The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  I imagined calling my father and saying, Dad, there’s monsters in the woods. Dad, I saw something horrible, and the weird woman across the road says it’s the holler people, and I climbed a hill that wasn’t there and there was a deer effigy hanging in the trees, but when I tried to call the cops, it was gone, and then it came back at night in my window.… No, I didn’t dream it.…

  Even in my head, it sounded stupid.

  The wind chimes blew back and forth in a wind that smelled like turned earth and spring, not like raccoons held together with cords and hogs with wasp nests where their heads would be.

  “Like I said, I figured your granny’d have told you something,” said Foxy after a while. “Didn’t think about what a nasty piece of work she was.”

  “I don’t think she knew,” I said. “Cotgrave—her husband—he knew something. He had a journal and said he saw them in Wales.”

  Foxy nodded. “Figure you get any set of old hills, you’ll have something in it. Probably holler people all over the world, if you know where to look.”

  I shuddered. This was not a comforting thought. “He also said he thought that things didn’t come around her. That she smelled bad to them or something.”

  “Huh,” said Foxy. She thought about that. “Suppose that makes sense. Some smells you just don’t want to be around. Skip can’t stand liver, won’t even come in the house if I’m cooking it. Doesn’t mean he’s scared of liver. Don’t think the holler people are scared of much, but I can see ’em giving that house a wide berth unless they had to go there.”

  “I think it’s why he married her,” I said. “He had some kind of experience with them in Wales, and then he thought she was safe because they just didn’t want to be around her.”

  Foxy snorted. “Lord. Talk about bein’ caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea!”

  “Yeah. His journal’s rambling, but by the end he’s saying he’d rather deal with them.” Cotgrave’s white people must be the same as Foxy’s holler people. If I could find his typed manuscript, surely it’d have something more… wouldn’t it?

  Assuming it existed. Assuming he knew anything for certain. Assuming his medication hadn’t been playing tricks on him and it wasn’t a letter to Ambrose.

  Ambrose, I don’t know who you were, but I wish I could talk to you or smack you or something!

  “So what are you going to do?” asked Foxy.

  “I have to stay,” I said. It was easier to say out loud than I expected. “Until Bongo comes back.”

  Foxy nodded. “You can come stay here,” she said. “I ain’t saying they won’t come here, but company’s better than none.”

  I took a deep breath. “I want to,” I said. “But if he comes back, he’ll come to the house. He got out once back in Pittsburgh and he came back after three days of rabbit chasing.” I tried not to think about what would happen if Bongo decided to go home to Pittsburgh. The noses on hounds are good enough that I won’t swear he couldn’t smell his way back there, while I sat in a house surrounded by deer monsters.

  There comes a point where terrible things are funny. It’s the point where the furnace is broken and the hot water heater is leaking and your dog comes in smelling of skunk and the check engine light has come on when you go to get tomato juice. You stop crying and you stop being frustrated because none of that will help. All you can do is start laughing hysterically because that’s the only thing that’s left.

  Foxy let me laugh until it started to get weird, and then she slapped me on the back repeatedly, as if I were having a coughing fit. “Settle down there, hon. Get it all out. I got some stuff that might help you or might not, but it never hurts to try.”

  * * *

  Foxy’s “stuff” was a little velvet bag of herbs and a rosary with round wooden beads. “Got it at the state fair for three dollars,” she said cheerfully. “The roots, though, that’s from a guy down south who said he studied under Doc Buzzard.”

  “Doc Buzzard?” I asked.

  “A hoodoo man. He was probably lying, but you never know. Anyway, it ain’t gonna hurt. You know how to pray the rosary?”

  “No?”

  She looked faintly disappointed, but rallied anyway. “It don’t matter. The holler people ain’t religious. But the beads are hickory and hickory’s special.”

  In all of Aunt Kate’s botanical musings, she had never covered the specialness of hickory. I knew oak and ash and rowan, from reading fantasy novels, but not hickory. I said as much to Foxy.

  “No, no,” she said. “It ain’t magic. It’s the other way around. We got hickory over here, but I don’t think they got it over there. You got hickory with you, you got a piece of the world that’s normal. It’s so normal it’ll cancel out some of the weirdness. You follow?”

  Clearly I was losing my mind, because that actually made a kind of sense. I went back to the house with a hickory rosary and a bag of dried roots draped around my neck.

  * * *

  Maybe it was the rosary or the talk or the lemonade. Maybe it was just guilt, or the restless, edgy feeling that I had to do something. But I took my courage in both hands and walked into the woods, shouting Bongo’s name and listening for the knocking of hagstones in between shouts.

  I scoured the woods around the house, but Bongo still wasn’t there.

  “All right,” I said, going back into the house. “Next thing.” I turned the radio on so I had something to talk to and went through the house, checking for monsters. There weren’t any, or if there were, they were upstairs on the second floor.

  I shut down that train of thought quickly. Elaine Rogers told me about the great programs that were only available because of my help. I was starting to wonder if this radio station ever played anything but Pledge Week spots.

  If I was going to stay in the house tonight, I was not going to sleep in the bedroom with the window right there where things could look in. Bongo was loud enough when barking to wake the dead—if he showed up on the porch and started yelling to be let in and given dinner, I’d be able to hear it through a few layers of wood.

  “Bathroom it is, then,” I said.

  I stripped Cotgrave’s bed and tossed the blankets aside, then wrestled the mattress off the box spring and dragged it into the bathroom. It took up the entire floor and curled up at the edges. That was fine.

  “If I have to pee, the toilet’s right there. This’ll be efficient,” I told the radio.

  “We have some fun gifts as a way of saying thank you,” said Ms. Rogers, sounding tired. “We’ve got a mug, and at the hundred-dollar amount, this exclusive hoodie.…”

  An exclusive hoodie sounded pretty awesome. Clearly I was developing radio Stockholm syndrome, on top of my other problems.

  I went back to get the blankets… and stopped.

  Spread across the box spring, where they had clearly been wedged under the mattress, lay a pile of papers. They were covered in double-spaced type. Someone had handwritten notes and corrections in ballpoint pen between the lines.

  I picked up the top page.

  I was first lent the Green Book by my friend and mentor, the philosopher Ambrose, as an example of what he referred to as “true sin.” He believed that the greatest sin lay in seeking things outside the natural order, not in mere wickedness such as murder. “A passion of the lonely soul,” Ambrose called it The Green Book was a diary of one such sinner.…

  I had lost my dog and found, quite by accident, Cotgrave’s manuscript.

  11

  It was not terribly long. As I scanned it, it became immediately obvious that Cotgrave was one of those people who typed better than he wrote by hand. You see that sometimes as an editor, when people are writing notes in the margins of printed pages. The difference between the voice of the manuscript and the curt, scribbled notes in the journal was striking, not just the bits where he was transcribing another book, but his interjections as well.

  I made another pot of coffee and pulled a chair into the entryway. With t
he screen door shut and locked and the front door ready to slam, I could see Bongo if he came back, and… hopefully… I’d have warning if the deer monster returned.

  I sound so calm about that, don’t I? Like I’d do some kind of action-hero move and slam the door on it, or if it came through the screen, I’d beat it to death with the chair. I know perfectly well—and probably you do, too—that at that moment, I’d have peed myself and died and probably wound up as a skeletal effigy tapping on Foxy’s window. Still, I couldn’t think of anything better to do.

  I had hours until nightfall. I had a lot of coffee. I had a manuscript to read, and hell if I was going to stop halfway through.

  “All right, Cotgrave,” I said aloud, settling the sheaf of papers in my lap. “Let’s do this thing.”

  I was first lent the Green Book by my friend and mentor, the philosopher Ambrose, as an example of what he referred to as “true sin.” He believed that the greatest sin lay in seeking things outside the natural order, not in mere wickedness such as murder. “A passion of the lonely soul,” Ambrose called it. The Green Book was a diary of one such sinner, a sixteen-year-old girl who had been the daughter of an associate. When he died, he left it to me in his will.

  I am going to try and record my memory of the Green Book as closely as I can. I have read it many times, and parts I can recite, but it was very disjointed and my memory is not what it used to be. But since my wife has hidden the book, or perhaps destroyed it, I must write down what I remember before I forget even more. In places where I cannot remember the exact words, I will make note of what I do remember.

  The Green Book is what we used to call a pocketbook, but not like they are called in America, where they mean a book for holding cheques. It was old and had gold end papers and the binding was broken in two places from rough handling by the mail when Ambrose sent it to me at the last. He said he had known the girl who wrote it, but he never told me her name.

  The book starts with a description of where the girl found the blank pocketbook, in a drawer in her home. I don’t think that part was important. The narrative then begins:

  I have a great many other books of secrets I have written down and hidden all in a safe place, and I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones, but there are some I shall not put down at all, in case someone ignorant should find it and read it. I must not write down the real names of the seasons.… There were other things here that she must not write down, but I do not remember them all. It was an extensive list. Languages, I think, and letters. Some of them may have been made up. I remember the word “Aklo” and “chief songs.” And then that she could not write down the ways to do things, “for peculiar reasons,” or “say who the Nymphs are.” The Nymphs appear later, and I believe them to be some kind of spirits, perhaps the numen of a place, expressed in physical form.

  “Cotgrave,” I said, putting the read pages facedown on the floor, “if you were a client and came to me for editing, I’d fire you. Footnotes are your friend.”

  Narrative continues: These are the very most secret secrets, and I am glad that I know what they are and glad when I think of how many wonderful languages I know that others do not, but there are some things that I call the secrets of the secrets of the secrets of the secrets—don’t remember how many times she wrote “secrets”—that I dare not think of unless I am alone.

  There was a section here I don’t remember well at all. She says that she puts her hands over her eyes and says a word and the Alalaa? Alala? comes. She does this at night in her room or in the woods. She must also do a number of ceremonies, which are named after colors. She liked the Scarlet Ceremonies the best and the Yellow Ceremonies the least because it made her “feel so queer,” as if she had eaten something disagreeable. There is no information about what the ceremonies are or what she does.

  “Did they have psychosis when you were young, Cotgrave?” I mused. “I mean, they must have, but did they call it that? Because this is starting to sound like the diary of a girl with some very grave issues.”

  I know it’s wrong to try to diagnose people who aren’t there, and I’m a hack armchair psychologist who hangs out on the Internet, so my opinion was worth exactly nothing, but I started wondering about the ceremonies and the rituals some people get with OCD. If she called those “ceremonies” and had to perform them when people weren’t looking…

  Well, that would be a very tidy explanation right up until we got, y’know, horrible deer monsters looking in the window.

  Ugh.

  I wondered what the Alalaa was, or if it was anything at all. The sound or maybe the shape of the word made me think of glossolalia—you know, speaking in tongues. I had to proof a thesis about it once, and I don’t think the author spelled the word the same way twice. The thesis said it sounded nearly the same whatever the culture was, though, and had endless citations to back it up.

  Maybe this kid got alone and did something and kicked off a glossolalia fit. Lots of people can do that, usually at tent revivals.

  Maybe I was reaching for explanations that had no bearing on anything.

  Ambrose believed that the ceremonies were some form of folk magic survival, most likely learned from her nurse, meant to propitiate the white people.

  In the next section she described someone talking about her, probably servants, saying that she had been a strange child saying words in the cradle. Chronology is confused, though I have tried to make sense of it.… I can remember things before that, only it has got confused. Says she remembered “little white faces” looking down at her and talking to her, and a white land with white grass and white trees when she was very young. White faces went away and she forgot the words.

  Next, a description of a short journey with her nurse to a pond in the woods. At the pond, the nurse leaves, and shortly after she sees the white people again, says two of them came out of the water and the woods to dance and sing and play with her.

  Description of the white people here, as “a kind of creamy white, like old ivory.” One was female and had dark eyes and hair. The girl likes her, “the white lady.” Says they danced and sang and played games together until she fell asleep. I thought this was probably a dream when I first read it, but not now, of course. Ivory is not a bad description, but not quite right. They’re white like bone after the flesh has been pared off.

  Sitting in my chair in the entryway, I felt my eyebrows climb toward my hairline.

  Of course, he mentioned seeing white people in his journal, so I don’t know why I’m surprised. Maybe by the description of flesh being pared off. Yikes.

  I got up, closed the front door before turning my back on it, and got a warm-up on my coffee. Elaine Rogers asked me if I valued investigative journalism.

  “I do,” I told her. “I wish somebody would have done some investigating about this.…”

  Of course, Foxy was probably right. If a reporter went digging around in the hills and somehow did manage to turn something up, it’d be dismissed as hillbillies and aliens.

  I looked out the screen door for a moment before sitting back down. No dog. No monsters. No white people, other than my pasty Caucasian self, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t what Cotgrave’s girl had meant.

  When she wakes up, the nurse has returned and the girl thought the nurse looked like the white lady. Nurse cries, becomes frightened, threatens her with “being thrown into the black pit with the dead people” if she speaks of it. My nurse used to threaten to beat my head against the wall when I misbehaved, so not sure if this was anything but an idle threat against misbehavior, though it is strangely specific.

  I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, when I had a very singular adventure, so strange that the day on which it happened is always called the White Day.

  Lengthy description of walk follows, “up thorny thickets on the hills, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns.” Much of the Green Book is descriptions of journeys. I am not sure any of them are relevant or just untutored storyte
lling.

  “You’re one to talk,” I muttered. “And I want to know more about this nurse threatening to beat your head against the wall. Child-rearing has changed a lot.”

  Honestly, I wanted to know more about the girl’s nurse too. Was she supposed to have been the female white person dancing around? Was she traveling in disguise? Was this like a horrible fairy godmother?

  I sighed and ran my free hand through my hair. “Or maybe she was just a woman whose charge started babbling about fairies and didn’t want anybody to know that she’d left her alone so she could sneak off and hook up with the hot butler.”

  Sixteen years old when she wrote this. But there was something strange about the way she was writing—a kind of twee Alice in Wonderland phrasing—that made her seem younger, or like someone’s idea of what a younger girl should sound like.

  Maybe Cotgrave had made the whole thing up. Or maybe that was just the way she wrote. I’ve read much more grating narrative voices, Lord knows.

  It occurred to me, depressingly, that maybe the Green Book had nothing to do with Foxy’s holler people at all. Maybe Cotgrave had just been obsessed with the book and had run afoul of the holler people and had cast his experiences in relation to the book. Maybe if he’d had different reading material, I’d be working my way through a bad rewrite of a Regency romance. Maybe I was sitting here wasting time with a useless partial transcript of a diary written a hundred years ago by a woman with severe issues and meanwhile there were monsters outside and I didn’t have a gun or a chain saw or even a large brick.

  And it was a long, long way… repeats this phrase. Rocky floor, dried-up stream, a “dismal thicket,” climbs a hill. I went on and on through that dark place; it was a long, long way.