by Leah Bobet
All the shadow pours from my icehouse throat into the file in Whisper’s hand.
She shrieks, quick and thin, and drops it to the floor. The brown cardboard of the file goes midnight black and cold, so cold it puts off winter into the whole room and turns our choking breath to frost. The shadows’ stomping, shrieking, kicking stops. Whisper and I both stumble back against the peel-paint wall in an ear-popping quiet.
Deep inside the file there’s a terrible, terrible rip.
Jack abandons the doorway in three long strides and plunges his brand into its heart.
The shadows yelp and Jack raises the brand again, but the dark is on the move, fading soft and smoke-thin grey, lengthening out into one soft-edge mocking of legs and head and arms; all the edges of a real person with nothing true or living underneath. It scoots back against the wall like water running downhill and I blink to clear my eyes, to separate out the dark that’s living and moving from the normal dark just lying still.
When I get it sorted there’s but one shadow on the creaking wood floor, short-limbed and curled forward, holding Atticus’s papers to its breast.
“Teller!” Jack throws me the brand. I let it fall to the floor, snatch it up by the handle, and shove the fire hard up beside the face of the last shadow.
“Don’t run.”
The shadow whimpers, and the mad furnace-roaring in my belly turns cold and sick. That’s not a right sound.
That’s not a sound a monster makes.
Whisper’s prim mouth is back from her teeth, wrinkles all contracted into vicious yellowed points. “What are you?” Nothing. “Who?”
Hesitating, hesitant, I push the fire closer.
The shadow keens, high and hurting like a lost little baby. Who told you that you might gather my roses? it murmurs. The sound rushes overlapping from corner to corner. It’s so close I can see its hair, long and flopping over a small brow, fine cheekbones. That’s what it said, the Beast, the Beast, and her papa he had no good answer.
I squint. It’s not my imagining. This shadow’s fuller than they were in the sewers, in the streets. It’s the difference between a fed man and a starving one, and something here is very wrong.
Monsters don’t weep.
Send me a child, then, he said, the Beast, and they sent it into the big house with no windows and locked doors, it sniffles. Then you say: No. That’s not how it goes. It’s us that are the Beasts.
“Speak clean,” Jack says beside me. “Whisper, make it speak.”
“I can’t make it speak. Shadows aren’t ghosts,” Whisper snaps.
— and no little girl’s gonna save us, it gasps.
I draw the fire back, guttering low and thin. A tear-drop smudge of darkness works down one of its cheeks, then the other, and this is not at all the same creature that swiped the Sanctuary Night dinner off the shelves and laughed as the glass broke into our blood.
“What are you?” I whisper. My mouth doesn’t taste like peas or roast beef or — I shiver — medication no more; it tastes like my own blood. I hold it in, scared to spit and feed what ghost-or shadow-mouth’d come gaping out of the floor. But my back’s curved, my shoulders down, my hands smooth and slow and unsudden: all the things that make a Telling, and from nothing else but habit, the habit of hearing something lost and in pain.
“What are you?” Jack booms at it, and the shadow changes. Its limbs grow darker, thicker, strong. It pours together like water coming down the drain and I can see pupils, lashes, the fold of a loose shirt made of dark. It narrows into waist and widens to hips, and the boards creak underneath it as its weight settles in.
I’ll be your rose, it says suddenly, clear. Fifty voices collapsing into one, and it’s one like a bell, boy-girl clean, touched with the most terrible yearning. I’ll be your Beast. Just take me away from here.
Whisper steps back, and she’s the color of dead things by torchlight. “Corner?”
Don’t call me that, the shadow whispers, soft and plaintive. I don’t like it when they call me that name. It leans toward my torch like a cupped loving hand. The first bit of flame nibbles at the cheekbone, the chin. I yank it back, and it leans farther. A little hole burns into the delicate curve of shadow-jaw.
“What then?” I ask, frantic. Ask something. Ask anything. “What’s your name?”
Angel, it says, and the flames lick at its face, reach from brand to shadow-skin and catch the edge of that soft shy smile. I toss the brand right down to the floor, but it’s much, much too late. My mama said I was her little angel, and God loved me like every other —
The fire takes its mouth first. It doesn’t struggle while the fire eats it up, head to tips of the fingers to toes, and finally smolders out on the scorched wood floor. A painting of black ash in the shape of a living body. A stain on the floor like any other.
“We killed it,” I manage.
“Nuh-uh,” Jack says, hoarse and quiet like funerals. He tucks his gloves back on, face bent to that smear on the floor and not looking away. “It chose.”
I spare a good look at Jack, and his eyes are tired like a day-and-night duty in the hot-hate sun. “If it chose, that means it’s a thinking thing,” I say. “That wasn’t a thing from the sewers.” He gets it: That wasn’t monsters. You can tell the Whitecoats by the smoothness ’round their eyes, and you can tell monsters because they never, never weep.
But he doesn’t reply, just looks over at Whisper hunched over the floor and pats my shoulder. Hush, says that pat, better than any word would. Between us.
I hush.
Whisper swears a little on the ground, and when I hurry over, her fingers are trying to piece together the shredded mess of Atticus’s file. “It’s gone,” Whisper says, and her face is fury-bleak.
“Goddamn,” Jack sighs, but his heart ain’t in it. He’s too far away, in the land of hush. He lifts her up with an offered hand, still looking half over his shoulder at that smear on the floor. “Wanna check the other cells,” he says after a moment.
Whisper gathers up the last tears and pieces of the file in one of her fluttered skirt pockets. “Not leaving anything more of us here,” she says, and caresses them through the cloth. I take her hand when she’s done. It’s cold and tight, not soft no more; tighter yet as we step through the door to Isolation, over the spilled-out and burned-in shadows.
My brand is running down, running out. I shrug the burned-up rags onto the floor and stomp them careful, twisting my shoe on the embers ’til I know they’re truly out. I cough at the risen dust, suck in a steady breath.
I let it out slow, and someone lets a breath out after me.
“Someone living,” Jack calls low and shrugs off his gloves again, quick-step moving to the last unopened cell. Shouldn’t have put down the fire, I think, but fire don’t do nothing against the living. I loose Whisper’s hand and follow Jack in.
When I catch up his back’s straight, his fists open; everything in his body saying nothing threatening. And it’s not: a tumbledown pile of pants and arms, gleam-pale and unmoving. Somewhere underneath it all, a glint of eyes. “Hello?” I try, but it don’t move, don’t speak. Dying, I think, and then the air shifts in the eaves and my nose finds the musty-sweet smell of flowers.
“Violet,” falls out of me, horrified, and the broken pile of woman moves.
Whisper shoves past me hard, rushes to the side of the tumbledown blanketed thing. “Vee?” she murmurs, stricken, and carefully lifts her chin to the light.
I don’t see the face. But I see Whisper’s break into cracks and lines and mess. “Oh, Vee,” she chokes, wide-eyed and terrible. “Oh no, oh no, my Violet —”
It takes two of us to haul Violet up to sitting. She doesn’t help; she’s limp like a dead thing in our hands. Violet stares straight forward without blinking, eyes red and dry from staring so long. Nothing moves, nothing but her fingers taptaptap and a little smack of lips so we know for sure it’s her. I swallow. Wave a hand in front of her gaze, back and then forth again. She
doesn’t follow.
“What’s wrong with her?” I whisper, throat ache-straining, picturing tunnels and houses and all the corners of Safe stacked full of people unseeing, limp and robbed of everything but breathing.
Nobody answers.
Whisper leans down to the curve of Violet’s ear, and her lips move urgent, words that I know aren’t made for me. She murmurs and sings and cajoles for too long while I hold Violet’s shoulders up from sagging, and when her voice dies down there’s something ugly in it, ready to break.
“Whis?” Jack asks, soft, too soft.
“There —” Whisper halts, and her voice is queer and small. “There ain’t no ghost in her.”
“What’s that mean?” Dead meat, my hands on her shoulders tell me. It means she’s nothing but dead meat.
“It means gone,” Whisper says, breathless. “Lost her mind.”
“She was never Sick —” I choke out, and bite my lip.
“Not Sick,” Whisper interrupts, harsh like Atticus scared, and she never interrupts; she speaks ladylike and precise like her mama and papa trained her to do. “Lost her mind.”
“Not lost,” Jack murmurs, back in the shadows. “Stolen.”
We carry Violet out into the hungry green yard. There’s no shadows left to follow us.
Violet stumbles. We gotta lift her up good over the grass and potholes, dragging her feet in a way that makes me want to cry, until Jack just swears a long tangle of words I was never, ever supposed to say and lifts her with one arm behind her knees, one under her shoulders; carries her like a child to the chest. A glitter of electricity plays on the metal of her allergy bracelet.
“Whisper,” Jack says, and Whisper undoes the bracelet’s catch. I think she’s gonna pocket it, keep it secret and close and safe, but her fist closes about it tight enough that I feel the dent of metal in my own flesh. She’s still for a long moment, two, eyes shut against something she won’t yet deign to see.
“Whis?” Jack says again, gentler, and shifts Violet’s hanging weight in his short, rough arms.
“I wish this place never was,” she says, and opens her eyes to stare a stare so full of grieving I want to fly into her arms.
“Won’t be, soon,” is all I can say.
“That’s not good enough,” she spits, hair tangled, eyes sparking, and still I’m watching the hand with Violet’s bracelet in it closed tight as the Pactbridge door.
My hand in my pocket closes on something else. Something strong for reassurance, folded and sharp. Six matches wide.
“Houses burn,” I say to Whisper, and the hand tightens into a fist.
The grass rustles. Falls silent.
“Then burn it,” she says, and stalks across the long-grown lawn.
Jack looks at me. I look at him.
I pull the first match and strike a light.
There’s no getting the smoke off us.
The smoke of houses burning is more sewer-thing than friend; rank and slippery and foul, following you down the streets, through the alleys where every electric light sputters dark from Jack Flash’s passing. The smell sticks; marks you out different for the police who come squalling through the afternoon, too late to save what used to be Lakeshore Psychiatric. Marks you Freak.
When we get back to Doctor Marybeth’s, I’m sure she knows what we’ve done.
But: “Oh lord,” she says, not to us but at us, and takes Violet off Jack’s failing arms to help her safe indoors.
“Water,” she snaps, and lays Violet out on her stuffed red couch. I stare for a second. Violet’s still and stiff like Jack’s face when he tells the Tale of the lightning. Doctor Marybeth runs one hand through her hair and glares at us. “I need water and my rounds bag, now.”
Whisper scatters up the stairs for the bag. I hurry into the kitchen and fill a clean glass right up with cool clear water. My fingers leave black smudges on the crystal.
“This ’nuff?” I ask, small, and Doctor Marybeth takes it without a second glance.
She listens to Violet’s heart. She listens to her breath, light and choosy as it is. She drips the water down Violet’s throat with a tiny glass eyedropper, and all the while we sit in the parlor chairs watching, watching like a violation, too scared to look away.
Violet’s chest rises and hitches and sinks all out of tune, and I can’t bear to look away in case the breath I miss is the last. At least Ariel isn’t here. Safe with Beatrice and probably mad at me — and that gives me a little unfunny twitch of a smile. Burning mad at me and with Beatrice: living, breathing, safe.
Violet stares on at a nothingness. Finally I close my eyes against it, shutting out the bad things, the dark. All I see in my eyelids is that awful stare on Mack, on Scar, on Heather.
After an age and a half Doctor Marybeth sits back, lets her stethoscope slide down onto her belly instead of holding it up high. “She’s gotta go to the hospital.”
My skin goes cold.
“No,” Whisper says somewhere behind me. “No way in hell.”
“She has to.” Doctor Marybeth scrubs her eyes. Her voice is heavy, beat. “She can’t eat. She can’t sit up. She’s catatonic.”
I don’t know catatonic. But Violet doesn’t look up, doesn’t speak while we talk over her head. Spit gathers in the side of her mouth, brought on by her mouth music, the smacking clasping sounds she always makes. I watch it fill up, overflow, sitting in my chair shivering and forgot.
“No hospitals,” Whisper says. Her eyes are full of tears; unlike Jack or Ari or me, she doesn’t look away when she’s crying. She’s not ashamed. “Atticus said no —”
“Atticus is dead,” Doctor Marybeth’s voice cracks. “And there’s no one to take care of her.”
“There’s us,” Whisper keeps on. “Same as it’s always been.”
“You?” And Doctor Marybeth laughs, not a happy laugh. “Can you do it? Can you change her pants and put the spoon down her throat? Can you draw the kind of power it takes to run an ECG?” She takes in a shaky breath, and when I dare to open my eyes, her hands are tight and round on the tops of her knees. “You can’t. Because you don’t even have downstairs right now, so fuck what Atticus said.”
Jack stands up. I suck in a breath and hold it, not making one little sound.
But she’s crying too. There’s wet all over Doctor Marybeth’s cheeks and dripping off her chin, and Jack just leans forward and puts one heavy-glove hand on hers, smoothes it down from a tight knobbed fist into flatness, palm down on her slacks.
“Trust me,” she says, and she’s pleading, she’s leaned over the coffee table and taken Whisper’s hand. “I got you out. I sent you supplies that might’ve cost me my license, never mind my goddamned job. I’ve kept this secret for twenty-three years and you still won’t trust me to do right.”
“It’s not you —” Jack starts, rough.
“Oh, it is,” she snaps, and pushes herself to her feet. “With your stories. If you can’t tell the difference between good medicine and bad after all this time —”
“It’s not just stories!” Whisper screams, and everyone else flinches back. “They did those things, they happened, and it’ll happen again and take a look at her, just look!”
Doctor Marybeth shudders in place. “They did those things. Don’t you even think you have to tell me that.”
“You want to give her to a —”
“I want to put her in a hospital,” Doctor Marybeth says flat, “’cause otherwise she’s going to starve and rot in the dark. And even all the things that happened to you in Lakeshore and all the stories you’ve blown up so big you can’t see what’s changed won’t stop that from being cruel.”
Jack’s hands have fallen awkward to his sides. He puts them, then himself between Whisper and Doctor Marybeth, blocks the sight of one from the other. “Nobody’s bein’ cruel,” he says, thick and uncomfortable.
Violet’s chest rises, falls. The drapes flutter. They match Doctor Marybeth’s sofa.
“You wou
ld be,” Doctor Marybeth says, and turns her gaze to him, burning. “She’d end up in a little room trapped and hungry, and then you’d be the goddamned … the Whitecoats from all your terror stories.”
“They’re my stories,” I whisper, and I wouldn’t know that anyone hears except that Doctor Marybeth glances toward me, to my working tangled hands and eyes so big I can feel the strain in them, and her mouth goes tight and sorrowful.
“The things you teach your children,” she says half to herself.
“So you don’t care about us?” Whisper says, and she’s gulping sobs. “So leave us alone. Let me take her home.” But she’s still sitting down, wringing her hands back and forth. The tears shake down her face in little pipe-falls and spray wild across the table. “You don’t want us, leave us alone.”
“That’s not what I said,” Doctor Marybeth says quieter, and takes Whisper’s hands in hers.
“You said we were Whitecoats —”
“That’s not what I said,” again, and her voice is smooth and calm again, a voice that’s just as in charge as Atticus ever could be but soft and collected as my mama’s. Her doctor voice, I realize. The one she uses to keep you still while the needle goes in or the baby comes.
“Anne, Annie,” Doctor Marybeth says, and then the tears get in her mouth and make her stop for breath. “I love her too.”
Whisper’s mouth opens, then shuts, and she snatches her hands away and stuffs them behind her back. “Don’t ever call me that,” she croaks. “That’s not my name anymore,” before her voice fails and she bawls like a little baby, like a kid who’d never gone to Atticus and got their first lesson: that big kids are quiet, and big kids are sharp, and if the world cuts you, you never cry out loud.
DOCTOR MARYBETH’S TALE
I don’t know Doctor Marybeth’s Tale.
I never asked her.
There are medical words on the Whitecoat papers Doctor Marybeth writes up to send Violet to the hospital; words I don’t know. After our silent supper, a supper Whisper won’t come down for, I ask Doctor Marybeth for them.
