Beastkeeper

by Cat Hellisen

  “Is it rare?”

  “Not very.” Alan settled down on the ground, cross-legged. His bare feet were flecked with broken leaves and grains of rich dark earth like crumbs of chocolate cake. “It’s finding the right one, you see.”

  “What happens when you catch it?” Sarah wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to know. “You don’t eat it or anything, do you?”

  Alan frowned, and stared at her sidelong. “That’s a funny sort of mind you have, cat-girl. I’m no beast. No.” He sighed. “She’s sickly, doesn’t know what she’s doing now, the little feather-brain. I need to find her so I can take her home and back to where she’ll be safe. She flew away, and there’s a woman pining for her. Pining so hard her heart is broken.”

  “Over a bird?” Sarah couldn’t keep the amused disbelief out of her voice.

  “Why not?” He looked away from her, toward the bushes, as if he might spot the flown-away bird eavesdropping on their conversation. “People find all sorts of things to love.”

  “Is that what you do—find missing pets?”

  “Most times.” Alan was still frowning. “I don’t always find them in time, mind. Sick ones I can help, but if it’s too late…” He drew a spiral in the soil with his index finger. There was black dirt ground under his nail. Tiny bright leaves like bracelet charms had caught in his hair, and Sarah wanted to comb them out, watch them fall. “There are times when it’s better to put a beast out of its misery. I don’t like it much, but there it is. Some truths are hard ones. Your father is bellowing for you.”

  “Huh?” Sarah looked around, though she could hear nothing more than the soft sound of the wind rustling through the branches, stippled over with bird calls.

  “Listen,” Alan said, and then Sarah could hear it, faint under the sighing wind. Her father was calling for her. She shouldn’t have been able to hear him from so far away.

  He was probably furious. Sarah went cold, then hot, then cold again.

  “No need to be so scared. He’s opened all the windows and the water is drying up. It’ll be like old bones by morning.” Alan was scrutinizing his fingers now, and cleaning under his nails with a splinter of white wood.

  “Are you a wizard?” It sounded ridiculous the moment the words left her mouth, though not that ridiculous, she thought, considering. Alan was rather strange and fey, and if anyone was going to be magic, it would be this barefoot teenager with silver leaves caught in his hair. A boy who was hunting for a sick bird.

  Alan shook his head. “Not a wizard, not as such, but I understand magic. And there’s magic in forests. Even in yours,” he said. “It’s just a little piece of forest, but it remembers being part of the great old forest, and when you’re in it, you remember too.”

  “Remember?” She couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying; it was like he was having a conversation with her, but she was saying the wrong things, all out of time. “Alan? Remember what?” But again Alan had slipped away like a shadow behind the sun. Her father’s voice drifted over the roofs of the nearby buildings, and Sarah got to her feet, dusting the rich earth from her jeans. He was home earlier than she’d expected, and Alan seemed sure he wasn’t angry about the washing machine disaster. Maybe that meant good news. She didn’t let herself hope too hard.

  * * *

  “Care to explain what happened?” Her dad was half smiling when he said it. At least she wasn’t in serious trouble, then. Her mood lightened for a moment. Things weren’t so bad. They’d get through it. Until she realized that his eyes were sad and hopeless. She thought she preferred it when he seemed half wild and dirty.

  Sarah slipped onto one of the high bar stools that lined the kitchen counter. “It was an accident.”

  “No. It wasn’t. There’s someone to blame,” he said.

  Her hands were folded tightly on the counter. Sarah could see a tiny spike of nail sticking out like a splinter on one thumb. The skin around it had gone red and puffy where she’d chewed at the split.

  “Me.” Her father sighed. “You look as if you’re expecting a thrashing or something. I don’t hold you responsible, you daft thing.” He curled his hands around hers. They were warm and a little sweaty, like he was running a fever. The hair on the back of his wrists looked thicker than it usually was, longer and darker. “Don’t worry, Sarahbear, I’m going to do better, you’ll see. Things will go back to normal.”

  How normal did he expect their lives to be? Was she coming back?

  Sarah dragged her gaze away from the thick dark hairs on her father’s wrists and met his eyes. They were shining. Candle-bright. He smiled, and his teeth were yellow, the gums receding so that they looked almost like lengthening fangs. “Trust me, Sarahbear.”

  A cold feeling swarmed up her arms. Ants made of frost were marching under her skin. “Okay,” she said, even though she felt numb inside. “Okay.”

  4

  THE DISAPPEARING ACT

  “YOUR TEACHER WANTS a meeting with me,” her father said. It was evening, several weeks after what Sarah privately referred to as the Washing Machine Incident. Sarah had no idea when her father had last showered. He’d called in sick today, she knew. He’d been here when she got back from school, sitting on the couch watching talk shows. He’d hardly spoken to her, hadn’t even looked at her, like she was some kind of ghost that drifted through the house.

  Sarah knew he wasn’t sick. Or maybe he was, but not in the kind of way that meant sniffles and tissues and cups of hot water with lemon and honey. Her stomach swooped and dipped, and for a moment she could taste sour fear lodged in her throat. There were several reasons she could think of why her teacher would want to meet with her father now.

  I’m dead. She was pretty sure she’d failed the last set of tests. And there was that thing where she’d missed a few days. Just a few. It’s not like we were learning anything new. It was near end of term, and the exam cycle was over. People were just mucking around and getting ready to go on vacation.

  So she’d taken some … days off. That’s all they were. Sarah had spent them in the Not-a-Forest, wondering about Alan and the things he’d said to her about forests and what they remembered, and—most of all—hoping that she’d see him again. She looked for birds that were so big, sick ones, because if she found the wren, then she’d have a reason to leave him another note.

  “Oh?” Sarah busied herself with her fried egg, mushing the yolk into bright yellow smears.

  “She said that you’ve been sick quite a lot these last few weeks.”

  Her ears were burning. Sarah stared resolutely at her toast, watching the spilled yolk spread across the plate. So dead. She wondered what happened to girls like her. Next year was supposed to be the start of eighth grade, and then moving on to high school. And just moving on, probably, because that’s what her family did. Maybe this time she’d end up in a reform school. Stop being ridiculous. They do not send people to reform school for skipping a few—or more than a few—days. You have to at least stab someone. Or something. Sarah stabbed her egg with the fork, and wondered if that would be enough, if she pretended it was whichever teacher had gotten in touch with her father. She ate, forcing the food into her mouth even though she wasn’t hungry anymore and the egg was too cold and tasted of wobbly bland nothing. At least with her mouth full, she wouldn’t have to talk.

  “You forged my signature,” her father added, his voice throaty, like a cat’s growl. “I’m slightly impressed. It’s not the easiest one in the world to copy.”

  The food got stuck, and Sarah had to swallow and swallow to make it go down. “Um,” she said. “I was sick. I just didn’t want to bother you.”

  Her father sighed. When he didn’t say anything for a long time, Sarah glanced up. He was leaning his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. His shoulders were shaking, just the tiniest bit, but the strange shivering made her whole stomach knot up like old shoelaces.

  He was crying. Fathers never cried. Her father never cried. Sarah pushed what
was left of her dinner away from her. “I’m sorry.” The words fell out onto the table and flew away like dandelion seeds, never reaching him.

  “I’m not doing well by you,” he said, not lifting his head. “This is no way for you to grow up. I need to go to … a special kind of hospital, and you need to go to people who can take care of you properly.” He wasn’t looking at her, as if he was lying and knew she’d see it.

  “What?” The word burst out, startled. Sarah’s stomach twisted and tightened; for a moment she thought she was going to be ill and puke up little gobbets of egg white and ketchup and chewed-up toast right onto the tabletop. “You’re sending me away? Where? To who?”

  She hadn’t really been worried about reform school; that had just been her hyperactive imagination. It hadn’t registered that her father might really want to get rid of her. Did he hate her that much? Maybe it was her. What this was all about. Why her mother had left, why her father was slowly going mad—it was her. She swallowed the thought down, and a fierce little voice in her head tried shouting that she was just imagining things, that it had nothing to do with her. But a louder, calmer voice smothered it. My mother left, and the night she left, she was talking about how she couldn’t deal with it. With me.

  And now …

  Now her father was saying the same thing with different words, his face still buried in his hands.

  A hiccuping sob jumped in her chest. Sarah could feel the tears choking up her throat. “You can’t do that!”

  But he could. So maybe it wouldn’t be reform school—but there were other places. She had visions of herself sent off to a children’s home or to some ancient aunt she’d never even known existed. “This isn’t happening,” Sarah said. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t fair. She’d lost her mother to the cold and the winds, and now her father was also lost, lost to some strange sickness that ate away the inside of his head until he wasn’t anything like her father at all, just a beast wearing his skin like a coat. “I’m not listening to you.”

  Her father carried on talking through his fingers, talking and talking like if he stopped he’d have to realize how scared she was. “I’m sending you to your grandparents,” he mumbled. “You’ll be safe with them. They’ve wanted to see you for so long, and they—they’re not bad people. A little strict, and maybe a little odd, but they love you very much—”

  Grandparents? He was going mad, that was it. Or this was all some big unfunny joke he was playing on her. Something to scare her so she’d behave. And if these mythical grandparents had ever truly wanted to see her, why was this the first time her father had ever mentioned it?

  “What grandparents?” Sarah shouted as she stood. “I thought all my grandparents were dead, and now you tell me, now you tell me…” Her knees shook. “I don’t know what you’re telling me,” she said to the table. “You’re a liar.” Without looking at her father again, Sarah turned and ran from the house, out the kitchen door and into the dark wet of the night. She’d show him. He wasn’t the only one who could frighten people.

  The saw-toothed emerald grass in the alleyway slapped all around her legs, making her jeans heavy and damp. Above her the sky was deepest darkest blue, like the inside of a marble, and little tattered rags of dirty cloud stretched across the night. The moon was round and bright. It drowned out the stars and lit the alleyway and the distant trees of the Not-a-Forest.

  Sarah raced down to the pathway and deep into the little lost parcel of abandoned land, to the place by the eucalyptus trees where she spent her time not-exactly-waiting to bump into Alan.

  With the night had come the other owners of the land—the vagrants and the wanderers. Sarah skidded to a walk, her breath shuddering her ribs. Through the leaves and the slender trunks she could see the flicker of fire and hear the low voices of men and women.

  The air was rich with wood smoke and raisin-sweet sherry. In winter, her mother had liked to have a sherry on the coldest nights, drinking it from a tiny, beautiful little glass that had made Sarah wish she was old enough to drink sherry too. The little curved glass had enchanted her. It was too good to be wasted on an adult.

  The memories hit her, and all Sarah could do was stand there and let them batter her down. The feather-and-lily smell of her mother’s hair, the sherries on cold nights, the watermelon summers, the sound of the bees humming around her mother while she gardened. The nights when her mother had still read to Sarah at bedtime from a book filled with myths and heroes. The way she almost never smiled, but when she did, it was small and secret and only for the person who had seen it, like when her dad told awful jokes and her mother would wink at Sarah just so and share that little twitch of her mouth.

  There had been the Christmas Sarah had woken her parents in the dark and her mother had walked bleary-eyed to the tree and agreed that indeed Santa had already been, and that two o’clock in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to drink hot chocolate and eat candy canes and unwrap presents. It had been so long ago, but Sarah could still remember the particular crisp and drying smell of the tree, the scatter-glitter of ribbons and discarded wrapping paper in reds and golds and greens. The feeling of sitting warm in her mother’s lap, her mother’s arms strong and protective, the sound of her unexpected laughter like the liquid call of a forest bird.

  There were other, less happy memories. But they were still hers, still her mother in all her moods. The color of the shadows of her eyelashes across her cheeks as she sat next to Sarah’s bed and watched Sarah through a fever, her hands clasped and bony.

  The days her mother would sleep until noon and then spend the whole afternoon sitting at the kitchen table tearing junk mail into confetti. The other, worse days, when she stared out the window for hours, her fingers holding on tightly to her scarf. Nothing Sarah said on those days would make her so much as twitch in response.

  Maybe those had been the signs that should have warned Sarah that the day would come when her mother would be actually gone—not just into some place inside her own thoughts, but for-real gone, with no intention of coming back.

  Sarah sat down in the middle of the narrow track and sobbed into her palms.

  The tears seemed endless, pouring hot and thick down her face. Her nose was running, and she was making little choking animal noises, sounds humans aren’t supposed to make. The beast noises shook her body. Her skin felt less and less real, like a numb coating over the desperate, lonely little creature she really was on the inside. Sarah couldn’t have stopped crying if she’d tried. There was just too much inside her, and now that she’d begun, it would be like trying to dam a flooding river.

  She cried in the dark until the smell of smoke and sherry was drowned under salt.

  After a while the sobs turned to hiccups and coughs and splutters, and slowly, slowly, her shoulders stopped jerking so hard, and the worst of her sadness trickled out of her. She felt deflated. Sarah lowered her hands and wiped her sleeve across her face. Her eyes were tight and itchy. Inside she was empty and new, all cried out.

  “Here,” said Alan.

  Sarah’s head jerked up so quickly she felt something pull in her neck. “Gah!”

  He was standing over her, frowning, a scrap of white material dangling from his fingers. “You should always carry a handkerchief.”

  Sarah grabbed at the piece of material and tried to cover as much of her face with it as she could. She was pretty certain that she looked more like a snot-nosed brat than anything else. “Thanks,” she mumbled. “But no one normal uses handkerchiefs anymore.”

  “Are you saying I’m not normal?”

  “Right, because normal people are always wandering around in the middle of the night, appearing and disappearing like a—like a ghost. Don’t you have a home to go to?”

  “What’s wrong with handkerchiefs?”

  “Nothing, I’m sure, if this was a hundred years ago.” Sarah tried to laugh, but all she could feel was the horrible empty black space inside her. She was leaving, not because she wanted
to but because he was sending her away. The man who called himself her father.

  Alan crouched down so that his face was very close to hers. “Why were you crying, anyway?”

  “Because.” She wiped her face, scrubbing at it till her cheeks felt raw, then handed the hankie back. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Is that so?” Alan didn’t stuff the material back into his pocket, but spread it out over his knee and began to fold it very neat and small. It was embroidered on one corner—Freya—in a swirly, curling script. “And why wouldn’t I?” He tucked the folded hankie away.

  “Because your mother didn’t run out on your family, and your dad didn’t go crazy, and no one’s making you move, no one’s making you leave and go to strangers—family you’ve never met. It’s not fair.”

  “No.” Alan stood and looked down at her. “I have no family to call strangers. And I live in a place where all that is left to me are the memories of the people I have loved. Is that better?”

  Immediately Sarah’s stomach did a slow, hideous somersault. “I—I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.” She scrambled to her feet. “Where do you live? I mean, maybe I could—” Not visit him, that would be ridiculous. “I don’t know…”

  “Hush, it doesn’t matter.” Alan’s mouth was twisted in a strange lopsided smile that made her feel even worse. “It really doesn’t.” He stepped back into the dark, already looking wavery and shadowy, like he’d never really been there at all.

  “Wait.” Sarah lurched forward and caught at his wrist. His bones were thin and sharp under her fingers, and she let go immediately.

  Alan’s eyes widened in surprise, but he did as she asked.

  “Where do you go?” She looked at him helplessly. “Where do you disappear to?”

  He smiled, slow as pouring honey, and the moon shone off his milky teeth and the white corners of his eyes.

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  From behind Sarah came a soft sound, like the padding of a huge dog. She whipped around, half expecting to see Alan come creeping up behind her again under the moon-bright sky, trying to scare her, leave her feeling even more freaked out.