Fiendish

  We got her arranged, then took turns pulling the johnboat along by its rope while the others pushed. The whole production was the strangest thing, the three of us wading through the trees, leading the boat between us, and the creek fiend lay in the bottom, still and peaceful and sad.

  When we reached the back edge of the birches, where the woods opened out into the bottom of the hollow, we dragged the boat up the hill. The ground was still muddy there, but out of reach of the water.

  Once we’d got the boat above the creek, Shiny straightened and popped her neck. “We should get her ready,” she said softly, looking down at the boat. “For her funeral.”

  Shiny and I sat with the johnboat between us, picking twigs and leaves from the fiend’s hair. In the knotted tangle behind one of her ears, I found a beetle, black and squirming. I pulled it loose and threw it into the weeds.

  Rae held the fiend’s head in her lap, working at the tangles with Shiny’s comb.

  “I feel like we should maybe have a prayer,” Shiny said. “Or sing, or something.”

  I looked down at the body between us. Her face was strange and delicate. “What song?”

  “I don’t know. A hymn maybe?”

  But I didn’t know the words to any hymns. The only song I could think of was Clementine, and since the words were all about drowning, it didn’t seem right.

  Before either of us could pick something, though, Rae began to sing softly, almost to herself. The song was “Shall We Gather at the River.” The sound of her voice was clear and sweet, ringing through the trees.

  Shiny was bent over the boat, fishing around in the pockets of her shorts. She pulled out a spool of ribbon and began to unwind it.

  The ribbon was printed in a faded cabbage rose pattern, and she cut a length off with her folding knife. Then she got down on her knees and set about braiding the ribbon into the fiend’s wet hair. Then Rae and I did the same.

  I didn’t ask what we were doing it for, but Shiny answered anyway. “For safe passage,” she said. “So on the other side, they know that she had people.”

  Afterward, we dragged her up to the top of the little hill, leaving a wide gouge where the bottom of the boat cut through the muddy ground.

  The graveyard was barely even a yard at all, just a tiny clearing in the trees, dotted with leaning headstones and full of weeds. The graves were untended, some so old that the ground had started to sink, reminding you that there were bodies buried there.

  We stepped inside, dragging the boat behind us, the bottom scraping against stones.

  The ground was damp and rocky, and witchgrass grew in coarse tufts. I wound my way through the rows of graves until I came to one that was newer than the rest, sunken and weathered but without a crust of lichen and moss. The stone said:

  MAGDA MARIE DEVORE

  SISTER, MOTHER, FRIEND

  I stood in the weeds, looking at it—the last evidence of my mama.

  The sight was like a slap in the face and suddenly, I remembered. I remembered everything.

  The night and the men and the voices, but more than that, I remembered hands grabbing me from my bed, leading me down into the cellar, and the tight, painful grip of fingernails digging into my wrist.

  Hold still, the voice had said, and now it had a face. Bright black eyes shining in the dark of the cellar—Isola standing over me, pinning the trickbag in my collar and then taking out a needle. My mother behind her, crumpled and sad.

  After that, though, the memory stayed white. No sting as the needle went through, no pain. Just a blank sheet that spread all the way to the corners of the world, eating up time in huge, hungry bites.

  I wanted so much to sink down in the dirt and cry. To be heartbroken, standing over my mother’s grave. I knew it was what I was supposed to do, but it had been so long. The wound was a deep one, but old and knotted. Full of scar tissue.

  “Hey,” called Shiny behind me. “Hey, he’s got the hole dug over by the—oh.” She said it softly, coming up to stand beside me.

  I only nodded, raking my hands through my hair and turning my back on the headstone.

  Fisher was already gone, farther into the hollow or else home, or just somewhere the three of us couldn’t wind up his craft anymore. He’d left a long, narrow hole in the corner of the graveyard, flanked by a mound of weedy dirt, shallower than I liked, but it would have to do. It seemed awful to just dump her into the ground like that, without a service or a coffin, but we bent and dragged her out of the boat. The ground left smears of dirt on her wet legs, and caked on her bare feet.

  I stood at the edge of the pair of graves, looking down at her. “Is this how they buried my mother?”

  Shiny turned on me, wild and fierce as ever. “We buried your mother. And we did it in the evening, with songs and flowers, and we said a prayer. There wasn’t a preacher, but goddamn it, Clementine, it was a real funeral, and it was a good one.”

  I nodded, looking down at the fiend. “This one should be a good one too.”

  We covered her, taking turns with the shovel. Shiny was the fastest, working like a demon, and I was pretty sure she would have done it all, but it seemed better to split the work between the three of us, so that we each had a hand in it.

  When the grave was filled, we stood over it, not speaking. After a time, Shiny reached out and took my hand, twining her fingers through mine.

  We stood in a huddle over the grave of a stranger, in the back of a small, secret graveyard, surrounded by all the old families—crooked families, fiend families. My family.

  BLACK WATER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  By the time we started home, the clouds were coming in.

  All three of us were exhausted, covered in dirt, and none of us were talking. I was lost, stuck deep in the knowing that Isola had done this to me. She had taken me down into the cellar and left me there to disappear, to rot and shrivel and be forgotten. The idea was black and hateful, even for Isola, but the thing that made it so much worse was that my mama had let her. My mama had stood by and watched as Isola put me away. Her pale, frightened face had been the last thing I’d seen, and I went over the memory again and again, turning it in my head, trying pry it open. No matter how closely I examined it though, nothing would come clearer. My mother and Isola had put me in the cellar, and the memory was only what it was.

  Out on the Crooked Mile, Shiny strode past the driveway that led up to the Heintz place, swinging her shovel and heading for home, but Rae pulled her sweater tight around herself and said, “I don’t know, but I think we should see about stopping by to check on Davenport.”

  The way she said it was light, overly casual, like we were just stopping by to be neighborly. It was not like the way a person would stop by to make sure someone was doing all right since we’d last seen her. To make sure her father hadn’t done something violent to her in the few hours since we’d left her.

  We came up the driveway, dragging our tools. Greg Heintz’s red truck was pulled up crookedly by the porch, with the driver’s side hanging open and the engine running, and for a minute, that was the only thing I could get my head around, it was so eerie and strange.

  Then we saw something so much stranger and so much worse that we all just stopped, watching the scene unfold with a cold, unearthly horror.

  Davenport was standing in the dooryard, slump-shouldered and windswept.

  Her father lay in the dirt at her feet, and everything about him was and would be and could be nothing else but terrible.

  “Oh, God,” said Shiny, grabbing my arm and squeezing hard. “You think he’s having a heart attack?”

  But whatever had afflicted Greg Heintz was no heart attack. He lay on his back, water gushing from his mouth, pooling around his head while Davenport stood over him, her arms limp at her sides and tears streaming down her face.

  The water was everywhere. I
t seemed to seep straight from his hair and his clothes, washing across the ground in a pool.

  I tore loose from Shiny and ran across the yard. The water was coming too fast and unforgiving to stop it, but I got down next to him anyway, trying to roll him over on his side to keep him from choking on the flood that was filling up his mouth. He only gasped like a stranded fish. I could hear a deep rattle in his chest and knew that he was already dying.

  Davenport stood over us, slack and wordless.

  The sky was nearly black behind her as she watched—me in my soaked dress and her father on the ground. She looked into his empty, blue-lipped face. His eyes were open, but the light behind them was gone. His chest stopped moving and he only stared at the gathering clouds.

  “Davenport,” I whispered, still cradling the back of Mr. Heintz’s neck and knowing, knowing with a slow, dumb hopelessness, that there was nothing I could do to help him. “What happened?”

  But I understood that this was the creek. The craft was in her blood, and now it was working through her, filling up her daddy’s lungs even as she stood over me, tears dripping off her chin.

  “Don’t you look at me like that.” Her hand was against her mouth. “He was ready to kill me, and I did what I had to.”

  The note in her voice was like steel, and cold to the bone.

  As soon as I reached out to her, though, her face crumpled. She flung my hand away, then turned and bolted for the house. The door slammed, and then came the sound of Davenport shooting the bolt. I wanted, more than anything, to run after her, try to find out just what had happened, but I couldn’t see how the answer mattered in the end. Mr. Heintz was already gone.

  I laid his head gently on the ground and stood up, trying to wipe my hands dry on my dress. It felt wrong to leave him lying in the dirt with the pool spreading around him, but there was nothing else to do for him.

  Shiny and Rae were standing back by the gate looking shaky and stunned, so I folded his hands on his chest and left him.

  * * *

  At home, we went around back to where Rae had left her bike, but she didn’t make any move to leave. None of us knew what do next.

  Shiny sat down on the back steps, staring out at the pasture. “I didn’t think a person could be down-hollow, in secret,” she said, after a minute. “I didn’t think it was possible to be anything without everybody and their brother knowing.”

  And it was true that no one ever let her forget it. And even when Fisher pretended a story that his grandmother had been telling the whole town since he was kid, everybody still knew, even if they didn’t like to admit it. It was the kind of secret that about a hundred people were all busy keeping.

  Rae was looking thoughtful though, shaking her head. “That’s only ’cause you don’t listen to any sort of trashy stories,” she said. “But people still tell them.”

  “Stories about what?” I said.

  “About Greg Heintz. Like that he had a real taste for the hollow and liked to get at the fiends down there. That his family was an old creek-born family and so he liked the creek fiends best of all.” Rae’s voice was icy. “And when Davenport was born and he was living alone out here with a new baby and couldn’t say exactly who her mama was, well everybody assumed things. Stories like that. Like nice people don’t listen to.”

  “So she’s been living low this whole time,” I said. “She’s been covering for herself, and he’s been covering for her too.”

  Rae nodded. “And now look at her. Just as wild as anything they got down in the hollow. The creek is a big kind of craft, and goddamn but it’s getting away from her.”

  “Because of me,” I said, seeing Greg Heintz and his blue, swollen face every time I closed my eyes. “I’m the one who did it to her. Just by being here, I made her into something dangerous. She’s too powerful to hold it in, and it’s all because of me.”

  Rae didn’t answer right away. Her eyes were narrowed and she was biting her lip, shaking her head in a slow, considering way. “Maybe, yeah—maybe it came from you at first, but not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe your being here is why Shiny’s been so ornery lately and Eric Fisher can’t get a handle on his urge to overgrow the county, but you are not why Greg Heintz is dead, okay?”

  “How do you know?”

  Rae pursed her lips. “He killed a fiend and left her lying out in the creek, seeping craft everyplace! He treated his own daughter like shit for her whole life, and now that she’s come into some power, you think bygones are bygones? Creek is all feelings, Clementine, and he didn’t drown up there because of how much she wanted to give him a hug. So yeah, maybe you’re the pointiest point on the star—maybe that’s true. But he didn’t die because of you. He’s been messing around with all the wrong things, pulling craft out of the hollow for ages and look what it finally—”

  She broke off though, looking behind me, watching something that made her voice die and her eyes go wide.

  I turned with an ache in my chest, knowing that whatever I was about to see, it could be nothing good.

  At the edge of the field, the creek ran high and dark, slopping over its banks, too black to be normal. Too black to be water. It had changed in a matter of minutes.

  As we watched, a huge shape rose toward the surface. When it broke through, we all gasped. The fin broke first, then the tail with spines that stood a foot above the water. The thing was bigger than the biggest catfish, bigger than a rowboat or a bull, bigger even than Shiny’s truck. It seemed to fill the creek, rising up from nothing, and then the head broke, and I saw the gleaming horror of its face.

  It was slimy and flat-nosed, its skin gray-green and its mouth a huge, hungry gash evil with teeth, its eyes like lanterns, glowing yellow-green in the afternoon light.

  Shiny screamed, a sharp, short little scream that echoed across the yard and then cut off, but I just stood with a hand against my mouth, afraid to breathe or look away. Rae was huddled against me with her hands clasped under her chin and her whole body shaking.

  “What was that?” she whispered, her voice sounding thin and high-pitched.

  Shiny answered in a flat, faraway voice. “Does it matter?”

  Off in the distance, the sky had started to turn colors, and they were all the wrong kind—blacks and greens and poison.

  “What are we going to do?” I whispered.

  Shiny was standing perfectly still, the way she got when the feeling inside her was so powerful she might explode if she dared to move. “I don’t think we have a lot of time. If it’s the same upstream, the coalition is going to be coming down here, and I think this time, they’ll burn the whole Willows to the ground.”

  I looked up. The clouds overhead were dark as thunder and there was only one person who might have any idea what to do.

  PART V

  LIGHT

  BAD MAGIC

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I ran.

  All around me, things were moving in the tall grass, and the sky overhead was darkening. I didn’t want to leave the road, but it was faster to cut straight through the fields and so I did, plowing through the empty pastures and the trees.

  I ran full out, crashing through the weeds, jumping the ditch that butted up against Foxhill Road. From the top of the hill, I could see lines of trucks, pulling out of the long farm driveways and onto the blacktop.

  The sun was still shining in places, yellow and watery through the clouds, but they all had their headlights on. The lights looked like giant pairs of pale, staring eyes.

  The sight of them all together nearly made my heart stop, but then I saw they were all headed into town, full of men with toolboxes and stacks of boards. I still had time.

  In town, I walked tense and fast, not daring to look around in case any of them saw me, saw my face and decided I was someone worth dealing with
. But they were all deep in their own tasks and no one said a word to me. The wind was ripping through the streets and everyone I passed was busy with the shops, taping over the windows and tying down the awnings.

  By the time I got to the Fisher house, I was shaking and out of breath, covered in scrapes and fallen leaves.

  “Isola!” I shouted, slamming into the kitchen. My voice sounded rageful and raw, like someone else screaming.

  She was at the table, rolling out a pie crust like the world wasn’t falling apart in one big smear outside her window.

  She looked up, hands covered in flour. “And there’s a fine way to invite yourself in.”

  I stood at the head of the table, looking at her across the spread of flour and pastry and all the little homey things. “The reckoning is here,” I said. “You know what that means for us out in the Willows—I know you do. I know it was you that buried me alive.”

  There was a minute where I thought her blank eyes meant she didn’t understand a word I’d said.

  She gazed at me with her cool stare and her thin, ruinous mouth. “And kept you alive, too. For all the good it did. And here you are again like a bad penny, out in the world to wreck everything.”

  The way she looked at me was black with blame, and I understood it, but in my heart, I knew she was wrong. I was not a person who broke things. I was the one who found ways to fix things, the one who wanted to see things mended.

  “I didn’t do this, Isola. But in another minute, it won’t matter. Shiny says they’ll come for us, because at the reckoning, it’s what they do. They’ll drive us out or kill us if you don’t tell me how to stop it!”

  Outside, the wind was buffeting the house, making harsh, hungry noises that I’d never heard a wind make. Someone’s freshly washed day dress flew against the window, one clothespin still clinging to the shoulder. The dress stayed for a second before peeling off again and flapping away across the yard. I could hear the steady rumble of the storm, and under that, another sound. A low, foreboding sound, like something waking up.