The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  I heard Foxy emptying her gun. The report deafened me. I crawled away, into the wicker tunnel, my head ringing and my wrist throbbing, trying to get to my knees so that I could pull the leash off my left wrist. Bongo barked furiously, which didn’t help at all.

  Then Foxy was picking me up and I somehow got the leash transferred and we staggered together down the tunnel. She said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the ringing in my head.

  A long time later, it seemed to me, I realized that Anna’s screaming had stopped. I didn’t know when it had stopped. Maybe when Foxy had fired her gun.

  Leaning on each other like two drunks in a three-legged race, we stumbled toward the bottom of the tunnel. I knew it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but it seemed to take an age of the earth. My lungs were raw from running, a pain that I welcomed because it had nothing to do with the pain in my wrist.

  “Are they following us?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Don’t think so.”

  Bongo seemed to agree with her. He wasn’t running, but shuffling along, nose to the ground, a tired dog ready to go home.

  It occurred to me that it was a good thing he was a coonhound. A border collie would still be up on the hillside, trying to herd the effigies into the proper formation. Although a border collie might have been smart enough not to go up the hill in the first place, so it was probably a wash.…

  “Why wouldn’t they follow us?” I wondered out loud.

  “Maybe we don’t have anything they want.”

  No. No, I didn’t have anything they wanted. My blood was all human and I was no replacement for Anna.

  We reached the bottom of the tunnel. Our footing evened out. Bongo threaded through the opening and led us into the dark trees.

  “Think we can get somebody to come back here and brick this thing up?” I asked.

  I couldn’t make out Foxy’s face in the moonlight, but I felt her frown. “Not sure you can brick up a bunch of dead trees, but we can give it a go. Skip might know.”

  We were relying on Bongo now to get us home. It was dark and I had no idea where we were. I kept listening for the woodpecker knock of hagstones, but I didn’t hear a thing.

  Is it over?

  Is it ever going to be over?

  At last, far in the distance, I saw a light. I’d left the back porch light on.

  It looked like a beacon. The real world. The normal world. Even if it was my grandmother’s horrible hoarder house, it was just a dead woman with too much stuff. There were thousands of them in the real world, and it was a thing that real people dealt with.

  I blinked back tears.

  We hobbled around the side of the house. Bongo was starting to pull again. He wanted dinner. I wanted to fall down and not get up again for days. Years. Maybe ever.

  I took a step up onto the porch.

  And stopped.

  The front door was open.

  23

  The screen was pushed back against the wall, and the inner door stood wide. The hallway was a square of darkness.

  “Foxy,” I said quietly, “tell me that Tomas and Skip came over to the house while we were gone.”

  “Don’t know, hon.” She reached into her purse and took out the gun.

  “Have you got any more bullets?”

  “No.”

  I pulled Bongo back from the porch.

  “Let’s go to my place,” said Foxy. “Worse comes to worse, we can—”

  I never did find out what we could do because I caught a flash of movement over her shoulder.

  The deer effigy came around the front of the truck, skull gleaming white, running on all fours.

  I grabbed Foxy with my injured wrist and practically threw her into the house. I think I screamed something, probably “Shit!” or maybe I just screamed because my wrist throbbed with a deep, nauseating, yes-something-is-now-broken pain.

  Bongo let out a low, awful growl and spun around, and I realized he was about to attack the damnable thing. I hauled him back by the collar and somehow we all fit inside the open doorway and I slammed the door in the effigy’s face.

  It was the screen door. It smashed into the wire mesh, tore it open, and I fell down over Bongo while it pawed through the opening, trying to get in.

  Foxy grabbed the inner door and kicked me hard. I had a split second of hurt confusion, then realized she was rolling me out of the way.

  The door hit the effigy with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a board, and then suddenly there was silence.

  I curled around my wrist and my dog, making small, uhn-uhn-uhn noises of agony. I needed a doctor. I needed this to not be happening. I needed the world to go back to being a place I understood.

  I was not going to get any of those things, so I let Foxy haul me to my feet.

  We stood there for a moment, in an awkward half embrace. Her lips were bluish and I knew that was bad and I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

  She pulled my jacket off me, which was confusing. When the sleeve went over my wrist, it was up there in the worst pains I’ve ever felt in my life. Then she started trying to put it back on me, which was even more confusing.

  “What…? What are you…?”

  “Zip up the jacket with your bad arm in front,” she said. “It ain’t a sling, but it’s as good as we’re gonna get in the next five minutes.”

  I let her work the zipper. With my arm tucked under my breasts, it didn’t feel good, but at least I wasn’t banging it around.

  “What do we do?” I said.

  “Wait until morning, I guess. Skip and Tomas’ll come over to check on us.”

  I had no idea what time it was. I had no idea what day it was.

  “We can call them,” I said. “From the landline. If we just…”

  I heard a clattering tok-tok-tok on the glass window and stiffened.

  “It’s at the window, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  I turned.

  The sofa still blocked most of the window, but I could see a narrow sliver of glass to one side, and the deer skull gazed at me eyelessly through it.

  Tap… tap…

  “You don’t want me!” I screamed at the effigy. “You don’t want me! I can’t do what you want!”

  It tilted its awful upside-down head. I would swear for an instant the damn thing looked confused.

  How much individuality did they have? Had this one imprinted on me, as it hung in the tree, watching? Had it been separated from the others? Did it know that I wasn’t able to make more of its masters?

  I don’t know why I stared so long. I’d seen enough of the effigies to last a lifetime. But there it was, one leg raised to tap against the glass. Its rib cage looked oddly human from here.

  Maybe it was.

  Dear God, what was it made out of?

  Who was it made out of?

  The two headless ones that had followed Anna around, had they been made from the bones of her children, as I suspected? And this one—I had thought of it as deer bones, but apart from the skull, I don’t know a deer from a human.

  Cotgrave had died in the woods, and the scavengers had gotten to him. Closed-casket funeral.

  Had the scavengers been simple animals, or something more?

  Who was in the effigy that looked in the window of Cotgrave’s bedroom, who knocked on the front door of the house, trying to get in?

  Trying to get back in?

  “Of course…,” I whispered. “You don’t smash the windows of your own house. You tap on the glass and wait for someone to let you back in.”

  Foxy gave me a worried look. “You lost me, hon.”

  “It’s Cotgrave,” I said. “That effigy. It’s made of Cotgrave. It’s got to be.”

  “Your granddaddy had a deer’s head?”

  “Okay, not just of Cotgrave.” I shook my head. “But that’s why it keeps trying to get in. It doesn’t want us. It wants to come home.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting we ope
n the door and let it in,” said Foxy.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t quite that far gone.

  But what would it do? a little voice whispered in my head. Would it attack you? Was it even trying to attack you in the woods, or did it recognize its granddaughter and was trying to keep you from going up the hill? Maybe it would just go to Cotgrave’s bedroom and curl up on the bed? Sit in his favorite chair and read the paper?

  I bit my knuckle to keep from breaking into hysterical laughter.

  “Come on,” said Foxy. “Just like last time. We just gotta wait until it goes away. Then we’ll call Skip and Tomas and…”

  Bongo began to growl again.

  She made an exasperated sound. “Buddy, you’re not helping.”

  Yeah, Bongo, just ignore the monster at the door. That monster is old news now.…

  I reached down to put my hand on his head and realized that he wasn’t facing the door.

  He was facing down the hallway.

  “Foxy,” I said quietly.

  She turned to me, and I pointed.

  In the shadows of the hall, something moved.

  I remembered suddenly the way that there had seemed to be two effigies chasing us in the tunnel.

  I remembered the Building, and that the effigies could reproduce themselves.

  I remembered these things much too late.

  That movement was our only warning before an effigy erupted from my grandmother’s doll room.

  * * *

  If it had been made entirely out of doll parts, I would probably have stood there and laughed, high-pitched and awful, while it took me apart. It would have been too much, too horrible, too movie-monster cliché. The killer doll. The china doll with the long fingernails and the murderous expression.

  But the effigy was made out of many more things. Cotgrave’s effigy had constructed it (Lovingly? Vengefully? Who knew?) out of the remnants of his dead wife’s hoarding.

  Maybe that was why I saw it so rarely. Maybe it wasn’t hiding during the day. Maybe it was busy working.

  The hoarding effigy was a papier-mâché of old newspapers, layered like the Building itself, furred with bits of cardboard boxes and old bottles of cleaner. There were doll parts, yes, dozens of them, little plastic limbs making up a rib cage built of bright pink severed legs, but they enclosed a jumble of wire coat hangers and broken plates.

  The ancient typewriter had been broken apart, and the letters, with their metal shafts, made claws that gouged the floor and tore the carpet runner into long stringy threads.

  I screamed. Foxy swore. Bongo’s growl erupted into a high, awful bark, the sound of a dog desperately calling for help that he knows isn’t going to come.

  I hauled Bongo back by the collar, into the kitchen. We couldn’t go out the door, because the other effigy was there, and the back door was closed off, and I knew we were trapped like rats, I knew it, but I didn’t know where else to go.

  The hoarding effigy had no such concerns. If it hadn’t skidded when it hit the linoleum, I imagine we would have died right there. But as soon as it reached the kitchen, its legs went sideways and it crashed into the counter and that bought us a small amount of time.

  We went up the stairs. I only had one hand and I had to use it on Bongo, but he didn’t object to running. Foxy was right behind me, knocking boxes loose and throwing them down onto the effigy. Her heart might be about to give out, but she wasn’t going down alone.

  At the top of the stairs, one door stood open. It was the room we’d watched the effigy from, approximately a thousand years ago. Some furniture, a man-high stack of old newspapers, and not much else. “Foxy! In here!”

  We slammed the door shut behind us. I set my back against it while Foxy, having two good arms, grabbed a nightstand and started dragging it over.

  The effigy hit the door with enough force to knock me forward an inch or two. I don’t know if the metal claws made it hard to work doorknobs or if it didn’t understand them, but it didn’t seem to want to open the door so much as smash it down. I set my feet, trying to hold it until Foxy could get the furniture in place.

  This effigy did not seem interested in scaring us. This one wanted us dead.

  I thought of the gleeful malice that exuded from my grandmother’s house and wasn’t at all surprised. How could a creature made out of the essence of this place not want us all dead?

  “This is bad,” said Foxy.

  “I knew it!” I said. “I thought I’d put doll parts in the truck and then there weren’t any in the morning and I thought I was nuts, but I wasn’t. It took them. Cotgrave’s effigy took them.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” said Foxy, “but it’s beating down the door, hon.”

  “Yes, I’d noticed.”

  The nightstand looked painfully fragile. I had enough space to brace the door with my good shoulder while she grabbed the other one. The doorframe rocked with the effigy’s blows. I heard wood splintering an inch from my head.

  Heeeere’s Johnny! I thought. And then, Oh God, if only I had an ax!

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “This isn’t going to hold.”

  “There’s the window,” said Foxy. “We can go out on the porch roof, but after that, we’re running real thin on options.”

  Slam. Slam. Slam.

  Sudden silence. I could hear claws clicking as the effigy stepped back from the door. What was it doing?

  I heard it walking down the hall, into the next room. That one had been full of junk. A regular firetrap.

  An idea crystalized into my head, as cold and clear as ice.

  This house. This fucking awful house. Why had I fought so hard for it? Let the monsters have it. The only thing I cared about was my friend and my dog.

  Well, and my laptop, and that was still in the truck. Thank God.

  If I did it wrong, we were going to die.

  If I did nothing, we were still probably going to die.

  “Foxy,” I said quietly. “You have a lighter, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it to me.”

  She didn’t ask questions, just dug into her purse and handed it over. It was an old Zippo, weighty in my hand.

  “You about to do what I think you’re about to do, hon?”

  “Burn this place to the ground, you mean?”

  “Hey, it’s your house. But I’d prefer to be outside before we do that.”

  “We’ll jump down from the porch roof onto my truck.”

  Foxy gave me a dubious look.

  Crack. The effigy hit the wall between us. Apparently it had decided that drywall was easier to get through than wood.

  It was right. Metal flashed as its claws shredded through the wallboard. I didn’t know how much space there was between studs or if there were pipes in the way, but I wasn’t about to stick around to find out.

  “… the truck, you say?” said Foxy.

  “Get the window open,” I said. I bent down, flicked the Zippo open—God bless stupid teenage me, who had spent hours learning to flip open my boyfriend’s Zippo so that I could look cool—and lit the stack of newspapers on fire.

  They caught with remarkable enthusiasm. I lit the carpet on fire just for good measure. The fire department could yell at me if we lived.

  There was a monster coming in through the wall and I was in the top floor of a house, lighting it on fire, and what I felt was a sudden wild exhilaration.

  Let it burn. Let this awful place and its secrets and its nightmares and the dead I hadn’t asked for and the junk I never wanted burn.

  The effigy got one of its arms through the wall and began tearing at the hole to widen it. I shoved the Zippo in my pocket.

  Foxy kicked the window screen out. I heard the crackling of the newspapers and smelled burning. It was a very cheerful, campfire sort of smell, desperately incongruous given the circumstances.

  I still don’t know how we got Bongo through the window. I may have picked him up with one arm
while Foxy pulled. But we got him out, and then I climbed out onto the porch roof after, praying he didn’t take it in his head to run off the edge and break his neck and my other wrist in the process.

  “Now the truck?” said Foxy.

  “After the fire’s caught,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “I want that thing to burn, not be chasing us around the woods.”

  “Can’t argue with that.” She eyed the distance to the truck. “Think I can make it. Don’t know how you’ll convince the dog to do it, but we’ll figure it out.”

  Presumably Cotgrave’s effigy was still on the porch somewhere. It had been trying to get into the house. I just had to hope that it had gotten in, and the fire would take it out, too.

  Houses are supposed to catch fire really fast. In all the movies it goes from a shorted-out Christmas-tree light to flames shooting out of the roof in like two minutes. And you’d think this house, made of ancient materials and packed to the rafters with tinder, would practically explode into flame.

  We waited on the roof and it didn’t happen.

  I could still see the orange flicker on the walls and obviously something inside was on fire, but my hope that the whole place would turn into an inferno and take the effigy with it was starting to fade.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get to the truck—”

  The hoarder effigy hit the open window like a freight train.

  Its shoulders were too broad to get through. It turned and scrabbled at the windowsill, cracking the wood, slamming into it over and over. Bits of bone flew off. I watched one of the doll-leg ribs pop loose, then another, as it tried to drag itself through.

  Something went Fwooooosh!

  I don’t know what caught, but suddenly the fire was no longer an orange glow but alive. It roared as if it was inhaling, and I heard glass shattering as the windows broke.

  “Come on!” shouted Foxy. I could barely hear her over the fire, but when I turned, she was standing on top of my truck, Bongo in her arms. “Get the hell out of there!”

  The effigy strained at the window. Another set of ribs broke off. Parts of its papery guts were spilling out onto the roof, and then a spark hit them and they, too, began to burn.

  I ran for the corner of the porch roof.