Fiendish

  I got up too and buttoned myself into another of the ancient dresses. I’d have rather had some pants, but there were none in the box. I considered seeing if I could borrow some of Shiny’s, but it didn’t take more than a glance to know that all her things were likely to be too tall and too skinny.

  I sat on the bed, looking at the chimes that covered the walls and dangled above us, still now, in the quiet room.

  “What are these for?” I said, reaching to touch a tin star that hung with a whole galaxy of other tin stars. “Don’t they belong outside?”

  Shiny set down her brush, but didn’t turn around. Her voice was strange and flat. “They’re supposed to make noise if any kind of demon or spirit walks through.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  But I was remembering the way they’d jingled softly the night before, light and cheery, like someone was in the room waiting for me. Like they were welcoming me home.

  Shiny shrugged. “Every old family’s supposed to have a fiend that wanders through the house once in a while to check on them. Whoever was their first link between their craft and the regular world. The Blackwoods are so deep in relations with fiends, though, we’ve probably got more like eighty.”

  “If they’re supposed to watch over us, why bother with all the chimes?”

  She leaned over the dresser, examining herself in the foggy mirror. She twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head, then let it fall again. “Because if someone’s going to be wandering around in my house, I want to know they’re coming. So. Did you have a good time ditching me for Eric Fisher?”

  “He’s not as bad as you keep acting like.”

  Shiny rolled her eyes like I’d said something so backward it hurt. “Don’t even give me that. He’s ten times worse than any of those raging assholes he hangs around with.”

  “Really,” I said, in a voice meant to show just how unconvinced I was. “You think Fisher is so much worse than someone like Mike Faraday.”

  “Mike and them, they’re just doing how they’ve always done, being ugly like they always have. But Fisher? He goes around pretending he’s just like them, so redneck and regular. He tries to act so ordinary in town, like he belongs there, but his family is just full of the old blood, and he’s as wild as they come, always running off to Wixby Hollow. And no one even gets after him for it! They pretend like it’s not even true.”

  For a second, I just stared at her.

  It was commonly held that every piece of craft in Hoax County came from down in the hollow. It was supposed to be a wild place, full of strange plants and hell dogs and fiends with glowing eyes and more power than a person could even properly conceive of—foreign things, bound by the hollow like creatures in a book, or else bound to the families that served them. The hollow drank its craft from them, and all the old families got theirs from the hollow.

  But even though the mouth of it was directly behind my mama’s house, I had never been there. My mama was happy enough to use the plants that grew there to make tonics and medicines, but she was scared of the animals and of the fiends, and had never let me go past the fence that divided our backyard from our neighbor Harlan Beekman’s pasture.

  I turned to face the mirror, working my fingers through my tangled hair, already knowing I was never going be able to do a thing about it. “Now you’re just telling stories at me—he cannot be going down there.”

  Shiny was putting on her eyeliner now, drawing a hard purple smear along the base of her lashes and waving around her free hand the way people did when they were spouting gossip. “He can and does. Anyway, he’s just as crooked as the rest of us, and everybody knows it. Everybody knows that’s why his parents got out of town.”

  “What does that mean, got out of town?”

  “Just that Randall Fisher got married to one of the Wallace sisters—Marcy, I think—and they had Eric, and then one day, they ran off. Spirited him away to Alabama or somewhere, and no one hears a word. Then one August, she comes slinking back alone in the middle of the night and leaves Fisher with his grandma. He was about nine, I think, and it was the biggest scandal in years. Them running off was bad enough, and Isola was about ready to just blame the whole thing on a bad gambling debt or something—save face and pretend none of it ever happened, and then his mom brought him back, and him being how he is? I mean, no wonder Isola hates him.”

  I nodded, thinking of how careful he’d been to seem plain and regular in front of his friends. “So, you’re saying he’s like Mama and Myloria then?”

  “Oh, no way. The things people say about him, his craft is the real deal—none of this powders-and-pills bullshit that the Blackwoods are so in love with, but full-on, to-the-hilt magic.” Shiny was brushing her hair with a vengeance again. “Anyway, now he goes around acting like the prince of Hoax County. Like being left on his grandma’s doorstep is something so great. Whatever,” she said, making a thin, purposeful line with her mouth. “That boy is the devil.”

  “Well, I’m going to kiss him.”

  It was the kind of thing she used to say about boys when we were little, sitting out under the apple tree in a tent made out of sheets. She’d say, “I’m going to kiss Andy Buckner,” or whoever, and then she’d slap her hands over her mouth and we’d both laugh like crazy people, and sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t, but the thrill was all in the saying it.

  Instead of laughing, though, she just put her hands on her hips and looked at me, this long, judging look that said my store of common sense was about what she’d figured. “Clementine.”

  “What?”

  Shiny sighed. “You can’t just go around deciding to kiss boys. You have to be smart about stuff like that. You have to make them work for it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because . . . because.” Her eyes flashed, and I remembered all the ways we’d been like best friends, but now none of that was evident in her face, and it was like I didn’t even know her.

  Suddenly, I had a clear recollection of my mother’s voice, low and singsong, making a game of it once when Shiny was having one of her bad spells. There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid.

  I sat on the bed and looked up at her, trying to figure out the thing that had changed since last night. “Why are you being so mean today?”

  Shiny glared at me. “Because you ditched me! I’m your family, and he’s just some down-hollow creep who likes to pretend so hard that he’s not. He’s nothing to you.”

  It bewildered me that she could say that like it was some kind of fact. How you went about knowing if a person was something to you. I couldn’t help the way I wanted to stand close to him. I couldn’t help that when I closed my eyes, I sometimes saw the world through someone else’s, or that it was like he found me even before he came to find me.

  I slumped against the wall, remembering the dark silence of the cellar, and suddenly, even the tiny room seemed like too much, because my hair was tangled and there were blisters on my pinkie toes from Shiny’s sneakers, and I was so ungodly hungry.

  “Will there be breakfast?” I said finally, scooting up to the edge of the bed.

  Shiny sighed and sat down next to me. “Probably not. Myloria isn’t really bothered about things like that—food and clothing and keeping things clean.”

  Even just saying it seemed to take the fire out of her, and we sat side by side, daunted by the empty kitchen and my fascination with a boy whom Shiny believed to be everything wrong in the world.

  “We could go down to the creek,” she said finally. “See if we can catch some bass or catfish.”

  I nodded, but I was not entirely optimistic. We’d played at fishing when we were little, tying lines onto crooked sticks and letting the ends dangle in the water, but it wasn’t like w
e’d ever caught anything.

  Shiny was already heading toward the door. “Come on, we’ll drop in over one of the lower bridges by the county line. The holes are really deep there and the channel cats come in close during the day.”

  In the front hall, she took down an old-fashioned fishing basket that had clearly seen better days. The bottom looked like it might fall out at any second.

  Outside, she got down on her hands and knees, feeling around under the front steps. She pulled out a plastic margarine tub and I watched with interest as she tucked it into the basket. Then she got up from the ground and led me around the side of the barn.

  A truck was sitting in the grass behind the hay crib. It was very old and very rusty and very white and green, with a big bald spot on the hood where the paint was fading off. Shiny slipped into the barn and came back carrying a gas can. She popped the cap and slopped some into the truck tank. She did it fast, with her foot propped on the tire and her shoulder braced.

  I watched her wrestle with the can, balancing it on top of one knee. “Can’t you just go into town and fill up at the pump? I know Carter’s has a pump.”

  Shiny flipped the gas cap closed and set the can in the bed of the truck. “I am not going to waste a single dime on fuel just to burn it up on my way back out to this hellhole. I buy a couple gallons, take it home, and just pour it when I need it.”

  When the gas was in the tank and the fishing gear was in the bed, she opened the driver’s side and hopped in. Seeing her sitting up there in the cab was like seeing a wish come true, but something in my throat hurt anyway.

  We had talked about this, made up stories about it, but now that it was here, it just made something ache in my chest. I’d missed so many things, and every bygone holiday and birthday left a kind of hole that couldn’t be fixed, even sitting in the cab with Shiny beside me, remembering the wild plans of two little girls who’d once hooked pinkies and sworn to drive away.

  We headed down the Crooked Mile, away from town and toward the county line, to the widest, deepest part of the Blue Jack Creek.

  The truck hit every rut and pothole like it was looking for them, and the radio didn’t work, but I was too pleased to be riding around the back roads with my cousin to even care. The truck was high as a house, and Shiny drove like she was getting away from somewhere.

  We crossed the low-water bridge, rumbling over the creek, and when I looked down, I saw that there were people in the water, wearing all white and standing waist deep. The way they raised their hands and looked to the sky was so reverent it made my neck prickle. Their faces were pure and peaceful, lit up with a powerful kind of devotion.

  “What are they doing?” I said, nearly leaning out the window to see better.

  Shiny hardly even glanced over. “Oh, they’re just getting dunked. A lot of the folks outside town do it at the start of summer so the devil won’t get at them.”

  I leaned my elbows on the window, watching the preacher tip them back and dunk them under. Their white robes billowed in the water and stuck to them like wrinkly skins as they came up again. One by one, they waded back up onto the bank, looking eerie and beautiful, like creatures in a fairy tale.

  I pulled my head in and turned to Shiny. “Are you dunked?”

  She laughed like I’d said something clever and shook her head. “Are you kidding? That is not for people like us, okay?”

  “Do a lot of people do it?”

  Shiny tossed her head and gave a little shrug. “Naw. I mean, Rae’s family’s Baptist, but the in-town kind, not dunkers. And some of the folks in town aren’t anything at all. Or else, they traded out one thing for another. Like the Fishers are originally supposed to be from Moravia, I think. In the beginning, they might have been some other kind of religion altogether—Jewish, maybe—but now I’m pretty sure they’re Pentecostal.”

  “What are we, then?”

  Shiny just shrugged and stared straight ahead. “Wicked.”

  The way she said it was like she was sounding angry so she didn’t have to sound sad, and after that we rode in quiet, rattling along through the open fields and into the far bottom of the Willows.

  The longer we went without talking, the less sure I was of my own true whereabouts, and I started to think about the cellar again. The cab of the truck was feeling smaller and smaller, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was going fishing. I was out in the world and we were going to get ourselves something to eat, and that was almost enough to make me feel free.

  “Hey,” I said finally, looking around the empty road. “Do you think you can you teach me to drive?”

  Shiny raised her eyebrows. “I guess. But just out here. I don’t want anyone giving us a hard time because you haven’t got a license.”

  She pulled up to the shoulder and switched places with me, leaning across the seat to point out the positions on the shifter. “Okay, now the Ranger’s a three-speed, and it is really awful for upshifting, so you have to just hope, pray, and stomp down the clutch like you mean it. Do not try to baby it, or it will know you’re scared.”

  The steering wheel felt warm and cracked in my hands. When I was little, I’d always figured the pedals and the gears had their own special kind of magic, but now, with the engine rumbling through the floorboards, I could almost see the parts that made up the clutch, feel the tug of the drive-shaft moving to turn the axel. When I stalled out the first time, I could almost see what had gone wrong.

  The second time, I knew it was coming before it happened, but I still didn’t get the clutch down quick enough to beat it. The truck coughed and died, rattling to a stop.

  Third time was a charm, though, and I took us rocking and shuddering along the shoulder of the road and then pulled out into the lane.

  The truck was finicky and hard to turn, but driving made me feel better. Like things were governable. Like I could fix on a solid thing in the world and have it do what I wanted.

  When we reached the county line, Shiny had me park in the little dirt turnoff at the top of the bridge and got out. The creek was low and lazy in its banks, and Shiny’s truck was the only thing around.

  She opened her tackle basket and took out the margarine container. Up close, the smell coming off it was so bad that I covered my face with both hands. “Oh, what is that?”

  She laughed and reached into the bed of the truck, tossing a fishing pole at me. “Spoiled chicken livers. Catfish are so nasty it’s like their idea of a treat.”

  She offered me a hook and a piece of liver and I followed her down along the bank, where the weeds grew thick and tangled and the ground sloped away.

  Shiny stood over me, watching as I made a mess trying to get the liver on the hook, before finally taking pity and doing it herself.

  Then she scrambled down the bank and pointed out into the creek. “You’re going to cast into the middle, over there where the water looks dark. I’ll go a ways farther down, and you stay here up by the bridge.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the big ones are all down in the bottom of the creek bend, and you won’t hold one if you catch it.”

  “How do you know?”

  She gave me that long know-it-all look she’d been doing since we were little, and it made one part of me feel safe and homey, and another part feel plain furious. “I just do.”

  I sat on the top of the weedy hummock nearest the bridge. The water was slow and clear, and I sat with my feet tucked under me, watching the crawdads skitter around in the shallows. Farther out, my bobber floated over a dark, uneasy shadow. The day was warm and mostly still, and there was an empty mason jar lying near the edge of the water, caught in the weeds.

  We’d been sitting for maybe twenty minutes when my line gave a jerk, so hard it almost took the pole out of my hands. In less than a second, the creek had gone so wild it looked like it was boiling, and then I saw the fish, shinin
g like gunmetal, rising out of the water and thrashing down again.

  Shiny gave a shout, and then came crashing through the weeds behind me.

  “Hold it,” she said, her voice buzzing like an electric current.

  “It’s too strong! I think it’s getting away.”

  “Hold it,” she said again, sounding nothing at all like Shiny and everything like a girl with fire in her blood. “Keep the line tight—no, don’t pull on it! Just play it, play it!”

  I worked the reel, letting the line run slack and then catching it before it could spin all the way out, but the fish was wild, making the water churn up in a white froth. I saw a flash of spiny tail, and then it splashed under again.

  Shiny marched straight down to the edge of the water and peeled her shirt over her head. She did it in one fast yank, like there was nothing strange about skinning off her clothes on the side of the road. She had on a black bra with flowers embroidered on it and there were a pair of wings tattooed on her back, right over her shoulder blades.

  Then she was in the water, splashing down off the bank and wading out.

  She looked tall and tan following my line and when she got to the end, she ducked and grabbed the fish in both hands, then hauled it, flopping and wriggling, up onto the bank.

  I dropped the pole and ran over to her.

  Shiny sat down hard on the dirt, holding the catfish in her lap. The wings rippled on her back when she moved. I wanted to reach out and touch them. They were the most delicate thing I’d ever seen, each feather perfect, like every line of the picture had been loved into existence. Under them, the rest of Shiny was sharp and brown and kind of lonely.

  She stuck out her chin and clamped her fingers around the fish, never minding the spines. Its skin was a slick, awful green—an impossible green—with slimy whiskers and dull, milky eyes. The ends of her hair were wet, sticking to her arms.

  She was about to stick her fingers in the fish’s mouth and twist the hook out, when suddenly she yanked her hand up to her chest and we both froze. Its mouth was full of long, jagged teeth. Row upon row of them, and every one like a needle.