The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  Foxy shook her head. “No, but that don’t mean anything. Like I said, I ain’t an expert. There used to be people around who might know what it was, and you’d prob’ly be better off with one of them. Problem is… well… you know. People move away or they die. Their kids go off to get a job and the farms get chopped up and sold. And half the old-timers are just old men bullshittin’ and tryin’ to act like they know things.” She shook her head. “Believe me, if I had somebody I could call and say, ‘Hey, bad shit goin’ down,’ I’d have done it as soon as you told me ’bout the deer. But I guess I’m what we got.”

  I had been afraid of that. On some level, I’d hoped that Foxy had people she could call, reinforcements who’d come charging in like the Ghostbusters and handle this whole mess for me. I could have stepped back and said, “So sorry, above my pay grade,” and it would be somebody else’s problem.

  Until I get Bongo back, it’s still my problem.

  Shit.

  * * *

  We went into the kitchen and ate more sandwiches, because it seemed like a good idea. I was maybe a little woozy from the bourbon, and there is something very nonthreatening about a tuna-salad sandwich. If I’d had the chance, I suspect I would have eaten a couple dozen of them, just because they were real and they made me feel like I was real too.

  Foxy eyed the staircase. “Yikes. You been up there yet?”

  “Haven’t had a chance to get the stairs clear,” I admitted.

  “Doesn’t look too bad. Two-man job, maybe. Or two-woman in this case.” She pushed the sleeves of her denim jacket up, revealing tanned forearms.

  “You want to move stuff? Right now?”

  “I ain’t got anything else to do right now,” said Foxy. “Why, you got a hot date?”

  “Well, no…” Honestly, I wasn’t going to argue with an offer of help. I needed to do something while the things in Cotgrave’s manuscript settled into my head, and clearing the way to the second floor would be more useful than playing endless games of solitaire. I got out my gloves and passed her a pair.

  It wasn’t bad. It was easier with two people. I’d lift a box and carry it to my staging area in the living room, and by the time I got back, Foxy would have shoved most of the contents of a step into a trash bag. It took only an hour to break a gap in the wall, and then I pushed my head and shoulders through the resulting hole and saw the upstairs for the first time.

  There were three doors on the left-hand side of the hall, presumably leading to the bedrooms that made up most of the upstairs. A line of windows on the right-hand side of the hall let in the faded denim-colored light of late afternoon.

  It was… empty.

  Not completely empty, of course. There was an old clothes hamper in the hallway, with the lid open and an ancient towel dangling from it. There were a few boxes, with the by-now-familiar cargo of old wire coat hangers sticking out haphazardly. But compared to the downstairs, the hall looked as empty as a minimalist photo.

  My knees got shaky for a minute, and I had to grab the banister.

  “You okay?” asked Foxy from below. “The air bad up there?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I’m fine. It just… it’s not bad. I expected it to be terrible, and it isn’t.” I felt as if I’d been braced for a blow that hadn’t come.

  “Well, that’s good.” She poked her head up alongside me. “Oh. Huh. Cleaner than my place. Looks like she kept putting stuff on the stairs to take up here, until she couldn’t get up the stairs anymore. Well, that’s a relief, ain’t it?”

  “Let’s see if the bedrooms are bad.…”

  The first one wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, mind you, but it wasn’t anything like the doll room or my grandmother’s bedroom. There was a sort of semicircle of junk around the door, as if she would open the door, plop something down, and then leave. When the semicircle filled up, she’d set things out as far as she could reach, but she hadn’t systematically packed things up the way she had downstairs.

  The bathroom was in a pretty bad state. The cupboard under the sink was overflowing with boxes of soap and bulk packs of ancient toothpaste, and the tub was full of clothes in garment bags hanging on the shower rod.

  The last door was at the end of the hall. I opened it and let out a groan.

  She’d started here, apparently. The far wall was stacked with boxes like ramparts. The wire coat hangers were snaggled together like metal macramé. There was, I kid you not, a freakin’ stuffed moose head in the corner. A sea of knee-high bags and boxes obscured the floor, and while I’m nearly sure there was a window on the other side of the room, you couldn’t see it from here.

  “Give you five bucks for the moose head,” said Foxy.

  “If you can get to it, it’s yours.”

  It’s not like I expected to find anything good up there. I really didn’t. It wasn’t like my grandmother was hoarding gold bars or anything useful. I didn’t really expect to see the Green Book on a reading stand in the middle of the hall. I was just hoping for… oh, I don’t know.

  No, I do know. In a story, if you go through a big, miserable trial and you don’t complain… much… you get a reward at the end, right? You get the happy ending or you marry the prince or you get a pot of gold. And this was a big miserable trial and it even had monsters, and my job was to know the shape of stories and help other people hammer them into place, and I guess I thought on some level that when I got to the last room, there’d be some kind of reward for it.

  I picked up a bag and looked in it. There was a roll of paper towels that had gone yellow with age, three cans of Spam, some Christmas lights still in the box, a pile of coupons, and a couple of cassette tapes.

  Some reward.

  “Well, come on,” said Foxy. “We can get a couple more loads out before we lose the light, I bet.”

  I leaned against the doorframe wearily. “What’s the point? God, I mean… why even bother?” I couldn’t believe how depressed I was over this. Then again, I couldn’t believe I was still cleaning the place out. “I can’t sell this place.”

  As soon as I said it, a weight seemed to descend on the top of my head. My chest was already squeezed tight over Bongo, but this was like having a cinder block lowered onto my skull.

  Because I couldn’t sell it, could I? How awful would I have to be to just hand the keys over to someone to live next to a hill full of nightmare stones, with the effigy roaming around in the dark?

  This wasn’t like claiming that the dishwasher ran great or that those stains had been there for years. You couldn’t even warn people about it.

  I told myself I wasn’t upset about the money, but dammit, I could have really used the money too.

  I felt like I would have been fighting back tears, but I couldn’t even get up the energy.

  “Here, now, hon, let’s not do that.” Foxy put an arm around my shoulders and led me back downstairs. She made a cup of tea—real tea, not bourbon—and shoved it into my hands, and eventually I calmed down or came up for air or something. A couple tears leaked out and she didn’t say anything about it and neither did I.

  “Come on,” she said again. “Sell it or not, it’s gotta be shifted. Even if you decide to burn the place down, I want that moose head first.”

  And I nodded and I stood up and I carried out that stupid bag with the can of Spam and the cassette tapes and then another bag and another one, and eventually we got the moose head downstairs just before it got dark.

  * * *

  It’s a bit awkward figuring out how to go to sleep when there might be monsters outside. Do you sleep? Do you stay up all night and risk seeing them? Do you turn the lights on to scare it away or turn the lights off so that it thinks no one’s home?

  I would have liked to stay up, frankly, but I was exhausted. At the same time, I was jittery with nerves and my stomach was rebelling after the pots of coffee I had poured into it. I had to go to the bathroom about once every half hour.

  “You’re nodding off right here at the ta
ble,” said Foxy accusingly.

  “I am not,” I said, sitting up.

  “Then what were we talking about?”

  “About… about…” I tried to remember. “A boyfriend you had, wasn’t it?”

  “That was an hour ago. Go to bed.”

  “I’m too scared to sleep,” I said.

  “Like hell you are. Heck, I’m a little afraid you’ll fall asleep on the pot like this, but I suppose you’ll just fall on the mattress.”

  I yielded to the inevitable and went to bed.

  I think I fell asleep instantly, but I’m not sure for how long. I hadn’t thought to plug in a clock in the bathroom, and anyway, the outlets weren’t looking all that trustworthy. Without a working phone, I couldn’t tell if it was nearer to midnight or dawn.

  I was not deeply asleep but not quite awake, drifting aimlessly from thought to thought, when an arm came through the crack in the door.

  I would have screamed, but it was accompanied by Foxy’s voice hissing, “You awake?”

  “No!” I whispered.

  “Well, you better wake up damn quick because there’s something in the road out front!”

  I woke up damn quick.

  “Stay low,” Foxy ordered. “Follow me.”

  I crawled after her on my hands and knees. She was wearing a bathrobe with either flowers or a giant squid on the butt.

  I couldn’t not look at the windows. I didn’t want to look at them, but I did anyway, in case there was something there.

  There wasn’t.

  We got into the kitchen and stood up. “Sorry,” said Foxy. “It was in the road, but I was afraid it’d come in closer. Up the stairs, quick. You can see it out the window.”

  She led the way up, the stairs creaking under her bony feet. “Went upstairs to use the pot,” she said.

  “You could have used the downstairs one,” I said, somewhat inanely under the circumstances.

  “Didn’t want to step on your head. Also, we ain’t so good of friends yet that I’m gonna pee in front of you. Anyway, I got a look at it out the little window there. You can see it better out the one in the bedroom, though.”

  I didn’t much want to see it, but what was I going to do? I followed her into the bedroom—the mostly empty one, which was emptier now that we’d cleared it out—and over to the window. We stood on either side of the frame, peeking around the edges.

  Moonlight blazed over the empty road. There was nothing there.

  “Shit,” said Foxy, disgusted. “It must have moved.”

  “What was it?” I said, although I had a pretty good idea already.

  “Dunno. Weird thing. On all fours, and then it stood up a few times. Not a person. It was right on the edge of the driveway, like it didn’t want to cross the road.”

  Someone else had seen it too. It probably wasn’t black mold. I wasn’t crazy, or if I was, it was catching.

  Oddly, this was not as comforting as one might wish.

  We waited for five or ten minutes. Foxy adjusted her bathrobe like she was buckling on armor. In the reflected light, I could see that the robe did in fact have giant flowers on it, not squid. This was vaguely disappointing.

  I wiped my palms on my jeans. I’d taken off my bra but slept in my clothes otherwise. It just seemed easier.

  “I guess it’s gone…,” Foxy began, and then deer burst from the woods.

  Three of them, as always. The first two running, with their tails flagged high, and then after them came the hunched-over one, the damaged one, and oh shit, how stupid am I?

  It was mostly a deer. I hadn’t exactly been wrong. But now that I was really looking, not just yawning at blurry deer charging through the yard, it came into focus.

  The dark eye sockets. The front legs that didn’t quite touch the ground.

  It wasn’t really on four legs. It was running bowed over with its arms dangling, chasing after the deer. Was it chasing them? Were they a herd of deer, or was the effigy herding the deer, running them through the yard night after night, for its own obscure purposes?

  If it caught one, would it make another effigy like itself?

  It was not as fast as a running deer, but not slow. It finished crossing the yard and vanished into the trees. The moonlight beat down on my truck and the road and the carport.

  It hadn’t touched my truck. That seemed very important. If it had touched my truck, then how could I ever drive it again?

  “That was the thing in the window,” I whispered. I sounded very calm to myself.

  Foxy nodded. “One of them things,” she said. “Like the hog and the raccoon. They make ’em for some reason, but damned if I know what it is.”

  “Do you think it’s dangerous?” I asked. Which was also stupid, because Jesus Christ, of course it was dangerous. You just had to look at it to know that.

  “I think it’d try,” said Foxy. “I dunno how much it could do. Mebbe no more than a dog would, but dogs kill people sometimes.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Fire stops ’em,” she offered. “But enough fire stops damn near everything, so I don’t know as that’s much help.”

  I swallowed. “Do you think if we burn that one, it’ll be over?”

  Foxy looked up at me. The shadows hid her eyes, but I didn’t really need to see them.

  “It’s possible, hon,” she said very gently, “but I gotta tell you, I don’t think it’s likely. Not with the stones up there on the hill and one in the yard and everything. I think there’s something goin’ on here.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t surprised.

  Foxy reached out, underneath the level of the windowsill, and squeezed my hand.

  * * *

  We came down the stairs slowly, moving like we’d just come out of a bar and weren’t quite sure if we were sober enough to get home. I wasn’t tired. I couldn’t have had more than a couple hours of sleep, but I was wide-awake again.

  “Tea?” I said.

  “Yeah. Can’t hurt to—”

  Something banged against the screen door.

  I nearly leapt out of my skin. Foxy slapped a hand over her heart and muttered, “Kee-rist!”

  “What is it?” I whispered. As if Foxy would have any more idea than I would.

  As if we didn’t both know what it was.

  The screen clattered as whatever was out there hit it again.

  We stared toward the door. It was locked and bolted. I knew it was. But there was a window right next to it, looking into the living room, and what if the thing moved six feet to the left? It could come right in through the glass.…

  I took a deep breath and stepped forward.

  “Don’t open it!” hissed Foxy.

  “I’m not going to! But what if it’s Bongo?”

  “I don’t care if it’s Elvis and the Blessed Virgin. Don’t go opening that door!”

  “I won’t!” Which was partly a lie, because if it was Bongo, I was going to open the door, and if it was something dressed up in Bongo’s skin—

  don’t think it don’t think it don’t think it

  —then I guess it’d get me too, and maybe we’d be a couple of skins wandering around the woods together.

  The ten feet from the kitchen to the front door was the longest walk I have ever made in my life.

  The screen door banged again.

  I was about to look through the peephole. I knew it was going to be the deer effigy. I knew it, and I was still going to put my eye to this ridiculous little piece of glass and squint out at it like it might actually be the UPS guy delivering at three in the morning. What else could I do?

  I looked out the peephole.

  The deer skull grinned at me, upside down, and I jerked back just before it slammed its hooves into the door again.

  I fell over on my ass. Probably it hurt, but I didn’t feel it. I just scrabbled backward on my hands to the kitchen.

  “Is it—” Foxy started to say.

  “Well, obviously!” I snapped. I was mad because I’d known perfectly well
what it had to have been and I went and looked anyway.

  Foxy didn’t hold it against me. She and I crouched down behind the counter in the kitchen, looking over the top at the front wall of the house.

  Bam! The screen door crashed again.

  “Why isn’t it coming through the window?” I whispered. “Is it just trying to scare us?”

  “Shit, what am I, the monster whisperer?”

  I looked around the kitchen for a weapon. A cleaver, maybe? Would a cleaver be any use? No, it was mostly bone. I needed a baseball bat or something like that. Was there a baseball bat in the house?

  Well, I suppose I could try to fend it off with the stuffed moose head.…

  I put my forehead against the silverware drawer and made a noise that wasn’t a laugh.

  “Stay with me, hon. If you crack up, who’s gonna appreciate my jokes?”

  There was a loud, final bang, as if the screen was being torn completely off its hinges, and then silence.

  We waited.

  A shadow prowled in front of the window, back and forth. It was too dark to see anything but a humped outline with a jagged face.

  Foxy had her fingers locked on my forearm. We watched, not breathing, not moving, two small animals crouched motionless while the shadow of the hawk passed overhead.

  The deer effigy stopped in front of the window for a long time. I heard the tap of bone against glass.

  And then it dropped to the porch and went away again, but neither of us moved from the kitchen until dawn.

  14

  I slept most of the day at Foxy’s house. She made some kind of stroganoff thing. I ate it dutifully.

  “Should we stay here tonight?” I asked miserably. Not willing to leave completely, but it wouldn’t do Bongo any good if I stayed in my grandmother’s house and was eaten by walking deer bones.

  Tomas and Skip looked at Foxy. Foxy scowled.

  “Hate to say it,” she said slowly, “but this place has three times the windows and twice the doors of yours. And…”

  She stopped. She looked embarrassed, which was not an expression that one usually saw on Foxy’s face.