Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  When I pulled into town, the nightly bedlam was beginning to die down. The haunted houses had all closed for the evening, but I passed a trio of teens in bloodied steampunk costumes, who were inexplicably lighting a handkerchief on fire. A guide in Puritan-era wardrobe held a lantern aloft while he led a gaggle of tourists to Proctor’s Ledge, the site of the seventeenth-century witch executions.

  My destination was on the northeast tip of town, a waterfront park known as Salem Willows, named after the iconic trees that lined the property. I parked by a dilapidated arcade and popped my hood as I entered the grounds. It was a look that would scream “sketchy” anywhere else, but in Salem, I was just another delinquent who was up to no good.

  Beyond the gates, I could hear a distant ruckus. I followed the sound across the park to the wharf and paused to watch from the shadows of a silent carousel, its plastic horses in suspended animation on their metal rods.

  A large gang of punks had gathered around two flaming trash cans. Between the thirty of them, they had enough piercings and metal hardware to give any MRI technician an anxiety attack. What the hell is this? I wondered. The fucking Thunderdome?

  Bottles of milky, glowing Blyss made their rounds, and even from my vantage point, I could feel the palpable electricity circulating with it. It was like being at a pet shop: If you rattled one cage, all the animals would start yowling.

  The tension thickened when a tall skeleton of a man stepped forward. He must have been three heads taller than anyone else, yet probably weighed less than I did, with emaciated arms that dangled nearly to his knees. His ripped jeans were so tight that they looked like they’d been painted onto his pipe-cleaner legs.

  Half of the crowd cheered as he mounted one of the motorcycles parked between the flaming trash cans, and it was only then that I realized the punks were divided into two camps. They were all so uniform in their alternativeness.

  The opposite side exploded in their own cheers as a spiky-haired girl stepped out to meet the tall man’s challenge. Her face had been painted as a Mexican sugar skull—chalk white, with a spider web across her forehead, violet flowers encircling her eyes, a black nose, and a lipless, toothy grin. Leather clung to her curves and she had a wooden croquet mallet strapped to her back.

  The gangly man jammed a black helmet down onto his tiny head and climbed onto his bike, revving the engine twice in challenge.

  The skull-faced girl rolled her eyes and made an obscene jerking motion with her hand, to the laughter of her gang members. She, too, straddled her motorcycle. Instead of a helmet, she unholstered two steel ram’s horns from her belt. She screwed the prostheses in place one at a time, first the left, then the right, until they were firmly attached to the metal bolts protruding from her scalp.

  My fingernails dug into plastic saddle of the carousel horse I was hiding behind. Aries.

  Her real name, I had learned according to Rufus’s source, was Dominika Calderón, a drug dealer who’d emigrated from Venezuela. Little was known about her prior to a few years ago, but she’d apparently made an impressively cutthroat ascent through Nox’s organization, slowly commandeering his respect by sabotaging the markets for Blyss’s competitors. Marijuana greenhouses burned. Meth labs exploded. Heroin supplies laced. Ecstasy, oxy, and Molly swapped for deadly pills. She had poisoned every well she could to ensure that addicts and recreational drug users alike would, in their fear, turn to the one drug that was consistent, tamper-free, and bountiful. It was basic supply and demand. Apparently, she would have made a brilliant economist in another life.

  Somewhere along the way, Dominika had adopted an alias from the zodiac and started sporting demonic headgear to match it. Apparently her ruthlessness trumped her young age in Nox’s eyes, because he’d quickly promoted her to oversee all Blyss distribution in the northeast. All that responsibility, and she still found time after her “day job” for illegal street-racing.

  I was reminded of another interesting fact from Rufus’s intel as Aries rolled up her sleeve and injected a syringe into her track-marked arm: Aries was a thrill junkie. As if racing her bike around public streets wasn’t dangerous enough, she took a hit of Blyss mixed with a mild hallucinogen, intravenously for quicker results, and let the drug transform the streets around her. All of that, without wearing a helmet.

  Well, if she had a death wish, it was about to be granted.

  One goon stepped up to the starting line, holding bundles in each hand. When he dropped the first into the burning trash barrel, the flames turned yellow. Both competitors revved their engines. The “official” opened his right hand this time, and as soon as the second package hit the fire, green flames spewed out.

  Both bikes shot forward. They whipped past my hiding spot, already jostling for the lead as they rattled down the narrow path. The last I saw of Aries was her popping a wheelie over the curb and speeding through the parking lot.

  With the race underway and Aries now positively identified as a participant, I had probably no more than twenty minutes to get to the waypoint I’d chosen to make my last stand.

  Then it would only be a matter of looking for the horns.

  I hid on the grassy shoulder of Derby Street, the course’s waterfront home stretch, which ran parallel to Salem Sound. Behind me, moored at the end of a long wharf, was the Friendship, one of Salem’s many tourist attractions. The enormous three-masted clipper ship loomed silently over the bay, its rigging occasionally groaning in the night breeze.

  With a pair of binoculars, I gazed down the straightaway, which was devoid of traffic this time of night. It wasn’t long before I heard the distant, excited hum of two motorcycles, growing louder on their approach. The tall man rounded the bend in the road first, his head low to the handlebars as he clung to his narrow lead.

  Then I saw the telltale glint of metal horns. Aries was a hundred feet behind her competitor and her Yamaha jerked forward hard as she tried to close the distance. I wouldn’t put it past her to jam her croquet mallet into his spokes if it meant the difference between winning or losing.

  I readied my bundle at the roadside, a booby trap hastily constructed from materials I’d bought at a twenty-four-hour department store. The grandmotherly cashier had given me a strange look when, well after midnight, I’d dropped a long runner carpet and a box of nails onto the checkout belt. “Late-night home improvement,” I’d explained.

  Now it would all come down to timing. I lowered my body deeper into the weeds as the gangly punk flew by me at seventy miles an hour.

  I popped out of the grass, pushed my palms against the rolled-up carpet, and shoved it toward the street. The twelve-foot rug unfurled across the road, and as it opened, the rows of nails that I’d hammered into it pointed skyward, snapping into place like hidden fangs.

  The homemade spike strip had barely finished unspooling when Aries’s bike sizzled over it. Pop-pop. The nails shredded the front tire, then the back. Her momentum was so great that as the bike’s rims grated harshly against the asphalt, I feared that Aries might simply slow down and pull over, unfazed.

  But then the front rim caught a dip in the road and bucked sideways. Aries flew over the handlebars headfirst, while the motorcycle clattered across Derby Street. Pieces of the plastic shell snapped off in chunks until the riderless bike slammed into a light pole.

  Meanwhile, Aries hit the pavement and continued to slide across it. Sparks blossomed from the tips of her horns as they traced two blackened lines across the asphalt, before her body finally came to rest by the roadside.

  I yanked the trap out of the street and threw it into the grass. Then I walked determinedly toward Aries.

  I’d hoped the crash itself would put an end to her, but cockroach that she was, she was already peeling herself off the pavement. Her hands were bloodied and raw and the road rash had burned away her leather suit in patches. The tips of her horns glowed a fierce red, with smoke trails faintly rising from them.

  I’m not sure what the cocktail of designer hal
lucinogens in her system made her see as I marched toward her, but as her hazy eyes struggled to focus, she groaned, “What are you?”

  I drew back my hood to let her get a good look at the face of the girl she should never have crossed. “I’m the nightingale,” I rasped.

  I was nearly upon her when one of her bloodstained hands opened and she blew a handful of powder into my face.

  The particles stung my eyes, momentarily blinding me, and I inhaled sharply before I could think better. The pixie dust unpleasantly coated the inside of my nose and mouth and I gagged on its pungent, chemical taste.

  While I coughed out the wretched substance, Aries popped up to her feet in one feline movement and took off running down the wharf. The murderess was fast despite her road-chafed knees.

  I wiped my eyes clear and pursued her, but I took my time since the jetty was a dead end. She would have no choice but to either turn and face me or dive into the frigid waters of Salem Sound. Unlike the mercy I’d shown Grimshaw, I would happily hold her punk head underwater until her legs stopped kicking.

  Aries had other plans. She cut a hard right where the clipper ship was docked. The Friendship’s boarding ramp had been withdrawn for the night, but Aries planted her feet on the wharf’s edge and leaped over the water with her gazelle-like legs. Her hands found the edge of the main deck, and after a few seconds of frantic writhing, she hauled herself aboard.

  An unpleasant sensation swept through my brain as I reached the Friendship. The world around me distorted and the colors grew brighter. With my vision in a constant state of flux, I nearly misjudged my leap onto the boat. Pain exploded in my knees as they struck the pine hull, and it was only by a miracle that my hands found the deck’s edge. My boots scrabbled blindly until I found a notch in the wood, which gave me enough leverage to drag my body up over the railing.

  I assumed a defensive stance as soon as I could rally to my feet, but Aries was nowhere to be seen. The pixie-dust drug had me in its grip, assaulting me with a fresh wave of vertigo. The floorboards of the deck undulated beneath me, making every footstep I took uncertain. Even the masts twisted back and forth, like sky-bound serpents rising out of their coils.

  Something fist-sized nailed me directly between my shoulder blades—Aries’s croquet mallet hammering my spine. I staggered forward and caught the mast before I went down. Footsteps thudded across the deck behind me, and I whipped around to see the mallet on a collision course for my head.

  I ducked just in time and Aries’s major league swing connected with the mast instead, leaving a dent in the wood and shattering the mallet. The impact rattled her, and I seized the opportunity to punch the demoness right in the throat.

  She clutched her windpipe, inhaling ragged breaths. I came at her again, ready to bash her horns into her drug-addled brain.

  Aries grabbed a cannonball from a supply rack and side-armed it at me. The round shot slammed into my ribs, doubling me over. The world around me burst into a kaleidoscope of color.

  I heard Aries laugh as she took another unexpected path of retreat: up the rope ladders that ascended the mainmast. As she clambered up the rigging, she hoarsely sang, “The itsy-bitsy spider crawled up the waterspout …”

  The Friendship’s mast must have been over a hundred feet tall. As I ascended after Aries, the ropes squirmed beneath my fingers, snakes ready to sink their fangs into my flesh. I kept my focus on the trail of her bloody handprints and tried not to look down at the deck of the ship that was growing smaller.

  At the top of the ladder, Aries pulled herself up onto the yardbar, the long piece of lumber that supported the topsail. She shimmied out to the edge, holding onto a rigging line to steady herself. “Come on up,” she taunted me. “The view’s to die for.”

  When I neared the yardbar, I climbed onto the beam’s opposite end, putting myself out of reach from Aries so she couldn’t kick me in the head on my way up. We now stood with only a handful of steps and the mainmast between us. My adrenaline was finally overpowering the drug, but the beam was narrow. If the line in my hand snapped, I’d fall for sure.

  Aries’s Cheshire grin broadened as she drew a knife from her waistband and flicked out the blade. “Perfect,” she cooed. “You’ll make an even bigger splat than your brother.”

  She crossed the beam slowly, knifepoint extended. She’d be on me in seconds.

  My free hand slipped into the back pocket of my jeans. I felt the sand from Salem Sound that I’d tucked away earlier for good luck. Aries was three steps from me now, making quick jabs to try to spook me off the edge. The next slice would find my flesh.

  I closed my fingers into a fist and withdrew the sand from my pocket. My eyes smoldered as I met Aries’s bestial, gloating gaze for the last time. Then I asked her, “Do you want to hear the sound you made when you died?”

  I flung the sand into Aries’s eyes right as she lunged. Instinctively, she let go of both the knife and her handhold to wipe them, tottering precariously on the yardbar. I grabbed the rigging above me with both hands, swung toward her, and kicked her in the chest with my boots as hard as I could.

  Aries flew back off the beam and began the long drop to the deck below. Her rapid descent was interrupted three-quarters of the way down when one of her looping horns snagged on a line between the masts.

  Even sixty feet up, I could hear the harsh crack when the sudden stop separated her skull from her spine.

  My feet fumbled to find a perch again, and I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until I’d lowered myself back to the ladder. I squeezed it for dear life. Beneath me, Aries’s body listed slowly from side to side on her makeshift gallows, her arms slack and her head bent at an unnatural angle on her broken neck.

  I marveled at the remains of the sand that still coated my fingertips. When I was five, my brother had stuffed a handful of the Cape Cod beach into my pockets. Little had he known then that, twelve years later, his advice would save my life and avenge his own murder.

  It was dawn by the time I returned to the South End. I knew I was going to have to face the protective wrath of Atlas the moment I opened the Dollhouse door.

  As luck would have it, I didn’t even have to wait that long. After I’d rolled the truck into the condo’s underground garage, my headlights illuminated Atlas, swaddled in a bathrobe and wearing an expression that hopscotched between fury and relief. He had set up a beach chair in the spot where his Silverado should have been, and I had no doubt he’d been staking out the garage for hours, stewing miserably.

  To be fair, I had stolen his truck with no explanation, right after a car bomb left a crater outside our safe house.

  After I’d parked and he stood there fuming, waiting for my explanation, I tried to muster an apologetic façade, knowing full well that I couldn’t pull off the “puppy dog” look with any shred of sincerity. “Would you believe,” I asked, “that I was taking the Silverado out for a car wash?”

  Atlas crossed his arms tightly enough to pulverize a cinderblock. “You,” he replied, “are a panic attack personified. If you keep this up, I’ll be on blood pressure medication before I turn nineteen.”

  There was no way I was going to evade explaining myself this time, so we climbed into the bed of the truck and I told him everything, from Aries’s phone call to her lynching aboard the Friendship. The ice melted off Atlas throughout the story, fury giving way to understanding, tinged with disapproval. In the end, his primary concern came down to whether or not I could be connected to the death of Aries.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “With any luck, they’ll run a toxicology test and her blood will light up like Times Square. Hopefully they’ll see a girl who was so strung out on uppers and hallucinogens that she crashed her bike, tried to use a clipper ship as her own personal jungle gym, and accidentally belly-flopped off the topsail. Even if they suspected foul play, they’d have to sort through the fingerprints of thousands of tourists on the ship to find any of mine.”

  Atlas withdrew the tenth
journal page from his pocket, and I felt immediately grateful for the change in subject. “I had a few hours to kill while I was waiting here to make sure you were alive, so I dug into the latest riddle.”

  “Any headway?” I asked.

  “To be honest, I feel like I’m chasing my own tail again.” He flattened the page against the rubber lining of the truck bed, and we studied it under the glow of the jaundiced garage light. One by one he pointed to words that he’d highlighted on the document’s protective sleeve:

  The first stop for enemies from afar,

  The last for enemies from within,

  Five brazen stone-faced soldiers

  To keep their city sound and safe.

  A widow mourns a lonely walk,

  Her grave mistake, her husband’s ruin,

  And roams the beach eternally

  Grieving in black amongst the gray.

  Her gallows long since rendered tinder,

  The promise of life springs anew

  Where the five petals converge

  On the cinquefoil in bloom.

  “To put it academically: There’s a lot of weird shit going on,” Atlas said. “Note how the number five comes up repeatedly. A cinquefoil is a five-petaled flower, so maybe we’re looking for a garden. But it also refers to the pentagram, a star within a pentagon, a symbol commonly associated with witchcraft.”

  “Pentagon” made something in my memory twitch, but I couldn’t summon it to the surface. “Witchcraft isn’t a bad starting point. After all, I did just come from Salem, the witchcraft capital of the country. And there is that reference to the gallows.”

  “My thoughts initially as well.” He tapped twice on the opening lines. “But what do protecting the city and stone-faced soldiers have to do with the witch trials? And what about this mourning widow—her grave mistake, her husband’s ruin? I cross-referenced that second stanza with the full list of the accused witches who were executed by hanging. A few of them were widowed, but none of the stories mentioned anything about them being responsible for the death of their husbands, so I have no idea what to make of this lady in black.”