Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘Is she there with you?’ Trista asked quickly. ‘Is the other me there?’

  ‘Oh yes, listening to every word I say.’

  ‘Can I speak to her?’ Again Trista channelled her resentment of the Crescent family, and made her voice hard and gleeful. ‘I want to tell her everything I’ve done. I want to tell her I’ve been sleeping in her bed, and eating her dolls, and making her friends and family hate her. Can I? Please?’

  For a long moment, there was nothing from the earpiece but a distant, papery crackle.

  ‘Why not?’

  There were a few scuffling clicks, and then Trista could hear shallow sobbing breaths on the other end of the line. She felt pins and needles tingle over her skin.

  ‘Hello?’ Trista could barely give the word breath.

  There was a ragged gasp.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ And Trista could hear her own voice speaking to her, just a little higher in pitch, more wobbly and more miserable. ‘You’re . . . the thing they talk about, aren’t you? The thing pretending to be me! What have you done to my parents? What have you done to Pen?’

  For a tiny moment Trista felt a burst of panic. They were too alike. There was only room for one of them. She felt an impulse to fight back and claim the one Triss-shaped space in the world. Then, with difficulty, she swallowed down the feeling.

  ‘Listen!’ hissed Trista urgently, before her other self could say anything more. ‘Can the Architect hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘I . . .’ The other girl’s voice was tear-drenched, uncertain. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good! Now listen – please! I’ve tricked the Architect into letting me speak to you – he thinks I just want to torment you. You must pretend that’s what I’m doing. Please, while I’m talking, you have to cry as if I’m scaring you!’

  ‘You are scaring me!’ wailed the girl on the other end, so loudly that static crackled in Trista’s ear.

  ‘I know – I know I’m frightening – but I didn’t ask to be made. I haven’t hurt Pen or your parents. The Architect doesn’t know this, but I’m not on his side. I want to rescue you! Is he still there with you, listening to what you say? Shout, “I hate you!” for yes, and, “stop it!” for no.’

  ‘I hate you!’ It was screamed with enough tearful force that Trista was not quite sure if it was the signal or just a sincere declaration.

  ‘So he’s still there.’ Trista racked her brains. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘Stop it!’ was faintly sobbed. The signal for no.

  ‘Do you know anything that might help us find you?’

  But how could Triss answer without the Architect hearing? And how could they come up with a message system in no time flat? Desperately Trista scanned Triss’s memories, trying to see whether she and Pen had ever shared a secret language or code. No, they had not. Perhaps if the sisters had ever been closer, shared more memories . . .

  Memories.

  ‘Triss, listen! We share memories. If there’s something you want to tell me, then give me a clue that’s linked to it in your memory – our memory.’

  For a few seconds she could hear only sobbing, and then just very faint two words.

  ‘The frog.’

  The frog? Trista floundered, wondering if she had misheard.

  Click, click, rattle.

  ‘Did you have fun?’ The Architect sounded as if he was trying with difficulty not to laugh. ‘The poor creature looks more terrified than a mouse in a trap. Good work! The sight of that silly, trembling little face has put me in much better humour. In fact . . . little Cuckoo, I think I might do you a favour. Do you want to live longer than seven days?’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes yes yes yes. But it was impossible. He was teasing her. He had to be.

  ‘I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to you already, to be honest. If you are eating Theresa’s dolls, then you must have realized the key to keeping yourself intact is to eat things that are important to her. And you will need more and more of them, as time goes by.

  ‘If you are to survive longer than seven days, you will have to devour something very important to her indeed, something rooted into the very core of her heart and being. But you actually have something of that description. You know what I mean, don’t you?’

  Trista gripped the earpiece and tried not to know, even as the Architect spoke again.

  ‘Theresa’s little sister. Penelope. Eat her, and the future is yours.’

  There was a final click, and the earpiece went dead in Trista’s shaking hand.

  Chapter 32

  SPITTING IT OUT

  Trista could not meet Pen’s eye as she left the telephone booth. Her insides felt like gravel, and for once she was glad that there was no time for conversation.

  He told me to eat you, Pen. As they hurried out to the motorcycle, the unspoken sentence lay like a penny on Trista’s tongue, cold and metallic-tasting.

  When they scrambled into the sidecar together, Pen all elbows and scraping feet, Trista could not help flinching away from the other girl. It had never occurred to her to think of Pen as something she could eat. Now she realized that Pen did have the same tingling, tempting quality as Triss’s possessions, but a hundred times magnified. The gaping, ragged hole at her core told her that, yes, the younger girl would fit inside it, like a ring in the velvet niche of a jewellery box.

  When they were all back in the attic room, Trista tried to tell Violet and Pen all she could about the conversation with the Architect. Her words sounded flat and dead to her, however. They were cold after-dinner scraps, handed to people who could never have appreciated the meal.

  All the while, she was trying to decide whether to tell them what the Architect had told her to do with Pen. The trust of each had been hard won. What would they do if she transformed herself before her eyes into a child-eating monster, a creature of the darkest fairy tale? How could they bear to be near her if they knew her life might depend on gobbling up Pen?

  She was going to tell them. She was not going to tell them. She had to. Yes, but later. No, now or never . . .

  And then she reached the end of her story and the coin still lay there on her tongue, numbing it. The silence stretched, and both Violet and Pen looked up, realizing that she had finished talking. Trista’s heart sank into a morass of misery and self-loathing.

  ‘Good,’ said Violet. ‘We’ve learned much more than I expected. Well done, Trista.’ Her smile was kind, but Trista felt a sting of self-reproach at its very warmth.

  ‘You say Triss mentioned something about a frog – do you have any idea what she meant by that?’

  ‘No,’ answered Trista. ‘It must be something she remembers, something that should be part of my memories too. But it doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘It looks like it means something to Pen though,’ Violet remarked.

  Sure enough, Pen had withdrawn into herself once more, like a belligerent little hedgehog, and was staring down at her own knees while kicking her heels against the bedpost.

  ‘It was just a frog,’ she said defiantly. ‘And it wasn’t my fault! I thought it was dead! I was trying to . . .’ She let her face droop into a pout again.

  ‘Oh.’ A memory seeped belatedly into Trista’s mind. ‘Oh, that frog.’ She met Violet’s questioning gaze. ‘It . . . It really wasn’t Pen’s fault. It was about two years ago. The cat caught a frog, and left it on our doorstep. So Pen gave it a funeral, with rose petals, and a barley-sugar tin as a coffin, and buried it in the garden. Then, um, much later she dug it up again—’

  ‘I just wanted to see if it was a skeleton!’ protested Pen. ‘But it wasn’t. It was just really . . . dead and dry and flat. And . . . And it wasn’t in the same place in the box – it must have moved – it must have still been alive when I buried it . . .’

  It was all flooding back to Trista now, the memory of the frog drama. She felt a wave of horrified fascination and sympathy for the poor frog that had suffocated alone in darkness, bu
t just as strong was the tide of exasperation and pity for guilty, miserable Pen. The feelings were not new, nor were they entirely her own.

  Then this surge of emotion changed course as she understood what Triss had meant.

  ‘He’s going to bury her alive,’ she said. ‘The Architect’s going to bury Triss alive.’

  A few seconds passed before Violet broke the stunned silence.

  ‘That’s . . . medieval. We have to stop him.’

  ‘We probably don’t have long.’ Trista tried to remember the Architect’s exact words. ‘He said I might “outlive my namesake” – and I only have a day or so left.’

  ‘But if they bury her in the churchyard, won’t everybody hear her banging to be let out of the coffin?’ asked Pen.

  But Trista did not think that the Architect would be burying Triss in a coffin or in the churchyard. On the telephone he had hinted that he would arrange Triss’s fate through things that he could do better than Piers Crescent. She knew where his talents lay, had seen his space-twisting masterpieces of brick-and-mortar magic. He was quite capable of building a fatal prison for Triss that Piers would never find in a million years, let alone one day. With the Architect’s strange gifts, he could hide a dozen such prisons within a space no thicker than a coin. If he was building such a prison for her, it could be anywhere in Ellchester.

  Trista opened her mouth to say so, and once again choked on the ‘magic promise’.

  ‘Once he buries her, we’ll never find her,’ she said instead. ‘But . . . he said something about taking Triss for “midnight rides”. Maybe if we see them on the move, we can follow them – even rescue her.’

  There was a doubtful pause. It sounded a forlorn hope even to Trista. However, they were short on more robust hopes, so after a moment Violet nodded slowly.

  ‘There won’t be many cars on the roads at midnight. If we can get to high enough ground, we might be able to spot the Daimler’s headlights, or hear its engine. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try. And thanks to your father, there’s some very high ground. Come midnight we’ll be on the Victory Bridge.’

  Needless to say, Pen was sullenly insistent that she was coming on the midnight mission. Pen was not tired. Pen was not going to bed. Pen was . . . asleep. So impenetrably asleep, in fact, that she was tucked into one of the attic beds without waking, to the relief of Trista and Violet.

  Even when she was back in the sidecar again, Trista kept seeing in her mind’s eye Pen’s small, curled form under the thin blanket. There was a tempest in her stomach made up of guilt, anguish, conflict, shame and dread. She hoped that there was no hunger in the mix as well.

  The night streets were still warm, and Trista could not stop herself twisting her head to peer at the lit windows of public houses, from which poured piano music and occasional gaggles of figures. Other worlds that she had never seen, by virtue of her age and the ‘niceness’ of her family.

  When the motorcycle rose up above the city on the vast, curved back of the Victory Bridge, the winds grew fiercer and more irregular. Remembering the Underbelly beneath them made Trista feel giddy, and she wondered whether this was really a wise vantage point.

  At the crest, Violet let the engine idle, then stop. There was nobody else on the bridge, nobody to observe as Trista and Violet dismounted, walked to the barrier and peered down at the nocturnal city.

  It was not like looking at a map. The hills left Ellchester looking crumpled, lights nestling in dark folds like glow-worms in the crags of a tree stump. The river was ink, jewelled by the tiny hurricane lamps of occasional boats. A few squares and streets flared with electric light, the whiteness like an ache. Lesser streets were murky necklaces of dim gas lamps. On one side the dark outline of the new rail station cut a triangle out of the sky.

  The wind blew Trista’s hair around her face, and she caught at it to push it back. The stray tress turned to dry leaves in her hand. So little time left . . .

  . . . so was that why she had not told anybody about the Architect’s last words to her? Was she keeping her options open after all? Had she always been keeping Pen around for that reason, like a packed lunch?

  What was she?

  ‘Violet.’ It came out as a husky whimper.

  ‘We’ve got a minute or two, I think.’ Violet had her goggles raised to her forehead and was scanning the scene. ‘Drat! I thought we’d be able to see more.’

  ‘Violet!’ Trista’s exclamation was a muffled yelp, and when Violet turned to look at her in surprise, the rest came out in a tearful, choked gabble. ‘TheArchitecttoldmetoeatPen!’

  ‘Do you want to try that again, but with words?’ Violet suggested.

  ‘The Architect – he said I could live longer than seven days. But . . . he told me I had to eat Pen.’

  Violet stared at her for a second, then gave a hearty snort of mirth.

  ‘He really doesn’t know you very well, does he?’

  ‘But . . . B-but I could eat Pen,’ stammered Trista. ‘I know that now. I can feel it.’

  ‘You’re not going to though, are you?’ answered Violet without hesitation.

  ‘How do you know?’ demanded Trista. In spite of herself, she found her horror receding a little in the face of Violet’s tone of calm certainty. ‘I don’t know. How can you know? I . . . I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything.’

  ‘Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you.’ Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. ‘I know, you woke up one day and found out that you couldn’t be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be. You just weren’t her any more, and there was nothing you could do about it. So your family decided you were a monster and turned on you.’ Violet sighed, staring out into the darkness. ‘Believe me, I do understand that. And let me tell you – from one monster to another – that just because somebody tells you you’re a monster, it doesn’t mean you are.

  ‘Just now you told me what you did because you want me to stop you from eating Pen. If you were a real monster, you wouldn’t have done that, would you?’

  Trista’s eyes stung, and she wiped strands of cobweb away with her sleeve.

  ‘Idiot,’ added Violet, for good measure.

  ‘Violet,’ Trista began again when she thought she could keep her voice steady, ‘can I ask you something?’

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ came the answer, ‘but not right now. There’s something strange happening down there – a sort of flickering. There! Can you see it?’

  Trista became aware that from the city below her she could make out the sounds of church clocks chiming midnight, each voice lonely and cold.

  She hurriedly cleared the remaining gossamer from her eyes and stared down into the city, following Violet’s pointing finger. Down in the poorly lit docklands by the riverside, she thought she made out a moving glint, or perhaps a host of tiny glints, fizzing and zigzagging across a square like champagne bubbles.

  Both Violet and Trista jumped when a wild surge of winged shapes burst from beneath the bridge on which they stood, and flocked out towards the city, wheeling downward with cries like steel shavings.

  ‘Gulls,’ gasped Violet in a half-laugh. Trista said nothing, her tongue held by the magic promise. She saw white wings as Violet did, but she also saw wings of pale leather, glassy insect wings, wings made of paper and matted hair. Some of the things had riders. Some had two heads. None of them looked up or saw her. She was able to watch as the strange flock sped down to join the strange flicker in the streets.

  The flicker itself was moving over a distant hill now, threatening to disappear behind the crest.

  ‘We’re going to lose sight of them!’ exclaimed Trista.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said Violet. ‘Get back in the sidecar. They’re not the only ones who can move fast.’

  Chapter 33

  THE TRAM

  Trista gritted her teeth as the motorcycle weaved sharply through the streets, bracing her limbs
inside the sidecar. Violet was leaning forward over her machine like a cat preparing to pounce. Trista could feel in her joints every bounce of the tyres, each road crack.

  Gas lamps whooshed past on either side like will-o’-the-wisps on a mission. Bridges swooped overhead, shadowing the sky for a second, then were gone. The motorcycle’s headlights flashed in the sullen windows of closed shops. Buildings scrolled past at speed, like the visions of a zoetrope.

  Trista tipped her head back as far as she dared and watched the sky, looking for a flicker of movement, or a darker patch against the void of the heavens. The air caught in her throat. There was a smell that made her hungry again, and filled her with an odd, shadowy elation. It was a crisp, treacherous twilight scent that reminded her of the Underbelly, the Architect and the fight with the bird-thing. The Besiders were close by, and it set her blood alight.

  The alleys twisting up the hill were cluttered with rubbish pails, zigzags of washing and bicycles against the walls. The motorcycle swerved between them all, triumphantly erupted with a roar into a square at the top of the hill and descended into the winding lanes beyond.

  As they roared over a narrow bridge, Trista glanced down at the street below it, which was bathed in dull yellow gaslight. Cruising past beneath her was a large, black Daimler. The light seemed to slide uneasily over it like water over wax. Its engine made no sound. As she watched, it turned a corner and vanished from sight.

  ‘There!’ Trista’s desperate squawk was inaudible, but also unnecessary. Violet had seen the car. At the far end of the bridge, Violet took a right to follow.

  There was a rustling sound at the back of Trista’s mind, and for a little while she thought it might be coming from her own head. But this time it was not the laughter of her inner leaves. There were wings beating overhead and whispers on the breeze. Looking upward, she saw rapid shapes skim past at eaves’ height. Some spread dark wings. Some had insectile legs akimbo, like water boatmen. Some clawed their way through the air, as if it was solid as earth.