The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  “But, Foxy—”

  “Don’t argue. I got a will all made out. And notarized.”

  I looked at her. She was wearing ripped jeans over black fishnets and the sort of spiked boots that you’d wear to a punk show. Her lipstick was a particularly savage shade of pink.

  She was perhaps the most unlikely bodyguard I could imagine, but the alternative was going alone with my dog.

  “Notarized?” I said weakly.

  “Yeah, and I had to pay five dollars to have that done, so I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  I finished my meat loaf in defeat.

  I tried one more time before we left, standing in the doorway. “Are you sure? I mean… this is way past being neighborly.…”

  “Ain’t paid you for the moose head or the microwave,” said Foxy. “And if we all come back, I ain’t going to.”

  I just looked at her.

  Astonishingly, a little bit of a flush started to creep up her sharp old face. “Look,” she growled, “you’re doin’ a dumb thing for a good reason, and maybe I’m not that different from Tomas. If I let you go off in the woods and get et by holler people, or whatever it is they do, I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror anymore.” She rallied a bit. “And I gotta look in the mirror. Makeup this good doesn’t happen blind.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She snorted. “Don’t thank me too hard. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit curious about what’s on the other side of those stones.”

  “Yeah, well…” I held the door open for her. “I was pretty scared.”

  She went out past me, hefting her backpack strap over her shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry. You still oughta be.”

  * * *

  There were still a few hours of light left as we set off into the woods. Bongo bounced around on the end of his leash, in enormous good spirits. I hoped this was a good sign. If he had been terribly traumatized by visiting the place where someone had put a note in his collar, he didn’t show any sign of it.

  “Probably should start out in the morning,” said Foxy, “but I ain’t looking forward to another night waitin’ for monsters to come in the windows.”

  “You and me both.”

  Leaves crunched underfoot as we walked. The house vanished behind us.

  “I don’t know where we’re going,” I confessed. “I figured we’d start at the stones. I think sort of… this way-ish? But Bongo led the way the first time.”

  “Think he can find it again?”

  We both looked at Bongo. He was peeing meditatively against a tree stump.

  “I don’t think there’s any way to ask him,” I confessed. “He’s… uh… kind of an idiot.”

  Foxy grinned. “Well, I got there by shooting a deer, and deer are about the dumbest animals in creation, so maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  In retrospect, if we’d been really lucky, we probably would have wandered around in circles for a bit and then gone home for more meat loaf. I still probably wouldn’t sleep well at night, but I’d have managed. I could have convinced myself it was all an elaborate hoax and some weird neighbor had dressed up in a deer outfit to scare the crap out of me.

  But we weren’t lucky like that.

  Bongo picked up a smell that was probably a vole under the leaves and dragged me after it, huffing on the end of his leash. When he reached the invisible spot he was after, he scuffed at the ground for a minute, then, disappointed, he straightened up.

  I watched his nostrils working. His ears were lifted, alert, and then he struck out south and east. He wasn’t quite running, but moving with the concentration of a dog on a mission.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I muttered, to myself or to Foxy or both. “He does this for squirrels, too.”

  It wasn’t a squirrel. It was something else. He began to move faster and faster, into a ground-eating lope, tail up like a flag.

  I glanced beside me. Foxy was keeping up despite the heels on her boots. “Don’t mind me,” she panted.

  “There’s a lot of holes.…”

  “Hon, I been living in these woods my whole life. You just watch your own feet.”

  “Yes, Foxy.”

  We veered more south than I remembered. I was starting to wonder if maybe we were chasing a squirrel after all, when there was the dry streambed.

  Despite the recent rains, the leaves were dry and crackling instead of slimy. Small blessings, I suppose.

  In what seemed like no time at all, we reached the wicker-like tunnel. It was still dry and dead-looking, and the afternoon shadows were starting to lengthen under it. I ducked down into it while Bongo sniffed along the leaves.

  “Whew,” said Foxy. “Not the way I came last time. Or maybe it was, and stuff grew up around it.”

  We went forward. Pretty soon we were almost jogging along. There was a sense of urgency that I can’t explain. Part of it was the desire to get to the stones before the sun went down, but there was something else, too. As if a door was closing, and we had to reach it before it shut.

  No, not like that. As if a door was opening, and we had to be out of the room before whatever was on the other side came through.

  Foxy hooked her hand under the strap of my backpack. I glanced back, surprised.

  “I ain’t slowing down,” she said, although she was breathing hard. “But feelin’ weird.”

  “Your heart?” I said, panicky. “Are you—”

  “No, not my heart! Don’t make me slap you upside the head! My heart’s fine!” She rolled her eyes. “I mean it feels like you’re goin’ on ahead of me and it’s gettin’ harder to follow. I’m thinkin’ something doesn’t want me along.” She tightened her grip on my pack. “Ain’t gonna give it the satisfaction.”

  I nodded. Bongo was hauling on his leash now, whining at our slowness.

  The tunnel tilted upward. I had to hunch over, feeling Foxy’s knuckles still hard against my shoulder blade. We had to hurry. The door was opening, and if we weren’t quick…

  There was a single hollow tok! on the other side of the wicker, and my heart lurched.

  If it had stopped there, I could have convinced myself it was a woodpecker. Maybe. But it didn’t stop there. The noise came again and again, louder, until it was directly beside me. If the wall had not been in the way, I could have reached out and touched it.

  Tok! Tok! Tok!

  The sounds of stones in a hollow chest of bones.

  Bongo began to run.

  * * *

  It was there.

  Tok! Tok! Tok!

  I could hear the stones rattling and the sound of its feet hitting the ground, and a strange scraping noise, like scissors opening and closing.

  Is that what it sounds like when bones run?

  All that stood between us and the effigy were thin dead branches and dry vines woven between them. I could see flashes of light and shadow through the gaps and I thought, inanely, I knew it could go out in the day. I knew it. It could have been there all this time, watching me—

  Bongo heaved forward against the leash, and I ran after him, trying to remember if there were gaps in the tunnel, if there was a place where the effigy could come through. Please no, God no…

  I remember very little of that flight up the hillside. I don’t know how long it took. It must have been much lighter than I remember it being, because it was only late afternoon, but in my memory it is a dark, closing tunnel. I could not see my feet. Occasionally I would catch a flash of brightness from the metal rings on Bongo’s collar. I ran blind and Foxy ran behind me and, outside the tunnel, the effigy kept pace.

  Was it on the left? The right? I didn’t want to look because if I looked, maybe I’d see it, and if I saw it, I was afraid I’d fall down and curl into a ball until it ate me.

  Tok! Tok! Tok!

  Oh God, was there more than one? It seemed to come from both sides. Oh God, let that be echoes let it not be two of them I can’t handle two of them I can’t even handle one of the
m oh God

  Something struck the wicker tunnel. The precarious root-and-vine frame bowed sideways, and fragments of bark and dried leaf rained down on us. The walls shook wildly as whatever it was—shut up, you know what it is—slammed against the side and the tok! tok! tok! was no longer a woodpecker knock but a staccato like gunfire.

  Foxy never faltered. I must have paused, because she shouted in my ear, “Keep moving!” and I lunged forward, while Bongo heaved upward at the end of the leash.

  Foxy was in better shape than I was, for all that she was close to twice my age. When my backpack began to slide down, she wedged it back up on my shoulder, and pretty soon she was pushing me forward and Bongo was pulling, and the effigy rattled the hagstones in its ribs and I dragged air into my chest that stabbed like knives and not suddenly, not suddenly at all, not anywhere close to suddenly, an eternity later—

  —we fell out of the wicker tunnel and into the field of twisted stones.

  17

  I couldn’t have leapt to my feet if my life depended on it. Foxy was crouched over me, and Bongo was trying to stand over me protectively and also to hide underneath me in terror.

  When a minute or two had passed and my heart was slowing and I still wasn’t dead, I whispered, “Is it gone?”

  “Think so,” said Foxy. “If there was ever anything there, which I ain’t entirely sure of.”

  I looked up at her silently. She snorted and looked back down the tunnel. “Fine, okay,” she said. “Yeah, it’s gone.”

  I breathed for a few minutes. The sky was gray. Bare trees hung on the hills like—yes, like curtains in a dark room. Bongo hunched down and fit himself under my knees as best he could.

  “I kept thinking it was a woodpecker, before,” I said finally.

  “Can see why.”

  I didn’t say, “Do you think there were two of them?” because I didn’t think I could handle it if she said “Yes.”

  “Do you think it was trying to keep us from getting here?” I asked instead.

  “Something was,” said Foxy. She held out her left hand.

  There was a raw red stripe across her fingers and palm, as if something had taken the top layer of skin off. Blood beaded at the edges.

  “Foxy!”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I mean, it hurts like the devil, but it’s not deep. It was where I had your backpack. Toward the end there, it felt like a handful of nettles.”

  I grabbed my backpack strap as if expecting it to be made of sandpaper, but it just felt like normal nylon.

  “Expect it was meant for me, not you,” said Foxy matter-of-factly. “I felt it before, too. I’m not supposed to come along.”

  “Why would it want that?”

  “Who knows what the holler people want?” She grinned sourly. “Maybe they figure my ratty old bones won’t look good on their mantelpiece.”

  “And mine will?”

  “Hey, maybe you got cute bones.”

  I started laughing, half high on adrenaline, and stood up. Bongo, reassured that everything was all right again, licked the back of my hand.

  I dug my fingers in behind his ears as I looked around the hillside.

  The sky was the same shade of gray as before. If sunset was coming on, there was no sign of it. It was gray, gray, gray.

  A wicked voorish dome.

  Under the sky, the hills. Same as before. And the trees that hung like curtains on the hillsides were still bare. I wondered if they ever leafed out at all. Were there even seasons in this place?

  “Shit,” said Foxy, looking around. And then, more quietly, “Shit.”

  “Eloquent,” I said. “Is it like you remember?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much. Only”—she waved her hand—“more.”

  I nodded. It had been only—what, ten days? Eleven?—but my memory had whittled down some of the edges of the place. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember it. It was just that the reality was indeed more.

  The tree slithering out from under the stones was more like a snake. The leering carvings were stranger and sharper, and the animals twisted themselves more grotesquely in pain or in ecstasy. As if my mind hadn’t quite been able to hold everything.

  No, wait, the girl in the Green Book had described the trees like snakes. Maybe that had gotten into my head somehow too.

  “Which way?” said Foxy.

  “I have no idea.” I hefted my backpack. “I still don’t even know if Bongo was here when he got the note. We might be in completely the wrong place.”

  “Never stopped me before,” said Foxy.

  “The white stone’s this way,” I said. The white stone, yes, the white stone, the tall one, the one that’s carved with something that you need to see again…

  My voice sounded totally normal, and the fact that I suddenly had a weird itchy desire to see the white stone again didn’t seem to impact it.

  I could touch it. I could figure out the carvings this time. Would it be warm or cold? Smooth or rough? In my dream, it had been cold and I tried to warm it.…

  “Good a place to start as any.”

  Of course she couldn’t know that I wanted to see it. I shouldn’t tell her. It would make me sound weird or controlled by holler people, when the fact was that… was that…

  The fact was that…

  Oh, it doesn’t matter. Stop worrying and start walking.

  Past the carvings, the scowling ones and the ones like animals and the ones that lay down like dead things…

  And I twisted myself around like—

  Shut up. Just shut up. Get to the white stone.

  “Ugly little bastards,” muttered Foxy, eyeing the scowling stones.

  “Don’t try to imitate them,” I said. “They don’t like that. Or they like it a lot. I don’t know which.”

  Foxy gave me a sharp look. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I—sorry, it’s this place.” I rubbed my forehead. “Brain fog. But the stones, yeah. I tried to make a face like one the last time, and I shouldn’t have. I was almost able to. I thought I was going to dislocate my jaw.”

  Foxy raised her eyebrows. “Huh!”

  “Yeah, I… I sort of forgot about that.” I tried not to make eye contact with the grinning faces in the rocks. “It seemed so crazy and it’s all crazy and I was afraid I was going crazy, so I figured it was just my mind playing tricks and maybe I had a muscle spasm or something. But now I think it was probably real.”

  “Probably.” Foxy shook her head. “These things… If Skip was here, he could tell us what kind of carving it is. He went to some fancy art school out west, and every now and again he’ll come out with ‘That’s postmodern pre-Raphaelitism,’ or something like that.”

  “I dunno if they covered things like this in art history class.” The stones that lay down like the dead ones were curled in the grass in front of us. “I guess we could take a photo for him.…”

  Foxy snorted. “I didn’t bring a camera. Kinda doubt things would come out real well even if I had.”

  I remembered the way that my one photo had come out overexposed, looking like a bad photoshop of somebody’s fingerprint. “Probably.”

  Bongo gave the dead ones a wide berth. He didn’t seem frightened of them, but he definitely didn’t want to get too near them, as if they were a hole in the ground he was afraid to fall into.

  Maybe they’re a hole in the world, and if you look too long you’ll fall through.… The lines seemed to swim in front of me as if they were breathing. I felt dizzy and hot.

  It’s just like being seasick. The horizon’s wrong. Go find the white stone, use it as an anchor, and everything will settle down again.

  “The white stone’s past these,” I said, careful to keep my eagerness out of my voice. My hands appeared to be shaking. That was very odd. It wouldn’t do to let Foxy see that. She’d get the wrong idea. I shoved them in my jacket pockets as well as I could while holding Bongo’s leash.

  Something jabbed me in the knuckles. My head seemed to
clear abruptly.

  Wait, what?

  “Foxy…”

  “Eh?”

  “Um. This is odd. I want to see that white stone again.”

  She looked over at me, faintly puzzled. “We’re going there, ain’t we?”

  “No, I mean I suddenly really wanted to and I didn’t want to tell you about it, and I think that’s weird and suspicious.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Now, that’s interestin’. Good on you for fighting it.”

  “I don’t think I was fighting it,” I admitted. I dug around in my jacket pocket for what had jabbed me and pulled out a twig. “I poked myself with this.”

  “Is that hickory?”

  “Yeah. From outside the coffee shop.”

  Foxy nodded. “Hickory’ll help. I’m wearing, like, a pound of it myself. You still got that rosary?”

  “In my backpack.”

  “Well, put it on, then! You think evil’s gonna sit around and wait while you get dressed?”

  Chastened, I pulled out the string of hickory beads and dropped it over my head.

  The air seemed to lighten. The twisted carvings still moved when I looked at them, but they moved less, more like a bad moiré pattern than like breathing.

  I thought of the white stone carefully, as if I were probing a sore spot with my tongue.

  Big white rock. Some weird stuff going on with that rock. How we feelin’ about that rock?

  I had no particular opinion about the rock, other than that it was another creepy thing on the pile of increasingly creepy things. I was pretty sure that it was another rock like the one in the Green Book, and thus there was a slim chance it might try to get me pregnant, and that I was a bit miffed at it for apparently trying to get into my head. I reported this to Foxy.

  “Complicated old world, isn’t it?” she said. She had picked up a stick somewhere and was poking the dead twisted one with it.

  “Are you sure you should be doing that?”

  “Look, if it’s gonna come to life and take a chunk out of me, I’d rather it did now than when my back was turned.”