The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “You turned him into a crow?” Trixie asked.

  Tom offered her a smile.

  “Wish you’d left him like that,” Maggie muttered.

  “I know you do,” said Tom. He stared at the steering wheel, then looked at her. “I’m not that type of person. I can’t just go off and leave him—” But he had left his spell-net around Carroll. Wasn’t that the same thing? Tom frowned. It didn’t feel the same as trapping and abandoning someone in a foreign form. He would have to work on his ethics while he was learning everything else.

  “How could you turn someone into something?” Trixie asked. “Have you ever done it before?”

  “No. Peregrine helped me.”

  “All the time, you could have been turning people into things, and you didn’t even know it?”

  Tom sat back and thought. He had started seeing and hearing ghosts when he was about ten, and that had confused him—too much going on, nobody else paying attention—and messed up his school work even more than all the moves, though the moves and the ghosts were connected somehow. Hannah had helped him calm his vision so he could focus on what he needed to see when it was important. He had refined that technique into full ghost-blindness, and then, a year ago, he had lost the power to make the visions go away. He had never had any feeling that he could affect what he was seeing, not until that morning at Chester Arthur High when he had grabbed the sky skins and pulled them taut to catch the kids. Now, since he had accepted his vision, he could open Othersight or shut it off whenever he wanted to, which was wonderful. He looked at Trixie. “I don’t think I could have turned people into things until today. I had to see someone else do it first. Carroll turned me into an animal, and I learned from that. But now…” The nets. The sky skins. They were connected somehow. If he took some time and played with them, he knew he would learn new things. Peregrine probably had vast knowledge to which he had access. Possibilities yawned wide, waiting to swallow him. He shook his shoulders.

  “But now?” Trixie prompted.

  “Now I don’t know what next. Let’s go shopping.”

  The thrift store was run by a local service club. It was full of Reader’s Digested books, stacks of old National Geographics, broken toys, paint-peeling furniture, nearly unwearable clothes from the sixties and early seventies, thick stiff record albums bearing nicks and scratches and a variety of animal hair, dolls with missing or electrified hair, bent and tarnished silverware, and the scent indigenous to attics and garages. “Yuck,” said Maggie, paging through dresses with loud flower patterns or overgrown paisleys, sleeves that belled at the elbows or wrists, and hemlines that stopped at nothing.

  Tom went to the boys’ rack. He found two plaid flannel shirts whose pearly cowboy snaps were mostly missing or presumed dead, but he held the shirts up to Maggie just the same.

  “They’re ugly,” she said.

  “They’re warm,” he said.

  She took off her Levi’s jacket and tried the shirts on over her T-shirt. The sleeves didn’t reach her wrists on the blue-black-and-red plaid one, but the green-black-and-yellow fit her. She stroked the worn plaid. “Soft,” she said. She looked up at Tom and nodded.

  Trixie found her a red sweatshirt with elastic at the cuffs and hem that still stretched. Tom came up with a pair of bib overalls, and Trixie located some black leather girls’ shoes with straps that fit Maggie’s feet without pinching. For herself, Maggie found a pink cashmere sweater. She showed it to Tom, holding it up to her chest and waiting, mute, while he looked at it.

  His smile started small, then widened. “Yes, Maggie. Yes. I think…I think Laura makes good money. We can take you shopping someplace real.”

  “Can make my own money,” Maggie said. Her hands lowered, the sweater a pink rag dangling from the right one.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” He sat on a ratty sofa so he could look at her with level eyes. “I just thought—this is fun. It’d be more fun with more money. I’ve never shopped for anybody but me before. That’s all.”

  She sighed. “Guess I’m scared to trust anybody who wants to do me favors. Had to trust you before—nothing to lose. It hurts more when it means more.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Closing in five minutes,” said the woman behind the counter, ringing a crystal bell.

  Maggie held out the sweater. “Can we afford this?” Its tag read seven dollars.

  Tom put the flannel shirt back on a hanger and hung it on the rack again. “Sure. With that you don’t need this. Let’s go. We can go to Everything and More for socks and underwear, but that’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

  Trixie showed them another find: a flannel nightgown, its tiny print of carousels almost washed and worn to ghosts. They took their collection of clothes to the counter, and the old woman snipped off the tags and lined them up next to the ancient hand-cranked adding machine. She studied the tags through her bifocals, then looked over her glasses at Tom. “Marshal said a Bolte boy was heading over here. That you?”

  “No,” said Tom.

  She added the numbers up. “Nineteen dollars,” she said, and smiled when Tom handed her a twenty.

  “Let’s go to my house and see what we can find,” said Trixie as Tom started the cab. The woman closed the store behind them.

  “Hope it’s something to eat,” Maggie murmured.

  “Oh dear. How long since you ate?” asked Trixie.

  “Had some wedding food this morning…usually get decent meal breaks with good food. They like us to keep our strength up. Miz Blythe is very strict about that. She always watches out for our health, so we can do more work and take more punishment.”

  “They have this down to a science?” said Tom.

  “It’s a tradition.” Maggie gave him an unhappy smile. “Decades of practice.”

  “Tom, you eaten lately?” asked Trixie.

  “I had a big breakfast, but I could eat again now.”

  “I have the fixings for grilled cheese sandwiches,” Trixie said as Tom pulled up to her house, a two-story Victorian with lots of gray exterior and white gingerbread. All the windows downstairs had lace curtains. Trixie led Maggie and Tom up across the porch and inside.

  The air inside was warm and dry, electric heated, and smelled a little like burnt toast. As they crossed the threshold a German shepherd-mix dog jumped up, put its paws on Trixie’s shoulders and greeted her with kisses. “Down, Dasher,” she said, pushing the dog away and stepping on his back toes. “My son Abel named him after one of Santa’s reindeer. He thought that would make it stay Christmas all year. He’s not nearly so optimistic anymore.”

  Dasher yelped and licked Maggie’s face, then leaped at Tom, dancing around and barking.

  —You could send him to sleep, Peregrine said.—The simplest spellcasting of all, and no bad consequences.

  —I’ll keep it in mind. For now I’d rather act normal. I don’t want to upset Trixie.

  Tom held out his hand to Dasher, who licked it.

  “Push the dog aside and follow me,” said Trixie, leading the way down the hall to a swinging door under the staircase that opened into the kitchen, a room papered in pale yellow and white.

  Maggie, carrying a large paper bag with her new clothing in it, looked around wide-eyed. The kitchen was modern and clean, though the air carried the scent of hours-ago coffee. The door they entered through led them into a central food-preparing space framed by three walls and a counter with hanging cabinets above it. Beyond the counter was a dining nook, where a round white Formica-topped table stood firmly rooted atop a square cupboard, with five white metal folding chairs around it, and several more in their dormant state against the wall beside the back door.

  Maggie blinked. A tear ran down her cheek. Tom touched her shoulder. She looked up at him. “It’s just like my mom’s kitchen,” she said. “The one she always wanted. Daddy gave it to her, a piece at a time, until it looked like this. She was so happy with it. It was like she could go in the kitchen and walk out of the
world. She cooked a lot. I…wanted a place I could walk out of the world like that, and then ended up in the Hollow kitchen. Seemed like revenge or something meaner. Had to do everything the old way—heat water over a fire to get it warm enough to wash dishes, boil eggs, cook soup; cut wood for the fireplace and the stoves; sharpen knives on whetstones; and scour the pots out with pumice.”

  “They don’t have electricity?” Trixie asked.

  “They don’t need it. They have fetches.”

  “Not even electric lights?”

  “They can snap their fingers and make lights. At least, some of them can. Something. Something in the teachings, about light…Heard the younger ones telling a rhyme Miss Fayella taught ’em. Plakaneshti sirilka, koosh kaneshki porilka.”

  “This means something?” asked Trixie.

  Maggie frowned, staring at the floor. “It’s a riddle. She was always full of riddles, some of them real mean. This one is kind of—don’t know how to tell you the words one for one. Sort of like, ‘In changing time, the heavier the light, the lighter the darkness.’”

  —Close, thought Peregrine.—She is perceptive. It’s a corruption of a proverb. The original reads, “Those who receive a great portion of light in changing time carry a heavy gift.” This one means, “The one who receives a great portion of light in changing time has a great power of darkness.” I have been asleep too long, Tommy.

  Maggie continued, “There’s something about it—remember watching Mr. Michael tease Mr. Perry. Mr. Michael’d snap up a light and stick it on Mr. Perry, and Mr. Perry couldn’t put it out or control it or even make one of his own. Mr. Michael kept telling Mr. Perry he’d end up just like Miss Laura—wingless, he called it, not quite tanganar, but not quite gifted, either. Mr. Perry was so scared. He had nightmares about it. He woke up screaming that Arcadia children were throwing rocks at him and he couldn’t stop them.” She went to the kitchen sink as she talked and washed her hands.

  “Imagine them having us for a nightmare,” said Trixie. “I always thought it was the other way around.”

  “Well, Mr. Perry grew out of it,” Maggie said. She shivered. Tom patted her shoulder.

  Trixie went to the refrigerator and got out bread, cheese, and butter. “Food. You’ll feel better.” She turned on a gas burner, got out a big Silverstone skillet, and threw some butter in it. The kitchen smelled like somebody’s home as the butter melted.

  Tom glanced at Trixie as she sliced cheese. He got down cups and took milk from the fridge, poured it, and gave a cup to Maggie. Maggie accepted it, but looked doubtfully at Trixie. “Is this okay?” she asked before sipping.

  “Make yourself to home,” said Trixie. She smiled, then frowned at Tom. “You knew I felt that way, did you?”

  “Felt. Not words. But I should have asked you.”

  “Yes,” she said. She flipped two sandwiches in the pan, one for Tom, one for Maggie, then looked at him. “Okay. You can get yourself what you want. But let me show you where things are first, okay?”

  “All right.” He gave her a cup of milk, then put the carton back in the fridge. Maggie drank.

  “Plates are up there,” Trixie said, pointing to the cupboard Tom had gotten the cups out of. Tom got down plates and Trixie put the golden-brown sandwiches on them. He grinned, raised his eyebrows, and glanced toward a drawer. “Right,” said Trixie, “the silver’s in that drawer.”

  He got out knives and forks and took the sandwiches to the table. Maggie carried the milk cups over to the table and they all sat down.

  “Thanks,” said Maggie. She wolfed her sandwich without benefit of fork, juggling the bread to keep its heat from burning her fingers. Trixie sipped milk and watched her. “Yum,” Maggie said when she had finished.

  “More?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “How much more?”

  Maggie looked at her for a long minute. “Two?”

  Trixie got up and made two more sandwiches for Maggie. Tom ate. Dasher flopped down on the floor and stared dolefully at Tom’s sandwich as it disappeared inside him.

  “This is nice,” Maggie said as Trixie set more food in front of her. “Thanks. Thanks. This is so normal.” She held up half a sandwich and just stared at it; she blinked twice and looked at Trixie. Her eyes were bright. “It feels so safe. Like maybe my stomach can relax.”

  “Good,” said Trixie. She leaned back, folded her hands over her stomach, and surveyed her kitchen, her guests, her dog. She looked happy. “It’s so strange having you here, Tom. Never thought I’d feel safe with a Bolte in my kitchen. Is this what normal people Outside feel like? Nothing outside going to hurt me, nothing inside going to hurt me, sun’s gonna shine in my back door today?”

  “I wonder,” Tom said. He remembered eating strange meals with his Aunt Rosemary, sixteen years earlier, the two of them sitting in her kitchen together. Sometimes she made fussy things like stuffed grape leaves; other times she made him pickle and peanut-butter sandwiches, or handed him a bowl of dry sugar cereal; it depended on how much wine she had had that day. He had adored her. She sat with him as he ate. She smoked cigarettes and sipped red wine and talked about the religious practices of the ancient Babylonians or the discovery of perspective in art. She had read a lot of odd books. When his cousin Rafe was away, he and his aunt spent precious time together. But she died after he had lived with her two years, and he moved on to some other relative’s. “I never knew anybody who was normal. Did you, Maggie?”

  “Had one great next-door neighbor. Used to tell me good things, strong things. She gave me my first important secret for strength. Don’t think she was normal. Everything else—never felt safe anywhere else, really.” Sandwiches inside her, Maggie leaned back. She studied her palm, stroked the silver brand. “Guess this is as close as I’ve come.”

  A knock sounded at the front door, sending Dasher into torrents of barks and leaps. Trixie jumped up. “Now, who—?” She went to find out.

  Presently she returned, with Bert in tow. “Is it true what Sam said about you?” Bert asked. “He’s talking to everybody at the Dew-Drop. You a Bolte by marriage now, Tommy?”

  “Yep. I didn’t want to announce it at the bar. Didn’t want everybody to look at me funny, but I guess I can’t stop that now.”

  Bert reached into his back pocket and fished out his wallet. He peered into the currency compartment, then slid two fingers in and retrieved a fragile, yellowing piece of newspaper. “This about you, Tommy?” he asked, handing the folded leaf of paper to Tom. “Always thought it was.”

  Tom teased the paper open and faced the story from the Portland paper he had run away from:

  TEENS FALL OFF SIX-STORY BUILDING,

  LAND SAFELY

  “They flew like angels,” said Betsy Willard, Chester Arthur High School cafeteria worker. Willard arrived early for work Wednesday morning. She claimed she saw a male and a female student step off the roof of the Caldecott Building.

  At first, said Willard, the teenagers fell. She screamed. “I thought they were going to die,” she said.

  The girl’s mother found a suicide note on the kitchen table of her home when she got up Wednesday morning. She declined to make the contents public, but said the girl and boy had signed a pact to kill themselves together.

  “They started falling. Then they flew,” said Willard, “or walked on air.”

  Willard said she saw the school custodian, Thomas Renfield, watching the event from below, reaching out and moving his hands. When the teens landed safely after their six-story descent, the boy berated the custodian, according to Willard.

  “It seemed like [the boy] blamed Tommy for making him fly,” said Willard. “I was too far away to hear the words. I know this sounds crazy, but the kids are still alive, and they’re not happy about it.”

  Willard consented to a breathalyzer test directly after she reported the incident. The results were negative.

  “I believe [the teenagers] fully intended to kill themselves,” said Police
Investigator Terence Mitchell, who questioned the teenagers after Willard reported the Incident. “[The girl] said she was prepared to die. [The boy] said next time they’d do it right, where no one could see them and stop them. Neither of them could explain why their attempt failed, but [the boy] blamed it on the Janitor.”

  Mitchell said a lock on the back door of the Caldecott Building showed signs of tampering, as did the lock on the door to the roof staircase. “Kids aren’t allowed on the roof,” said Mitchell. “It’s for maintenance access only.”

  Both teenagers have been remanded to the custody of their parents under the condition that they and their families receive intensive counseling.

  Renfield could not be reached for comment.

  “Where the hell did you get this, Bert?” Tom asked.

  “I like keeping track of things.”

  “How long have you known, boss?” Tom asked. Trixie leaned over his shoulder and took the clipping.

  “I’ve had the clipping since it came out. Before you came to town. Didn’t know it was you until a couple weeks after I hired you. I knew the name was the same, but I didn’t know if you’d come from Portland until that night we were in the bar watching the Blazers game, and you said it was better live.”

  “And you never said anything.”

  “Your business, Tommy.” Bert grinned. “I had my hopes.”

  “Like what?”

  “I figured, if you went out to the Hollow, you might surprise ’em. Spike their guns. Yesterday, though, after Fred told me you’d left with Miss Laura, I started feeling awful. I wasn’t sure if you would make it. I should have told you…”

  “But you couldn’t, could you? If what Sam said about having a built-in censor was true.”

  “I could have gotten around that, if I had really tried. I thought it was too soon after Eddie for there to be any action, though. Wrong. Things have been building up for the last while till they’re getting nigh intolerable. Time for a change. I’m very glad you made it back.” He frowned. “Things are shifting around here in town, though. Your marriage isn’t secret anymore, and people aren’t going to feel safe with you.”