The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  One of the guards called out, reminding anyone planning to go into Wellsburg of the curfew.

  “Who’s that?” she said sharply.

  “A guard,” I said it too loudly.

  “How many?” her voice sounding too close and never ever close enough.

  “Two. One on either side.”

  “Regulars?”

  I nodded, and her droning grew louder, no longer a backdrop to her voice but the other way around.

  “What else?” She wasn’t a real witch and I was a shitty Made and we’d never really seen eye to eye, but she knew when I was trying to hide something, and that I sucked at it.

  I said, in the lowest voice I could—I felt my tongue mouth the words but couldn’t hear them above her incantations: “Someone, maybe me, crossed out where we’d written Norman on the Redress form. They spilled ink on it, and put something else. Something that made me look . . . more interesting than I am.”

  “Interesting to who?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe to some Regulars with the power to select the right students for the course, I suppose. Marvin, the Malemade, says that there are Regulars in Wellsburg who are worried that the Redress Scheme threatens their way of life. They want to make courses like FiFo sexy again, and boost enrollments . . .”

  “Stories are sexy?” Narn’s humming reverb rose to a crescendo and then abruptly quit.

  “Fear is sexy.”

  Suddenly I heard Eric leap to his feet and begin that sibilant keen peculiar to the thylacine, neither dog nor cat. “Shhh,” I said into the phone. “I love you too.” I wiped my eyes. “The spelling of the word on the form was wrong.”

  “How wrong?”

  “Not wrong enough.” There was another, longer pause. Some nocturnal thing moved on the riverbed far below. The pause stretched out, longer even than the last one. Had she forgotten me? It wouldn’t be the first time.

  And then, slyly: “When is class?”

  Next Wednesday, I told her. Between six and eight.

  “And then?”

  “Depends on the story, I guess.”

  “Hah.” She barked out a laugh. “Narn has a story that will scare the bark off the trees. Make them rich bitches shit him britches.”

  Leaning against the rails, I coughed wetly and painfully and then I let the sweet cut of her gibber slice into my ear, my brain, my heart, and cut open my treacherous memory like an artery, and worlds away, the ravens shut their eyes.

  When I hung up the phone minutes that seemed like hours later, or vice versa, my spine was still tingling, a cold sweat across my skin where the gooseflesh had subsided. At either end, the guards had retreated into the safety of their watchhouses. Three or four steps along in the direction of the Towers, I halted, unable to comprehend what I was seeing: a distorted hand—more a claw—reach up from under the bridge, and grasp onto a rail. The hand was blacker than the night, sharp against the glowing blue of the railing, putting everything around it into a greasy soft-focus. Five segmented phalanges joined by another set, creeping over the lower edge feeling blindly for one of the glowing blue spindles. I forgot to breathe, my heart in my throat. The claw was both animal and human, with pointed talons at the end of grappling fingers. The fingers scrabbled like a spider’s legs. My stomach rolled. I imagined the rest of it dangling over the river. Or suctioned onto the underside of the bridge. I imagined.

  Suspended in fog between the winking leer of Wellsburg and the panopticon gaze of the Towers, the darkness was shot with red strands of vapor that webbed around my own ankles and lashed me to the spot. I struggled against what I clearly saw—the monstrous hands—and against nineteen years of loneliness, an unreliable witness to my own life, because there was someone there, not just beneath the bridge, but, horrifyingly, also behind me. A meaty perfume made my throat close up. My vision grew cloudy. I tried to tell myself the fog was real but its hold on me was not, and that the rank breath at the back of my neck was molecular, nothing more, and wanted nothing, asked nothing from me except for my . . . fear. Yes! A small price to pay, I could give it that—enough left from the Blood Temple to last me a lifetime. Forgetting everything else—the walls of the Culture and Society Office closing in on me, the humiliation of Pagan’s bullying, never another punchline to that old joke, the shipwrecked cake and the broken word on the Redress Form—forgetting nothing and imagining everything, I gave the fog my fear. Not all of it but enough to make it recede and open a door back to the beginning. To where the worst of what slithered in this place waited for me, and I would meet it halfway, if I could. In the glare of my fumbled phone light, the claws grew still against the thrown shadows that a moment later would become their camouflage, and for the first time in my life, I screamed.

  CHAPTER 6

  NOTEBOOK

  At my scream, the guard emerged from his gatehouse. He took two steps toward me with his night stick out before I stopped to mumble an excuse about how I’d “seen something.” He sent me on my way, giving me curt advice to stop by the infirmary on my way home to get medication for my nerves. Mades had bad nerves. Everyone knew that.

  The guards hated us.

  I spent the next Saturday in the dorm trying and failing to remember the gist of the story that Narn had told mostly in a language—part words, part sound, part thought—that I didn’t know. I wished Kai were here to remind me. In the Starvelings, after she came back from the dead, I would seek out new places to play, unclassified forms of lichen to introduce to her. I made up games for us, and characters—for her, for Eric, for me—and she would remember it all, come home and scribble it down in Narn’s notebooks so that we wouldn’t forget.

  But that part of me was gone now.

  The memory of those hands clawing their way over the edge of the bridge blurred with Narn’s syllables. Transforming the lost tongue of the ancients into modern words—much less a coherent story—defeated me. Why hadn’t I written it down? How many times had Kai lectured me on this, sternly supervising my jotting down of every new potion or charm in Narn’s tattered grimoire, so I wouldn’t forget? And as always, even in death, Kai was right. But Narn’s glottal singsong babble scrambled my thinking. I couldn’t remember anything more than that nightmarish fog that had lashed me to the bridge, and a feeling, more than anything else, of creeping talons inching toward my heart.

  I tried to scribble a sentence here or there, but the implications of the recall were lost to me immediately, like that headless snake girl back in the Blood Temple. How had Kai managed to extract meaning from Narn’s madness? How did she know what was the beginning, middle or end?

  How could Kai’s listeners understand what she was saying when she herself did not?

  I blew my nose. Kai’s dainty nostrils had run with black goo when she came back from the dead. I was constantly wiping it away with paper or rags that I tossed into the stove, a rotten-eggs smell the origins, the implications, of which I tried not to imagine. But the more I tried not to imagine it, the more clearly I could.

  “The female imagination,” the Father had preached, “is single-handedly responsible for opening the gates of hell—what crawled out is your fault, my pretties, and for your sins, it will chase you to the ends of the earth. That is the curse you brought down upon yourself, upon the world, and this is the only cure.” He raised a scalpel. “You’ll thank me later.”

  We already did.

  The Father showed us the petri dish in which we were made. Made us watch footage of the egg fertilized by the fast-swimming sperm. The development of the blastocyst, the laser insertion into the gonad cluster of a mesh of electrodes, mesh thinner than a wavelength of visible light, onto which the algorithm of our “artificial” intelligence was coded. We watched on jerky film as the implanted embryo was then placed into a special IVA medium—a combination of the salts and sugars, buffers and cell volume regulators extracted by the Assistants, along wi
th the human albumin of which there was an endless supply from his donor surrogates. This last came with a high risk of contamination, which is where Narn’s botanicals came in. From her lichen, she compounded a genius brew of antibiotics—her plant extracts provided essential vitamins and amino acids to protect the zygotes and the embryos from disease. She added to this a secret concoction—a growth factor perhaps? Magic? Whether science or sorcery, she refused to divulge—and the Father was so convinced that it was the latter, that it made him, in Kai’s words, the “witch’s bitch.” But Narn was bound to the Blood Temple or lose the Father’s protection—and that made her a prisoner just like the rest of us.

  Or in other words, it was a mutualism from hell.

  Eventually all physical sign of the mesh filaments disappeared across the blood-brain barriers. And there we were. The fast-action absorption into the developing brain of the coded filaments was so smooth that they literally became us, directing our actions, augmenting our behavior, deforming our cognition, compromising our immunity. On top of that a restriction protocol designed by a team of geneticists stunted our embryonic brains in sections of both the occipital and hippocampal regions, where imagination and memory are activated, respectively. For their efforts, the assisting geneticists were recompensed with offshore bank accounts, chunks of Rim property, and even a Made or two of their own.

  My legs were still heavy and my head foggy from flu. I flopped down on the bed, exhausted. Lara and Trudy were out, and the dorm, with its high double-glazed windows overlooking the river, was silent as the tomb.

  I shivered, the disremembered claws creeping over the edge of my heavy eyelids. That too-long thumb. I tried to nap but those spidery black fingers pulled open my eyes and kept them stretched grotesquely wide. I tried to close them, pressing them shut with my hands as I had with Kai’s after she died. And like hers, mine flew open as soon as I took my hands away. Thoughts teemed. Terrors gathered. Tears ran. When I checked the mirror, a new array of baby crow’s feet had imprinted at each eye. I rubbed some of Lara’s eye cream on them but it did no good.

  The day was getting away from me.

  It was time to admit it. That the Father was right, again and always: the imagination is monstrous in the wrong hands—I knew those claws.

  * * *

  The first thing Narn does when I enter the shed is pour me a cup of thick, slow-steeped tea from a pot on a high table. She tells me to sit at a stool. I put the cooler bag on the table and sneeze in the musty air—oils from all the wool that had once piled in the shed, a ferrous whiff of blood from the backs of the sheep overlaid with other smells, the funk of moss and fungus piled high on the table, the sharp reek of cat piss—but I stay standing. On the floor beside the wood stove is a cat bed. I sneeze again. The old woman’s hair is more like a clown’s than a witch’s—as orange as if she’s ripped off a shred of sunset for a wig. Her skin is seamed and there are black streaks of grime in the leathery folds, but she regards me steadily from eyes once again filled with agate light, red and copper and a galactic green. They are the eyes of someone much younger—for a moment I get a glimpse of a ripe, pubescent nymph instead of the ageless hag before me.

  “How bad is it?” she says.

  I tell her it’s bad. I tell her the Father gave Kai medicine to make her better but it just made her worse.

  “Good twin loves too much.”

  “Loves me?”

  Narn clucks disparagingly. “Who else?”

  It’s all my fault.

  “Kai said your stories were her protection,” I begin.

  “No protection against a sister’s love,” Narn mutters. “No protection on earth.”

  “Well where then? There must be something!”

  She reaches for her pestle, sniffs the powder and licks it off her nose with a tongue dry and forked as a lizard’s. “Truth is only protection.”

  “I can’t remember,” I say. “I can’t remember the truth.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  I sit down on the stool, my short legs dangling above the greasy floor. I feel cheated. Imagine how different life would have been if I’d known from the beginning that I was a twofer. I would have had someone to tell about the snake girl behind the tree. Someone to teach me word games. Teach me how to deal with a witch. Now all I have is someone to save.

  I unhappily gulp the tea. It smells terrible but tastes sticky and sweet. It makes me relax enough to focus, more than I really want to. A single bulb from the ceiling casts a queasy cone of light. Beneath it details pop, leaving the edges of the room in darkness. Through the shadows, I make out the angles of a camp bed. But my eye is drawn to the table. Scattered across it are brown paper scraps crawling with names—I register the words betony and ocedar—and scribbled equations, and liquid in beakers and chunks of resin in glass jars. The light picks up bones on a shelf above the stove, a dingo skull and an infant’s crooked spine. Glimmering in the bad light is a bone-handled knife that I will later learn is a boline. There are containers filled with muddy powders, baskets of rubbery lichen whose names I have yet to learn—lurid curls of snot green, amber lobes and flat scales that look like flakes of rust. The huge gray cat comes in, dugs dragging on the floor. She leaps nimbly up onto the table and sniffs at a bowl in which float pustules of midnight blue. Her teats sway heavily.

  “Strigula nitidula,” the crone says. “Good shroom for bad blood.”

  “Are you a witch?” I say. “Or a goddess?”

  Narn shrugs, her thin lips curved grimly downward: “Same difference.”

  “Why did you come to the Temple?”

  She shakes her head and her agate eyes glitter. “Looking for bad blood.”

  “I know about that. Your sister, I mean. Did you find her?”

  “Not yet. Maybe him not ready to be found.”

  I already hate the way she writes her own linguistic rules. I hate the way she talks in riddles. How she makes herself deliberately misunderstood, playing word games, playing with my head. My knuckles are white, and I want to hit something. I want to leave, at least. Get what I came for and be far away. But somehow I know that’s no longer possible. “What will you do?”

  “Pretend to be boss’s bitch.” She tops up the tea. “Boss lets witch stay, buy time to look for lost sister. Boss thinks good witch Narn will get him to Paradise with secret shroom and conjure words.” That stomach-lurching eye-roll. “Narn not real name—Boss doesn’t care. Boss says ‘witch’ like a sex-word. But Boss is witch’s bitch.” Her laugh is free, unsettlingly girlish. “Babies and mothers dying, only sexy witch can save babies and mothers too. Fewer graves to dig . . .” She dissolves in an unintelligible mutter that makes my spine tingle.

  “Do you think your sister—the one who ran off—do you think she’s still alive?”

  She shakes her head—the stiff orange frizz gives off a golden syrup smell. The room is getting dark and I am shivering.

  “Alive but not alive,” she says, topping up the tea.

  “Do you think the Father knows where she is? Is that why you stay?”

  I know I’m asking too many questions and that there will never be enough time to find out everything I want—need—to know. The old woman shrugs miserably, looking more like a sad clown than a mad witch.

  “Boss made sister wicked.”

  “Maybe she was wicked already.” I am thinking of the snake girl in the playground, and when I look up, Narn’s blood-clot eyes are fixed once again on mine.

  “Crappy twin doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Anyway, have to save twofer now.” She rises from her stool.

  “Both of us—Kai and me?”

  “Wanted one, got two instead. One is a blessing. Two a curse.”

  Which is which witch? I gulp more tea, and more and more. A piece of myrtle cake has suddenly appeared on a plate. I take a big bite. I think I have the answ
er.

  “If you save my sister,” I say with my mouth full, “I’ll tell you where I’ve seen yours.”

  “Sister gone.” She shrugs, picks up a cup to take to the basin. My mouth is too dry to swallow the big bite of cake I’ve taken and my cheeks bulge. “Crappy twin has bitten off more than it can chew.”

  Dead candles litter the hut. Crumbling wax mountains and stunted melted glaciers frozen mid drip. The shroomy funk is everywhere and I feel it in my very veins. Narn is glancing at me sideways through the floating spores and half-light. My scalp itches with thoughts of the headless snake girl.

  Chew, swallow, repeat.

  “Honestly, I can show you,” I say excitedly. “I’m good at finding lost things.”

  Even then I think I knew that I was exchanging a life for a life.

  “Too late.” She goes to open the stove door, nimble as a ferret. She shoves in some kindling and closes the door without lighting it. Her motions jerky, fast-forward. I watch the piled sticks burst into flame through the stove window. She holds the boline up to the light. “Crap twin or good twin. Make choice.”

  Horrified, I somehow manage to get to my feet. The floor feels spongy. “No way. No choice. I’d never leave Kai. Ever.”

  Narn nails me to the spot with her pointed finger. “Maybe good twin leaves crappy twin instead.” Her voice catches, an airless, chalk-on-blackboard scritch. “Sisters don’t always want same thing.”

  “Shuddup, witch! Save her! I’ll do anything!” Shame washes over me. I see myself standing before the Assistant’s prying eyes, his poking fingers, how I said I’d do anything—just make it quick—and Kai bursting in, and then no more. “Kai saved me from the Assistant. It’s my fault. It should have been—”

  “—trash baby,” Narn whispers.

  Me.

  * * *

  The doubled memory of the claws came to me halfway through that gray Saturday afternoon trying to make something out of the nothing of Narn’s story. Suddenly I knew where I’d seen them before. On the high edge of the windowsill of Middles Bunk the first time Kai told her conjure tales, and every time after that. Hanging on, I imagined—I didn’t yet know why I could imagine, only that I could, and did—several feet above the asphalt below. I never told Kai. I knew that if I did it would make them real. Those neither-in-nor-out, both-human-and-monster claws that were both fingers and toes—terrifyingly all the same length, nauseating. How I’d stared up at them, drooling, from my lonely bunk. I never told Kai because what I would have had to admit to was fear of and for anyone with the power to conjure them. My love for her became my wound, not just because it was greater than the love I had for myself, but also because even then I knew there was no protection from it.