He tilted his head, his eyes soft with amusement. “Go away now,” he repeated. Slam. “Is that begging, perhaps? Is that how you tell me you’re scared, under all that idiot talk about my secrets?” Slam. Slam. “Don’t just spit out nonsense you’ve heard the grownups say. You’re far too old for that.” Slam. “Old enough to talk.” Slam. “Reason.” Slam. “Argue. Old enough to die. But then, nothing on earth’s ever too young to die.”
Slam, thud, slam, reverberating through my arms and shoulders and back and jaw, wrenching me between his hands like I was a dry half-broken branch. The drawer banged home and pulled back faster and faster and then it was a volley, a frenzy of clanging steel and jolting blows shredding me into splinters and I screamed, my fingers flying away from the desktop frantic to save me. I stumbled backwards, didn’t fall, wrapped my arms around myself but they couldn’t keep me still; I shook and trembled with the rattling echoes inside me, the screech of tortured metal ringing in my ears.
He reached an arm toward me, to jolt and break me just like he had that desk, and I cringed and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, he was holding something out—my papers, the whole lot of them from all over the floor, gathered up tight and crumpling in his fist. He couldn’t have picked them all up so fast. Bits of them fell to the floor again, like torn-off corners, and then, there in his hand, they all crumbled so softly into pulp, into dust.
“You won’t need these anymore,” he told me, watching them disintegrate. “Amy won’t need them either. Not where she’s going. There’s nothing your researchers”—that word, in his quiet mouth, was a snake poised to strike—”can tell anyone anymore, to do them any good.”
My desk was ruined now, the frame buckled and bent and the lock-up drawer twisted nearly in half, hanging forlorn from the edge of its runners like it’d melted. The vibrations of it were still banging all through me, my whole skin prickling and painful as the warmth, spring warmth, slowly flowed back. I wasn’t going to let him think he’d really scared me.
“We can do lots of things now,” I said. “We can bring dead people back. I can. Us lab rats, we’re new, a new kind of human. When we die, we can bring each other back. This isn’t your house anymore. We’ve kicked Death out.”
“You think you have me figured out,” he said, and he was cheerful again, quietly genial, his face thoughtful as he surveyed the tiny anthills of dust littering my floor. “Because you know. You’re in possession of all the facts.”
He smiled, a real smile, open and sweet like the old days. “You know all the facts. Well, know this, when the time comes: you had a chance to stop me. All you had to do was leave this place—let it sit, find another roof, tell each other all sorts of ghost stories about the God-knows-what-went-on-here as it rots in the sand. You did, for a bit, last fall—remember, when the folks trying to shelter here gave up, headed east? But then you came back.” He didn’t move a step but he was still inches from me again, eye to eye. “You came back. My little prodigal daughter, crying for her fatted calf. Telling old father he’s not welcome in his own home anymore, he has to clear out.”
Something stirred in the dust piles, the little paper trails, shifting, settling, crawling out of the center. Ants. They were actual anthills now, all around us, with tiny black dots busily heading in and darting out as they set up housekeeping at our feet.
“You threw me out,” he said, and watched impassively as a line of ants reached the summit of his shoe. “Can’t even set a foot out of doors without getting kicked out of my own home—you can’t even imagine how long it took me to get used to it all, to make what’s mine really mine, but you don’t care. Don’t give a damn. So I’m out.” His voice was so soft, so suffocatingly soft. “All your experiments, setting up to take the Grim Reaper’s scythe away, so I can’t claim a single solitary soul until they decide when to die, how to die, all on their own. And then you have the gall to turn around and beg, sob, cry for me to come back, daddy, come baaaack—and I do, I do just that, and after all that fuss you throw me out. You want me gone that badly? Maybe I’ll just go. Forever. Not one single part of me ever to return.”
The ants struggled over the scuffed toe of his shoe, its dirt-caked sides, in a futile search for food. His other foot reached out and nudged; a cluster of ants scattered, running frantically back and forth, their sandhill a flattened heap and the rice-grains of their eggs crushed to glassine specks of powder. He laughed.
“Don’t,” I said. A weak little whisper. I hadn’t meant to say it.
“My first mistake,” he said, smiling too hard and too wide, “was thinking all this was over and done. All that nasty upstart lab-ratting of years and years, grabbing at my scythe and spitting in my face, the plague took good care of all of that and all of you—” He chuckled, a smothered explosion. “And the best part is that it wasn’t my doing, it was all of yours. I just admired from a distance, laughed my head off, reaped one truly stunning man-made whirlwind. Because I was foolish enough to think that finished it, that nobody left standing would ever again defy me like that, face to face. You, though—you’re dragging all your kind right back into it, a little palace coup, dangling it in front of them knowing they can’t refuse—so!” He shrugged, let his painfully stretched-out mouth relax. “You’ll all have to suffer. Every one of you, everywhere. You could have left, you could have stopped this. You had the chance. You, Natalie. And you threw it away.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. Ants trekked around my toes, seeking the hiding places they’d lost. “I don’t.”
“Of course you don’t. But that’s all right. That’s half the fun.”
He was too far away for his arm to reach but still right there in my face, a dizzying mirror-refraction turned solid, patting my shoulder all good-kiddo with happiness dancing in his eyes. “And when you realize just how wrong you were—sorry, you just blew your last chance! You, my sweet Amy, all her funny little friends—”
“Amy,” I said, and I was supposed to be cool and nonchalant and make him understand just how unwelcome he was but that name made tears threaten to spill all over again, ignited an angry little coal in my chest. “It’s always Amy, Amy gets presents and friends and you and why do you like her better? You help her, you rescue her, I know it’s you who sent that horrible ghost dog to guide her here and get her out of—why? Why is it never me?”
His hand on my shoulder tightened and from each pressing fingertip a plume of crawling unpleasantness, the sickly heat of nausea, went traveling down and through me like a little nest of snakes.
“Because,” he whispered, “she might’ve turned her back on me, but she never spit in my face.”
He was back where he was supposed to be now, on the other side of the room, self-contained as a bird strutting over the soft loose ridges of sand above the lake. Right there in front of me and completely unreachable, like the thick, dark borderline where lake met sky.
“I wouldn’t waste time envying Amy, if I were you,” he said. Squatting down, laying an opened palm against the infested blood-spattered floor. He hadn’t even asked whose blood it was. “She’s going to die too. That should make you happy. They’ll all die, everywhere, thanks to you—no matter what happens, you can rest assured it’s all you—but I admit it, some deaths you regret a lot more than others. Some of those others? You just don’t give a damn at all.”
He looked up at me. “I love a killer. But what I hate, more than anything else alive, is a thief. Like you.”
The thick ribbon-clusters of ants crawled in a steady, obedient line up his fingers, into his waiting palm, no panic or retreating when he closed his fingers around them and kept opening them up empty. All of them, so dutiful and happy, diving into the abyss. Then he took up his rucksack and was back on his feet.
“I’ve got things to do,” he said. “I’ve got to leave, I’m a busy man. Thanks to you.” His eyes flashed with a dark hollow sheen, then softened. Warm and kind as the old days. “But don’t you get lonely, now. I�
��ll be seeing you again. Very soon. Before we all part ways forever.”
He turned on his heel and vanished, leaving me there in the cold and the dust.
THREE
LUCY
“I told you he was nothing but a Scissor Man.” Stephen reached over to Amy, pulled the plastic travel slicker’s hood up from its slide down her neck. Thank God I’d thought to grab some rain gear, cheap and flimsy as it was—we woke up to puddles in the store aisle and it hadn’t stopped spitting, pouring, spitting since we started walking. “He finally got sick of us, or didn’t like his odds, and left.”
Amy kept her head down, not looking at him, me, anyone. The wind had made short work of her hood even when it stayed put, blowing in volleys of droplets so her hair was plastered to her cheeks, to that swollen-shut eye that made me wince inside whenever I saw it. My handiwork, that eye, even though I’d rather have died than hit my own child (I got more than enough of that, growing up, that’s one of the few memories no lab-table time could erase). That and her fight-swollen fingers and torn-up throat and her expression permanently hardened, setting in its own rough sharp stone, even when she smiled or laughed or cried—that’s what I’ve made of my own child, by leaving her behind. The flash-fire craziness of thinking, at the time, that I was doing right by her wasn’t half enough excuse.
“It wasn’t a Scissor Man,” she finally said. Her voice was short and terse, little clipped-off syllables like her father’s when he was impatient. Her “real” father, not my Mike. “I keep telling you that and telling you that, I know what sort of thing he is and if we can’t see him just now, it doesn’t mean jack. He’s still there. So don’t get too excited.”
Her voice, his face, like they’d been arguing about this all night. Maybe they had been, for all I knew; I fell over drained dry on a heap of fleece and all of a sudden it was morning and we were shivering with the chill and rain, the strange man-shaped apparition who’d been trailing us all yesterday up and vanished. Not a trace left. “Either way,” I said, “at least we don’t have to see him following us—”
“So what?” Amy shook her head, exasperated at him, me, all of us. “Nobody wants to get it, do they? He’s still there, whatever we do, and God only knows where he’s taking us.”
“There’s nothing—” Stephen shook his head as he pushed aside another tree branch, inky-slender like a living brushwork line; a shower of tender green buds, small and fine as paper-punch holes, shook free and stuck to our damp plastic slickers and the skin of our hands. Sandy Shores had given way to open woods, former subdivisions gone to prairie. “Okay. Fine then, Amy, we’re dancing to his tune, right now. He’s here pulling all the strings and we only think we’re walking, so why the hell are we even bothering at all?”
“So what, you want to go back to Prairie Beach?” Amy’s voice was sharp and angry but her face was wary, almost fearful, like we might all just run off and leave her alone in the woods with a man who wasn’t there. I couldn’t much blame her for thinking that. “I can’t stop you, I guess. No strings on you, you can do whatever you want.”
“Do you think I’m crazy? I never said that, I just—”
“Dear God,” Lisa muttered, from up ahead. “Will everybody just stop bickering—”
“No,” Amy said flatly, shoving her fists in her pockets. “Not over something this important.”
Lisa kept on trudging forward, skinny shoulders hunched and those big broad paddle-feet splashing though the thin watery mud. I didn’t like her, didn’t like her narrow suspicious face and soaked rattails of dishwater hair and that plague-dog’s voice whose every syllable barked and growled and snapped—she’d been good to me, better than good to my daughter, she’d never leave her own child standing in the dust like I had, but I just did not like her. Her little girl, Naomi, clutched her hand and had eyes only for her, just like it should be. Amy lingered behind them with me and Stephen, reaching out stroking fingers at soothing intervals like she had to keep checking we were there, but it was when Lisa spoke that she really listened. Her eyes would grow alert and her head tilt to attention, like that stray dog we all wished she’d just left behind at Prairie Beach, and when Lisa said not to bicker, defiance gave way to silence. Me, though, I still didn’t know what to say to anyone. Quiet as that dog, that Nick, that we all wished she’d left behind.
What was I expecting? I was lucky she hadn’t spat in my face. Three years of letting her think I was dead. Because I’d thought it was better that way. I was the only one to blame that someone else was her... her big sister, now. Well, she’d always wanted a sister. At least when she was little. And without Lisa I didn’t know the way to Cowles Shores, much less what we’d actually do when we got there.
I kept turning my head to see if the man had come again, the man who wasn’t there. There was nobody behind us but I still felt like he was there, staring at me, waiting his moment to show himself in the flesh and ambush and pounce. Lab-rat jitters, only natural after spending your whole life tracked and followed everywhere whether you knew it or not. Even when she was small, Amy just took it as normal that windows always had curtains closed, that I could never sit with my back to a door; when Mike’s sister put me there, one Thanksgiving, Amy switched all the place settings around while us grownups were in the kitchen. Nobody ever really understood our little ways but us.
Naomi yanked hard at Lisa’s hand, then harder, like she was trying to pull it out and keep it in her pocket. “Can we stop soon?” she pleaded, in that little seesaw whine every child’s got patented. “I’m tired.”
“We just got started,” Stephen muttered. Nick, padding along in the mud, brushed against Stephen’s shin and I saw Stephen stiffen at the touch, then migrate pointedly to Amy’s other side. “If you’re tired, ask Lisa to pick you up.”
“What am I already carrying?” Lisa said, sharp and brusque, brandishing the supply-stuffed backpacks weighing down her arms, piled on her shoulders. She’d insisted on shouldering our latter-day luggage herself, reminding us how strong that plague-body was compared with us who’d never been ill, and Amy and Stephen ignored my protests, obligingly loading her down. “You’ll have to walk, Naomi, you’re a big girl—”
“I never asked to be picked up.” Naomi craned her head around, glaring at Stephen. “I just want to stop, just for a minute. He’s not the boss of me.”
“Thank God.” Stephen glared right back. “I want this, I want that, when are we gonna stooooop—”
“You’re the one whining, not her.” Lisa stomped one foot into a mud-puddle, then paused to stare with grim satisfaction at her saturated boot. “Knock it off.”
Stephen mouthed something that made Amy shove an elbow hard into his side, but she was almost laughing. So Lisa wasn’t the revered general of this army after all? That shouldn’t have made me feel better. Naomi marched along in silence for another mile, then tugged at Lisa’s hand again. “I think Nick needs to stop too,” she said.
Nick. His inky-brushstroke ears twitched at hearing himself mentioned, but he didn’t look up, just kept plodding along tireless and steady because it wasn’t Amy who’d said his name. Amy’s boy he was, Amy’s—something inside me twitched like Nick’s ears, thinking of that archaic, superstitious, perfectly suited word: familiar. Except familiars do the witch’s bidding and if anyone were the witch here it was Nick, Nick who Amy credited with leading her away from home and bringing her to me. She’d heard him, his tireless scratching and barking, while the rest of us had only silence. And she’d killed someone. She’d killed someone, my little girl—maybe to defend herself, maybe something else, and whatever had happened, it was me who’d left her to that, to the elements. The beasts. To the protection of something that hadn’t been real until she called it up and made it real. Or maybe it called itself up. Nick might’ve been some kind of flesh and blood—technically speaking—but whenever I looked at him, I saw nothing but a dark moving splotch, a blight. Like the hole a flame burns in a photograph, taking bigger and
stronger shape as everything around it melts.
Stephen was right, however gracelessly he said it. I did not like that dog.
Naomi pivoted on her heel, walking backwards now with arms out at her sides to keep from hitting the trees; bored with walking, bored with us, bored with everything but the black dog-shaped blight that barely noticed her. “Miss Lucy,” she ventured, her respectful little-girl’s name for me, “I really think he needs to rest—”
“That dog, or whatever the hell he is, is just fine.” Stephen gazed back at her, and there was a hardness in his eyes that would’ve made Naomi quiet down fast if she hadn’t already seen so much— too much for someone five times her age. “You can pet him and play up to him until you drive the rest of us crazy, but he doesn’t like you, d’you get it? He doesn’t care. Stop wasting your time. If you’re not her”—he jerked his chin toward Amy, her hand cradling Nick’s huge, indifferent head-”then he doesn’t wanna know.”
I saw Lisa’s shoulders twitch, somewhere under their lumpy load of nylon, but she didn’t say anything. Naomi marched on in silence, neat little steps still tramping in reverse, frowning crestfallen down at her shoes. Not looking at Nick anymore.
“He does like me,” she insisted at last, small and timid. “He—”
“I’ve had it.” Stephen snapped a bending branch straight off a tree, barely missing a step as he reached up and wrenched it away. Gray and dead, that branch, the whole tree looking like it had sickened and withered months back. “I’ve seriously had it.”
“You are not her father.” The mud beneath Lisa’s shoes was firmer now, cake-packed deep, but her toes plowed through it like boat prows slicing the surface of a lake. Her voice was stone scraping at metal. “Understand me? All the shit Billy and them put her through, everything that happened, you even think now you’re gonna turn around and—”
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