St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  “I dunno. Annie was acting pretty strangely. Did you know she used to be a scryer? She had her spoon out with her tonight. Suspicious. Could be one of the Narcos having a hypnagogic seizure. And then there’s—”

  “Keep it down over there,” the counselor growls from the corner. “Try to sleep. Fake it to make it. Close your eyes and do your lulling exercises.” God help him, he would administer a Kentucky sleep remedy if he could, the counselor tells us, and club us over the head. Our jubilant paranoia means that he can’t sneak off to refill his flask.

  I close my eyes. The cabin is full of comforting sounds, snores and orchestral cicadas, the dromedary rasping of the sisters. But lying in my bunk, listening to the other Others breathe, I get this empty-belly loneliness. It’s both too much and not enough, somehow, to be this close to my brothers and sisters in the dark. Espalda and Espina are the luckiest ones. They have a special dispensation to sleep in the same bed. They get to sleep back to back in their matching sailor pajamas, nautical embroidery along the open, lewdly enticing back flaps. I picture their humps sharking together, their vertebrae interlocking in a columnar ladder to their separate brains.

  “Are you scared, Emma?” I whisper.

  “I’m scared!” Espalda says.

  “I’m scared!” Espina says.

  I feel Ogli shift in his bunk, and know he is smirking into his pillow above me. “If you’re scared,” I continue, more firmly, “you can come sleep in my bed.”

  “What?” she hisses. “Here? In front of the twins?”

  “We don’t mind!” says Espalda.

  “I mind,” whispers Espina.

  Emma gives me a long, assessing look. Then she fluffs her pillow. She drags her blanket past the bored, whiskey-blurred gaze of the counselor. She crawls into my bed. I annotate the moment with a historian’s portentousness. This is it. The event that I’ve been waiting for all summer.

  We spend the next two hours squirming around miserably, trying to get comfortable.

  “Elijah, it’s just not working,” she finally sighs.

  “Well, if somebody would quit hogging all the covers…”

  “We just can’t sleep together,” she says sadly. “Maybe it’s your lullaby….”

  “Maybe it’s you,” I say, hating and hating myself, “have you ever thought of that? Maybe you’re what’s not working. Maybe you can’t sleep with other people.”

  We even lie back to back, fused at the base of our spines, curling out from each other like fetal twins. But it’s nothing like I imagined it would be. It’s an empty warmth, an only-bodies touching. We listen to the New Kid itching and baying. We watch Felipe flinch beneath invisible grenades. I feel guilty; Ogli has started his midnight divination without me. I shut my eyes, and will myself to sleep.

  The following night, I am running towards the sheep pen, flanked by Emma and Oglivy. We take a willfully, gleefully stupid shortcut through the woods. We are Others, I pant to myself, equal to any nocturnal danger. And tonight, we are wide awake. Instead of dreaming about the past while the slaughter continues, we’ve made a pact to protect the flock.

  “Zorba’s going to kick us out!”

  “Annie’s dogs will get us first!”

  “You mean the muuuurderer,” Oglivy whoops. He mock-stabs us both in the back and then runs past us, vanishing into the marsh.

  The forest at night is full of friendly menace. It blurs and ashes all around us, a dark dream of itself. Rain runs down the skinned black hands of the trees, down the white mushrooms that push their tiny faces from the logs. Frogs jump from the branches like spry blemishes. We flinch beneath the leaf-swung shadows, the winged attack of lunatic moths. The forest gives me all sorts of reasons to reach out and hold Emma’s hand.

  “Blah!” Oglivy yells, pushing Emma and me into a pile of wet leaves. We roll around, a red flail of limbs and hysterical laughter. We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest. I breathe in the sharp odor of cold stars and skunk, thinking, This is the happiest that I have ever been. I wish somebody would murder a sheep every night of my life. It feels like we are all embarking on a nightmare together. And we will stop it in progress! I think, yanking Emma and Ogli to their feet and hurtling towards the lake. We will make sure that the rest of the herd escapes Heimdall’s fate, we will…

  Emma lets out a low, strangled cry and stops short. We are too late. The unlatched gate of the pen is swinging in the wind. Ewe’s blood glistens on the tiny leaves. She steps aside to reveal the humped form of Merino.

  “Oh, Ogli…”

  This isn’t the ashes to ashes of our dreams. This is Merino, our living, bleating lamb, now a heap of meat and sweaters.

  “We failed.”

  When she hears Emma moan, Mouflon comes trotting over from the far end of the pen. She steps blithely over her murdered sister, nosing our palms in search of poppy buns. But Emma is looking past Mouflon, past Merino, to the other side of the fence.

  A wraithlike figure is rising out of the mist on the far end of the pen. “Do you think that sheep have human ghosts?” Ogli wants to know. But it’s just Annie. She is drenched, her white nightgown sopping wet, water pooling at her bare feet.

  “Children?”

  She blinks at the dead sheep with a dreamy incomprehension. She stoops and touches a wondering hand to the slick grass.

  “Annie, we can ex—”

  “Emma,” she barks, suddenly all business. “Go back to your cabin. I need to have a word with the boys.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Emma squeaks. She goes doe-leaping off into the woods without a backwards glance. Blue clouds race past her over the tall pines. Then the clouds part, and the moon blinks open above us.

  That’s when I notice a bright spatter of blood on the hem of Annie’s nightgown.

  “Boys,” Annie says, “my prophets, I need you to be honest now. Have you had any postmonitions about the dogs?”

  We stare down at the blood drying on Annie’s hands.

  “The dogs, boys,” she prods, her hazel eyes shining with a marbled hardness. “The dogs.”

  “Uh, no, ma’am.” I cough politely. “We had the Typhoid Mary dream again last night. No, uh, no dogs.”

  The scariest thing about the blood on Annie’s hands is the fact that Annie doesn’t seem to know it’s there. She’s busy scanning the ground for paw prints.

  “Oglivy,” she asks, taking his hand, “did you dream them? Have you dreamed the dogs? Your dream log has been blank for days.”

  “Oh,” Oglivy gulps, looking down at his clownish feet. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Annie. I, uh, I haven’t been remembering them. You know, the dreams.” He won’t look at either of us.

  I elbow him sharply.

  Annie nods. “Well. We musn’t let the little ones see her like this.” She turns to me. “Elijah, I need you to help me to drag Merino to the sinkhole.”

  “Me?” I ask, horrified. “Um, Oglivy’s probably the man for the job….”

  But he is already slouching off behind the red bushes. He mumbles a hollow apology over his shoulder.

  Annie takes hold of Merino’s cloven hooves and grunts. I take up her forelegs, careful not to touch her still-warm body. I nearly drop her, shocked by the tactile revelation that beneath the airy wisps of fur, she is gristle and bone. Merino is easily the heaviest weight I have ever carried.

  “Come on, Elijah,” Annie huffs. “Good job, Elijah. We’re almost to the sinkhole. Unh!” Her muscles shudder. “This is what’s necessary, you know, for the little ones to sleep easy.”

  I wonder which part of this Annie considers to be “necessary,” the murder or the cover-up. I wish Ogli had stuck around to help me carry the body. I feel Merino’s damp nose brush against my thigh and let out an involuntary groan. When a blood-glutted tick jumps down her haunch and onto the white rim of my thumbnail, onto my sweaty wrist, it’s all I can do not to scream.

  The sinkhole is a boggy pit on the
edges of Zorba’s property. Elastic bubbles pop along the puckered brown skin. Lightning-scored cypress trees surround it, a greenish phosphorescence sparking along their submerged roots. And it occurs to me that throwing a dead sheep into the sinkhole, this is not our best idea. The sinkhole is a window to the camp’s aquifer. Anything you throw into the sinkhole remains in our water system indefinitely. Eventually, Merino is going to come back to haunt our drinking supply. Annie’s not protecting anyone by dumping the body.

  “Are you ready?”

  Peering over the edge of the limestone cavity, I have an otherworldly certainty that I have been here before. It’s one of those rare moments, the air thick and perfumed with memory, when the imagined world and the real world seem to overlap. A catatonic calm takes hold of me. Oh, no, I think, staring into the swirling, milky center, the blind eye of the sinkhole. We should not not not be doing this.

  “Ready.”

  With a strength I couldn’t have predicted, I help Annie to swing Merino’s body into the murk. She hits the sinkhole with an awful thwack, her pale belly facing us. Annie and I watch in a grim, conspiratorial silence as she sinks beneath the surface. I wonder how much of this Annie will remember in the morning.

  When we get back to the cabin, I wash my hands eighteen times. Then I loofah them. Then I wash them again. Then I wake Oglivy up and drag him outside and heave him up against the rain-slick wall, my palms still smarting.

  “Why did you lie to her?” I hiss. “Were you trying to make us look like sheep killers?”

  “Jesus, Elijah,” Oglivy gasps, squirming away. “Calm down. I was going to tell you, you know.” There’s a pained expression on his face.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I think I might possibly be, uh, getting better? Our dreams, the fires…” He gives me a helpless shrug. “I haven’t been remembering them.”

  My hands drop from his shoulders. “What?”

  “I mean, I still get the shakes, and everything,” he says quickly. “I just can’t remember what I augured, you know?”

  “No,” I growl. “I don’t know. You faker! You mean you’ve been lying to me all summer?”

  Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp is divided down all kinds of lines: campers who can’t sleep vs. campers who sleep too much, campers who control their bladders vs. campers who do not, campers who splinter through headboards vs. campers who lie still as the dead. Now Ogli and I are separated by one of the greatest rifts: campers who remember in the morning, and the ones who forget.

  “You didn’t have the Trail of Tears dream, with the ice floes and the frozen squaw?”

  He shakes his head.

  “The Inundation of Ur dream? All those alluvial, egg-smooth Sumerians?”

  He shakes his head.

  “What about the Great Peruvian Firequake of 1734—”

  “Look, Elijah. It’s a good thing.”

  “Oh, sure. It’s great!” I kick the side of the cabin, feeling stupid even as I do it. “You’re getting better! You don’t remember our dreams! That’s a great thing.” I blink furiously, glad for the dark. “Really.” I reach up to give him an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Really, Ogli. It is.”

  Ogli grins down at me, relieved. “Look, let’s go to sleep? Maybe if I concentrate really hard I’ll remember them tonight?”

  “Nah, Ogli,” I sigh. “I appreciate your volition. But I don’t think the dreams work that way. You go get sleeping without me.” I turn back towards the woods. “I need to be awake for a while.”

  “You’re not going back out there tonight, are you?” he yells after me. “After what we just saw?”

  You mean what I just saw? I think, a deafening, echoing thought. It roars around me, the new solitude within my own skull. And I am angry, so angry at Ogli, for his forgetting. It’s worse, somehow, that it wasn’t deliberate, that the dream sickness just left him like a fever lifting. It means I don’t even get to hate him. Ogli gets to wake up to cheery blankness and cereal, and I’ll spend the rest of my life counting dead sheep.

  This time I do a slow, listless shuffle through the woods, crunching into the leaves. All the happy fear has ebbed out of me. The leaves sound like leaves; the lake looks glassy and flat. When I startle a young stag in the middle of my path, I stand my ground and hurl some sticks at it. I climb into the Insomnia Balloon and curl my body like a fist. Now that I really am ballooning solo, I’m afraid to pull the rip cord. At least with Emma I could feel the warmth of another body in the basket.

  Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She’s alone with Annie.

  Eventually the dark gravity of the postmonitions begins to tug at my eyelids, a first oracular shimmer. I shiver and lie flat against the basket. My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world: Oglivy erasing his dream log; Annie’s blank eyes filling with phantom dogs; Merino’s milky gray belly resurfacing with a terrible buoyancy. I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. Oglivy really spoiled me. I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams. Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry.

  The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime

  My job is to be the lookout.

  Raffy’s job is to give out jobs.

  Marta’s job is to get Petey choreographed and in costume.

  Petey’s job is to be the moon.

  I didn’t come out here tonight expecting to join a Comical Ironical Crime Ring. I’m here because my dad set me up on a date to see Alcyone. Dad made some sly references to her long blue light filaments and her extraordinary nebulosity, and boy was I excited. I polished my pocket planisphere. I read up on all the expert tips for locating her star cluster center in my Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy—For Kids! I logged her spectral type prematurely in anticipation of one luminous night. That’s how Molly and I got suckered into coming out to the touristy side of the island in the first place. Dad promised us that it would be a Junior Astronomer’s beach paradise. But then I crested this dune and saw Petey, and now all my thoughts of Alcyone have been eclipsed.

  Petey is dancing on the beach in a puddle of moonlight. He appears to be doing your basic two-step, but he’s spiced it up with a spastic little shimmy from side to side. He twitches; he twirls. He lets out a low, gurgly giggle that goes goose-bumpling up my arm.

  Petey’s not particularly nimble, but he sure is quick. I’m not surprised. The formula bubbles up unbidden in my brain: Momentum © mass ® velocity. And Petey is a sandy dervish of a man, soft-bellied, at least twice my height.

  He is also twinkling like a star.

  When I get closer, I find out why. Somebody has tied a trash-can lid to Petey’s chest with crisscrossed strings of Xmas lights. It’s been buffed to an impressive sheen. The rest of Petey’s upper body is festooned with more of the tiny white bulbs. They loop around his arms and neck, blinking on and off at random intervals that seem timed to coincide with his lurching dance. I hypothesize that they must be battery-operated. The nearest hotel is a fifteen-minute walk away, so you’d need a pretty long extension cord.

  We’ve never met before, but I know that this human disco ball must be Petey; after all, what other adult man on the island would look and move and laugh this way? Petey is something of a legend around here. Doreen, the chambermaid at the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel, told Dad
that he’s one of the few people who come to the island every summer. Nobody’s sure what’s wrong with him, exactly, and Doreen says he always shows up at midnight so she’s never there to check him in. All Doreen knows for certain is that Petey’s at least thirty years old and has wax-white skin and long, colorless lashes. She says that frightened guests always call to report a ghost haunting the hallways whenever Petey comes to stay.

  “Is he a friendly ghost?” my sister Molly wanted to know. “Like Casper?”

  “Oh, Petey’s no ghost,” she reassured us. “I told you, I don’t know what he is, exactly, but he’s harmless. You’ll see.”

  But the ocean mist has fogged up my glasses, and now I can’t see a thing. After I spit-shine them, I realize that Petey’s arms and hands are covered in tinfoil. He’s holding a pair of huge red flashlights in his aluminum-foiled fingertips; he shakes these like maracas. They cast weird shadows across a roped-off square of sand. I can’t actually see what’s inside the roped-off area; all I can make out is the red plastic tape wrapped around four wooden beams. A triangular sign is attached to a driftwood post behind it. It takes me a couple of Petey’s strobe-light revolutions to read it: SEA TURTLE NEST. DO NOT DISTURB! VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO FINES AND IMPRISONMENT.

  A boy and a girl are standing next to Petey, staring down at the mound of sand. I recognize the boy as Raffy. Uh-oh, I think. I stuff my stargazing apparatus in my back pocket and turn to go, but it’s too late. They’ve seen me.

  “Hey, Raffy,” I gulp. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, cockbag,” he says. His tone is unexpectedly genial. “Who the hell are you?”

  Raffy must have forgotten that he already knows me. We’ve had homeroom together since middle school, but Raffy travels in a different social solar system. Raffy hangs out with tattooed graffiti artists who race cars; I hang out with members of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club. We discuss the fiery edge of Orion’s sword. We wear helmets and reflective knee pads when we ride our ergonomic bikes to school.