The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  She raised an eyebrow. “Most of those people are nuts, hon.”

  “I know. But everybody’s gonna think we’re nuts too, if we try to tell anybody about this.”

  Foxy laughed. There wasn’t much humor in it. “I don’t know that that’s gonna be a problem.”

  I sighed. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I slid down on the floor and rubbed Bongo’s ears. He thumped his tail.

  We sat there in the silent room for what felt like years. I suppose it was probably hours, although it might have been less. Bongo stretched out and went to sleep. Well, why not? He’d had a long, exciting day full of running and climbing and scary things and then somebody came along and enchanted him to make him feel better. I’d want a nap, too. It was a lot for one elderly coonhound.

  It was a lot for one thirtysomething woman.

  The stone walls muffled sound. We didn’t hear our captors approach until the door began to open. Bongo raised his head from his paws and gave a brief whine.

  It was Anna, flanked again by effigies. I couldn’t make out which ones these were. The shadows were thick around them, and all I could see was the occasional gleam of wire.

  Anna spoke to them over her shoulder. “I will tell the prisoners of their fate.”

  They tapped and clicked at her. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

  Foxy and I stared at her. She stood before us, inhumanly tall, inhumanly pale, her eyes full of red gleams.

  Then she took three steps forward and sank down to her knees.

  “You have to help me get out of here,” hissed Anna. “Please.”

  * * *

  Foxy said, “… whut?”

  This was maybe not the most intelligent response, but it summed up my thoughts pretty well.

  “Please,” said Anna in a low, urgent voice. Crouched on the floor, something seemed to change in her face. She was still pale, but not like a corpse, and her eyes were plain brown, no longer flecked with red.

  Was that some kind of illusion? A glamour, like they used to call spells back in the day?

  Or is this the illusion? Is she trying to look more human for us?

  “They can’t hear us in here, I don’t think, not with the door closed,” she said. “At least, I don’t think they can, but it’s hard to tell. They don’t react to things like we do.”

  “Are you… uh… in trouble?” I asked, thinking that whatever trouble she was in, we were probably in much worse straits and, if anything, we should be asking her for help.

  She pushed her hair back from her eyes. “Yes. It’s bad. This isn’t a good place.”

  “I’d noticed,” I said.

  She gave a short, humorless laugh. “You would have, I imagine. I don’t even see it anymore. You get used to everything. Except sometimes the poppets do things that no one could get used to.”

  “The poppets?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I already knew. “The bone and stick things?”

  She nodded. “Uriah says they used to be shaped more like people. But he’s been here too long. Much longer than me, and I’ve been here for years—I don’t know how many years. I know it’s been a long time. It was winter of seventy-three.”

  Foxy and I looked at each other over her head. Anna looked to be, at most, in her early thirties, and only if she’d been really relentless about skin care and exercise.

  “It’s been a while,” said Foxy kindly. “What happened to you? Wandered in here, did you?”

  “Ugh.” Anna put her face in her hands. “I was so stupid. We’d go out in the woods behind my cousin’s place and smoke grass, try to raise our consciousness, you know? And then one day a woman showed up while I was high and I actually asked her if she was my spirit guide. Can you imagine?”

  Whatever I was expecting from the holler people, it wasn’t this.

  “Uh,” I said.

  Foxy had no such qualms. “Hell, hon, I was tripping balls one night and asked a cop if he was my daddy. It happens.”

  Anna nodded. “She was the one before me. She brought me back here. Then she left, that bitch.”

  “You can’t leave?” I asked.

  “Not for good. The poppets will let me go out for a bit, but they watch me. If I try to leave, they…” She swallowed. Whatever she was going to say, she apparently thought better of it. “They bring me back,” she said.

  I pictured long twig fingers closing over my arms, a deer-bone effigy picking me up and carrying me back to the place of stones, and shuddered.

  Something snapped suddenly into focus, now that she was no longer so tall and pale. “Wait!” I said. “You were in the woods! I saw you! You’re the hiker!”

  Anna nodded. “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “To see if you could help me.”

  “But you didn’t look like…” I waved my hands, trying to express tall and pale and red-eyed all at once.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. She waved her hand and suddenly her eyes shone the color of brake lights. I recoiled and then they were brown again. “A little magic. Like the charm on your dog. So that people don’t have a freak-out.”

  Have a freak-out, I thought. I can almost hear the seventies.

  “I used to come out and see Frederick.” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t think he understood what I was trying to tell him. He kept trying to warn me. I told him it was too late, but… well.”

  Frederick. She means Cotgrave. Oh. He mentioned a girl in the woods.

  I hadn’t connected the hiker to Cotgrave’s girl in the woods, but how could I? There were a lot of people in Pondsboro. It’s not like you expect any of them to be magically concealing the fact that they’re seven feet tall and the color of ice.

  “I think he was pretty far gone by the end,” I said.

  Anna nodded. “He couldn’t help me,” she said.

  “You were the one who sent the note. And drew ‘Kilroy was here’ on it.”

  She petted Bongo. “Yes. He used to draw it. I didn’t know if you knew him, but I thought you might recognize it.”

  I tried not to sound accusing, but I’m pretty sure I failed. “I came because of the note. Because you asked for help! And instead you captured me—us—and locked us up in here!”

  “Well, I didn’t expect you to just walk in! I thought if you’d found the place of stones, you must know something about how things worked!”

  Foxy gave a short bark of laughter.

  “No,” I said. “My dog wandered into it one day and then things started to go really sideways.”

  Anna stopped petting Bongo and shoved her hair out of her eyes. “You’re not one of them, then. One of us?”

  “Uh… what?”

  “Part hidden folk. They go out and get children on ordinary folk. My father was one. That’s why they wanted me here. But you’re not one, are you?”

  I raised my eyebrows, thinking of my dad and the roughness in his lungs. “Jesus, no. My dad’s an actuary.”

  I don’t know why I added that last bit, except that it seemed like being an actuary was the diametric opposite of being a holler person.

  “Unnngghhh.” Anna looked as if she might scream. “But you have to be! Frederick was one!”

  “He what?” I said.

  “He was one of us. Generations back, but there was a little bit there. How can’t you have it?”

  I blinked at her stupidly. “He was my stepgrandfather. Mine died in his thirties.”

  Anna collapsed onto the stone bench. “This is awful.”

  I was getting a little fed up with her assumptions. It was looking like this was at least partly her fault. “You could have asked! Or, you know, not captured us!”

  She shook her head. “I tried to keep everyone else out but you. I thought you could help me.”

  Foxy lifted her head. “That’s why it felt like the place was trying to keep me out.”

  “I tried,” Anna repeated, sounding almost petulant. “Once you were in the place of stones, the poppets were going to brin
g you back no matter what. I had to make it look good. They’re already suspicious of me. At least, I think they are. Who knows what goes on in their heads?”

  “Don’t you?” asked Foxy mildly.

  Anna gave a high, humorless laugh that made the hair rise on the back of my neck. Bongo jumped.

  I slid down on the floor and hugged my dog, feeling a territorial urge to claim him as mine, not hers. The hickory beads around my neck got tangled up in his collar, and as I wrapped my fingers around them to pull them loose, I had a strange sense of double vision. Anna, still looking like a hippie, with human eyes and human skin… and then behind that, as if through a frosted glass, Anna with red eyes and skin whiter than any white woman on earth.

  Which one is real?

  I dropped the beads against my chest. The vision faded, even though the beads were still touching the back of my neck. Perhaps the hickory was only strong enough to show me the glamour if I was holding it tightly.

  Anna hunched up one shoulder in a shrug, unaware of any of this. “Look, I need your help. I have to get out of here. It’s been too long. I can’t do what they want. It’s not working. I used to at least get pregnant, but now that doesn’t even work anymore.”

  If she’d sounded like a grieving mother, I think I would have tried to say something sympathetic, but she didn’t. She sounded irritated. And I know people are complicated and grieve in their own ways and all that, and maybe it wasn’t even grief anymore, but that was one more strange thing going on.

  I’m not judging. This whole situation was beyond anything I understood.

  “We’ll help you get away if we can,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say, given that we were locked in a stone cell and she had free run of the place. “But there’s effi… poppets at the house, too. If they come after you, won’t they just come to the house?”

  “The house, maybe.” Anna dipped her head. “But if I can get far enough away, they’ll give up. I’m sure they’ll give up. They have to give up.”

  I wasn’t so sure, but I also wasn’t going to argue with her. Her eyes were doing a very unsettling thing, where they flashed red, then remembered they were supposed to be brown, but then the red would start seeping through again.

  “What about the others?” I asked. “The other holler people. Won’t they try to stop you if you leave?”

  “What?”

  “The…” It occurred to me that she might not know what I meant by “holler people.” “The hidden people. Like you and the old man.”

  Anna stared at me, then gave another high, unsettling laugh.

  “There aren’t any others,” she said. “He and I are the only ones left.”

  “There aren’t any others?” I repeated stupidly. “What? How is that possible? You’ve got a whole city here!”

  Even as I said it, I remembered how silent the city had been as we’d walked through it, how the only movement had been the effigies. At the time I’d thought that perhaps the others were sleeping or watching us from the windows.

  Perhaps the truth was that there was no one left to watch.

  But if that was true, then where were the effigies coming from? Somebody was building them.

  Was it Anna? Or the other man—Uriah? Now, there’s an old-fashioned name. I wonder how long he’s been in here.…

  An old-fashioned name, like… like Ambrose, for that matter…

  Ambrose destroyed the white stone, but there was another one here. Cotgrave knew about the holler people when he was in Wales, and the narrator in the Green Book talks about them, so there had to be more.…

  “Are there other cities?” I asked. “In other places?”

  Anna gave me a startled, appraising look. “I don’t know,” she said. “Uriah said something about that once, but he rambles. Nobody ever comes from them, if there are.”

  Something rattled against the door. Anna stiffened.

  She rose to her feet. It looked for a moment as if she stood in a light that no one could see, as her skin bleached whiter and whiter and her eyes grew strange.

  “I’ll come back,” she whispered. “The poppets will want to take you to the Building next. I’ll try to put them off, but if I can’t, be ready.”

  “The build—”

  “Later.”

  She opened the door. A wall of bone and rags and twigs stood behind it, moving restlessly.

  Anna stepped outside, head held high.

  “Your cooperation has been noted,” she said. “We will speak again.”

  She shut the door behind her and was gone.

  * * *

  “Holy crap,” said Foxy.

  “This is getting weirder and weirder,” I said. “What do you think is going on?”

  “Not a damn clue,” said Foxy. She jerked her chin toward the door. “Not real keen on her. I feel bad for her, but something stinks.”

  “Yeah…,” I said. I wanted to feel bad for Anna, who was clearly a victim of… something… but there was a wrongness to her that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  It reminded me of the narrator of the Green Book. That same feeling that I knew I was supposed to pity them, but I mistrusted them instead.

  Well, Anna had hauled me into a situation I had no idea how to fix, and she hadn’t apologized; she’d just seemed annoyed. I was probably justified in being a little annoyed myself.

  There was just something… off.

  Off, I thought bitterly. Yes, you’re surrounded by monsters, trapped underground, but something is off. And you’re still brooding because you didn’t think the narrator of the Green Book was likable enough.

  Bongo liked Anna, but that didn’t mean much. She’d put a spell on him. And anyway, Bongo liked everyone except for the UPS guy, and maybe he’d like the UPS guy too if he could do magic.

  I wished I knew what it was that was nagging at me. Then I’d know if I should pay attention to the feeling or ignore it.

  Of course, how I was supposed to pick out a subtle wrongness when I was being held in a cell by stick effigies under an empty city that was somehow in the hills behind my dead grandmother’s house…? Yeah, no, we’re way past subtlety.

  She isn’t acting right, though. The way the narrator in the Green Book didn’t act quite right.

  If you’d been held prisoner by effigies for decades, getting pregnant from a rock, how the hell would you act?

  But why did she care that I wasn’t one of the holler people? If I was going to help her escape, what did it matter?

  “Do you think there’s really no other holler people?”

  Foxy shrugged. “Didn’t see any. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything. And you’re right that maybe there’s none here, but there’s some somewhere else.”

  “Maybe the effigies are getting made somewhere else. In another city. Cotgrave must have seen one in Wales and then ran…” Ran across the sea and moved into a house with one in the backyard. There’s irony for you.

  Maybe he didn’t have a choice. Maybe he couldn’t get away from them.

  “Do you think this is a trap?” I asked, my brain a whirl of thoughts—Cotgrave drawn to my grandmother, whom he clearly despised, Cotgrave drawn to the house, not leaving, even once it became clear that the holler people had found him… Cotgrave trapped, and now we were trapped…

  Foxy raised a carefully drawn eyebrow. “If it’s a trap, she already sprung it. She’s got us in a jail cell. Why come in here and lie to us about it?”

  I grunted.

  After a minute I said, “If there’s no holler people, who the hell is making the effigies? Or the poppets or whatever she called them?”

  “Maybe that old guy,” said Foxy. “He looks like the sort who’d stick a wasp nest on a pig’s body and call it a day.”

  “Uriah,” I said. “When was the last time you heard of somebody named Uriah?”

  “Sunday school, I think. He was a Hittite or a Levite or a Sodomite or whatever.” She considered this. “Well, maybe not a Sodomite.”


  “I’m not judging.” I considered. “Do you think he could have made all of them?”

  “If I was immortal and bored, I’d probably get up to a whole lotta mischief.”

  “You think he’s immortal?”

  “I think that Anna girl sure as hell doesn’t look like she was a teenager in seventy-three.”

  I sighed. “What do you think she meant about getting pregnant?”

  Foxy considered this. “Sounded a bit like somebody wanted her to have kids, but she couldn’t anymore. Said something similar when she caught us, didn’t she?”

  I have borne seven. Five drew no breaths.

  “Hell,” Foxy said, “if I was stuck here with nobody but that old Uriah guy and a bunch of walking twig monsters, having babies, I’d want to get the hell outta Dodge myself.”

  I snorted. This exactly echoed my thoughts, and she wasn’t wrong, but still… still…

  Why trap us? Why call for help when we pretty clearly weren’t competent to give it?

  No, it wasn’t us. It was me. She tried to keep Foxy out, remember?

  Why were the effigies staring in my windows anyway?

  We didn’t have enough information, and that was all there was to it.

  We sat in silence. Bongo went back to sleep.

  “You still got those sandwiches?”

  “How can you possibly want to eat at a time like this?”

  “Look, being terrified makes me hungry.”

  I dug in my pack and pulled out the Tupperware container.

  As soon as it was open, the smell of tuna and mayo hit me and I was suddenly ravenous.

  “Told you,” said Foxy smugly, as I shoved down two sandwiches.

  Ten minutes later, I was so tired I started to wonder if the tuna salad had been drugged.

  “Perfectly normal,” said Foxy. “Look, we ran like hell and then we got marched through the streets scared out of our wits. The adrenaline’s gotta wear off sometime.” She stretched out on the stone bench, using her backpack as a pillow. “Also, neither of us got much sleep last night.”