by Amanda Leduc
What does it mean? What has happened?
“Tasha,” Annie moans. She doesn’t sound mad now, only heartbroken—but then she bangs on the door again and Tasha jumps. “Come out. I know you’re in there. You can’t hide from me forever.”
Tasha gets up off the floor, silently, and feels along the shelves and through the boxes—gauze, bandages. Sanitary napkins, toothbrushes. On the highest shelf she finds what she’s looking for, but loses her grip on the box, which topples to the floor.
“Tasha,” Annie moans again. “You come out now.” She starts banging on the door again.
Tasha scrabbles on the floor through clamps, scissors. She picks up a pair of scissors and unwraps them with shaking hands, then feels along the shelves again until she finds a small, heavy box.
Then she goes to the door and turns the lock slowly, hoping Annie doesn’t notice.
One, two. Three.
She shoves the door open, pushing Annie back, brings the box up and smashes it against Annie’s head. Her wife drops the scalpel she’d been clutching and as her hands go up to her head, Tasha kicks Annie in the stomach, then brings her elbow down hard against her neck. Annie falls and Tasha lunges for the scalpel, her fingers closing around it just in time. She climbs over her wife and straddles Annie’s torso, holds the scalpel flat against Annie’s throat while the other hand points the scissors at the soft knob of Annie’s trachea. “Don’t move,” she hisses.
“Tasha,” Annie whispers. “Tasha, I can’t do it. Not anymore.”
“They’re only thoughts,” Tasha says, her voice hard. “They’ll go away.” Her mad thoughts went away in the greenhouse. Despair faded, and became smaller. She has to believe the same will happen for Annie.
“They’ll go away,” she says again. Over and over. “They’ll go away.”
* * *
This time, the terror comes for both of them. She sees it sprout from Annie’s ribcage first—an ivory creature with blood-red teeth, its wings all knuckled bone and raw, sinewy flesh. It moans at her, flapping its wings so that darkness brushes her face.
Look at what you did to me, it says.
Tasha whimpers. The creature slithers closer until it’s nose to nose with her, Annie’s fear and sadness staring her straight in the face. How selfish she has been. How selfish she has always been—desperate and arrogant, terrified and yet determined not to show fear. Telling stories. Telling nonsense.
“It’s just a thought,” Tasha whispers. She closes her eyes. “It’s just a thought. It will go away.”
But it’s not enough, and her own creature crawls out of her ribcage—dark and silent, sticky with blood and lumpy bits of brain matter. It stretches its wings and makes for Annie.
“No,” Tasha says. “You’re not real.” But the creature doesn’t stop. Annie sobs in terror and now Tasha is sobbing too, shaking as she says the same useless thing over and over.
It’s just a thought. It will go away. It’s just a thought. It will go away.
The creature opens its mouth wide, showing its long, rotting black teeth. Annie screams and screams.
The creature bends, and Annie’s face disappears.
Tasha screams, and faints.
* * *
She opens her eyes. There are no creatures.
Beside her Annie sits up slowly, a hand pressed to her head. “Did I fall?”
Tasha shakes her head, sits up on her own. “Something happened,” she whispers. “Do you remember what you did?”
Annie frowns. “I remember—the fire,” she says. “I remember how you stayed in bed for days.”
“Yes.”
“I was in our house,” Annie continues. “And you were there, in every room, and in every room you turned away from me. In the hospital, too—at work, at home. And then—and then we were here, and you were doing the same thing. Over and over.”
She watches Tasha’s face for a moment, then swallows. “Something came out of your ribs.”
Tasha nods, swallows hard.
It’s dark outside, maybe one or two in the morning. A gust of chilly wind blows on them through the broken window. Annie turns to look out the window and sees the dark shape of the body slumped over the broken glass. Her face alive with horror, she turns back to Tasha. “Who is that? What did I do?”
Tasha takes Annie’s hands and squeezes them tight. “No. She did it to herself. But first—” and she watches Annie’s eyes find the crumpled body of the little boy—“first she did that.”
Annie covers her mouth with her hand. When she turns back to Tasha, they’re both wondering the same thing. “The city?” is all she says.
Tasha closes her eyes. The screams, the long silence. “I think so,” she says.
* * *
In the morning they make their way out of the clinic, armed with scalpels and scissors.
The dead are everywhere, and already vines are growing over the bodies. The only sound a faint swoop as vultures circle overhead.
They don’t go in the houses, just walk up and down the streets, finding no one.
“Are they all dead?” Annie says after some time.
Tasha wants to weep, but she’s too tired. She also wants to be back inside—away from the living green that masses all around them, especially thick and lush where the bodies lie.
Annie touches Tasha’s shoulder, hesitantly, as though they are strangers. “You need to lie down,” she says.
“We both need to lie down,” Tasha says.
“Let’s go home,” Annie says. “Let’s go home and sleep and we’ll see what we can do after that.”
“What about Elyse?” Tasha whispers, shocked that she hasn’t even thought of her. Annie has no answer, just takes her hand. When they reach the townhouse, the door sticks, and Annie has to shove it open with her shoulder. Tasha grabs her arm. “What if she’s inside?”
They pause, horrified, but Elyse is not behind the door. They creep from room to room but there is nothing—no body, no voice, no shock of blonde hair. The house feels like a museum.
It is a museum, Tasha thinks. A museum of a world that is never coming back.
In the kitchen, everything has a faint greenish tint—the windows are almost obscured by vines. A handful of red amaryllis she brought back from her last trip to the greenhouse still bloom on the windowsill. Tasha checks the vase. It is bone dry but the flowers sit unchanged, deep and red.
She picks up the vase and smashes it against the tiles. Then she gathers up the flowers and throws them out the back door while Annie stands looking at her as if it’s Tasha, now, who has lost her mind.
Tasha takes a deep breath. “I don’t want them in the house anymore.”
They climb the stairs to the bedroom, crawl into bed, and curl close together. Annie is weeping silently now. Tasha raises her hand and wipes her tears away. She falls asleep to the rhythm of Annie’s heartbeat, firm and strong beneath her ear.
* * *
In the morning they go outside, armed with scalpels and scissors. They walk up and down and up and down the streets, screaming names until they lose their voices.
Elyse!
Kevin!
Alan!
ANYBODY!
They retreat to the clinic, pry open a can of baked beans, share it between them.
“What do we do now?” Annie says.
“We leave.” She closes her eyes and leans her head back against the wall. “Annie,” she says, “I’m so sorry.”
“We’re still alive because of you,” Annie says.
“Maybe that’s why I’m sorry,” Tasha says. “How long can we survive on our own?”
Annie clears her throat. “Well,” she says. “We have each other. At the end.”
Tasha reaches for Annie’s hand. “Yes,” she whispers, and she closes her eyes. “We do.”
; When she opens her eyes again, vines are slithering over the woman’s body in the broken window and stretching out toward them. Tasha scrambles to her feet and pulls Annie with her.
“Out,” she breathes. “We need to get out of here.”
They lurch out of the clinic and into the stillness of the day. It is a stillness that feels different now—heavy, waiting.
“Let’s go back to the townhouse,” Tasha says, and they walk quickly. Everywhere they turn it feels like green things are moving, and yet everywhere they turn things are too silent, too still. Even the wind seems to be holding its breath.
“Run,” Tasha says, suffused with sudden terror. “Run, run, run.”
They take off down the street toward the townhouse—halfway there, Annie grabs Tasha and they both stop.
“Did you hear that?” she gasps.
“Hear what?”
But then Tasha hears it too. Tap. Tap tap. A faint rattle. Followed by a slow, almost imperceptible moan.
Annie turns her head. The vines and flowers—Tasha’s not imagining this—freeze around them. “Where is it coming from?”
Tasha listens again, and then points. The screen door on the front of the house next to theirs trembles, just a little bit.
Tasha takes the scissors out of her pocket and walks slowly toward the house.
Get inside! a voice screams inside her head. Get the fuck inside!
“Tasha,” Annie says. “Tasha, you don’t know—”
She doesn’t listen. She crosses the path to the house and climbs up the front steps. She takes a breath and puts her hand against the knob, then pulls.
Tasha drops to her knees, and Annie comes running.
It’s Elyse, crumpled on the floor. She slowly turns her head.
“I heard you,” she gasps. “I heard you call my name.”
They gather her up, weeping, and hold her close between them.
15
He doesn’t mean to go far. He doesn’t. But he finds he needs to run, only stopping for a moment at the mountain cave to tell his sister where Heather is. “She’s up with the willows. Go to her, Aura. I—can’t.”
And then he’s past her, through the meadow, then on the downward path, his hooves hitting the shale and sliding, going down.
Heather. As a child standing before him on the mountain. As a teenager in the garden, her eyes lost and huge. Heather at the greenhouse. Heather on the mountain.
Heather, before him at the willow trees.
Heather, telling him to leave.
He’d been a monster that day when her father had fallen from the cliff. He hadn’t meant to be.
She doesn’t need help! he had wanted to scream. The child there in front of them, so sweet and open. The struggle of their climb had been written all over her face. She’d looked tired, and also guilty to be tired, as though her fatigue had somehow betrayed her father’s dreams. He’d seen it all at once, had understood it instantly.
What monsters are these?
Get them away, get them away.
Help her, the father had said. The way their own father had asked for the mountain’s help so long ago. Make them like me.
She doesn’t need help! he’d wanted to yell at her father. She doesn’t need to be fixed!
And so he had hesitated. Not for long, but long enough.
He runs. To the base of the mountain, past the city, through the foothills. The stars shine far overhead and the ground tells him nothing. There are no people. Not even animals bar his way.
When he stops, a long while later, he can smell the faint tang of the sea. He walks for a while until he reaches an abandoned beach village—old clapboard houses falling down, the centre street overgrown with grass and weeds. Two rabbits leap across what used to be the road and then disappear.
At the edge of the sea, he pauses for a moment, then he wades into the water until it’s up past his knees, above his belly, until the ocean covers his back and he’s just a torso in the waves. If someone saw him now, they would think he was a man. Only a man.
The waves push hard against him. Other things still live here, beneath the surface. He can feel them swimming far away. The ocean keeps on going. The mountain endures in a different way.
The green of growing things—that endures too, in a way he is only beginning to understand.
He stands for a while in the sea, feeling the waves, soothed by their roar. He isn’t cold. The sky above him is shot with stars.
When daylight is still some time away, he turns around and heads for land. He stands dripping on the beach for one long moment and then begins the long run back home. He’ll bring Heather here, he decides. He’ll stay with her, he’ll find them food. Whatever it takes.
He runs on a tangled road that leads him through one empty town after another. The buildings on either side are like dark hills with hidden eyes. They watch, but let him pass.
Then, suddenly, the start-up rumble of an engine. He freezes, alive with fear.
The headlights come from nowhere, and everywhere. The hard blast of a car horn burrows deep into his ribs. Lights come at him from everywhere.
A hot, sharp flash of something against his side—he cries out, stumbles, hits the ground.
He can’t see.
He can’t see. He can’t see. He can’t see.
THE DOCTOR AND THE TWINS
The next time the doctor visits the mother’s village, there are two new babies to see. Twins—like the doctor and her sister long ago, like the nieces who love her stories whenever she returns. The twins are healthy and big. There is nothing wrong with their lungs.
“And the birth?” the doctor asks, cuddling one of the babies—a boy, with large, dark eyes and a nose that already looks like his father’s.
The mother has been smiling, but now her face clouds over. “It was fine,” she says. “There was no trouble at all.”
This is true; the villagers confirm it. No labour that stretched from one day into the next. No need for a surgeon’s slender tools. The boy came first, and then his sister—the mother was up and moving around the house within hours. The entire village has been visiting the babies, playing the songs of welcome for days.
They are happy babies, which is just as well. Two babies at once is more than enough for anyone, the doctor thinks, remembering what life was like for her sister when her own two girls came into the world. An unending avalanche of crying and pissing and shitting and never enough sleep. The second husband holds the children like they are made of glass; when they cry, the doctor takes pity on him and reaches for them. He soon escapes outside.
“Surely he should learn,” the mother says. She and the doctor are at the window, watching the husband retreat into the fields.
“Parenting is different for everyone,” the doctor says. She’s seen enough parents to know. “He’ll get used to being a father, eventually. And you’ll be fine.”
“I thought I’d feel whole,” the mother says. “But instead I feel…unfinished.” She turns and grips the doctor’s arm. “How are they?” she whispers. “How are my babies?”
“Your children are right here,” the mother’s mother calls from the front door. She shuts the door behind her and comes to stand with them. “See?” she says. “Look how beautiful she is. Look how beautiful they both are, and how perfect!”
“Yes,” the mother whispers. She looks up at the doctor. “They’re perfect.”
The doctor stays for two weeks. She sleeps in her old room. The other husband, haunted and grief-stricken, does not come this time. There are no footsteps in the hallway. There is no dark presence on the other side of the door.
When the doctor is ready to move on, the mother insists on walking with her to the edge of the village, her twins in a sling. As the doctor says a final goodbye, the mother stops her with a hand on her arm, the same hun
ger in her eyes.
“Are they all right?” she whispers. “My babies. You never tell me how they are.”
“I haven’t seen them,” the doctor says. “But I think they’re all right.”
“You think?”
“I hope,” the doctor says.
“And—him?” she says. “Is he all right?”
“He is as all right as he can be.”
The mother nods. “I knew he was different. I wanted my life to be different too. But at the time I didn’t know what that meant. What that could be.”
The doctor nods, and gently pulls her arm away. “We never do,” she says.
The mother thinks about this for a moment. Then she turns back to the village without saying goodbye.
* * *
The doctor makes her way back to the city of her birth, where her sister still lives. At their house, her nieces run out to greet her.
“We’ve been waiting for days!” one of them exclaims, hanging on the doctor’s arm. “Where have you been?”
The doctor laughs. “I could move as fast as the wind and it wouldn’t be fast enough for you.”
“Yes,” her sister agrees, coming down the front walk to kiss her. “Nothing moves fast enough for these two.”
Inside, the girls hang her coat up in the closet. The doctor carries her bag and her satchel to the guest room. She is barely unpacked before they’re at her door and tugging on her hands, pulling her into the living room.
“Tell us about the centaur,” they say. “Have you seen him? Have you seen the babies? It’s been so long!”
The doctor lets the girls lead her to a seat before the fire. Her sister brings her a mug of tea, then sits in a nearby chair. She asks, “So have you seen him? Did you give him my thanks for taking those heavy, godforsaken books from my shelves?”
As promised, the doctor had been bringing gifts up the mountain every time she passed by. Last time, she had given the centaur some of her old textbooks.