Nightmare Magazine Issue 26

by Nightmare Magazine

  I join him. “Come alive at the count of five.”

  Now together: “One.” Oona’s face is turned toward the ground, and her shoulders are hunched inside her yellow dress.

  “Two,” and the sky has thunderheads. Oona’s totally still. I want to start laughing, but I don’t.

  “Three,” and a dog’s barking. The last light’s on Oona now from the sun coming down, and I hear a screen door slap itself against a doorframe like a mosquito killed on a thigh.

  “Four,” and Trevor’s jigging high-kneed behind Oona and then around in front of her. She’s still as a statue, and for a second that’s what she is, a marble girl, hard-skinned and smooth and waxy as a plum. There’s a smell, an oven smell, and then a cold smell, a dark blue-green smell, and I feel my bladder give.

  Trevor doesn’t notice. He’s swooping and bouncing and Oona doesn’t notice either, because she’s getting up.

  “Five,” Trevor shouts, but Oona’s already off the ground. Not Oona. Someone else, unfolding like a newborn calf, awkward arms and knees all folded up. Red hair to her waist. Ragged yellow dress. Pale speckled skin and wide eyes. I look at the ground. Oona’s gone.

  “Dead girl,” the lady says, and looks at me. Her lips are parched. She’s filthy. She raises her hand to her mouth and coughs, and I’m stuck in front of her as she gags on bugs. The whole world’s full of bugs suddenly, all kinds, and I don’t know where they’re coming from, but I can see them coming out of the sky and up from the dirt too, all in rows and then in a rush as quick and glittering as water. Beetles and moths and lightning.

  “Where’s Oona?” I ask the lady, but she doesn’t answer me. In the sky around us, something’s ripping like nylon stockings, running down from the center of the dark. Brightness rolling casually from behind the black. Holes all around us. Lightning bugs disappearing into them, a blink, a blink.

  I feel her hands on me, on my shoulders, and she’s looking down at me as her head rips off her shoulders and falls. I’m a basket. I’m a hoop. I put my hands up to cover my face, and I catch her crown of braids. One of my fingers sticks in her mouth and I feel her teeth in my skin. Another in the corner of her eye, and I feel it give, swishing wet, a ripeness.

  “Oona!” I’m screaming, and I’m holding this dead thing, and I move my hands, trying to drop it, but I can feel her skull. I can feel her jawbone and the sockets of her eyes, and she’s dead.

  I look at the ground and it’s covered in a carpet of dying lightning bugs.

  The head in my hands says something, but she can’t even talk. Her tongue is thick and garbled, and my hand is in her mouth, and when she looks up at me, I see one of her eyes is missing. I can’t move. I can’t scream anymore. The sky is ripping open. I see ambulance lights and someone on a motorcycle. I see a fishhook gleaming. I see a pile of bodies. I’m seeing all these things and also I see my own skinned knees in front of me, and my mom is nowhere.

  A dark hole in a pale face, a mouth around my hand, bugs crawling out the corners, dirt everywhere, and blood, and then it’s done. There’s a flash of light brighter than the bugs.

  • • • •

  Trevor’s standing behind me with a flashlight, and all the screen doors are opening, and Oona’s on the ground in front of me, a flickering image at first, fetal position, dress torn, and all around her this woman, a bigger version, who looks at me, her eyes screaming, glowing, and then she’s gone.

  “Don’t,” she says, but she’s not saying it to me. The sky zips itself like the back of a dress.

  Oona sits up. She looks at us and at my mom and at all the parents in the circle, who wonder why I screamed. I look down at my hand. I wipe it on my t-shirt.

  “Do I come alive now?” she says and laughs. “You look weird.”

  There’s a stripe of red on my buffalo t-shirt. There are teeth marks in my finger. When I go to bed, I find dead lightning bugs in my shoes. Everyone says we have a big imagination. Oona doesn’t say anything.

  We didn’t really know her, and now we don’t really know her more. We’re invited to her birthday. She turns another age. We’re invited to all her birthdays. Her dad doesn’t notice us. We ride in fancy cars. We get bikes. We eat hamburgers. Oona never shows up in school pictures. Oona never shows up on videos. Sometimes I see the lady outside the school, waiting, but if I look at her, she’s gone.

  Sometimes I pull the book from under my bed, the one full of dead girls, pictures of them in their fancy silk dresses, but I don’t look at it. I just pull out the library check-out card, and then I put it back in. My name isn’t even on it. Nobody knows I have it. Nobody knows anything.

  I don’t think it was my fault.

  I think it was my fault.

  One

  The window explodes behind Trevor, and I watch it happen. A swarm of insects filling the bar so there’s nothing to it but wings, and all of them on fire, glowing with captured sunlight.

  The little girl steps over the sill. The bottoms of her feet are black. She’s been walking dead for thirty years, and beside her I see another Oona, and another still, this one old, all of them walking through that window.

  Trevor turns. I look at his neck. There’s a piece of glass in his skin. I lift my hand, wondering at the piece of glass in my arm, and blood around it, pulsing out calmly to a beat. I see myself from the wrong angle, and then I see Trev from the wrong angle. I see dirt below me, me pitching into it, downward.

  We’re surrounded. All the Oonas are in the bar with us, and there’s something about them, the way their hair is braided, the way they hang for a moment by their necks and then tilt forward under the blade, the way we’re everywhere at once, an execution on a hillside somewhere, Oona’s head shaved, a basket to catch it, and an execution in a prison somewhere, Oona’s head hooded, and an execution on a street somewhere, a little Oona and a car slamming its brakes on, a grave full of beetles, a little Oona in a Victorian dress, a little Oona made of light, her whole body glowing and then dark, glowing and then dark.

  Trev and I are on the floor in a landscape of glass and both of us on our knees.

  “Who’d we bring back?” I ask him, because we tangled time back then, thirty years ago, and the Oona that was with us that day is not the Oona we’ve ever seen again. I’ve known it and Trev’s known it too, and now we’re going to die knowing it. We’ve seen her sometimes, glimpses of the original, but she’s wired together with something else, an Oona full of centuries worth of dead girls, all held in one body, all moving at once. I’ve tried to puzzle it out: thirty years of antennae and wings, thirty years of insects crossing centuries, flying fast. No one would listen to me when I tried to talk about it. I stopped trying. I thought I might end up shouting, trying to tell strangers. No one ever believed that something came up out of the dirt. No one ever believed she was a nest full of spirits, and I tried not to believe it either.

  I try to be ready to go. I try to be ready to skip back in time, to die over and over, to be whatever it is Oona needs me to be.

  Trev’s looking over my shoulder at her.

  “Who’s your executioner?” says Oona from behind me. “You catch your own head in a basket and spend the rest of time carrying it around with you. You get murdered in Mexico and dropped into the dirt and no one ever finds you. You get beheaded for being a witch in Massachusetts. You walk through a jungle with a basket on your head. You fill a basket with bugs. You die in a pit in Indonesia, shot for selling them to the highest bidder because the beetles all contained god and you blackmarketed them.” She pauses. “I did that one time. Maybe that’s how this started.”

  She leans over me. “You shake hands with your lover before you leave her. How about you, Zellie? You used to love me. Do you still love me?”

  She coughs. A lightning bug on her tongue.

  This Oona’s not the little girl Oona, but the ancient Oona, her body full of bright, her eyes dark.

  “Where is she?” I ask. Trev’s choking and a little bit of blood is comin
g out of the corner of his mouth.

  “There’s no Oona left,” she says. “We filled her up.”

  But there’s a flash in those eyes, a thirty-year-old circle of dirt. The ancient Oona looks at me, her head tilted, black wings running down her cheeks. The thirty-seven-year-old Oona looks at me too, and at Trev. She leans forward and picks him up. She blows into his mouth, and in her breath appears a black butterfly. Trev gulps.

  “Oona?” Trev asks. “Are you in there? I’ll take the rest of them.”

  “Let’s go home, Oona,” I say. “Dead girl, dead girl,” I say, and I struggle to my feet. “Come alive.”

  There’s a blurry motion and for a bending moment, there are nine of us in the room, three children, three adults, three old people tilting to our graves.

  I grab Trev’s hand, and Trev grabs mine, and another mine, and another Trev takes another me. We ring around the Oonas and the room fills with light, with glowing and dark, with blurring motion.

  Trevor leans in. He’s a broken man in bad shape and he doesn’t give a fuck about fear. He kisses Oona, and the room bends. I lean in. I kiss another Oona, the old Oona before me, and the floor tilts. The little ones stand together in the center of us all, children, smaller than I remember being. We’re both kissing blurs.

  “Dead girl, dead girl, come alive,” I say into the ancient Oona’s mouth.

  “Five, four, three, two . . .” Trev says into the little Oona’s ear. We are both the dead in the picture, but we’ve been good as dead since we fell in love with someone who wasn’t living. We have nothing to lose.

  “One,” we say together.

  I see my executioner, and I see us all weeping for a loved one. I see a basket, and I see myself in it, my own head, my own hands. I see an Oona, naked and dead, and beneath her body a litter of shining insects carrying her over the forest floor, moving their treasure to a mound of dirt. I see an Oona swarmed by tiny gods, all with their wings humming, their mandibles clacking. I see a living, breathing Oona in our arms.

  Someone flies into me, and someone flies into Trevor, filling us with the dead. Our bellies, our bodies. We carry the lost. We share the burden.

  But on the floor, there’s a circle of dirt. And curled in it is Oona, asleep, like a volcano erupting, like a yellow iris blooming, her hands full of old knives, rusted with centuries of exposure to the elements.

  She opens her eyes.

  “When did we get so old?” she says, and outside it’s bright, and gold, and summer.

  © 2014 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the upcoming young adult skyship novel Magonia from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the memoir The Year of Yes, and co-author with Kat Howard of the short horror novella The End of the Sentence. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” “The Traditional”), on Tor.com, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Uncanny Magazine, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead, as well as in a number of Year’s Bests, most recently Year’s Best Weird. She lives in Brooklyn with a collection of beasts, an anvil, and a speakeasy bar through the cellar doors. Find her on Twitter @MARIADAHVANA or on the web at mariadahvanaheadley.com.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  Rebecka

  Karin Tidbeck

  The outline of Rebecka’s body is light against the scorched wall, arms outstretched as if to embrace someone. The floor is littered with white ashes. Everything else in the room looks like it did before. A kitchen table with a blue tablecloth, a kitchenette stacked with dirty dishes. A wrought iron bed, which I am strapped to.

  I ended up here because I was Rebecka’s only friend. As such, I used to clean up after her half-hearted suicide attempts: blood from shallow wrist cuts; regurgitated benzos and vodka; torn-out overhead light sockets and doorjambs that wouldn’t hold her weight. She would call me in the wee hours of the morning: Get over here, help me, I tried again, I screwed up . . . and I would go over there to nurse her and hug her, again and again. What was I supposed to do? I wanted to tell her to do something radical—jump from the West Bridge, throw herself in front of a train—just to get it over with. But I didn’t have the heart. I don’t know why I remained her friend. It’s not like I got anything out of it. It was the worst kind of friendship, held together by pity.

  • • • •

  I remember the phone conversation we had the day before her first suicide attempt. It was a slushy Saturday in March. I was in my pajamas on the sofa, watching two sparrows fight over a lump of tallow that hung from the balcony rail. We were talking about something inconsequential, clothes and sizes I think, when she suddenly changed the subject.

  “The Lord,” Rebecka said over the phone.

  “Hallowed be His name,” I said reflexively.

  “Sure. The Lord,” she said. “He punishes people, right?”

  “Is that a trick question?” I said.

  She was quiet for a moment. Then: “I did something.”

  “What?”

  “I went to the Katarina Church and spit in the baptismal font.”

  “You did what?” I must have shouted; the birds took off.

  “Spit in the baptismal font. I thought that might get His attention.”

  “Rebecka, that’s insane. People have been fried on the spot for doing stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, that was sort of the point, wasn’t it?”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, He showed up.”

  I waited for her to say she was just pulling my leg, but she said nothing, just breathed down the line. “He showed up? How?”

  “Uh,” she said, “it was really bright. I had to cover my eyes.”

  I looked outside. Melting icicles on the windows and rain gutters that glittered in sunlight unbearably bright after the foggy Stockholm winter. “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “But He said He was okay about the font,” she continued. “He said that some people have to be allowed more mistakes than others. That they’re damaged and don’t understand.”

  “Did you get a chance to ask Him about the other stuff?”

  “No. He left after that. I’ll have to come up with something else.”

  “Rebecka,” I said, “you can’t make Him change His mind.”

  “I just don’t want to feel like shit. Is that too much to ask?”

  “We can’t expect Him to take care of everything,” I said. “After all, we had to take care of ourselves before He came back.”

  “But there were psychologists then,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And there aren’t anymore.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Because He cures everyone and . . . how was it . . . ‘lifts the darkness in every soul.’ Except me. So what am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a task you have. A test.”

  “I already went through my damned test. I can’t deal with all this crap.” She hung up.

  The string of attempts with pills, razor blades, and ropes started after that. She would call me after every attempt. I took her to the hospital the first few times. After making sure she didn’t have any life-threatening injuries (and she never did), they sent her home with a priest in tow. Eventually, Rebecka wouldn’t call me until a day or so after she’d done something. Then I’d visit to clean up the mess while she hid in her bed.

  The Lord tells us we must have patience with our fellow men, especially those who are being tested. Rebecka was being tested. Around the time when I had just met her, she had been raped and tortured by her husband, rest his soul. She had never recovered.

  • • �
�� •

  “People who hurt others are the ones with the best imagination,” Rebecka said.

  We were walking along the quay from Old Town to Slussen, watching the commuter boats trudge across Lake Mälaren. It was November. There were no tourists waiting for the boats this time of year, just some pensioners and a kindergarten group in bright snowsuits. I didn’t mind the cold, but Rebecka was bundled up. We each had a cup of coffee, Rebecka occasionally pulling down her scarf from her face to take a sip. I couldn’t help but look at her scarred lips as she did so.

  “I don’t follow,” I said.

  “Would you get the idea to cut a pregnant woman open with a breadknife and take the baby out?” She was talking through her scarf again, voice muffled.

  I shuddered. “Of course not.”

  “Or poke someone’s eyes out with a paper clip?”

  “Come off it.”

  “Three days, Sara.”

  Of course. This was what she was on about. Karl.

  “He used everything he could get his hands on.”

  “I know, Becks. You’ve told me everything.”

  She went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “You couldn’t imagine the things he came up with, not in your worst nightmares. Get it? And you know something else?”

  “What?” I said, although I knew what she was going to say.

  “How could He let it go on for three days before He decided to do something about it?”

  “He did deal with him,” I said, as I usually did.

  “Yeah, after three days. Why did He wait so long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We were quiet for a while, sipping coffee.

  “And I’m still here,” Rebecka said. “It’s like I’m being punished too.”

  “I don’t think you are,” I said. “You’re not being punished. He doesn’t do that. Like I said before, maybe it’s a test.”

  We went through the motions like that, until I said I had to go home and dropped her off at Slussen, where she would take the subway.

  • • • •

  She didn’t take the subway. She tried to throw herself in front of it. It was in all the morning papers: Rebecka jumped from the end of the platform so that the train would hit her at full speed. The driver later told reporters that he’d had a sudden impulse to brake before he was supposed to. The train had stopped a meter from where Rebecka was lying on the tracks.