by Paula Guran
When he leaves the car, he makes his way through the forest by feel. Vines of Asiatic bittersweet snag at his ankles, though hardly a stick cracks beneath his feet. Where sight is gone, sound and feel remain. As a ghost Karyn might have hoped to be blessed with some kind of night vision, but she moves through the forest as sightlessly as the hunter.
The other women are brief faded spots on the retina, soon eclipsed by other trees. They wait. They listen. Somewhere far away, Easterday is crying, or laughing hysterically, the sound muffled by greenery and ghostly hands.
Karyn hears the beast before the hunter does. She can’t help the cry of warning that rips out of her, but it rolls past him unheard. He spins, perhaps too late, at the wet protest of claw-torn vines. By the creature’s slavering snarl, by its sheer size, Karyn recognizes it for a werewolf, and now she doesn’t know whether she’s crying or laughing either. Of course it would be a werewolf.
The hunter’s favorite knife, his well-honed Woodman’s Pal, is already in his hand. He brings it to bear but the creature has the advantage of him and blood splashes through where Karyn stands. The hunter cries out but it’s not his knife arm that’s taken the wound, and he stabs out in kind. Hot breath, gnashing teeth. Karyn can barely tell where man ends and wolf begins as they grapple and slash and bleed.
A misstep, then, or the gravity of exhaustion. The hunter tumbles backward and the wolf is on top of him. A glint of ghost-light glitters on the knife blade, between them now. The hunter’s hand is still on the hilt but the werewolf’s wiry arms have turned the blade inward. The hunter strains, fighting it back, losing ground. The wolf snaps at his face—inches away, but its saliva flecks his bloodied face.
Karyn holds as still as death and watches the hunter’s arms start to give way. He chokes out a curse as the knife’s point taps a button on his shirt. He’s going to die now, and then Karyn will be dead too. In death, no one can lay a claim on her. She will be her own.
In death, true death, she’ll never go home again. The monster hunter has lived too long, and now he’s going to go before he’s had a chance to make amends.
She’s already moving before she realizes she’s made the decision. She drops through the werewolf and into the hunter. She lends what strength she has to him.
It’s not very much. His arm trembles, and the knife stays on the button. It starts to press inward. A garbled prayer leaves the hunter’s lips and Karyn wonders if she’ll feel what he feels, if she stays in here, if she’ll know a death by blood and torn bone one more time.
The hunter’s frame shudders again and Mrs. Thelma Owens is in here too. “Well, don’t just gawk,” she says, schoolteacher-stern. “Push, honey.”
Karyn pushes.
María-Belén squeezes in, Janine too. The knife’s momentum slows, then stills. Dawb and Anamaria. Lucy and Jaspreet. Others, shoving in, one by one. Making room where there is none. The hunter stops shivering with each new addition and the knife turns upward.
Before the knife can pierce its hide, the werewolf bellows its confusion and leaps back. It huffs and circles cautiously. The hunter doesn’t rise in answer, he stays on his back, knife hand up and the other to brace it.
Karyn understands. “Up,” she begs, and together the women bend joints, contract muscles. He moves like an ill-used marionette. But he moves. The knife hand comes up again and he lumbers toward the werewolf.
The beast retreats a few paces to snort and study the hunter again at a distance. It takes in the uneven gait, the jerky twitches of the arms. It’s calculating its odds, and it seems to like what it sees. It lunges.
Easterday slams into the hunter with a scream, and the hunter screams too. He launches himself at the werewolf faster than he’s moved in years and he opens its belly from intestines to sternum. The women jerk his arm to pull the knife free and they stoop down to take the head—the head, you have to get the head. They’ve all seen this show before, though not from a front seat vantage. In his hand, their hands, the knife grates across the beast’s throat and gristle and sinew tear and blood soaks into the ground beneath the hunter’s boots.
After, they clean the knife as best they can and walk on unsteady legs back to the car. He falls, twice, along the way; they pick him up and keep him moving. Through unspoken agreement they wash his face and hands and chest with water from a canteen and change him into a more presentable shirt. When they turn the rearview mirror toward his face, Karyn can almost see herself peering out from his eyes. His shoulders rise as she pulls with need and purpose and the others echo the same back to her.
Their turns are coming, too.
* * *
Driving is an exercise in teamwork. The GMC takes a ding from a highway railing, but the trip is otherwise uneventful.
The Greenhill Family Diner still stands, with the same yellow-lit sign flickering over the front entrance. It’s had a fresh coat of paint in the past twenty years, though. Maybe more than one. The bell on the door is new, too, higher-pitched than Karyn remembers. The hunter slides into a seat at the counter and she moves his head to look around at patrons and waitstaff, scrying for familiarity. The other ghosts move the hunter’s hands, playing with the salt and pepper shakers. Fiddling. Fine-tuning.
It turns out that there are three kinds of ghosts, and the kind that’s still alive comes out from behind the grill and heads straight toward the hunter.
“What can I get you?” says Rena, taking a pencil stub out of her steel-gray bun and a pad of paper from a stained apron pocket. At the sound of Karyn’s sister’s voice, the hunter’s hand jerks and crystal grains of salt bounce across the Formica counter. Rena doesn’t notice, scribbling out some prior entry on her order tablet. “The biscuits are good today. The biscuits are always good.”
“Your dad used to run this place.” The hunter’s voice comes out scratchy; anyone listening closely might hear the echoes underneath the words. A creak of tone at the end almost, but not quite, turns the statement into a question.
Rena looks up from her pad, nods slowly. “You knew him?”
Knew. Karyn throbs with sorrow. She keeps grinding words out of the hunter’s mouth. “I was—a friend of your sister’s. At school. Ag department.” A believable lie. The hunter’s tongue sticks to his teeth. Karyn wants to reach across the counter and pull Rena into an embrace, but she can’t. Not while she wears the hunter’s face in place of her own. There are a thousand things she wants to ask, to say; she ekes out one. “She talked about the diner a lot. She’d be proud of how it looks. Proud of you.”
Rena rocks back on her heels. “Thanks,” she says, and her voice is husky. Karyn’s sister has never been a crier, except the year she didn’t make the varsity swim team. “I still think about her every day, you know?”
“Yeah.” The hunter’s head turns toward the menu board. His throat jerks in rhythm with Karyn’s. “The biscuits sound good. With honey? And a coffee too, please.”
“You bet.” Rena smiles and slides off. As she goes, she dabs the corner of her eye with her apron. The hunter’s neck cranes, trying to peep at the pictures jammed on the inside of the counter. Karyn spies one with Rena and another woman, two skinny kids squeezed between them.
Later, on a cigarette-scented hotel bed, they page through the atlas, planning routes. Easterday seizes the hunter’s hand and heavily taps an intersection just south of Dayton, Ohio. Karyn remembers it well, the copper sting of blood in the air, the electric hum of a new ghost screaming through the darkness toward her captor. The ghosts agree on their next destination, and set the atlas aside.
The room phone is an old beige plastic model. The ghosts lift the receiver and key in the old ten-digit string, stabbing the 7 last of all. When it starts to ring they all flicker out of the hunter at once, leaving him to panic and gasp until his friend picks up on the other end.
“It’s me,” he gasps, “it’s me.” The fingers of his free hand dig deep into his shirt, five sharp disruptions in the plaid flannel pattern. “I—Jesus.�
�
Karyn, perched on the windowsill, half stands now. Maybe he’s forgotten how to breathe, how to keep his heart beating, with all that time out of the driver’s seat.
But then a great sob rattles the cage of his chest, and she freezes where she is. The only thing he’s forgotten is how to express a genuine emotion. How to feel one at all.
“Something weird’s happening to me, man. Things I say without knowing why—stuff I do without meaning to do it. It’s like I’m losing control and—and somehow it feels like the right thing to do. Am I going nuts?”
From the sill, Karyn can’t hear the voice on the other end of the phone. That’s all right. The phone call is for him and him alone. The hunter will give up enough of his privacy in the coming weeks; has given up quite a lot already. When he hangs up, he weeps again, small shuddering sobs that wear him down into a deep dreamless sleep.
No one slides into his head tonight. He’ll need his rest. Karyn runs her fingers over and through the tattered edges of the atlas. She closes her eyes and remembers the feel of the paper, the way the pages riffle at the touch.
AIMEE OGDEN is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. Her work appears in Analog, Shimmer, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a new zine for fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Ogden lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where the beer is always fresh and the curds are always fried.
IN THAT PLACE SHE GROWS A GARDEN
DEL SANDEEN
All the students at Queen Mary Catholic High School knew about Principal Vargas’s death before the first bell.
To Rayven James, it was welcome news.
The entire student body swarmed through the hallways like a many-headed ocean with straight brown, blond, and black hair coloring the seas. An occasional pop of red floated past like flotsam. But one thing as rare as finding a perfectly formed pearl within the tight clasp of an oyster’s shell was any hair that didn’t flow in silky sheets, that didn’t bounce like those no-rhythm-having girls trying to twerk in the restroom, that didn’t accept a fine-toothed comb as readily as a mother’s hand opening for her child’s.
Rayven was that rare pearl.
Her locs, four years in the making, trailed down her back that Tuesday morning, the tips grazing her waistband. A shortage of time had prevented the usual adornment, a green-and-white ribbon to match the green-and-white plaid skirt. No, that morning had been a blur of three snooze alarms, a two-minute shower and a single slice of dry toast snatched out of the toaster as Mama’s horn blatted with impatience from outside.
“Rayven!” had come the call, for the fourth time, right before the high-school junior had bolted out the front door, sure that the neighbors were cursing the early-morning chaos that routinely got them up and moving. Barely had her butt touched the seat before Mama zoomed the car into reverse, shaking her head and flicking a cigarette at the same time, her hold on the steering wheel not extending past two fingers of her left hand.
So there was no time for ribbons that morning.
Rayven tossed her head, the sheet of her locs shifting like a curtain with a curious neighbor behind it before twitching back into place.
“Did you hear about Vargas?”
Rayven glanced to her right, where her friend Sonia Williams matched her step for step, like they were the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall or something. They might not be high-kicking chorus girls, but according to the majority population of Queen Mary, it was hard telling them apart anyway. Although Sonia was several shades lighter than Rayven, wore a completely different hairstyle—short relaxed bob—and stood two inches taller. And yet, to the white kids they attended school with, these two black girls had practically shared a womb.
“I heard something,” Rayven said, twirling around the dial on her locker. “Is he really dead?”
“Yep.” Sonia leaned in closer, though any fear of being overhead was unwarranted, considering the loud chatter going on around them. “I heard he shot himself.”
Rayven shrugged. “So?”
“So that’s a grave mortal sin. He can’t go to heaven.” The white around Sonia’s liquid brown pupils seemed to pulse. “You know that, right?”
Rayven nodded, mainly to stem the tide of any religious teachings outside of Theology class. Sonia, like almost every other student there, was Catholic, so she knew all the ins and outs. Sonia also wasn’t on scholarship like Rayven. Although her friend didn’t live in a three-story mansion like some of their classmates, Sonia’s upper-middle-class background was still quite an upgrade from Rayven’s lot.
“Why would he kill himself, though?” Rayven asked as they walked to first period, hers being English Comp and Sonia’s being World History, across the hall from each other.
“I heard he was having family problems.”
Throughout the rest of the day, rumors and gossip flew through the air like invisible bullets, propelled by little more than breath and boredom. By the time Rayven made it to lunch, the late principal’s death had been attributed to everything from poison, hanging, gunshot and carbon monoxide in the garage to his mistress’s fury that he wasn’t actually going to leave his wife. To Rayven, that was definitely the best one.
“You can’t stay mad forever.”
Mama’s words danced in Rayven’s head, one of Cathy James’s mamaisms, as she thought of them.
How did she know what Rayven could do?
But Mama had issued that mamaism after Rayven’s father had left to live with his baby’s mama six years ago, after she had grounded Rayven for a week for wearing lipstick when she wasn’t supposed to five years ago, and after Principal Vargas had suspended her for skipping class and therefore preventing her from playing in the girls’ varsity basketball quarterfinals last month.
Queen Mary had lost without Rayven’s handles on the court.
Unknown to Mama, Rayven could stay mad and she’d certainly hold onto that rage forever if she could.
Trouble was, her rage was soon to have a brand-new target.
Mrs. McGee replaced the dead Richard Vargas as principal at Queen Mary. The student body reserved opinions publicly, although privately, text messages and DMs had already sized the woman up.
Rayven had no opinion, one way or the other, until one week after McGee’s appearance.
“Mr. Holloway?” the mechanical voice filled the Chemistry classroom. “Can you send Rayven James down to the principal’s office?”
Silence, heavier than noise, pressed on her skin as she made her way to the door. She imagined everyone’s eyes shining in her direction. Once the door clicked behind her, a rush of voices would break out from every corner of the room. Walking down the steps, Rayven wondered what this was about. When she made it to the main office, the principal’s secretary ushered her inside Mrs. McGee’s room.
“Good morning, Rayven.”
“Good morning, Mrs. McGee.”
Thus far, Rayven had only heard the woman speak at the morning assembly where she introduced herself and went into a rambling monologue about her experience, her past positions and what she hoped to bring to Queen Mary. The leather seat sank miserably under Rayven and she glanced at the woman on the other side of the big oak desk—a picture of unflattering bangs and milky blue eyes that just missed the boat of prettiness—before settling her gaze on the potted plant in front of her.
The only other time Rayven had been in this office was before Mr. Vargas had either killed himself or been in a grisly car accident driving home drunk from a late-night poker game, according to the latest rumor passing from mouth to ear.
“I hope your classes are going well. Although, I am aggrieved to come in and replace Mr. Vargas under the circumstances.”
Aggrieved? Rayven’s mind stumbled around in the dark, looking for a light switch. That had been a vocabulary word a few weeks ago, but she’d never heard anyone use it in regular conversation. She nodded, unsure w
hat to say.
“Well, as your new principal, I have reviewed some of the school’s policies.” A clearing of the throat which sounded completely unnecessary. “And one of those policies regarding dress code had been rather lax under your former principal.” Another cough-cough coming through a clear passageway. “It’s about your hair.”
Rayven’s attention, which had been teetering on exiting stage left, made a quick about-face.
“What about my hair?”
Here, Mrs. McGee consulted a paper on her desk. Gone were the uncalled for ahem-ahems as the woman settled into more comfortable territory.
“I’m now enforcing the policy of Queen Mary School that no student sports any extreme or distracting hairstyles, which includes unnatural colors, shaved images or words, or dreadlocks.” Brown eyes locked onto blue ones as the bobbed head gave a brief nod. “You’ll have to cut your hair, I’m afraid. You have until Monday.”
Later that night, when Rayven was finally able to think about the day without an excruciating buzz drowning out everything else, she tried to replay the rest of her conversation with the principal. All she recalled were perfunctory words and phrases: if you don’t cut your hair . . . expulsion . . . school policy . . . changes.
“We’re gonna fight this, baby,” Mama had said as soon as Rayven told her. “I’ll call the news station.”
Even as the words left her mother’s mouth, Rayven felt no conviction there. Because if Rayven left Queen Mary, what were their options?
Mama worked two jobs—one as a teacher’s aide in a preschool and the other as an after-hours office maid—to make up the difference that Rayven’s scholarship didn’t cover. It was either that or their neighborhood high school, R. G. Franklin. The “R. G.” stood for Rupert Godfrey, but these days, everyone called it “Riots and Guns Franklin.”
Rayven’s tears stopped long enough for her to speak clearly.
