I didn’t ask what the point of applause was or how she even knew that I could play. Instead, what came out of my mouth was dazed and stupid sounding. “Why is it important to make them happy?”
The Morrigan ripped out another clump of hair. “They’re better at loving us when they’re happy.”
I was beginning to get the feeling we were just going around in circles. “What does it mean, love us? How can they love you? They don’t even believe you exist.”
“They have to love because otherwise, they fear and they hate, and we’ll all spiral down in one long decline. They’ll hunt us—they’ve done it before. If we don’t keep the peace, they kill us.”
I knew that was the truth. All my daily concerns and everything that defined my life—it all came back to what had been done to Kellan Caury.
The Morrigan scowled and it made her look terrifying. “They can be very dangerous if they take it into their heads, so it’s imperative that they remain placated. Their admiration sustains us, and our music makes them smile, even if they don’t realize it’s us they’re smiling at.”
“You live off groupies?”
She shrugged and drew a large, lumpy animal on the floor. “Off their attentions and their little favors.” She added a pair of eyes, drew two slashes for pupils. “It’s not the only form of tribute, but it’s a good one.”
“If it’s not the only form, what else is there?”
“I have a sister who believes something else.” She said it lightly, but she was looking away and her voice sounded thin and high pitched. “She’s a right vicious cow, though.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your sister.”
“Well, it’s not a nice thing, snatching away children. It makes the town uneasy.” She dropped the stick and crawled over to the corner of the desk, peering around it at the main doors. “And it means giving up our own precious babes to replace theirs.”
The two girls from Stephanie’s party had come in from the long tunnel that led up to the slag heap. The one with the torn throat leaned in the doorway, while the little pink princess skipped around her, waving the star wand.
The Morrigan stood up and pointed to the rotting one. “The family knew her for what she was. They took her out into the hollow by Heath Road one night and cut her throat with a sickle.”
I tried to breathe, but for a second, my lungs wouldn’t cooperate. The girl was horrific, but the story was worse.
The Morrigan only nodded and patted my hand. “Terrible, isn’t it? She was very young. Only a baby, really.”
The girl stood by the double doors, tall and ragged. She was running her fingers over her torn throat, playing with the edges of the gash. When she caught me looking, she smiled.
I glanced away and turned back to the Morrigan. “How could she have died when she was a baby, though? I mean, she’s not little anymore—she grew up.”
The Morrigan nodded. “And why shouldn’t she?”
“Because when people are dead, they don’t do that—they don’t get older.”
She waved me off, shaking her head. “That’s ridiculous. How on earth could I keep a proper house if I had to spend all my time looking after infants who never learned to look after themselves?” The Morrigan smiled, sounding pleased with herself. “The dead mind me. It’s not a hard trick to make them live again if you have the right tokens and charms and the right names to call them by.”
“I don’t know, but I think most people would say that’s a pretty hard trick to pull off.”
She looked up at me, shaking her head seriously. “Mostly, people just don’t want to.”
“People like your sister?”
She grabbed the stick and slammed it down on the floor. “My sister lives on blood and sacrifice. She cares nothing for what’s already dead. But then, she has the distinct advantage of being born heartless.”
“It’s heartless to think dead things should stay dead?”
“No,” said the Morrigan. “It’s heartless to use children so callously, to toss them away simply because she’d rather have something else. But look at me, I’m going on. You’ve come for the hawthorn analeptic, and I intend to give it.”
When she came around the front of the desk and reached for my hand, I followed her.
She led me out through a narrow door and down a short flight of stone steps. The air smelled damp and mineralized, but it was nice and I wanted to keep breathing it. I followed her through doorways and tunnels, amazed by how far the House of Mayhem seemed to sprawl.
We turned down a wide hallway and into a huge room, far bigger than the lobby. The floor of it was covered in patches of standing water, so much in places that there was no way to avoid it.
The Morrigan splashed happily, jumping into the smallest puddles and kicking at the surface so that water sprayed up around her. I followed more carefully, walking around it where I could.
“Mind the pools,” she said, pulling me back from the edge of a wide puddle. “Some of them go quite deep and I would have to call Luther to fish you out.”
I looked closer at the puddle I’d almost stepped in. The edges were steep, cut straight down into the stone, and the puddle was so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom.
At the end of the room, we skirted around a pool that was even bigger than the others. A woman lay on her back, floating in the water. Her arms were crossed over her chest and buckled to her sides with canvas straps, but she drifted on the surface without going under. Her dress was stuck to her legs, sinking down so the hem of it disappeared into the murky water. Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling, and her hair fanned out around her head, tangled with leaves and twigs. There were deep scars running down her cheeks, crisscrossing and overlapping, like someone had carved a grid into her face.
The Morrigan barely glanced at her, but I stopped and leaned down to get a better look. “Is she dead too?”
The Morrigan scampered back and came up next to me. “Her? Oh, not remotely.”
“What happened to her, then?”
The Morrigan took a deep breath, like she was trying to find the best way to explain something, and said carefully, “Some can go out and some can’t, and some can only go out on nights when strangeness passes for merriment, and some used to go out but due to misfortune or accident cannot go out anymore.” She slipped her arm through mine and whispered, “My sister’s man did that to her—the Cutter. He laid iron rods against her face because it amused him, and now we have to fasten her arms down to keep her from clawing off her own skin.”
In the pool at my feet, the woman opened her mouth but didn’t make any noise. Her lips were a chilly blue and she stared up at me with wide, anguished eyes until I had to look away.
I turned to the Morrigan. “Why, though? What good does it do to hurt someone like that?”
“Not good. It’s never a matter of good. But my sister does love to punish the innocent for our trespasses. She was displeased with me, so she took it out on someone else.” The Morrigan fumbled for my hand. Hers was tiny and hot. “It wasn’t my intention to make you sad. Here, don’t let’s dwell on misfortune. Come along and we’ll fetch you something nice to take away with you.”
When I looked over my shoulder, the woman was still floating, staring at the ceiling as the water slopped gently against her tattered cheeks.
The Morrigan glanced up at me. “It’s not always so bad as that,” she said. “My sister is only unduly cruel to those who cross her. She makes sure we know where we stand and who we answer to, but if you keep out of her way, there’s nothing to fear.”
We left through a door at the far end and went down another flight of steps to a little room off the end of a hall.
I stood in the doorway, staring into a room full of glass cabinets. A marble counter ran the length of the wall, with shelves and cupboards above it. The counter was covered with pipes and test tubes and glass containers in all different sizes.
Emma’s friend Janice was
sitting on a little hassock at the counter, picking through a heap of twigs and roots and leaves. I almost didn’t recognize her. Instead of the wild tangle of curls, her hair had been scraped back hard from her face and twisted into a knot on top of her head, like Emma usually did before she went to bed. It made Emma look touchable and soft, but on Janice the effect was the opposite. It left her face completely unobscured, showing high, sharp cheekbones and a delicate jaw.
She was startlingly beautiful, but in a way that could never function in the world. The kind of thing so eerie that people can’t even deal with it, and so they have to destroy it.
She had one leg stuck out behind her at an awkward angle, trailing her bare foot in the flooded place where water bubbled up from the stone.
“Hello, ugly boy who isn’t ugly,” she said without looking up. “Are you here for more of my restoratives and my analeptics?”
The Morrigan went skipping across to her through the puddles and hugged her around the neck. “He would like another dram of the hawthorn, please. Just a taste, to start with. If he does us proud tomorrow, we’ll see about giving him a more practical amount.”
Janice got up and went over to the row of cupboards. She was wearing a sort of romper suit. It buttoned down the front, with lace around the neck and armholes, and looked like it might be some kind of old-fashioned underwear. She opened a glass-fronted cabinet and started sorting through bottles.
When she found one she wanted, she took it back to the counter. With great concentration, she licked a paper label, running it carefully along her tongue, and pasted it to the bottle. Taking a pen from the knot on top of her head, she marked the label with what looked like a big floppy 3. Then she turned and looked up at me.
“A dram,” she said, setting the bottle in my hand. “It isn’t much, but it should be enough to hold you until you’ve earned your keep.”
Behind her, the Morrigan was creeping toward the worktable, reaching for the pile of plant cuttings.
Janice spun around on her hassock and slapped the back of the Morrigan’s hand. “Naughty!”
The Morrigan skipped back, looking guilty and sorry. Janice sorted through the leaves and stems until she found a small yellow flower and tucked it behind the Morrigan’s ear.
The Morrigan ran her fingers over the flower, smiling and ducking her head. “She’s very kind, our Janice. Isn’t she kind?”
I held up the little bottle. “Is this why the dead girls and the people in the band seem okay?”
The Morrigan shook her head. She rolled her head so the side of her face was pressed against my arm. Her cheek was hot. “You are an entirely different class of people. Everyone has their own manner of survival. The blue girls are quite sturdy, only susceptible to true destruction by dismemberment and by fire. My players only need adulation if they’re to thrive, and my lady-sister lives off the blood sacrifice of unfortunate creatures like Malcolm Doyle.”
I stared down at her. “Me, you mean?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, Malcolm Doyle was a little boy who was taken from his bed in order to feed the ravenous appetites of my sister. You are someone else.”
It was the truth, but it still felt strange to hear someone say it. I am not Malcolm Doyle. I’m someone else. “So, they hurt him.”
“She tore out his throat,” the Morrigan said. “It was very quick. I suppose it may even have been painless, but I can’t be sure. Yes,” she said after a minute, winding a handful of hair around her wrist and then unwinding it again. “On second thought, I do imagine that it hurt.”
“So, when you talk about feeding on the town, you mean murder.”
“Oh, no, no. Not murder—sacrifice. And the cost is small. It hardly even qualifies as hardship, as it only comes in sevens, and the town grows strong on it for another handful of years, and when the town is well, so are we.”
I remembered how bad I’d felt at the blood drive just smelling the iron. “Do you drink it?”
The Morrigan shook her head. “The Lady’s methods are her own business and has barely anything to do with the House of Mayhem. Our job is only to stand in the churchyard and bear witness.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t go in the churchyard.”
“Don’t be dense. It has a plot saved just for us—you know, for the heretical and the unclean.”
“For suicides and stillbirths and murderers, though. Not for people like you.”
The Morrigan smiled up at me and squeezed my hand. “That ground is for us. Each seven years, we go down to the unholy ground and bear witness to the bloodletting.”
I stared at her. “But that means it doesn’t even get used if they’re just pouring it out.”
“Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world.”
“But you can’t pour blood on the ground and have it make you strong because you think it should. The world is just . . . the world.”
The Morrigan shook her head, smiling. “All great acts are ruled by intention. What you mean is what you get. In the House of Mayhem, we get what we need when they love us. That’s why we need lovely creatures like you—there’s a great deal of power in beauty, you know.”
I thought about Alice, how she existed at the top of the social ladder for no reason except that the perfect symmetry of her face made people want to do whatever she said.
The Morrigan was hugging herself, rocking back and forth. She leaned against me suddenly, resting her cheek on my arm. “We love the town as best we can, and they love us back, although they don’t always know they’re doing it. But it isn’t enough for my sister. She needs sacrifice.”
She played with the flower behind her ear and said in a low, singsong voice, “She takes their pretty babies, and in exchange, she leaves them our own diseased flesh. Those are the ones who die, of course—almost always. It’s nearly impossible to live outside the hill. So you see, we sacrifice our own too. But it’s a small cost to give up the sick ones, the ones who are only going to die anyway. Except . . .”
“Except what?”
Her hand was small and hot when she reached for mine. She turned and smiled up at me, showing her jagged teeth. “Except you didn’t. Isn’t that the most wonderful thing?”
I didn’t answer. I was too far into my own unsettling memory, thinking about the dark, flapping shadow and the screen. What it meant to be left somewhere and never found.
The Morrigan laced her fingers through mine, holding on tight. I looked down at her and she was shrunken and ugly, smiling like she knew something completely desolate. Like she knew me. Her eyes were huge and dark, and I smiled back because she looked kind of pitiful standing there. She looked so sad.
“Promise,” she said, hooking her little finger through mine and leading me toward the door. “Promise that you’ll work for me and play glorious music, and in return, I’ll make sure you never want for anything. Promise that you stay safe and out of the clutches of my sister, and in return, we’ll cease to trouble your own sister.”
“I promise,” I said, because Emma was the most important person in my life and because it was nice to be able to breathe. “I promise.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HUMAN LOVE
When I left the slag heap, the air was clammy, damp with autumn and the rain that never seemed to stop.
I climbed up the side of the ravine and crossed the footbridge, then started across Orchard Circle, headed for home. On Concord Street, porch lights glowed in a line all the way down the block.
Inside, I stood at the top of the stairs and leaned against the banister, making sure I was composed, before padding down the hall to Emma’s room. I opened the door a crack, pressing my mouth to the gap so I could whisper without letting too much light in.
“Emma?”
There was a sigh, a rustle of blankets. “Yeah?”
Relief washed over me, making my chest relax. I stepped insi
de and closed the door and then there was just the splash of light shining in under it. I lay on the carpet beside her bed and looked up at the shadows on the ceiling. She didn’t say anything, and I knew she was waiting for me to talk.
“I met some people tonight.”
Above me, she rolled over but still didn’t say anything. Then she took a deep breath. “What kind of people?”
The dead kind. The still-walking-around kind. The reeking, stinking, rotting-from-the-inside-out kind. Toothy and grinning, nasty with the dark and the dust of abandoned strip mines. But none of that was the whole truth. They were more than that. They were Carlina and Luther, electric on the stage, and the Morrigan with her hand on my arm like she knew me and had known me my whole life. And not the Janice who showed up after school to work on botany homework and was bony and weird looking, but the one who lived down in the House of Mayhem and was beautiful, and the girl who liked stars was happy and pink and sort of cute.
“Why is Janice your lab partner?”
Emma answered in a tight, controlled voice. “Well, because group projects pretty much always involve a group.”
“Are you lying to me?”
Emma was quiet a long time, and when she answered, she sounded defensive. “I saw her brush against a stainless steel table. She pulled away and then looked around to make sure no one was watching. I thought she might be . . . like you. I asked if she wanted to work together.”
“You took something from them,” I said, pressing my hands flat against the floor.
“To help you,” she whispered. “Only to help you.”
“This isn’t free, Emma. I think they want something back.”
“Then we’ll pay them,” she said, and I closed my eyes at the conviction in her voice. “We’ll do what it takes.”
“What if it’s not that simple? What if they want something weird or impossible or . . . bad?”
Neither of us said anything after that. Sometimes things are so big and complicated that you can’t actually talk about them.