Baking for her boyfriend felt like a serious step in her relationship with Eleazar. Sindy wasn’t a natural baker, and she would never get onto Top Chef, but she knew everything needed to taste good and look cute. She took her time, checking and rechecking her measurements.
She looked down at the bowl as she finished mixing everything together. The batter was a deep, earthy brown, with a subtly sweet scent. Maybe it was better to just spoon it into the cups and shake off Hester’s words like a bad dream…
As she picked up her spatula, she felt a pang of regret. Even if Eleazar had no reaction at all, then that wasn’t a waste. She’d know that what Hester told her had been a lie.
She had to know.
A needle waited for her, gleaming on the white countertop. She’d taken it from a dusty pincushion in the parlor drawer, and in here, its presence overwhelmed the entire room. Sindy picked it up and watched the light play off the point as she held the index finger of her left hand over the batter. She was afraid of the pain, but she was far more afraid of the power she felt.
That power wasn’t inside her, not exactly. It was all around her but shut out, as though it had been locked away on the other side of a door. Holding the needle in her hand now, she felt like that door had opened. The power flowed into her and filled her entire body with a glimmering insistence. It demanded release.
Sindy pricked her finger and watched as a ruby-colored droplet of blood welled up around the needle. Turning her hand, she allowed the droplet to fall to the batter. As it fell, she felt the power follow it, like it was a lightning bolt and she was a conductor. Her muscles ached as though she had run a great distance. Her vision went red before the kitchen once again swam into view. She didn’t know when she’d done it, but her finger was in her mouth. She sucked away the little bit of coppery blood, then covered her fingertip with a band aid.
She stirred the batter once. The blood had vanished, but she knew it was there. She could feel it.
She spooned the batter into cupcake liners, baked a whole sheet, waited for them to cool, and then frosted them. When they were finished, she arranged them into a basket and went out into the winter cold.
A rind of snow covered everything. The roads were clear, with pools of salt soaking the ice up. Sindy’s breath was a white plume as she clipped in the direction of the Grant household. She was bundled up, and her skin burned pleasantly in the few places she hadn’t protected from the wind. After the heat and closeness of the kitchen, she felt refreshed but the secret in the cupcakes put a spring in her step that the winter air could not.
In another town, Eleazar Grant’s house might have been huge. It was a two-story colonial with more space than he and his father needed. In Arkham, where the homes were either sprawling mansions or rickety matchboxes, the Grant house was one of the few outliers.
Eleazar’s father Elijah answered the door. He looked a lot like his son, except his perfectly-styled, blonde hair had gone almost white, and he had fine crinkles around his eyes and mouth. Sindy thought that Elijah Grant might be the most attractive man she had ever met. She always had a tough time talking to him without her cheeks lighting up.
“Hello there, Sincere,” Mr. Grant said. “Come in out of the cold.”
If anyone else had called her by her full name, Sindy would have cringed inwardly and grimaced outwardly. But when Elijah Grant said it, her knees threatened to buckle and she felt a warm flush on her cheeks again.
He stepped aside, calling up the stairs, “Eleazar, your young lady is there.”
Sindy liked being called a young lady. She looked up as Eleazar came down to the landing. He smiled when he saw her, like the sun momentarily breaking through a cloudy day.
“What do you have there?” Mr. Grant asked.
Sindy moved the cloth she had over her basket, and suddenly felt like Little Red Riding Hood. There were no wolves or grandmothers around, at least. She held up the basket for inspection. “Cupcakes.”
“They look delicious,” Mr. Grant said.
“They’re for Eleazar.”
“Lucky him. You two kids have fun.” He wandered into the other room, and Sindy heard the television come on. An announcer said something about sports and she tuned out.
“Cupcakes?” Eleazar asked from the landing.
“Uh-huh. I thought I’d bake you something for the holiday.”
The smile broke through again. “Guess you’d better come up then.”
Sindy felt two things then. On one hand, there was the pure and honest affection she felt for him and the joy he was taking in the fact that she’d baked for him. On the other, she was detached, wondering what effect, if any, the cupcakes would have. She held both of these feelings within her at the same time, and both swelled as she watched him.
She went up the stairs and met him at the top. She leaned into her boyfriend and kissed him deeply. She loved how he kissed. He was sensitive and forceful, and his tongue was quite agile. He took her by the hand and led her to his room. It was dark, and had an earthy smell that Sindy associated with teenage boys. Most of the walls were covered with pictures and posters. Most of the floor was covered with dirty clothes.
“So, cupcakes, huh?” He turned around.
Sindy blushed and nodded. She gave him the basket without thinking of the drop of blood she’d added to the batter. Eleazar uncovered the cupcakes and raised his eyebrows. “They look great.”
“Gingerbread with peppermint frosting. I found the recipe on a website.”
He selected one and put the basket down on his chair. He raised it, as though toasting her, and took a big bite.
He looked to be on the edge of exploding into a smile, but then his face just seemed to explode. There was no sound, and no spray of blood and brain matter. His flesh just came apart in dark, staticky shards that shot away from him and melted into the back of a writhing shadow. In an instant, he was no longer eating the cupcake with his normal (and, in Sindy’s opinion, quite kissable) lips. His mouth was a horrid, circular hole that was ringed with curved teeth. His tongue-at least a foot long-snaked out and swirled around his mouth cavity. His pretty eyes faded into bloodless, white orbs. His skin turned slimy and dark.
Worst of all, he still seemed to be smiling.
Sindy was paralyzed. She wanted to scream. She wanted to release the awful pressure building inside her as though she, too, were ready to explode into an inhuman monster. She found she had no breath. The air had been squeezed out of her. There wasn’t even enough to move her body. She was frozen. No force on earth could have moved her.
“What’s wrong, Sin?” the thing asked.
That was enough. Like a hammer through stained glass, she was broken, but free. The shriek that tore from her throat rattled the windows. Even the monster recoiled, though she wouldn’t remember that detail until much later as she asked herself how many times she had kissed that horrible mouth. Right now, the fear was enough.
She ran out of the room, shot down the stairs, and burst out of the house. She heard Mr. Grant say something behind her, but she could not turn. She was terrified that he had turned into the same kind of creature as his son, and she could not take a second transformation on top of the first.
She ran. She had to get as far away from Grant house as she could. She wasn’t certain she could ever feel safe again, but the blind animal panic that consumed her, that suffused her tissues, demanded only that she run.
She didn’t stop until the frigid air made her feel like she was inhaling sheets of glass. Only then did she look around-she had no memory of fleeing the house, only seeing the image of the monster Eleazar had become before her eyes. Everything around her felt entirely new. Arkham, the place she had lived every one of her fourteen years, was an alien landscape under its crust of snow. It was a bright and dangerous place. She stood at a crossroads on one of the sloping streets that fed into the hills. To her right, Arkham Academy and Harwich Hall. To her left, home.
She thought of Abby. They were
still best friends, regardless of their fight. Yes, things were still rocky… and yes, they still hadn’t made up because she’d talked to Hester instead of Abby, but… She needed help. She needed to talk to her.
Sindy remembered the first day of school. Abby had been running down the halls, screaming in terror at something only she could see. What if it was more than that? What if she’d seen something terrible?
The secret of the blood had come from Abby’s grandmother. What if Abby had tried it? What if Bryce Coffin had been turned into one of those things, too? Or… Maybe he hadn’t been transformed. Maybe that was just what he always looked like, and Abby could see his real body. That would explain why she still hadn’t kissed him despite how obvious it was that she wanted to.
She shivered in the cold, her breath rising in great plumes. She had to ask Abby what she’d seen. If anyone could understand it would be her.
41
Bound by Secrets
sindy trudged toward Abby’s house. As she passed by Arkham Academy, she cast a superstitious look at it. It looked like a predator nestled in the perfect hiding spot. The windows were a hundred blank eyes hunting the world for more prey. Sindy shuddered again. She was allowing herself to get spooked. Then she thought of her boyfriend and thought she might not be scared enough.
That put a hurry in her step, driving her to the gates of Harwich Hall. She stopped and looked at the house. In the snow, the Thorndike home was perfect. The lawn was a field of unbroken white and the trees held great fat drops of sugary powder. Sindy took out her phone, thinking that she should have texted Abby earlier and saved herself the walk. But if Abby wasn’t home, Sindy also knew that she might have lost her nerve.
U home?
Waiting for the text in response felt like days, but it was barely a minute.
ya~~~ u here???
Out front
get in here!!!
Sindy smiled. There was no clearer signal that everything would be fine than Abby’s enthusiasm.
Before Sindy was halfway to the door, Abby stood waiting on the threshold. She was a little chubbier than she had been and her face had taken on a childlike roundness. Her green eyes were somehow brighter, looking more and more like precious stones enhanced by the glasses perched on her nose. Her pale complexion turned instantly florid in the cold.
“Hey, Sindy.”
“Abs.”
They paused, and Sindy went in for a hug. Abby’s embrace was grateful, though Sindy needed the contact more. She held Abby against the fear of what she had just seen.
“Are you okay?” Abby murmured into Sindy’s hair.
“No,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Come on. Come inside.”
Abby broke the hug, and Sindy felt abandoned. She clutched Abby’s hand as they went upstairs toward Abby’s room. She saw Bertram in the front hall and smiled at him briefly. At least he wasn’t a monster.
In Abby’s room, Sindy sat on the bed. She hadn’t taken her coat off and Harwich Hall was warm, but she kept on shivering.
“What happened? Is everything okay? Are you still…” Abby’s voice faltered on the last word, and Sindy assumed it had to be because of how she looked.
Sindy focused on her friend, and knew then how she could proceed. She was too brittle to leap into her own story. She needed to be certain she wasn’t crazy. “Abby… I need to know what happened to you on the first day of school, why you were screaming and running down the halls. Okay? I need you to be honest. I promise you, no matter what you say, I won’t think you’re crazy, just… just be honest, all right? I need you tell me the truth.”
Sindy gazed at her friend. Abby looked so like her mother, though there was an undeniable warmth to Abby that Constance could never duplicate. There were too many emotions flashing behind Abby’s clear emerald eyes for Sindy to count, but she could tell when Abby had made her decision.
She listened as Abby told her a terrible story of waking up to find creatures walking among normal people as though they belonged. Then she described them: monsters that looked like they’d risen out of the deepest parts of the ocean. They were so loathsome to the mammalian eye that the only possible reaction was blind panic.
Abby paused, recognizing something in Sindy’s expression. “You’ve seen them too.” It was a statement.
Sindy nodded, a jittery, abortive gesture. “Only one.”
“Who?” Though the way Abby said it, Sindy knew her friend already knew.
“Eleazar.” The name came out in a whisper.
Abby nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what, exactly? Is there anything I could have said that you would have believed?”
“No. I guess not.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten weird about everything. Not when you needed me.”
“It’s okay.”
Sindy hugged Abby, wishing she could be as forgiving as her best friend. Knowing she wasn’t crazy was comforting, but something still wriggled in her mind.
“There are others?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Who?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
Sindy nodded. “Tell me.”
“Okay. Well, there’s Eleazar and his dad. Mr. Harris. Mr. Weatherby. The janitor…”
Sindy’s eyes got wider and wider as Abby ran down the list. She used the term croatan once, a label that made them sound more like a race and less like monsters. ‘Crow’ fit better in her mouth. It was something that she had seen, even if it made no logical sense; the correlation to a tangible creature was enough to hold the insanity at bay. Finally, she asked, “Only men?”
“Yeah. I’ve only ever seen men.”
“What do you think their women are like?”
42
It’s Beginning to Look
a Lot like Dysfunction
Bryce thought that every poor person in Arkham under the age of twenty must have envied the Coffin family Christmas. They probably imagined a tree sitting on top of a colorful mountain of presents that promised untold riches in gifts. They probably pictured him and his mother by the fire in silk pajamas, sipping at eggnog-hers laced with just a nip of brandy-opening gift after gift and sharing broad, white-toothed smiles that only existed on television.
There was indeed a tree in Coffin Manor, and it was fairly tall as far as indoor Christmas trees went, but Bryce and his mother spent little time enjoying it. The tree was in the front room, which was the closest thing to a living room they had, though his mother referred to it alternately as the lounge or parlor. The ceiling in there was vaulted, so it was easy to accommodate trees of twelve to fifteen feet.
It was dripping with perfectly arranged decorations. Marianne Coffin paid strangers good money to have it decorated. None of the ornaments were personal. There were glass icicles, silver balls, a few bells, and candy canes. Once the tree was taken down, Bryce would never see any of those ornaments ever again. In the houses of his friends, the tree would have at least one ornament that hinted at familial love. Something made by the children. Something that said the house was a home.
When people envied his Christmas, they probably pictured the kinds of presents that only the rich kids got: a real car to drive around, remote-control helicopters, or whatever video game console was on the market that year. They probably wouldn’t imagine an envelope with his name scrawled across it, tucked into the boughs of the tree.
Bryce knew that inside there was a message from his mother wishing him a Merry Christmas and a check for one thousand dollars. Bryce didn’t even have to open it to know, because it was the same thing every year. The worst part was that it was always in Harcourt’s handwriting. Bryce had a tidy little collection, and he looked forward to adding a new one to it. Sometimes he liked to fan them out and wonder what real parents got for their children.
It was about a week before Christm
as, and Bryce started the day like any other. While Marianne Coffin slept off her hangover, he was in the game room, death-matching with a bunch of strangers. An entire wall of the room was a screen with his game projected on it. A bunch of futuristic warriors, nearly the same size as Bryce, butchered each other with a variety of bizarre weapons. Bryce didn’t get even a small amount of pleasure from wiping out player after player. He didn’t even react to the kid cursing at him in a foreign language.
“Bryce!”
Bryce took off the headset and turned around. His mother was dressed and made-up. It hardly looked like she had consumed her weight in vodka the night before. Just seeing her like that told Bryce what she was after, but he wasn’t going to go easy on her.
“What?”
“We have company. Turn off your game and get ready.”
“I can’t, Mom. All of these foreign strangers are counting on me. You wouldn’t want to disappoint ‘LOLUSUCKDONG,’ would you?”
Marianne walked over and turned the game off-it was the one thing she knew how to do on any electronic device-and left the room before he could swear at her. He got up, thinking he could just as easily cuss her out in another room, but by the time he found her in the lounge-slash-parlor, she had company: Patience and Ophelia Thomas. Bryce wanted to roll his eyes, but such a juvenile display would only undermine his position.
“And here he is,” Marianne was saying. “Bryce, say hello to Ophelia.”
“Hello, Ophelia. Hello, Mrs. Thomas.”
“Hello, Bryce,” the woman said. She greeted him with an apprehensive smile, but she had nothing to worry about. Bryce rarely used the same tactic twice.
“I was thinking you could show Ophelia around the manor,” Marianne said.
“What a lovely idea, Mother. You’re such a good hostess. What would I ever do without you telling Harcourt to tell me how to be a better person?” Bryce said and turned before he could see the scowl darken his mother’s face. He offered his arm to Ophelia.
Mother of Crows Page 20
