by Dia Reeves
They next tried their inner room, one of the smallest rooms in the house aside from the bathrooms. Fancy turned the crank once and then joined Kit’s laughter when the happy place immediately projected on the walls. She felt the kinetoscope vanishing in her hands, so she stopped cranking before the happy place could fully form around them, and the walls returned to normal.
“Well, that settles that.” Fancy flopped onto the bed.
“So we have to be somewhere small and enclosed or it won’t work. Which means that instead of people coming to our cellar, we’ll have to convince them to let us into their homes. So that we can slaughter them.”
“You’re good at talking to people,” Fancy said, surprised to hear the uncertainty in her normally confident sister’s voice.
“I know, but . . . sometimes when you talk to people, it turns out they’re kinda interesting. Interesting people might be harder to kill than, you know, dullards.”
“If they’re bad enough, it won’t matter how interesting they are.” She stood and balanced the kinetoscope on her hip. “Go get the old man’s ear. And a steak knife.”
“Why?”
“It’ll be safer in the happy place than here where Madda can find it.”
“And the knife?”
“For stabbing. Der.”
Kit ducked into the kitchen and came back minutes later with a steak knife and the jar holding the severed ear. “How many ears do you think this thing can hold?” Kit asked.
Fancy put the jar and the knife in her pocket. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:
ILAN RAN UP TO ME IN CLASS AND GAVE ME A BIG HUG. I TOLD HIM TO GET OFF ME BUT HE SHOWED ME A DRAWING OF US HUGGING AND SAID I HAD TO LET HIM. I TOLD HIM THAT WAS A FAKE DRAWING CUZ IN THE REAL ONE WE WERE KISSING, AND HE SAID, SO KISS ME THEN! BUT INSTEAD OF KISSING HIS LIPS, I BIT THEM. HARD.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sisters had to bike around their upsquare neighborhood for two hours before they finally happened upon a villainous situation: Five boys, just a few years older than Kit, were beating up another boy in the parking lot of Wyverly Park, a few miles from their home.
The boys were transies, transients, which was how Porterenes thought of the outsiders who wandered into their town, because they almost never stayed long. Transies lacked Porterene fortitude and tended to end up fleeing town in terror or getting eaten by monsters in a relatively short amount of time. There were, of course, a few special individuals who moved into town and were able to tough it out.
These boys, however, were not special.
The sisters stopped at the edge of the parking lot and watched, but the boys, intent on their victim, didn’t notice them.
“You know how rare it is to get one of these freaks alone?” said one boy wearing smoky aviator glasses. He and the boy in the orange Longhorns T-shirt he was speaking to weren’t involved in the beating but were instead sitting in the shade on the hood of a red Escalade, drinking beer.
“I know,” said Longhorn. “Why’re you alone, freak?” he yelled. “Are you such a freak that even in a town full of freaks nobody wants anything to do with you?”
“Or did the monsters eat all your friends,” said the aviator boy, “and you’re the only survivor?” All the boys laughed at this.
“Why’re you wasting your aggression on him?” said Kit.
The boys jumped and turned to see the sisters behind them on the other side of their truck. The silence was so deep Fancy could hear the whack of a ball from the tennis court nearby.
“Why beat him up?” Kit continued, eyeing the scrawny, bleeding boy curled up in a handicapped parking space. He seemed even scrawnier compared to his attackers, who were fit, like they spent all day baling hay or something vigorous and outdoorsy like that. “There’s barely enough of him to make it worth your while. If you really wanna take out your frustrations on someone, you should go find a crowd and have a good old-fashioned rumble!”
“Is that what we should do?” asked aviator boy.
Kit nodded. “There’s a party at the water tower teeming with huge, strapping guys who can take a much better beating than him. Me and my sister can show you where it is.”
The aviator boy looked her over. “I see all that black, so I know you gotta be from here. Why would you help us out?”
“Because I know that if y’all start any shit at the water tower,” Kit admitted cheerfully, “you will get toasted. And I wanna see it. Is that a good enough reason?”
The boys laughed and piled into the truck, leaving the scrawny boy motionless on the ground.
The car was large, but then so were the boys. Fancy had to climb into one guy’s lap in the backseat in order to fit, a boy wearing green Bermuda shorts, which Fancy resented. Only the Mortmaine wore green, and this bully was as far from a Mortmaine as a person could be and still be human.
“They’re gonna get toasted,” said the green-clad boy, squeezing Fancy too tightly. She wanted to smack at his wandering hands, but she had a death grip on the kinetoscope, peering into the round screen and letting the view of the happy place settle her nerves. “And after we rumble with them, maybe we’ll rumble with the two of you.” More laughter.
“You hear that, Fancy?” Kit was crammed in between the aviator boy and Longhorn in the front seat. “We get to be the spoils of war. But that’s only if you losers win. What’re the odds of that happening, Fancy?”
Fancy was already turning the crank. “Zero percent.”
Almost immediately the view inside the kinetoscope appeared outside, creeping along the interior of the truck until the world beyond the windows was hidden from view.
“Dude?” The boy sitting farthest from Fancy in the back-seat had a tattoo of a girl on his arm and was pointing at the pink flamingo staring at him through the window. “Are you seeing this?”
The only answer was a collective gasp as the window, along with the entire truck, disappeared. They hit the headless statue platform on their butts, flamingos scurrying from the commotion. The aviator boy scrambled to his knees, gawking at the ring of statues as if he thought they might come alive and crush him underfoot. “This isn’t possible,” he whispered, and then looked to Kit for confirmation.
“Sure it is.” She leaned toward him like a black mamba ready to strike. “Anything is possible here, even that rumble you wanted to have. Remember?” She snapped open her switchblade. “So okay. Here we go!” Kit removed the aviator boy’s sunglasses and jammed her switchblade into his left eye. As the aviator boy fell over dead, Kit put on his shades and chuckled.
“Look at me!” she yelled to Fancy. “I’m a pilot!”
But Fancy was busy with her own boy. The kinetoscope had vanished, leaving Fancy’s hands free to grab the steak knife she had hidden in the deep pocket of her shorts. She used it to stab the boy with the green shorts in the chest. She had to try a couple of times because the knife kept glancing off his ribs. The third time was the charm, however, and before he managed to knock her off his lap, she sank the blade into his heart. She had a hell of a time trying to pull the knife free, though. Stupid ribs.
The bullies had wanted a rumble, but now that they’d gotten their wish, they were almost completely paralyzed. That’s why transies were so easy to kill—they wasted so much time gaping and questioning every little thing, they didn’t notice important things like the fact that they were being slaughtered.
Longhorn, for instance, had scooted past Kit and was shaking the aviator boy’s shoulder, completely ignoring the hole Kit had put in the boy’s head by way of his eye. “John? John? ” He gaped at Kit. “What did you do to him, bitch?”
“I stabbed him!” she exclaimed, flicking eye and brain matter from her switchblade. “God! Why am I always having to explain that to people?” She slashed her knife at Longhorn, but he jerked back and up, so instead of slashing his throat, she only nicked his chest.
Longhorn took off, leaping from the platform down to the garden
. His flight broke the others’ paralysis, and the remaining two boys also scrambled away. The sisters took off after them—Kit went after Longhorn, and Fancy, after she finally got her knife free, went after the boy who had sat in the middle with her in the backseat. She chased him across the greenscape, past quacking flamingos and topiaries shaped like butterflies. Her boy was as swift as an antelope, and Fancy knew she’d never be able to catch up. If only she had a way to block his path—
Two men, huge and burly and dressed in white like orderlies at an insane asylum, stepped out of the hedges. Their coveralls roared like an angry sea as they darted forward and caught the antelope boy by the arms, one on either side. The antelope boy was huge, but between the two men in white, he looked like a gnat.
Fancy, startled by their sudden appearance, had frozen, but they didn’t do anything or even speak. They simply hauled the boy back toward her and then stood, as though awaiting instruction.
Fancy looked around for Kit and saw her riding Longhorn’s back like a rodeo clown, stabbing him in the neck and shoulders and screaming, “Yee-haw!” while he tried in vain to buck her off.
The men in white seemed harmless, though, so Fancy stabbed the antelope boy since they were thoughtfully holding him still for her. But his ribs also deflected the knife. Stabbing people in the heart was much more difficult than she’d ever imagined it would be. And the antelope boy wouldn’t stop screaming. In a fit of pique, Fancy stabbed him in the throat just to stop the noise, but when she pulled out the knife, blood sprayed everywhere.
Fancy skipped back to avoid the mess and landed on her butt in the grass. She glared at the boy, who was making a horrible gargling racket. She knuckled blood out of her eyes and screamed, “Can’t somebody shut him up?”
One of the men released antelope boy and snapped his neck. The silence was luscious.
Fancy regarded the men thoughtfully as they let the boy drop to the ground and stood at attention. They wanted her attention. “Thank you,” she said generously. “Breaking their necks is much neater than stabbing them. And then getting blood in your ears.” She got to her feet, tilting her head to the side and waggling her earlobe. “Amazing, all the orifices that blood can seep into.”
“And out of,” said Kit, coming up behind her, watching the men with great interest. “Who’re they?”
“I dunno. Minions. Isn’t that what you call a person who does your bidding? A minion? Minions, bow to my sister.”
They bowed and Fancy laughed. “See?”
“Your bidding?” Kit said, mockingly. “Look at the little raja.”
“Rajas are boys. You must address me as maharaja, if you please.” Fancy looked around the garden, counting the bodies scattered here and there in the warm sunshine. “There’s one missing,” she said. “Where’s the one with the tattoo?”
“Through those hedges, I guess,” said Kit. At some point during her wild ride with Longhorn, she must have lost the aviator glasses. She bounced in place like a sprinter before a race starts. “Wanna go run him down?”
“No need. Minions!” Fancy snapped her fingers. “Find the tattooed boy and bring him here at once.”
The minions disappeared through the hedges that separated the garden from the rest of the happy place, and Fancy grinned ear to ear. “How cool is that?”
Kit seemed to find it more freaky than cool—she had stopped bouncing. “Who are those guys?”
“Happy-place people. And happy-place people have to do whatever I want. Watch.” Fancy stared hard at the hedges, and moments later people entered carrying armchairs and a pail full of ice and drinks. They weren’t dressed in white like the minions; they were just ordinary people, women and men and even a small kid, who looked pleased at the chance to offer Fancy any assistance they could. As she directed them to set up the chairs on the headless statue platform, she noticed that, unlike her and Kit and the dead bodies lying upon the ground, none of the happy-place people cast a shadow. Neither did the statues.
“You can go now,” Fancy told them, trying not to feel spooked as they hurried silently past her and left the garden.
“Wow,” said Kit, looking gratifyingly impressed as she sat with her bottle of lemonade. “This is the life.”
Fancy sat in her own chair and clinked bottles with her sister, glad to see her in such a good mood after all her whining about her inability to “connect” with other people. Whatever that meant. “Did you get any more ears?” she asked.
Kit gasped and nearly choked on her lemonade. “I forgot! Wait here.” Kit hurried off the platform, switchblade in hand, and Fancy watched her flit from body to body collecting ears like a bee collecting pollen. Kit returned with four ears stacked in the palm of her hand.
“I don’t wanna put them in with him,” she said when Fancy removed the jar from her pocket and unscrewed the lid. She wagged her finger at the old man’s ear. “You’d like being surrounded by the flesh of young boys, wouldn’t you?”
Fancy grimaced at the stench rising from the jar. “We gotta bury this thing. It’s disgusting.”
“I considered preserving it, but decomposition has its own beauty. Don’t be such a girl.”
One of the elevated, stone-bordered circles of earth that separated each statue drew Fancy’s eye.
She walked to it and sat on the stone, trying to shake the old man’s ear out and onto the dirt. The ear, however, was stuck tight to the bottom of the jar, so she buried the whole thing, lid and all, pressing it into earth so spongy she didn’t need to dig.
She looked for her sister, and then rolled her eyes. “Kit, stop molesting that statue and bring the ears over.”
Kit poked her head out from under the loincloth of one of the male statues. “You know these things are anatomically correct?”
“Kit!”
“All right, all right. I’m coming.”
She gave Fancy the ears and watched her bury them in a ring around the spot she’d buried the jar. Moments later the minions reentered the garden.
“Lemme go, lemme go!” screamed the tattooed boy as the minions hauled him forward. He was battered and bruised as though he had put up quite a struggle, but he was otherwise unharmed.
The sisters left the platform and joined the minions on the ground.
“Lemme go!” he screamed again.
“Let you go where?” asked Kit. “Back home so you can beat up other people just because they’re different? What did you call that boy at the park? A freak? You wanna shake hands with a real freak?” She showed him her switchblade.
“I’m sorry!”
“I bet you are.”
“I mean it. We grew up hearing these stories about y’all.” He was talking fast, eyes on the knife. “We didn’t know they were true!”
“Stories?” Kit exchanged a look with Fancy. “About us?”
“About Porterenes. About Portero. About how there’s monsters and doors to other worlds.” He looked around and the fight seemed to go out of him all at once; he started crying. “I didn’t know it was true. Please let me go. I’ll go back and tell everybody I know it’s the truth.”
“Like Scrooge,” said Kit, amused. “You’ve seen the error of your ways and now you’ll do nothing but good deeds all the rest of your days?”
“Yes, I swear!”
“What do you say, Fancy?” Kit gave her a strange look.
“Stab him.”
“Really?” The strange look deepened. “You don’t wanna set him free? Like with Franken?”
“I said stab him!”
The strange look was replaced by one Fancy knew all too well—annoyance. “I’m not one of your minions, maharaja. You stab him.”
“I’m sick of stabbing things.” Fancy threw the steak knife, and the tattooed boy yelped as it landed between his feet. “I know.” Fancy smiled at the boy and snapped her fingers.
Half a dozen happy-place people entered the garden, rolling a huge and colorful circular contraption on a stand. A wheel of death, like knif
e throwers used to entertain people at the circus.
Kit laughed and put her switchblade back in her pocket. “You are so twisted, Fancy Pants.”
Fancy had the minions strap the boy to the wheel, and one of the happy-place people presented Kit with a metal box full of knives with handles as pink as cotton candy. After Fancy sent the happy-place people away, she said, “Age before beauty,” and gestured for Kit to make the first throw.
Kit chose one of the knives and expertly skewered the tattooed boy’s thigh.
“Good throw!” Fancy exclaimed, and then took a turn. Both sisters were very good at this game; despite their spinning target, very rarely did they miss.
“You know why people scream when they’re in pain?” Fancy asked at one point, after her knife buried itself in the tattooed boy’s hand.
“So that if there’s friends nearby, they’ll come to the rescue,” said Kit reasonably, hitting him once again in the thigh—she had made an almost perfect line from the top of his thigh down to his shin.
“I don’t think so,” said Fancy. “I think screaming’s a self-destruct mechanism. The person who’s causing the pain gets so irritated by all the noise that she’ll do anything to silence it.” Fancy threw the knife, and it was a perfect throw. “Anything at all. What do you think?”
“I think you’re right,” Kit said, watching the boy go round and round on the wheel, silenced by Fancy’s knife in his throat. Instead of throwing her own knife, she gave it to her sister and grabbed another bottle of lemonade from the pail on the grass.
“Five bucks says I can get him right between the eyes.”
“I think he’s dead, Fancy.” The strange look was back on Kit’s face.
“So? It’ll still be a neat trick.” She threw the knife, but it stuck, quivering in midair several feet before her. She felt a moment of confusion until she saw the knife wasn’t in midair, but in the dashboard. Just as she recognized what was happening, as she felt an inescapable pressure folding her, forcing her to sit, the dashboard became more solid and the knife became less so until it disappeared completely and the Escalade reappeared around Fancy, the kinetoscope in her lap as it had been before. The truck was now empty of boys, but Kit was beside her in the backseat attempting to look unaffected, as if she popped in and out of the world every day.