The Replacement

by Brenna Yovanoff

  The gutters still ran, but the water came from the hoses and not the sky. It spilled along the sidewalks and into the street, black with soot, glittering with sparks and loose embers.

  Firefighters were jogging back and forth on the grass, leading people out in twos and threes away from the building.

  I found Emma on the lawn of the courthouse. She was standing by herself, hugging her elbows and watching as the Sunday school burned. I came up next to her, reaching for her, pulling her toward me. When she looked up at me, her face seemed to crumple.

  “How did it start?” I asked, keeping my arm around her and letting her hang on to me.

  “I don’t know—lightning, maybe—there was lightning. The chapel caught before the trucks could get here. I don’t think they can save it. The roof’s gone.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  Emma shook her head. Her mouth was open, but not like she had anything particular to say.

  “No, Emma, where’s Dad?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. There were so many people—women’s choir and Bible study and the cleaning crew.” She was shaking her head, not stopping. “There had to have been at least thirty people in there.”

  I splashed through the street to the church and crossed the police line, ducking under tape and around stretchers through the crowd to the service driveway, where EMTs loaded choir members into the ambulances, oxygen masks strapped over their mouths. I looked for him in the coughing crowd of people wrapped in fire ponchos and blankets, and when he wasn’t one of the stragglers filing out, I looked for him on the stretchers.

  One of the gurneys was covered, and my chest tightened with a deep, wordless dread, but even before I got close, I knew it couldn’t be him. The body was small and delicate under the sheet. The body of a woman. Or a girl.

  I came up to the driver and grabbed his arm. He wasn’t part of my dad’s congregation, but his face was familiar from years of hospital picnics, Brad or Brian—some safe, pleasant name—and I held on, turning him toward the sheet. “Who is it?”

  He shook his head. “We can’t disclose that. She has to be pronounced.” His voice was helpless and he stared at me with a stark, jacklighted expression. “I can’t pronounce her. She has to be identified by the doctor or the coroner.”

  I let him go, staggered by the utter formality of pronouncing someone dead. I knew it already, and so did he, without confirmation from the coroner. Her body was there under the sheet in front of us, and what difference did it make who said it? Nothing would be different if it was a wide-eyed EMT who called her dead and not someone else.

  I looked down at the covered body. The rain was just a fine mist, soaking slowly through the fabric. The shape of her profile was unclear. But I knew her shoes. The toes stuck out from under the sheet, just barely, just her toes.

  The shoes were flat bottomed, made of black rubber and red leather, with little flowers cut out on the toes. I could see her socks through the openings of the petals. I’d noticed them at Stephanie’s Halloween party. They’d looked so wrong with the rest of Jenna Porter’s costume.

  I raked my hands through my hair, trying to find the right set of feelings. She’d been nice. Thoughtless or shallow, maybe. But nice. She hadn’t deserved to die like this, sucking down smoke until her lungs stopped. She’d said hi to me in class and lent me pens and stayed quiet when Alice said nasty, malicious things to other girls—and she did, I’d always known that, even when I was busy being awed by her eyelashes or mesmerized by her hair. But not Jenna. She’d never done anything to anyone.

  I backed away from Brad, who was looking slack and shell-shocked, then turned in a circle, scanning the crowd for my dad, until finally I found him. He stood in the middle of the street, in the dark blue suit that he always wore for office hours. His hair was wet and his white button-down shirt wasn’t all that white anymore but streaked gray with soot.

  He stood with his arms at his sides and his face turned toward the church as it blackened and crumbled. His expression was bare and helpless, and he didn’t see me. The only thing in his field of vision was the ruined church. It was a landmark, one of the oldest buildings in Gentry, and now it was nearly gone. I stood next to him and watched it go, thinking how strange it was that something could stand for so many things. It was Gentry, like Natalie was Gentry— just a symbol of a town, the particular warm body that represented everyone else.

  I watched the smoking church, the demolished Sunday school, feeling a kind of surreal tenderness for it. It had been built to withstand disasters and acts of God. There were lightning rods on two corners of the roof and one on the point of the steeple, and that was where the lightning had hit. The strike had made contact six inches from the tallest lightning rod. It had arced away from the metal, and that was not consistent with lightning, but pretty goddamn consistent with other types of disasters.

  I turned away from the smoke and chaos of the blackened church, away from Jenna’s covered body and my devastated father, and headed straight for the slag heap.

  On Concord Street, the gutters ran high and fast, and the storm drains were clogged with leaves.

  “Mackie! Mackie, wait.” Carlina was hurrying up the sidewalk after me. She was wearing her coat and had wrapped a scarf over her head.

  The rain was so thin it was almost fog, coming fine and sideways under the streetlights. It dripped off the bottom of her coat in a little fringe, splashing around her feet.

  “Where are you going?” she said, stopping under the streetlight.

  “Where do you think? I’m going down to ask the Morrigan where the fuck she gets off torching community property! The church is gone, Carlina. The whole thing, it’s just gone.”

  She pressed her hands against her face, letting her shoulders slump. “It’s not like that.” Then she said it again. “It isn’t like that.”

  “Tell me what it is like, then. Tell me what happened to the church. Did you burn my dad’s church?”

  “We’re not monsters, Mackie. We didn’t do this.”

  Her face was strangely plain, and I was struck again by how different she looked from the woman onstage. Carlina Carlyle meant smoke and colored footlights. This new woman was mysterious and still. In the street, the air was hot and used up.

  “Who are we?” I said, and I sounded tired, like I didn’t even care anymore.

  “We don’t really like names. When you name something, you take away some of its power. It becomes known. They’ve called us a lot of things—the good neighbors, the fair folk. The gray ones, the old ones, the other ones. Spirits and haunts and demons. Here, they never really named us. We’re nothing.”

  It was a minute before she said anything else, and when she did, her voice sounded strange. “The Lady is the kind of person who likes to make the town hurt. She’s the kind of person who sets fires.”

  “Where is she?”

  “There’s a door in the dump hill by the park. But you don’t want to go there. She’s incredibly dangerous, and the Morrigan will be furious.”

  “Then she can be furious.”

  Carlina turned and looked out over the road. “You need to think about what you’re doing. You can be angry at the Lady for doing this, but it’s not your job to stand up for them.”

  “Stop talking about them. I am them.”

  Carlina nodded, eyes huge and sad. “Then take a knife with you.” Her voice was low. “Just a regular kitchen knife. Wrap it in a dish towel or a handkerchief if you have to, but take it and stick it in the ground at the base of the hill. The door won’t open otherwise.”

  “And that’s it, just stick a knife in the dirt and the door opens. What then? I just smile and walk right in?”

  Carlina shoved her hands in her pockets. “Castoffs are always allowed to come home if they want to. She might be a nasty piece of work, but she owes you that much.”

  The rain was thin and constant. Castoff was like a slap when Carlina said it.

  Maybe she saw something
on my face because she folded her arms and looked down. “What I mean is, good luck.”

  PART FOUR

  THEM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE HOUSE OF MISERY

  At home, I wrapped a dish towel around my hand and dug through the cupboard over the refrigerator, feeling around in the mess of forbidden cutlery for a paring knife. I was shaking, and my fingers skittered over forks and ladles before I found the knife my dad had been using on his apple the other night. The blade was only about three inches long, not particularly sharp. It had a wooden handle, and the finish had started to wear off. I wrapped it in the towel and put it in the pocket of my coat. Then I put up my hood and started for the park.

  At the intersection of Carver and Oak, I cut across the grass, past the picnic shelters and the playground. The swings were squeaking to themselves. The park was empty and smoke hung over everything.

  On the other side of the baseball diamonds, the dump hill rose dark and hazy through the rain. The ground was swampy with standing water.

  I jumped the fence, wading through a tangle of weeds. At the base of the hill, I stuck the knife deep into the loose gravel and the fill. The door was there almost at once, so dull and worn out that it was almost invisible. There was no handle, so I knocked and stepped back. For a second, nothing happened, but then the outline flared from inside, lit with a warm glow. From far away, I heard the sound of bells and was blindsided by a strange feeling of inevitability. The hill had always been there, looming over the park, right there on the other side of the fence. Waiting for me.

  When the door swung open, no one was waiting in the entryway. Glass lanterns lit the corridor in two rows. The panes were set in a network of lead, arranged in fancy diamond patterns. When I pushed my way inside, the door swung closed behind me. The knife lay on the floor and I bent and picked it up.

  The Lady’s hill was nothing like Mayhem. The walls were paneled in dark, polished wood, with an intricately tiled floor and carved baseboards. Everything was clean and symmetrical and shiny. Stained glass windows hung in rectangular alcoves along the hall, the pictures lit from behind with oil lamps. The air smelled nice, like cut grass and spices.

  At the end of the hall, there was a little table with a shallow silver dish on it.

  A boy stood beside the table, wearing dark blue knee pants and a matching jacket. He looked maybe twelve and was looking up at me, holding out his hand. “Your card, please.”

  I stared down at him. “Card? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Your calling card. Present your card and I’ll announce you.”

  “I don’t have a card. Take me to see the Lady!”

  He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded and gestured for me to follow him. “This way.” He led me through corridors and doorways into a warm, lamplit room.

  There were rugs on the floor and a fire burning in a marble fireplace. All of the furniture was the fussy old-fashioned stuff my mom liked.

  A woman sat in a high-backed chair, embroidering a cluster of poisonous-looking flowers onto a piece of cloth. She looked up when I came in. The skin around her eyes was pink, like maybe she’d been crying. When she raised her face to the light, though, I saw that her eyelashes were crusted with something yellow and diseased. She looked young and like she should have been delicately, strikingly beautiful, but it was spoiled by her unhealthy appearance.

  “Are you the Lady?” I said, standing in the doorway.

  She sat perfectly still, holding the needle out from the cloth and watching me. The front of her dress was a complicated arrangement of creases and folds. Above that was a high fitted collar made of lace. She smiled and it made her look frail. “Is that any way to greet someone?”

  Her voice was sweet, but it had an icy undertone that cut through the harmony. Her expression was so peaceful it looked arrogant, and I could feel myself getting angrier. “You burned down my dad’s church! Is there a formal greeting for that?”

  The Lady set down her embroidery. “It was a necessary evil, I’m afraid. My dear sister has been scampering around like a trained dog, playing jester and fool to people who are already dangerously close to forgetting us. It was time to remind the town what really defines us.”

  “That’s your reason—to put the fear of God into a bunch of people who don’t believe you exist? You just destroyed a two-hundred-year-old building! A girl is dead!”

  “The fear of God is nothing compared to the fear of tragedy and loss.” She tilted her head and smiled. Her teeth were small and even, perfectly white. “But in the main, it benefits us in other ways. After all, the tragedy has turned sweet and brought us a visitor.”

  At first I thought she was talking about herself in the plural, the way that queens did, but then I looked around. On a big pillow near the writing table, there was a little kid wearing button boots and a white sailor dress. She was playing with a wire birdcage, putting a windup bird inside and taking it back out. She had a wide ribbon tied around her waist. The other end was fastened to the leg of the table.

  “Do you like her?” said the Lady. “She is such a sweet thing.”

  The girl was maybe two or three, with hazel eyes and small, even teeth. She smiled up at me, and one cheek dimpled so deep I could have gotten my finger stuck in it.

  I sucked in my breath. She wasn’t how I remembered, but I knew her. Through all the bows and the ruffles, I knew her. She was human. I’d seen her every week in the church parking lot or playing tag with Tate on the lawn in front of the Sunday school. Natalie Stewart sat on the floor, looking at me over the top of the cage.

  She waved the clockwork bird, and the Lady reached down, touching Natalie’s hair, patting her cheek.

  I remembered what my mom had said about sitting on a cushion at the Lady’s feet. Natalie was so clean that she looked artificial. “So, she’s like your doll?”

  That made the Lady laugh, hiding her mouth with her hand. “I do love a pretty child, don’t you? And she complements the room.” She gestured around us. “As you can see, I am a great lover of beauty.”

  The walls were covered with glass display cases holding seashells and pressed flowers. The biggest case hung over the back of a velvet sofa. It was full of dead butterflies on tiny brass tacks. Two of the walls were lined with built-in shelves, like a library, but there were no books. Instead, there were birds—robins and jays, mostly—and a huge stuffed crow with orange glass eyes.

  While I looked around at all the butterflies and birds, the Lady sat at her table, watching my face. Then she stood up and turned her back on me.

  “Please, sit,” she said, gesturing to a chair by the fireplace. “Sit and warm yourself.”

  I sat down on the edge of the high-backed chair, leaning forward a little. My jacket was wet and I was dripping on the upholstery.

  Natalie put down the cage and came as close as the knotted ribbon would let her.

  The Lady smiled. “And what does one say to our guest?”

  Natalie tucked her chin and didn’t look at me. “How do you do?” she said, rocking back on her heels.

  When she rocked forward again, she held out a hand, offering me a crumpled ribbon with a little charm strung on it. When I reached for it, she dropped the ribbon into my hand. Then she smiled and backed away, tugging a handful of hair across her mouth and sucking on it.

  The Lady stood very still, staring off at nothing with her hand at her throat. She kept touching a carved oval on a velvet band, brushing the profile with one finger.

  Then she turned to look at me. When she smiled, it looked savage. “My sister used to be a war goddess. Or didn’t she tell you? She used to sit at the ford with an ash branch in her hand and a crow’s wing tied in her hair. She watched as armies crossed the river and chose who and in what order they would die. And then she let herself be ruined, like everyone lets themselves be ruined, shrunken down to fit the visions of the ignorant. All except me.”

  “I don’t understand. Why d
o you care so much what people think about the Morrigan?”

  “No one is immune to disbelief. Their weakening faith can destroy us all.” She turned and looked me full in the face, biting down on the word all. Her eyes were dark and bloodshot, caked yellow with infection. “We have always gloried in our strength and our power, even when it made us monsters. But now, they diminish us in their stories, making us spirits and sprites. Trivial people, bent on mischief, petty in their dealings. Petty and spiteful and powerless.” She raised her head and looked me straight in the face. “I assure you, Mr. Doyle, I am not powerless.”

  I didn’t say anything. She might look sick and frail, but in that moment, she also looked unbelievably cruel.

  “We are changing,” she said. “They’ve ruined my sister and robbed her of her power. We’re a fabular people, defined by the whims of their lore and their tales. They have always told us what we are.”

  “Why stay here, then, if it’s so bad? Why stick around and wait for them to ruin you?”

  “The town is bound to us. From the earliest days, we’ve helped them where we could, and they’ve helped us.”

  “By help, do you mean blood?”

  The Lady drew herself up. “We are entitled to payment for the assistance we provide. We gave them prosperity. We made them what they are—the finest, the most fortunate hamlet in the region, and in turn, they remembered us as tall and proud and fearsome. Their belief has been enough to keep us whole.”

  But it wasn’t enough. The roofs leaked, the topsoil was washing away in the rain, the rust had settled in, and now Gentry was coming down in pieces. She was pale, red around the eyes, and they needed blood and worship to survive.

  I shook my head. “You take kids away from their families, and you kill them. Are you saying that everyone should just sit back and let it happen?”

  “We are as much a part of this town as they are—vital to their way of life. And they love us for it.”

  I stared into the fire, shaking my head. “That’s not true. They don’t love or need us. They hate us.”