by Sarah Porter
But Luce couldn't stop. Her voice fell and fractured into aching chords and then her father couldn't stand it anymore. He grabbed his head, trying desperately to make the pain stop. And Luce saw that it wasn't snow in the window anymore, but tall lead-colored waves. The ocean knocked on the glass, asking to be let in...
No, Luce tried to tell the waves. You can’t come in. He’ll drown! But the song still controlled her voice, and she couldn't make her voice say the words. The waves crested and slammed at the window, and Luce saw the glass starting to bow from their weight.
The glass crunched and screamed with a sound like tearing metal, and Luce was lost in the dark sea. She looked around for her father, but she couldn’t find him anywhere.
The scream of the breaking glass kept going, and then Luce realized that the scream was hers. She was flailing from side to side in the narrow cave, thrashing so hard that her body had rolled up out of the water and the top of her tail was exposed to the cold night air. It was the pain in her drying tail that had made her wake up. She was out of the water all the way to where her knees used to be, and for a second Luce just stayed where she was, feeling the burning claw through her.
It would be so easy to die, she thought. All she’d need to do would be to pull herself a little farther up the beach. So easy but also so terrible. She used her hands to slide herself back down into the sea, gasping as the pain gradually subsided.
If she could completely forget her human life, not miss any of it anymore, then being a mermaid would be so wonderful. She could be free and wild and beautiful forever; she could welcome the cold into her heart and not care how many people she killed. It would just be a game to her, the way it was for Samantha. A joke. She could laugh at the people she drowned for believing the forgiveness in her song was real, laugh at them for loving her. A trace of her father’s warm voice still thrummed in her mind, a residue left over from her dream.
Luce decided then that she’d rather die. She would never let herself turn as cold as Samantha seemed to be, not even if she’d be happier that way, not even if what Miriam had said was right. “It’s worse when you love them,” Luce repeated to herself, and the caramel-skinned boy smiled in her mind, his hair rippling in the green, shining water. Humans were grotesque a lot of the time, but—just once in a while—there was something about them that was marvelous, too. A sustained note of something that was greater and sweeter than any emotion...
There had to be some way she could stay a mermaid but still keep that note alive in her own song.
8. Quick Animals
Fifty miles inland, in a town called Henton, a woman paced the nighttime hallways of an ugly, flashy, oversized house. It had once been the mansion of a man who’d made a lot of money in the canning business, then he’d died and left his house to the county. They’d converted it into a home for orphaned and abandoned girls, the ones who were already too old when their parents died, so that nobody wanted to adopt them. The house was bigger than they really needed. Fourteen girls lived there, along with Mrs. Beebee Merkle, but the emptiness of the rooms made everyone nervous and all the girls slept in the three bedrooms that made up the house’s east wing. Mrs. Merkle had her own apartment upstairs, but at night she had trouble sleeping and more trouble keeping still. She’d lie awake in a pile of knotted, sweaty sheets, convinced that animals she couldn’t see were nipping at her feet with tiny fangs like crescent moons. She'd kick and throw off the covers, but the slithering animals were always too fast for her to catch sight of them, and when she couldn't stand the biting anymore she'd slide her feet into her grimy pink slippers with holes in the toes and pace through the unused rooms, turning on every light that still had a working bulb and rapping anxiously at the huge, dusty sofas and gutted home entertainment centers.
On nights when it got especially bad, she'd get out a hammer and saw and start ripping into the plaster. The animals that plagued her had to make their nest somewhere, after all. Sometimes she could just catch glimpses of them from the corners of her eyes: slippery, malignant weasel-like creatures with girlish heads and, Mrs. Merkle thought, a kind of dark shimmering around them.
This was a very bad night.
Beebee Merkle had begun tearing out a wall in what had once been a large formal dining room, making such a ruckus that all fourteen of her charges were wide awake. The twins, Jenna and Dana, who were the oldest, gathered all the younger girls together in their room. Girls in donated T-shirts and faded pajama bottoms sat huddled together on the floor, dirty comforters wrapped around their shoulders. Tufts of pale polyester filling leaked through the holes in the comforters, so that the girls seemed to have bits of cloud sticking to them. Some of the smaller girls were whimpering. Jenna tended to get impatient when the young ones cried, but Dana was cuddling them and doing her best to distract them with a story about a witch who kept turning kids into cats and rabbits because she liked watching them eat each other until the cats and rabbits wised up and formed a strategic alliance against the witch. Dana had just reached the part where the first brave rabbit accepted the cats’ offer to join forces.
A drawn-out, musical crash shook the house, and Dana stopped her story and pulled the small girls closer. The girls all looked around at each other, realizing together that Beebee must have somehow managed to rip the huge brass and crystal chandelier out of the dining room ceiling. The crash turned into a relatively subdued tinkling as broken crystals slipped off the wide mahogany table and rained onto the floor.
“How much longer are we supposed to pretend that she’s not completely out of her mind!” Jenna exclaimed in exasperation. “You sit there telling your stupid stories, but if we don’t do something...” Dana hit her with a pillow to stop her from finishing the sentence, but not before nine-year-old Rachel, who was smart but constantly terrified, figured out what Jenna meant and started howling. Dana’s dark brown hand stroked Rachel’s soft pink cheek. Almost everyone in that part of Alaska was either very white-skinned or else Native American, and Jenna and Dana stood out: their mother had emigrated from India and their father was African American. They had thick ebony braids, huge dark eyes, and mouths like sad red flowers.
“What do you think she can do?” Dana said as strongly as she could. “We have her seriously outnumbered. Even if she tried something, we could throw a blanket over her head and tie her up. Okay, Rachel?” Rachel wouldn’t stop crying, though. She knew as well as the others did that Beebee Merkle kept three guns in a locked drawer. Beebee liked to talk about them at dinner; sometimes she'd get hung up on a single sentence and keep repeating it over and over while the girls struggled to act normal and keep on swallowing their macaroni and cheese. "So the best thing we can do is stay together. See, Rachel, if we hear her coming, Jenna and I will stand flat on either side of the door. You all throw the blanket, and we'll pull it down and get her splat on the floor, okay? So right now your job is to stay brave and be ready to help. Just like that little rabbit.” Rachel tried to smile.
***
The chandelier ripped loose when Beebee jumped up from the table and got a chokehold around the brass flange at the top where the wires snaked into the ceiling. She'd just seen one of those half-weasel animals winding its way up until it vanished into the globby plaster above, and since that was clearly impossible, Beebee decided it must still be hiding up on the flange where she couldn't see it. But she wasn't prepared for what happened next. At first the chandelier jolted and dropped a foot lower, still dangling from a few spark-spitting wires, and then as Beebee scrambled off the table the whole thing came smashing down. That didn't bother Beebee nearly as much as what came gushing out of the ripped mouth that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the ceiling, though. Hundreds of lithe, horrible animals dribbled from the hole and then licked out across the ceiling and walls like black flames. The animals were eerily translucent; Beebee could see the silver bamboo pattern of the wallpaper right through them, and the dark shimmering they emitted warped everything she saw like waves
of intense heat.
By the time she’d recovered from the shock enough to pull herself up off the floor and straighten her bathrobe, the animals had all flickered out through the dining room door. Beebee followed them cautiously. There were far more of them than she’d ever imagined, and if she didn’t use all the cunning she was capable of, they’d simply turn and devour her.
The weasels slicked soundlessly over the walls and floor of the long hallway. Occasionally one would glance back at Beebee and dab its long tongue in her direction, tasting the air, while it gazed at her with unpleasantly human eyes. It was hard to see the weasel-creatures very well, but their eyes were always glittering and definite and far too big for their pointed faces. Beebee couldn’t help thinking that the weasels were wearing too much eye shadow; their eyelids gave off flashes of garish color, turquoise and lilac and even orange, contrasting disagreeably with their smoke-tintedfur.
The weasels sped up as they glided around a corner to the right; Beebee got the impression that they were trying to throw her off their track. That meant they must be afraid of her, which made Beebee grin to herself. Maybe she was finally going to uncover their secret lair. Then she’d be able to eradicate them, once and for all. She was just in time to see them fanning out in a dark corona around the kitchen door; they were so oily and tricky that they seeped right through the cracks and vanished.
Beebee padded quietly up to the kitchen door and eased it open. The hanging lamp was already shining; she’d left it on during an earlier stage of her explorations.
It looked empty, though Beebee had to admit to herself that the huge lime green and tan roses on the wallpaper might provide decent camouflage. Were they all hiding? Was this some kind of ambush? Beebee could still outsmart them, though. She murmured something out loud about how careless the girls were, always leaving the lights on, then flicked down the switch and backed away, shutting the door behind her. She stomped off loudly and then doubled softly back, hiding in a linen closet with the door left slightly ajar, and waited.
A single dim shape oozed out through the crack at the top of the door and cocked its little head from side to side, reconnoitering. Then it sucked back into the kitchen, wiggling like the tail end of slurped spaghetti, and to her astonishment Beebee could hear it jabbering softly to its companions. She'd never heard the weasels speak before.
They had the voices of little girls.
***
"She's quieting down,” Dana said. "I bet she'll knock off and go to sleep soon. You guys should settle down and try to sleep, too, okay?” The room had two big double beds, enough room for eight of them if they squeezed, and they made nests out of heaped comforters for the smallest girls. Only Jenna couldn't relax. She stayed standing with her ear to the door, listening intently.
"She's still doing something,” Jenna said after a while. "She's just trying to be sneakier, but I can still hear her shuffling around out there. You know what? Nobody's going to sleep yet. Not until she does.”
"Jen, you're so paranoid!” Dana was exhausted herself; she didn't like hearing that she was expected to keep a bunch of crabby, frightened little girls awake for who knew how much longer. It was getting close to dawn. “Anyway, how’s anyone going to know if she’s asleep? She could just, whatever, stay up lurking in the kitchen.”
“There’s something wrong!” Jenna usually stayed fairly calm, so her anxiety sent waves of fear through the younger girls. Rachel had started crying again, along with Violet and Becka. “You are not going to tell me I’m paranoid when that psycho is out there plotting something. Don’t you see, Dana? It’s worse now that she’s being quiet! When she’s loud at least we know what she’s doing...”
“You’re scaring everyone for nothing.” Dana was getting snappish; she was so tired her head felt like it might roll off. “Look, Jen, I’ll go out scouting, okay? I’ll find out what she’s up to and report back. Then maybe you’ll chill enough that we can get some rest.”
Rachel started sobbing even louder at the idea of Dana going out there alone, and the others were upset, too. What if Beebee shot her? She was definitely crazy enough, and she would get away with it, too. She could just say she thought Dana was a burglar.
Hilary was eleven; she was homely and sulky, with stringy brown hair and a blob-shaped nose. She was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon of a doe-eyed, thick-lashed beauty on the front, which only had the unfortunate effect of emphasizing how drab she was. Hilary tended to keep to herself and she hadn’t said anything all night, so they were surprised when she looked up. “I’ll go. Dana needs to stay here. In case her and Jenna have to do that blanket thing.”
No one felt like arguing anymore, and after a moment of hesitation Hilary skimmed out of the room. She moved so softly that they couldn't hear her footsteps at all.
***
Beebee waited, keeping perfectly silent, until the last of the weasels slithered out of the kitchen. They crawled along the ceiling in a long, dark trail, and after a moment Beebee sidled out of her closet, staying as far back as she could without losing sight of them. Her heart was pounding with triumph. The weasels thought they'd lost her, and they were heading back to their lair. Beebee was minutes away from learning their secret hiding place. She was grinning so wide her cheeks hurt.
The weasels poured down another hallway and turned a corner. They were heading to the east wing, where the girls all slept.
Beebee's eyes went wide with sudden understanding.
She told herself to stay steady, stay crafty. She should make completely sure, of course, before she took any extreme measures.
It was incredible. There were hundreds of those weasel creatures living in the house. Maybe thousands. Each one of the girls must be made out of dozens of them! Cautiously Beebee tipped her head around the corner, just in time to see the last of the weasels melting through the cracks around the girls' bedrooms. Beebee waited another minute, trembling with excitement. Then the door opened again, and ugly little Hilary Deckard came sneaking out like a thief.
Beebee jerked her head back, but not before she'd seen something that made her gasp. Hilary had a kind of dark shimmering around her, a secretive sparkling. It looked exactly like the shimmer around the weasels.
Beebee was disgusted but not exactly surprised. She’d always known there was something very wrong with the girls she looked after, and now—well, now she knew what it was. They couldn’t keep Beebee Merkle fooled forever! She tiptoed back the way she came, then took a sudden turn and ducked out through the front door. She was almost positive Hilary hadn’t seen her.
Still, just in case, she thought she’d better work fast. Beebee ran to the garage. She’d need rags, gasoline. Enough to make sure that nothing would get out of the east wing alive.
She’d show them. Those awful slippery vermin would never torture her again. She’d make sure of that.
***
“I couldn’t find her anywhere,” Hilary said. Hilary was usually bland and distant, so they were all surprised to see her crying with frustration. “Jenna, I really tried, but it’s like she’s not even in the house anymore. What is she doing?”
“It’s okay,” Dana told her gently. “It was really brave of you to go.” It didn’t help, though. Hilary couldn’t stop sobbing.
“I’m going to kill her myself ! ” Hilary said. She sounded hysterical. “I’m going to get one of her guns and put a bullet right through her brain! Oh, I’m so tired of her scaring everyone. "We’re always so frightened, and if she was dead we wouldn’t have to be! Jenna’s right, she’s doing something horrible. I know she’s doing something, right now!”
None of this helped the younger girls calm down. Dana was doing her best to soothe Hilary before everyone panicked, but Hilary was halfway out of her mind.
"Does anybody smell something weird?” Rachel asked timidly.
Hilary jumped up suddenly. Her eyes were wild and she was screaming at the top of her lungs. "We need to get out of here! We all need to get out no
w! She's trying to murder us!”
Jenna's gaze was fixed on the window, and suddenly everyone turned to see why she was staring. The blind was drawn, but it was glowing. It shone with a soft, yellowish, flickering light ... The scream spread, jumping like flames from Hilary's throat to the throats of the other girls.
"Shut up!” Jenna yelled. "Shut up and stay calm! I'm going to get us out of here.” Her face was so determined and fierce that most of the girls got quieter. "Everyone crawl on the floor so you don't breathe the smoke. I'll find a way out.” They could all feel the heat throbbing through the bedroom wall now, and the glow in the window was as bright as molten iron. Dana had also jumped into action, filing the girls out into the hall on all fours, and Jenna thought of something. All the windows on the ground floor had iron bars over them, except for the row of high windows up over the sinks in the bathroom. If they stood on the sinks they might be able to pull themselves through before the flames outside became impassably tall. Maybe they'd get burned, throwing themselves across, but at least they'd live.
"To the bathroom!” Jenna shouted. "And—wait—Hilary, help me carry this dresser. We can use it to climb out.” They could hear the fire roaring on all sides, and the heat came at them like a tide. Hilary and Jenna carried the tall dresser ahead of the line of crawling girls and slammed it against the wall under the windows. They were starting to cough, and their eyes were stinging. A haze of smoke blurred their vision. Jenna scrambled on top of the dresser, reaching to wrench the window open, while a crowd of desperate girls stared up at her from the tile floor.
Jenna's hand seized the latch, and she shrieked and pulled away. The metal was burning hot. For a second she was stunned from the pain, but then she jerked her T-shirt off over her head and wrapped it around her hand.
There was a tremendous crackling sound, the whoosh of a violent wind, the noise of something falling. Jenna was fighting to open the window, but it wouldn't move, and her face was tight with pain. She was higher than everyone else, right in the thickest smoke, and she started choking so hard she could barely hold on to the top of the dresser. There was a sound like an explosion, and the row of windows turned brilliant orange. Jenna gave a gasp and fell.
