by Chuck Wendig
"I can tell," she tells her dead self. "If there's one way to make a person feel reassured it's to appear to them in a dream as a drowned dead woman."
"This is a warning."
"A warning. Fine. So warn me."
"You're not alone."
"I'm not alone? What's that even mean? Is that the warning?"
Corpse-Miriam smiles. Slime slides from between her teeth. She opens her mouth wide, wider, widest – the jaw cracking and snapping and then her mouth becomes a howling tunnel, and in that tunnel Miriam sees onrushing waters, a river-tide of poison. An acid flume like heartburn shoots up her own chest and into her mouth and she tastes vomit and blood and mud and then the dream dissolves like sugar poured into hot coffee.
A whisper, then, as the dream falls apart: "The river is rising, Miriam."
PART TWO
The School of Broken Dolls
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl."
– Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
TEN
Disorder
"So not only is this an all girls' school," Miriam says, one leg dangling out the truck window, toes constantly adjusting and readjusting the passenger side mirror, "but it's a school for bad girls."
Louis grunts. That's been his response for the last couple days while they've been holed up in the Sugar Sands Motel. They camped out there while he waited for Katey to return his call. She did. School's in session. She's back at Caldecott and eager to meet Miriam.
Beyond the disinterested caveman noises, Louis isn't saying much.
Miriam fills the silence.
"Listen to this," she says, the mailer splayed open in her lap. She reads from the book: "Some girls benefit from a New Beginning – New Beginning, that's capitalized, by the way, and you know something's important when needless capitalization enters the picture – a New Beginning away from family and friends. How do you know if a girl will benefit from a New Beginning at the Caldecott School? Okay. Checklist time. Does your daughter: act out in defiance of accepted social norms? Believe that consequences do not apply to her? Become angry and defiant without warning? Engage in wanton promiscuity? What a great phrase. Wanton promiscuity. If it's so bad, they shouldn't make it sound so interesting. It almost sounds like an appetizer. Won-Ton promiscuity. That's a dude fucking his soup. Just going to town on it. Sure, he's scalding his gonads, but that's the price of forbidden love. Am I right?"
Louis stares out at the road ahead. A grim-faced cyclops.
She poked the bear too hard this time. The wife is a pressure point and she didn't just push on it – she hit it with a fucking sledgehammer.
"Whatever. Anyway." She turns back to the mailer. "They list a number of disorders they try to help 'curtail' – another great word, 'curtail'. A cur's tail. Huh. Anyway. They list, let's see, depression, manic-depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, anxiety, oppositional defiant disorder – whatever the hell that is – borderline personality dis–"
"It's oppositional defiant disorder." It almost startles her it's been so long since Louis has said more than three words to her. "It's a sign of someone who doesn't play well with authority. Doesn't like being told what to do. Angry, resentful, argumentative. Usually in some kind of trouble. Often does the opposite of what they're told just because that's how they are."
"Ugh." Miriam wrinkles her nose. "Bet those kids are fun to be around. Like hanging out with a cat."
It's then she sees Louis looking at her. That one eye firing a concentrated laser beam of scrutiny, slicing her apart and inspecting the remains.
"What?" she asks.
"Nothing." He goes back to driving.
"You trying to say something?"
"I'm not."
"I know what you're saying." She gets it now.
"Do you?"
"I don't have oppositional defiant disorder."
Grunt.
"I don't. That's crazy-talk. I was a good girl once. And it's not my fault I'm surrounded by idiots and lunatics half the time. I just go my own way on things. That's what an independent woman does. Right?" She scowls. "Just keep that one eye of yours on the road."
Then, just to tick him off, she cranks down the window, pops a filterless cigarette in her mouth, and brings a lighter flame to its tip. Puff, puff, puff. She blows a jet of cancer outside.
She picks a nit of tobacco off her tongue, flicks it out the window just as they pass a highway sign.
SELINSGROVE, 5Mi
SUNBURY, 7Mi
A hard knot like a calcified clump of hair forms in her throat. "We're in Pennsylvania."
"You were asleep when we crossed through Philadelphia."
Susquehanna River Valley. Three counties. All around the river.
The river is rising, Miriam.
But it's not that. Or not just that.
If they're near Selinsgrove, then that means right now, at this very moment, they're only thirty minutes north of where she grew up. Where her high school boyfriend blew the roof of his skull off with a shotgun. Where the boyfriend's mother beat Miriam half to death with a snow shovel. Where her baby died inside her.
Where her own mother still lives.
Miriam hasn't seen the woman since she ran away. Almost a decade now.
Maybe she's dead, Miriam thinks. Once she discovered she had the power to see how people were going to die, she never again touched her mother. By the next morning, she'd already bolted.
Ghosts, restless and sad, stir inside her.
It takes all her effort to tamp them down with a hard mental boot.
She clears her throat.
"Did Miss Katey get my rider?"
Louis grunts. An affirmative sound. Miriam already knew the answer to the question. They stopped off at a Kinkos to fax Miriam's handwritten list of rock-star demands to the school for the teacher.
"Fine," she says. "Good. Great. Let's go to school."
She flicks the cigarette out the window, half-finished. It just doesn't taste good anymore.
INTERLUDE
The Phone Call
Rain hammers the phone booth.
Miriam, sixteen, holds the receiver against her ear. Her jaw shivers.
It rings and rings. She doesn't want anyone to answer. Go to the answering machine, she thinks. It's like a prayer. A mantra. Go to the answering machine. Go to the answering machine. Go to the answering machine. It starts to sound absurd in the echo chamber of her own head.
Click.
"Miriam?" her mother's voice. Small and afraid. She's never afraid. It's like something's been stolen from her. And maybe it has.
"The baby's dead, mother."
"I know. I know." Of course she knows. She was there at the hospital. "God will take care of him now."
"Mother–"
"Where are you?"
"God can't be real," Miriam says, throat raw, eyes puffy. Every part of her feels like a tooth that's been cracked in half, the nerve ending exposed.
"Don't you say that. Come home to me."
"I can't. Something's wrong." Something she doesn't understand. The baby died inside her but something remained. Some little ghost, some little demon, fragile like the skeleton of a baby bird. It's changed her. Turned her very touch into a sponge, a sponge that draws poison. A sponge that soaks up death the way a gauze soaks up blood.
She doesn't understand it: Every time someone touches her – one of the nurses, a doctor, the security guard outside the hospital – she sees the most awful things. Visions of how they die. And when. They can't be true.
But they feel true.
All the more proof her mind is lost. It's like a moth – touch a moth and a powder comes off the wi
ngs, and once that powder's off, the moth can no longer fly.
The powder, she thinks, is off her wings.
"Just tell me where you are. I'll come get you."
"I'm leaving."
"Please, Miriam. God will protect us. He'll help us get through this."
"This. This? This is all proof he's just a… a bedtime story, Mother. To make you feel better about the way you are." She wants to tell her mother how horrible she is, how she's just a bitter pill, a mean little rodent, but she can't muster the words. She wants to yell about how her mother was never nice to her, not until she got pregnant – which means now that the baby's dead the old ways will return, the dismissals and the insults and God's love blinding her like the beam of a too-bright spotlight. By now, Miriam's crying again. She can't believe she has more tears, more spit, more snot, but here it comes, just as the pain of unstoppable grief is again hitting her in the chest like a sledgehammer. She doubles over. "I won't. I won't go back. I won't come back."
"Miriam, I'll do better."
And then she says the final words: "No. You won't. Because I won't give you the chance." She slams the phone down. With her back against the inside of the booth, she slides to the rubber mat and huddles next to the cigarette butts, the candy wrappers, the dead moths.
It's there she stays until morning.
ELEVEN
Summer's End
The gates – iron, each spiked at the top with a fleur-de-lis – look like teeth to Miriam. A hungry mouth with black metal canines. Probably what the Gates to Hell look like. The Devil's own maw. Chompy-chompy, all you sinners, all you dirty-birdy bad girls.
Louis pulls the truck up. A guard at the gate – an old black dude with eyes pinched tight behind rolling slugs of skin and cheeks sprouting a wan, wire-brush beard – gives a palms-out wave. "As I live and breathe. If it isn't Mister Truck Driver, tumbling in off the road after a long haul."
"No long haul this time," Louis says, leaning out the window. "How you doing, Homer?"
The guard gives a dismissive wave. "I could complain, but nobody'd want to listen. Who you got in there with you? Late admission?"
Miriam scrambles up over Louis and thrusts her head out the window. "Do I look like a student to you?"
"Shoot, I dunno."
With one of his bear paws, Louis urges Miriam back into her seat. "This is Miriam Black. She should be on your list there. She's here to see Katherine Wiznewski."
Homer looks over a clipboard, squinting even harder. So hard his eyes all but disappear and Miriam's not sure how he can see anything at all.
"Uh-huh, uh-huh. Here you go. Miss Black to see Miss Wiz. You hanging around, Louis? Almost lunchtime."
Louis shakes his head. "Just dropping her off."
"Wait, what?" Miriam asks. This is news to her.
He turns. "I have a job."
"Yeah. To be here. With me."
"A real job," he clarifies, the phrase a barb, a thorn, a needle. "You'll be fine. You're meeting Katey out back at the picnic tables. It's all set."
"And then what? Do I go sleep in the woods? How long do you think this is going to take? I'm not harvesting corn. I touch her. I get a vision. I tell her about it. Thirty seconds. Game over. I've spent more time smoking a cigarette."
"You don't want me there."
"No," she says. "You don't want you there."
"I've got to go. What she's paying should cover you, but just in case–" He peels a trio of twenties out of his money clip. "Here. Get a cab. Go rent a motel room for the night. I have a quick run up to Erie, and I'll be back tomorrow."
"You're really leaving me. Please. Stay."
"Go on. It'll be fine."
"Fine," she says. "I don't – you know what? I don't need you. This is what I do best. Walk. Wander. Alone. It'll be fine."
"It will be fine."
"It will, it totally will. Later, Louis."
"Miriam, I'm sorry–"
But she doesn't want to hear it. She's worked up. Miriam's already hopping out of the truck, his voice lost to the slamming door.
The truck grumbles, reverses, and is gone.
The Gates of Hell remain open. Just for her.
"You going in or what?" Homer asks.
She almost doesn't. Something about this place gives her a bad vibe and she's not even through the gates. She can't see the school yet – it's a winding drive that takes an elbow curve into the woods. All she has before her are the iron gates, the guard's booth, and a brass plaque on pale brick that says The Caldecott School in dizzying calligraphic loops and whorls.
Going back to school always gave Miriam the pissshivers. Even though it's late summer and the Caldecott School starts its year early, the feeling is the same: The days are getting shorter, mornings darker, evenings creep on like a stalker outside your window. With the end of summer comes the start of school, and school was never a good time for Miriam. The classes, sure. Tests. Papers. Lectures. Those were fine. But the other kids. Mean, shitty little fucks. Grade school – elementary and up – is like being dropped in a dunk tank filled with starving piranha.
And they never get full.
Every part of her wants to run away. Even though she's an adult. She doesn't have to do this anymore.
But Homer snaps the fingers on both hands at her. "Come on, now, shit or get out the outhouse."
Miriam jogs through the gates.
They close behind her with a mechanical whine.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Clang. The way is shut.
Still, her fingers tingle. While every other part of her – down to the twisting, thrumming marrow – wants to bolt for the woods, her hands know where they want her to go. They want to feed. They want to taste death.
Five-fingered vampires, they are.
"I… walk?" she asks Homer.
He leans out of the booth, looks up and down the drive, and then scowls at her. "Where the hell else you planning on going? It's one road. It goes to one place. You want a map and a hang-glider?"
"I just figured you had a golf cart or something."
"Oh, I got one up my ass but my doctor says I should keep it up there in case it tears something bad coming out."
"You're funny. You. Are. Funny. You missed your calling, Homer. Should've been a comedian."
"Why'd the chicken cross the road?"
She knows she shouldn't bother, but says anyway, "Why?"
"To peck you in the butthole so you hurry the hell away from my guard booth. Like I told Mister Truck Driver, it's lunch-time and I am goddamn hungry."
"Okay. Bye, Homer."
"See you on the way out, Miss Black."
"How far is the school?"
"Far as it needs to be." He laughs.
Asshole.
She likes him.
Time, then, to go back to school.
The road is paved, no potholes, smooth as a beetle's back. Trees rise up on each side of her, these trees nothing like the scrub pines of Nowhere, New Jersey – these tall legacy oaks ringed in dark wet bark, each a silent sentinel, each a judging spire.
Soon she hears it: the murmur of river water.
The river reveals itself before too long. Five minutes later, the trees give way to a grassy uneven bank, and beyond it the Susquehanna churns and shushes, Ovaltine waters gurgling forth.
The drive bends again, and there she sees the Caldecott School.
Ah, Victorian overindulgence. The middle of the school looks to be an old manor house, three stories high, the grim Gothic windows paired awkwardly with gingerbread trim. Each roof is red like a child's wagon, the walls a kind of gray-green, a clayey painted smudge dull in contrast to the house's red.
To the left and right of the house are the rest of the school – the bulk of it, really, plainly added on long after the original house was built. The two wings are almost prison-like in their austerity. Down to the wrought iron bars on the windows.
The Caldecott crest – eagles, books, a knight's he
lmet and other bullshit frippery – flies on a flag. The flagpole comes up out of a massive VW-bug-sized hunk of anthracite coal, which itself sits in the middle of the circular drive.
From here, the school looks silent, dead, no movement. No students, no teachers, not even a pair of ugly-ass pigeons.
Again that feeling: a twist, a twinge in her gut.
