Fiendish

  Fisher only turned away and didn’t say anything, but I could see the restless agitation coming off him like heat lightning.

  “Where does this go to?”

  He looked down and touched the edge of the door with his toe. “There’s a pull-down ladder in the bedroom downstairs, but if Isola catches us messing around in here, she’ll go nuts. It’s safer to use the roof.”

  I remembered the odd stretch of bare wall on this side of the hallway. “Why is the door to this room papered over? What is this place?”

  Fisher looked away. “I wasn’t supposed to be here,” he said. “But I showed up, she didn’t know what to do with me, and so she made it that anyone who came into her house couldn’t go snooping around and find anything.”

  I looked at the bunched-up rug and the trapdoor. “That’s kind of crazy.”

  Fisher nodded. “It’s Isola.”

  “How long were you in here?”

  He shook his head. “A long time. My mom brought me back here one night. I was seven, and Isola put me in this room. It seemed like forever before she decided it was safe to let me out. Then she acted like I just got here, started telling everyone I’d come up from Shreveport or somewhere.”

  I looked around the empty room, which was missing every kind of thing that made a bedroom—no dresser, no toys or curtains, just the mattress and the card table and a broken chair. “For how long, though?”

  Fisher let out the dry, barking laugh he did when something hurt almost too much to stand. “Two years, maybe? I can’t remember. I can’t even remember nights and days—just one long blank, like staring at a wall. After a while, I was so ready to lose my mind, I wrecked everything I could get my hands on.”

  In my canning closet, time passed in big smears, with the speed of dreaming. For Fisher, the time had gouged its way into his skin. He had felt every second of it.

  I stepped over the rug, kicking it back into place. The trapdoor echoed a little under my shoes. Being near him was the closest thing to knowing what to say, and I leaned my forehead against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart.

  “I have to tell you something,” he whispered, and just from the catch in voice, I knew it would be bad.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered back, because it seemed wrong to talk too loud.

  “Isola said she did it to keep me safe, but that’s a lie. It was to keep the town safe. She did it because I’m dangerous.”

  I squinted up at him. “Well, I know that, but it’s no reason to lock you up.”

  “No,” he said, and his voice was raw, lower than I’d ever heard it. “Listen. I came to town when I was seven—the week before the whole damn world went crazy and your house burned and everything in Hoax County went to hell. Isola lies about it, though. She tells everyone I wasn’t here. That way, they’d be stupid to think I had anything to do with it.”

  “Well, maybe she’s still nervous for you—she wants you to be safe.”

  Fisher let out a long, shaky breath. “I’m not talking about Isola. What I’m trying to tell you is, I know the truth.” He closed his eyes before he finished. “I’m the reason the reckoning happened.”

  I stared at him.

  “That can’t be,” I said finally, with my arms around the wedding album.

  I’d been so sure that it was me. That I was at the heart of it. I was the one buried down in the cellar, and now, almost the minute I was out, everything seemed to be starting over.

  Then I thought of what Isola had said—that one craft called to another.

  Fisher was standing with his head bowed, not looking at me. When I touched his arm, he flinched and stepped back.

  “Don’t you get it?” he said. “I’m the reason for everything that’s happened. I’m the reason you have nothing.”

  I stood holding the wedding album full of pictures of my grandmother. In a dusty room full of dead bugs and broken furniture, with a boy who had saved me from darkness, and who sometimes looked at me like he could see into my thoughts. Who could make me feel like I was seeing the world through his eyes.

  I didn’t know how to make him see that it wasn’t his fault. Or, if it had to be someone’s, that it was both of us. All of us. The fiend had tried to tell me that day in the hollow, but I’d been too scared for Fisher and too scared of myself to really see it. The reckoning was bigger than a single person. There were five points on the star.

  “You should hate me,” he said.

  I set down the book and put my arms around him. When my arms tightened, he swallowed hard, a long, painful swallow that made his chest jerk. He stood against me, not moving, not speaking. After a second, he hugged me back.

  The things I had were mine and some of them were broken, but they were real. They were so very far from nothing.

  THE DYING BIRD

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Later, Fisher drove me home. He walked me up onto the porch and we stood looking at each other under the light. In front of me, he was warm and solid, but now that the sun was down and the air was humming with crickets, I was starting to lose my sense of things again. Suddenly, I found myself nearly swallowed by the feeling that had gripped me on the day he’d carried me out of the cellar, like the world was too much, too full—like it was spinning away from me.

  I had a sudden, desperate feeling that if he touched me, it might prove that I was real. I wanted him to grab me and shake me, or press me hard against his chest, and then I might be sure that I was solid too, and not a trick of my own imagination.

  It was with a start that I came to a disquieting realization. Solid or not, it didn’t matter. I had to go on anyway. I was standing on a rotting porch at night, in a place that was either outside or inside my own head. I had no sense of time or distance or territory, and no way of knowing which world was the real one. Just being here at all would have to be enough.

  Then Fisher put his hand on the side of my face and all doubt and uneasiness vanished. There had never been anything but this moment and this porch and the two of us.

  He smiled down at me. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  I nodded. The way he said it made it so he wasn’t asking to see me again, just telling me about something that would happen in the future. Tomorrow.

  We stood in the halo of the porch light, white moths beating their wings around us, leaving powdery streaks on his shirt. He leaned down and kissed me so fast it was like a race. His mouth was soft and warm. I went inside without looking back or saying anything else.

  Outside the cellar, time moved in ways that made it impossible to catch hold of. It was always slipping. Silence seemed the only trick I knew to keep the moment in one perfect piece, like a scene inside a snow globe. Exactly how it was.

  * * *

  Shiny was already asleep, curled in a ball with the covers pulled over her head. She’d left the lamp on for me.

  Under the sheets, I lay staring up at the sagging bedsprings, following the shape of the wires in the dark, tracing how they crossed under the mattress. I smiled to myself at the memory of Fisher’s mouth, near and surprising and hungry.

  I was just beginning to drift off when a sound close by pulled me back to wakefulness. All through the room, chimes were jingling. When I rolled over, though, no one was there.

  Then, I caught sight of the mirror.

  A woman was in the room with us, standing at the foot of the bed. Her face was pale in the dark. Where her eyes should be, there were only two hot circles of white, glaring light.

  I lay perfectly still, staring at her reflection. As I watched, she met my gaze in the mirror and raised a finger to her lips. I was looking at one of the Blackwood fiends, and she was looking right back at me.

  Then, from outside the open window, there was a huge commotion of screeching and squawking, so loud it seemed to be coming from directly by my ear.


  In an instant, the fiend was gone and Shiny was out of bed, groping around in the dark for her boots. I rolled out after her, stumbling along behind the sound of her footsteps.

  In the kitchen, she didn’t even slow down, just kicked open the door to the sideboard as she passed it and grabbed an old walnut-handled shotgun from inside, all in one movement. Then she flung open the back door with the gun in her hands and her hair flying everywhere, and went storming across the yard toward the chicken coop.

  I ran out after her through the yellow circle of the porch light, grass sticking to the soles of my feet, wet against my bare ankles.

  From the hen house, there was the soft, irregular sound of the door bumping against the frame in the breeze, but it wasn’t loud enough to cover the screeching that came from inside.

  Shiny went stalking up the path to the coop with the shotgun. In the dark, she was almost glowing.

  “Shiny!” I shouted it, not to stop her exactly, or to call her back, but because her skin was gleaming like a piece of hot iron and I knew I would never catch her. “What are you doing?”

  “Saving my goddamn chickens!”

  She came up to the shed and stopped with her feet planted wide on either side of the little dirt path, then flung back the door. Inside, the noise cut off. Then a huge, dark shape came bolting out past her.

  She swung the gun up and I heard the short, mechanical pull of her finger on the trigger, but nothing happened. I stood in the yard with my hands held near my ears, waiting for a boom that never came.

  The creature went thundering across the grass and Shiny moved with it, tracking the shadow along the barrel of the gun and swearing like fire, but under the words, she sounded scared.

  The thing bolted past me, ugly as sin, all hooves and tusks and a huge, humped back. In the light from the porch, I saw blood across its muzzle and tufts of feathers around its mouth. Then it was gone, lumbering away into the shadow of the trees.

  Shiny let the gun fall to her side. “What the hell was that?” she whispered. “Was that a razorback?”

  But both of us knew it hadn’t been any razorback. The thing was monstrous, too big, too mean and hungry. Too bloody.

  “Should we go after it?” I said, staring into the woods. “Maybe we can still catch up to it, kill it, and bury it before anyone else sees?”

  Shiny let out a long, shaky breath. Then she tucked the gun in the crook of her arm and squinted at me. “You are not seriously telling me you want a piece of that thing.”

  Wordlessly, I shook my head.

  Neither of us felt much better when we got inside the coop. Most of the chickens were okay, but two were dead, a few had their feathers ruffled like they’d been stuffed in a sack and shaken, and one was barely even twitching anymore.

  Shiny brought it out into the light by the back steps and laid it down, getting ready to cut its head off with her buck knife. She had a flat, grim look, the same as when she’d cut up the catfish, but I couldn’t tell if her set face meant she was tired or sad or just pissed off at the way of the world.

  I got down next to her to watch how she did it, but the chicken was still struggling and twitching. I didn’t want it to be afraid. When she raised the knife, I reached out and touched the bird’s feathers, running my fingers over the torn place in its neck.

  There was a mess of broken bones in its back, and I put my hands on its warm, shivering side. I could see the shape of its body better with my eyes closed, better than I had ever seen anything in my life. The vision was like the night I had touched Fisher’s back. I pressed my hands over the curve of the bird’s chest and squeezed very gently, letting the bones slide together and knit there, letting the blood move in and out of its small, perfect heart.

  After a second, the chicken struggled over and tried to get up.

  Shiny put down the knife and looked at me with her mouth open. “Clementine, what did you do?”

  The chicken lay flapping and kicking on the back steps.

  “You made that come back from the dead.”

  “No,” I said, still crouched with my heart beating hard, my hands out in front of me. “It wasn’t yet. I mean, maybe it was about to be, but the heart was still going. It wanted to stay alive.”

  We stood looking at it as it picked itself up, rumpled and wobbling from side to side.

  Shiny watched it straggle back to the coop, then turned and stared at me. Her eyes were burning with their strange, unpredictable heat, flickering under the porch light so she seemed to be lit from inside.

  “What?” I said finally when she just knelt there, not saying a word.

  “You,” she said. “I always thought that any Blackwood would be drawn to the dirt, just like Myloria and Aunt Magda and everyone else in the family, the same way brown eyes beat blue. I thought I was the special one and here you walk around every day, brimming over with fool’s light.”

  I shook my head at her, not knowing how to make sense of what she was saying.

  She let out a shaky laugh. “You’re like a little piece of the hollow, just walking around. I mean, craft like mine is pretty uncommon, but light is rare. Forget blue or brown, that’s like being born with mismatched eyes or something. It’s supposed to be the hardest one to work, but it’s got more power than all the others put together. It’s the one that winds them up and sets them going.”

  “You’re saying I’m like an engine for the reckoning.”

  “Not an engine,” Shiny said. “Maybe more like fuel.”

  Her voice was reassuring, like she was explaining to me how everything was all okay, but nothing could make the truth any better. I was still the force that had started the destruction.

  There was a part of me that had known—known my craft wasn’t anything like Shiny’s or Fisher’s, or even really like my mama’s, for all that I had memorized the names and the uses of plants. Since Fisher had taken me out of the cellar, every aspect of what I could do had been mysterious, hard to understand or anticipate. It should have been a relief to know the nature of it, to have it named, but I couldn’t think of anything but the horrible truth of what it meant.

  When I’d rested my hand on the dying chicken, I’d felt the beat of its heart, and then the light had come, not like it was coming from inside me, but just running through me like a pulse of electricity through a wire. It was huge and it was powerful, and it didn’t feel like mine at all.

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Shiny broke the shotgun and peered inside. “Goddamn it, Myloria—do you want us all to die of home invasion? She keeps taking the shells out.”

  She dragged a shoebox out from underneath the china cabinet and slammed it down on the table. Then she laid the gun across her lap, loading both barrels and snapping the action shut.

  I watched her, thinking maybe this was just how a person survived out in the Willows. But I couldn’t help thinking that Shiny’s life was littered with dead things.

  I picked up one of the shells, mystified at the way it floated in my hand. “It’s light.”

  Shiny nodded. “For general defense only. I get a bunch of spent shells from Roy Wallace at Spangler’s. He buys tricks off of me and Rae sometimes for favors, and one of the favors is, he saves all his cases for me and I load them up with rock salt. Not like it would do much damage, but it’ll scare off anything smaller than a bull and it’s cheaper than buckshot.”

  She was talking fast and sociable, like she was trying to distract me from everything I’d just learned. I was grateful to her for her trying, but it wasn’t much help, considering I wasn’t even sure how I felt.

  All evening, I’d been thinking I’d made my peace with the reckoning star. Maybe I still had.

  It was just a little harder now that I knew some points were built to take more blame than others.

  I ran my fingers over four shotgun shells that didn’t match
the rest. They were tucked in the corner of the box and the plastic part was green instead of red. I took one and hefted it. It felt like a regular shotgun shell. “These ones aren’t packed with salt, though.”

  Shiny reached over and snatched it back from me. “For emergencies,” she said, dropping it in the box. “Now, don’t touch them.”

  “Shiny,” I said, watching her load the gun with rock salt and put it back in the cupboard. “What happens when the bad stuff from the hollow gets all the way up to town? When that monster hog gets seen on some nice, quiet street, what then?”

  She didn’t answer right away.

  Then she looked up with wide, sober eyes. “They come for us.”

  The way she said it was like someone digging in for a war. Someone ready to fight any creature that came near her. Even in her own kitchen, out in the Willows, ten years and a crooked mile away from men with guns and gasoline, her skin seemed to glow hot.

  “How come your house didn’t burn to the ground like mine did?”

  I already had an idea. I just wanted to hear her say it, like hearing how powerful she was might make me feel less dangerous.

  She shrugged, but wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t know. I guess I stopped it.”

  “You were just little, though. How does a kid stop a house from burning?”

  She shook her head. “It was scary. When the reckoning hit, everything changed so fast. One second, I was just regular Shiny, hot-tempered and hot-blooded. The next, it was like I was made of white, powdery ash or something. That’s what I mean about the hollow. The light from the hollow touches stuff, and when it does, there’s no stopping it.”

  “It lit something in you?”

  She nodded. “It was all through my veins and in my skin, and I just knew that with the fire in me, I could walk through a flame and not be hurt.”

  “But you couldn’t save the house?”

  She shook her head. “I was barely strong enough to keep it out of the kitchen. And then the fire went down, and that was worse, because in a minute they were going to come in and when they saw we hadn’t burned, they were going to take care of it themselves.”