The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  I started singing again to drown out the thoughts. This was like having the world’s strangest anxiety attack.

  “I had a dream the other night, when everything was still.…”

  The tall stone was much taller than I had thought. The base was set in a deep depression in the ground, perfectly round like a bowl. Gray rocks stood all around the lip of the circle, facing inward, like a knee-high Stonehenge.

  “I thought I saw Susannah dear, a-coming down the hill.…”

  There may have been a seep in the depression. Mosses grew in a thick blanket around the base of the stone, shaded by tiny green ferns. I don’t know my ferns. They all looked alike to me. Aunt Kate said it wasn’t worth bothering unless you really wanted to get into spores. I do remember that one was called ebony spleenwort because I always thought the name was funny, particularly since it was a green fern and not ebony at all.

  “… a buckwheat cake was in her mouth, a tear was in her eye…”

  The tall—monolith? Dolmen? Big-ass rock?—was the only one that wasn’t carved into some unpleasant shape. There were two lines near the top, broken in the middle, a bit like eyes. Otherwise it was smooth and white.

  Bongo, having come this far, had stopped. He stared at the rock and gave the thinnest thread of a whine. Whatever he had been following, he hadn’t expected it to be this.

  Would the surface of the monolith feel rough, like sandpaper, or polished smooth? It didn’t reflect as if it were polished. I put a hand on one of the low rocks and used it to lower myself to the ground on the lip of the bowl.

  Bongo whined again, more loudly.

  “Says I, I’m comin’ from the South, Susannah don’t you cry…”

  The monolith was carved, I could see now. It was very faint, that was all. The lines swirled up and around and down, looking like… like… something. I couldn’t quite make out what it was supposed to represent.

  The bowl was steeper than it looked. I was afraid that I was going to roll down and smack into the monolith. That was one way to tell if it was smooth or rough, but I didn’t want to find out with my face. I wanted to run my palms over it and feel the chisel marks on my fingers. Then I would be able to tell what the carving represented.

  Then perhaps I could put my cheek against it and feel the coldness of the stone growing warm underneath my skin.

  And through the stone pressing down into the other place the voorish dome under the ground the other place where the dead go

  Bongo wouldn’t leave the lip. He pulled back against the leash until the collar was up around his ears.

  “Come on, you stupid fucking dog,” I snarled, and my voice was harsh and grating and what the hell was I doing?

  I blinked a few times.

  I was standing partway down the depression in the ground. My hand felt greasy where I’d touched one of the carved rocks. The moss was too yielding underfoot, as if I were leaving bruises.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus.”

  I don’t know what had come over me. I hauled myself out of the depression, even though I had to touch the gray stone again. I’ll be honest, I was nearly expecting it to bite me. Bongo pressed so close to my thigh that I nearly fell over him again. His ears were down and his tail was tucked and he was making little champing motions with his mouth.

  “Right,” I said. “Right. You’re my good dog. I’m sorry I yelled.”

  I wiped my hands on the seat of my jeans and glanced over my shoulder at the tall white monolith. It gazed eyelessly over my head. Why had I wanted to touch it?

  Bongo whined again.

  I knelt down right there, even though the presence of the stone made my skin crawl, and pressed my forehead against his. You have to reassure dogs right away. They don’t have a good sense of time, and they don’t link past behavior to the present.

  Why had I yelled at my dog anyway? What had come over me?

  go down the hillside out of the sky under the ground through the stone to the gray place

  “You’re a good dog,” I said to Bongo. “A good, good dog.”

  He sighed and leaned into me.

  “You said it. C’mon, buddy, let’s get out of here.”

  We made our way back up the hill. The voice in my head buzzed like a gnat, growing more distant as I shoved it down, like the desire to jump fading as you stepped away from the edge.

  The rocks stared at us as we passed. The flat, twisted stones pulsed like a moiré pattern.

  I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones—

  I inhaled sharply.

  Christ, I’m stupid! This is what Cotgrave was writing about!

  Probably you’re thinking I’m an idiot not to have made the connection before. But Cotgrave’s diary was decades old, and honestly, I’d been thinking more about its relation to my grandmother. You don’t expect that ramblings of a sad old man to suddenly turn up in real life.

  I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. But that was stupid too—of course Cotgrave must have known about this place; it was practically in his own backyard, and there was the deer-stone actually in the garden. The deer-stone had to have come from up here. He must have found a small one that wasn’t buried and carried it back home.

  Unless he carved them himself. That’s possible, isn’t it?

  This was an unsettling thought. I couldn’t reconcile the image of the tired old man who had sat in a chair reading the newspaper with whatever mad artist had created the field of carvings.

  You couldn’t possibly create something like that and then wander around like a normal person, going to the grocery store and worrying about heart medication and paying the water bill, could you?

  Serial killers do it all the time.

  No, that’s unfair. It’s not like these are actually hurting people. They’re just creepy, that’s all. Whoever made these is a sort of… Goth genius, that’s all. Like H. R. Giger or that guy who does the album covers with all the super-pale people and the skulls.

  Still…

  Lying down like the dead ones, I could just about see. In order to make faces like the faces in these rocks, though, you’d have to be able to lick your own eyelids. And I don’t think any person with bones could twist themselves about like the twisted ones.

  “It can’t be done,” I told Bongo. I tried to make a face like the one on the nearest carving. Its lower jaw was distended like a snake about to swallow and its eyes bulged. “See, ’ook…”

  I opened my eyes and mouth as wide as I could and wider, wider, wide enough to eat the sun this is the one that puts the stars out when the shadows go over them this one’s eyes can see in the gray that’s left behind after even the darkness is eaten.

  Oh shit.

  I tried to close my mouth and it didn’t want to close.

  What the hell is going on oh my God Aunt Kate always said my face would freeze like that and holy shit I think it is.

  I put my hand up under my chin and shoved it up. My teeth slammed together. The hinge of my jaw ached like when you get dental work and they hold your mouth open for an hour.

  “Right,” I said in a high, panicky voice. “Don’t taunt the evil rocks.” And I bolted past the last of the stones with Bongo running beside me, and I didn’t stop until I saw the tunnel of trees.

  Relief hit me so strongly that I thought for a minute my knees were going to buckle. I hadn’t realized how frightened I’d been that the tunnel would be gone.

  Of course it isn’t. This is perfectly normal. Absolutely nothing weird going on here. I’ll go into town and say, “So there’s this tall white stone…” and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that’s the Moonshine Monolith,” and I’ll order a coffee with a shot of Irish cream syrup and sit down and look it up on the Internet and there’ll be a whole page about how the rocks were carved in the 1700s by a local mason called Zebadiah or Asa or some other old-fashioned name.

  And I just had a wei
rd spasm in that one muscle—the temperomandibularwhatsit, the one that goes out sometimes and clicks—because I was making a face at the stupid rock and not because the rock was talking in my head and trying to get me to imitate it, not at all, because that would be crazy.

  I went down the tunnel of trees, half on my feet and half on my ass, and Bongo slithered and scrabbled down with me.

  By the time I got to the bottom, I was pretty much willing to chalk up the incident with the stones to the power of suggestion.

  It was weird and creepy and you were already on edge and the line from the journal just set you off, that’s all. And staying in that house would disorder anyone’s nerves. Focus on the things that are actually real, like the fact that Cotgrave’s journal talked about the carved rocks.

  We hurried back through the trees. The way seemed shorter, probably because Bongo knew that dinner awaited him at the house and was suddenly all business.

  I wanted nothing more than to run into the bedroom and snatch up Cotgrave’s journal, but Bongo needed water (and for that matter, so did I). And I was covered in twigs and dust and my skin still felt greasy where I’d touched the stones. So I got us both water and then took a shower and scrubbed down with a bar of gritty yellow soap that Grandmother had stashed in a bathroom drawer.

  I was drying off when somebody rang the doorbell, and I let out a shriek.

  The door slammed open. “Jaysus!” cried a voice. “You bein’ murdered? Where you at, honey? I’ll get ’em!”

  And that is how I met Foxy.

  6

  Foxy had a face that was well lived in for fifty or in good shape for seventy, and since she never told anyone her age, I couldn’t say which it was. She was six feet tall and wore black leather boots with heels. She had on a denim skirt, a hot pink top, three necklaces, and a bright orange scarf. Her earrings would have reached her shoulders, but they kept getting tangled up in her scarf and then she’d free them with a practiced flick. Her nails were a brilliant turquoise.

  On 99 percent of humanity, the outfit would have been a riot of mismatched color. On Foxy, it somehow all pulled together. She looked like a cross between a drag queen and a wildflower meadow.

  After we sorted out the issue of whether or not I was being murdered, Bongo had to be soothed with petting and dog treats, and I had to put on something more substantial than a towel. Foxy leaned against the kitchen counter and looked around.

  “Forgive the mess…,” I said hopelessly.

  “Ain’t your mess, hon,” said Foxy. “We all know what the old lady was like. Tomas said you’re here to clean the house out, and I wouldn’t wish that job on anybody.”

  “Tell me about it…”

  “Came over to thank you for the microwave.” She moved restlessly, setting her jewelry clicking together. “And—shit, you ain’t eating ramen for dinner, are you?”

  I shuffled hurriedly in front of the ramen on the counter. “I… uh…”

  “Come have dinner with us tonight,” she said. It was somewhere between an offer and an imperial command. “It’s just me and Tomas and Skip, but we’ll do you up a damn sight better than ramen.”

  I was torn between a strong desire for a real meal and human company—particularly after that weird afternoon in the stones—and an equally strong desire to stay home, read the rest of Cotgrave’s diary, and maybe get to the bottom of things.

  “Well…”

  “Your momma alive?” asked Foxy abruptly.

  “Uh… no?”

  “Then if she’s lookin’ down from heaven, she’ll want to make sure somebody was feeding you, not eating ramen in this nasty old rattrap.”

  I bowed to a will superior to my own. “May I have an hour?” I asked humbly. “I’m still damp.”

  Foxy grinned. “Look at me, rushing in here and dragging you out to eat dinner with soap still in your hair. Come on over when you’re ready, hon. Just across the road and up to the big house.”

  And with that she swept out, leaving me slightly dazed in her wake. I could hear her immense boots clack on the steps as she went out. I couldn’t imagine wearing heels that size on a gravel driveway, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I guess I’m going out to dinner,” I told Bongo.

  But first there was something important to do. I put a towel around my shoulders to catch drips and sat on the bed with Cotgrave’s diary in hand.

  If I was hoping for a great revelation—“By the way, I’ve taken up sculpting”—I didn’t get it. There were several pages about the adjustments to his medication and a few repetitions of the litany of the twisted ones. It gave me the creeps reading it, now that I’d seen what it probably referred to.

  I made faces like the faces on the rocks…

  “You did not,” I muttered. “Human faces don’t work that way.” I deliberately did not think about what had happened on the hill. It was just me being stupid.

  Then, about halfway through the book:

  Slept in woods again. Had to. Saw one of their poppets. Just watched, didn’t do anything. Don’t know if they can hurt someone or just scare them. With my heart, not much difference!

  He’d underlined difference. The rest of the page was blank, except for another drawing of Kilroy, sideways this time.

  Another few pages of nothing much. I squeezed water out of my hair.

  Then:

  Met girl in woods, near place of stones.

  I sat up straighter. “Hello…,” I muttered. Had Cotgrave been having an affair? No, he was old with a bad heart. Although that doesn’t always stop people.

  She knows. One of them? Doesn’t seem like it. Not normal, though. Beautiful hair. Ambrose believed in changelings. No reason to think he was wrong. Younger than the ones I saw in Wales, anyway, if one of them.

  Cotgrave had seen changelings in Wales? Well, I’d never been, but it seemed like the sort of place you’d get them. Perhaps Welsh fairies stole children and confiscated their vowels.

  Have almost finished typing up manuscript. Remember more than I thought I did, but know I’m forgetting parts. Hid it. Won’t say where. Think she might be reading this.

  If you are, then you’re an awful old biddy and I wish I’d died before I married you. Go ahead and say something about that, if you’re willing to admit you’ve been snooping.

  “Ha!” I punched the air. Poor old Cotgrave—but he’d gotten in a blow there. Grandma would never admit to wrongdoing. If she yelled at him for calling her names, she’d be in the wrong for reading his private papers. It must have driven her up the wall not being able to call him on it.

  I sighed. And she’d probably taken it out on the old man too. But it’s not like she would have been sweetness and light otherwise, anyway.

  Won’t say any more here. Doesn’t matter anyway. Gonna get out one way or the other. And you’ll finally be free of me, you old bat.

  He’d underlined you old bat twice. And that was it. The last entry. The rest of the book was blank. I flipped through it, carefully at first, then increasingly annoyed.

  “Dammit, Cotgrave… you couldn’t have said something? A helpful clue for the person reading your journal? By the way, the girl I met lived down the road, and here’s her phone number if you’d like to ask her about the stones. Gah.”

  Well, presumably there was more in his typed manuscript. Which quite possibly my grandmother had found and disposed of.

  No, she wouldn’t have disposed of it. She hadn’t disposed of the diary, and it insulted her to her face. She couldn’t throw away anything. It was in the house somewhere, surely, with the Green Book and a thousand old PennySavers and the corks to every bottle of wine she’d ever opened.

  I sighed and shoved the journal into the desk drawer, then ran the towel over my drying hair. It was time to dress for dinner.

  * * *

  Foxy was sitting out on the front porch. She had a mason jar in her hand, full of ice and amber, which she waved in my direction.

  “It’s a mint julep,�
�� she said. “Want one?”

  “I don’t see any mint,” I said.

  “Yeah, we ran out.”

  “Doesn’t that make it just a julep?”

  “No,” said a gray-haired man stepping out onto the porch behind her, “because she doesn’t put any simple syrup in it either.”

  Foxy grinned. “Aw, but mint juleps are so classy. Just straight bourbon over ice makes it sound like I’m a lush.”

  “I’ll take one,” I said. After my experience with the carved stones, getting blitzed seemed like a delightful idea.

  The house was a sagging, ramshackle affair with a battered tin roof. There were a couple extra additions and a covered carport that held cobwebs and elderly machinery. I could see a single-wide trailer set at right angles to it, and another farther back on the property.

  A radio played tinnily from inside the house. We sat on the front porch drinking un-juleps and watching fireflies blink on and off over the grass.

  The gray-haired man was named Skip. He had a thick braid down his back and pretty much screamed aging hippie. He was a potter.

  “Not that it’s hard to be a potter around here,” he said. “The clay’s alive. Red clay, like blood. It wants to be useful. Practically throws itself.”

  I nodded politely into my un-julep. Foxy rolled her eyes behind his back.

  Tomas came up with grease on his hands and launched into a diatribe about tractor engines that I didn’t even begin to understand.

  “Cool, cool,” said Foxy. “Dinner’s nearly ready, hon.”

  “It needs a new glorshometer with a zappulater cap,” he said. (Okay, not really, but hell if I can remember what he actually said.)

  “That glorshometer’s been fixing to go for ages,” said Foxy.

  “Well, it’s gone now. We’ll have to get a new one.”

  “Ah, just thump it a few times. It’ll be fine.”

  Tomas sighed, gave me a you see what I have to put up with look, and went to scrub off his hands.

  We all tromped inside. It was dark in the house, with battered seventies wood paneling, but there were shockingly Day-Glo rock posters on most of the walls. Bob Marley smiled down benignly over the dinner table, holding a joint between his fingers.