The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart

by Lauren DeStefano

  Lionel would have thought the blue creature had gone to sleep, but he could still see that foreign blue glow in Marybeth’s opened eyes. The blue creature was watching him. Lionel crouched to the ground and held out his hand. Marybeth’s nostrils flared as the blue creature sniffed him.

  “What are you?” Lionel asked, more to himself than to the creature. The creature was not violent, but he didn’t like that it had hidden Marybeth away somewhere. Her body was right in front of him, but she was as gone as she had been the other day when he found the lantern by the river.

  “Will you come out?” he said. “Your coat was so lovely and blue. I’d like to see it again.”

  The creature closed its eyes and slept.

  Once Lionel was sure that the blue creature would not awaken, he took Marybeth’s wrist and held his fingers to her pulse point. He felt Marybeth’s heart throbbing gently, as the hearts of humans did. But beside that heartbeat he felt another that galloped like hooves against the hard ground.

  All night Lionel sat beside Marybeth and the blue creature and kept watch. He was still awake when the rooster crowed and the morning light began to fill the cracks in the barn walls. He had been watching Marybeth’s sleeping face, trying to determine which one of them was in control. Sometimes her lip would pull back in a snarl, and always the eyebrows were drawn together. Even in sleep her face was troubled.

  He shook Marybeth’s shoulder. He knew that the blue creature was still wary of him and he didn’t want to anger it, but Mrs. Mannerd would be awake soon and wondering where they’d gone.

  Marybeth’s body stirred. She cringed when the smell of the barn reached her. It was like mold and old manure. She pushed herself upright, blinking, and Lionel could see that she was Marybeth again. The cold hit her all at once, and her lip shook as she shivered. “Am I dreaming?”

  “No,” Lionel said. “I followed you here. We have to go back now.” It was strange even to him that he should be the voice of reason, but Marybeth wasn’t entirely herself these days and he didn’t want Mrs. Mannerd locking her in the house.

  Marybeth staggered to her feet and grasped a hay bale for support. She started walking for the door.

  Lionel followed her.

  “I remember this,” she said. “I thought I was dreaming.”

  Her eyes were no longer blue. They were familiar, but still Lionel sensed there was something that wasn’t right about the way she stared ahead.

  She walked out into the chilly morning air. She stopped to look at the farmhouse. It was small and colonial, with a tattered wooden fence whose paint was stripped down to mossy wood.

  Lionel stared at it, too. But he did not understand what about it had captured Marybeth’s attention. It was not very different from the red house where they lived, or any of the other houses they’d passed on their way here.

  Marybeth didn’t walk toward the house, though. Instead, she walked even farther from the main road, until she had led them to a river overrun with weeds.

  “This is the river that runs all the way to our house,” she said. “I’ve seen it when Mrs. Mannerd takes us into town. I asked her once, and she said it ran clean through the entire state.” Her breath came out in little clouds. “The water must be freezing cold, but when I fell in, I didn’t feel cold at all.”

  “What did you feel?” Lionel asked.

  “Frightened, at first,” Marybeth said. “It was strange. All in one second I thought, ‘I’m never going to be old like Mrs. Mannerd. The veins in my hands will never look like maps.’”

  Lionel looked at Marybeth’s hands. They were starting to turn blue from the cold. She knelt at the water’s edge and looked inside. “I never thought about how dangerous water was before. It seems so pretty and harmless. How many other pretty things are dangerous, do you suppose?”

  “Anything can be dangerous,” Lionel said. He turned his head at the sound of a door squeaking. Someone was coming out of the farmhouse. He grabbed Marybeth’s arm and tried to pull her toward the trees so that they could hide.

  She resisted. There was a flash of blue in her eyes, and when she hissed, it was so fierce that Lionel let go. He backed two steps away. If the creature was in charge, he didn’t want it to run away in fear, nor did he want it to attack him.

  But Marybeth came back immediately this time, and her face went pale. “Lionel? I—” She sobbed.

  “Oh, no no no, don’t cry,” Lionel said eagerly. “It’s all right. I shouldn’t have gotten so close. I won’t do it again.” He was finding it difficult to do all this talking. He spoke to Marybeth more than he spoke to anyone, but even with her he didn’t have to do it often. But now, with this untrusting creature under her skin, he would have to learn to use his words before he acted. “Someone is coming. We can hide in those trees.”

  It was too late, though. A voice called from the top of the embankment, “What are you children doing by that river? Don’t you know you could drown?”

  CHAPTER

  6

  At the kitchen table in the farmhouse, Marybeth ate the scrambled eggs like she’d never seen food before. She even drank Lionel’s milk, not that he minded. He was too busy trying to act human to be bothered with breakfast. He sat at the table and tried to find a place to rest his hands.

  The old woman chuckled at this. “If you’re going to keep coming back here, I’ll have to get another cow for milk.”

  This was the second time Marybeth had spent the night in that barn, and the second time the old woman made her breakfast. The old woman didn’t seem to mind. Unlike Mrs. Mannerd, she did not have a house filled with children asking for things, and she had a great many things to give. Her pantry was full, and it was a big house.

  “Don’t you want your eggs?” the old woman asked Lionel.

  He shook his head.

  “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

  “No, thank you,” he said. The words stuck in his throat.

  “He likes to eat things he finds outside,” Marybeth said. “There are berry bushes by our house.”

  “You have to be careful with those,” the old woman said. “Lots of berries are poison.”

  “Lionel always knows the difference.” She smiled across the table at him, and Lionel wished that the creature, whatever it was, would leave her. She was acting like herself this morning, but last night the animal had once again given Lionel cause to be afraid. He wasn’t afraid that the animal would harm him, but rather that it would take over completely, and Marybeth would be gone.

  “Eat up,” the old woman said. “I’ll take you home. Your mother must be worried sick.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Marybeth said. She didn’t correct the old woman and say that Mrs. Mannerd wasn’t her mother.

  Marybeth did her best to look the part of a normal girl. She brushed her teeth and kept them pearly white, and she braided her hair, and she said “please” and “thank you.” But normal girls had mothers, and there was nothing she could do to make up for that. All she could do was play along when people assumed that she had one.

  The sound of footsteps caused Lionel to tense. His nostrils flared, and all at once he smelled something similar to the air inside the barn.

  Across the table, Marybeth raised her head. Her pupils dilated, like an animal that had just been startled. Lionel watched her. Even when the creature wasn’t in charge, she was becoming less like a girl and more like a wild thing herself.

  The footsteps came down the stairs, which groaned and creaked as though someone were trying to pry off their boards. Marybeth shrank in her chair. She set down her fork and hid her hands under the table.

  When the man entered the kitchen, Marybeth’s tension didn’t ease up, even though the man looked perfectly ordinary. He wore pinstriped pajamas and had messy hair. He saw Lionel and Marybeth at the table, and he said, “What’s this?”

  “I’ve found children in the barn again,” the old woman said. “Two of them this time.”

  “Well, you c
an’t keep them,” the man said. “Take them back.”

  “I know that,” the old woman said. She looked at Lionel and Marybeth and said, “This is my son, Reginald. He forgets his manners in the mornings.”

  Marybeth stared at her plate. Her appetite was gone.

  “Are you all done?” the old woman said. “Come on, then, I’ll give you a lift back home. That is, if you remember where it is this time.”

  There was a low growl in Marybeth’s throat, like the one she’d given before she lunged on the hyena boy, but only Lionel heard it.

  “I remember where we live,” he said.

  Marybeth stood, and Lionel followed her at a close distance. Something was troubling her and he would have liked to hold her hand, but he was afraid of summoning the blue creature again. And he couldn’t ask her what was the matter, not with the old woman around.

  The old woman led them to a green pickup truck that was parked on the grass. “Didn’t learn to use this contraption until my Abner died, God rest his soul,” the old woman said.

  Mrs. Mannerd was running out of the little red house even before the truck had made it down the driveway. Lionel did his best to make himself into an opossum; he did not care to do any more speaking.

  “Oh, Marybeth, not again,” Mrs. Mannerd said, when Marybeth and Lionel climbed out of the car.

  The old woman stepped out of the car. She had a very kind face, and it seemed to put Mrs. Mannerd at ease. The old woman was not the sort of dangerous person Mrs. Mannerd had warned Lionel about. “I do apologize,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “I don’t know what has gotten into these two. They’ve never wandered off like this before.”

  “It was no trouble,” the old woman said, and despite her smile Lionel could sense that she was sad. “It’s nice having children on the farm again, even if only for a quick breakfast.”

  “That’s very generous, but they won’t be troubling you again. Lionel, Marybeth, in the house.”

  Marybeth hesitated. There was something about the old woman that she liked. She was staring at her face and trying to think of what it was.

  “Come on,” Lionel said.

  He began walking toward the house, and Marybeth followed him just as she always did.

  CHAPTER

  7

  As she moved about the kitchen preparing for breakfast, Mrs. Mannerd told Mr. Porter that she was coming to her wit’s end. “That Lionel is one thing,” she said. “He’s never been quite right, but even he never ran away before all of this. And now Marybeth! My only bit of sanity among the lot of these children has lost her marbles.”

  Lionel and Marybeth were huddled together with their ears pressed to the floor vent in the girls’ bedroom, listening.

  Marybeth sat up and leaned against the wall. “It’s true,” she said. “I am losing my marbles. I walked that whole way to the farm, and I thought I was dreaming it.” She looked at Lionel. “What if I wander somewhere more dangerous next?”

  “It always seems to be that barn,” Lionel said. “Maybe the blue creature likes hay.”

  “We have our own barn here,” Marybeth said.

  “Ours has animals in it,” Lionel said. “Maybe the blue creature likes to be alone.”

  Marybeth shook her head. “There’s something about that barn. And that old woman.” Her breaths came quicker. The difference was slight, but Lionel noticed. “And that man.”

  Marybeth hadn’t braided her hair for days now, and she began to tug at a piece of it. She was thinking of the man—the old woman’s son—but she didn’t have the words to describe what the thought of him did to her nerves. She felt a heart begin to pound in her chest, and she knew that the heart was not her own.

  It was Tuesday. Errand day. It was the one day of the week that Mrs. Mannerd was allowed any reprieve from the children, or so she liked to say.

  But that morning, once the older ones had gone off to school, she told Lionel and Marybeth, “Get your coats. You’re coming into town with me.”

  “What about our lessons?” Marybeth asked.

  “They’ll resume tomorrow.” Mrs. Mannerd did not like to interfere with the children’s education; with no parents and no inheritance to help them get by, they would need their brains. But she worried at the thought of leaving that poor tutor alone with Marybeth in her current state, wandering off as she had begun to. Lionel was no help. He would only follow her, if he weren’t too busy gnawing on the table legs like a beaver.

  Lionel and Marybeth followed Mrs. Mannerd out to the car. It was a Cadillac that used to be the color of a manzanilla olive but now resembled a rust-spotted Dalmatian, and it was old and took several turns in the ignition before it sparked to life.

  “Marybeth,” Mrs. Mannerd said as she backed the car down the long dirt driveway. “Why don’t you put those pretty braids in your hair anymore?”

  “I forgot,” Marybeth said.

  Mrs. Mannerd caught Marybeth’s eyes in the mirror. With her long hair fanning around her shoulders and without her spectacles, Marybeth looked like a different girl completely.

  Mrs. Mannerd had found Marybeth’s spectacles in the leaves near the river and was patiently waiting for Marybeth to admit she was nearsighted and ask to have them back. But if Marybeth was pretending to have perfect vision, she was doing a convincing job of it.

  “If you children are on your best behavior with me today, I’ll let you have a treat. How’s that? I’ll take you to the library and you can look at anything you’d like.”

  “Even the encyclopedias?” Lionel asked.

  “I suppose it’s been long enough,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “As long as you promise not to pretend you’re a lion and chase the children through the house again.”

  Lionel hadn’t been pretending. On the afternoon that he had chosen to be a lion, he was merely trying to protect himself from the older ones when they had barricaded the door so he couldn’t go outside to feed his wild rabbits. One small boy was no match for a herd of six monstrous baboons with fangs that extended to their chins when they laughed. Only a lion could best them.

  But he knew that he could never make Mrs. Mannerd see reason, and so he said, “Yes, I promise.”

  “Well, all right then,” Mrs. Mannerd said.

  Marybeth nudged him. “Say thank you,” she whispered.

  Lionel made a sour face, and she nudged him again.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Mannerd,” he said. The words stuck to his tongue, and he fought the urge to hiss.

  He saw the reflection of Mrs. Mannerd’s raised eyebrows in the mirror. “You’re most welcome, young man.”

  “I’m not a young man,” Lionel said. “I’m going to grow up to be a leopard, or maybe a bear.”

  Mrs. Mannerd sighed.

  Once they reached the center of town and stepped out of the car, Marybeth and Lionel truly did try their best to behave. Marybeth walked slowly and with poise; she didn’t know what would cause the blue creature to awaken, and she didn’t want to provoke it.

  Lionel walked beside her, watching her with heightened senses, prepared to create a diversion if the blue creature did emerge.

  “Come along,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “Move your feet, pick it up. That’s it.”

  In the tailor shop, there was a giant box of mismatched buttons. Lionel and Marybeth arranged them into patterns as Mrs. Mannerd ordered a bolt of fabric to repair the children’s winter coats now that winter was coming.

  Marybeth picked out all the blue buttons and the deep purples, and when Lionel noticed the concentration on her face, he stopped touching the buttons and he watched her. Her tongue peeked out from between her lips. Her eyes were big and dazed.

  “Marybeth, what a lovely collage,” Mrs. Mannerd said. Marybeth blinked, and then looked at her handiwork.

  The buttons were arranged in the pattern of a blue painting whose shades and hues made up a face with blank spaces for eye sockets. Marybeth did not think it was lovely. She had no memory of making it whatsoever, and now that strange heart w
as beating in her chest again and she felt as though she might faint.

  Lionel stared at the button face. Marybeth’s pallor wasn’t lost on him. He thought that the button face was as disturbing as any other portrait that lacked eyes, but beyond that it meant nothing to him. Whether the face was young or old, whether it belonged to a boy or to a girl, he couldn’t say.

  “Let’s move along now,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “We have other things to tend to.” Marybeth was already at the door, eager to leave it behind.

  As they walked from store to store, Lionel watched Marybeth. She had her head down and her arms crossed tight against her stomach. She looked frightened and horribly sad.

  Lionel felt helpless. He couldn’t talk about the blue creature or the button collage in front of Mrs. Mannerd. He would have liked to climb one of the trees along the sidewalk. He could dangle upside down by his knees and become a monkey. That would make her laugh for sure. But Mrs. Mannerd would not approve, and then she wouldn’t take them to the library.

  All he could do was whisper, “It’ll be all right.”

  She turned her head sharply to him. Her eyes flashed blue for only a second, but even after they returned to their usual brown, the skepticism remained.

  “Trust me,” he said, to both Marybeth and the blue creature.

  Marybeth looked at her boots. She nodded, just slightly.

  Lionel wanted to be rid of this blue creature. He had never met an animal he didn’t like, but he was growing to hate this one. Marybeth had always been soft spoken, but never subdued. He could see it in the way she walked. She was so worried about awakening the awful thing that she didn’t even raise her eyes.

  This blue creature was no different from the older ones who had locked her in the closet. But this time, he didn’t know how to open the door and set her free.

  By late morning, the car was filled with fabric and groceries, and there had been no outbursts or displays from either of the children. Lionel had done an impressive job behaving like a human, and Marybeth had not wandered off. So, as promised, Mrs. Mannerd took them to the library.