The Replacement

by Yovanoff, Brenna

  I didn’t know how to explain life at my house, how bad and weird and creepy it could get. How my mom was still being punished just for surviving, and they’d waited fifteen years to get revenge, because to people like them, fifteen years was two seconds and nothing was ever really forgiven. They could make you pay for the rest of your life.

  “It’s just going to mess up your family,” I said.

  Tate took a long breath and reached for my hand, not like a girlfriend, but hard and panicked like someone drowning. “Mackie, my family is already so messed up that I can’t think of a single thing anyone could do right now to make it worse.” She squeezed my fingers, staring up at me, and everything smelled like metal. “Just tell me what to do.”

  I shook my head. Tate never asked anyone what to do, and I had no answer, no secret knowledge. This was just what always happened and what had been happening for decades. Maybe centuries.

  Tate’s eyes were hard and shiny, but not like tears. Her gaze was brutal, and she wasn’t the kind of girl who begged for anything. “There has to be something I can do because I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing!”

  I held her hand in both of mine, gripping her by the wrist, holding her still.

  They’d had to work on Kellan Caury a long time before they finally made him their man, but the Cutter had figured it out eventually. You can get a lot from a person if you cut the fingers off his girlfriend.

  “Stay inside,” I said with my hands locked around hers.

  The look she gave me was terrible. “No—no way. You’re talking about my sister. There is no way I’m just going to sit home like a good little girl and wait for you to decide whether or not you’re going to do something!”

  She was so brave and so reckless, and I wasn’t lying when I said, “Look, this is how it is, and you can’t do anything to help her. You need to go in the house and lock the doors. I’ll figure something out.”

  Then I kissed her fast and ducked out the open garage door before I could see the look on her face.

  I’d been relatively sure that Tate would follow me, but she didn’t. When I’d gone a block and a half without her screaming obscenities at me or chasing me down, I let myself hope that for once, she might actually be listening to me.

  I headed home, making a mental inventory of my resources. They weren’t very encouraging. The Morrigan might hate her sister, but she wasn’t going to help me save Natalie because apparently human sacrifice didn’t fall under her classification of inappropriate reasons to steal kids. Or maybe it was just that the Morrigan was scared of her sister—like everyone else. Scared of what happened when the Lady caught someone doing something she didn’t like.

  I didn’t have a solution, I didn’t have a plan. I had half a bottle of analeptic and an old paring knife, neither of which was that much help in the greater scheme of things.

  At the corner of Concord and Wicker, I stopped. I stood on the sidewalk for a long time, looking at my house like it was one of those find-the-hidden-picture games. The yard wasn’t right, and there were too many wrong things to count.

  The stepladder was out, but it was tipped over, open so it made a capital A on the lawn. There were long smears of dirt on the front walk. The grass was mashed down flat in places. The gutter was stopped with twigs and dead leaves, and water ran in a steady fall down onto the front steps.

  I tried the door, but the knob was locked and so was the dead bolt, and I had to go scraping around in the bushes for the hide-a-key. Some of the edging was torn up and tulip bulbs lay brown and papery on the cement.

  A jack-o’-lantern lay smashed in a pulpy mess on the porch. Its eyeholes gaped up at me, candle scorched, half caved in.

  When I stepped into the front hall, I was struck by how deserted the house was. My dad was probably at the police station or maybe helping Jenna’s family make preliminary arrangements for the funeral. He’d be comforting the masses, managing the chaos, and my mom would be at the hospital, working the morning shift, but Emma didn’t have class until noon. Her bag was hanging on a hook behind the door. I waited a second and then called her name.

  There was no answer. Her coat lay on the bench by the mail table. All the lights were out and I moved slowly, staying close to the wall.

  The kitchen was empty, but I had a soft, creepy feeling on my neck, like I wasn’t the only one in the room. I listened a long time before I heard it. Not a cry, but a breathless gasp. Then nothing.

  “Emma?” I flipped the light switch and knelt on the floor.

  She was sitting under the table. All the stainless steel flatware and the good knives were lined up in a circle around her, and she had her arms pulled close against her chest. She was holding a butcher knife. There was a bruise coming out on one cheek.

  “Emma, what happened?”

  She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything, looking out at me from under the table, shaking her head.

  I reached for her and the metal circle sent a flash of pain up my arm. I sat back hard on the floor, closing my eyes as the kitchen spun. “You have to move that stuff.”

  She shook her head again, a quick, frantic little shake.

  I yanked my sleeves down over my hands and raked away the knives, reaching for her, pulling her out from under the table and dragging her across the linoleum into the light.

  Dead leaves and little twists of brown grass were stuck all over her clothes and in her hair. Her T-shirt was muddy. Her arms were bare, covered past the elbow in thin, spiral burns. They ran in crazy squiggles, oozing clear and yellow. When I touched one of them, she gasped. The skin around the burn felt sticky. I didn’t do it again.

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “Did they come in the house?”

  “No,” she whispered. “They were out in the yard. I was on the ladder, you know, to clear the gutter. It was running over. They—uh, they were laughing.”

  “What did they look like? Were they like me?”

  The look she gave me was agonized. “No, they weren’t like you. They were—” She took a short, hitching breath. “They were ugly.”

  I realized I was squeezing her and made myself stop. “Ugly like how?”

  “Like bony and white and . . . rotten.” Without warning, she mashed her face against my chest so she was talking into my shirt. “They were dead, Mackie.”

  Pain seared across my ribs and I gasped. “Ow. Put that down.”

  She looked at the knife in her hand like she was surprised to see it there. Then she tossed it away. It spun like a dial on the floor. When it stopped, it was pointing to the refrigerator.

  She took a deep breath. “They came up on the lawn and stood around the ladder.” Her voice was hard. “They asked me if I wanted to come and visit them. They said they ran a sanitarium and I was just the kind of girl they needed on their staff.”

  “Then what?” I was brushing at the grass on her T-shirt, picking leaves out of her hair. “What did they do to your arms?”

  “They knocked me off the ladder. They had fingernails—long fingernails—and then . . .” She held out her arms and didn’t finish.

  The burns were wet and raw. They gave off a bright ozone smell that reminded me of lightning storms. “How did you get away?”

  She smiled and it was the most ironic expression I’d ever seen. “I said the Twenty-third Psalm.”

  “You chased them away by quoting Bible verses?”

  “I read, Mackie.”

  “So, what you’re telling me is, you have a book that says if a pack of rotten girls shows up at your house and starts burning graffiti all over your arms, recite a couple of psalms and they’ll go away?”

  “Revenants,” she said, with her head against my shoulder. “When a person comes back from the dead, they’re called a revenant.” She sounded fussy and serious, even with her scorched arms, her wet hair soaking through my shirt to the skin. She squeezed me hard and raised her head again. Her arms were a raw, oozing mess and she was holding them stiffly away fro
m her body like she was trying not to show how bad it hurt. “It’s . . . I just didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Emma, I’m sorry. I’ll get you peroxide or iodine or something. We’ll get you cleaned up. Just tell me what to do.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. Water was dripping down the sides of her face. “I’m okay. They didn’t even come in the house. And it’s not as bad as it looks. It hurt a lot, but it’s better now. I can hardly feel it.”

  I looked at her arms again, then held her away from me, staring at her hands. “Are you cold?”

  “A little. Not too bad, though.” Then she looked down.

  Her hands were pale blue and going bluer as we watched. The veins stood out in a dark network under the skin. Her fingernails had turned a deep bloodless gray.

  “They took my work gloves,” she said in a thin, shuddering voice. “They have my gloves.”

  I stood up. “Okay, turn on all the lights and lock the doors. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She reached out, grabbing at my sleeve. Her fingers slipped and fumbled on my jacket, like she couldn’t quite make them work. “Wait, where are you going?”

  “To get your gloves back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE PRICE

  Under the slag heap, the House of Mayhem was humid from the rain. At opposite ends of the lobby, the two huge fireplaces had been lit and the room was warmer than usual.

  The flock of rotting blue girls huddled together around one of the fireplaces. They were sorting through trays of Janice’s bottles, melting wax over the tops and pasting on labels. They worked in kind of an assembly line, passing the bottles along and talking in low voices. Behind the reception desk, the Morrigan was sitting on the floor, playing with a doll made of feathers and dirty, knotted string. I came around the desk and stood over her.

  “Hello, castoff,” she said without looking up. “Are you here to tell me how sorry you are for running off to beg favor from my sister?”

  “No, I’m here to tell you that you just made one huge fucking mistake. And stop calling me that.”

  “What would you prefer? Foundling? Changeling? Child left in someone else’s bed?” She dropped the doll and stared up at me. Her teeth reflected the firelight back at me in bright pinpricks. “I gave you cures and medicines, cared for you when you were ill. Without my mercies, you would have died, and still you disregard me, you slight me for my sister?”

  “Yeah, I talked to your sister, okay? Fine, I’m a terrible person. Tell your rancid hookers to give Emma’s gloves back.”

  The Morrigan nodded toward the far side of the room. “Tell them yourself.”

  The girls were clustered together on the floor, laughing in a soft, breathless way. One of them, starved looking, with matted hair and ragged gashes down her arms, was wearing a pair of pink suede gardening gloves.

  I crossed the lobby and stood over them. Close to the fire, they smelled worse—all wet dirt and rank, decomposing flesh. In the flickering light, they looked greenish under the skin.

  “May we help you?” said the one wearing Emma’s gloves. She smiled a loose, mushy smile, showing black teeth and rotting gums.

  “Yeah, give me those.”

  “Give you which?”

  “Give me my sister’s gloves. I’m through dicking around.”

  The girl next to her leaned in and elbowed her, grinning up at me. She was holding a smoldering stick of wood and a lump of half-melted wax. Her tongue was blue and her whole mouth was crawling with little white maggots. “How will she be compensated for her cooperation?”

  “Kiss her,” whispered the girl from the Halloween party.

  The others laughed and covered their mouths. “Yes, kiss her, kiss her and we’ll let your sister’s hands go.”

  The one with the gloves got to her feet, stepping close and smiling up at me. “Just once,” she said, and her voice was softer than the others’. Almost sad. “Kiss me once, and I’ll give them back to you.”

  I looked down at her. Her eyes might have been green once, but now they were cloudy and pale.

  “It doesn’t have to be passionate,” she said. “You don’t have to convince me that you mean it. Just give me the chance to pretend you don’t find me revolting.”

  The other girls watched, hungry and eager, but the girl with the gloves just looked cold. She wasn’t laughing.

  I bent and kissed her on the cheek, close to the corner of her mouth. The smell was bad. She reeked like groundwater and decay, but underneath was the thin fragrance of church incense and funeral flowers, the dismal aroma of grief, of never really dying.

  I stayed with my face close to hers, my mouth against her cheek, even after I’d given her what she asked for. The only thing she’d wanted. I wanted to make it count because I was sorry for her. Because she was dead and I wasn’t.

  When I finally straightened and stepped back, the girls on the floor muttered restlessly, but the one with the gloves just gave me a wistful look.

  “That was nice,” she whispered, holding out her hands.

  I took the gloves by their fingertips and slid them off. Underneath, her hands were a healthy pink, but even in the firelight, I could see it draining out of her. The warm tinge faded, and her fingernails went an ugly bruised color. She sighed and smiled at me. The smile made the skin on her lips crack.

  I jammed the gloves in my coat pocket and crossed back to the desk, where the Morrigan sat playing with her doll, dancing it along the floor. I could still smell the chilly stench of the girl’s skin, this ghostly miasma that drifted and clung to me. The Morrigan was humming and it made me want to kick her.

  “Why did you let them do that to Emma? I thought the whole agreement was that you would leave her alone if I worked for you. I thought she and Janice were supposed to be friends.”

  The Morrigan glared up at me. “You chose to appeal to my sister. You ran to her at the first opportunity. She did her best to break the town, and you went to bow to her.” She swung the doll against the leg of the desk. Its head made a hollow noise when it hit. “They don’t have the will to give us favor when they’re sad. They’re too caught up in their own misery, their own tragedy, and then they don’t love us.”

  “Look, you started this. You called out the Lady when you stole my mother back.”

  The Morrigan sat with her legs folded under her, hugging the doll against her chest. “And look at where it got us. The town is sick. It gets worse every year, and now the buildings are falling, the house of God is destroyed, and even the train tracks and the trestles rust.”

  I let my breath out between my teeth and then held out the zipper pull. “They’re going to kill a three-year-old girl. Not a warrior or a king. She’s a little kid—she’s like you.”

  The Morrigan took the plastic bear, turning it over in her hand. Then she looked up at me, teeth sharp and glossy. “No, not like me. I’m quite sturdy. She, on the other hand, is going to bleed a river.”

  When I finally spoke, my voice sounded dry. “What is your problem?”

  She dropped the doll into her lap and looked up at me, still holding the plastic zipper pull. “You choose them over us. Every single time.”

  “And I’ll keep doing it! This isn’t about picking sides. The Lady is completely out of her mind, and you know how to stop her. Tell me what I need to do to steal Natalie.”

  The Morrigan seemed to consider that. Then she gave me a sly look. “Dead is dead,” she said. “But my sister is plenty cold herself. Sometimes she can’t tell the difference.”

  “Okay, but what does that mean?”

  “Only that there are always spare children, dead in borrowed beds, buried in borrowed clothes, waiting to be made use of.” Her smile was wide and it was hard to tell if it was cruel because she was cruel or if that was just her smile.

  “No.” I shook my head. “That’s not what you’re talking about—not children. You’re talking about bodies. About grave robbing.”

 
“Call it what you like. You asked how I managed it, and I’ve told you. The night was long, and in her sitting room full of dead beauties, I exchanged one more dead thing for a live one, and it was hours before she knew. Before she realized that her prize was gone and the silent child in her sitting room was one of ours.”

  I took a deep breath and felt a little sick. “Tell me how. How you made the Lady believe the body was real.”

  The Morrigan smiled, shaking her head. “Dearest, it was real.”

  “How you made it seem believable, then, how you replaced something alive with something that wasn’t.”

  She fidgeted with the zipper pull, rolling it between her fingers, humming and rocking. “Our children rot, but not as readily as theirs do. They’re restless things, the failed replacements.”

  Over by the fireplace, the blue girls whispered and snickered, braiding each other’s brittle hair. The one I’d kissed was looking back over her shoulder at me, just once. Then she turned away, keeping her head bowed.

  The Morrigan stood up, facing me with the mangy doll in one hand and the zipper pull in the other. She looked like a little girl, old-fashioned and strange, but her teeth were brutal, and her eyes were wide and black. “I’m not your keeper and I don’t owe you anything, not anymore. If you intend to cross her, that’s not my business, but you should know the cost. A person should always be familiar with the cost of his actions.”

  “What’s the cost?”

  She dropped the doll and it landed spread-eagle on the floor, its arms and legs sticking out at awkward angles. “If you don’t know after this morning’s escapades, I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

  She smiled up at me and held out the plastic bear. After a second, I took it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  RAISING THE DEAD

  When I came in out of the drizzle and the fog, I was relieved to see my dad’s black overcoat hanging in the hall. He was sitting in the kitchen with his back to the door. The kettle was boiling on the stove and there were cups on the counter, but Emma wasn’t with him and I wasn’t brave enough to go in and ask how he was.