The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  HELP

  Kilroy was here.

  Someone had asked for help.

  It didn’t matter that they might not have been asking me specifically, that it might have been the equivalent of a note in a bottle, where the bottle was a large, good-natured doofus of a dog. They’d asked.

  “This could all be a trick,” I whispered into Bongo’s fur. “They could be trying to get me to go out in the woods.”

  Bongo’s tongue lolled. He had been in the woods and apparently taken no damage from it at all.

  Underneath all the fear, there was still a vast well of relief that my dog was alive.

  Well. If Bongo could survive the things in the woods, surely anyone with two brain cells to rub together could do so as well.

  “I hope so,” I said, and I put my face down into his fur and cried for a little bit, just in case I was going to die.

  * * *

  There were three things I had to do before I went looking for whoever had written that note.

  The first was to tell Foxy. I went across the road with Bongo on his leash. She opened the door, looking tired, and then saw him at my heels.

  “He made it!” she said, and looked ten years younger. She went down to her knees and hugged him. Bongo flattened his ears and wagged his tail. He was getting a lot of attention this morning, and he was fine with that.

  “He came back just a few hours ago,” I said. “He was hungry, but not starved.”

  She nodded, rubbing his ears, and looked up at me. “You gonna be leaving now, then?”

  I shook my head and held out the note.

  She read it, turned it over, frowned.

  “It was on his collar,” I said. “Somebody’s out there. They sent him back to call for help.”

  “Could be a trick,” she said, turning it over again.

  “Yeah, it could.”

  I explained about Kilroy. It sounded nuts when I said it out loud, but what didn’t these days?

  Foxy listened and didn’t tell me that was crazy.

  “You think it’s your granddaddy?”

  “No,” I said. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. It can’t be, can it? He’d be nearly a hundred years old. Someone he knew maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m going in to town to get Internet. I want to see if I can find out about Cotgrave. He had to at least have an obituary or something. And then I guess I’m gonna go into the woods and see if Bongo can find that hill again and find… them.” Them was easier. Them was a word that didn’t mean I was looking for a dead man.

  She just looked at me that time.

  “I know,” I said. “I know. He might not find it and I’ll probably die if he does. It’s stupid. But I can’t very well bring the cops, can I? So—well—look, he got back once on his own. If we go and I don’t come back and he does, this is my aunt Kate’s number, okay?” I had written it down on a scrap of paper. “Just… can you make sure she gets Bongo? She’ll take care of him. She’s got a stupid Irish setter that he loves. He’ll be happy.” Was I babbling? Maybe I was babbling. I put my hand on my forehead.

  “Come inside,” said Foxy. “You can’t tell me you slept worth a damn last night, and I know I didn’t. I got a couch in the den. You and he can have a nap, and if you still want to do this when you wake up, fine.”

  “But—it’s been hours. What if they were in trouble? I mean, obviously they were in trouble—” I already felt guilty about having planned to take the time to look Cotgrave up on the Internet, but I had to be absolutely sure it wasn’t him out there in those woods.

  I’m not saying I wouldn’t have gone out after him. I still would have. But I wanted something like a coroner’s report or at least his obituary that said he’d died and there was or wasn’t a body. I just… didn’t want to be surprised.

  (I realize this sounds bizarre, like it was going to be any better if Cotgrave was still alive or undead or whatever, but I don’t know that I was thinking all that clearly. Somebody had sent for help and I had to help them. Because the note had come to me, and that made it my job because that’s what my family does.)

  Foxy rolled her eyes. “If they were dangling off a cliff, they probably wouldn’t have time to write a note. You aren’t gonna help anybody haring off half exhausted. Take a nap, hon.”

  “But…” I said that to her shoulder blades. I appeared to be following her inside. I appeared, in fact, to be taking off my shoes and climbing onto the couch.

  Bongo hopped up next to me, delighted, and settled across my legs with a happy groan.

  Foxy flipped off the lights and said, “When you get up, we’ll have lunch, and then we’ll see what happens next.”

  * * *

  I slept for probably three hours. It was nearly noon when I woke up, and Foxy handed me a ham sandwich when I came out of the back room, and then another one down to Bongo.

  He was delighted to have another meal. I should probably have objected, but really, I was about to drag him to God knows where, so it seemed like a stupid time to argue about eating people food.

  There was mayonnaise on the sandwich. Maybe when we met the holler people, Bongo’s gas would knock them out.

  * * *

  I went to the coffee shop, fired up my laptop, and deleted 90 percent of the e-mails, which seemed deeply unimportant now that I was probably going to die. Did I want to get involved in a fight about e-books? I did not.

  There was an e-mail in there from a name that looked very familiar. I couldn’t place it until I clicked it, whereupon I realized it was from the ex-boyfriend I’d left town to avoid. He was apparently sending me a cautious it-is-possible-he-could-have-handled-that-better overture.

  Jesus, of all the things I no longer cared about in the slightest…

  Well, I suppose there’s nothing like stark blazing terror and the upending of your entire worldview to cure a broken heart. I deleted it. If I died, let them not find that in my in-box.

  The only really important e-mails were the ones to my authors. I’d gotten another delay on the one project, and that was good enough for me. I had done my due diligence. I’d waited patiently for more than three months at this point. I’d sent reminders. Now it was her fault for not delivering before I was killed by holler people.

  The other one… that was the one I felt guilty about. He’d paid the whole thing up front and it was almost good enough and I owed him a final pass. So I finished it off, at breakneck speed, and sent a note saying I thought it was good to go as it was, I was going to be out for a bit on some family stuff, and not to wait on me if he was ready to publish. He was a nice client and he was terribly insecure about his work—occasionally with good reason—and I didn’t want to leave that loose end dangling.

  When that was done, I searched for Cotgrave’s obituary.

  I should probably have done this days ago, but it simply hadn’t occurred to me. He was dead, after all, and if he wasn’t, it wasn’t as if a newspaper clipping would say COTGRAVE’S FUNERAL FAKED TODAY.

  I punched in his name and the town, and there it was, three lines down. Nineteen years ago, give or take a few months. His first name had been Frederick, which I vaguely remembered from his signature on the manuscript. He was a World War II veteran.

  Well, of course he was.

  Had he been Freddy when he was young? Drawing Kilroy on things, along with his fellow soldiers? Freddy Cotgrave, who saw all the horrors of war and still wasn’t done with horror, who married one enemy to get away from another one…

  Poor sod.

  There was no cause of death, but there often isn’t in an obituary. He’d died at home, it read. Granted, that made one think of dying in one’s bedroom, not outside on a cold night, but still, he’d been on his own property. Close enough.

  If I’d had a lot more time, I could have tried to find a coroner’s report, check the cause of death or whether there had been an inquest. There weren’t any newspaper clippings from the day of or the day afte
r that seemed to have any bearing on the matter. Even way out here in Pondsboro, an old man wandering away from the house and sitting down and dying wasn’t much of a story, I guess.

  And that was it. Nothing much to show for a life.

  On a whim, I typed “Frederick Cotgrave death” into the search engine and waited.

  Nothing.

  Almost nothing.

  On the second page of search results, after the obituary and an archive of the exact same thing and a bunch of websites that promised me they could find hidden records on anyone, I turned up a single link.

  The Society of the Embers of Dawn wrote that they were saddened to hear of the passing of their brother Frederick Cotgrave, who had been a member many years ago.

  I looked up the Society of the Embers of Dawn and sighed.

  “What’s up?” asked Enid.

  “Why does every secret society have a crappy webpage?”

  “Immutable law of the universe,” said Enid. “I’ve thought of joining one sometime just to fix their website, but I’m not really interested in knowing the secrets of the cosmos if it means I have to make web pages.”

  I poked around the website, but it was a dead end. Literally. Half the links didn’t work. It looked to have gone defunct not too long after the funeral, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they actually were. Their website was doing a pretty good job of keeping things secret, anyhow.

  Odd people at the funeral, Aunt Katie had said. Well, maybe that was it. Maybe that’s how he met Ambrose or maybe he just joined for the dental plan.

  There was contact information on the bottom of the website, including a phone number, God help us all. A website old enough that people still leave their phone numbers lying around on it. On something slightly less than a whim, I turned on my phone and punched in the number.

  It rang five times and then somebody picked up. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I’d expected it to be as defunct as the website.

  “Hello?” said a man’s voice on the other end of the line.

  I didn’t have a name or anything else. I blurted out, “Did you know Frederick Cotgrave?”

  Silence.

  “Is this a prank call?” asked the man, sounding less angry than tired.

  “No! I’m his granddaughter. His stepgranddaughter. Please, I think it’s important.”

  A longer silence. Then, “I don’t know what could be so important. He’s been gone for a long, long time.”

  “Please,” I said. “It’s about the holler people. Uh, the white people. The—the ones in the hills—” I got up and went outside the coffee shop so that Enid didn’t think I’d cracked up completely.

  A sharply indrawn breath on the other end of the line was the only acknowledgment.

  “Please,” I said again. “I need to know—” What did I need to know? God, stupid question. I needed to know a thousand things, probably, and I didn’t even know what questions to ask. “He’s dead, isn’t he? Really dead?”

  “He’s really dead.” The voice at the other end was grave. “They buried as much of him as they could find.”

  “What?!”

  I remembered Dad saying that Cotgrave had been outside too long and that the funeral had been closed casket, but this was something else again.

  “I know he died of exposure.…” The damn phone was already starting to heat up and I switched it from one ear to the other.

  The man sighed. “Probably. No reason to think he didn’t. But the scavengers were at him while he was out there. A lot went missing. I believe they identified him by his dental records and his wedding ring. I was at the funeral. We looked. I wish we hadn’t.”

  Odd people at the funeral, Aunt Kate had said.

  “It’s just… I got a message. I mean, it had Kilroy… Kilroy was here… you know?”

  The voice gave a choked laugh. “Mr. Chad. Yes. I remember.…” And just like that, I was pretty certain that the man on the other end of the line had been no stranger to World War II and Freddy Cotgrave.

  “Can you tell me anything about the people in the hills?” I asked desperately. The phone was starting to cook my ear, and I swapped it again.

  “I can tell you to stay away,” he said, and then my phone beeped twice and went dead.

  And that was the end of that.

  There was one task left that I had been putting off. Now it seemed that I was out of time.

  I went back inside, pulled up a file on the computer, and wrote down all the important information I could think of—the vet Bongo went to and the name it was under and my aunt Kate’s contact information and the password to my e-mail. I didn’t have a will. I didn’t have enough stuff to really need a will. The bank would probably take my house back shortly, once I stopped paying the mortgage, and Aunt Kate had keys so she could get in and get anything she wanted before it all got cleared out. The truck was paid off, so I made a note where the title was in the house.

  I sat back and took a slug of coffee and stared at the list. My life in a nutshell, and mostly it was my dog.

  Should I say something to Kate and Dad? Something that would make sense of it all?

  What could I possibly say?

  I thought for another minute or two and then I typed, “I’m going into the woods to try to find someone. I’m afraid they might be in danger and need help. If something goes wrong, here is all the information for everything. Give Aunt Kate and my dad my love, and make sure someone takes care of Bongo.”

  I saved everything, put the file on the desktop, and named it PLEASE READ THIS.

  Give Aunt Kate and my dad my love. It felt like the coward’s way out, but I didn’t even know where to begin otherwise.

  I shut down the laptop and stared at my coffee. And then I felt a pang of guilt and started it back up, so I could add a note at the bottom that I hadn’t finished the project for the one author and to please refund her three-hundred-dollar down payment, because if I wound up dangling from a tree with wind chimes hanging off my ribs, I didn’t want my last thoughts to be that I owed her, even if she was three months late.

  “You doing okay?” asked Enid.

  I looked up at her and thought that if we’d had more time, and if everything hadn’t been so insane, we could probably have been friends. I wanted to say, I’m about to do something stupid, and incidentally, the world is totally different than we think it is.

  “I’m tired,” I said instead. “Just… everything. Tired.”

  “Any more things in the trees?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Not in the trees.”

  Her gaze got a little too sharp at that, and I thought of all the things I’d have to explain to get around to the effigy in the window. Did she know about the holler people? No. She wasn’t from around here, was she? At one point she’d mentioned being from New Hampshire. Did they have holler people in New Hampshire? I looked down at my coffee cup instead.

  “Let me get you a refill,” she said.

  “I’m about done,” I said, putting my laptop away.

  “Then I’ll get it for you for the road.”

  I left the shop with a hot cup of coffee in my hand and hoped it wasn’t the last one I’d ever drink.

  Just past the coffee shop was an empty gravel lot. The edges had grown up into the unruly hedgerow you get when nobody bothers to weed for a couple of years.

  The hickory tree wasn’t even as tall as I was. It had been cut to the ground a couple times and was sending up suckers with unkillable enthusiasm.

  I crouched down and snapped off a couple of dead twigs at the base and stuffed them in my pocket. Then I looked around to see if anybody had seen me, stealing bits of wood with coffee in one hand. Nobody had.

  I went to the truck, feeling invisible, and as far as I know, nobody saw me go.

  16

  Foxy was waiting for me at her house. She handed me another Tupperware container full of sandwiches. “You’ll want these, I imagine. And have some food.” />
  “This is insane, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Oh, you’re completely out of your head,” said Foxy agreeably, heating up meat loaf in my grandmother’s ancient microwave. She pushed it toward me.

  Tomas came in. I wasn’t sure how much he knew, but he looked at me and said, “It’s a bad idea,” so I figured he knew enough.

  “I know,” I said. “But I have to.” Saying it out loud made it sound even more fragile. Did I? Why? Because somebody had drawn Kilroy on a scrap of paper? “Somebody sent me a note asking for help.”

  Tomas nodded. He went into the back of the house, and I heard a door open and close.

  I was dragging the last forkful of meat loaf through the gravy when he returned. He was wearing a battered leather jacket and hiking boots. “I’m coming with you,” he said.

  I stared at him, blinking stupidly. “What?”

  “Look, my momma would beat me senseless if I let you and Foxy go off without me.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Foxy sharply. “You gotta stay here and take care of the place. We can’t both go.”

  “I’m half your age!” said Tomas.

  “So you got more to live for!”

  “You’re both nuts!” I said, rising out of my chair. “You can’t come with me! I’m going to get killed!”

  “Better to do it in company, then,” said Foxy. “I ain’t scared. Tomas, you’re staying here, and that’s final.” She folded her arms. “It’s your name on the deed. And the power bill.”

  This was not a line of argument I expected her to take. We both stared at Foxy.

  “So?” said Tomas.

  “So you ain’t got a will, so iffen you die, they’re gonna take the whole place and throw Skip out on his ear. And shut off the power. So you gotta live, and maybe that’ll teach you not to die intestate like a damn fool.”

  Tomas’s mouth opened and closed. He looked at me, but there was absolutely nothing I could say to this, and also I was still dealing with the fact that Foxy was coming with me.