by Chuck Wendig
"My mom could've used more prim and proper."
"We could trade moms."
"Deal."
The girl offers her hand.
Miriam stares at it like it's covered in spiders.
The door to the office opens – and Miriam notes that it says Headmaster, not Principal. A small man with slicked-back black hair, two dark cherry-pit eyes, and a navy blazer pokes his head out.
"Miss Lauren Martin," the Headmaster says, his voice long and drawn out and creaky like an old door. "Nice to see you again. We will attend to you shortly. First I must meet with Miss…"
He looks at Miriam, expectant.
"Black," she says. She thought about lying, but fuck it.
"Good. Miss Black, if you care to…" He steps back from his door.
The girl – Lauren – looks up at her. Hand still out.
"Do we have a deal?" she asks Miriam. "To trade moms."
Miriam knows she shouldn't touch the hand. What's the point? Just as she's starting to like this girl she's going to fast-forward to the girl's demise, however it goes. Drunk-driving accident at age eighteen or a head-cracking slip in the shower at age eighty-one?
And yet there's that urge, that familiar urge, the tingle in the tips of her fingers and the damp creases of her palm, and she reaches in and hesitates suddenly the way an airplane hovers above the landing strip before setting down on the tarmac and then–
She takes her hand and sees how the girl is going to die.
FIFTEEN
The Mockingbird's Song
Early morning light shines gray through shattered window, capturing in its beam whorls of dust and flakes of rot, and the beam ends on the face of Lauren Martin, age eighteen, strapped to an old doctor's table. The leather padding beneath her is cracked and bites into her naked back, thighs, buttocks. Smells braid together: sweat, urine, steel, and through all of it the thread of a sharp chemical stink.
Lauren is gagged with barbed wire, wound all the way around her head, front to back – the rusty barbs tearing into the corners of the girl's mouth.
The wire binds her head to the table.
Her tongue and lips are dried. She's been here a while.
The walls around her are blackened and charred. Wallpaper bubbled like blistered skin. The ceiling is pulled down in places. Knob and tube wiring dangle, caught in saggy bundles of ruined insulation, bundles that look like gray clouds dragged down by hard rains.
Moths dance. Crickets chirp.
A man emerges out of shadow. He's singing a song.
"Young people, hark while I relate
The story of poor old Polly's fate
She was a lady, young and fair
And died a-groaning in despair."
The song is folksy, old, measured. His voice is gravelly, yet behind it the voice warbles and wavers from lowpitch to high-pitch, as pleasant as the tines of a fork dragged across a piece of slate. Sometimes the voice is a man's. Other times, a woman's.
"She'd to go frolic, dance and play
In spite of all her friends would say
'I'll turn to God when I get old
And then I'm sure he'll take my soul.'"
Lauren whimpers against the gag. Scabs at the corners of her mouth crack, and fresh blood flows over dry. Her palms are marked with Xs. Shallow cuts, but cuts just the same. Her feet bear the same marks.
"One Friday morn, Polly took ill
Her stubborn heart began to fail
She cried 'Oh no, my days are spent,
And now it's too late to repent'."
A new odor, a pungent odor, fills the air. Smoke. Strong of dry flowers, funeral flowers, rose and lavender and carnations, an oily tincture of bitter orange.
"She called her mother to her bed
Her eyes were rolling in her head
A ghastly look, she did assume
And then she cried, 'This is my doom'."
The man's face is that of a bird, a featherless beast with flesh of leather and a beak as long as a child's arm. Wisps of greasy wet smoke drift up from holes in the beak. Human eyes blink from behind filmy goggle lenses bolted to the flesh. This is not his head but rather a hood, a hood that covers down to his shoulders and leads to a bare and sallow chest. Across that chest is a tattoo, blue as a vein, dark as a bruise: the boomerang wing of a barn swallow, twin tails sharp as a barbecue fork.
He reaches into the dark corner of the room, past a scorched mattress. From the shadows he draws a fire axe.
"She called her father to her bed
Her eyes were rolling in her head
'Oh early father, fare you well,
Your wicked daughter screams in Hell.'"
Lauren struggles upon seeing the axe. She rubs her head back and forth, trying to escape, trying to free some part of herself – her scream a hollow and harrowing call as the barbed wire saws into her cheeks.
Blood in her throat. Almost choking her.
The man in the beaked hood leans in, caresses the girl's face. His fingers return wet with red. He steps back, axe held against the tattoo's ink.
"'Your counsels I have slighted all
My carnal appetite shall fall
When I am dead, remember well
Your wicked Polly groans in Hell.'"
The man's eyes close. Rapturous. Ecstatic. The axe raises aloft. A pair of insects suddenly move to circumnavigate the blade: moths in orbit like tiny satellites.
As the man sings, the girl writhes and screams and cries.
"She wrung her hands and groaned and cried
And gnawed her tongue before she died.
Her nails turned black, her voice did fail
She died and left this lower vale."
The axe-blade falls heavy against the table. It falls into a groove that's not new. Lauren's head, silenced, tumbles behind the table. The man kicks it into a ratty wicker basket lined with a black plastic garbage bag.
The killer drops the axe to the ground with a clatter.
He picks up the head, still singing as he holds it aloft. Blood pitter-patters against the ruined floor. His voice changes now: gritty, growly, throaty. His own voice? The words now are barely sung. They're not even spoken so much as they're coughed out of his throat and spat to the earth. A crass expectoration.
"May this a warning be to those
That love the ways that Polly chose
Turn from your sins, lest you despair
The Devil take you without care."
The man pulls a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of his ragged jeans, then cuts out Lauren's tongue. He has to work to get a grip, and it takes a while for the cutters to bite through.
Her eyes, still wide, go still as placid pools.
The killer laughs, a throaty, happy trill.
SIXTEEN
Purge
Every part of her jolts awake with a full synaptic shock, like a lightning storm is throttling every nerve ending in her body. Her limbs splay out. Her fingers tighten and curl inward. One of her nails breaks on the wooden floor. Snap. A face, blurry now but swiftly coming into focus, floats above her.
Mother?
An old woman, her silver hair pulled back in a long braid, shines a penlight in Miriam's eyes.
"Here she comes," the woman says, and the face resolves, a total stranger. "The strange woman awakens."
She offers Miriam a hand.
Not again.
Miriam can't handle that right now. Another touch. Another vision. More death, a ceaseless parade of skulls and bones and hungry birds. Instead she sits up and scoots backward against a cherrywood desk. Gasping. Mouth tasting of vomit.
The woman – mid-sixties, in a cozy blue shawl over a white blouse – reaches for Miriam again. "Take my hand. I'll help you up."
"Touch me and I bite it off." Miriam clacks her teeth together to ensure that the literality of her statement is keenly felt.
"I'm not your enemy," the woman says, her voice crisp, prim. " I'm Miss Caldecott. The school
nurse."
Miriam bares her teeth again. "Wait. Caldecott." Miriam squints. "Like the school."
Another shape moves in behind her. The Headmaster. Half his hands rest in his blazer pockets, delicate, the way a library card sits tucked in the back of a book.
"Yes," he says. "Eleanor Caldecott. I'm Edwin Caldecott, Headmaster. This woman is my mother. And, not coincidentally, the founder of this school."
"Great. Good. Fine. Whatever. What happened?" Miriam asks. But she doesn't need them to answer before it all comes spiraling into view. Bleach hair, young girl, handshake, old-timey doctor's table, bird mask, fire axe, death sung to sing-song. "Oh."
Her flailing limbs grab for a nearby metal trashcan, and she pukes into it. A hot tide of pretzels, peppers, tequila.
"Lovely," the Headmaster says. Nasal intonation. As though he's bored by these proceedings. He sucks air through the gap in his two front teeth.
Miriam rests her head against the side of the desk. Wipes a smear of drooly barf from her lip. "The girl. Lauren. I need to talk to her."
"We sent her away," the nurse says. Mouth a severe line.
"Who are you?" the Headmaster asks. "A relative to one of the girls? A sister? Mother? Are you on drugs?"
"I need to talk to that girl."
"We can't allow that, Miss Black. And if you continue to make such strange requests, I will be forced to call the police. I'm already regretting not doing so from the moment you tore one of our sconces from the wall, stumbled into my office, and had a seizure here on the floor."
"I'll go," Miriam says. "I'm sorry. I'll… go."
"Good. I've brought some friends to ensure that to be the case." He untucks one of his hands from its pocket and waves someone in. The nurse studies her the way a cat studies a mouse before the pouncing.
The two guards from before – Roidhead and Mario – enter, and reach to help her up. She fends them both off with the trashcan. Pukey vapors rise from within, and she hisses like a cornered puma. "Fuck off. I'm going. You lay one hand on me and I'll sue you so hard you'll be shitting legal papers till the stars burn out."
Clumsily, drunkenly, Miriam manages to stand by grabbing the edge of the Headmaster's desk. It's only now she gets a good look at the room, and it's almost ludicrously typical: old globe, dark shelves stuffed with books, everything in wood, everything oiled and dusted, no computer. An academic's nocturnal emission: Egyptian artifacts and books of poetry and a glass case featuring some old illuminated manuscript.
Nurse Caldecott reaches for Miriam, but she dances away.
"Miss Black. You should see a doctor."
Miriam says nothing. Just pushes her way out, flanked by the two guards.
She winds her way through the school and all its Victorian trappings: flower-pattern rugs and tea tables and school desks that seat two children each. It smells of dust and books and the faintest hint of strawberry lip gloss.
She passes by classroom after classroom, all filled with girls, some bright-eyed and ready to escape the sucking mud of their own pasts, others glowering and glaring as though to say, This will do nothing for me.
As they walk, Roidhead keeps coming up behind her and bumping her. Then laughing. Like it's an accident but it's not. He's fucking with her.
All she can do is point to him, give him a scathing Iwill-stuff-your-balls-up-your-ass look. Anything past that right now would require energy she doesn't have. That vision didn't just take the wind out of her sails: It tore the sail to ragged ribbons so that the wind whistles through the tattered vents.
He doesn't care. Mario, on the other hand, watches. Cagey. Like she's a snake who might bite. Good boy.
And then, just like that, she's out. The day is bright. Noon-time sun at the tippy-top of its totem pole. The day is warm. But it doesn't matter. She still feels cold. A chill, down into her marrow.
Mask. Song. Axe.
They stuff her into a security guard car – a crappy four-door Ford sedan from the early Oughts, painted to look like an almost-cop-car. On the way, despite the heat, she catches early whiffs of autumn's approach: Somewhere, someone is burning leaves.
Rose. Carnation. Orange oil.
Chemical stink, piss, fear.
The guards ditch her at the gate. Homer's still there and he tries some more witty banter, but it doesn't take.
She can't even hear it.
The gate opens. She takes her chance and escapes this awful place.
SEVENTEEN
Crapplebee's
"Todd," Miriam says, tap-tap-tapping on the edge of her glass. "You're going to need to put another Long Island Iced Tea in this motherfucker, and this time, you're going to need to crank it up a notch. Don't gyp me on this. Did you know that 'gyp' is a racist term? It's totally a racist term. Short for 'gypsy', because apparently the gypsies were always dicking people over. Stealing babies and shit. Whatever. What was I saying? Long Island. Iced tea. In my glass. Pretty please, Todd."
Todd's the bartender here at Applebee's. He's got a black polo on, and he's about as well put-together as a bundle of dry branches. He's probably twenty-one but he looks eighteen. His face has such a crass topography of zits it made Miriam set aside her mozzarella sticks.
"Sure thing," he says, his voice an uneven pubescent croak. He sets to making her a new drink.
It's dead in here. Might as well set up headstones at each booth and table, cover the whole place in cobwebs and grave moss.
She's not sure if it's the only bar in town. But it was the one she found first when walking away from that God-fucked girls' school. And at the time she figured booze was booze, greasy food was greasy food, and that was that.
Since that time, she's revised her opinion. All the bullshit tacked up on the walls is getting to her. Kitschy nonsense, street signs, faux-retro stylings, a fucking boat oar. A boat oar. What a boar oar has to do with anything, she doesn't know. Maybe it's to bludgeon unpleasant customers.
She wonders how long it'll be before Todd bludgeons her.
He seems too sweet to do that. Or dumb.
Maybe he'll take an axe and chop off your head, Wicked Polly.
No. No! She wasn't going to think about that. That's not why she came here. She's not here to stew. She's here to drink. And eat. And forget.
And talk to her new friend, Pizzaface Todd.
"Lemme ask you something," she says, slurring a bit. She damn well better be slurring. She's had – five? – five Long Island Iced Teas. Each of them individually weak but together they form a cauldron of foaming booze in her gut. "Todd. Todd. Lemme ask you something."
He places her next drink in front of her. "Huh?"
"You ever think that, okay, my life is meant for one thing, and that sucks, and you hate it, and… fuck. Right? But then you find out your life is meant for this whole other thing and in many ways that sucks so much worse than the thing you thought you had to do? You follow me, Hot Toddy?"
"Maybe. I dunno." He looks at her like she's got two noses and a vagina for a mouth. He's been this way all night. But that's okay. Todd's a perfect sounding board – and, her liquor-sodden brain tells her, a good good friend.
She pounds back the "iced tea." Still doesn't have enough booze in it. Then again, it could be a tall frosted glass of rubbing alcohol and it might not have enough.
From her right, she hears it: the clickity-click of claws on the bar-top.
At the end of the bar, where no one is sitting, a fatbellied crow stands, drinking the last few drops of something from the bottom of a shot glass. Its beak clinks against the bottom of the glass.
Smoke slowly drifts from its beak-holes.
She blinks, and the crow is gone.
"I don't know either," she says, voice quiet.
A hot rocket surge of acid refluxes up into her throat. With it, a crass reminder: The girl with the red hair and the strawberry freckles is going to die.
Poor little Lauren Martin.
