by Sarah Porter
There’s a whining noise in the distance. After a few seconds of wobbly confusion I recognize the sound. Sirens. If they’re heading this way, that will force him to finally slit my throat. I mean, it’s now or never.
He stands up, polishing the knife methodically with a fold of Ruby’s scarf. He’s buffing the fingerprints off, and maybe that will protect Ruby from getting busted for this. Good.
Then he turns away. What is he doing? He walks a few paces by the curb, bends.
And chucks the knife down a storm drain. I can hear it clunking away.
“Dash?” I sputter. I’m not sure if the words are even comprehensible. “Dash, what—what are we going to do now?”
“Hush now, Never. The ambulance will be here soon. I expect you have a collapsed lung from those ribs I kicked in, but they can fix that. You’ve turned a distressing shade of blue. You appear to be going into shock, in fact, but with any luck you’ll live through it.”
I’m so flummoxed I can’t even answer. It’s not like I want to die, exactly, but if I live then how will the people I love ever be safe? I’m shaking so hard now that it’s stirring up a weird black dust in my vision. I’m falling out of joint with the world.
“You’re an entirely different species of man than me, Never. Wherever I’m going, it’s safe to say you won’t wind up there. We won’t be seeing each other again.”
Dashiell? I try to say, but I can’t tell if there’s any sound. Maybe my eyes have closed again, because I don’t see anything except red-black mist. The sirens are blasting into my mind now—they must be almost here—and all at once I understand that I have to tell him goodbye. I’m straining as hard as I can to form the words, but all that comes out is a croak.
“Your resentment of me is perfectly valid, Never. I won’t try to tell you that it isn’t. I’m sure it’s been brutally difficult, both Ruby and me overshadowing you in our various ways, and showing so little consideration for your feelings on that score. The ways you trump us aren’t so nakedly obvious, simply. But if it helps anything, you should know that I love you. More and more, as I’ve come to appreciate who you are.”
I hear his footsteps walking away, and I try to call him back. I try to say whatever it is I have to say—because I finally grasp that this is really my last chance. There are things I’ll regret forever that I didn’t tell him, if I can only remember what they are and then force the sounds out. But I can’t.
I can’t.
RUBY SLIPPERS
The shack encloses me like a cube of smoke-gray velvet. I stagger in with my arms stretched in front of me, feeling at every step like I might fall, and fall forever. How can I do what I have to do, even when the situation is so desperate, even though there’s no other way? I don’t see my body in here anywhere and the walls are spinning. Mabel wouldn’t lie about this, but maybe she was confused and there’s no drowned corpse in here. No corpse with my face, my dress, my hands greenish and spongy from long submersion.
Then I notice something low in the corner, coming into focus in the lethargic way things sometimes do here; Everett’s corpse came into my vision with the same slow drift, the delayed understanding. But now it’s not my body I’m seeing, not a human form at all. It’s oblong and made of glass: a huge, boxy aquarium, filled almost to the brim with muddy water.
An aquarium exactly the same size as a coffin. And in the fog and silt, the dimmest suggestion of a solid form. A nebulous, pale smear like a dead fish half emerges from the gray-brown murk.
It’s as if time thickened, and understanding has to fight its way through it. That pale thing has dark cracks running lengthwise, and after an indefinite moment I realize that it’s my own hand and those cracks are the gaps between my fingers, and it’s so much worse than it would be if I could see myself clearly in that tank. I know I have to go to it, reach in and lift out my corpse. But I picture that floating hand leading to something much worse than my own dead body, something gray and covered with cartilaginous scales; something that will break into sinuous movement at my touch. I’m almost sure I can see a very subtle fluttering in the depths and I stop where I am, stiff with dread.
There isn’t much time. I know that, I know I have to leap forward, to burst through the frozen moment. Any second now it will be too late, and Everett will be destroyed—by me. By what I did and what I failed to do.
I pry my right foot off the dirt floor. I can barely lift it, and when I try to lean into the step I feel like endless midnight-colored towers are toppling and pulling me down with them. Like I’ll never find the ground again.
A stirring in the murk. An almost imperceptible splash in the corner of my eye. If that’s really my corpse then maybe it’s not as dead as it should be.
That, or it’s not alone in the tank. Maybe whatever is in there is waiting to twine around my neck and pull me in. Maybe it will drown me all over again with my mouth crushed against my corpse’s bloated lips, those wide green eyes inches from mine. The swishing movement comes again, sending delicate eddies through the sediment. I can feel how something in there is waiting for me, the tautness of its anticipation.
My foot finally slaps down and I teeter.
I’ll never make it in time, not moving so slowly. I close my eyes so I won’t see that soft, anxious swirling, and throw my weight forward so that my legs have to move to stop me from pitching headlong onto the floor. I feel the tank’s sharp edge hitting me just below the knees and I double over, my left hand smacking the wall and the right sinking into slimy wet.
A cold and slippery something wraps itself around my hand and forearm. Or, no: it isn’t binding me, but surging through me, a chill substance merging with my flesh, and even though I know this is what I have to do, and do now, a scream tears from my throat and I rear back.
As my arm pulls out of the sludge it’s too heavy, too long: as if it’s grown an extra segment in place of my hand. Then I see a drenched, flowered sleeve rising up where my fingertips should be, followed by a shoulder, an algae-filmed cascade of my own dirty blond hair. My arm has fused into my corpse’s arm as high as our elbows. Dead fingers nose from the flesh below my triceps and I’m shrieking so that my throat feels like shredded paper.
I yank back again, struggling to free myself, and the Ruby-corpse heaves into sitting position, but floppily, spilling forward over the tank’s brim. She looks slack and her skin is puffy and sodden. Electric green weeds spill from her sagging jaw. I feel the silence in her wide mouth, and somehow it stops me from screaming.
She’s sick and pitiful. She’s me, though; I have to take her back. I have to fold her into me like a door, and then turn the key.
And lock Dashiell out.
Tiny, pearl-pink fish drop from her hair and dart away into the muddy water.
“You know how much I love you, Dash,” I say out loud. “You know I’d do anything for you that I could. I’d give my own life for yours, over and over again, if only that was the choice I had to make.”
Even as I say it I’m staring into my own vacant eyes, remembering how this poor dead Ruby felt as Dashiell shoved her under the river, how her lungs ballooned with water. How she thrashed for air, but wouldn’t fight hard enough to get free because she couldn’t bear to hurt him. I feel such piercing compassion for her that I reach forward with my left hand—it’s the only hand I have, with my right completely swallowed by her arm—and stroke her cheek. As if I could comfort her.
My hand swims straight into her face. Her skin parts around it like a puddle, and then a heavy suction takes over and we’re sliding into each other, our parts all slipping and rearranging until her hands nestle into my hands, her chest in my chest. Her lower body snakes out of the water, pulling into me.
There’s a terrible moment when my worst fear comes true and her unbreathing mouth squeezes mine, a kiss of warmth and chill death, and then heat and cold boil into a single pair of lips, gasping with nausea. I feel the cold gel of her eyeballs roiling in mine, and for an instant I’m not
sure which of us is crying.
And then I’m panting on the dirt floor. One girl, unified. One heart, so dense with grief that there’s no space left in it for the brother I loved beyond everything else in life.
This should be more than enough to finish anyone. But I know it’s not, I know there’s more I have to do.
As my breathing calms, I become aware that there are figures in the doorway. Dim silhouettes with glints of light in their eyes, watching me with ravenous longing.
“Ruby, darling,” a high-pitched man’s voice says. “Are you feeling better now?”
MABEL
Charlie yanks my hair back in a big fist and shoves his other fist between my teeth before I can scream, and Aloysius dips one hand to filch the gun from my pocket. He dandles it and gives it a flip and smiles.
“Now, Mabel,” Aloysius says with his teeth twisted up like a big bow, “you know very well that Ruby Bohnacker is too rare and delicious a morsel to be wasted on a little bitch like you. Be very grateful that we’ve excused you for your past naughtiness, and leave it at that, there’s a lamb. A single, solitary peep of complaint out of you, and you’ll be punished most severely.”
Youpromised, youpromised! I can’t scream it out with Charlie stuffing my voice down. He promised, and I did everything he said to do, I coaxed and cooed to Ruby just, just so, and he has Everett anyway.
“You’d like to say that I don’t require her services, since I already possess her brother? That runt is worse than useless, unfortunately. Ruby will pay me back for my disappointment, though, now that she’s so wonderfully unencumbered. Footloose and fancy-free, so to speak. And Mabel, you’ll do just as you’re told, if you want to keep the barest memories of your old life.”
In the dark hut Ruby rolls into herself, arms and legs wriggling from spidery doubling into one girl. Then she lies on the floor and gasps, her face striped bright with tears. When Aloysius calls to her and asks is she better she looks at him, blank and shiny, like nothing and nobody makes sense to her now that Dashiell’s shoved out. Charlie lets me go, knocks me down and sideways into the mud. Don’t come, Ruby! I should scream, but they’ll hurt me and hurt me if I do and so I keep quiet.
She gets up and her face is like she’s lost, like she’s forgotten how to see. And Aloysius stares at her crazy-sharp, because he wants to say, Come to me, but not too soon, not until the just-right moment, in case he scares her. Because even now that he has the gun, she has to come toward him. Of her very own free, free will. Or it won’t work and Aloysius won’t get her.
Ruby looks so dizzy, though, so goggling and empty, and I’m frightened for her. I’m scared she’s too blank and sad to understand that she mustn’t, mustn’t go near him, like she has become the dark woods with no more moon, like she can’t imagine that anything can matter. But Ruby, it does, it still does!
And Aloysius sees it too, how snapping herself closed to Dashiell has left her like a forest with no paths going through. “Ruby?” he says, but he keeps his voice easy, like it doesn’t matter. “Could you come here for a minute, please?”
Ruby lifts one shiny red boot and stands there with it floating in front of her, but she doesn’t put the foot down and Aloysius and Charlie are fixed with no attention left for anything but her, not in the world. It’s only Ruby in the dark shack and if she’ll keep coming, that’s all they know or care about. Like two snakes hypnotized, the way I saw once at a fair.
So they don’t hear and they don’t see, not what I see, and I keep quiet. Oh, no, not a single peep, just like he told me.
Ruby wavers, drowsy and confused, and her floating red toes dip toward the ground, and there’s the quick suck of breath from Aloysius.
I see a little flick in Ruby, like the tiniest possible spark hiding under her lashes, and I want to squeal. But I have to keep very, very still. Because Aloysius mustn’t guess that Ruby’s not so silly after all. She stops and wobbles and gawks above his head like she’s forgetting all about where she is and what she was doing.
“Ruby,” he calls. Trying to sound nice, but it’s tight with how angry he is, and I want to squeal and laugh at him. “Ruby, darling, just one moment of your time. Step right this way.”
Another lift, wobble, tap of her foot. Then one more. So slow and sleepy, like each step is a dream big enough for everybody here.
Is it enough steps forward, yet? She lets her boot go like a leaf into the air, and sail along, and his fingers are so white with readiness to swing the gun at her, but he wants to be sure, veryverysure, that she’s come to him enough for it to count.
And as he waits the blue-striped girl is silent behind him, getting closer. Almost close enough to reach and touch him, when Ruby’s foot taps down.
At the same time the gun is lifting. At the same time Charlie sees the girl in blue satin pajamas and starts yelling. Aloysius is spinning and the bullets flash into the dark; did they hit her? But no, the blue girl is dipping in quick and low, one bullet just wisping through her blue-striped hair, and the colored stars shine on the teeth Aloysius had when he was alive.
But none of us can touch anything that was in our bodies when we were alive. That’s what happened to Constance, her mother hugged her wearing part of Constance in a locket, and Constance crumpled up and was gone.
An allergy to our mortal remains, Dashiell said when I told him the story. An allergy of the most violent kind, from the sound of it. And he got a look like a shopkeeper who thinks you might pay too much for something.
And now I am laughing, because I see Aloysius’s old teeth biting into his neck. The blue girl is shoving the teeth into him, hard. They’re sinking into his skin, and he starts to fold up, and the girl jumps back screaming. Aloysius points the gun even as his shoulder wads up like dirty laundry. It’s aiming right at her, about to blast her wide open. She came up to him ofherownfreewill, and so Aloysius can still escape inside her if he hits her just so.
But Ruby isn’t moving like a sleepy leaf anymore. She’s running in and toppling Aloysius to the side, so his gun shoots space instead. And the whole time he falls he’s creasing into himself, his skin turning into a hundred umbrellas all folding up at once. He looks so shocked that he might not know what’s happening to him.
Every bit of his body is sucking inward, draining into flower-shaped holes, all closing. His cheeks pull in and his face pleats smaller. Funnels sink in his neck and chest, spewing breath as they go deeper, pulling him after them. Legs turn into paper lanterns, scrunching in the rain.
Then he sees his teeth, where the blue girl let them drop. Pale and biting up from the ground. Oh, and now he understands how they tricked him. He understands it wasn’t enough to worry about Ruby, and if she was carrying teeth in her pocket! But it’s too late now.
Ruby lets him have eyes, or maybe it’s the strange girl who is seeing him that way? A little, creasing monkey of an old man, getting smaller every moment, but with his eyes stretched so huge they dig holes in the air. His mouth has shriveled into a tiny dot but his eyes are still screaming, and we all hear it: a shriek whistling out of his pupils, like high wind through cracks in a wall.
Now Dashiell comes walking right up, in jeans but no shirt and his feet bare on the dirt. He walks swinging and calm, like he’s not scared, like he doesn’t have lots of enemies here. Aloysius is so bent into his disappearing that he can’t even fight when Dashiell opens what’s left of his fingers and takes his gun away.
Ruby runs straight to Dashiell and throws her arms around his neck—Ruby, no! You should know better. Don’t trust him! But she went so quick, before I even realized, and it’s too late to shout that. He squeezes her tight and croons to her. “Ruby-Ru, my sweetest, my precious girl. How bravely you’ve come through.”
Then he lifts the gun’s nose and presses it to the side of her head.
RUBY
I didn’t understand how cold I was, cold through my heart and through the quick of my being, until I felt Dashiell’s warmth against me. I nestle
my face against him, sobbing, and only the muzzle of the gun at my temple remains as an imprint of chill.
Aloysius keeps collapsing on the ground in front of us, a shrill scream piping from the wreckage of what he was. I try not to watch, it’s so horrible, but I still see too much from the corners of my eyes. Facets of skin pleat in to meet one another, his body pulled into a slow implosion.
Elena sits on the ground, eyes wide with shock, and hugs herself. She knew what she was doing when we met just at the edge of our tumble into the borderlands, when I passed that jawbone to her. She knew that approaching Aloysius would give him a chance to try and take her, but it’s impossible to understand, viscerally, how it will feel to come that close to losing yourself. It was close for me, too, and now that it’s over I can’t understand how I stayed so perfectly controlled as I walked toward that focused evil, feeling the yawn of its hunger for me.
Mabel is hopping around in excitement, and that thug who dragged me here—Charlie?—is already darting away.
“Softly, Ru-Ru. Everett is safe now, assuming anyway that he pulls through the physical damage he’s suffered, which I think he will. But he’s safe from Aloysius, forever. He owns himself again, completely, and the shadow-corpse he left here will vanish along with the ghost who created it. Don’t cry.”
“Did we hurt him, Dash?” I barely hear myself, but Dashiell does.
“Ah, Ru, we did. We hurt him badly. Staved in his ribs and popped a lung, as far as I could tell, all in the interests of hampering Aloysius. But we didn’t kill him, and he truly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. A few days in the hospital and he should be all right.”
That makes Elena glance up for the first time, and the anger on her face flickers into alarm as she registers the gun in Dashiell’s hand.
