The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart

by Lauren DeStefano

  “We have an hour before it’s time to go home for lunch,” she said. “I’ll be just over there.” She pointed to a row of shelves near the door.

  As Lionel and Marybeth climbed the spiral staircase that led to the library’s top floor, Marybeth said, “There’s no sense looking at the encyclopedias. We have them at home, and I’ve been through all of them. I must have looked up every animal that ever existed. Even the ones that have gone extinct.”

  “What next, then?” Lionel asked.

  Marybeth peered over the railing at Mrs. Mannerd, who was browsing a traveler’s atlas. “Come on.” She led him past a row of empty tables and down a narrow aisle of books. “While I was researching, I found something that gave me an idea.” She stopped walking, and Lionel looked up at the sign affixed above the bookshelf:

  SUPERNATURAL OCCURRENCES

  He looked at Marybeth. “You think it’s supernatural?”

  “We’ve already ruled out everything else,” she said. “There are animals that burrow and dig, but mostly in the ground. And there are parasites that can get under your skin, but they aren’t as big as a fox, and they surely don’t glow the way that this one did.”

  Lionel stared at the books, overwhelmed by all the dusty cloth spines and the possibilities they represented. He knew everything about animals and nothing about ghosts. “Where should we start?”

  Marybeth shrugged. “Alphabetically, I suppose.”

  Lionel became an iguana and scaled the shelves so that he could reach the topmost books.

  They sat on the floor, below a flickering bulb, and read passages aloud to each other as they researched. They read about photographers who took pictures of spirits, and spiritualists who could summon the dead and see the past.

  “We don’t have any money,” Marybeth said. “Do you suppose they’d do it for free? If we explained?”

  “No,” Lionel said. “They’d want money. Especially if we explained.”

  Marybeth frowned at the page. “We could try to make money.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Lionel said. “I don’t trust them, and, anyway, it looks fake to me. That ghost is wearing a trench coat. Why would a ghost wear a trench coat? Clothes are so itchy. If I were dead, I wouldn’t wear anything.”

  Marybeth stared at the photo a long time, and then her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Lionel said. He didn’t want to make her cry. He wanted to yell at this blue creature to leave her alone. He had liked the old Marybeth, who was bright and inquisitive and never looked sad. He missed that Marybeth, and he wanted her back.

  “It’s not what you said,” Marybeth sobbed. “It’s not me. It’s this.” She grabbed his hand and brought it to her neck so that he could feel the pulse galloping beside her own. “It’s telling me what to feel.”

  Lionel drew back. “What does it feel?”

  Marybeth rubbed the tears from her eyes. “Homesick. It’s getting harder to tell what I’m feeling and what it’s feeling, but I know this isn’t me. I’ve never felt homesick.”

  “Does it want you to go back to the barn?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like I should growl at you, and climb that tree outside that window there and run off before Mrs. Mannerd catches me. But I know that I don’t want to at the same time.”

  “Can you tell it to go away?” Lionel said.

  “I’ve been trying. I don’t think it wants to listen.”

  Mrs. Mannerd came up the steps, wheezing and muttering about her sore knees. “Children, it’s time to get home and make lunch, and—my goodness, what are you doing in such a peculiar section?”

  “We’ve read nearly everything else,” Marybeth said politely. “Now we’d like to read about ghosts.”

  Mrs. Mannerd put her hands on her hips and looked at Lionel. “I suppose you’re going to act like a ghost around the house now,” she said.

  “I’m not dead, so I can’t be a ghost,” Lionel said. He wouldn’t know where to begin, and what would be the use? A ghost couldn’t get the chickens to lay eggs or feed the coyotes.

  On their way out, Marybeth and Lionel each borrowed a book from the Supernatural Occurrences section, and they were both very quiet on the drive home. Marybeth read, and Lionel petted the bolt of fabric like it was a lion cub. He was thinking how much easier it would be if he could transform into a jungle cat completely, and get stuck that way and never have to bother with porridge or worry. The porridge was dry and he hated it, but worry was just awful, and try as he might to be a real lion, he could not stop worrying about Marybeth.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Marybeth waited until everyone was asleep, and then she lit the lantern she’d snuck under her blanket and began to read by its light.

  She had selected an anthology of personal anecdotes written by people who had experienced their own supernatural occurrences.

  She read until her eyelids felt heavy, and then she pinched her cheeks to stay awake. She was afraid to go to sleep, afraid of where she might wander next. She did not want to go back to that farmhouse. Despite the kindness of the old woman, there was something about that place that didn’t sit right with her.

  She turned the page. “The Odd Occurrence in October” was the title of the next story.

  It began on October thirty-first, or as most would call it, Halloween . . .

  She read until the words no longer made sense, and then, using the open pages for a pillow, she fell asleep.

  That night, a cold wind crept into the house. It breathed its way through the cracks in the windows, and it settled in Marybeth’s hair.

  She opened her eyes before she fully awoke.

  There was something calling her—she sensed it but didn’t hear. It had happened earlier that day in the library as well. A pull that tried to make her run away from Lionel and Mrs. Mannerd. She had been able to fight it then, but the gentle suggestion had become violent and pleading.

  The blue creature wanted to show her something in the river.

  Quietly, she crept down the ladder and past the sleeping older ones.

  When she reached the hallway, there was Lionel, curled up and sleeping with a worried expression and a twitch to his leg. He was quite like a mother rabbit, Marybeth thought, so eager to protect its young while all the while knowing the threats of the world were too great to counter alone.

  Leave him. It wasn’t a voice or even a thought, but rather a pull like the one bringing her to the river.

  She walked around him and managed to make it down the steps without making a sound.

  She stepped into her boots and buttoned her coat, and opened the door to the chilly autumn night.

  “Who are you?” she whispered to the blue creature.

  In answer, she found herself standing before the river. This was where it had all started. During the day, the river was gentle and clear. At night it was ink spilled across a page. It was bottomless and looming.

  “Why did you bring me here?” Marybeth wasn’t sure if she was speaking the words out loud or thinking them. She only knew that the blue creature heard her.

  She felt a stirring in her chest as the blue creature breathed in.

  And then a blue glow appeared in the river. It was small at first, just like that night when Marybeth fell in and it appeared before her. And just like then, it looked like a fox. Until the water rippled, and the blue light expanded into a human silhouette.

  Marybeth edged closer. She felt the water seeping in through the holes in her worn boots, dampening her feet. But the cold and the wet didn’t bother her. Her eyes filled with that blue light as she moved closer and closer.

  The silhouette looked like her, she thought, with twin braids at either shoulder and a skirt that fanned out below its knees.

  The silhouette was saying something, but its voice was lost to the gentle rushing of the water and the wind rattling the dry leaves between the trees, and Marybeth leaned in—

  Somethin
g pulled her back, and the blue light disappeared and the stirring in her chest turned violent. She was Marybeth and yet not Marybeth at all. She had fangs and claws, and she fought the thing that was trying to hold her.

  In some faraway sense, she recognized that the thing that had pulled her away from the water was Lionel. But to the blue creature, he was just a monster. A shadow that had emerged from the woods to harm them. The blue creature pushed him down onto his back and pinned his wrists and snarled.

  What the blue creature didn’t know, and what Marybeth did, was that Lionel was incredibly brave. There was no fear in his eyes.

  “Okay,” he cooed. The blue creature had pinned down his wrists but he didn’t struggle. He didn’t move at all. “Okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The blue creature was frightened. Marybeth could taste its fear. She could feel it in the marrow of her bones.

  “Marybeth.” His voice was cool and even and soft. “Are you in there?”

  The blue creature had taken over her skin, and Marybeth was nothing but her thoughts. But at the sound of Lionel’s voice she found a way to fight back. She forced herself back into her arms and legs, until she could feel Lionel’s wrists under her palms, and his hips under her knees.

  The blue creature recoiled in fear, and curled up in her chest and went still.

  He knew the moment that she had come back. She saw the relief and the hope on his face. “Marybeth?”

  She climbed off him and looked over her shoulder, at the river that had gone black and ordinary again. “Did you see it?” she asked.

  He sat up, dead leaves clinging to his wild hair. “See what?”

  “The blue creature in the water.” She looked at him. “It was human. A ghost. I’m sure that’s what it was.” Her lip had started to tremble, and the rest of her body followed suit. Her body felt weak and weary.

  Lionel pulled her collar up around her ears to keep her warm.

  “How did you find me?” she whispered.

  He smiled. She loved it when he smiled; it made him look like a boy, and he only did it for her. “I can find anything,” he said. “Even a blue creature, and even you.”

  Marybeth took a deep breath and tried to stop shaking. “It’s a ghost,” she said. “I saw it in the water. I don’t know what it wants, I—”

  Her voice cracked.

  Lionel pulled her to her feet. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find out what it wants.”

  Marybeth wanted to ask him how he was so confident. But she said nothing as they walked back to the little red house. For now, she wanted to believe that he was right.

  In the morning, Marybeth could barely stay awake as she ate her porridge. She nearly fell asleep midchew.

  Despite her slow pace, none of the older ones tried to snatch away her food. Not after what had happened when the hyena boy took her toast. In fact, the children avoided her altogether. They didn’t tease her or shove her on the staircase, or call her a runt. They didn’t know about the blue creature under her skin, but they could see that something had changed, and it made them nervous.

  Marybeth didn’t mind being ignored by the older ones. It was a relief more than anything.

  She stared sleepily at her breakfast. She could hear Lionel crawling about under the table, gnawing on toast crusts that crunched when he bit into them. After the breakfast plates had been cleared off and the older ones began to get ready for school, Marybeth crawled under the table to join him.

  Lionel stopped purring when he saw the bags under her eyes.

  “Listen,” Marybeth whispered. “After we came back inside, I was up all night reading, and I’ve found something interesting.”

  He twitched his nose. He was a rabbit this morning, listening for danger, and this table was their warren.

  “The night that I fell into the river and saw the blue creature was October thirty-first,” Marybeth said. “Halloween.”

  Lionel and Marybeth knew a little about Halloween. They knew that some children would dress up like ghosts and goblins and ask their neighbors for treats. Mrs. Mannerd didn’t allow it. She had enough on her plate, she said, without having to stitch together eight costumes and pay the dentist when all those sweets rotted the teeth out of their heads.

  “The book says that Halloween is the one night of the year when the dead can come back to life. And that’s the first time we saw the blue creature, isn’t it? On Halloween.”

  Lionel was skeptical. Until last night he had been sure that the blue creature had been an animal, maybe even a fox. But Marybeth was right: a fox couldn’t climb under her skin.

  “The book said that the ghosts don’t know they’re dead until they’re shown.”

  “How do you show a dead thing that it’s dead?” Lionel asked.

  “The man had a spirit that would wander his house every Halloween, and one year, he lured it to a graveyard and showed it to its headstone.”

  Lionel hoped it could be as simple as that. “There’s a graveyard just before we reach town,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Marybeth said. “If we behave very well this week, and you don’t growl and I don’t wander off, by Saturday Mrs. Mannerd will trust us by ourselves again. We’ll tell her that we’re walking into town to return our library books. But along the way, we can stop by the graveyard. If it is a ghost, maybe we can convince it that it’s dead, and it will go back to where it belongs.”

  Lionel hoped for Marybeth’s sake that she was right. But whether it was a ghost or not, the blue creature still behaved like an animal, and Lionel would do his best to tame it. At least until Saturday, so that Mrs. Mannerd would let them walk to the library.

  All week, the quiet made Mrs. Mannerd nervous. The older ones quarreled and quibbled as usual, but Marybeth and Lionel were eerily demure. Sometimes Lionel would bare his teeth at the other children when they came too close, but Marybeth would whisper to him and he would be a boy again.

  But as difficult as it was for Lionel to behave like a human (and a civilized one at that), it was becoming even more difficult for Marybeth to hide the blue creature.

  Nobody in the house paid Marybeth much mind, and so they didn’t see the way her pupils dilated when a gust of autumn wind rattled the walls. They didn’t notice when she darted under the stairs to hide when the paperboy rang the doorbell to collect on the bill.

  The nights were always the true challenge, though. After everyone else had gone to sleep, Lionel curled up outside her door, so that she would step on him if she tried to wander off.

  As long as Lionel was outside the door, Marybeth did not wander, though. She heard his gentle raspy breathing as he slept, and the blue creature heard it, too, and seemed to be calmed by it.

  But while her body didn’t wander, her mind did. She had dreams of a little boy she’d never met. In her dreams, he led her to peculiar places. Sometimes it was a well. Sometimes it was a cave, or a river, or a cliff. “Look,” he would say. “There’s something that I want to show you.” But something was warning her not to trust him. The heart beside her own would beat faster, and she would wake up in a panic. After she awoke, when she tried to remember the boy’s face, all she saw was a blue button face without eyes.

  By Saturday morning, Mrs. Mannerd was very suspicious, especially at breakfast, when Lionel ate his porridge with a spoon rather than lapping it up with his tongue.

  After the bowls had been cleared, Lionel and Marybeth remained at the table with perfect posture and their hands clasped together.

  “Well?” Mrs. Mannerd said. “Aren’t you going to go outside and play?”

  Marybeth and Lionel exchanged glances.

  “Actually,” Marybeth said. “We’d like to walk to the library.”

  “The library?” Mrs. Mannerd said. “I could have sworn your books weren’t due back until Tuesday.”

  “We’ve finished them, and we’d like to check out something new,” Marybeth said.

  Mrs. Mannerd hesitated. All week ther
e had been something strange in Marybeth’s demeanor. Sometimes, in certain lights, Mrs. Mannerd could believe that Marybeth’s eyes turned blue. And Lionel had kept very close to her—much closer than usual. Even as Marybeth sat on the bottom step and read for hours, Lionel napped curled by her feet. Odd as it was, she didn’t want to discourage them. Closeness of that sort was rare enough for people who had families, and rarer still for those who didn’t.

  Perhaps it was those supernatural books that had frightened them, Mrs. Mannerd had thought. It was the only explanation.

  “I suppose the walk would do you some good,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “But wear thick socks, and no more scary books. Pick something nice this time, would you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Mannerd,” they said together.

  Dutifully, they buttoned their wool coats to their chins, pulled on their boots, and left the house with their library books under their arms.

  Mrs. Mannerd stood at the storm door and watched them walk down the dirt driveway. Lionel stooped to bite the head off a dandelion. Even on his best behavior, he would always be just a little bit wild.

  CHAPTER

  9

  “Can you feel it now?” Lionel asked. He was talking about the blue creature’s heartbeat.

  “Yes,” Marybeth said. “I couldn’t this morning, but it started up when we left the house.”

  They had been walking up the road for a quarter mile before the graveyard began to show itself in the distance, like a tiny abandoned city that would never again be inhabited.

  The heart sank in Marybeth’s chest and disappeared. She staggered when she felt it stop. “It’s all right,” she told it, and walked ahead of Lionel. “Look. See? There’s nothing that can hurt you in there.”

  The older ones would hold their breath when they passed the graveyard. They told Marybeth and Lionel that if they dared to breathe as the car rolled past, the ghosts would come to their beds at night and drag them to an empty grave and bury them alive.