Necessary Monsters

by Richard A. Kirk

  Hours passed and he heard no more whistling, though the dogs cried mournfully in the dark. He was feeding broken pieces of a tiny stage set into the fire when he heard the wood barricading the front door fall in. Moss rushed to the top of the stairs and looked down. A hand holding a lantern was thrust through the opening and then withdrawn.

  "It's warmer in here," said an old woman's voice.

  "Be careful, the floors are rotten," said a man.

  "It's not the first time I've been here, you. Hold the light up, or I'll walk into a wall," said the woman.

  "Who's there?" called Moss.

  A tiny woman wrapped in a huge scarf, wearing a man's hat and boots, looked up the stairs with pursed lips and a wrinkled nose. Her glasses glinted in the lantern light. In her hand was a black physician's bag. A man stepped into the space behind her. He made certain the woman was safe before he too looked up. He was dressed in a knee-length worsted wool coat with a hood. His leather boots rose above his knees. Moss recognized him immediately from the shipwright's house, the night he saw Echo. Both of the visitors breathed white vapor into the air.

  "My name is May," said the woman. "Where's the girl?"

  Something in the certainty of her tone made him feel it would be ridiculous to do anything but to state the truth. He took a chance. "Up here."

  "Then I'm coming up." With this declaration, May ascended the stairs with the grace of a junebug, all flailing arms and false starts.

  "Careful, May," said the man.

  "Master Crow, you're more of an old woman than I am."

  Moss watched as the two climbed to the landing. He stepped back from May while she regarded him as though he were another one of the fantastical puppets adorning the wall behind him. Up close May looked to be in her late eighties. Moss had never seen a woman so minutely wrinkled. Moss interrogated Master Crow with a look.

  "Later," the man said. "First we'll see to Imogene."

  "Well, where is she?" May looked down the long corridor to the room lit with firelight. "Never mind." She pushed past Moss with the air of a woman who was used to being obeyed. Master Crow politely waited for Moss to follow before falling into line. Once in the room the old woman removed the scarf from her head and draped it across the foot of the bed. Nonplussed, Moss stood to the side as she opened Imogene's eyelids, looked in her mouth and checked her pulse.

  "I think she has hypothermia," said Moss. May looked at him as though he was an imbecile, then looked at Crow. She opened her bag and pulled out a stethoscope and listened to Imogene's chest. May smelled her breath and looked at the palm of her hands. She reached once more into her bag and pulled out a bottle filled with some kind of dried herb. She handed it to Moss. "What is it?" he asked.

  "Tea. I'd kill for a cup."

  "May—" Moss began. It felt odd to use her name with such familiarity, when he had only met her five minutes earlier. He felt Master Crow gently take the bottle from his hand.

  "If it was hypothermia, she would have died hours ago," said May.

  "Then what?" asked Moss.

  "How well do you know this young lady?" said May, stroking Imogene's hair.

  "Well enough," said Moss. As he said this, he realized how little he did know.

  "Right." May sat on the edge of the bed. "Forgive me, I'm old and nobody offered me a chair." She glared at Master Crow, who, having found an old kettle, was presumably heading off in search of water. She returned her gaze to Moss. "So you don't know if this has happened before?"

  "What has happened before?"

  "She's been drawn away."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I've seen it before. It means that someone pulled her out of her body into another."

  "Impossible," said Moss.

  "It's as I say. She may not even have known it was happening. Master Crow said that she fell unconscious because of the cold. At that moment she would have been weak, no resistance. Somebody took advantage of that and pulled. She left her body behind like a loose slipper."

  "To where?" asked Moss, unsure how long he could tolerate this nonsense. Master Crow reappeared with the kettle packed with snow. He cleared a spot on the coals and kneeled down to tend to the making of tea.

  May shrugged. "It's anyone's guess. There's no use trying to understand it."

  "Who might have done this drawing?"

  May chewed her bottom lip. "Well, the Black Carriage has returned. So I think we can guess." Moss, his head abuzz, wandered around the room distractedly. He came to a desk covered in papers and books. A circus elephant's head made of silver sat on a round wood base. Moss picked it up and weighed it in his hands. There was a tiny monkey on the elephant's head. It opened to reveal a hidden inkwell. The ink had dried long ago. He set it back down.

  "What can I do for her?" asked Moss.

  "You have to keep her here," said Master Crow. He gave May and Moss a cup of tea each. Moss looked at the china cups, curious where they had come from, but he was too preoccupied to ask. "If you don't, the others will kill her. In their eyes she will be seen as tainted. Bad luck."

  "The others? There are more of you?"

  "Well of course there are more of us," said May. "Do you think an old woman like me would be wandering around this forsaken island alone?"

  "May, there's no call to be unpleasant," said Master Crow. "There is a small community about five miles from here. May is one of the elders. They are survivors of the Purge. Many in the community have died mysteriously of late and they believe it is the influence of a witch that lives in the monastery, in the flooded forest. I know, it sounds like a ridiculous fairytale. But they have suffered real loss and live in unmitigated terror of her. One of the men lost a daughter this way. If they see Imogene they will not let her live. Superstition runs very deep here."

  From this explanation Moss understood that Master Crow was concealing their previous interactions. Master Crow was, after all, the person who had identified Echo in the shipwright's house. He sensed that Master Crow's relationship with the survivor community was provisional. Moss thought back to the footsteps outside the caravan and wondered how long Master Crow had been following them. Had he tailed them from the City of Steps? Did he know Irridis was dead? Did he know about the dark ocellus?

  The tea was scalding but Moss drank it quickly. He had never been so thirsty. "The witch, her name is Elizabeth?" he asked.

  "That's not her real name," said May, sipping her tea rather loudly. "But I won't speak it. You are right. She goes by the name of the wretched girl whose body she inhabits, Elizabeth. Jansson's poor little girl; so lovely, before she drowned."

  The blood was rushing in Moss's ears as he looked down at Imogene. How had Elizabeth taken her so deftly?

  "What a night," said May. "The wind's howling." She handed her teacup to Master Crow and lowered herself into the chair he had found for her. She winced. "Oh, my feet."

  At that moment, Imogene shot forward in the bed and screamed. Moss threw his empty teacup at the ceiling. Master Crow jumped backwards, lost his balance and careened into a stack of theatre models. Imogene beat her head with her fists until Moss grabbed them and forcibly held them to his chest. She screamed again, eyes darting wildly around the room.

  "Good God," said May. "What a carry-on."

  TRAPS

  Moss was aboard a ship locked in a frozen ocean. Outside every window of the house was an expanse of white, broken only by islands of trees. In the far distance the hills were like the coast of a country never visited. Completing the effect, the house even creaked like a ship when the wind was up.

  May and Crow had left in the morning on a dogsled. Imogene had come around gradually under May's ministrations and calming hands, while Moss and Master Crow had watched from the bedside. Eventually, she had fallen into a deep but natural sleep. May had carefully instructed Moss not to press Imogene on what had happened, fearing that it might bring back the trauma. Moss understood this but was left wondering what Imogene had experienced.

>   She woke in the late afternoon. The temperature had risen, bringing wind that howled in the fireplace. Moss emerged from a spiral of dark thoughts—he had been thinking about Irridis's murder—to find her watching him.

  "I'm afraid you'll think of me differently now," she said.

  "How do you mean?"

  "Moss, what are we?"

  Moss fidgeted under her gaze. He shrugged. "What are we?"

  "Do you love me?"

  "Yes," said Moss, without hesitation. It was true. He had known it since that terrible night when he thought she was going to die.

  "I love you too." Imogene looked down. Tears followed the contours of her cheeks.

  "You don't look very happy about it," said Moss.

  She looked up. "I'm going to tell you what happened to me. I hope you feel the same way after." Moss reached over and put two oak bannister rungs in the fire.

  "Shoot," he said.

  She looked at him oddly, and began.

  She had never been cold before. Oh, she had been cold, of course, but compared to this, it was nothing. The air penetrated her clothing as though it were tissue paper; it chilled her muscles and bones. The worst of it was the shivering. Imogene understood the mechanisms of hypothermia. The shivering was a harbinger of much worse to come. Even this knowledge, though, was not as painful as the fear and concern in Moss's eyes. What fools they were, being out here, unprepared, chasing monsters in the dark. Elizabeth would kill them in a heartbeat. If Memoria was alive, how could they hope to find her amid this encroaching danger? What they both feared in their hearts was inadvertently leading Elizabeth to Memoria. Memoria had been kidnapped from Little Eye at the same time John had taken that vile bookcase. Unspoken between them was the fear that Elizabeth was not after the bookcase alone and that there was a connection they did not understand. And then there was the gross assumption. Why would Memoria speak to them, even if they could find her? This was a woman who did not want to be found, if indeed she existed. It had occurred to Imogene that Memoria was a creature whose only existence was in the minds of traumatized men. Was she a person, or a dark reflection? After Irridis's death, Imogene's misgivings had begun to run deep. Elizabeth was a monster. Imogene, no coward like her father, was nevertheless no slayer of monsters, not even close. If she were, she would have killed Lamb herself many years ago.

  "Moss, I'm really cold and I'm afraid of those dogs."

  She'd always been afraid of dogs. Sometimes it seemed as though the entire city was full of them, dogs running wild. In the city it was possible to stay out of their way, but here there was nothing but open ground. She licked her lip. And it was as though this minute action triggered a cataclysm. Suddenly she was falling. Something was pulling her. Terrified, she jumped clear and ran. She felt light, the way you feel in the spring when you put on shoes after months of boots. She thought herself to the edge of the woods. That is how it felt, a wish granted before it was expressed. Her toes barely touched the thin film of ice. Was she flying? Looking down she could see that she was naked. Her breasts and stomach, thighs and feet were like smoke coiling in the transparent membrane of her body. How strange! Beneath the trees she stopped and looked back. What had happened? Moss was standing over a woman's body. He picked her up. He's afraid, she thought. He thinks that I've died.

  Don't wait, said the trees. Move, said the grass. As fast as you can, said the half-awake moles beneath the ground. The wind itself called her on. She rose into the air, arms outstretched like wings, one foot drawn up like a dancer, and turned. Make haste from here, said a voice from above. She looked up and for second saw the moon through the shredded clouds. Go.

  Into the thicket she fled, like a hare, like a doe, like a bird. She felt as though she was all of these things at once. Branches and thorns that should have shredded her flesh passed straight through her without so much as the rustle of a dry leaf. She flowed around every tree trunk as she hurtled deep into the woods. Sticks tinkled like tiny bells. She was not so much propelled as lifted; in the way that John had lifted her once, when she was five. He had held her by the hands and spun her so quickly that if he had let go they both would have spiraled off into the rose garden.

  A small clearing appeared in front of her. There was something there, unmoving. It was orange. A fox. It lay on its side with its coat broken in a way that left no doubt that it was dead. Without thinking about it, she jumped into it.

  Imogene had no idea how or why she had done this thing. Going into the fox had been instinctive, like burrowing into a hiding place to evade a pursuer, but once she was inside, she was seized with terror. The aching hunger that had just a moment ago caused the fox to die was now her hunger. It pervaded her being, and pushed her toward despair. Was she trapped? Stuck? She lifted her head and stood gingerly, grasping with frozen footpads to find a grip on the ice that covered everything. Her ears pricked. Moss was shouting out beyond the trees. She shook and filled the air with droplets, as her body heat melted away the ice. She could not return to him, not like this. He would not see her.

  On a hidden road that ran for a few hundred feet in the woods, she caught a mouse. It was still moving as she swallowed it.

  The ice rain turned back into snow. It sparkled in her fur as she trotted down the middle of the road. She heard something, a clink of metal against stone. There it was again. She followed the sound to an open place in the woods and sat in the shadow of a tamarack.

  Elizabeth's carriage formed the backdrop to the scene that was unfolding. Its heavy wheels were caked with mud. Along the side was evidence of events at the quay, a deep gouge in the side panels that ran from front to back. Echo stood in the space protected from the wind by the body of the carriage. The organ Elizabeth had cut from Irridis floated in the air, emanating a faint light. It moved slowly, filaments snaking around each other. Imogene thought of the jellyfish in the great aquarium in the Cloth Hall repository. Whispers. Before it stood Elizabeth. Her hair, knotted and unclean, hung down, covering her bowed head. Imogene could not hear and moved closer, slinking against the trees until she was only a few feet away from Elizabeth's tattered hem.

  "Do you remember the names of my deaf sisters, Violette, Charlotte, Anna, Magda, Chella and Allison? They gave their lives to watch over you. They've all gone. You outlived them all. Now it's just me. I'm sure the Sisterhood of Little Eye didn't expect me to be the last Attendant," said Elizabeth. She crouched down and hissed at the floating organ. "You should never have lived. They should have killed you all those hundreds of years ago when they found you and Aurel bewildered and frightened on the heath." Elizabeth walked around the black organ. "After they killed Aurel you seduced them with your wonders, didn't you. You maintained your childish form, never growing, so they would pity you. But you were a toxic prize, one that they couldn't turn away from. They called you Starling, the Terrible Angel. Keeping you imprisoned was a fatal error. I have no remorse for trying to kill you after everyone else was killed, and none for finishing the job now. I will bring you back home to Little Eye, Starling, and bury you with your dead sister." Elizabeth motioned to Echo. He shuffled forward ponderously, leaving deep impressions in the pine needles beneath the snow. The girl stepped back as Echo lifted the organ. He carried it to the carriage where a perfectly square panel slid aside. A thin white arm emerged and took the organ. The arm withdrew and the panel closed with a loud click.

  Imogene did not have long to think about what she had seen. Elizabeth turned suddenly as if she had heard something. The child's eyes flitted around the clearing and landed on Imogene.

  "Little fox," she whispered. "So you came." Imogene felt herself held by Elizabeth's eyes. Her legs felt paralyzed. Elizabeth moved closer, the hem of her dress dragging through the slush. "Little fox, come here and I'll burn you like I did your mother." Warmth spread through Imogene's body. She panted, unable to move as Elizabeth's finger found the soft down behind her ears and stroked it gently. "Life is full of little twists and turns." Elizabeth stopped her h
ypnotic stroking and smacked Imogene on the muzzle so hard that her teeth cracked together. She seized Imogene by the scruff. "Burn, little fox," Elizabeth spat. Imogene buried her teeth in the girl's hand. Miraculously, it was enough. She twisted from the grip of the small hand, hit the ground and ran. Elizabeth's laughter followed.

  Imogene followed a deer trail back through the woods. Behind the clouds the sky lightened. While she had listened to the bizarre conversation, the temperature had steadily dropped and now the snow had begun anew. A sparkling dust fell through the trees. Crows cawed overhead. Ice fell from the branches. The ground was sharp and painful against her feet. She slowed to a trot only when she was convinced that she was well away from Elizabeth and her companion. The deer path carried her out of the woods to a leaning wire fence. A plan of sorts had formulated in her mind. She would look for the old house that she had seen and see if Moss had taken shelter there. Beyond that, she had no idea what would come next, but at least she would be near him.

  The fence was too high for her to jump, so she looked for an opening underneath. She found one. It was a low, fur-lined dip through the snow and the grass that grew thick against the fence. Rabbits had probably made the hole. Without a further thought, she slipped through. She realized her mistake immediately as a wire snare closed around her body. The more she fought, the tighter it became.

  The hours wore on. For a time, the light brightened. Snow drifted. Imogene lay on her belly unable to extricate herself. The grass around her was covered in a bloody slush. In her attempts to chew through the wire she had cut her tongue and gums. Breathing was difficult. She took the air in sips. She had tried to jump from her fox body, the way she had jumped from her own. But she did not have the trick of it, or her pain had so stolen her concentration that she could no longer envision it. She was snared.