The Shimmers in the Night

by Lydia Millet

  “Well, you got hurt, too,” said Jaye. “Worse than I did. And you still want to try to help Zee, don’t you?”

  “But I know her more than you do. And Max is my brother.”

  Jaye nodded and then spoke slowly.

  “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, that guy having his hands around my neck. For sure. But the rest of it—stepping through that book and being somewhere else—that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I mean, the world isn’t what I thought it was. Now—life could be anything. The world could be anything. It’s amazing.”

  They smiled.

  “What does the ward do, exactly?” Cara asked Jax when she and Jaye and her two brothers were gathered in her room.

  It was dinnertime, but Lolly had turned out to have the evening off, since Cara’s dad hadn’t expected her or Jax home yet; their dad had his nose buried in papers in his study.

  He’d said they could forage for lasagna in the fridge.

  “Ward lines protect against the old ways—both the Cold’s and our own. A ward wouldn’t cover guys like Roger, though—unless he was using an old way. It wouldn’t do anything to stop a regular person from, say, walking into a regular place and pulling out a regular gun. Far as bad guys like Roger go, it’s safe as it ever was. Or wasn’t,” said Jax.

  “So Jax,” said Cara, “when Max and Jaye and I go through the windowleaf—if it lets us without Hayley—you stay here. We’ll step through the book, and the book will be gone, too. You need to hang tight and stay safe till we get back.”

  “But before you go,” asked Jax, “can you ask the ring where Zee is? Her address? Because I should know it. In case you don’t come back. And I have to come after you.”

  “You don’t come after us,” warned Max. “If we don’t come back, you get Dad. You tell him where we went. Tell him what we were trying to do. You hear me?”

  Jax nodded stiffly.

  “I still need the address,” he said.

  Cara sat down on her bed, feeling a little self-conscious, since no one had really watched her before except in a crisis situation where she didn’t have time to feel watched. She closed her eyes, touching the ring with her other hand—which was, she realized, almost completely healed from last night’s burns. She asked a question about where—which town, which road, which house, was how she phrased it in her head—and thought of Zee.

  She saw a sign, WELCOME TO ORLEANS, and then another sign, a light blue one sticking out of an expanse of dried-up grass—BLUEBERRY HOLLOW. Finally she saw the flash of a front door marked fifty-five. It looked like a newer, cookie-cutter-type neighborhood, the kind where all the houses were built at the same time and were the same color.

  She opened her eyes again.

  “If the ring is right—my vision with the ring—she’s near here!” she said, surprised. “In Orleans. A neighborhood called Blueberry Hollow, number fifty-five.”

  “I can’t believe you can do that,” said Max. “Really? You just looked up my girlfriend in your head?”

  “I could be wrong, Max,” she said. “It’s mostly the ring.”

  Max shook his head—half admiring, she thought, and half disbelieving.

  “So far so good,” said Jax. “Then I can google you. If that’s allowed by Big Brother.”

  “Are you ready?” Cara asked Jaye, who’d spread the windowleaf open on the bed.

  “Wait!” said Max. “Ask if there’s a ward, too. Because from what you told me about last night, we have to land outside it, right?”

  “Plus,” said Jax, “the ring or the book can’t give us data from across the ward. That’s what the ward’s about. Protection from objects like this. It’s why you could see Mom was at the power plant, but not where she was inside it till you stepped past the line. Same here: the book may tell you where Zee is generally, but then you have to cross the ward line to find her.”

  “So the elementals can’t cross them at all?” asked Cara. “Even if it’s their side’s ward in the first place?”

  “Right,” said Jax. “Elementals can’t cross wards at all, because the wards repel both our works and the enemies, and elementals are purely the Cold One’s work. Nonliving. But once you’re inside, you should be able to use the ring again.”

  “So if those elementals can’t cross.does that mean once we cross the line, the Burners can’t get us?” asked Jaye. Jax shook his head.

  “I wish. But they could be inside already. Guarding her. Like they were guarding Mom at the cooling tower.”

  “Great,” said Max.

  Before, Cara had leapt before she looked, she thought—and to be impulsive on her own behalf was one thing, but now other people were at stake, too.

  “Thanks for that, Jax,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Again she closed her eyes and touched the ring. This time she asked to see the ward line in Blueberry Hollow. And it was hard to see what she was looking at, at first, in the descending dark of twilight. But when she finally made it out, it was surprisingly beautiful: a kind of thin wall of distortion that seemed to rise from the curb up into the air, half reflecting and half absorbing the scenery around it—bushes, houses, telephone wires, and sky. Images stretched and compressed, softened into blurs and then came clear again.

  They should land on the street, then step onto the grass. After that they’d find out more.

  “OK. So I guess I know where we need to be,” she said, opening her eyes.

  She and Max and Jaye stood close together beside the bed, where the book was spread open, Max grimacing to cover his embarrassment. Cara repeated the question ritual, and beneath them the pages lost their whiteness as the scene came up: the sign, the curb, the dry grass, and the light blue sides of houses and gray-shingled rooftops. It was working. The sky wasn’t too visible from this angle, but there was a purple hint of it at the top.

  “Holy crap,” said Max. The semi-permanent skeptical look was wiped off his face, Cara saw, and felt a surge of pride.

  The picture was dizzying to look into, she realized—it was so jarring that this space yawned at their fingertips, this depth and air and world where really, beneath the book, all there should be was a coverlet and sheets and a mattress, and beneath that the floorboards, and so on downwards, in three simple dimensions, through the normal strata of the old house….

  “Let’s go,” she said, and grabbed the hands on each side of her.

  They stepped awkwardly up onto the bed, springy beneath their shoes, around the sides of the book with their arms stretching over it. And then they stepped in.

  This time it was more of a clamber than a fall, as though they’d stepped down onto the street from a step, like some steps on buses, that was just a bit too high. But they didn’t tumble, as they had before.

  “Wow!” said Max. “That was rad. That was rad!”

  For a moment his eagerness made him sound less like himself and more like Jax.

  Cara gave the book to Jaye to hold, looking around at the neighborhood as Max enthused on how amazing it had been to step through the windowleaf. She felt grateful that everything was quiet, and no one was with them on the street; she was glad Max was there. The cookie-cutter houses had some lit windows—though number fifity-five looked pretty dark—but there were no people on the sidewalks, no cars pulling in or out of the driveways.

  It was dinnertime here, too, after all.

  “She has to have a sleeper, doesn’t she? Those are their keepers, sort of,” said Jaye, explaining to Max. “You saw her with a little girl, right, Cara? Could that little red-haired girl be it?”

  “I doubt a little kid could boss Zee around,” said Max.

  “If she’s a hollow, she’s not really Zee, though,” said Cara. “You haven’t seen them. They’re more like robots. Or zombies.”

  “My point is, though, either way she’s probably not alone,” said Jaye. “Right?”

  “All the ring showed me was the house,” said Cara. “I’ll ask again when we get past t
he ward line, if you want….”

  “Let’s just go in,” said Max impatiently. “If she’s there, I’ll find her.”

  And then they were past the line, which, seen with the naked eye instead of through the windowleaf, was so much like nothing at all that she could barely believe it was there. They walked across the grass toward the back of the small cottage, through a waist-high white picket gate. There was the door to the kitchen, a screen and a door with panes of glass; Max reached out quickly and pulled the screen door open.

  “Wait!” burst out Jaye. “Assuming she is a hollow—I mean, there’s no guarantee the Burners won’t be watching through her eyes, and then decide to use her! To get to us! You haven’t seen them, Max, but the Burners come through the eyes….”

  “Cara told me,” said Max.

  “So how are we going to stop that from happening?”

  “We’ll just have to just grab her—Max, you’ll have to be the one. Grab her and run outside as fast as you can, crossing the ward. Then we’ll go back home through the book,” said Cara. “And hope we make it through before a Burner can use her.”

  Max nodded curtly and pushed on the inside door. It wasn’t even clicked all the way closed.

  “Once we’re back, she’ll be warded,” Cara reminded Jaye. “And then Jax will fix her. OK?”

  Jay nodded uncertainly, and Cara smiled to reassure her but felt worried herself. That must be what leadership was: just hoping desperately that you’d turn out to be right.

  And then they were in, Max leading.

  Inside the lights were off but she could still see the shapes of things around them—the kitchen, long and narrow, with linoleum under their feet; then the hall, with a long, flowery rug. She saw a phone on a table, a kitten calendar on the wall. She grabbed the newel post and swung around onto the stairs, with Jaye right behind her.

  “Can’t see anyone on the first floor,” whispered Max.

  None of them wanted to speak out loud in the cottage. It seemed too risky. They made their way softly up the carpeted stairs; at the landing there was a window through which light from streetlamps came through, enough to keep the dark at bay.

  “I’m taking the room at the end, you take that one,” whispered Max, and went ahead of them down the hall.

  Cara and Jaye passed a bathroom with its door ajar; they looked at each other, and then Cara pushed open the next door down.

  It was a mostly dark bedroom; a soft light came from a star-shaped nightlight plugged into a wall beside the bed. There was a row of dolls on a shelf, a chest of drawers with flowers on top, a white bed with a sleeping shape nestled under the covers. A tinkly, mechanical little tune was playing from a jewelry box. The box sat propped open on a white chest of drawers, and inside a minuscule plastic ballerina rotated on her small pedestal in jittery motions, wearing a pink tutu, her arms curved over her head.

  The bed was straight ahead of them, and someone was asleep in it. But something kept Cara from calling out Zee’s name. She stepped toward the bed nervously as Jaye hung back just inside the door to the room. It was so strange to be intruding into someone’s home…but her mother had said: Most hollows don’t survive the Burners coming through. She remembered Zee smiling warmly at her on the bus last time they talked, saying Max said to keep an eye on you…. I’m here if you need anything. Zee had always been nice to her. Even when Max was blowing her off and treating her as younger and uncool, Zee didn’t talk down to her. Zee acted like they were almost the same age.

  Then she saw the hair on the head on the pillow: red.

  She turned to Jaye and mouthed: little girl. Not Zee—the little girl.

  Jaye nodded, understanding.

  So the little girl had to be captive here, too. Didn’t she? She was too little to be anything else; she had to be a victim, either a sleeper or a hollow, and she would be hurt if they left her here, just as Zee would.

  Cara stood over the girl. She hesitated.

  She could carry the little girl, couldn’t she? Carry her through the windowleaf and to safety? Maybe she wouldn’t even wake up; maybe she was sleeping like, well, like a baby…. Max was looking for Zee, Max would find her and bring her with him; Cara doubted he’d even let them help. And surely, between them, Cara and Jaye could handle one little girl.

  Let’s take her, she mouthed to Jaye, and at first Jaye didn’t get it but then she did, and nodded.

  Cara lifted the coverlet carefully—it’d be too hard to bundle her up and lift her with its downy thickness in the way—and she saw the little girl’s flannel nightgown stretching over her back; she was facing away from Cara, a worn stuffed animal peeking over her shoulder. A teddy bear? She leaned down and slid her arms under the girl, warm and snoring lightly. And then she lifted.

  She was far heavier than Cara had expected, and then, oh no! She was waking up!

  She turned in Cara’s arms, dropping her bear—it wasn’t a bear, Cara recognized in the background of her mind; it had long teeth—and then her face was there. Right up close to Cara’s.

  And she wasn’t a little girl.

  Wasn’t a girl at all.

  Cara dropped her instantly, stifling a scream. Behind her, Jaye was screaming for Max. Down on the bed the little not-girl sat up, smiling. The smile was hungry, the eyes were huge—black and huge!—and the little girl was actually an old lady, her hair a fake, dyed red, with fat apple-doll cheeks and smeared lipstick and blue eyeshadow and rotting teeth. Her breath was terrible.

  She was a tiny old lady, a lady with enormous, hollowing eyes who was clearly…even without those eyes, she wasn’t OK. She wasn’t normal. She was something Cara had never seen, like a child aged prematurely. There was a viciousness to her face. She was ghoulish.

  And behind the bed, on the shelf on the wall, the row of dolls stared down at them, and the dolls were old too, Cara registered with a part of her that was distant from the old woman—old, old and dusty, with frozen porcelain grins. Suddenly the whole room felt different: the tinkly song from the jewelry box was eerie; the flowers on the bedside table were long dead and crawling with bugs.

  “Cara!” yelled Jaye, behind her. “Come on!”

  For the old lady was rising from the bed. As Cara stepped back—she couldn’t help screaming—the old lady reached out for her. She was grasping and scrabbling at Cara’s arms her long and yellow fingernails. Her toenails were long and yellow, too, on the bare feet on the carpet, and she was grinning and scrabbling at Cara’s wrists, trying to get ahold of them. She grabbed at Cara’s left hand, and as she did so her big eyes were even bigger, expanding in her face, and Cara staggered backwards, trying desperately to pull away.

  “The Burners! The Burners are coming!” shouted Jaye, terrified by the old woman’s eyes.

  The old lady was pulling so hard at Cara’s wrist that Cara was afraid the skin might tear; her nails were digging into Cara’s fingers, but Cara pulled free and staggered back, and she and Jaye were out the bedroom door, and Max was there, too, half colliding with them, his face an inquiry into how scared he should be, and he caught Jaye’s eyes and decided to panic too, and then all three of them were pounding down the stairs, fumbling with the lock on the front door and racing through the yard. They leapt off the curb, past the wardline, and into the street. Jaye dropped the book and Max pulled it open.

  But then Cara felt something behind her, grasping hands, and there was the woman, dreadful with her smeared makeup and ragged hair, dreadful with her ferocious grin and the spreading black eyes that were eating up her face, and she had Cara’s left hand again.

  Cara turned away and focused—the book was her only saving grace, she knew—and squeezed her own eyes shut and thought of home, her bedroom and her home, thought hard while Jaye and Max were grabbing her other hand and arm. She thought of where they had to go and reached her right hand back to touch the ring on her left, her fingers at the same time touching the old lady’s, too, which were bony and hard, and it was all a rotten, horrified w
restle. A long, ragged pain shot through Cara’s left-hand fingers, and the old lady screeched, a high, terrible screech.

  They were stepping forward, Cara and Jaye and Max, just as the smell of burning came to Cara, the smell of singed hair in her nostrils, and they knocked heads and shoulders into each other as they fell, and her finger tore.

  She’d never loved her own bed as much as she did landing there: a trusted place. Even the slightly dirty but familiar smell of her sheets—which told her right away where she was as she hit them—was comforting.

  Still, for a moment she rubbernecked, confused, and scrambling to right herself, half sure the terrible woman was close on their heels. Max and Jaye were practically on top of her, like in a game of Twister; they all got off the bed and stood there, breathing hard.

  The windowleaf had fallen beside them on a pillow, and Jax was sitting a few feet away. He looked up startled from his laptop.

  “You’re bleeding!” he said.

  She raised her left hand slowly, stunned, and saw a slice down the length of one finger, blood running down her arm. It stung. She felt it strongly as soon as she saw it—as though the pain had receded when she wasn’t paying attention to it but, once seen, came back again.

  “She scratch—scratched me—” she started limply, and then she knew why the woman had scratched her.

  Because her bloody finger was bare. The ring was gone.

  “My nazar!”

  “What was that?” asked Jaye, pale and still panting a little. “What was she?”

  “Did you find Zee?” asked Jax.

  “She was sleeping,” said Max breathlessly. “Literally sleeping. This deep, deep sleep. I couldn’t wake her. I was going to pick her up. But then I heard you guys screaming about the Burners…. Can I go back? I need to get her. I’ve got to go back!”

  “Are you kidding?” asked Jaye, incredulous.

  “The old lady’s a hollow. They were just about to come through. Didn’t you smell the burning as we stepped? If you went now, she’d be waiting for you—you’d get burned, Max!” said Cara. She swallowed with a painfully parched throat and then saw an old, stale glass of water on her nightstand; she reached out and gulped it down.