Isola only sat at the end of the table, the cut-glass window behind her. Her hair looked terribly thin with the light shining through it, brittle and crunchy like spun sugar. Finally, she looked up.
“You and your cousin were born too late for this place,” she said. “Back in the day, the old kind were welcome in the town as any normal folks. Oh, but we had a wild time when we were coming up.”
“You and Emmaline Blackwood. You and my grandmother.”
Isola nodded. “This town wasn’t always the sick little armpit you see now, and not so hateful when it came to having dealings with the old kind.”
“Fiends, you mean.”
Isola’s smile was thin and hard. “Sure, but folks don’t usually go around naming themselves an ugly name. That’s for other people to do for them.”
“But the town—you’re talking about a time when the . . . old kind lived here like regular people?”
“No,” she said. “But they came and went as they pleased, and they took care of it like it was their own. And back then, maybe it was.”
The idea was too incredible to think of though. It seemed impossible that a place could change so much and so badly. That people like me and Shiny could be hated for things our grandparents and great-grandparents had done by people who didn’t even seem so much better.
“What can you tell me about Greg Heintz?”
Isola snorted. “The things I know about Greg Heintz would make your hair curl.”
Her eyes flashed dark and wicked, leaving a shimmery feeling in my head. I understood that I was seeing just a glimpse of her power, seeing into her store of secrets. She was the one who knew all the dirtiest games in town, knew every scandal and lie and whisper.
“Greg was a mean creature,” Isola said. “Even as a boy. And when he was grown, he got to going around with some sort of creek fiend. I think he thought he was going to start himself a powerful crooked family, just like in the old days, but she was what she was—too wicked and too wild—and he got his heart broke.”
The way she said it was self-satisfied and I nodded, but I was picturing wicked and wild. I was picturing the pure opposite of Davenport and her pale, see-through skin. Her woeful, shining eyes.
“Any other, they would have just gone on by, but not Greg. When his girl out-the-creek was through with him, well, he let it be known that he was not through with her. No one had heard a peep from the coalition in thirty years, but next thing anybody knows, he’s handing out tracts and calling meetings. Going around grilling people about their family trees, and what do you know but there are some around here just young enough and dumb enough to join up.”
“There were enough people to start a whole coalition, just because one man said so?”
Isola laughed, a dry, ugly sound. “There always are.”
“Underneath that, he was so crooked, though. Fisher told me Greg’s been taking stuff out of the hollow for years and selling it. I saw a craft shack back in the woods on his property. It was all full of fool’s light, all going to rot.”
Isola nodded. “There’s nothing like someone that’s angry and afraid for being a hypocrite.”
It seemed to me, though, that Hoax County was a whole place of hypocrites, full to the top with hate and fear and loss.
“And what can you tell me about Davenport?”
Isola scowled and pressed her lips together. Then she set down her rolling pin and looked me square in the face. “Why do you want to know it?”
I stood at the head of the table, trying not to come undone, but my hands kept shaking. They kept wanting to go into fists. “Because an hour ago, I saw her murder Greg Heintz by some kind of magic.”
Out in the road, a gun went off with a sound like the very sky was breaking in two, and someone screamed, but I was scared to go to the window and look. I was sure that if I did, I would see every savagery and horror from the hollow come to life out in the world.
Isola stared back at me with her mouth mean and her eyebrows raised. “Then it looks to me like he made his bed. What do you say about that?”
“I say I need to know exactly what bed this was.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t a good one. “The kind of bed that’s a long time coming.”
“When the creek fiend left him, that was a good thing, right? It should have been the end?”
Isola nodded heavily. “Imagine how my jaw fell when I heard that that little shitweasel had got himself a baby, left on the steps like a bag of flour. Who knows—it’s possible that his creek-girl brought him that child willingly, thinking it would persuade him to leave her be. More likely, he just went down in the hollow and took it from her as his way of making her sorry.”
“But Davenport—why didn’t you save her, Isola?”
Isola looked back at me, and her eyes were dark and dry and furious. “Because it wasn’t my business what that man did in his own house, raising his own child!”
Outside, the sky was dark and livid as a bruise.
I threw my head back, belting out a huge, shrieking laugh at the absolute cruelty of it all. “Everything is your business!”
Isola stared at me like I’d slapped her across the face. “You can’t,” she said finally. “Try all you want, but you can’t save everyone, and even the times you get it right, they’ll hate you for it.”
The way she said it was mean and sad, bitter as horehound.
“Fisher doesn’t hate you,” I said, because her eyes were bright with trouble, and it was the truth. The truth in his thundering rages was that he loved her every minute of every day, even when he was deep at war with her. Even standing in the room where he’d been trapped.
“Well, he should,” she said. “I tried to do right by him, but his mama brought him back here when she didn’t want him weighing her down no more—after I had said and said how he couldn’t be raised here as long as all you girls were around, and what was I supposed to do with him then? But I couldn’t turn him away.” She looked away, shaking her head. “Not even after the reckoning began and the whole world began to slide, I couldn’t put him out. He was my flesh and blood.”
“Is that how come you locked him up in the attic?”
Isola drummed her fingers on the table and looked away. “They would have taken and left him for dead in the hollow. Or else, more likely just dragged him out in the yard and ended him right there.”
I wanted to reach for her hand and cover it in mine, but something in her face stopped me. “Was that really the only way to stop them? Fisher’s so strong, and you’re a regular . . . witch.”
Isola shook her head. “I might have a drop or two of the old blood in me, but it’s breath—weakest and most wanting of all the humors—and I was an old woman even then. And he was just a little thing, most of his powers still laying quiet, and not the big troublesome creature he is now.”
The catch in her voice made me think of the photo albums put away upstairs in a secret room, stories of a secret life. The truth was clear in her stooped shoulders. She had never once considered him a troublesome creature.
“That was Fisher’s hair in my trickbag, though, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “I had to bind you to someone free in the world so the trick would take. He was the clear choice. Dirt’s powerful kindling for a trick. It can give and give and give. But Lord knows I didn’t think it would mean him getting an itch to dig you out!”
“You didn’t feel guilty, using your own grandson for fuel?”
“Someone had to be put away, and if your mama hadn’t offered you up, it would have been him. As long as one of you five was put by, the light from the hollow would sleep.”
I shook my head, horrified at how she could talk about a person like some heirloom dish or china figure. “Why, though? Why save me? You could have just let them burn me and it would have been over. Why not me? You let my
mother die.” The last part came out raw and shaky, but I looked at her straight on.
“The deal I made with your mama was one that eats me up to this day.” The way she said it sounded too brisk and careless to mean much, but her face was dark and I believed her.
“Then why? You didn’t have to. You could have said no.”
“I could have, but the upshot would have been no better, and there’s still some of us that believe it’s a regular sin to let a child die. The choice was no choice at all. She loved you, God bless her. She knew what she was asking.”
The way Isola said it made something go tight in my throat. It was painful to be sitting there in the kitchen with someone who remembered that once, I had belonged to someone, belonged to love and home and family, and could say so with absolute certainty.
“Couldn’t you do anything to save her, though?”
Isola shook her head. “I did everything I knew. I helped her hide you and did every trick I had to keep you safe. They burned her out, though, and then when that was done, they went on down to your aunt’s. I did everything to stop it. The reason you got your life is that I know how to make a trick, and the reason they stopped is ’cause after you were put away, the reckoning went quiet, and I went down there and told them to go home. But the reason your aunt’s house is still standing is thanks to a lot more than me. Your cousin has a powerful way with fire when she feels like it.”
I nodded. “And we’re more powerful than ever now—that’s something, isn’t it? The reckoning star might be what’s tearing up the town, but it works both ways, I think. We’re stronger than we’ve ever been, and so I need you to tell me how to stop it now.”
“They way I see it, you got two choices.” The brittle crack of Isola’s voice made something in me go cold. “Either you work between you to fix the trouble filling up this town, or one of you has got to die.”
The way she said it was heavy, full of resignation, and the breath all went out of me. The five of us were young. We were wild and uncertain and just kids. I wasn’t ready to go back in the ground.
Isola was looking at her hands. The way her skin crinkled around her mouth was mean and bitter. She didn’t say anything else.
We were still sitting in silence when the kitchen door banged open. Fisher stood in the doorway, looking windblown. There was blood on his shirt and fallen leaves in his hair.
“What are you doing here?” he said, and his voice was tight.
I stared back at him. “I had to see Isola. What happened? Is everything all right?”
He shook his head. “I was just down at Carter’s Garage, and no one there is listening to any sort of reason. They’re getting ready to go down to the Willows—Mike and them. I tried talking to them, but they didn’t hear it. They’ve got a lot of gasoline.”
UNEARTHLY
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We left the house at a run, Isola shuffling out onto the porch after us. Her arms were folded and her face was troubled but she didn’t try to stop us.
As we crossed the yard to Fisher’s car, something white drifted in front of my face. It fell like snow, but the air was warm, swirling with a hot updraft.
“It’s ash,” I whispered, holding out my hands to the awful dust falling all around me. “The sky is burning.”
I understood suddenly that for as long as Shiny had been trying to explain, I’d been wrong about the reckoning. In my head, it was ugly fish and plants that grew too wild and too fast. Now that Davenport had woken up her craft, now that it was the five of us, all those things were so small—just the little daily vagaries of the hollow—and there was a world of difference between the hollow and the reckoning.
We drove through town, holding hands across the gearbox the whole way. It was like something sweethearts did, but I couldn’t help thinking that how I was holding on to him was not like a sweetheart, but like a drowner. Like I was scared someone was going to try and rip him away from me.
The clouds were huge and almost green. The wind was up, making the trees along Broom Street toss and thrash. The whole place had taken on a strange, eerie light.
The streets were mostly empty, people barricaded in their houses, the black muzzles of rifles and shotguns the only thing that showed between the blinds. Now and then, we passed signs that something terrible was happening. A bloody square of sidewalk. A house that had gone completely to brambles and kudzu vines in less than an hour. The reckoning was lunatic and it was everywhere.
We drove too fast for town, passing handfuls of trucks and off-roaders and every one of them headed out toward the Crooked Mile.
“They’re going down to the Willows,” I said. “We have to get there before they do—otherwise they’ll . . .”
Fisher nodded once, without looking at me. Then he whipped the Trans Am around in the middle of the road.
“What are you doing?”
“We’ll go out on Main and then cut down through Beekman’s back acreage, just as long as the farm road isn’t still underwater.”
The south end of town was completely empty, quiet as a grave.
As we watched, the sky turned black in a long plume all the way down toward the hollow. The wind picked up, tearing the banners off the buildings, sending them flapping across the empty street like huge, ungainly bats. The storefronts were left naked, their windows dark like jagged, empty sockets.
At the edge of town, the fair stood eerie and deserted. One of the midway booths was standing empty in the street, bloody and covered in handprints. The windows of Spangler’s were broken out, and some black bat-winged creature lay slumped over one of the frames, half in and half out. Glass lay in a glittery spill all over the sidewalk.
We rolled through the fair, everything still and empty as the end of the world.
The swings turned gently by themselves. The lights on the carousel had all gone dark. Over the roofs of the abandoned buildings, the sky was an oily black, swirling slick and ominous.
Only a few days before, Fisher and I had ridden these same swings while the speakers played old country songs and the only thing on my mind had been how he might kiss me before the night was through. Now everything was ruined.
We left Main at a dirt turn that was marked by nothing but a fencepost and cut down through the pastureland on a little tractor road that was barely a road at all, just dirt and gravel and deep wheel ruts. Fisher drove it like a maniac, plowing along through the hay and out onto the Crooked Mile.
Out the back window of the Trans Am, I could see the line of trucks as it wound down into the Willows—a long way off, but getting closer. They were taking the road slower than Fisher, and for good reason.
The town had been bad enough, but the Willows was turning monstrous. The creek wound black all through the lowlands now. Tree roots crept up from the ground like clutching fingers, snaking across the road.
At the Heintzes’ place, the gate was torn half off its hinges and far off, behind the house, I could see flames out in the birch wood. The whole countryside seemed to flash and flicker like the very air was burning. I didn’t see Davenport anywhere.
We drove on, toward Myloria’s, and as soon as we pulled up to the house, I was out of the car, running up the front steps.
I tore through to the back of the house, looking for my family, for anyone. Shiny and Rae were in the kitchen, scraping together all the sharpest things from the drawers, and locking all the windows.
“The coalition’s coming,” I said. “We saw them on the road, and Shiny, there are a lot of them.”
The words gave me a tight, choking feeling in my throat, but Shiny just nodded. Her face was terrible and beautiful. She yanked open the side door of the china cabinet, reaching for the shotgun and the shoebox, fingers sliding past the rock salt loads to the real shells.
She had the gun laid across the table and was loading it when the silence was
broken by the rumble of an engine. The only person who’d driven up that driveway—maybe in years— was Fisher, and now a whole chorus of engines sounded, rusty and uneven, metallic clangs and doors slamming.
“Myloria Blackwood,” someone called from the yard. It was a man’s voice, twangy and nasal.
We went to the window and peered between the curtains. A bunch of men stood in the yard, holding shotguns and rifles and wooden bats. They had their hats pulled low over their eyes, but when I looked closer, I saw they were mostly young, and some were still only boys.
Mike Faraday was there, along with the rest of the in-town crowd who ran around with Fisher. The Maddox brothers stood side by side near the back, hair standing up like they’d walked out of a blast furnace. Luke was holding a pickax, and Cody had a kaiser blade in each hand. Behind them on the road, I could see a parade of headlights, getting closer.
Fisher moved behind me, shaking his head. “Shit,” he muttered, peering out the window into the yard. “Shit.”
“What is it? What’s happening?” Myloria had come up behind us, her flannel shirt slipping off her shoulder and her hands stained purple with some kind of ink. She looked wild.
Shiny didn’t glance around. “That asshole Faraday and his hick friends are here.”
“Then this is the end,” Myloria whispered, sinking down onto the floor with a thin little gasp, clutching at the curtains and nearly bringing the rod down with her. “They’ve come for us.”
The yard got very still. There was no answer but the grim metallic sound of someone hauling something heavy out of the bed of a truck. Shiny stood in the kitchen with her shotgun, a butcher knife held in her other hand like a sword. Myloria was making a thin, moaning sound.
“Myloria,” Shiny said sharply, standing over her. “Maybe you’re ready to roll over. Maybe you are fine and good to just sit there and wail about the world ending and wring your hands. Maybe you’re all set to do exactly what you did the last time this shit got stirred up and these assholes came out here. But not me.”