front steps of the school waiting for Deacon to show up and walk her home. “I have yellow eyes, but I’m not part cat.”
“Maybe your mama’s a cat,” the boy said.
“My mother’s dead. She was a paleontologist, not a cat,” Emmie told him, wishing that Deacon would hurry up or that the boy would get bored and find someone else to pick on.
“Maybe they just told you she was dead. Maybe they didn’t want to tell you she was really a cat. Maybe they’re ashamed to have half a cat for a daughter. Do they glow in the dark?”
“Do what glow in the dark?”
“Your eyes, dummy.”
“Leave me alone,” Emmie said, though she knew that he wasn’t going to stop until someone made him stop.
“That would make you a monster,” the boy said, “if your mama was a cat. Maybe they don’t want you to know you’re a monster. Maybe they think if you knew, you’d kill yourself or something.”
“Lots of animals have yellow eyes,” Emmie said. “Not just cats. Lots of animals have yellow eyes.”
The boy smiled and sat down on the step next to her. “Yeah? So maybe she wasn’t a cat. Maybe she was one of those other animals,” he said. “But you’d still be a monster, because normal people don’t have yellow eyes or animals for mothers.” The boy was fat, a year older than she was, and he had a short, piggy sort of a pug nose.
“Maybe your mother was a sow,” Emmie said, and the boy asked her what the hell a sow was. When Emmie told him it was a mama pig, he called her a freak and a retard and kicked her in the ankle.
By the time one of the teachers was able to pull her off the boy, Emmie had blackened both his eyes, knocked out a front tooth, and bitten him three times on the face. Two of the bites were deep enough that he would have to have stitches, but at least Emmie never had to go to school with him again. When Deacon finally arrived—almost fifteen minutes late because the toilet at the shop had backed up, and he’d had to wait on the plumber—he found her sitting in the grass, surrounded by three teachers, the vice principal, a crossing guard, and several other students. There was crusty, drying blood on her face and hands and the front of her white Curious George T-shirt. Her ankle was starting to swell and turn an angry cloudy color, but she wasn’t crying. The boy was still screaming and rolling about on the ground, yelling that Emmie had almost bitten off his goddamn face, and now he was going to die of rabies because she was half cat.
Later, after they’d gone to the emergency room and knew that her ankle wasn’t broken, Deacon took her home, and they sat at the kitchen table, eating grape Pop-Tarts and talking.
“He called me a monster,” Emmie said. “He said you were ashamed of me because I’m a monster and a freak and a retard and because my mother was a cat.”
Deacon chewed his Pop-Tart, washed it down with a mouthful of Coffee Milk, and then he scratched at his head. “And you think that was any way to show him different, acting like a zombie or something, trying to eat off half his face like that? You know you’re not a monster. And you know better than to get in fights with assholes that call you names.”
“I wouldn’t eat his face,” Emmie said, picking some of the purple filling out of her Pop-Tart. “You can get worms from eating raw pork.”
And then Deacon was laughing so hard that Coffee Milk squirted out both his nostrils, which made Emmie start laughing, and by the time they’d both stopped, Deacon was out of breath and Emmie was beginning to feel a little bit better. He didn’t punish her, told her that the swollen ankle was probably punishment enough, but he had to apologize to the boy’s parents, and Emmie had to apologize to the boy in the principal’s office. There were white bandages on the fat kid’s swollen face, and he didn’t look at Emmie once the whole time.
Emmie finds the cardboard box beneath Deacon’s bed, right where the brown girl said it would be, and she pulls it out and opens it.
“There’s very little time,” the brown girl says. “You wasted so much of it, piddling about downstairs, staring at the snow.”
Emmie nods her head, but she takes her time emptying the box and spreading its contents out on the floor of Deacon’s bedroom, the room that used to be his and Sadie’s, the room that never was his and her mother’s bedroom. There are photographs, newspaper clippings, old letters written by hand, old letters written on a typewriter that punched out holes in all the Es and Os. There’s a dried daisy pressed between two sheets of waxed paper. There’s a much smaller box filled with ticket stubs from movies, and there’s a beaten-up old copy of a Dr. Seuss book, McElligot’s Pool. There’s an envelope marked WR with a gold ring inside. There’s a stack of “Calvin and Hobbes” strips clipped from the funny pages, all of which have something to do with dinosaurs. There’s a Bullwinkle key chain with seven keys on it, and, wrapped in tissue paper, there’s a reddish brown rock about as big as Emmie’s fist with a dime-sized trilobite fossil embedded in it.
These are the pieces of a puzzle, she thinks. Now, if I just knew how to put them all together—
“But you don’t,” the brown girl says. She’s sitting in the window seat, watching Emmie impatiently, “and there isn’t time now to figure it out. You should look at the newspaper clippings.”
“These are pictures of my mother,” Emmie says, setting down the trilobite, returning it to its crumpled tissue, and picking up a stack of Polaroids. She knew her mother’s face. Deacon kept a photograph of her on the table beside his bed, and there were others in a scrapbook downstairs. This was the same woman, the same bright green eyes, and in this picture she’s smiling and holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. In the next one, her mother isn’t smiling. She’s sitting on a sofa reading a book, but Emmie can’t tell what the book might be. In the third Polaroid, Chance Silvey is standing on a beach, and there’s a dead pelican on the sand near her feet.
“You don’t grasp how precious time is or how little of it we have left,” the girl tells Emmie. “You’re wasting it. Look at the clippings.”
“But I’ve never seen these photos,” Emmie says, still examining the Polaroid of her mother and the dead pelican. The ocean is flat and silver-blue in the background; the sky’s almost the same color.
“That’s because he hid all these things from you. Deacon’s hidden many things from you.”
“That’s a damn lie,” Emmie snaps at the girl, but she puts down the stack of photos and reaches instead for the nearest bunch of newspaper clippings. They’ve gone golden brown and brittle around the edges, almost like something that
’s been burned, but Emmie knows it’s just because the paper’s old and was so acidic to start with.
“Read the headline,” the girl says.
And Emmie does, aloud—“‘Atlanta Police, FBI, Used Local Psychic, Source Claims.’” Emmie stops and checks the date—August 23, 1989, twelve years before she was born. Deacon would still have been a young man, and Emmie does the math in her head; in 1989 Deacon would have been only twenty-seven years old. “This was almost twenty-one years ago,” Emmie says, and the brown girl frowns.
“That’s not the part that’s important. Keep reading the article.”
And Emmie looks back down at the clipping, but not, she promised herself, because the brown girl said she should. This cardboard box has been filled with secrets her whole life, filled with secrets and hidden all those years right here beneath her father’s bed, where she could have found it on her own any day or night, if she’d only bothered to go looking.
“But you didn’t find it on your own,” the brown girl says haughtily. “If I hadn’t come, you probably never would have.”
“That’s annoying, and I wish you’d cut it out. Stay out of my head. Anyway, they aren’t my secrets. They’re Deacon’s secrets, and this isn’t right. I think it’s almost like stealing.”
“You should keep reading,” the brown girl says. “We’re quite nearly out of time now. They’ll be coming soon, and I need you to understand.”
“Then shut up and stop talking to me,” Emmie says, and she goes back to reading the article.
“I didn’t come here to lie to you. If you’d have believed me, you wouldn’t have needed to see the contents of this box.”
But Emmie is no longer paying any attention to the girl, too busy with the words printed on that scrap of paper, a source close to the Atlanta PD claiming that the Mary English case had been cracked using a psychic named Deacon Silvey. The woman who was accused of having kidnapped and murdered fifteen children between 1982 and 1989, though no bodies had been found. The newspaper article said that Deacon had helped the police with other cases, and that he’d once been a student at Emory University. It also said that he was there with them when the cops found Mary English in the cellar of an old house in the woods, and that he helped save the life of a four-year-old girl named Jessica Hartwell. When she comes to the last line, Emmie puts the article on the bottom of the stack and begins reading the next clipping—“Inside Douglas County ‘House of Horrors.’” There’s a photograph of a very old house; the roof’s sagging in the middle, and there are vines covering one side of the wide porch.
“Mary English was a woman in the employ of the hounds,” the brown girl says. “And the policemen never found the missing children because she didn’t kill them. She merely delivered them to the Cuckoo.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Emmie says, staring at a faded photograph of a doorway. An arch has been woven out of old dried vines, maybe some of the vines from the front porch; three human skulls have been nailed above the arch, each one wearing a crown of what appears to be rusted barbed wire, the words LAND OF DREAMS printed in neat black letters on the door underneath.
“Deacon Silvey never should have crossed that threshold,” the brown girl says, “for in doing so he interfered in the dealings of the Hounds of Cain. His wife died because he went through that door.”
Emmie lays the clippings down, because she doesn’t want to read any more, doesn’t want to know any more, even though she’s still not sure what it all means. “He never told me about any of this stuff,” she says quietly, and glances at the stack of Polaroids again.
“He was trying to do something kind, helping the police,” the brown girl says. “He was trying to do something good. But he never wanted any part of it.”
“But what he did, saving that girl, that got my mother killed?” Emmie asks, and she touches the dead-pelican photo with the tip of her right index finger.
“It’s a very complicated story,” the brown girl tells her. “There’s not time for it now. But that woman is not your mother, Emmie. I know that you’ve always believed that, that you’ve been taught that she is, but that doesn’t make it true. She’s not your mother, and Deacon Silvey isn’t your father.”
“You’re a goddamn liar,” Emmie says and pulls her hand back from the Polaroid.
The brown girl stands up and goes to one of the stacks that Emmie has made, the stack of typed letters, and sits down on the floor. She takes an envelope from the stack and hands it to Emmie.
“Your stepmother wrote this to Deacon. You need to read it,” she says. “Deacon’s wife was pregnant when she died. It’s a very long story, Emma Jean, but she died fighting a monster, a much more terrible monster than Mary English had been, a monster that tried to kill Deacon and Sadie and was trying to kill Deacon’s wife and her child.”
Emmie opens the envelope. The old paper crinkles loudly in the quiet room, all sound stifled and yet made somehow more distinct by the falling snow. There’s no date on the letter, but it has Sadie’s signature.
“The hounds took Chance Silvey’s child for their own. They left you with Deacon, after Chance had died, and he has always believed that you are his daughter. But your mother is a changeling named Saben White.”
“Yeah,” Emmie says, remembering the woman on the train, the woman with the Seal of Solomon tattooed on her hand, the woman who knew about invisible things that were there even if you couldn’t see them. “I met her on the train to New York,” she says, and Emmie feels dizzy and sick to her stomach and has to shut her eyes a moment.
“I know it’s a lot to have to hear, a lot to take in all at once like this,” the brown girl says. “I’d have come to you sooner, had I been capable of doing so.”
Emmie opens her eyes again and begins reading the letter. You know that’s not Chance’s child, her stepmother typed. It isn’t over. That isn’t Chance’s baby, and this all has something to do with Narcissa Snow and whatever she was trying to do. Jesus, I wish you would answer the phone. I wish you would just talk to me. I don’t like writing this stuff down in letters and mailing it. I’m always afraid someone else will get the letters.
“This is sometime after she left,” Emmie says and chews at her lip.
“Yes,” the girl says. “Have you seen enough? Do you believe me now?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Emmie replies. “I don’t even think I know what’s for real anymore.”
You can’t doubt the blood and DNA tests, Sadie’s letter reads. She isn’t your daughter, Deke, and she isn’t Chance’s daughter, either. I talked to the doctor. I know they weren’t supposed to talk to me, but they did. Her blood work had them all a little freaked out.
Emmie folds the letter and returns it to the envelope, returns the envelope to the stack on the floor. Then she picks up the trilobite fossil again. The weight of the rock feels good in her hand. There’s a tiny handwritten label glued onto the bottom that she didn’t notice the first time she picked it up: CRYPTOLITHUS GIGAS, CHICKAMAUGA LMS., RED MTN. CUT, BIRMINGHAM, SUMMER ’73.
I won’t cry, she thinks. I’ll cry later, when she’s gone, but I won’t cry sitting here in front of her.
“There will be time to think about it later,” the brown girl says, standing again. “But now you have to leave this house. The Bailiff is coming, and you must get far away from here before he finds you. I know a place where you’ll be safe. You’ll need warm clothes—”
“Then who is my father?” Emmie asks, interrupting and ignoring the brown girl. “If it’s not Deacon, then who’s my father?”
“We can talk about that later, when you’re safe. It’s nothing you need to know just yet.”
“Was he a cat?” Emmie asks, and the brown girl stares at her, then looks over her shoulder at the bedroom window. Outside, the snow seems to be falling even harder than before. “Was he a monster?” Emmie asks.
The brown girl kneels down in front of her, unmindful of the clippings
and letters and photographs she’s crushing beneath her knees. Emmie wants to slap her, wants to tangle her fingers in the girl’s ebony hair, wants to claw her and bite her and kick her until she admits that all of this is a lie. That she wrote the letter, that those aren’t even real newspaper articles. Instead, Emmie only bites her lip and sets the trilobite down again.
“Please trust me,” the girl says. “If you stay here, in this house, they’ll surely find you before the morning, and they will kill you, Emma Jean.”
“Who? Who’s coming?”
“We need to get you dressed. It’s very cold out there. It’s still snowing. And it’s only going to get colder, I’m afraid, before it gets any warmer.”
“I’m going to call Deacon. I’m going to ask him if this is true. He won’t lie to me—”
“Listen to me,” the girl says, and now she leans close and grasps Emmie’s chin in the fingers of her right hand. Suddenly, she looks very old, a shriveled old woman wearing a clever little-girl mask, and her eyes turn as red as ripe cranberries. “If they find you here they will kill you, and if they find Deacon, they’ll have to kill him, too. If you leave now, and if they know you’ve left, they’ll have no reason to come here looking for you, and Deacon will be safe. Now, get up and get dressed. We have to leave this house, Emma Jean.”
And then another instant passes, and she’s only the brown girl again, the girl from the attic, the girl from a dream, and she blinks once at Emmie and lets go of her face. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But there’s no more time.”
“This isn’t happening,” Emmie says. “I’m asleep, asleep in my bed, and in a moment Deacon will come and wake me up. I’ll tell him what I dreamed, and he’ll laugh at me. I’ll tell him I ran away in the snow with a crazy girl, and we hid so monsters wouldn’t kill him, and he’ll laugh at me.”
“Yes,” the brown girl says. “That’s exactly what you’ll tell him, but first you have to run away. First you have to hide.”
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