Here There Are Monsters

by Amelinda Bérubé

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Hey!” A shrill voice cut across the yard. Deirdre came storming through the grass, her hands in fists. “Hey!”

  “Oh, great,” I sighed. William raised a hand to wave, but Deirdre graced him only with a single baleful look before focusing on me.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “Target practice,” William supplied again.

  “Deir, you should totally see this,” I told her, William’s blunt friendliness shaming me into following suit. “You’ll love it.”

  But Deirdre was having none of it. “You’re out here with him? You never want to go exploring with me, but you’ll come here with him?”

  “Will you stop being ridiculous and just listen for a second?” I caught her elbow, tried to pull her over. “This is the coolest thing ever!”

  “You’re a traitor.” She yanked her arm away from me. “Bringing him here to my place! Him! How could you? You’re supposed to be my champion!”

  “Hey,” William said, finally getting defensive, “I’ve been coming down here since before they even built your house—”

  “He doesn’t belong here!” Deirdre shouted over him. “You’re siding with the invaders! Traitor!”

  “We’re invaders too, Deirdre! Nobody even owns this lot!”

  Her lip curled. “You like him, don’t you?”

  Oh my God. I didn’t dare look at William. I opened my mouth to say something withering, but she cut me off.

  “You do!” Her eyes were bright, threatening tears. “You’re choosing him instead of me!”

  “Right, because I talked to him for five minutes!”

  “Just wait until he figures out what you’re really like. He won’t like you back for very long!” She glowered at William. “You watch it! You just watch yourself! I warned you!”

  “Whatever, Queen of Melodrama,” I snapped, but she was already pushing her way back toward the house, leaving me to kick my heel down into the grass in thwarted fury.

  “Crap,” William said, looking stricken. “I probably shouldn’t shoot here anymore.”

  “Are you seriously going to pay attention to her bullshit?”

  “It’s a safety thing. Nobody used to use this place. But if she was here sometime and I didn’t know it…what if she ran out in front of me? What if I missed?”

  “Let’s go talk to my parents,” I blazed. “She can’t just throw a tantrum and expect—”

  “It’s fine. Really. We can use my yard, out back.” He hesitated. “Mostly I come down here to get away from my dad, is all.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” I insisted. “Look, give me your number. I’ll let you know. Okay?”

  He brightened at that. Just a tiny bit. He shouldn’t have let it show, but still, I saw it. We spent a moment punching digits into our phones, the crickets singing around us. I pocketed mine and waved a hurried goodbye.

  “Text me,” he called after me.

  Beneath my irritation with Deirdre, a weird satisfaction pushed its way up, an optimism. Something sprouting, finding the light.

  Part Two

  William

  Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for

  Although it is good here, and green;

  You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,

  You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

  —Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Dark Pines Under Water”

  Eight

  I wake to the pale beginnings of daylight, to footfalls overhead in the kitchen. It takes me a heartbeat to remember why my pillow smells like smoke, why tension and misery are crouched waiting for me, seeping in with consciousness.

  Deirdre. Still not back.

  Dad slouches at the kitchen table in front of the laptop, poking disconsolately at it, and looks up as I come into the kitchen.

  “I just fell asleep, that’s all. The other night.” Tears well up at the confession. Some champion. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I don’t know how it even happened.”

  Dad gets up to pull me into a hug. I fight for composure while he murmurs reassurances.

  “Where’s Mom?” I croak eventually.

  “Still in bed. She was awake most of the night, anyway. Let’s keep quiet so she can get some rest, okay?”

  I nod, hurriedly wiping my eyes. He gives my shoulders a last squeeze. “I’m going to make some more coffee. You want some?”

  While he rinses out the carafe, I lean against the patio door. The green wood of the balcony is marbled with streaks of water. It must have rained last night. That’s not good. Officer Leduc said rain would wash away her trail, make it harder for the dogs to pick up her scent. Not that they had any luck yesterday, apparently.

  And on the railing…what the hell?

  I push the door open, then the screen, ignoring the chilly bite lingering in the air. Lined up on the railing are three, four, five little bone-pale ovals.

  Skulls. Like the ones Deirdre collected from the woods.

  “Dad?”

  I try to keep my voice calm, but I must sound freaked out anyway, because he hurries to join me. “What? What is it?”

  I point. “Were those…were those here last night?”

  “Not that I saw.” He frowns at them, picks one up between two fingers, and then sets it down again, scrubs his hand against his jeans. “Well. That’s not creepy at all, is it?”

  “Who would do that?” I demand.

  Dad shakes his head. “I was wondering more how they’d get up here.” Fair point; there’s nothing to climb on. “Maybe it was an animal of some kind. You know how Mog used to leave critters lined up on the doorstep?”

  I did hear a bell last night. But it was never bones that Mog left behind as presents. The coffee maker gurgles in the kitchen, breaking the silence.

  “We’ll tell the police about it,” Dad says, “just in case. Leave them there and come on inside for now.”

  I follow him reluctantly, but linger at the door, still watching the bones on the railing. Like they might scuttle out of sight if I turn my back. Dad’s hand on my shoulder startles me; he passes me a steaming mug that’s almost too hot to hold. I think of the sword spinning out into the dark, the lights beckoning in the woods. An idea kindles coldly into life.

  “Dad, do you think the police would let me help look?”

  “They didn’t let me,” he says bleakly, and I wince.

  “It’s just that—she—I was in her room last night. And I found my sword. On her bed, under the leaves.” His brows quirk in weary puzzlement. I stumble on. “I know it sounds dumb, but it was like it was supposed to be some sort of message. I think she wanted me to come looking for her. And last night, I heard this bell, it was just like Mog’s, and I thought maybe—”

  Dad sighs and rubs his forehead.

  “Skye—honey—it doesn’t really matter who she wanted to come looking for her or why she went into the woods. We have to let the police do their job. Okay?”

  “But what if it’s some kind of lead?” I hate the pleading note in my voice. I sound like a little kid.

  “Well, I suppose you could tell the police about it. I don’t know what kind of lead that could really give them, but no harm in trying.” He fixes me with a look. “But you stay out of those woods. Got it?”

  I stare into my coffee to avoid his eyes. It’s true—there’s nothing I could do out there. If she were just waiting somewhere to hear my voice, they’d have found her in about five minutes.

  There’s a knock at the front door, and Dad hurries to answer it. I trail over to the computer. It’s open to the latest post on the search page: Deirdre’s smiling face again, a non-update—there’s nothing to tell—and a plea for information that’s followed by an endless string of useless mealymouthed comments.

 
I hope she’s enjoying this. Having everyone’s absolute, undivided attention.

  When I stab at the track pad to close the tab, a satellite image of our neighborhood fills the screen. Our street is a gentle curve, the last clean line of civilization before the wilderness takes over. There’s the blank, brown expanse of the empty lot, the brush that fades back into the woods, a gray haze at its edges. The zigzag pencil line of the creek slices through the trees, eventually meeting another that snakes off in a different direction, off-screen to the west.

  She always wanted to know what was back there. I scroll across to follow it, a thin porcelain crack running through the green expanse of the woods. The creek ends in a huge beige oval—dead grass, maybe?—that eats into the forest like a patch of mold. The water widens into a black swath down its middle.

  That beige tumor is the size of the whole subdivision and then some. Miles across. I can’t stop staring at it.

  Dad returns to the kitchen with Officer Leduc right behind him. He points out the bones on the railing, prompts me to explain how I found the sword. I leave out the part where I chucked it across the garden. The story doesn’t seem to spark any insights, though he listens seriously and jots down notes as we speak.

  “You’ve kept your doors locked? Anyone else have a key?”

  “No one,” Dad says. “I guess Skye was…out for a bit last night. But other than that…”

  “Deirdre had some bones like that,” I find myself saying. Officer Leduc and Dad both blink at me in surprise, and my face heats with that same old secondhand embarrassment. “She was collecting them or something; I don’t know. She had them in a box a few weeks ago.”

  “Well.” Officer Leduc frowns. “We’ll bring the dogs back around, I guess. Just in case. Mr. Mackenzie, maybe you could check her room and see if this collection is still there?”

  Dad nods, but it’s me he’s looking at. You didn’t tell us about this, the look says, and I dodge it, reach for the computer instead.

  “Um…out of curiosity…what is that?” I point at the beige oval on the screen. Dad leans over to look, casts an inquiring glance to Officer Leduc.

  “The long swamp,” Officer Leduc supplies. “At the bottom of the valley, see? That part of the road used to flood every spring.”

  On the other side of the pale patch, a cross street runs along another expanse of woods, almost as deep. I scroll down past the swamp, down, down. The green sea seems trackless in this direction, bottomless, marked only once by a long, straight scar for power lines. It takes forever before I find another road, all the way out past the next little satellite suburb. When the gray line of pavement finally appears on the screen, Dad sits back, letting out a little puff of breath like someone’s hit him.

  “It’s huge,” he says, hugging his coffee cup close. “I didn’t realize—my God.”

  “We’re focusing on the immediate area,” Officer Leduc puts in firmly. “A two-mile radius. She can’t be moving very fast.”

  Dad stares at the screen, nodding, not looking at him.

  “Here, look.” Officer Leduc takes over the track pad, drags the screen back to our neighborhood. “This is where we’re focusing our search today. Okay?” He points to the few houses scattered up the hill at the end of the street. “We’ve got our radius divided up into sections, and we’re going through them one by one. I’m guessing we’ll probably finish up out here”—he circles a patch of the green sea, out past the end of the houses—“for today, if we make good time, but really we just have to wait and see how things unfold. And like I said, this is our top priority. Right?”

  Dad nods, keeps nodding, his eyes fixed on the screen. Eventually he sets his mug down, slaps his hands against his thighs, and strides from the room, muttering something about taking a shower. I poke at the track pad, pan back up to the long, pale wound in the green depths. I wonder how deep that water is this time of year. It must be cold.

  “Maybe she went that way,” I say hesitantly. “Along the creek.”

  Officer Leduc gives me a somber look, then turns back to the screen with a sigh.

  “Anything’s possible,” he says quietly. “But it’d be mighty cold without boots.”

  * * *

  Mom’s already on the phone when she comes striding into the kitchen, her hair still sticking up in frosted tufts, her eyes puffy and red. She’s giving deceptively brisk instructions to someone at work, something about blockers that need to be dealt with so they don’t fuck up the deployment date. Finally she drops the phone onto the counter and scrubs her hands through her hair, drawing a deep, shaky breath. Not looking at me, hunched over my cold mug at the table beside her.

  “Have the police already come by?” She’s still using her manager voice, sharp and demanding. “Why didn’t anyone wake me?”

  I pull away from the interrogation. “Dad said you needed—”

  “I told him to wake me up!”

  “All they said was that—”

  “Never mind,” she sighs, yanking the ties of her bathrobe closed. “I’ll find out for myself.”

  The front door opens and closes again with a bang that echoes through the whole silent house. The distant drone of the helicopter shivers through the walls. Outside, a bark and jingle and a pair of men’s voices announce the return of the K-9 unit. From the window above the sink, I can just see the bushy tail of a big German shepherd weaving back and forth around the feet of the balcony.

  After a couple of circuits, it tosses its head, pulls its ears back; its tail curls down between its legs, and despite the encouragement of its handlers, it shrinks backward, into the garden and flattens itself into the dirt, whimpering. Even when they urge it forward, it won’t move. As the police officers stand over the dog, making gestures of bafflement, it takes off like a shot, bolting back to the road, leaving the officers to chase after it.

  I don’t know anything about police dogs, but I don’t think that’s normal.

  Not that you could blame the dog for wanting to get the hell out of here. I know the feeling.

  How hungover are you, I text William. The phone chirps with an answer almost right away, surprising me.

  Been worse, why

  Arrows today?? Rly need to leave the house

  I hear you. Can’t use the empty lot tho, too many ppl.

  Right. I sit back, resisting the feeling that the walls are sidling in closer around me. But then another message pops onto the screen.

  Fam is out this morning. Come over? Will make pancakes

  “Dad?” I yell, stuffing the phone in my pocket. “Dad, I’m going over to William’s!”

  I’m out the door without waiting to see if he heard me, plunging through the swarm of activity in the driveway, pulling the hood of my sweater up over my ears, blocking out the cameras and the uniforms and the pitying glances from strangers. Mom steps out of the mobile headquarters, letting the door slap closed behind her, just as I’m hurrying past.

  “Skye? Skye!”

  “I’m going to William’s,” I toss back at her.

  “Are you kidding me?” I recognize the tremor in her voice, and I hunch my shoulders, walk faster. It’s the sound of her cool fraying, at its limit. If I stay, I’m about to get thirty hours’ worth of fear and wrath and no sleep in a single screaming payload. That’s the way she works, hoarding it under a collected and rational shell until it cracks under the strain. “Your sister is missing, in case you hadn’t noticed!”

  “I’ll be back later.”

  “You’re just going to leave? Again? This is your family, Skye! This is why this happened in the first place, because you couldn’t spend so much as an evening—”

  I raise my hand to ward it off, don’t turn around, keep walking. When I finally give in and glance back, she’s stalking back inside, her arms folded, her hand at her mouth. Dad’s about to get it. Better him than me.


  Nine

  September

  William got the empty lot two afternoons a week, despite Deirdre’s furious protests. And sometimes I’d join him. Not often enough to make it weird. But sometimes. We spent the hours shooting mostly in companionable silence. Stealing a sliver of time to escape our families.

  But he’d text me other times to hang out with Sophie. Kevin too, sometimes. Kevin was aloof at first, but when Sophie greeted me with a peal of Skye’s here!, he didn’t dare hold out for long. Suddenly, the evenings I used to spend avoiding Deirdre were gloriously full of normal company: playing video games on the Wii in Sophie’s basement that made us “dance” to terrible pop anthems till we were breathless and laughing; sneaking bottles from Kevin’s dad’s beer fridge; roaming the neighborhood like we owned it, though there wasn’t much of anywhere to go.

  “I hate living out here,” Sophie said.

  We were leaning on a crumbling fence that roped off a long, green field tumbling down on one side of the road. The sagging gray barn marked halfway to the highway. The field ended, like everything did, at the woods, the murky green border of another country. The sun sank slowly toward the far edge of the valley, gilding the distant pines, turning the humidity into a thin rose-gold haze.

  “It’s fucking boring,” Sophie grumbled. “There’s never anything to do.”

  “Yeah, but we’d survive the zombie apocalypse.” Kevin smirked. “Right?”

  “Oh my God, don’t start with that again.” She turned to me. “Have you been sorted, Skye? Survivor or not?”

  Beside her, William grinned. “Three guesses, Soph.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “It practically is the zombie apocalypse out here. What’s that movie where the guy gets out of bed and everyone’s been zombified and he doesn’t even notice?”

  “Shaun of the Dead,” William supplied.

  “Whatever.”

  “We’d be good for nuclear war too,” he went on cheerfully. “There’s a reason that bunker’s out here.”

  “What bunker?” I asked.