by Kali Wallace
I THOUGHT ABOUT it in the thirty seconds it took for me to walk from the house to the truck, which was a black, beat-up piece of junk that didn’t look like it had very many miles left in it. On the windows of the bed topper somebody had written wash me in the opaque dirt, and somebody else had replied bite me.
I was digging in my backpack for my heart-shaped sunglasses and I was thinking: right, okay, ghouls are real too. I’m pretty sure I learned all about them in one of my old Goosebumps books. Something about graveyards. Lurking in graveyards. I remembered that much.
“Oh,” I said.
I stopped ten feet from the truck.
Rain snickered.
“What’s your problem?” Zeke said through the open door.
“Um,” I said, and Rain’s snicker turned into a full laugh.
Zeke started the truck and put it into gear. “You don’t smell appetizing,” he said. “You’re not that dead.”
“That is not as reassuring as you think it is,” I said.
“Are you coming or not?”
We were in the middle of nowhere. There was yellow prairie grass in every direction, a few distant houses along a dirt road, and dusty blue mountains on the horizon, still tipped with snow. The house sat alone at the end of a long driveway, without even a barn or a shed to keep it company. There was a soft-top Jeep parked outside. Not the best vehicle to use if you had to truss up people you’d kidnapped and drive them around, but maybe Brian Kerr had a system. Unless somebody drove right up to the house, they wouldn’t see the broken window. They wouldn’t have any reason to look inside and find the red bedroom with the boarded-up windows and the man lying on the floor like a discarded doll.
The sun was crawling higher and the day was already warm, the air dry and sharp.
I got into the truck.
TWENTY-ONE
WE DROVE EAST first, then south toward Colorado. The land was empty and dry, marked by evidence of civilization in narrow strips along roads and exits. We passed through the thin outskirts of Cheyenne and turned onto the interstate. The truck was old and noisy and it sounded like it would rattle apart if Zeke pushed it faster than sixty-five. Shook like it too, a deep vibration I could feel in my teeth and my bones.
My side hurt constantly, no matter how I shifted or braced myself. I reached beneath my shirt to check if I was bleeding again. My fingers came away tacky with blood. I didn’t know why this injury wasn’t healing like the others, but I was perfectly happy to blame Lyle.
Zeke was driving with one hand on the wheel, one elbow resting on the door, head propped up like he was having trouble staying awake. He was leaning away from Rain, careful not to bump her when he shifted gears.
Rain said, “If you fall asleep and kill us, I’m going to be pissed.”
He didn’t look at her. “It won’t kill me, and she’s already kind of dead. That leaves you, and I don’t care what happens to you.”
It was the first thing anybody had said since we left the house. Their argument about the witch settled, they didn’t seem to have a lot to say to each other. I was getting the impression they maybe didn’t like each other very much.
I watched the passing landscape through the window. Fields of grass turning brown for summer, wire fences and cows, pickup trucks rolling along the frontage roads. The day felt different from my nighttime ride across Nebraska. More exposed, less welcoming.
“All the stuff in that house,” I began.
I regretted breaking the silence as soon as the words were out. I didn’t want to think about the scared, screaming little girl with the braids and the yellow ball cap, or the young man gasping and gurgling as he slowly, slowly died. I didn’t feel guilty about Brian Kerr. I only wished I hadn’t left him alive.
“What about it?” Rain said, when I didn’t go on.
“It all belonged to people like—like us?”
“Monsters,” she said.
“And there are lots of different kinds of—” I didn’t want to say it. “Monsters?”
Rain raised one eyebrow. “Breezy, you can go ahead and ask if vampires are real. We won’t judge you.”
“Are they?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said. “Never met one.”
“I have,” Zeke said.
“Really?” Rain looked surprised. “You’ve met a real vampire?”
“Yeah, once.”
“I thought they were an urban legend, like the phone call coming from inside the house,” Rain said thoughtfully. “Are they anything like the stories? All suave and sexy with vague European accents and bespoke suits?”
“No. They’re kind of gross.”
“The kid who eats human corpses for dinner is calling something else gross.”
“Well, they are,” Zeke said. “They’re all hairy and pale. They live underground.” Rain wasn’t looking at him, so she didn’t see the slight twitch of his lips. He was messing with her. Lying through his mostly human teeth. That made me like him a little bit more, even if he had told me I smelled like death.
“What about mermaids?” When they both looked at me, I explained, “My sister swore she saw a mermaid in Lake Michigan once.”
I hadn’t thought of that day in years, but now I remembered it vividly: the hot summer sun, the cold lap of water, and Sunny running along the shore, shouting about the ugly green person eating fish in the lake. We had laughed at her at the time, even though she was red faced and shaky, her lips trembling, her eyes damp. Dad had taken her hand and led her back up the beach, even after she had shaken her head and wiped her nose and insisted she didn’t want to go. They didn’t find anything, and by the time they came back Dad had promised Sunny ice cream and she was laughing like she had never been scared at all.
“Mermaids,” Rain said. “In Lake Michigan. I hope you got your sister’s head checked out.”
But Zeke said, “There are a lot of people living in the Great Lakes. She’s lucky they didn’t grab her. They can be nasty. And they’re cannibals.”
“Pot, kettle,” Rain said.
Zeke ignored her. “That’s how they fight. Winner eats loser. People bet on the fights.”
“The first rule of cannibal mermaid fight club is don’t talk about cannibal mermaid fight club.” Rain laughed at Zeke’s confused look. “You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. You are so full of it. You’ve never seen a mermaid.”
Zeke only shrugged. “They smell like fish.”
Neither of them minded me asking questions on the theme of “real or not real?” so I kept at it, if only for a way to pass the time. “Ghosts?” confirmed what I had already figured out from my encounter on the country road; they were real, certainly, but they didn’t have a whole lot going on. “Werewolves?” led Rain into a long, elaborate story about a pair of brothers she had once known, or slept with, or who had been sleeping with each other, it wasn’t entirely clear, only that it featured a smokejumper and a park ranger and I believed about one-tenth of it.
“How about this one,” I said, after the smokejumper and the park ranger drove off into the sunset together. “What would you call somebody who looks perfectly normal but can spontaneously grow huge claws and run really fast?”
“Is that what happened to you, with all those scratches?” Rain asked.
“Yeah. What was he?”
“Was he hairy? Scaly? Smell like a trash dump? Red eyes?”
“No. He was just a guy, at least until the claws came out.”
“No idea,” Rain said. “Lots of things have claws. You’re gonna have to give us more than that.”
But I didn’t have anything more, only the marks Lyle had left. “What about somebody with glowing green eyes and a scream that can make people’s ears bleed?”
“Who the hell have you been hanging out with?” Rain said. “You need better friends. Are we talking about a woman?”
“Yes.”
“She could be a banshee,” Zeke said.
Rain nodded. “Sou
nds like it, but there aren’t many of them around.”
One less, now, if what Violet had been telling the truth about what Mr. Willow could do.
I made the mistake of asking about fairies and they spent twenty minutes arguing about what counted as a fairy and how they were different from sprites or elves or whatever, and whether it was even worth knowing the differences if nobody had ever seen half of the things that qualified. I was going to have to add an Unknown column to my Real/Not Real list.
“Unicorns?” I said, after the fairy discussion had subsided, unresolved.
Rain snorted a laugh, and Zeke said, “No.”
“He would know,” Rain added. “I hear they like ’em young and pure.”
My next question was there on my tongue. Closer to angels, Mr. Willow had said about Esme. Esme with her animal growl and her bib and her empty stare. I wondered if she had claws too, or if Mr. Willow’s help had taken them away. Closer to demons.
I didn’t ask. I couldn’t even get a handle on monsters in this world yet. Other realms were more than I was prepared to deal with.
Instead I said, “Dragons?”
“Dragons?” Rain repeated.
I sighed. “This might all be worth it if dragons were real.”
TWENTY-TWO
LATER, MUCH LATER, I did ask. By then my Real/Not Real list was a little longer, and the Unknown list on the next page was longer than both of them combined.
I asked, “Are demons real?”
Zeke and I were walking through the Gold Hill Cemetery outside Boulder. It was a warm morning, cloudless and clear, just like every other Colorado summer day. The cemetery was on a hill, steeper than you would think made sense for burying coffins, surrounded by a wire fence with a gate that looked like it hadn’t been closed in decades. The trees above the cemetery had been burned black by a forest fire a few years ago, but everything close to the ground was overgrown with rich green grass and bright wildflowers. Every step we took stirred up an explosion of grasshoppers.
We found the headstone we were looking for tucked away in a cluster of rustling aspens. Beloved Mother, Who Hath Suffered. Died 1973. No name. No date of birth. Possessive and dismissive, carved in stone.
Zeke had gathered up a bunch of wildflowers to put on the grave. I thought it was sweet, but I didn’t want to admit that out loud, so I said, “You know there’s nobody there, right? They buried an empty box. They only wanted everybody to think she was dead.”
I liked that there was one place in the old cemetery where I could stand and know there was nobody below me.
Zeke threw one of the flowers at me. It hit me in the nose, but I caught it before it fell. Purple lupine, and I only knew that because when Sunny was little she loved this picture book about a woman who traveled all over the world, had a lifetime of adventures, and in her old age planted flowers to make the world more beautiful. I must have read that book to Sunny about a dozen times, and we all had to endure her brief but fervent backyard gardening phase that followed.
I twirled the flower between my fingers. “Are they? Are demons real?”
“Is this the unicorn thing again?” Zeke asked.
“Just so you know, I still don’t believe you about unicorns,” I said, because I knew it would make him roll his eyes, which was almost as good as a laugh. “I will always believe unicorns are real. They’re pretty and sparkly and their horns are made of pure joy, but they only appear for people who aren’t jerks. That’s why you’ll never meet one.”
“Neither will you,” Zeke said.
I stuck my tongue out, the most mature comeback I could manage. “Tell me about demons. You know, demons from hell that possess people. Black eyes and pea soup and crab walks, the whole deal. Are they real?”
“No such thing. They’re just a stupid human story,” Zeke said. It was what I expected him to say, but he surprised me by continuing. “There’s no one monster that’s like that, but there are a lot that humans would probably call demons. Including you.”
“And you.”
“But they’re just people. They’re not different. They’re not from somewhere else.”
“Not from hell, you mean.”
“Wherever.” Zeke dismissed it with a quick shrug; the word had no meaning to him. Monsters are the least superstitious people I’ve ever met. “It’s just a story. Humans always like to blame everything on invisible monsters from an invisible world.”
Zeke turned away from the grave and started walking again, not down toward the car but up the hill, farther into the cemetery. When we had first set foot through the gate, half an hour ago, I had asked him if he felt anything, and he had shrugged and said, “It’s quiet. Peaceful.”
“What about angels?” I asked.
“Same thing. What’s the difference?”
It was the difference between people who were cruel and people who were kind, between stories about evil and stories about good, but maybe in his mind that wasn’t much of a difference at all.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because that’s how humans are,” he said. He said it the way a marine biologist might say, Because that’s how giant squids are, curious and knowledgeable, but observing an alien species from the outside.
There was a little voice in the back of my mind, an angry stage whisper that said: I am human. I know how we are.
But I knew the difference between the truth and a lie, even inside my own head.
And I knew he was right. I was asking because there was a part of me that still wanted to assign away blame. A part that still wanted to believe all of this, the magic and the monsters, it was all something apart, something not merely hidden but separate from the world I had known before.
Zeke was quiet a moment before he said, “You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?”
“No,” I said.
I didn’t have to think about it. Heaven or hell, clouds and harps or fire and brimstone. I knew which list those kinds of afterlife belonged on.
“I know it’s not real,” I said. “And if anybody should know, it’s me.”
I watched the Gold Hill grasshoppers flinging themselves this way and that, all around the overgrown gravestones and charred trees. Violet had said the darkness was inside me. She was wrong.
“Not bigger, but brighter,” I said to myself. At Zeke’s look, I explained, “It’s something Sally Ride said once. She was the first American woman to go into space. Not the first woman ever. That was Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. It took the Americans twenty more years to get a woman up there. That was Sally Ride.”
“Is she one of your dead astronauts?” he asked.
“They’re not my dead astronauts,” I said. So maybe being dead myself hadn’t stopped me from talking about my dead heroes all the time, but at least Zeke didn’t tell me it was morbid like Melanie used to. “And, no. I mean, yes, she’s dead, but she died of cancer, in her sixties. Not in space. But somebody asked her once in an interview about what it was like, and she said, ‘The stars don’t look bigger, but they do look brighter.’”
I looked up at the blue sky and squinted in the brilliant sun. Zeke had never asked. I had never told anybody before.
“That’s all I remember about that whole year,” I said. “It was dark and cold and empty. But there were stars. It was too lonely to be heaven, and there wouldn’t be stars in hell.”
TWENTY-THREE
WE DROVE INTO Boulder from the north. Busy midday traffic surrounded us, a sprawl of stores and parking lots and restaurants strung along busy streets, buses lurching from stop to stop, cyclists hunched over handlebars in the bike lanes.
At a stoplight, Zeke took out his phone, made a call, and left a short message: “Taking Rain to Ingrid’s, won’t be long.”
After he hung up, Rain said, “I can’t believe you. Nothing’s going to happen. Ingrid’s not stupid enough to do anything to you.”
Zeke was watching the road, not looking at us. “It’s not me I’m worried ab
out,” he said.
Rain opened her mouth, seemed to think better of it, and kept quiet.
We turned west and left the city behind. Climbed into the mountains, past the dam and reservoir at Nederland, straight through town and out the other side. I grew more nervous with every mile. Mr. Willow and Brian Kerr had left me wary of people who lived in remote locations.
About twenty minutes outside Nederland, Zeke turned off the highway and onto a narrow dirt road that skirted the edge of a thick pine forest, following a broad valley ringed by snow-spotted mountains. We turned again, this time onto a driveway that climbed through the trees before winding down a low ridge and into a gentle bowl of a valley. Tall shaggy animals grazed in a pasture. Llamas or alpacas. I didn’t know the difference. They ignored us.
The driveway led to a house and a red barn surrounded by a wooden fence. A speckled gray horse nosed at tufts of grass in a corral. The house itself was small and old, a genuine log cabin of rich ruddy wood, with a stone chimney at one end and a long porch stretched across the front.
It was a beautiful scene, sunny and bright beneath the deep blue sky, the mountains so close and so clear. It could have been from a postcard: Greetings from Colorful Colorado! Wish you were here!
All I could think about was how far I would have to run to get away.
The gate was open, but Zeke stopped before pulling through.
“You’re not even going up to the house?” Rain asked.
“No.”
“What the hell did you do to piss her off?”
“Nothing. I said I’d bring you here. You’re here.”
The house looked so pretty and idyllic, that quaint cabin huddled down in the blue mountains and green pastures. There was a hummingbird feeder hanging on the porch and a wind chime on the opposite side, both swaying slightly in a breeze not quite strong enough to make the bells ring.
If I had to imagine what a witch’s house would look like, that wouldn’t have been it. There definitely wouldn’t have been alpacas.
“Look, don’t listen to this idiot,” Rain said to me. “Ingrid’s fine. She’s like a liaison between all the different people around here. Monsters like us, magicians like her, people who aren’t either but know about both, right?”
