“What’s that!” Paisley shrieked, pointing wildly, vindicated and foaming at the mouth practically, and we kicked open the door and converged on the next room. We expected to find her there, cowering. The girl. She’d be in her coat, pulled up to hide her face. “It’s us,” we’d tell her. “It’s us.” At first she wouldn’t know we’d come to rescue her.
But when we landed in the room, it was a room with no other doors out and only the way we’d come in. It was a room with shuttered windows, hiding the view of the neighbors’ houses and all trace of sun. It was a room meant to be the dining room, maybe, but the table was covered with papers, so no one could eat a meal on it, and up above the table, like a centerpiece, was an object hung from a hook in the ceiling, swinging ever so slightly like someone had been here to give it a push. It was a cage built for a bird, the same one he’d carried out of the trunk. The cage was empty.
The room was empty too, except for the girls. There were girls everywhere. Girls on every surface. Girls splayed out on the table and girls spilled over the chairs. Girls pinned up against the walls and girls pasted to the back of the closet door. Girls propped up against the shuttered windows. Girls on the floor, some facedown and some faceup staring blankly at the ceiling. As we stood shocked in the doorway, a few girls skittered through the air as if from the sky itself, like a burst of bad weather, and Katie-Marie startled and stepped on one.
We were the girls. These were our photographs. It had been Leonard’s hobby these past months to take pictures of us, from his porch or from his bedroom window, and he must have spent hours printing them all out to collect them—to collect us—together in this room.
There was Katie-Marie, bent over on the sidewalk picking up something she’d dropped. The camera focused on what was under her skirt. There was Paisley, in the hammock in my backyard, legs stretched out. The camera looked down her shirt and centered in on her crotch. There were girls I knew from down the street, and girls I knew from across the way, and the girl in the house behind mine, Aggie, slipping a bare leg out of a car in the dark night.
There were also photos of me, a great many—as if of all his targets, I was most wanted, I was the star. In some, I was sleeping. In others, I was on my lawn, or on my porch, or in my bedroom, getting undressed. Sometimes I was looking out my window, like he was looking into mine.
Leonard’s photography hobby was worse than we’d guessed. What would he do now that he had us all inside his house, in real life?
We backed away and got jostled in panic. Paisley bumped into me, and I knocked into Katie-Marie. When we untangled and shot out of the room, Leonard was there, blocking the way through the hallway. None of us wanted to get near enough to touch him.
“The three of you,” he said, in wonder. Like we’d fallen from the heavens into his cupped and waiting hand.
There were three of us, and one of him. We outnumbered him. We had strong legs from field hockey and track. We had sharp fingernails, painted in bright colors. We had knees and elbows and teeth.
But something held us back. It was all too real, all of a sudden. We’d suspected. We’d told tales. We’d heightened our stories into gross and grandiose lies. And even with all of that, we never really thought we were in danger.
The slithery smile on his face sent us into a tailspin. Until we looked past him. Until we saw what was there. Who was.
She was behind him. The black-eyed girl. Right there drinking at his ear, and somehow he didn’t sense her hovering.
Then he must have caught something on our faces because he turned. How innocently he turned around to look.
She was strong. She grabbed his neck and dragged him back into the kitchen, and we followed the blur.
It was hard to keep focus. She was purple-black and without hard edges, like a cloud of static, a mass of feathered fury and fright. She didn’t voice anything to us in any human language, but we heard it all the same. A high-pitched shriek. Something terrible and terribly right.
Paisley was shaking—since she’d seen the photographs, she hadn’t stopped. But Katie-Marie was animated. “Get him!” she was crying, drowning out the wails. “Get him, get him!” We were surrounding him on the linoleum, but all we had to do was watch. The sugar container was knocked over and there was white powder everywhere, covering him but also sifting into the air so it got in our eyes, our noses, our mouths, studding our tongues. How sweet it was.
She came at him, it looked like with her mouth. The sounds in the room were squishy and made of wet smacks. She was stabbing him, but she didn’t have a weapon, not that we could see. Still, something was leaving punctures. Something was bulleting him with small holes.
Then quiet through the white haze. Dead calm.
Katie-Marie lifted her head. Paisley hiccupped uncontrollably, breaking the silence. We looked down and down. He was quite tall, and his legs took up a lot of space on the floor, so I had to step over him to get a view from a better angle.
It seemed like he’d been pecked to death, like from the knife beaks of a horde of birds. None of us could look at where his face had been. None of us wanted to remember his plushy lips, or his certain kind of smile.
“I—” Katie-Marie started, and said nothing else. Paisley was hiccupping and shaking.
The girl in the black-furred coat seemed fine, though. Black hides blood, so she looked clean, she looked calm.
“She—” Katie-Marie tried to say, and said nothing.
Through hiccups, Paisley spoke for all of us. “You,” she told the girl. “Killed him.” The way she said the words, it was almost a question.
“You have to go,” I said to the girl. She stared me down and made no move. “Can you understand what I’m saying? You have to get yourself out of here. Do you get that?”
She only wrapped the coat tighter around herself. Her legs were bare underneath, and she didn’t have shoes.
I turned to Paisley, I turned to Katie-Marie. “We have to get her out of here. She has to go.”
“How?” Paisley said, and her voice was the smallest I’d heard it. “None of us can drive.”
Katie-Marie was holding her nose and trying not to retch in the sink. Then she did retch, and I turned to the girl. Her eyes were perfectly black, swallowed by pupils. She didn’t blink. “Who are you?” I said. That had been our first question.
She cocked her head to one side, like she was saying didn’t I know already? Hadn’t I known all along?
Katie-Marie was hunched over the sink, and Paisley was stunned into an un-Paisley-like silence as if she’d bitten off her own tongue. Only the hiccups shook her. I was the single coherent one left. I led a path through the red-spattered sugar. The back door was open. We’d forgotten to close it when we came in.
“Go,” I said.
The girl stared at me, black eyes unblinking. Her mouth was covered in blood.
“Run,” I said.
She must have heard me. But she didn’t run. She didn’t have to.
There was a point when she was still in the kitchen with us, the air heavy and sickly sweet with what she’d done to him, and then there was the point when her feet were lifted in the air and her legs, her beautiful legs, shrunk in and shifted. Her coat became a part of her body, or maybe it always was. Her arms—what was left of them—opened wide. A dark streak took off from the back steps and the sky caught it and it was a bird, it was always a bird, she was, and the bird soared up into the clouds, a rapid retreat of wings, until it was a speck, a small seed, a dot, a blink, a memory.
I wanted to give her a head start, so I waited a good while before calling my mother to say we’d come over to borrow some sugar and found Leonard stabbed to death on his kitchen floor. I said “stabbed” because we didn’t know what else to call it. My mother was the one who called 911.
× × ×
When the police questioned me—same as they questio
ned Paisley and Katie-Marie—they wanted to know only certain things. Their questions were so ordinary. Why did we knock on our neighbor’s door so early on a Sunday morning? Where exactly did we find his body? What did we do next, after Paisley froze and started hiccupping and Katie-Marie puked in the sink?
They didn’t mention the photographs, and we weren’t sure if they were protecting us because they thought we couldn’t handle it, or if they were waiting for us to say it first.
I didn’t say, and Katie-Marie didn’t say. Paisley didn’t say either. We didn’t want to give ourselves any motive, now that the girl was long gone. We’d all agreed on that ahead of time.
Besides, they couldn’t pin anything on us. No witnesses, no fingerprints that matched ours on the body. No connection, except my house was right next door and my sugar bag was covered in blood on the floor. It was all I could do not to wave my arm up at the blank blue sky and tell them to search there for answers. Except that would have given her away.
Then the police had one last question, and it was here that I sat up straight and felt the heart in the cage of my chest pounding.
Could I describe the girl who was in his house the night before?
I didn’t know who let that piece of information loose, Paisley or Katie-Marie, but to me this question had only one answer. “What girl?”
It was easy to deny her. Even as I remembered the blacks of her eyes, and the painted points on the ends of her fingers. That was only my mind making her into what I thought she should be.
“So there wasn’t ever any girl,” the police said, they made me say, they made me write in some kind of official statement and sign while my parents watched, and I had to do it. I don’t know what Paisley said, and I don’t know what Katie-Marie said. But I said we were mistaken. It’s what we owed her. We thought we saw a girl, but it was dark. It was dark outside and confusing and we were wrong.
“So you’re sure?” they said.
“I’m sure,” I told them. “I never saw any girl.”
Because, could a girl be so terrible? Could a girl tear a man’s face out and could a girl litter his body with holes from the sharpest parts of her red mouth? Could a girl do something so perfect, and then vanish into the clouds?
Could a girl come at the exact moment we needed her? Could she come only to protect other girls?
I wasn’t lying when I said that to the police. In the end, she wasn’t even anymore a girl.
For Leonard’s wake—closed-casket; no one would have been able to stomach it otherwise—my mother made me help her bake his signature sugar-cream pie. His murder would be unsolved for some weeks, and then I guess it fell off the police’s radar, because summer was coming, and the softball tournament was approaching, and we were fund-raising for the dying oak trees now, and at some point our parents said it was safe to canvass the neighborhood and knock on every door.
Before his house sold, I ducked under the crime-scene tape and went onto his lawn. I swiped one of his bird feeders and put it on our side of the picket fence, and robins and little swallows started to flock to it. I fed them seeds from my trail-mix packs and sometimes bits of sugar-coated breakfast crunch. Sometimes I’d go outside under the bright beautiful blue and all I’d hear were these little titters, like the birds were trying to tell me something in a language I couldn’t understand.
I tried to tell them I knew. I tried to say thanks. I spent a lot of time in the backyard, searching the sky.
IN THE FOREST DARK AND DEEP*
CARRIE RYAN
Seven Years Old
When Cassidy Evans was seven years old, she found the clearing in the forest. It was far enough past the edge of her backyard to feel dangerous, but not so far as to be technically out of bounds of where she was allowed to roam. She wasn’t the first to discover the place—there were several cut stumps of wood scattered about. But she was the first in a while, as most of them had been turned to their sides and had long since sprouted thickets of slickly pale mushrooms.
The first afternoon, she touched nothing. Instead she chose to wander and crouch and peer closely at the stumps and the ground surrounding them. The grass grew long enough that a recent footstep would have been visible. Seeing none after careful investigation, Cassidy smiled and slapped a foot on top of a loose stump. “I declare myself queen of this realm,” she announced, raising a fist high into the air the way a conquering hero might.
Hearing no objection, she set about making plans.
First, she righted all the stumps and arranged them in a circle. In the middle she laid out an old tablecloth she’d snatched from the bottom of her mother’s corner cupboard. Day by day through the summer, she smuggled things to the clearing. A cracked saucer here, a chipped mug there. The kinds of things no one would notice missing.
But then something strange happened. She arrived at the clearing one afternoon to find a table sitting in the middle. Hesitating at the edge of the forest, she scanned the underbrush, eyes sharp and stomach squelching in disappointment that she might now have to share her private kingdom.
“Hello?” she called.
No one answered. She walked slowly toward the table. It was rough-hewn, the edges raw with gaps between a few of the boards. Pushing at it, she was surprised to find it sturdy and solid. She looked again over her shoulder. The forest was empty.
Frowning, she backed from the clearing before turning and running for home. For days, nothing else changed. And then it rained for a week straight.
Once she was finally free again, she tripped her way through the forest to the clearing, only to be brought up short. This time the table had been set. The smuggled tablecloth stretched the length of it, each place set with an assortment of unmatched odds and ends. Some of it the familiar cracked china from home, but most of it unfamiliar.
She approached the table slowly, warily. The mugs were all filled with murky water, the same with the plates and saucers, and as she neared, she could smell the moldering of the damp tablecloth. It must have all been set out before the rain.
But by who?
“Hello?” She craned her neck, listening. There was only the sound of stray raindrops falling through sun-slicked leaves, the call and response of birds, the damp rustle of squirrels foraging.
Cassidy had been warned enough through her life about strangers offering candy or other treats to lure her away, but she couldn’t quite figure how this situation fit into that. There was no candy. There were no strangers.
On further exploration, Cassidy found three unexpected objects at the far end of the table. The first was an old top hat that had seen better days. Its brim was ragged, its top lopsided, and it sported a dent on one side.
Next to it sat a pillow with a pinecone on it. Two sprigs of long brown pine needles arched from each side of the narrow end, and two red berries perched above them. Trailing from the thicker end was a length of browned rope.
And third was a white apron, neatly folded. A wide blue ruffle traced the edges of it. Cassidy couldn’t help but smile and laugh. “The Mad Hatter,” she said, tapping the top of the hat. “The Dormouse.” She carefully petted its bristly back. “And Alice!” She slipped the apron over her head, admiring the way it fell, just the way Alice’s had in her favorite cartoon.
She scanned the other seats. “I guess the March Hare is running late again,” she whispered behind her hand to the Dormouse. Then she giggled. “But what would you know since you’re always asleep!”
Any trepidation or hesitation now gone, Cassidy set about enjoying her unexpected tea party. She was a girl well-known for her imagination and had no trouble carrying the conversations for all of them. It was the most fun she’d had all summer. So much so that it wasn’t until gloaming had wrapped tight around the clearing that she realized how late it had grown.
“Now I’m the one late!” she cried, jumping from her stump. She dashed from the
clearing and was halfway home before she realized she still wore the apron. Stopping, she bit her lip and looked back over her shoulder.
She already knew she’d be in trouble for staying out so late, and she wasn’t sure how to explain where the apron had come from. What if her parents forbade her from returning to the clearing? She’d be stuck playing with her neighbor Jack and his little brother, Tommy, all summer. No, thank you!
She hastily drew the apron over her head and started back toward the clearing. It wasn’t until she’d burst from the cover of forest that she saw him.
The March Hare.
When trying to decide whether to tell the police about him later, Cassidy couldn’t figure out how to describe the white rabbit. He was the size of a man, that was for sure, and he had the proportions of a man as well—long legs and arms. But he wasn’t dressed as a man. He didn’t look like a man.
What stood out to Cassidy most were the ears. They were a shock of brilliant white against the gathering darkness of night. Everything else about him seemed to recede from memory until that’s all he ever was to Cassidy: ears in the shadows.
The first time she saw him, he stood just past the first row of brambles on the far side of the clearing. Had she not been so startled, she might have ducked and hidden. Watched him for a while. But it was too late, she was already too loud, each step a crash against old dead leaves and broken sticks.
He froze at the sound of her, face jerking in her direction. It was darker where he was, back under the cover of leaves. Too dark to see him clearly, except for those ears.
Cassidy opened her mouth but no sound came out. She flung her apron at him, as though that could do anything to deter him. It only fluttered, caught on the air, and drifted slowly to the ground. No matter. Cassidy ran.
The entire way home he chased after her. His breath hot on the back of her neck. She felt sure she heard the thump of his heart between the skittering beats of her own. But when she reached her backyard and allowed herself a glimpse over her shoulder, she found the forest empty.
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys Page 3
