“You’re safe now, runt,” she says. “No one can find us here.”
She blows a raspberry on my neck and she is the twin sister she never was in the Blood Temple, the other half I always wanted. My dark heart. I turn around to face the windows partly because her breath smells like worms and partly so that she won’t see me crying. It’s meteor season in the Rim, and we watch the display for a while.
“Do you know why I came back?” she says in my ear.
“Because Tiff was there, waiting in the dungeon?”
“That bad-news junkie,” Kai snorts. “I could smell her. Hear her. Railing about new wrong for ancient rights. I could hear her shriek on the winds down there, “Seize, seize, seize!” How it echoed on the walls of the dungeon. I was running from the fire of her breath, like a dragon. Oh it was terrible, Meera. I thought I was a goner.”
“You made it,” I say, trying to keep the doubt from my voice. “You’re back.”
She strokes my hair with her pulpy fingers, and my flesh crawls.
“I’d die for you, Kai. Don’t ever leave me again.”
“The old witch won’t let me stay forever. Not even for you. It’s too dangerous.”
I want to turn around to look into her dead-sea eyes, but she has her arms wrapped so tightly around me that I can’t move. Because that was the thing with calling something back into existence—surely I was just as responsible as Narn was for Kai. You make yourself inseparable from it, even indistinguishable—so fatal are the ties that bind you.
“What does Tiff want?”
“A sister,” she says around a mouthful of my hair. “Two, actually. But she says one is better than none.”
I hear her slobbering chew and then I hear her swallow.
CHAPTER 17
BIG MADE ON CAMPUS
Tower Village was emptying out as Mades fled and the college’s reputation plummeted. Security became overwhelmed. Itinerants and dealers took up residence in the shadow of the village riverbank. A rumpled sleeping bag lay across the running track. The yoga studio closed down. Weeds grew at the edge of the mica along the Corso. At eight o’clock on Thursday evening, I was the only Made calling home on the bridge. It spanned ahead and behind me, the blue arches at either side eaten by rust that not even the illuminations could hide. I thought of how in the spring I might like to go down to the river, look for Usnea in the new growth—I had given my last batch to Lara for a cold sore.
The attacks seemed to follow the same pattern—each victim saved in the nick of time by something that scared the Hunter off. There was much speculation as to the nature of what exactly this was, and how much worse the damage, as they called it, would be without it.
I worried about Narn alone in the faraway hut with no one to help her in the apothecary, to tell her where she left her glass eye. No one to feed the birds or pull burrs out of Eric’s tail. So when she picked up the phone, instead of asking for a story right away, I began with small talk. I asked after the thylacine and after the latest batch of moonshine. I asked about the weather. “So, I’m going to check out this cemetery tomorrow,” I said casually. “Seven so-called witches are buried there.”
“No apology can wash away the ghastly stain.” She sounded old and tired.
So much for small talk.
“People didn’t know any better back then.”
“People always know better.”
She asked about the campus attacks. On the Wellsburg riverbank below, that livid streak I’d seen before began its inexorable inch through the undergrowth. The sting of sulfur tickled my nostrils. A guard came out and sniffed his fingers—a passing student hurried past, and the guard said, “Egg sandwich for lunch,” and laughed but the student did not laugh with him.
“Another Made has been attacked outside Sweeney’s Landing,” I said. “Dragged down to the river, her back lashed down to her bowel.”
“The doomsman’s scourge?”
“You tell me.” Saying it made me think with a pang of Marvin. The holes where I’d punctured the flesh of my hands with my fingernails had formed tiny crescent scabs.
She coughed and had to take a swallow of tea before she could continue. “Come home. Thylacine getting old.”
I steeled myself. “The victim reports seeing a black cape or cloak, or something.” I thought of the Hunter’s black leather duster.
“Crappy twin bitten off more than it can chew.” Her voice is laced with uncharacteristic quiet, the words spoken in a monotone like Marvin’s when he left me standing at the bar.
“I’ll be fine. Sasha gets some Regulars to walk me home after the readings. Like sisters.”
“Rich bitches are fake sisters.”
“I’ve run out of real ones,” I said. “So there’s that.”
“Crappy twin is flesh meat.”
“Fresh meat? Anyway, it’s the stories they feed on, Narn. And while they’re eating, I think I can feel Tiff getting closer.”
“Could be anything,” Narn said. “Or nothing.”
And as I watched the undergrowth part for whatever it was that moved through it, I felt it again, that same tingling behind my ears, the lifting of hair on my scalp—that I’d always felt when things got out of control. Yes, it could be anything. Or nothing.
“Big Made on campus,” Narn scoffed. “Too big for sister’s shoes.”
I was used to her bark—knew by now it was worse than her bite. But from the other end of the line, I heard her swallow a sigh.
“To be fair,” I said, “the Gatherum’s profits go to good works. Scholarships at Wellsburg for needy qualified students and such. Repairs and upgrades to the old buildings. So in a way, we’re doing our bit to make the world a better place.”
I heard Narn open the woodstove door with a squeal and slam it shut.
“Boss bitch buys power and influence. Pretend Queen—makes all the rules so him can break them too.”
The bubble of something in that big, blackened pot. I salivated in spite of myself. How long since I’d had Narn’s terrible cooking? I wanted to ask if she was tending to Kai’s grave. If Eric still waited for me on the porch. But then something smashed. A jar of spice. A jug of moonshine. She cursed.
“Time’s short,” Narn said, as if to warn me against asking for another story. “Conjure tales cost too much.”
What she was saying was how she would never admit to getting old—the least I could do was respect that. Those two missing letters in Starv ing—that was Narn and me. Caught between a lost sister who she’d never find and a found sister who I’d never escape. I was doing this as much for me as for her.
“There are baskets of roots in the cellar.” I tried to keep the plea out of my voice. “And jerky. Mag and I worked hard before I left to build up the stores. Eric won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Brought that thylacine back from the dead,” a great weariness in her voice.
“Yes and Kai too.”
“Sometimes other stuff comes back,” she grumbled. “Trash from the other side.”
“Trash,” I said. “But also the truth. When you brought Kai back from the dead, Narn, what you also brought back were answers. You know, like for a rainy day?”
Silence on the other end. Then finally, “Soon?”
“Soon,” I said slowly, keeping my mouth close to the mic. “Whatever deal Tiff made with the Father—whatever code he wrote onto her for his own protection, and however hellish the powers she took in exchange—that’s where I come in. Because if all she can do is steal, like when she stole the playground girl’s body and then the Made’s in the infirmary—I mean there are only so many skins a snake can shed, right?”
“Time running out for lost sister?” And there was a terrible catch in her voice.
Because we both knew—everything had to be running out for Tiff except her own impossibility.
And we both knew this too: that there was nothing on earth or anywhere else so dangerous as a goner.
“What then?” Narn’s voice suddenly as clear as if she was right there on the bridge beside me.
“She’s got to go to plan B,” I said.
“Plan B is . . . ?” As if she didn’t know.
“Me,” I said. “It’s always been me.”
When I looked down at the bank, the amorphous half-invisible presence was gone, leaving nothing but shriveled foliage in its wake. Narn started to drone, a singsong incantation but in a queer, flat tone that made my knees turn to jelly. Because now I could understand her speech as clearly as if I’d spoken it myself.
“Long ago goddess promised three sisters a future. No more dungeon. No more blood. No more fury. Anguish gone. Power in justice. No house could thrive without sisters’ kindness. Accept it, goddess said, or be nothing.”
I hung up without asking for a story that time. I had what I needed for a rainy day.
CHAPTER 18
WHICH WITCH?
A white November afternoon, stark with black branches and faded leaves. Marvin and I had already reached the outskirts of town where the old church was meant to be, and still hadn’t found it. The signpost that I’d seen on the evening of my enrolling in FiFo was not where I thought it was. Nothing was.
I had called him to apologize about what I’d said about him eating his twin. I’d tried to explain how it should have been me. Me who was eaten. Blood on my hands and my feet too, twice as much as hers, and if I could go back and be her, I would. “I would sell my soul to go back in time and die for her,” I’d sobbed, “instead of the other way around, but I can’t get there. Marvin. I can’t remember. No matter how hard I try, how many stories I try and tell—the beginning where she is alive and it is me unmade, never comes. It’s the one thing I can’t do. Be her. So now? I can only be this. Whatever is in the mirror is too much and not enough but it’s all I have. All I am.”
He said that was good enough for him, but just to be sure, just to get him back to me, whatever I was, I’d appealed to the criminal in him and also the detective, the profiler and the profiled.
“What you said about those three sisters,” I began, “Mine are the only ones I know. Between the beginning and the end, there’s a bridge called the middle sister. And I have to find her, before she can do any more damage.”
“You think she’s connected with the attacks?”
I waited.
“And?”
“And I need your help,” I’d said, which was a first. “Come with me to the cemetery.”
Marvin stopped in his tracks and blew on his gloves. The small stone church huddled in a little clearing down an unnamed dirt road. A spire peered over the trees. As we got closer, I saw that the building was bigger than it first appeared, sprawling at the back and surrounded by a high stone wall. We entered through an iron gate, past a mottled sycamore. The stone wall enclosed overgrown grounds beyond which the forest encroached.
“The main cemetery will be around the back.” Marvin had dyed a tendril of his hair a blue-black, and it squiggled out of the silver mop like a tentacle. His fingers were misshapen from chilblains, and the circles under his eyes were purplish in the frigid light. He took off in long strides around the west side of the church through lichen-stained graves and piles of fallen leaves, the woods watching us all around.
I hesitated, looking up at the leadlight windows. “Wonder why they closed it in the first place.”
Marvin was bent toward the woods, the breeze tugging at his clothes. “A witch-hating past is not a good look for a progressive all-girls school like Wellsburg,” he called over his shoulder, beginning to sound more like his old self. Maybe things could be right between us again.
A homemade sign offered tours of the grounds, with a website address underneath. I felt uneasy so close to the blackened walls, the stern stone angles. Its windows depicted religious scenes in stark leaden outline that we learned about in the Temple—it was the same unease as I’d felt near the church in Norman. The windows looked identical—the glass stained ruby and gold and unearthly blue.
“Looks aren’t everything,” I said under my breath and ran to catch up. The ground was frosty beneath Kai’s shoes. I didn’t want to stand alone in this place.
We arrived at the rear of the church, stopped short at the edge of the cemetery. Unnumbered rows of gravestones, their edges blackened by time and spotted with crustose lichen, pale green scales growing in the engraved names. Markers all but drowned in kudzu listed against the stone wall like broken teeth, and beyond that stretched arcades of moss-hung tree trunks and watchful pines.
I stopped at a large family plot. In its center was a stone crypt, caked in bird shit and guarded by an angel with broken wings. Across the slate door, Psilolechia lucida picked out letters that said Younger. Hermann Younger, b. 1649 d. 1722, and beneath his name, his beloved wife, Louisa Isabel, and beneath her name, Nicholas, b. 1660 d. 1661, and others, more recent.
At the very lower edge of the plot, was a brass plaque half sunk into the earth: We shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell, Trodden under our feet.
The words were barely legible—the metal had been scratched over by a sharp instrument, the name of whoever the quote was attributed to covered in dirt. But from Corby, I knew what it said. Clustered around the crypt was the Younger family plot. At the marble gravestone of Sasha’s father, Orrin (beloved husband to Mary Younger and father to Sasha Younger), someone had placed a bunch of wilted flowers.
“They must still be putting Youngers in the ground here.” I thought of Sasha as she might have been at the start of all this, and suddenly understood what weight of history possessed her, at least in the beginning, to found the Fearsome Gatherum, what debt she felt she owed to the false memory of a past that never was, to keep it intact (unhacked) forever and ever, amen.
But Marvin had gone ahead and was marching through the graves until he got to a broken chunk of wall. At the edge of my eye, something plummeted to earth but when I turned it was gone. My feet could not feel the ground beneath them—I flew wingless after him over the tumbled stone blocks, through the wall and into desecrated ground, ankle deep in fallen leaves. In a clearing, the trees halted at a distance of about twenty meters, some small plain stone markers lay among the piled brown leaves. Despite the distance of the trees, no sun fell here. The smell of decay was suffocating. I struggled to breathe. It was the smell of the Hunter.
April B. Hobbes, 1680–1903, Pressed to death.
“Is that a human turd?” Martin said, pointing to a collapsed pile of feces above the name.
The distraught sound of his voice made me want to cry.
There was another one. Mary Goode, 1703–1712, Hanged. Pansy Osmon, 1692–1730, Hanged. And another, and another.
The dead leaves flung their spores of rot and grief up at us, until it was Marvin who sneezed and finally wept. We held each other and I could smell beer in his tears. Set off apart from the seven sad markers was a broad fallen log, hewn with a flat surface as if for a seat. Lobes of fungus grew between the softening layers of heartwood. Marvin’s square shoulders slumped in defeat. He sobbed the faint words crudely scratched across the flattened surface.
I am innocent. Wronged by HY.
“Hermann Younger.” I sunk down onto my knees. “The founding father.”
Tufts of bright yellow-green lichen grew at one end of the log. Letharia vulpina.
“It’s pretty.” Marvin sniffed and squatted beside me to touch the lurid stalks.
“And lethal.” I told him how the South Rim settlers had used the poisonous wolfsbane to cull foxes and wild dogs and thylacines, lacing fresh sheep carcasses with a mixture of powdered L.vulpina and broken glass that would shred the thylacine’s stomachs and ensure faster absorption of the poison.
“Narn found some thylacine bones in her cave,” I said.
“What did she do with them?” He hiccuped.
“She made herself a familiar, is what she did. She tried to make one for Mag, too, but that one didn’t make it.”
“From what you’ve told me about your aunt, maybe it didn’t want to be made.”
He pulled me to my feet.
The woods were silent the way winter forests are in this part of the world, the thick drifts of damp brown leaves scattered with crimson and yellow, the haggard branches, and monumental pines, imprisoned in this yearly ritual, this dark almanac.
Marvin wiped his nose on his sleeve. “You okay?”
“All this witchy stuff is pretty close to home,” I said. Again, that jagged downward movement from the corner of my eye, and a low sob, half animal, half something else. I narrowed my eyes. The silence so thick. I thought of death. Of how the problem with anything brought back, was that it wasn’t ever itself, not entirely. Never as fully committed to life and to the living as you hoped—like Kai. Always looking back over her shoulder to where she came from and where she mostly still wanted to be, the longer she wasn’t. And probably where she wanted to take me too, out of spite maybe or just so we could both be together again forever and ever, hold the amens.
At that moment the trees shifted and my head spun to where I could see, as sure as anything, a parting of the branches. Nothing there but the spiteful dead.
“Do you think”—Marvin moved in closer to me and took my hand, so I knew he could see it too—“it’s the Hunter?”
“It’s me it wants.”
“Who?”
“You’d make it to the wall in time,” I said. “Go!”
He didn’t move but it did, cutting a wide swathe through the trees, leaving a gelid streak of evanescence behind it. The canopy agitated, and the air grew gluey in the wake of the thing. We stood there together in some terrible grinding dream, with the woods spinning around us. We rotated on the spot, our sweat mingling, trying to keep up with the movement of the branches, low one moment, high the next. Birds shrieked. The canopy shifted, but when I looked to where I thought it should be, it was somewhere else—and somewhere else again. Branches cracked and fell, and the air hummed.
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