Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “He does that,” I said quietly. “All the time.”

  He didn’t look half sad enough about it. Nobody really understands, even when they see it for themselves. “Hey! Doesn’t matter, though, you know why, kid?” He was leaning forward again, all huddled-up shoulders and a face full of happy conspiracy. “Know why? ‘Cause I’m getting there. I know I’m getting there. Not now, though, it’s not time yet—but later. Later on. After I take care of business. And then I’m gonna run. I’m gonna run like I can run now, like I never could before, I’m gonna crash right through that big old invisible wall and just keep on going and going.”

  He smiled at me again, at me this time and not the open air. I felt good as certain now he wouldn’t hurt me but something about the sharp, tight curve of his mouth made the coiled thing inside me knot itself up harder, tug and twist. “So why the hell tell it to me?” I said.

  Billy thought that one over. Nodding his head at someone I couldn’t see. “You can’t stay here, you know. You think you’re safe, he told me you’d think you were tucked up all tight in this little stinking shithole but your Friendly Man? He knows where you are.”

  His smile was wider, harder, those long sharp-edged inhuman teeth a flash of incongruous good health, predatory eagerness in a face made gaunt and withered by grief. A death’s-head grin. “He knows where you are. And wherever you go? Whatever you do? He’ll find you.”

  I never told anyone I called Death the Friendly Man. Nobody except Amy and her horrible friends, and they wouldn’t have said it to Billy. “Who told you that?” I demanded. “Who told you I used to call him—”

  “We’ve gotta go,” he said. His smile didn’t waver. “You and I. We’ve gotta go, we’ve gotta get to what’s waiting for us. I’ll never get through the wall otherwise.” He leaned forward, half-bowed, defeated red-rimmed eyes alight with the pleasure of telling me something I didn’t want to hear. “It’s waiting for both of us. You, and me. You can stay here and let it find ya”—a single thick, damp potato-wedge of a finger traced a line across his throat, ear to ear—”or you can meet it out in the open. Your choice. Either way, once I find it again? I know what I’m gonna do.”

  His voice was thick with satisfaction, the pride of a well thought-out plan, but the tears had started again. Stay here, and die. Because he knew just where I was, and he wasn’t happy. Or meet him out in the open, in the arena of ground and sky, and—

  He thought he could kill me. He really thought that, that he could send Billy—Billy!—to finish me off, that he could threaten me and trick me into—I put my knife away, thrust hands in my pockets glaring at Billy. “Who told you I was in here?”

  The corners of Billy’s mouth curled up again, subsided before a real smile broke out. “A man you can’t see.”

  “Did he tell you to try and kill me?”

  “A man you can’t see, behind a wall I can’t bust through.”

  “Because you can’t kill me. You can’t. And he can’t either.” I cradled Sukie tighter in the crook of one arm, for strength. “He can’t kill anybody anymore, not without them deciding it’s time to die. That’s why he’s so angry. That’s why he’s trying to scare—”

  “You can stay here, and rot,” Billy said. Jacket flapping around his diminished chest, pants loose and sliding on his hips, another full-flowering, poisonous tree dropping its fruit and withering before my eyes. “Or you can meet it out in the open.”

  He couldn’t kill me. He couldn’t send Billy to kill me. He knew that now, knew our science was that far beyond him, that was why he was so angry. He couldn’t threaten me, not with Billy or dead-tinder trees or any other show-trick. He wanted to meet me out in the open, with respect, like the hero of some old movie meets the mortal enemy he can’t help but admire. And Billy was just the collateral damage, Billy even knew he was but with Mags gone, he didn’t care. Okay. Stop hiding away like some sad little human coward. Meet the Friendly Enemy-Man out in the open, fight him with everything I’ve got, show him all his old tricks meant crap. Obsolete. Less than nothing.

  And then, everything that was his, all the power, would be mine.

  Sukie was small and pliable enough I could bend her double, her bare dirty cloth feet touching the top of her yarn hair, and stuff her into my jacket pocket. I reached over to the dented gray metal desktop, grabbed for a couple of lake stones I’d used as paperweights—brick red, a mucky grayish-green threaded in pink—and when I felt the heat radiating from their surface I wrapped my hand in an old T-shirt for protection, gritted my teeth against the pain as I shoved them in my other pocket. The awful heat gnawed straight through the jacket cloth into my side and hip and leg, but they’d acted funny like this before and they couldn’t actually burn anything and I wasn’t leaving them behind just because of a little pain. I was tougher than anyone thought, than they ever wanted to think. I’d put up with a lot worse.

  I took a deep breath and crossed the room, stood there until Billy retreated almost meekly from the threshold. He fell in beside me, shoulder to shoulder, stinking of muck and sweat, and we went down the hallway to the lab’s front entrance.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, as we crossed the tall half-dead yard grass for the white gravel road, the noise of our feet on the stone-powder like someone softly, tentatively chewing something crunchy. “Where are we supposed to go, to meet him?”

  “Leave that up to me,” said Billy. One of his puffy pale doll-feet caught a sharp fragmented edge, bled in spots against the white, healed over again in moments. “He told me to fetch you, tells me everything I need to know—so you just leave that well up to me.”

  Meet him out in the open, the Friendly Man, in an arena of his choosing. Fight to the death, or rather, to the eternity. Okay. You asked for it. You’ll find out just what Grandma taught me, just what we learned about how to beat you back forever.

  Billy, as we walked, started singing under his breath, some old song Mags used to like about a girl named Dinah in Carolina and as he warbled off key the waterworks opened up in earnest; he wept and sang and sang and wept while the road narrowed until it was barely wide enough for a single small car, wound right back into the depths of the woods. I ignored him. Let it all just blend into the background, like the sounds of birds and wind-rustled leaves and small scuttling animals that should’ve been there, but weren’t. Don’t worry, I was on my way to get it back. I’d get it all back.

  SEVEN

  LISA

  Jessie just stood there, glaring at us, not giving an inch. Jessie never gave an inch, not when she was alive, not after she died, so one thing at least was still reassuringly familiar. She rocked back on her heels, skinny arms folded, her face twisted up like she’d realized she was about to smile and had to stomp on the urge in its cradle. That was familiar, too. Linc hovered close to the trees, poised to flee, like the wild animal he still was; Renee, beside him, smiled an actual smile, but didn’t step between us. She, at least, could still remember her own humanity, a few niceties of behavior here and there, like me—but Linc, Jessie, they’d shaken off the last traces of domestication so far back they’d never retrieve it for trying. Unfair of me to keep hoping, I knew that, but I was exhausted far past the point of sympathy. The three of them didn’t look much better.

  “So you’re back,” Jessie said. She kept her eyes strictly on me, like it was only us two standing here on the beach, watching as I slid our luggage off my arms and let it thud softly against the sand. I didn’t mind playing pack mule—it gave me something to do, besides pretending not to see Amy’s mother shooting daggers at me every time she thought my head was turned—but I didn’t want Jessie getting the idea I’d just been expected, ordered, to do it and meekly obeyed because I was just that soft-hearted, soft-headed. She assumed the worst of everything on two legs often enough as it was.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  “Your cabin’s still empty. Other than the mice.”

  From Jessie, that was practically a ticker-ta
pe parade. Naomi was clutching at my leg, nervous and wanting to be picked up, and I patted her head and flung my free arm out for introductions. “This is Amy. And Lucy, her mother, and this is Amy’s friend Stephen—”

  But she’d walked right past everything on two legs, kneeling next to Nick and almost crooning in his ear. “What’s your name? Hmm?” She stroked his head with an easy, calm hand. “Can you tell me?”

  Nick’s tail thumped against the gravel, with more eagerness than I’d ever seen him show anyone who wasn’t Amy. “You a good boy? Hmm? What’s your name?”

  “That’s Nick,” Naomi volunteered, almost beaming that he’d made friends so quickly. “Like Old Nick, which is what you call the devil, but he’s nice—”

  “And who the hell are you?”

  Naomi flinched and shut her mouth tight, hands curling even tighter around my shin. Right out of the box. Goddammit, Jessie, couldn’t you just try for even five minutes? Couldn’t I quit expecting miracles for even two minutes? I decided not to take notice. “And this is Naomi.”

  Jessie glanced at her, uninterested, then with obvious reluctance pulled herself away from Nick and back to her feet. “They can’t stay here.”

  Right out of the box. “Amy, Stephen, Lucy, Naomi, this is Linc—like Lincoln—and Renee, and Jessie.” I’m not taking notice, Jessie. I’m too tired for that. “And this is typical.”

  “And this is sensible.” Jessie brushed away bits of gravel stuck to her knees, her palms hard and sweeping like she was trying to rub right through to the skin. “There’s a human settlement right down the road, about a mile. They started moving in just after you left. I guess the kiddie can stay here with you, if you’re gonna whine and cry about it otherwise, but—”

  “It’s not like we’re crowded here,” Linc interrupted, like a casual afterthought. His usual method of getting his way with Jessie, by pretending it was all the same to him one way or another. From the corner of my eye, I saw Amy start at the sound of his voice, rumbling and deep in a way she probably never expected from that sallow scarecrow body. “Lisa and the kiddie can double up with Renee—all right, Renee?” Renee just shrugged. “And the rest of them can have the empty cabin.”

  He turned to me. “There’s a couple more cabins, but they’ve mostly fallen apart. Never thought we’d have to get around to fixing them, there’s so little company—looks like you’ve had yourself a hell of a winter, Lisa.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Stephen said, before I could answer. His voice was hard and flat, but not hostile: trying to sound as casual and assured as Linc, coming so close to pulling it off. Amy and Lucy just stared at the ground, waiting.

  Jessie ran fingers through her hair, the same old scraggly auburn snarls and knots; I suspected she kept forgetting she even had to comb it at all. That was never a crowning Porter family glory anyway, our hair. The look in her eyes, it wasn’t all the old hostility, the kneejerk misanthropy I’d never been able to stop taking to heart—she looked spooked, plain and simple, and a little disoriented. Like we’d just shaken her out of some horribly vivid nightmare and she was still in that in-between state, those first few startled seconds of consciousness, before the rush of relief from realizing that none of it had happened. Or the terrible reverse, a dream where everything was put quietly right, everything was back as she’d expected—we’d expected—it would always be, and then, she’d woken up. She reached down again, scratching Nick between the ears.

  “Double up, for now,” she said. “Like Linc said. For now. And clean up after yourselves. I don’t want any fucking dogshit all over Florian’s beach.”

  “... and so we left Natalie behind, at the lab.” I blinked into the encroaching sunset, watching the sky turn swollen orange and tender pink. I’d never stopped missing the sunsets at the lake. “What was left of the lab, that is. And we’ve been walking ever since, to get here. We didn’t start seeing anything really strange, though, until this afternoon—”

  “And now I keep seeing it everywhere,” Stephen said, stretching his legs out on the sand. We’d all been telling our story in bits and pieces, interrupting each other to fill in what we’d forgotten or never saw. “No rhyme or reason. Some places, big ones, they’re completely untouched. Like here.” He ran a hand through his hair, sighing, and gave Lucy a glance like she’d understand better than any of us. Lab rat solidarity. “It’s just, I keep thinking—”

  “Tell her about the man,” Amy broke in, around a bite of beef jerky. We still had enough Shop-Wel snacks to last for days, a mercy since I was too tired to hunt and almost laughed at myself for hoping Jessie might offer food. “The one following us.”

  “It was a Scissor Man,” Stephen said, a thread of impatience in his voice. “He followed us for a while, he realized there wasn’t any point, he left. There’s no more to it than that.”

  “And I keep telling you there’s a lot more to it than that. You just won’t listen to me, because—”

  “Because you’re wrong.”

  Even in the draining, fading light, I could see the tension making his every muscle clench up tight, how badly he needed to fall over and sleep. Maybe because she was as bad off or worse, Amy decided to ignore it. “Just like I was wrong, thinking I saw a black dog following me. All the way from Lepingville. Just like that, Stephen?”

  All the time we’d been talking, Jessie just sat there cross-legged with her elbows on her knees, face unreadable, she and Linc and Renee silent as church. Now, seeing this, she sat up straighter, her narrow angular face lighting up from the inside; I could feel her sudden eagerness for an argument, an outright fight, anything at all different from the long months before. Amy saw it too, her back stiffening and eyes narrowing. Even in the failing light I could read the dislike plain on her face, dislike and what almost looked like embarrassment: she’d almost done for another ex what Billy always loved to see, the apple cart overturned and humans fighting it out for his entertainment. It wasn’t like that with Jessie—she’d have been just as glad to see me and Linc go at it—but Amy would never believe that. Stephen must’ve been on Amy’s wavelength, too, because he shrugged, letting the whole discussion lie where they’d dropped it, and swiveled his head around to stare at the water. Then he sat up straighter and frowned.

  “What’s he doing?” Stephen demanded, a furrow cutting into his forehead as he stared at Nick.

  Nick was a dark streak below us on the ridge, hurtling himself down to the waterline, back up, then down again, running and panting and barking. Once out of Jessie’s direct line of fire, Naomi had reverted to an overtired strung-out little bat out of hell, gone hooting and hollering after Nick as he took off on a tear for the shore; as she hurtled by, I just pressed a package of cheese crackers into her hand and decided to let her run it off, keeping an eye trained on them both from where I sat. The lake was as calm as I’d ever seen it, the water almost ice-still—no danger of a rip current pulling either of them in—but as they both veered into the wetter sand and the lake splashed at their ankles, Stephen jumped to his feet, running headlong toward the shore with me in close pursuit.

  “What’s the matter?” I shouted at his back. “Stephen, they’re fine, they’re just—”

  But Stephen was sliding at double speed down the sand ridge, waving his arms furiously at them both; before I could catch up, he’d waded shoe-deep into the water and had Naomi tight by the arm, hauling her away from Nick and the shoreline as she let out squalls of angry protest. Nick ran ceaseless rings around them both, barking in agitation as Naomi tried and failed to pull free, and when I barreled past him, he just kept on looping around us like we were a pole stuck in the sand, with him leashed to us and only free to turn in circles. Stephen was unyielding, Naomi almost purple with indignation.

  “Let me go!” she shouted as I took her by the shoulders, trying to tug her away from Stephen. “We were playing, I wanna go play with him!”

  “Did you see him?” Stephen’s grip slackened, but he still w
ouldn’t let her go; the cords in his torn-up neck bulged out, the scars criss-crossing his skin swollen and as livid as Naomi’s own face. “Did you see it? He wasn’t just playing! He was leading her straight into the water, he—”

  “He wasn’t doing anything! We were playing, let me go!”

  Stephen finally let go and Naomi sat down hard in the sand as Amy, Renee, and the others came running up to us. “Nick wasn’t doing anything!” she entreated me, almost drowned out by the barking that only kept getting louder. “I wasn’t going in the water, it’s too cold and I wouldn’t go swimming all by myself anyway, not without a grownup, I’m not stupid like Stephen thinks I am—”

  “Is she okay?” Renee asked. “Is everything all right?”

  “Hoo melodramatics,” Jessie said, in a disdainful drawl I knew far too well. “That’s all.”

  “With a heaping spoonful of kiddie hysterics thrown in,” added Linc. They both stayed put, though, didn’t turn their backs on us and walk off to the cabins, and I knew that meant they were just as disconcerted as everyone else.

  “I’m telling you, he was leading her into the water!” Stephen’s arms dangled by his sides, as if without Naomi to animate them they were limp, purposeless puppet hands, but his eyes, his voice—they were tense with conviction. “I saw it, I’m not just imagining—she was too excited to know what he was doing, he was leading her in, little by little—”

  “He was not!” Naomi was kneeling against the sand now, her fists hitting it in fury. “We were just playing, we stayed right on the shore! He wouldn’t hurt anyone! You hate him so much you’d say anything to make everyone mad at him, and look how upset he is now and it’s your fault!”