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Heartsick

Page 3

by Dia Reeves


  The dining room was long and narrow, with tall rain-streaked windows and french doors that opened onto the portico. At the far end of a long table, a pair of identical twins sat opposite each other, mirror images. Like Karissa, the twins wore school uniforms—black suits with gray trim around the lapels, white shirts, and gray ties. Their cheeks were smooth and apple-red, and they had dark Bambi eyes and black hair that curled and snarled and refused to lie flat.

  They were as lean and sharp as the utensils they used to dissect their breakfast. Such precise cuts, even though they weren’t watching their plates. They were watching Rue, who was at a loss.

  The twins were her age.

  They did not look obedient.

  Rue positioned herself at the opposite end of the table behind a chair, so far away from the Westwoods she may as well have been on Mars. The sideboard at her back made her feel secure; nothing could sneak up on her. Karissa would approve.

  “Rue,” Westwood said, sitting between his sons at the head of the table, chic in his suit and vest. “I was about to send someone for you.”

  “Did you leave the presents outside my door?”

  “That sounds like something the servants would do. Showing their gratitude for your presence—servants are always the first to be eaten.”

  “Good thing I’m not a servant then.”

  The crippled smile made a comeback. “No, not a servant. I certainly don’t pay you like one.”

  One of the twins said, “If she’s not a servant, what is she?”

  “Didn’t I say? Stanton”—he gestured first to the boy on Rue’s left, and then to the boy on her right—“Sterling; this is Rue, the lethiferist.”

  She practiced her friendly face on them, but they didn’t seem impressed.

  “She’s your idea of a lethiferist?” Sterling stabbed the pink meat on his plate like he wanted it to die. “Were they all out of labradoodles at Assassins ‘R’ Us?”

  “You promised to take this seriously, Dad,” Stanton said, ignoring his food as though, unlike his brother, the conversation had ruined his appetite.

  Westwood snatched an apple from a fruit bowl near the plate of ham and hurled it down the length of the table. Rue, although surprised, still had plenty of time to grab one of the gold-rimmed plates off the sideboard behind her, turn, and swipe her hand through the air all in one movement. The apple hit the plate in five neat slices.

  The twins’ jaws unhinged and wonderment made them seem as young as she’d originally anticipated.

  Westwood poured himself a cup of coffee. “Is that serious enough?”

  “What is she?” Stanton said, as Rue lowered the plate to the table and wiped her claws on a napkin before retracting them.

  “She’s heartless,” Westwood announced, as proud as if he’d designed her himself. “If anyone can keep you safe, she can.”

  “Who’ll keep us safe from her?” Sterling said. “A labradoodle with claws.”

  Westwood snapped his fingers at Rue. “Come. Let me see you.”

  She should hurry forward, bow her head, hair to one side showing her bared neck. He’d like that. The way Shirley and Allan had liked fussing over her. But Rue stayed put, watching him as carefully as if he were a scorpion.

  Westwood seemed to understand. “I’m not going to touch you. Or do anything. I’m just going to sit here. But I have something for you.”

  Rue crept forward, hoping she wasn’t spattered in apple juice since the twins’ eyes were so heavy on her, no longer resentful, but interested. She had no idea in what. Maybe they were looking for a crooked back or a twisted leg—some weakness beneath her neat uniform and baby-scented skin to exploit. The twins noticed the key at her waist and eyed it dubiously, as though it wasn’t the same key that they carried around their necks or perhaps in their pockets. The same key the Mayor gave to every Porterene at birth regardless of species.

  She stopped by the chair next to Sterling, having no intention of getting closer to Westwood and his murderous feet than absolutely necessary.

  “You mustn’t hold yourself apart from us. That’s not how this is going to work,” Westwood told her, somewhat impatiently. He removed a smart phone from inside his suit and then hesitated. “Do you know what this is? Have you ever used one before?”

  “I’ve seen it done.”

  Condescending or not, he did have a point. None of the heartless she knew used phones—her people almost never spoke aloud, except to lure humans. She and Nettle had only begun using phones in the past year to help Nettle’s English improve. And then to keep in touch whenever Rue got the urge to leave home, which was often.

  Relieved, Westwood slid the phone down the table. “I’ve already programmed it with the numbers you’ll need—mine and the twins, and Grissel and Drabbin. Grissel helps me take care of the house and Drabbin helps in the lab and does the cooking. You’ll meet them later. I’ve given everyone your number as well, and they’ll be able to reach you whenever there’s a problem, so keep that phone with you at all times. And Sterling put your phone away. We don’t do that at mealtimes.”

  “This is business. Drabbin just sent the video he made of Shirley and the bone machine.”

  “Don’t call it that.”

  “Did it work?” asked Stanton, peering at the video his brother held up for him.

  “The Apparatus works fine. I just haven’t figured out how to make it not destroy everything it touches.” Westwood looked at the ceiling, as though a solution might be written there. “I suppose it didn’t destroy everything. The leftovers may prove useful.”

  “What’s the bone machine?” asked Rue.

  “What leftovers?” asked the twins.

  “Never mind your questions. We have important things to worry about. Like finding another NDE. This Saturday we’ll have to hunt.”

  Stanton said, “We’re taking Kissy to Frostfair on Saturday.”

  “I wish the two of you wouldn’t allow trivialities to get in the way of our schedule.”

  “Kissy isn’t trivial, Dad. She’s family.”

  Sterling said, “And we don’t want to hunt. Get Aunt Grissel to do it; she likes that stuff.”

  “Kissy?” said Rue.

  “Karissa,” Stanton told her, but he was looking at his father. “Our sister.”

  A tension filled the room. Westwood drained the last of his coffee and the tension remained. Increased. “I’ll allow this Frostfair nonsense, but one of you has to volunteer for extraction this afternoon.”

  “But you said we wouldn’t have to—”

  Stanton said, “I’ll do it.”

  Something passed between the three of them, potent and hurtful. It was only when Sterling silently yielded to it that Westwood left. Without another word.

  Karissa climbed from beneath the table to sit in the chair Westwood had vacated. Her sudden appearance gave Rue a start, but the twins behaved as though Karissa habitually popped out from under tables with no warning.

  Stanton passed her a plate of toast and eggs, and Sterling poured her a glass of milk. When they ran out of food, they each gave her a kiss. There was a routineness to it. A ritual.

  “You’re right,” said Rue, studying Karissa’s pigtails and sad eyes. “Westwood does hate you. Just the sound of your name makes him seethe.”

  “Told you so.”

  “Where’s Peppermint?” Sterling asked.

  “In his terrarium,” said Karissa, her mouth full. “He threw up again.”

  “Does Westwood beat you?”

  “Don’t upset her with questions like that,” said Stanton, filling a second plate with eggs and triangular toast and holding it toward Rue. “Sit and have breakfast with us.”

  “I can’t digest human food. Except coconut milk, if I don’t drink a lot.”

  “Human food?” Karissa asked, gaping.

  “She’s heartless,” Stanton explained. “And don’t speak with your mouth full.”

  “What do heartless eat?” Karissa said, afte
r she’d swallowed. “Do you eat hearts?”

  Rue ignored the question, struck by Karissa’s milk mustache. “I thought Westwood was your dad.”

  “He is.” Karissa said, as serious as a kid can be with a milk moustache. “But he likes the twins better than me.”

  Stanton tugged his sister’s pigtail, studying Rue all the while. “So not even fruits or vegetables?”

  Rue shook her head but wasn’t really paying attention to Stanton. Away from the darkness under the stairs, Karissa’s looks stood out. She had the twins’ florid cheeks and dark springy hair, and Elnora’s sea-blue eyes—startling eyes when seen up close—but Karissa’s skin, like Rue’s, was decidedly brown and her swollen upper lip, outlined in milk, was unique among the Westwood clan.

  “That’s why he doesn’t like you,” Rue told Karissa, pleased as always to unravel however small a piece of the ambiguous code that was human language. “The twins are his, but you aren’t because you’re a bastard. Am I right?”

  The silence that followed was so profound that each of Karissa’s tears that plip-plopped into her milk was as loud as a scream.

  She was surprised the twins weren’t soothing their sister, offering her sweets and hugs and extra toast. Instead the twins stared at Rue, frowning like they wanted her to handle it.

  “I don’t mean bastard as in jerk,” Rue said, offering Karissa a napkin to cry into. “I just mean you’re not Westwood’s daughter. Not his biological daughter.”

  Karissa didn’t take the napkin, so Rue reached out to dry Karissa’s tears herself.

  Sterling smacked Rue’s hand away, hard enough to hurt. “Don’t even think about putting your hands on our sister, bitch,” he said, speaking to her for the first time, the full force of his attention blistering. “And that’s bitch as in heinous individual, not as in female dog. Just so we’re clear.”

  Stanton scraped the food he’d set aside for Rue back into the serving dishes. “Go back to your end of the table,” he said, not looking at her. “And stay there.”

  Maybe not bitch as in dog, but Rue felt like one as she slunk back to Mars, slapped down for barking too loudly.

  Now the twins lavished attention on their sister, drying her tears and making soothing noises. Stanton removed notebook paper from his schoolbag and wrote on it, then passed it to Sterling who folded it into a perfect likeness of a gecko. That was impressive enough but then the gecko hopped from Sterling’s palm to Karissa’s and clambered up her arm. The gecko’s white body immediately turned gray to match Karissa’s sleeve.

  Karissa petted it, amused but not amazed, unlike Rue. Perhaps her brothers often made such things for her.

  Shortly after, without a word to Rue, Karissa and the twins grabbed their schoolbags, coats, and umbrellas and left through the doors that opened onto the portico.

  Rue crept up on the paper gecko as it scampered over Sterling’s plate of half-eaten toast and orange marmalade smears and pretended to nibble the scraps. She caught and carefully lifted it, marveling at the swishy tail and nimble feet that left sticky orange footprints in her palm. She stroked its head, which swiveled to stare at her eyelessly.

  “I didn’t mean to make her cry.”

  The gecko nuzzled Rue’s thumb, as if it believed her. And then it stiffened and tumbled off her palm, lying motionless on the table. Lifeless.

  Rue’s phone rang. She recognized the ring tone—“If I Only Had a Heart”—and would have found it amusing if she hadn’t ruined her chance to make friends on her very first day of work.

  “Hello? Please? I’m in the servants’ quarters in the basement. Come quick! Pretty please?”

  “What basement?” Rue said as she ran, holding the tiny black rectangle to her mouth awkwardly, not liking the intimacy of a stranger’s voice in her ear. “There’s a basement? Who is this?”

  “Frida Ramirez? I met you yesterday in the kitchen? Go to the wall across from the ballroom. Just push against it and the door’ll swing open. But hurry! There’s creatures hanging all over the ceiling, and I’m trapped!”

  Chapter 3

  Once she found the basement, it didn’t take Rue long to find the common room, where someone had uncommonly decorated the interior by chopping a servant into fifteen well-preserved pieces and then nailing him, in no particular order, to the wall: a work of art in a hellish museum. Rue guessed that decorating an area with body parts was more demoralizing than stealing hearts, but decided that Westwood probably understood what traumatized his staff better than she did.

  And the dismembered body wasn’t even the strangest thing—the jellied white growths clinging to the ceiling had stolen the spotlight.

  “Rue?”

  The same bespectacled girl she’d met in the kitchen last night hid beneath the billiard table.

  For no reason.

  “You’re not trapped,” Rue said, holding out her hand. “They’re not going to do anything. They can’t.”

  As soon as Rue beckoned to her, Frida dashed into the hall, hands shielding her head despite Rue’s reassurances. She hid behind Rue in the doorway. “What is all that?”

  Rue escaped Frida’s panicked grip and traversed the room, studying the wet, quivering growths hanging overhead, each one as long as her arm and three times as wide. “Some kind of insect laid a bunch of eggs. The eggs hatched and after a time, the larvae crawled up there to undergo a metamorphosis.” She cocked her head to one side. “Because these are definitely pupae.”

  “A metamorphosis into what?” Frida asked, not the least bit excited to find such an interesting species of insect.

  “Could be into something as harmless as butterflies. Giant ones. Wouldn’t that be fun? If they’re gigantic, they might be capable of higher brain functions like—”

  The pupae directly over her head shivered, an angry sound, as though a million rattlesnakes were cocooned within that dank whiteness.

  “Butterflies?” Frida said. “Are you kidding me?”

  Rue backed out of the room. “Or not. These are new to me. So was the rug creature that attacked last night. Why is this house so beset by unusual creatures? Unusual even for Portero. It’s as if there’s a door near here, like really near, but that would be—”

  “Yeah. On the second floor.”

  Rue studied Frida’s face. Came to the astounding conclusion that she wasn’t joking.

  “Door’s been there for at least two years. That’s why things are so thin around here.”

  “Two years? Why doesn’t Westwood shut it?”

  “Why should he? He’s in and out of it constantly.”

  “In and out? On purpose?”

  “I know! But,” Frida looked around to make sure they were still alone, “they’re queer. The whole family.”

  “Show me.”

  After Frida shut the common room door and placed a DO NOT ENTER sign on the knob, Rue followed her to the first floor, utterly disconcerted. A door in the house? For two years? And Westwood was in and out of it constantly? Rue had never heard of such madness.

  Servants were busy at the foot of the stairs, scrubbing away the blood Rue had discovered earlier. Two other servants passed in the opposite direction, carrying a stained-glass window, to replace the broken one in the music room Rue assumed.

  Shortly, she and Frida reached the northern end of the second-floor hall.

  “That’s the mister’s room,” Frida whispered, and then pointed at the room directly across from them. “And that’s the door.”

  A regular door, no different from the others in the house. That was usually the case, thankfully; doors that looked like something else, or worse were invisible, were much harder to avoid.

  Frida said, “It’s where he keeps his lab. On a strange world with a green planet hanging just over the horizon. I saw it one day, as I was walking by. And that one glimpse gave me so many sick, feverish nightmares, I had to stay in bed for two days. But they seem to handle it well.”

  “The twins too?”

  �
��And Drabbin and Grissel. Not so sure about the little one.”

  “But why? Why does Westwood need a lab in another world?”

  “The mister is very secretive.”

  “In and out of the world? With the twins? Isn’t he afraid they’ll get trapped? Doors are notoriously unreliable. Especially doors that lead to other worlds.”

  “The mister’s not afraid of anything. I even heard him argue with the Mayor once.”

  “He knows her?”

  “He knows everybody. And everybody knows him. Because he’s rich and beautiful—”

  “Beautiful?”

  “And powerful. Powerful enough to get away with anything.”

  A sharp knock from the lab door startled them.

  “Hello?” Rue called, but the only answer was more knocking—random and arrhythmic. She tried the knob—

  “No don’t!”

  But it was locked.

  “Only the Westwoods go in there,” Frida said, pulling Rue from the door. “We don’t have permission.”

  “Do I have permission to quit? Because I do. I quit.”

  Rue ran from the house and hurried across the lawn, the rain cold and biting. Winter in East Texas was generally mild, but for some reason real winter had traveled down south and refused to leave.

  “Hey, wait!” Frida squelched through the mud after her.

  “Don’t follow me. I don’t even know where I’m going.” Rue whirled, and droplets of rain whipped from her braids. “They got mad at me for calling Karissa a bastard, but they allow doors to other worlds to exist in their home? Karissa could wake up in outer space! They all could. I can’t bring Nettle to a place like this. I thought. I really hoped…”

  “Who’s Nettle?”

  “Go back inside and don’t. I’m not…just leave me alone.”

  Rue stalked forward, surveying the dead lawn in front of the plantation and the dripping garden in back that had been designed so that something would bloom year round. Eyeing the best escape routes. Settling on the prettiest one.

  White gravel paths crisscrossed the garden, ducked beneath trellises, skirted wet benches. Odd knee-high statuary peeped at her from the silvery grasses: a winged ape, a little catboy with whiskers. She passed the jasmine she’d smelled the night before, its buds closed tight, but yellow wintersweet was in bloom, and camellias decorated the bushes like fragrant snowballs. From the garden Rue could see down the hill, past the evergreen treetops, down to the black pool of the Basin about a mile away, barely visible in the freezing rain.

 

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