Mother of Crows

by David Rodriguez

  “Aches, pains? Dizziness, nausea? Anything like that?”

  “Nope. I could run a marathon.”

  “It looked like you wanted to.”

  “Um… yeah.”

  “All right, Abby, you’re dismissed. Go right home, and I’ll talk to Mr. Weatherby on your behalf. I would recommend you get your assignments from another student… but don’t mention this to them either.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good. Go home.”

  She looked up at the monster-No, it’s Mr. Harris, your bio teacher-and nodded. His face was still as evil, as terrifying as ever, but she felt safe with him. “Thank you… Mr. Harris.”

  He nodded, and she slinked out of the biology classroom. The halls had cleared of students, and she was glad for that. It was bad enough to realize that monsters weren’t just bedtime stories. It would have been much worse if they had still been swarming around her. Maybe she could get used to the idea at a distance.

  She walked slowly through the hall as the janitor mopped up spilled soda. His gray coveralls had a label over the right breast: MR. TREACH. He was almost human, except for the incongruity of those paws, that head, and the strange shadows thrown on the wall behind him.

  As Abby drew closer to Mr. Treach, she tried to act normal, but her legs grew stiff and her expression, plastic. Pretend he’s got a hunchback or a goiter, she told herself. She wouldn’t call attention to that, would she? She forced herself to smile and nod at him as she passed. Though there was no change in his fishy expression, he did incline his head to her ever so slightly.

  The doors ahead seemed impossibly far. Abby just knew Mr. Treach was waiting for her to look away. Then he would come, grab her with those spindly needle fingers, and sink his awful mouth over her to drill out a cylinder of her flesh. He’s trying to pass as human, she reminded herself. Generally speaking, humans don’t do that sort of thing. She nearly smiled: her voice just then had been Nate’s. Inner-Nate was right. Mr. Treach wasn’t going to do a thing. He probably wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Who had time to eat anyone when they were concentrating on getting dried high-fructose corn syrup out of three-hundred-year-old wooden floors?

  She stole a look at him only when she got to the end of the hall. She was right. He wasn’t even looking. It was almost more perverse that this deep-sea monstrosity was so focused on something as trivial as spilled soda. He dunked his mop in a bucket and slathered more soapy water over the stubborn patch.

  8

  Long Walk Home

  Abby went through the door and sucked in a big lungful of autumn air. The monsters were out of sight. Standing on the doorstep of Arkham Academy, she could have been the only person on earth. The town was just down the hill, but only a tiny slice was visible. The woods blocked everything else.

  As she started the walk home, she resolved to call Nate and Sindy when school let out. Between the two of them, she should be able to make up all her classes. More importantly, she needed Sindy for damage control. She’d probably already friended half of Bryce’s group on Facebook. If people thought she was crazy, Sindy could help convince them otherwise.

  Since she saw the thing that was Mr. Weatherby in the nurse’s office and talked with Mr. Harris in his room, she hadn’t had much time to think. Mr. Weatherby and Mr. Harris were monsters. Monsters that lived among humans and looked like them, too. It was beyond baffling. It was unimaginable.

  How had this remained a secret for so long? Did they only live in Arkham? Were the rest in the ocean or somewhere out in space? Where were they from? If they were anywhere within the fossil record, some scientist would know. Abby refused to believe that she was the first person to discover them. But if someone else knew about them, wouldn’t they have mentioned it?

  Maybe they had. Maybe the monsters had killed them before they could warn the world. Or… Had she imagined everything? The monsters seemed as real as anything else, and Mr. Harris had seemed to know what she was seeing. But she’d had so many headaches… And she had hit her head. As real as this all seemed, there was always the possibility it was only going on in her mind.

  Maybe she had a tumor.

  Abby thought she could either dive right into this to test everything she had seen, or she could wait. She could observe. See if the monsters were obeying some kind of rule. She could do that.

  She would have to warn some people. Probably her mom. How would that conversation go? Mom, I might be crazy, but there are these monsters that look just like people and… wait, where are you taking me? Right to the loony bin. If a Thorndike heiress couldn’t go out drinking with her friends, she definitely couldn’t be crazy. A certain bit of eccentricity was expected; after all, the Thorndike fortune was large enough to even require it, but raving madness? Or worse, low-class conspiracy theories about fish people walking unseen among normal people? That would drive a stake through the heart of the family’s reputation. She could imagine the lectures already: Whatever you do reflects on all of us.

  “Including going stark raving mad,” Abby said aloud. She fought the urge to laugh at the joke, because that’s what crazy people did. They talked to themselves, and they laughed at their own jokes, and they believed in monsters.

  She turned the corner. Below, the town opened up, but she was headed back uphill, toward Harwich Hall. She saw a few people moving around on the road below, just ant-like silhouettes. There was no way to tell if they were human or not. She felt tempted to go into town. Maybe the fish monsters were confined to the school itself.

  Mr. Harris had been right. She should probably lie down.

  As the gates of Harwich Hall came into view, Abby used a smaller, side gate set into the rock wall that blocked much of the property from the road. The wall circled most of the estate, though there were large gaps adjacent to the forest. When Abby was younger, she had asked for a pet a few times and her mother had always insisted it was impossible because of those gaps. Her pet would run away or it would be eaten by the coyotes that lived in the forest. Abby thought now that her mother just hadn’t wanted to deal with the hassle and mess of a pet. She climbed a short flight of stone stairs to a path that eventually led to the front lawn.

  Abby ran through what she was going to tell her mother. Constance had been waiting for her first day at Arkham Academy since Abby was little-probably since she was born-and she had screwed up. She’d either had a psychotic break or she had discovered the most incredible thing in the history of time. Neither story was going win her any points with Constance Thorndike. Abby went through her other options. Maybe she could say it had been a half-day? Constance would probably check. A fire drill? Same problem. A fight? That was even worse than the truth.

  Sick? Sick sounded pretty good. It was almost the truth even. She’d thrown up, gone to the nurse, and they’d insisted she go home. Mr. Harris had seen the whole thing. Abby considered the story critically. She wasn’t used to lying to her mother (or anyone really) but desperate times, and all that. Saying that she had been sick… seemed legit.

  Then there were the monsters. She wanted her mother to be safe, but how safe was total ignorance? It didn’t seem safe. But Mr. Harris seemed to think that it wasn’t safe that Abby knew about the monsters at all. If simple knowledge was dangerous, she might endanger her mother by telling her-and Constance couldn’t see the creatures coming like she could. Maybe she could warn her then, warn her away from being alone with the headmaster. And the janitor. And Mr. Harris? Abby didn’t know. She wanted to trust him, had to, but it all came back to whatever he was.

  She opened the front door, and heard her mother’s voice echoing in the halls. “…concentrate on closing up the east wing.” Abby stepped into the foyer, a wood-paneled chamber that opened into a wide hallway with a staircase that led up to the second floor. She saw her mother first and lost her breath when she saw who Constance was talking to.

  It was Bertram. Or, it was a monster wearing Bertram’s suit, listening patiently to the decrees of one of
the mistresses of the house. She saw the back of its head, where Bertram’s tangled graying hair should have been. Instead, she saw a craggy mass of spines and fins that barely made sense. The Bertram-creature, with its sloping shoulders and asymmetrical features, seemed ersatz. It didn’t look like the creation of evolution, but a creature with a fallible creator who had wanted something horrible, but didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the project.

  “Abby?” Constance said, noticing her daughter standing in the doorway. Bertram turned as well, cocking its-his-inhuman head.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, trying to block out the creature behind her mother. Light inside Harwich Hall was seldom bright, and Bertram’s shadow was wispy and faded, yet no less active for it.

  “Why are you home?”

  “I threw up,” she blurted, before she could second-guess herself. “I threw up. In Mr. Harris’s class. I stayed behind to ask about college prep, and it hit me, and I threw up in the sink. On his desk.”

  Constance covered the distance between them in three graceful steps. She laid the back of her hand over Abby’s forehead. “You don’t feel feverish.”

  “I’m not. I feel a lot better, but Mr. Harris said it would be better if I went home. I can get my assignments from Nate and Sindy tonight.”

  “All right,” her mother said. “Go up to your room, and I’ll have Bertram bring you something to eat.”

  Abby scowled at the thought of Bertram in her room.

  Constance misinterpreted the look. “Don’t worry. Clear broth and some dry toast.”

  Abby gave Bertram a final look as she trudged upstairs. The butler didn’t seem to react. She wondered how she was going to live in a house with one of these monsters. She didn’t even know what they were. She supposed that would be the first step.

  9

  The Shadow Ones

  Abby was in bed with the covers pulled to her waist. Her laptop and books were scattered across the bedspread, and a serving tray perched haphazardly on her nightstand. She’d had dinner and she’d already called Nate and Sindy. Nate had been concerned, but she put him off with a simple excuse about the time of the month. Sindy, who had witnessed her fainting spell, was harder to mollify. Eventually, she accepted the sickness excuse and told Abby that smoothing things over with Bryce’s friends hadn’t been difficult. Abby didn’t care if that entire group thought she was crazy, so long as Bryce didn’t.

  Now she was putting everything behind her by focusing on her homework. She had an impressive pile of it to work through, especially considering it was only the first day. Constance came into her room as she was in the home stretch.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Much better. Thank you.”

  “Looking forward to school tomorrow?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.” Constance turned to go.

  “Mom?”

  She paused. “Yes?”

  “I was thinking. I don’t know if… I think there might be some people in Arkham you should stay away from.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, ‘stay away from’?”

  “You know. Like they might be dangerous or whatever.”

  “Dangerous? What made you think that?”

  “Well, you know. Crime and all that.”

  Constance laughed. “Crime? According to any reputable statistic, Arkham has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Do you know why that is?”

  “Extensive cover-ups?”

  Constance’s face fell, and Abby knew she had gone a step too far. “Because of neighborliness. Because of a tight-knit community taking care of one another. We know everyone here, Abby. We know every name and every family, and those ties go back generations. Look at the Endicotts. You’re friends with Sincere, just as I was friends with her mother, and my mother was with her grandmother.”

  “There’s no crime because Sindy and I are friends?”

  “In a larger sense, yes. I don’t think I have anyone to worry about.”

  “Well, no, but what about specific people?”

  “Abby, did something happen?”

  “No! No, nothing like that. I was just going to school yesterday, and I’m, you know, growing up. I thought…”

  “You don’t have to. That’s why we live in a nice, small town like Arkham. If you were in some pit like Providence or Boston, I would be telling you who to watch out for. That attitude, believing that there are strangers that you should just ‘stay away from,’ promotes hatred, and racism, and distrust. It’s why cities are such ugly places.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry, Abby. You had a rough day, but tomorrow will be so much better. You’ll see.” Constance came back in and brushed a kiss over Abby’s forehead. Her lips were cold and dry.

  Constance Thorndike was right. The next day was better. Abby woke up without the aches and pains of the previous day. She was rested and ready for her day at schoolher first day, as she was considering this one a do-over. She felt she’d earned that. When she walked into school, the monsters were there among the normal students and faculty members. She saw them as students, as teachers, and as personnel, talking to normal humans like they weren’t giant, humanoid fishes directly out of nightmare. Not a single one reacted to Abby any differently, either.

  People pointed and whispered as she passed. There she was, the freak who had passed out in the cafeteria and run screaming from the nurse’s office. Half the school had witnessed her full-blown freak-out. By this point, the other half had probably heard the embellished version through the school’s rumor mill. Abby wilted under the scrutiny, but forced herself to persevere. She had to hold her head high and wait for the whole thing to blow over. Some new scandal would emerge in the halls; people would forget. She hoped for the discovery of a drug dealer, or an exotic pet smuggler on campus.

  The monsters acted like the humans. If they were masquerading as students, they leaned in and talked with their friends about the crazy new girl who’d run shrieking through the halls. If they were teachers, they did their best to studiously ignore her. All of them were going about the business of being human. Of acting normal. That was the strangest part. Here were these inhuman, terrifying creatures, and all they were doing was being crushingly mundane.

  Abby paid more attention to them as she passed. Gradually, she could distinguish individuals based on their spine or fin placement, and even by their skin tone, which ranged from an oily black all the way through purple and blue. Several had prominent scars, though she didn’t want to imagine how they’d gotten those. She couldn’t shake the sense they were some kind of failed Frankenstein experiment. Their hunched backs, irregular-length arms, missing fingers, and asymmetrical eyes all seemed to be evidence that they had been unnaturally created by something that was either incompetent, or didn’t care about standards of human-or even mammalian-beauty.

  There were so many. Abby couldn’t keep an exact count. There were more than she thought there were. There were more than she wanted, but really… just one was more than anyone would want. She thought that maybe, at a rough guess, there was one monster for every nine normal people that she passed. It was a staggering number. 10% made them one of the most significant minorities in the school. If they appeared in the school census, they would likely be just below Asian/Pacific Islander. Abby imagined they cut across human ethnic lines as well: Mr. Weatherby had looked white, while Mr. Harris was black. Really, Mr. Weatherby was more of a blue, and Mr. Harris was a kind of oil slick indigo, but thinking about that only muddied the water.

  Another thing occurred to her as she took her secret census: every single one of these creatures was masquerading as male. There was not a single girl or woman amongst them. Abby considered some possibilities. The most obvious was that the gender of the monster had no bearing on his chosen shape. The second was that they were some kind of… mono-gendered species that reproduced by cloning. She’d seen some
nature show about fish that did that. There were also fish that could spontaneously change sex when they needed to.

  A more chilling explanation struck her. Maybe the females weren’t human enough to pass.

  Nate found her in biology class. Mr. Harris was writing on the blackboard when Nate slid onto the stool next to her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “This is just like our old school.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Second day in, and we’re already the bottom of the heap.”

  She wanted to correct him, but Mr. Harris turned and started the lecture on the five kingdoms of life. Nate, as bitter as he was, was entirely correct. They had been the nerdy bookworms at Mather Primary-Sindy notwithstanding-and they were poised to become that here, with a generous side of crazy.

  Sindy found her at lunch. “You look better,” she blurted.

  “Thanks.”

  “Come on.” She tugged at Abby’s wrist. “The best thing to do is just jump right back in.”

  As they joined Bryce’s group, Delilah, Bryce, Hunter, and Ashley fell all over Abby with concern. They asked her about her fainting spell; they wondered if she was okay. Abby felt the heat in her cheeks as she told them she was doing much better. “I think I hit my head,” she said.

  “Probably why you were screaming your head off,” Hunter said.

  “Oh. Um. Yeah.”

  “Wish I did that,” he said, shaking his head wistfully.

  “Next time you’re gonna pass out, warn us,” Bryce said.

  “Sure, I’ll…” She trailed off as one of the monsters put his lunch tray down right next to Sindy. He got the beef stroganoff, Abby noted with the absurd detail of the addled mind.

  “Hey Laze,” Hunter said.

  Eleazar Grant was one of the monsters. Sindy shot him a smile. It was the winsome one, the one that turned boys to jelly. Abby’s stomach turned at the thought. Her friend liked a monster. She liked the false face that the monster put on to seem human. She thought about Sindy trying to kiss his lamprey mouth and looked down at her own tray until her stomach settled.