Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

  I had never been in a monster’s house before.

  The house was small and old, but it was clean. The living room, the kitchen, the bathroom’s eye-searing green fixtures straight out of the seventies, the bedroom with its hospital-neat twin beds, all of it was unbelievably clean, the kind of clean that came from being dusted regularly, mopped, polished, scrubbed with toothbrushes in the crevices. No dust in the vents, no bugs in the light fixtures.

  There was nothing in the refrigerator except spotless shelves and the strong smell of bleach. I was so relieved not to find Tupperware full of mysterious meat I almost laughed out loud. The drawers were empty except one, which held five knives—sharp, as promised—and all I found in the cabinets were some glasses and a half-empty bottle of bourbon.

  Everything they owned could fit into a couple of boxes. I didn’t know if that was strange or not. If somebody had asked me a week ago, when I was a lonely aimless hitchhiker without a pulse, I wouldn’t have even suspected that monsters would bother to have houses. Houses and jobs and phones and cars, witchy liaisons and magical communities, brothers expected home from work. It all felt so ordinary.

  One door in the living room led to the garage, another to what I assumed was the basement. I reached for the knob, ready to ignore Zeke’s warning, but I stopped when I heard something clank downstairs.

  Water pipes, I told myself. Old plumbing.

  I left the door closed.

  There was a laptop on the kitchen table, a clunky older model covered with cheerful Hello Kitty decals and silver sticker letters spelling out Kristy :). I turned it on and leaned back in the chair, winced at the press of wood against my injured side. I heard the noise in the basement again and looked at the closed door, looked away when the computer booted. The desktop background matched the stickers and decals. Poor Kristy. She shouldn’t have left her laptop unattended.

  I was in the news again. Nebraska state troopers had been called to the scene of a suspicious death two days ago. Duncan Palmer of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was found in his car on a rural road north of I-80. There were no obvious signs of foul play.

  The enterprising small town reporter had dug up Palmer’s past as a murder suspect, and discovering that was like the tumblers of a lock falling into place. I read through everything I could find. I stared for a long time at the school photo of the little boy Palmer had killed. Timothy Rosoff. He was chubby and gap-toothed and grinning, with a ridiculous cowlick sticking up from the back of his head. I smelled peanut butter, and for the first time it didn’t make me nauseous. It made me feel vindictive, almost proud.

  I looked for news about Brian Kerr too, hoping for the same flash of certainty, but there was nothing.

  Nothing from home either. The nameless man I’d killed by my grave wasn’t even in the news anymore.

  The excitement I felt piecing together Duncan Palmer’s crime didn’t last. I dragged my backpack over to the table, pulled out my notebook, and opened it to the second page. I had always hated my handwriting, resented how curly and big and girly it was, and I hated it even more now.

  1. Sleeping pills

  2. Drowning

  3. Rat poison

  4. Gunshot

  5. Electrocution

  6. Hanging

  7. Stabbing

  8. Skated face-first into tree

  I added:

  9. Eviscerated by Lyle

  Good band name, I thought.

  One more and I would have a perfect ten.

  I pulled the chair away from the table and angled it toward the kitchen light, pulled up my T-shirt and tucked it beneath my chin. The wound was red and scabbed, hot to the touch. It looked infected. I didn’t even know if that was possible. I hadn’t bothered cleaning any of my other injuries. My dad always said the most important thing to do for an open wound was keep it clean.

  I needed to see what was under the scabs. I selected a knife from the kitchen drawer.

  Before I could sit again, I heard another sound from behind the basement door. Not a metallic clank, but the creak of wood.

  Somebody was on the stairs.

  I glanced over my shoulder.

  The basement door was open.

  My heart jumped.

  Only a crack, but it was open. It had been closed before. I was sure of it.

  I was ten feet from the door, maybe twelve. I tried to guess how many steps it would take me to get there, how fast I could move, whether I could shut the door before—before what? Zeke had warned me not to go into the basement. How to Survive a Horror Movie 101: Never go into the basement. The rule had to apply double when you were alone in a monster’s house, even if the monster in question was an awkward teenage boy who had only left you alone because he had to go clean toilets in an office building.

  But the door was open.

  And, I thought, if this is a horror movie, I’m on Team Monster already.

  I saw the flash of an eye through the gap. It was low to the ground, gone before I could blink. Claws scrabbled noisily down the stairs.

  I made myself start breathing again. I didn’t put down the knife.

  Six steps to the basement door. I pulled it open and fumbled for the light switch. The stairs made a ninety degree turn halfway down. On the landing there was a broom and a blue plastic bucket filled with cleaning supplies. Sponges, rags, furniture polish, spray bottle of Lysol. And—I knew it—a toothbrush. Beside the bucket was a stack of picture books. Where the Wild Things Are was on the top. That had been my favorite when I was a kid.

  I crept down the stairs. They creaked beneath my weight; I paused every few treads to listen. I stopped when I reached the landing halfway down. I could see the edge of a woven rug on the concrete floor at the bottom, but not much else. The air was musty and cool.

  “Hello?” I said.

  There was a faint scratching below.

  “Hey. I’m not going to hurt you.” My voice wavered. I wondered if I should be hiding the knife behind my back. “I just want to, um. Say hi.”

  A shadow moved at the base of the steps. It was compact and low, creeping close the ground.

  The shadow became a small skinny thing. More animal than humanoid, with a narrow head and big ears. Long, long limbs that ended in long, long claws stretched forward to grasp at the rug, picking at the threads like a cat might knead a blanket. It turned its head—sniffing the air, I thought with a fresh spark of worry, scenting me—and pulled itself forward. Long teeth jutted from the jaw.

  But it was the eyes that got my attention. Big and round and yellow and eerily bright—

  And frightened.

  It was scared of me, the stranger in its house.

  My own fear vanished. What I felt in its place was more like pity with a helping of guilt.

  “Hi,” I said. I kept my voice low, easy. Moving slowly, I sat on the step and picked the top book from the stack. “Are these your books? I love this book. Would you like me to read it to you? Is that why they’re here? That has to be why they’re here, right?”

  I was speaking too quickly; my voice shook. The thing didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

  I opened the book and started to read about the night Max wore his wolf suit. The thing settled into the darkness as no more than a shape with big yellow eyes. If it blinked, I didn’t see it. I had read that same book to Sunny a hundred times when she was little. She had insisted on dressing up as a wolf with a crown two Halloweens in a row. Mom and Dad had discovered fairly early that I was so proud of my reading skills they could delegate bedtime stories to me whenever they wanted. Mom and Dad would lurk outside the door, smiling fondly, and sometimes Meadow would listen too, always pretending not to care. Sunny had loved bedtime stories long after she could read for herself, but she had lost interest a few years ago. She still read all the time, had won the local library summer reading contest for three years, but if she ever missed me reading to her, she had never mentioned it.

  When I finished the book, the thing at the b
ottom of the stairs made a quiet noise, a disgruntled little huff that wasn’t quite a word.

  “That’s the end,” I said. “You know it always ends the same way.”

  I didn’t want to think about Sunny and Mom and Dad anymore. I shouldn’t have come down here. I had thought it would be better, to make that little creature less scared of me, but it didn’t help at all.

  The thing blinked at me, just once, and slunk away into the darkness. I heard claws tapping faintly on the cement floor, the soft rustle of something that might have been paper or straw, and the basement was silent.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I RETURNED TO the kitchen with its bright lights to clean the wounds Lyle had given me. I positioned the tip of the knife over the longest claw mark and pressed down to make a dent in the scab.

  My hand was shaking. I stared at the blade. I had done this before. It was item number seven on my list of possible ways to die. By the time I got to seven, I was pretty sure nothing I could do to myself would be permanent. By the time I got to seven, I was already contemplating more extreme options—incineration, decapitation—and knowing they too wouldn’t work. The wound from number seven had faded to a scar, a fine white line just below my navel. It had bled a lot. It had hurt even more.

  I pushed the knife into the wound again. It broke through the skin with a bright spark of pain. I watched the blood trickle down my side.

  I pressed the tip of the knife into another spot, clean unharmed skin, made another puncture. Watched it bleed again. Again, then deeper, and deeper still, puncturing a matchstick scatter of small cuts around the slashes Lyle had made. The sting of breaking skin gave way to a different kind of ache. My breath was short and shallow and my lungs burned. I was going to ruin my stolen jeans. I didn’t know how to wash bloodstains out of clothes. I ought to learn.

  A key scraped in the front door. I jumped to my feet as a man came in.

  “Hi,” I said. I was still holding my shirt up. The knife in my hand was bloody.

  The man locked the door, lifted the curtain on the front window to glance out, then turned to me and said, “Hi. I’m Jake Horn. Zeke’s brother.”

  I waved a little, stopped when I realized I was waving the bloody knife. “Hi. I’m Breezy. I’m the reanimated corpse your brother found in Wyoming.”

  “He told me. He said you needed help.” Jake hesitated, then took a few steps closer, but cautiously. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m, um. This is awkward.”

  I lowered the knife. My face grew hot. I was standing in his kitchen with a bloody knife in one hand, half a dozen stab wounds on my side, and no good explanation. I thought maybe I should put the knife down, but I didn’t want to spread blood all over the counter.

  “I’m just trying to clean it,” I said finally. It sounded even stupider out loud than it did inside my head. “It’s healing, but not like it should. I thought . . . maybe I should clean it.”

  Jake stared at me. “That doesn’t hurt?”

  “Yeah, it hurts. It hurts a lot.”

  “It’s stopped bleeding,” Jake said. He looked curious rather than revolted, but he stayed carefully out of knife-jabbing range.

  “I heal fast. I don’t know why.”

  “Magic.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Wow, thanks, that’s so helpful. I never would have figured that one out on my own, all this magic happening to me.”

  Jake looked at me for a few more seconds. He looked a lot like his brother, but unlike Zeke, he had no trouble meeting my eyes. He turned and disappeared down the hallway for about a minute. He came back with a silver scalpel.

  “Try that instead of a kitchen knife,” Jake said. He leaned against the counter. “It’s not happening to you. You are the source of the magic.”

  “I don’t know what that means. It feels like it’s happening to me.” I set the knife down, picked up the glinting scalpel. “I’m not going to ask why you keep a scalpel in your bedroom.”

  “Somebody tried to kill you, right?”

  I tugged down my scarf and lifted my chin to show off the bruises. “He succeeded.”

  “If he had really succeeded,” Jake said, amused, “you wouldn’t be sitting here, bleeding all over my kitchen.”

  “I’m barely bleeding at all anymore.” I would be again, as soon as I got to work with the scalpel, but I hesitated. “I still don’t understand.”

  “That’s where magic comes from.”

  “From being murdered?”

  “From death,” he said. “From any kind of death. That’s how magicians get their magic.”

  “By killing people?” My voice rose with alarm. “Seriously? I thought—I don’t know. I thought they were born with it. Like it’s genetic or something.” I wasn’t going to admit I had only assumed that because that’s how it worked in Harry Potter. I felt a pang of sadness that Harry Potter had been lying to me all along.

  “Nah, humans aren’t born with magic,” Jake said. Unlike Rain, he didn’t seem to be making fun of me for what I didn’t know. I decided I liked him just for that. “They get it from the death of any living thing. Most use animals or insects.”

  The mixture Mr. Willow had used to knock me out, and the bowl of dead beetles in Ingrid’s house, not to mention the blood-soaked room, they made a lot more sense with that context, but they weren’t all that came to mind.

  “A lot of birds died the day I came back,” I said. “I mean, like, thousands of birds. Was that— Obviously it was related, right?”

  Jake’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “That was you? In Chicago?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “You heard about it?”

  “Everybody heard about it. When something like that happens, well, it’s kind of hard to ignore. Usually it means a magician has seriously fucked up.”

  I tugged at the scarf and tried to hide how my hands were trembling. “Does that mean somebody did this to me on purpose?”

  “Not necessarily,” Jake said. “He didn’t have to know what he was doing, or even to be doing it to you specifically. Magic is messy. It’s unpredictable. Even when it works, it doesn’t usually work how the magician wants it to. And sometimes it’s a complete accident.”

  “You mean I’m an accident?”

  “It’s possible. Nobody’s taken credit for the birds. Or blame, I guess. Nobody has any idea who was involved.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Do you?”

  I didn’t know his name, but I knew how angry he felt when he stood outside a house on a winter prairie. Oh, you’re perfect, you’re beautiful, that’s what he had said when he leaned over my grave. I knew he had decided to shoot the children and the husband first to get them out of the way. I knew the thrill he had felt pushing a knife into the woman’s heart. How he had carefully wiped his shoes on the doormat before leaving.

  I knew he was dead, because I had killed him.

  But if nobody else had put it together yet, I wasn’t going to do it for them. My brave new monster-filled world was hard enough to navigate without me revealing myself as a murderer to everybody I met.

  “No, nothing,” I said, the words as casual and dismissive as I could manage. “I don’t know how any of this works. What about plants? Does killing them make magic? Plants are living things.”

  Jake laughed. “You know, I have no idea. Maybe it takes a lot of plants to do anything worthwhile.”

  “Like if a magician started a forest fire.”

  “If it would work, I’m sure somebody’s tried it,” Jake said. “I really don’t know. We’re sort of immune to most magic, so I only know what other people have told me.”

  “Immune?” I repeated, then I understood. “Oh. So that’s why Zeke could get into that room when Rain and I couldn’t even touch the walls. Have you always been . . .” I hesitated. There was no polite way to ask. “Were you born like this? A, uh, ghoul?”

  Jake was surprised by the question. “Well, yeah.”

  “Oh. How does that ev
en work?”

  “Do you need me to give you the talk about what happens when a mommy and a daddy like each other very much?”

  “I really don’t, thanks. So, people—I mean, humans—humans aren’t born magical, but they can do magic if they kill stuff.”

  “Right.”

  “And some things—I mean, people, sorry—some people are born not human, because their parents weren’t human, and that’s just . . . just biology.”

  “More or less.”

  “And I’m not either one of those things.”

  “Nope,” said Jake. “You’re a little different.”

  “Okay. I think I get it. Uh, thanks.”

  “What for?”

  I looked down at the scalpel. My hand was still shaking. “You’re the first person I’ve met who’s actually tried to explain anything to me. Rain and Ingrid just kind of assumed that I already knew all of that. I asked Ingrid why I was, you know, like this, but she just said I wouldn’t understand.”

  “That’s her way of saying she doesn’t know either.”

  “She could have just told me that.”

  “She doesn’t like to admit she doesn’t know things. Do you want help?”

  For a second I thought he meant help in the big picture, the cosmic picture, help with life and death and afterlife and questions and answers and the fact that nothing made any sense at all anymore, and my knee-jerk reaction was to insist I didn’t need anything.

  But he was only talking about my injuries. He held out his hand for the scalpel.

  I didn’t pass it over.

  Jake smiled slightly. “Don’t worry. You don’t smell appetizing.”

  “That’s exactly what your brother said, and it’s even worse the second time. You know that implies other people do smell appetizing, right?”

  “Only the ones who are all the way dead,” Jake said. “Do you want help or not?”

  I gave him the scalpel. Without a couple of mirrors and some rapidly acquired contortionist skills, I was never going to be able to do it myself. Jake patted the counter beside the sink and told me to jump up so he could see better. He prodded the wounds with the scalpel; I hissed and clenched my teeth.