The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  Foxy and Bongo slid down into the bed of the truck and I vaulted the gap like an Olympic sprinter. I had been secretly afraid I’d come up short, and instead I nearly went over the other side. The roof rack stopped me. There was going to be an almighty dent in the roof, but who the hell cared anymore?

  I flung myself into the bed, over the side, and opened the driver’s side door. It seemed like an eternity while I dug for the keys—come on, Mouse, this is not the time to realize you’ve left them on the coffee table—but found them in the bottom of my pocket and slammed them into the ignition.

  The truck started. My beautiful, faithful truck. I slammed it into reverse, glanced behind me out of habit, and then the burning effigy landed on the hood.

  The truck hood dented under its weight. I didn’t care about that—a truck without dents in it is probably a stupid truck anyway—but it was touching my truck.

  I didn’t even let boyfriends drive my truck.

  Get it off get it off get it off this is mine this is mine you can’t touch it it’s on it it’s on me GET IT OFF!

  It glared at me eyelessly, its sides heaving as if were panting. The plastic doll legs had charred and melted. So had most of the bottles. One burned like a star—some kind of accelerant, God only knows what.

  If it could get to me, I would burn, too.

  If it could get to me, it would take me apart and then Cotgrave’s effigy would come along and build me back up out of bones and all three of us would roam the woods together in a family, clicking and clacking with stones in our chest and ribs made of doll arms and we could twist ourselves around like the twisted ones and lie down like the dead ones and…

  I slammed my foot on the accelerator.

  Foxy and Bongo had thrown themselves flat in the truck bed. Maybe it didn’t know they were there. Maybe it didn’t care. I don’t know. Maybe there was something of my grandmother in it, and there was no one she hated like her own flesh and blood.

  I shot down the driveway in reverse while it clawed at the windshield with the typewriter keys, leaving huge scrapes in the paint and scratching the glass. It got a claw hooked under the windshield wipers and somehow it held on, even when the truck went off the driveway and hit the ditch and bounced hard. I had one hand to drive with and steering wasn’t helping.

  I threw the car into drive and plowed forward until I nearly hit the burning porch, then slammed on the brakes. I heard a yelp from the back, but I didn’t dare stop to check on my passengers.

  The effigy slid off the hood and rolled in the front yard, painted orange by the flames leaping from the roof. It didn’t move.

  I backed the truck away, leaving ruts in the yard, and then Cotgrave’s effigy came down from the porch.

  I gritted my teeth, ready to run it down if I had to… but I didn’t.

  It ignored the truck. It picked its way down the stairs, moving on four legs, down to the burning effigy. Then it curled itself up, like Bongo does when he goes to sleep, and lay down against the other one.

  Cotgrave and his wife, I thought, watching the flames from the hoarder effigy lick across the deer hide. Or Cotgrave and his house. Maybe it doesn’t matter which.

  The roof fell in, and I pulled down the driveway and away from that terrible ruined house forever.

  24

  Well.

  That is the end of the story, or at least of most of it. Once we were a few miles away, Foxy banged on the back window until I pulled over. Then she drove me to the ER and spun a story I can’t even remember about squatters breaking into the house and a fire. My wrist was broken, but at least it was my left wrist, so I could still drive after they put it in the cast.

  Officer Bob came out to take my statement. I told him I didn’t know much. I hadn’t seen anybody I could pick out of a lineup. It had been dark and Bongo was the only reason I woke up at all, and probably the only reason I hadn’t died in the fire.

  I don’t know if he believed me, but he was kind about it, and that counted for a lot.

  At some point Foxy left. Tomas came and got her. I think she must have called from the ER. I kept asking if she would be okay in the house, if the house was safe now, if anything would happen. There were other people around, so I couldn’t say what I wanted to, just grabbed her sleeve and stared at her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right. They never wanted me. Ain’t got the parts they need. I been there for years and nothing’s ever happened.”

  A long time later I thought that maybe Anna might want revenge, but by then Foxy was long gone, and all I could do was beg Officer Bob to look in on them and make sure they were all right.

  Pretty much as soon as they released me from the ER, I got in my truck and drove into town. Enid took one look at me and let me sleep in the back of the coffee shop for a couple of hours.

  I told her there had been a fire but I honestly didn’t remember much.

  When I had about five hours of sleep in me, I drove to Pittsburgh. I stopped only at brightly lit places. Even those were too dim. I wanted the world to be lit up with halogens, with great blazes of artificial light. I wanted to see every corner of the world so I knew nothing could be hiding in it.

  I tuned the radio to something loud and brassy and sang along with everything, whether I knew the words or not.

  I got home and sat in the truck for probably an hour. Bongo was confused, but he’d gotten a cheeseburger at the last stop, so he was in a congenial mood.

  The DJ came on to tell us what the last song had been, and I was puzzled for a moment that I wasn’t being told about how my pledge would help support quality programming like this, and then I put my forehead on the steering wheel and cried hysterically for what felt like another hour.

  Then I went inside and turned on every light in the house.

  * * *

  I never told my dad the truth. How could I? The official word was that I was asleep and somebody broke in, and Bongo woke me up. There was a struggle and my wrist got broken and a fire started somewhere in all the junk. Foxy was drinking out on the front porch and heard Bongo freaking out, so she came and managed to pull me out. I was still confused from being half asleep and it was dark. No, I don’t know who’d break in. No, I didn’t get a good look at anybody.

  Dad apologized for how it had all gone down, and I told him there was no way he could have known. The doctor’s got him pretty well medicated right now, trying to deal with the rattle in his lungs. I don’t know how much longer he’s got, and I’m not going to tear up what peace he’s got trying to tell him the truth.

  The insurance company didn’t investigate the fire too hard. The place had obviously been a firetrap and we weren’t asking for money to rebuild, just to have someone with a backhoe knock the whole place down and fill in the basement. Foxy says the stone’s gone. I don’t know if they did that, or if it was someone else. If it really was a signpost, maybe the effigies came and fetched it back, now that they didn’t need it anymore.

  I prefer to think it was the people with the backhoe.

  The insurance company sent Dad what remained from the settlement and he sent it to me. I looked at the check—six thousand dollars, a lot of money by my standards—and started crying. I needed the money and I couldn’t keep it. Even the thought of cashing that check made me want to throw up. Anything I bought with that money would be tainted. If I tried to make a house payment with it, then my grandmother would own a little bit of my house. I couldn’t do it.

  I tried to send it to Foxy, and she refused. “I ain’t gonna take money for arson, hon.”

  I tossed and turned for three nights before I finally got an idea and sent the whole damn thing to North Carolina Public Radio in memory of Freddy Cotgrave. I got the tax break, and maybe that’s worth something.

  Obviously the Green Book was never found. If it didn’t burn, it’s probably buried somewhere in the pile of rubble left from the house. I’ve got the manuscript, though. I didn’t want that either, but Tomas had be
en reading it back at Foxy’s place when the house burned.

  They put it in an envelope and mailed it to me. It was a repeat of the insurance check—I cried. I wanted to throw up. I put it in the trash. I went back out and took it out of the trash.

  I tried to put it in a drawer and it felt like there was a snake in the room. Every time I went into the back bedroom, I could feel it lurking there.

  Eventually I rented a safe-deposit box. They’re not that expensive, as it turns out. Now the bank can worry about it.

  I suppose it goes without saying that I’ve pretty well lost my shit. My aunt wants me to see a therapist, but what am I going to tell them? There’s no therapist in the world who will believe the truth, and I don’t want to have to sit and lie to someone for sixty dollars an hour.

  Hell, how do you tell someone, I nearly spent the rest of my life giving birth to monsters in a city full of walking sticks and bones? They’d have you on antipsychotics so fast that your head would spin, and that wouldn’t help. I wish to God there was a medication that would make it all go away, but if there was, maybe I’d forget to watch for holler people. Maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky next time.

  It’s better than it was. Bongo helps a lot. I can leave the house, and as long as I’m in my truck or someplace with people, I’m pretty okay. I put hickory twigs in all the windows, but that just looks like a weird decorating choice.

  Do you know what I think about the most, though? It’s not Cotgrave’s effigy, lonely and wandering the woods near his dead wife’s house until he had a chance to build her up again out of parts. It’s not the stones or the voorish dome or the fact that there’s got to be other cities out there like the one in Wales, maybe less dead, full of the holler people and their servants.

  It’s the linoleum in my grandmother’s kitchen.

  When the hoarder effigy reached the kitchen, it skidded. Its feet nearly went out from under it. That’s probably the only reason we made it to the stairs.

  Three whole lives, hinging on shitty seventies linoleum. If she’d left the original hardwood, we’d be dead. Everybody talks about how awful it is that people cover up the nice wood floors in houses, and it turned out to save my life.

  I feel like the world must be full of things like that. Stupid minor things nobody pays attention to, and then one day you pick up the umbrella stand you’ve been meaning to throw out and beat the killer over the head with it, or you trip over the pizza boxes that you meant to throw out and the killer gets you instead.

  Things like dog leashes or hickory beads.

  I still carry the beads with me. If I leave them at home, I panic and have to go back. They’ve become a security blanket. As long as I’ve got them, I can probably see the holler people coming.

  Foxy and I still talk. Well, text mostly. After our little jaunt, she allowed as how a cell phone might be useful to have around, and Tomas set her up with a cheap one. She likes texting. I think she’d communicate entirely in emojis and smiley faces if she could. Skip is fine. Tomas gets hassled sometimes by people who think that anybody like him must be from another country, but that’s nothing new. Foxy went on a new heart medication after Skip badgered her into it. She says it makes her cranky, but I remember how blue her lips would get and I’m glad she’s on it.

  No effigies in the woods. No holler people. If they’re still back there—and of course they’re still back there—everything’s very quiet.

  “Why don’t you move?” I asked her, one of the few times that we talked instead of texting.

  “With what money?” asked Foxy. “Ain’t nobody gonna buy this crappy piece of dirt out here, and my social security ain’t gonna pay for a house anywhere else.”

  “I could help,” I promised recklessly. Half the time my own mortgage was a struggle, but I’d bring all three of them up to Pittsburgh if I had to.

  “Nah. It’s fine, hon. No different from living by a dump or one of them toxic waste things. I keep my hickory and I don’t go walking in the woods on that side.”

  A long silence. I heard the soft static of the line. Even after I got my phone fixed, Foxy’s connection wasn’t good.

  I wondered if she was thinking about Anna too.

  I should hate Anna for what she did. I know I should. She would have sold me for her own freedom without a second thought.

  But I think of what it must have been like, walking the corridors of that dead city, seeing nothing but monsters around you. When she found out she was pregnant, was she hopeful? Did she think that maybe it would be more company than Uriah and the effigies? And what kind of monstrous midwife had attended her, what claws of bone and twig and wire reached out to catch her firstborn?

  Was it easier, after she stopped being able to carry a child? It doesn’t work anymore. I can’t do what they want.

  Did she just stop caring? Or was she still hoping, every time? Did she plead her case to the Building, to the things hanging from the ceiling? Did they have a long, rattling conference about her fate?

  In the end, did the effigies drag her to the white stone anyway?

  Sometimes at night I wake up thinking I’m her and that if I turn my head I’ll find out that I didn’t get out of the dome after all. If I open my eyes there will be effigies around me, and the weight on my legs won’t be Bongo but something made out of his bones.

  It takes me a long time after that to turn on the light.

  No, I don’t hate Anna. If she hadn’t called me, maybe I’d be able to sleep at night. Maybe I wouldn’t think about monsters pressing against the walls of the world, effigies making more and more copies of themselves, waiting for their masters to come home.

  Or until they overflow the hills and break through.

  But I still can’t hate her. Sometimes I even feel guilty. Here I am, trembling and quaking in the dark, at the mere possibility of taking her place. What right do I have to be so broken, when she carried on, year after year, decade after decade?

  All those years in the dead city, and she survived. I couldn’t have done that. Maybe that was the gift of her inhuman blood, that she didn’t kill herself or curl into a ball and give up. The Lady Cassap, the narrator of the Green Book said, had been burned alive. And I wondered whether she cared, after all the strange things she had done…

  Perhaps that’s what set the holler people apart, not the white skin and the red eyes, but the ability to be burned alive and not care or to walk a dead city for decades and not go mad.

  “Do you think she’s still back there?” I asked. Trying not to think of Anna, alone, having murdered the last of her human company. Anna, not aging fast enough, part of the effigies’ desperate, twisted breeding program to bring back their old masters.

  “No,” said Foxy slowly. “No, I think maybe she didn’t make it.”

  After she hung up, I stared at the phone and remembered how Anna’s screaming had stopped after Foxy had fired her last bullets.

  And I knew that I was never going to ask, and thus Foxy was never going to have to lie to me about what had happened.

  I hoped like hell that she was right.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Astute readers will have noticed immediately that the Green Book is the diary from Arthur Machen’s found manuscript story, “The White People.” Published in 1904, this is one of the great classics of horror. (His novel The Great God Pan gets a lot more press, but for my money, “The White People” is far superior.)

  Now, I love a good found manuscript story as much as the next person, but one plot contrivance that drives me up the wall is “we found the manuscript, and then we lost it, and now I am re-creating it as best I can.” These “re-creations” often read like the narrator conveniently had a photographic memory, even under extreme duress, capable of casually re-creating a hundred pages, usually handwritten, without much effort.

  In my own experience, that’s just not how memory works. So when I was writing Cotgrave’s version of the Green Book, I wrote down as much as I could remember of “
The White People” without referring back to the original, including noting all the bits where I could not, for the life of me, remember what came next. Eventually, I would go back and clean things up, add in more references and more direct quotes, but I tried very hard to preserve the initial experience of trying to transcribe a memory of a rambling, dreamlike narrative.

  Another thing that has always frustrated me about found manuscript stories is how uncritically they’re read by the narrator. Not for truth, but for style. Half the writers and all the editors I know would spontaneously generate a red pen and begin making corrections immediately. So I couldn’t resist giving Mouse the opportunity to make editorial comments of her own.

  I am, for the most part, a reteller of fairy tales, but retelling pulp horror is really not so different. There is the same process of trying to find the bones of the story, of throwing in references for the reader to pick out and (hopefully) feel a sense of smugness at having gotten the joke. In this case, however, Machen left many things ambiguous. The whole question of what the white stone’s carvings looked like is never mentioned, and a great many details go unresolved. What’s a writer to do?

  Well, Lovecraft, bless his heart (that is a Southern bless his heart, in case anyone is curious), wrote a letter about “The White People” to a contemporary explaining what was going on with the stone, that it was clearly two monstrous creatures copulating, and that witnessing this accidentally got the narrator pregnant. Which is certainly one explanation. Lovecraft assumed that the narrator, horrified, would have killed herself to end the pregnancy. I, being me, had a slightly different interpretation of how such things would actually go down, and with one thing and another, that interpretation became The Twisted Ones.

  They say all books are in dialogue with other books, and I can’t speak to whether that’s true or not. I can say, though, that this novel is in dialogue with a letter written about a short story that was itself about a book… and even typing that sentence out makes my head hurt.