Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “I love this song,” he sighed, swinging their joined hands between them. “Your voice is lovely, Val.”

  There was a game Val and Natalie Breckenridge had played when they were young. One girl closed her eyes, and the other pretended to crack an egg over her head—a soft thump of the fist against the skull. Then, the yolk sliding down, down—fingers spider-trailing down the neck and arms and back. It had been a shivery thrill, raising all the blond hair on Val’s legs. Once, she had kissed Natalie after, and then it had become a different game—let the other girl crack an egg somewhere on your body, and if you didn’t shiver, didn’t flinch, didn’t make a single sound, you’d get a kiss anywhere of your choosing.

  But now Natalie was gone, and Val dated fine, handsome young Sawkill men. The Breckenridge estate had been sold. The grieving Breckenridges themselves had moved back to the mainland, fleeing ghosts, and Val was, as ever, alone.

  Val felt the same shivery sensation now, trailing down her body like invisible fingers, as his tiny child’s hand crept up to circle her wrist. He sang along with her, her grandmother’s words:

  Little fairy girl, skipping down the sea

  Little fairy girl, pretty as can be

  Who is the fellow with the bright clean grin?

  Do you want, fairy girl, to weave a spell for him?

  As they sang, trekking through the woods like sister and brother, cousin and cousin, Val’s mind wandered back to the clean white room in which Marion now lived.

  Marion, Marion. It was a pretty name, really. Marian the Librarian. Maid Marian the noblewoman.

  Marion Althouse, with slick black hair, soft pale skin, a low voice like the slide of honey.

  Val stumbled again—these awful trees, their roots were everywhere, she wanted to mow them all down—and the boy shoved her. She fell, knocked her knees against the cool ground, packed hard with mud. They had reached the circle of stones. Val would recognize that mud anywhere. She’d grown up with it wedged under her fingernails.

  Once, he wouldn’t have dared push her quite so hard.

  Once, he’d needed her more than he did now.

  “You’re distracted,” came the little boy’s voice. His smile was small and cold. He stood over her as she twisted around to sit properly, inspecting her scraped palms.

  She didn’t look up, but felt his eyes on her all the same. He examined her, head to toe, like her mother looking after one of the horses. And he would like what he saw—her long, lean lines; her shining golden hair; her trim waist. She made sure he would like what he saw, and so did her mother, and so had her grandmother, before cancer got her.

  Or so Val had been told.

  She couldn’t imagine her mother thought she actually believed that bullshit. But Val was good at pretending. Her mother had made sure of it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Val, looking up, but the boy was no longer there. Instead, shadows writhed around the edge of the stones. They were only stones from the beach—small, pale, innocuous—but even so, Val saw them whenever she shut her eyes at night. They encircled her every shrinking dream. He didn’t want her ever to forget who she was and what she had been born to do.

  “What are you thinking about tonight?” came his voice from the shadows. The shadows shifted and curdled, sometimes tree-shaped, sometimes wing-shaped, sometimes arm-and-leg-and-shoulder-shaped.

  “I was . . . I don’t know,” Val said, shaking out her stinging palms. “Do you have instructions for me?”

  “Are you thinking about the Althouse girl? Is that what’s distracted you?”

  Marion.

  God, surely he wasn’t interested in Marion? She had a plain face, a soft body. Thick thighs and a round face and wide, limpid eyes like a trapped puppy. She was dull where other girls shone; you’d walk by her at a party and mistake her for the pattern on the wall. Marion didn’t make Val hungry like Natalie had, like Thora had. Marion didn’t stir his appetite, which lived like an alien egg inside Val’s womb, waiting to be passed on.

  “Charlotte is lovely,” he said, a dark triangular shape, now perched beside her. She blinked, and he jolted across the edge of her vision. She could feel him curled around the back of her neck. “She’s hungry. She’s lonely. She aches, and she fears.” He licked his little-boy lips. “What’s the word? She is pliable. Don’t you think?”

  The relief that rushed through Val was like diving into the surf in high summer. She nearly choked on her own breath.

  Charlotte. Of course. Not Marion. Charlotte.

  She pressed her bleeding palms flat against the mud. Her grandmother had taught her that it never hurt to offer some of herself to the stones, so Val did whenever she could. It kept the trees serene. It reminded Val that, no matter how tightly he wound her chains around his wrists, she was still a girl, still a human, still an independent being who decided when she breathed and when she ran and when she stood her ground.

  Well. Mostly.

  “She’s exquisite,” Val agreed. Her voice rang out strong and clear in the glen. “You’ve chosen wisely, as you always do.”

  He squirmed in delight against her back before leaving her alone in the dirt. His nails crab-claw clattered across the stones. Then he was up in the trees, jerking from branch to branch like the stabs of an angry painter’s brush.

  “Bring her to me,” his voice crackled back to her across the woods. “Tonight.”

  Val blinked. “I need more time than that.”

  A thick silence made Val’s stomach tighten and sink.

  “More time?” He was horribly calm about it.

  “I’ve already befriended her, but it takes time to really gain trust,” Val explained, battling the instinct to cover her chest with her palm and hide her beating heart. “If she suspects anything, if the hunt doesn’t go smoothly, that could ruin everything. You taught me as much yourself.”

  Another fraught silence. Then the clearing seemed to exhale.

  So did Val, faintly dizzy.

  “I have taught you well,” he agreed.

  “I wouldn’t be the girl I am without you.”

  “You won’t be a girl for much longer,” came his low voice.

  No, and he would soon no longer need any of them, Val knew—not her, not her mother, not Val’s someday-daughters. Soon, he would be grown and free, able to kill whomever and whenever he pleased. Her mother’s estimate: weeks, maybe, until that day. Two months. Three, at the most, depending on how quickly Val helped him feed.

  And then what would she and her mother do? What would they be? Would he turn on them?

  Would he set them free, too?

  Unlikely, thought Val.

  That was an absolution her kind did not deserve.

  She gathered herself and stood tall. She had long ago taught herself to look only peripherally at the truth of what she was, what she did. Any closer, and she would lose her mind. “I will not fail you.”

  “You never have, child.”

  There—a note of affection in his voice. Val swayed where she stood, her eyes falling shut. A fierce warmth expanded in her chest and slid down her belly, her thighs, her legs. Her traitorous body—groomed to serve him, birthed to anchor him—responded gleefully to his approval.

  When she opened her eyes once more, a supple smile curled across her face. She had one goal, one purpose. It was the thing for which she had been conceived: she would make him proud.

  But first, back to Kingshead. Her party was in a week, and there were arrangements to be made. Booze to select. Most important, an outfit to be crafted.

  Val Mortimer never showed up to a party looking anything short of to die for.

  Zoey

  The Find

  A week after the Althouses arrived, Zoey lay in bed, stricken with insomnia. It had been a problem since Marion’s fall. That day had kicked off a series of agitated nights and black-and-white dreams that never quite left her.

  After two hours, Zoey crept through the house, stopping at each window and staring outside lik
e somewhere out there lay her wandering sleep. She drank two glasses of water and stretched on the floor in the living room until she lay limp and worn-out on the braided orange-and-blue rug.

  She looked right: Her father’s leather chair, his pilled pink blanket draped over the back. A lopsided stack of mail that needed sorting.

  She looked left: The faded brown couch—stained and sagging but outrageously comfortable. Underneath it, a field of dust bunnies and lost coins, a pen, a book.

  A book. An unfamiliar one.

  Zoey reached under the couch and dragged it out. It was a small thing, bound in faded black fabric with mismatched pages stuffed within, the first few of which were blank.

  Then Zoey reached a page of text. Written not in English but in Latin, the cramped, inked lines went on for paragraph after paragraph, so messily scrawled that even if they’d been written in English, Zoey would have struggled to read them. She didn’t recognize the penmanship. Not hers, not her father’s. She ran her fingers across the paper. A thin creeping sharpness scraped its way up her arm.

  She flipped through a few pages and then landed on one that made her stop and stare:

  A collection of figures stared back at her, sketched in black ink, every one of them scratchy and misshapen. Some sported scales and matted tufts of fur. Others wore top hats and sleek coats with tails. Some looked human; others not human at all, or at least some sort of unholy hybrid.

  All had perfectly round, perfectly colorless white eyes.

  All wore wide grins packed to the brim with teeth.

  They were vaguely familiar to her, these monster-men. Had she seen these images before?

  Under one such image, three scrawled words proclaimed: ILLE QUI COMEDIT.

  “Couldn’t sleep, either?”

  Zoey yelped and flung the book across the floor. Skid, slide, thump, it hit the opposite wall. She jumped to her feet and wiped her hands on her pajama pants and hit the floor lamp with her elbow.

  A jolt of static discharge shocked her, a real violent son of a bitch that made her rub her skin and look at her fingers, expecting to see blood.

  “What?” Her voice cracked open, high and shaky. “Dad?”

  Ed Harlow stood in shadow at the bottom of the stairs, robe and slippers and glasses on. He walked to where the book had fallen, picked it up without even glancing at it, and tucked it into the pocket of his robe.

  Then he smiled. “How about some hot cocoa?”

  Normally Zoey would have said yes, because they’d enjoyed hot cocoa in the middle of the night since Zoey was small, whenever she’d visited her dad in the summers—first in Baltimore, then in Newton, New Jersey, and finally in Sawkill. From the beginning, Zoey hadn’t liked the place. Even that first summer, when she’d kept mostly to herself, she’d walked down the blandly clean streets of Sawkill Rock and seen people eye her Afro and eccentric thrift-store outfits with mild dismay. The next summer, she’d gotten a job at the public library, which had introduced her to a level of snotty rich-person entitlement she’d never dreamed could exist in a place as well-meaning as a library.

  Then, the next summer, she’d met Grayson. And suddenly an army of Sawkill mothers who’d been circling the Tighe boy for their daughters shot Zoey dagger-eyed glares whenever she approached.

  But when her mom had gotten the job in San Francisco, Zoey had decided that, as miserable as it would most likely be to live on Sawkill, it would be better than moving to the West Coast. At least from Sawkill she could take the ferry to the mainland, then hop on a train down to Maryland and visit friends.

  Not that she’d done that very often, since moving to the island.

  Ed Harlow was an excellent guilt tripper, maybe even more excellent than he was an organizer of file cabinets, and whenever Zoey talked of leaving Sawkill for even a short weekend trip, he’d act like she was proclaiming her intentions to abandon Earth for the moon.

  But Zoey didn’t agree to the hot cocoa this time. She frowned at her father’s pocket and stayed solidly put.

  “What is that book?” she asked.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” he replied, in this voice of manufactured calm that set off alarm bells in the back of Zoey’s skull.

  “I’m not worried,” she lied. “I’m asking what it is.”

  “It’s personal.”

  “It’s weird.” Zoey crossed her arms over her faded Wonder Woman T-shirt. What she wouldn’t give for a Lasso of Truth right about now. “Some random book full of Latin in our living room?”

  Her father turned away, toward the kitchen. “You want your orange mug?”

  “Dad. What the hell?” Zoey followed him. “There were monsters in that book.”

  “Zoey, I don’t go poking through your possessions, do I?”

  Zoey tried to look him in the eye, but as he pulled out mugs, cocoa mix, marshmallows, he kept his face turned slightly away from her.

  “I don’t know,” she answered shortly. “Do you?”

  “No. So kindly return the favor, please.”

  “I wasn’t trying to poke around. There was a book right there on the floor, I didn’t know whose it was—”

  “Can you hand me a spoon, please?”

  “Dad. Look at me.” She was undoubtedly going to butcher the pronunciation. “Ille qui comedit. What does that mean?”

  For an answer, he slammed his mug onto the countertop, a little too hard. A crack slapped the air; ceramic shards scattered, spinning out across the Formica.

  Zoey froze.

  Her father stood at the sink, facing away from her, gripping the edge of the countertop, saying nothing, saying nothing, saying nothing.

  Outside, the lighthouse circled. A bright beam looped through the kitchen and disappeared. Her first summer on the island, Zoey, recently introduced to Tolkien, had named the lighthouse the Eye of Sawkill.

  “Do you remember when I found your and Thora’s notebook of fake fiction?” her father said at last.

  Even freaked out as she was, Zoey bristled. “Fan fiction, Dad.”

  “All right. Fan fiction. Do you remember that?”

  Oh, yes. Zoey remembered. She wasn’t sure a girl could ever forget her father stumbling upon the sexually explicit, extremely plotless Star Trek fan fiction she’d cowritten with her best friend, no matter how diligently said girl might have tried to scrub the memory from her brain.

  “You were mortified, as I recall,” he continued.

  Zoey wondered if she could will herself to melt into the floor. “Mortified is a kind word for it.”

  “Well, then.” He turned to look at her. His wide, deep-brown eyes were the same ones Zoey had seen her whole life, the same ones she saw whenever she looked in a mirror, and yet suddenly they looked different to her—alien, and opaque.

  Was she dreaming? Was the book, and the broken mug, and this entire conversation, all some kind of weird-ass dream?

  “Imagine me feeling something like that right now,” her father continued, “and try to grant me a little bit of mercy.”

  Zoey tried valiantly to wrap her mind around what was happening. “You mean this book is, like . . . your fan fiction?”

  He shrugged. “It’s as important to me as your fan fiction was, and is, to you.”

  “It’s weird, then,” Zoey said slowly, “that you would leave it on the floor, under the couch.”

  “Even dads can be careless,” he replied with a wry smile. “Listen, I don’t fault you for looking at it, but I also hope we never talk about it again.” He withdrew a pack of cards from the junk drawer. Another hot cocoa ritual: Go Fish. “Deal?”

  Zoey took the offered cards. When her fingers brushed her dad’s, she barely resisted the urge to flinch away from him. But instead she shrugged the careless shrug she had perfected in the months following Thora’s death.

  So, Zoey thought, my best friend disappeared.

  So no one can figure out why.

  So Dad can’t solve the case, so Dad has a freaky secret book, so
it feels like he’s lying to my face.

  So what? Could be worse. I could be dead, like Thora probably is.

  Zoey forced a smile. “Deal.”

  Marion

  The Heart-Hole

  Marion was about to give up, return to her room, and go to bed when she heard the door to the back porch creak open.

  She scooted across Charlotte’s bed, peeked out the bedroom curtains, and saw Val gliding back toward the mansion. Val paused where the lawn ended and the terraced landscaping leading up to Kingshead began. She stretched, shook out her starlit tresses. The tree-shadowed lines of her body in that tight violet shell of a dress: supple and smooth.

  Then Val looked back over her shoulder—and up.

  A static shock bit Marion’s fingers, like she’d touched a car door in winter. She jumped back and snapped the curtains shut.

  “Oof.” A muffled curse from the direction of the stairs. The door opened, and Charlotte stumbled over the threshold.

  “Where have you been?” Marion had stayed up until two o’clock waiting for Charlotte to come home, pacing around, looking at her unanswered texts and squinting out the window at the drive and worrying about the dangerous cliffs that might have killed Thora Keller, and who had asked Marion to do that, anyway? To wait up and worry?

  Absolutely no one.

  It was like she couldn’t help herself. She was a masochist of the highest order.

  And her head wouldn’t stop throbbing. She glared at Charlotte, rubbing her right temple with the heel of her palm.

  “I was out,” said Charlotte with a glutted sigh. She barely managed to kick off her shoes before she tottered into her bed and wriggled under the covers.

  “Out where?” Marion insisted.

  Charlotte blinked sleepily up at her. “With Val,” she said, as if there could have been any other answer.

  “Doing what?”

  “Just . . . around. Exploring. You know.” Charlotte snuggled Marion’s arm.

  “I know you reek of beer.”

  Charlotte frowned. “Are you mad at me or something?”