Creatures of Charm and Hunger

by Molly Tanzer

  What could Jane say except “Okay.” So she did, but then she asked, “Will you be all right?”

  “Eventually.” Miriam didn’t sound too sure of what she said. “I think. Look, either it’ll be fine, or it’ll be worth it not being fine. Does that make sense?”

  Jane took Miriam’s hand in hers and squeezed it. “This—what you’re doing—it isn’t for your Practical, is it?”

  Miriam shook her head no, and Jane suddenly felt about five years old. She was used to feeling like the mature, sophisticated one, but as it turned out, as she’d been obsessing over what amounted to doing well in school, Miriam had been off doing something that seemed awfully important.

  “I know I look ghastly,” said Miriam.

  “I’m worried for your health.”

  “I know,” said Miriam. “But I think I know what I’m doing. The thing is . . . I’m not exactly following the directions as written on the package,” she said, with a quick grin that did much to make her look like she had mere hours before.

  “I see,” said Jane. “Oh, Miriam, I hate that we’ve been quarreling for ages. Can’t we make up? I’ll start—I’m sorry I hurt you. I never wanted to. I just can’t help but be who I am.”

  Jane bit her lip. This was likely neither the time nor the place for a sisterly reconciliation, but Miriam didn’t seem annoyed.

  “I know,” she whispered. “But neither can I.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to be anyone other than who you are!”

  “Nor I you. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have feelings or opinions. I don’t want you to leave, Jane—but that doesn’t mean I want you to stay!”

  Jane finally understood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “And as for what you’re doing . . . I’ll only say good luck.”

  “Thank you,” said Miriam. “I appreciate you not prying.”

  “Of course,” said Jane.

  Something had changed between them for the better; Jane felt it as surely as she felt the wind on her cheeks when, later that night, she got on her broom to spy on Miriam through her window after they’d both allegedly gone to bed. She had agreed not to pry, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to figure out what Miriam was up to.

  But all Miriam was up to was sleeping. She was already in bed when Jane peered in through the sheer curtain. A candle burned low by her bedside, and Miriam was still wearing her cardigan and skirt. Jane watched on until the candle burned itself out, just to be safe, and then went to bed herself.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, MIRIAM ASKED JANE to make sure she wouldn’t be disturbed. Jane was thrilled to agree, not just because Miriam was confiding in her. It was easier to spy when she knew she ought to be spying.

  It was a bright, cold day outside. Jane watched the skies off and on for an hour, hoping for some clouds or even a drizzle, but it was hopeless. She would have to risk riding her broom in full daylight, when anyone could come up the path and see her. She didn’t have any other options for discreet spying; they didn’t even have a ladder tall enough to reach Miriam’s window.

  At least Miriam’s room was at the back of the house, and they had no close neighbors. Jane thought of it as a calculated risk when she mounted her broom and floated up to Miriam’s window.

  It occurred to Jane that she wasn’t worried about Nancy discovering her—only strangers. She knew her mother would be down in the Library, doing whatever she did.

  Jane wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see, but it certainly wasn’t Miriam just sitting at her desk staring into a mirror. But as Jane continued to watch, she noticed Miriam wasn’t moving, not at all. She sat frozen, back straight, feet planted firmly on the floor. Her other hand, dangling by her side, held an unadorned knife that glinted dully as a ray of the cold sunshine filtered through the gap in her sheer curtains.

  “What on earth,” murmured Jane as she looked on for a few moments more.

  Smudge had been nestled in what lap Jane had while sitting on her broom. As Jane watched, he stood, though Jane hissed at him to be still.

  For once, her familiar did not obey. He pulled a complicated maneuver while maintaining physical contact with her, rearranging himself to face her. Then he nuzzled her chin with his cheek.

  Jane couldn’t rub at her nose to get the fur off it, which was maddening. “Smudge,” she whispered. “Stop that!”

  “Meow,” said Smudge, still standing. And it was Smudge—Smudge as he had been. These days, he was so helpful, so well behaved, that if not for the fact that she was still hovering on her broom outside a second-story window, Jane would have suspected the demon had departed without her blessing.

  “What are you doing!” she hissed at him, craning her neck to try to see past the bulk of his not-insubstantial rear and curling, fluffy tail. “I’m trying to . . . oh!”

  As for that tail, it was curled in the shape of a shepherd’s crook, or perhaps a magnifying glass. And when Jane looked through it, she saw something even stranger—a ghostly double of Miriam hovering just above her body.

  This apparition also stared at the mirror, but it was not posed the same way—no, it was sitting cross-legged in the air, and while a spectral copy of the knife still depended from its hand, in the other, it didn’t hold the mirror. Jane didn’t think it could hold anything, even something insubstantial. The arm was missing much of what passed for its flesh. Jagged swaths of skin and muscle were missing; exposed bone peeked through. Jane was briefly confused to see that apparently ghosts had bones, but quickly the horror set in—that was Miriam’s arm, and those were Miriam’s bones, and while that flesh might not be her actual flesh, it still didn’t seem wise to carve it away.

  For the life of her, Jane had no idea what Miriam could possibly be up to—but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be particularly safe. Nor did it seem to be ending; unfortunate for Jane and her plans to spy. But it was simply too risky to watch for long, what with her looking through the window sitting on a broomstick, her familiar helping her see beyond what she could see with just her eyes. So Jane descended and retired to her room. She kept the door open so she’d hear Miriam when she came back.

  She would just have to wait.

  * * *

  SHE HAD TO WAIT a long time.

  23

  * * *

  MIRIAM DIDN’T LIKE LYING, and she especially didn’t like lying to Jane, though she seemed to be doing a lot of that lately.

  She’d told Jane she knew what she was doing, but nothing could be further from the truth. She was planning to jump into Querner’s body—she was sure she could do that. As for what she could do to ruin his attempt to create a diabolic weapon, she really had no idea.

  She did know that she would have to put a lot of herself into this journey to get what she wanted out of it. An ear wouldn’t do. She needed something meatier, weightier. Something more personal. As difficult as it had been to carve away her ear, the bit of cartilage was fundamentally inessential. With her fingers, Miriam gingerly traced the edge of the ear she’d sacrificed with the veil knife. Her skin and flesh felt the same, but she sensed something was missing. She assumed that would be the case with her next sacrifice, too.

  Miriam had weighed her options and decided that this time, for this journey back to that terrible forest, she would use her strange, dull knife to cut off her spirit’s foot. Her right foot, to be specific.

  She knew from experience that it wouldn’t hurt. It was just upsetting to saw through something attached to her, incorporeal though it might be. And of course, there were the consequences. If removing a bit of her spirit’s ear had so altered her appearance that she’d frightened her own best friend, what would cutting off a foot do?

  She wouldn’t die. She was fairly certain of that. Badgerskin hadn’t led her wrong yet. Her spiritual flesh would heal and regenerate, with time.

  It wasn’t as if she had a choice. She couldn’t stop—not now. There was much more at stake than her life.

  It was time to stop worry
ing and start acting.

  The taste of the sublingual tablet was so familiar to Miriam now, with its odd notes of lemon and ash. Also familiar was the feel of the veil knife in her hand, and the eerie coolness of the liquid diabolic essence in its bottle.

  She drank the whole thing this time. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone.

  Miriam gasped without sound when she finally brought the blade of the knife to her ankle. There was a little resistance when she pressed, like trying to slice cold cheese, but a few little sawing motions worked the edge in deeper. When she cut it free, it dropped into the waiting palm of her left hand. Black smoke welled in the wound and dispersed, drifting off like smoke until it dissolved away entirely.

  It was so odd. It was her foot, translucent but in every other way the twin of the one that was still attached to her leg. Thankfully, it was already dissolving into vapor, so she breathed it all in and waited to see with her spirit’s eyes what flew or crawled past the grove where her father’s bones lay silent in the dappled sunlight.

  * * *

  THE PAPER WASP HAD BEEN an effective vehicle, so once again Miriam borrowed one of their number to get herself to the infirmary, and then beneath it, down the stairs, through the keyhole, and into the Dark Lab beyond.

  The place was dark and cold—cold enough that her wasp body became a little less responsive. She kept flying to stay warm, exploring the premises.

  She hoped she was early, not late, for whatever they would do today . . .

  She found a table set with various types of scientific glass and apparatus whose purpose Miriam could not perceive as she stalked among them on her six slender legs. Then she buzzed over to the cages full of miserable animals snuggled in their meager bedding.

  Finally she turned her attention to the doors. Other than the one she’d come through, there were three, two with keyholes. The one on the far wall was without one. Miriam selected the right-hand door and crawled through the keyhole only to enter into an even darker chamber. She immediately felt her connection to the wasp weaken.

  Lead walls, perhaps—or some other way of suppressing diabolic energy. But why . . . ?

  Miriam urged the wasp toward a dim light shining on a pedestal in the center of the room. Whatever it was, it was under a cloth. She landed on it, her wasp feet sinking into velvet of all things. What with the war, Miriam hadn’t touched such luxurious fabric for years, but the wasp’s carapace and feelers did not register the sensation as her own fingertips would.

  She crawled all over it, noting that the object was spherical, about the size of a large walnut, but with a strange and springy texture. She burrowed her way under the cloth to get a closer look.

  It was a marble—or rather, it wasn’t. It was perfectly round like one, but soft rather than hard. As Miriam got closer to it, looking deep within the swirling, shining interior, she felt the energy radiating from it.

  It was a familiar energy. Even suppressed by the room, Miriam could tell it was some sort of concentrated source of diabolic essence. It had been extracted, purified, and then concentrated into what seemed like a gel contained by a rubbery skin that Miriam suspected would withstand a fall to the floor. Or perhaps it would burst on impact, with unknown results.

  Querner had discussed creating a weapon. Miriam was no munitions expert, but she had a feeling this was likely to be an extremely important component.

  There wasn’t much else she could do in regard to this ball of energy—at least, not at the moment. And not in this body. The wasp was getting tired, so before flying to the other doorway to see what lay beyond it, Miriam landed on the desk in the center of the room. It was tidy—of course it was tidy, with stacked papers and letters in a file and fountain pens and a letter opener and so on and so forth.

  The stacked papers were notes. She crawled beneath the cover and managed to get it off with a brief burst of flight that further exhausted her. But here was her chance to see what Querner was up to . . .

  Experiment 12

  The Hunter Sisters

  Of course Querner would have a title page. Annoyed, Miriam tugged it off, buzzing angrily, the wasp body protesting every moment of activity. Then—at last—she began to read.

  It was a slow and laborious process due to the wasp’s eyes, and its unwillingness to move if it didn’t have to, but soon she became absorbed in the reading.

  The Hunter Sisters, also known as the Furies, have plagued the Reich for years. Early members of the OSS, they came to notoriety as their activities have not been limited to the usual sorts of espionage; indeed, their exploits include training an all-woman spy network in Istanbul under Lanning McFarland, separate from the Dogwood chain and much more effective, and then later penetrating several of our installations in Austria and Germany.

  Before their diabolic corruption became generally known, it was believed that the Furies had been so damnably effective due to their truly uncanny similarity to one another. The assumption was that they were triplets, but in reality they are several years apart in age (Mary being the youngest, Martha the middle, and Prudence the oldest of the girls). Their near-identical features are not the result of nature, but of diabolic manipulation. How their father—for that is whose responsibility they are—came to create them, we may never know; he was a wild diabolist and did not reveal his secrets to them. They themselves had no hand in the process. Under duress they all revealed that it was their own mother upon whom they were molded; surely the Jew Dr. Sigmund Freud would have quite a lot to say about that. They, too, must have sensed the deviation in such a desire on the part of their father, for they fled to Paris from the United States, and took many pains to differentiate themselves from one another.

  Then came the war, and their decision to become spies for the Allies turned their similarity into an asset rather than a liability.

  Miriam had to pause to painstakingly flip the page.

  Tests have revealed that the demon responsible for their altered appearances is none other than the unspeakable horror known as the Dreamer in the Darkness. The summoning of the Dreamer has been forbidden by all diabolic organizations, reputable or otherwise, due to the intensity of its aspirations. None of the Furies know how their father summoned it. We must all hope that its secrets died with their sire, for the agent we sent to the family homestead found nothing, only a cold hearth and no forwarding addresses for their surviving siblings.

  Such things are beyond the scope of my experiments, and yet thoroughness and posterity both demand that I record their origins. My hope is that the capture of the Furies will lead to a great advancement for the Reich, if I am able to manage it—a weapon that will weaken the resistance of the Allies and what traitors exist yet within the glorious Fatherland.

  It is generally known that while a diabolist may consume specific diabolic essence, once it is processed by the body, it becomes general diabolic essence. And yet, this understanding must be expanded if we are to succeed in our quest to cleanse the world in fire and in righteousness. We are out of our reserves. There it is, in plain language. The stores of our specific essences have been depleted by the war as has been our network of diabolists and those willing to trade with us. This is our last-ditch effort, as the Americans might say; a gambit where we will risk all to save all. While using the Dreamer is a crime I never imagined myself committing, if I can simply extract some of its specific essence from these women, I believe I can create a weapon the likes of which has never before been seen. It will kill many but change more, for the Dreamer was once known as the Pied Piper, due to its ability to ensnare, persuade, and sway. If I succeed, and add the Dreamer’s essence to the—

  At that moment, the door with no keyhole flew open and the lights came on in the room. Querner was there, wearing large thick mitts and carrying a bright purple pyramid-shaped crystal. He was saying something to an unfamiliar nurse as she scribbled something on a clipboard, while Nurse Franzi, still wearing the cattle prod at her waist, pushed a gurney at a near run.
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  Upon the gurney lay a young woman. She appeared to be moaning—Miriam couldn’t hear in the wasp’s body—and more troublingly, her body seemed to be smoking; yellow clouds billowed off of her as if she were an overheated engine.

  Miriam buzzed away from the desk, flying to the doorjamb to see if she could read their lips as they spoke.

  The vantage point was a decent one; when Querner handed off the crystal to unlock the door she’d not yet explored, Miriam could see two other women lying slumped against the wall of the chamber, their wrists chained to rusted metal rings jutting out from the tiled walls. Their faces were indeed surprisingly identical to the wracked visage of the woman on the gurney. They both perked up a bit when the door opened and called to their sister.

  Their sister did not look up.

  The prostrate woman’s lack of response seemed to agitate the middle child of the bunch. She began to speak to Querner—to shout at him, Miriam assumed, given how accusatory her expressions and motions were. Miriam almost didn’t need to hear the conversation to understand it. The woman was both threatening and pleading with Querner; he was responding mildly and reasonably. He was smiling—Germans always smiled so much—which is why it was all the more terrifying when he reached over and slapped her face. Hard.

  Miriam didn’t see the woman’s response. She was too angry and, blinded by this anger, she let the wasp take over. Leaving her unobtrusive position by the door, Miriam sped at Dr. Querner and stung him on the neck, just above where his collar ended.

  Miriam made her escape as his hand came up, and she had the small satisfaction of seeing him frown. Then she fled the insect to rest, escape, or die as it wished, selecting the caged marten as her next host.

  “I can’t see it,” said the nurse with the clipboard. “It must have flown off. I wonder how it got down here?”