Fiendish (8 page)

The truck was finicky and hard to turn, but driving made me feel better. Like things were governable. Like I could fix on a solid thing in the world and have it do what I wanted.

When we reached the county line, Shiny had me park in the little dirt turnoff at the top of the bridge and got out. The creek was low and lazy in its banks, and Shiny’s truck was the only thing around.

She opened her tackle basket and took out the margarine container. Up close, the smell coming off it was so bad that I covered my face with both hands. “
Oh
, what
is
that?”

She laughed and reached into the bed of the truck, tossing a fishing pole at me. “Spoiled chicken livers. Catfish are so nasty it’s like their idea of a treat.”

She offered me a hook and a piece of liver and I followed her down along the bank, where the weeds grew thick and tangled and the ground sloped away.

Shiny stood over me, watching as I made a mess trying to get the liver on the hook, before finally taking pity and doing it herself.

Then she scrambled down the bank and pointed out into the creek. “You’re going to cast into the middle, over there where the water looks dark. I’ll go a ways farther down, and you stay here up by the bridge.”

“Why?”

“Because the big ones are all down in the bottom of the creek bend, and you won’t hold one if you catch it.”

“How do you know?”

She gave me that long know-it-all look she’d been doing since we were little, and it made one part of me feel safe and homey, and another part feel plain furious. “I just do.”

I sat on the top of the weedy hummock nearest the bridge. The water was slow and clear, and I sat with my feet tucked under me, watching the crawdads skitter around in the shallows. Farther out, my bobber floated over a dark, uneasy shadow. The day was warm and mostly still, and there was an empty mason jar lying near the edge of the water, caught in the weeds.

We’d been sitting for maybe twenty minutes when my line gave a jerk, so hard it almost took the pole out of my hands. In less than a second, the creek had gone so wild it looked like it was boiling, and then I saw the fish, shining like gunmetal, rising out of the water and thrashing down again.

Shiny gave a shout, and then came crashing through the weeds behind me.

“Hold it,” she said, her voice buzzing like an electric current.

“It’s too strong! I think it’s getting away.”

“
Hold
it,” she said again, sounding nothing at all like Shiny and everything like a girl with fire in her blood. “Keep the line tight—no, don’t pull on it! Just play it, play it!”

I worked the reel, letting the line run slack and then catching it before it could spin all the way out, but the fish was wild, making the water churn up in a white froth. I saw a flash of spiny tail, and then it splashed under again.

Shiny marched straight down to the edge of the water and peeled her shirt over her head. She did it in one fast yank, like there was nothing strange about skinning off her clothes on the side of the road. She had on a black bra with flowers embroidered on it and there were a pair of wings tattooed on her back, right over her shoulder blades.

Then she was in the water, splashing down off the bank and wading out.

She looked tall and tan following my line and when she got to the end, she ducked and grabbed the fish in both hands, then hauled it, flopping and wriggling, up onto the bank.

I dropped the pole and ran over to her.

Shiny sat down hard on the dirt, holding the catfish in her lap. The wings rippled on her back when she moved. I wanted to reach out and touch them. They were the most delicate thing I’d ever seen, each feather perfect, like every line of the picture had been loved into existence. Under them, the rest of Shiny was sharp and brown and kind of lonely.

She stuck out her chin and clamped her fingers around the fish, never minding the spines. Its skin was a slick, awful green—an impossible green—with slimy whiskers and dull, milky eyes. The ends of her hair were wet, sticking to her arms.

She was about to stick her fingers in the fish’s mouth and twist the hook out, when suddenly she yanked her hand up to her chest and we both froze. Its mouth was full of long, jagged teeth. Row upon row of them, and every one like a needle.

The fish twisted and flopped, mouth opening and closing, and we sat looking down at it. Suddenly, the green skin seemed much greener and much, much wronger. Shiny had taken out her buck knife now but was holding it the way someone would hold a stick of butter, like she’d forgotten what it did.

“Shiny?” I said, sounding much calmer than I felt. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a catfish with teeth like that.”

“No,” she said in a soft, faraway voice, and put the point of the knife against the back of its head. “No, I don’t think anyone has.”

The fish thrashed, reaching with its needle teeth, trying to take a piece of her hand, but she squared her shoulders and held it steady. Then she drove the knife through the slimy green skin between its eyes.

Afterward, we both breathed out. The fish lay on the bank, oozing a little.

Shiny shook herself, then wiped the blade clean on the grass. Her face was empty and cold, like a stone girl’s.

“Dig a hole,” she said. “Now.”

I ran across to one of the willows and got down on my knees, scrabbling in the dirt with my hands. The ground was soft and black, getting under my nails, and as I dug, I remembered something that until that instant had been tucked safe behind the sheet in my mind. It was a squirming, awful thing that left a hard knot in my throat and a taste like pennies in my mouth.

My mama, out in the garden, ripping down the strange stone tomato I had found and burying it, looking stricken in the evening light. I dug faster.

Over on the bank, Shiny was chopping up the fish. She cut away the fins and the head, then began, in fast, hard jerks, to skin it.

When I’d dug a hole as deep as my shins and Shiny had pulled the fish nearly to pieces, she gathered what was left and dumped it in the ground. Her hands were pink with blood and slime.

We stood together kicking dirt over the top of it, and then, when it was buried, covering the hole with rocks and brush till there was nothing to show that such a wrong, vicious thing had ever been there.

THE DEVORE HOUSE

CHAPTER NINE

W
hen we climbed back in the truck, we were both shaking a little. Shiny swung out of the dirt turnoff, jouncing out onto the road. Her foot was heavy on the gas and we didn’t talk. My heart was still beating like a wild thing, and I didn’t know of a single thing I could say.

“What are we going to do?” Shiny whispered after much too long. “I don’t think we can tell Myloria.”

But the very idea was impossible. I didn’t even know where I would start. Tell Myloria
what
? That we had buried a catfish? That it had happened to be monstrous one? And even if we told her, what would she say to that? What could she possibly do to change it?

Shiny was driving fast, looking more frightened than I’d ever seen her. “Do you think we put it deep enough?” she said, gripping the wheel tight with both hands.

“Deep enough for what?”

“To keep the craft in. That fish was touched by the hollow, and the only way to keep it from spreading is to put it straight back in the ground.”

“I think so,” I said, reaching across the seat to her, although I truly had no idea.

We were quiet after that. Shiny seemed very focused on driving, but she still blew right past the sign for Weeping Road.

“Shit,” she whispered and kept on going, heading up past the Heintz place, where the shoulder got wide enough to turn around.

Greg Heintz was out in the yard, wearing a red feed cap and looking sunburned. He was nailing the wire mesh back onto the side of the dove coop, but he looked up as we drove by. I didn’t see Davenport anywhere.

The zoo was in bad shape, empty and leaning every which way. The cages Fisher had kicked apart looked worse in the daylight.

“Shit,” Shiny said again, slowing the truck to a crawl. “What happened
there
?”

I sank down in my seat, chilly from the way Greg Heintz was looking at me. His eyes were a clear, ringing blue that seemed to bore directly into me, so hard and flat they looked like coins. The way he watched us go by was like he was seeing some far away, dark part of me, some nastiness that hadn’t yet been accounted for.

“Me and Fisher let the animals out,” I said in a low voice, facing forward.

The look Shiny gave me was ruinous. “What in blue hell would you do
that
for?”

“Why
wouldn’t
I? No one
else
was going to.”

“Clementine, I don’t know how to make you see, but there is a
reason
people leave him alone. Greg Heintz is mean, sure, but plenty of people are mean. The main difference is, he is also crazy.”

“And just because he’s crazy, he gets to do whatever he wants?”

“Listen to me. He doesn’t follow a single law if he can get away with it. He has shot people for hunting on his property. Back when things got bad with the reckoning, he was the one who dragged that goddamn Coalition for Purity out of hibernation. They still have meetings to this
day
. The last thing we need is him paying more than a passing attention to us. You can’t go around messing with just anybody because you don’t like how they’re behaving!”

I didn’t answer. There was that word again—
reckoning
—but I still didn’t know what it meant. I had no say about how Shiny chose to do things, but I wasn’t about to put up with ugliness like the zoo just because someone was crazy.

At home, we straggled into the kitchen, where Shiny slumped at the table with her hands against her forehead. Sitting there, she looked about the same way I felt, but still, I couldn’t see the point in starving over a fish, so I went through the cupboards to find something for lunch.

I got down some beef jerky and crackers, and ate a scoop of peanut butter out of the jar. It wasn’t much, but I felt better afterward. Shiny just stared out the window, running her hands through her hair. Finally, she pushed her chair back and stood up, so I put away the peanut butter and followed her into the bedroom.

She sank onto the bed with her back to the wall and her pillow held against her chest. After a second, I sat down next to her.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “It was just one fish.”

She shook her head. “The last time I saw anything like that catfish, it was the reckoning.”

“Shiny, I don’t even know what that is.”

“The day everything broke loose from Wixby Hollow, and the coalition came down here and torched our houses and there was nothing we could do. It’s the day Myloria stopped being worth a damn.”

Shiny’s arm was pressed against mine. Her skin was very hot and so I leaned away. “What did they do to her?”

She hugged her pillow tighter. “Just took or killed or ruined everything we had and now she’s afraid that if anyone even gets an idea she’s still using craft, they’ll come back and do it again.”

“Oh,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of. Suddenly, the hole we’d buried the fish in didn’t seem nearly deep enough.

Shiny bowed her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “You know how termites will eat up a board until there’s nothing left? I think it was like that. The reckoning went through like plague, infecting everything, and people were just willing to do anything to put it back where it belonged.”

“Like set fire to anyone known to have anything to do with craft.”

Shiny nodded. “The only ones who didn’t get the gas-can treatment were folks like the Daltons, who keep their talents low and don’t do more than sell advice or make a trick sometimes.”

I nodded. It was a remarkable thing, what Rae had done in the play tunnel at the park, just taking something mixed-up and mysterious and sorting out its meaning. But what she had done was a world away from Shiny’s blowing a plume of fire in Mike Faraday’s face.

Rae had a gift for understanding and for solving problems, but Shiny’s kind of craft was extraordinary. A little frightening, even.

And still, it seemed preposterous—out of the question—that someone could be so frightened they would actually want to
hurt
her. To hurt me.

“Just how scary was the reckoning?” I said. “Scary enough to make people want to get rid of us? I mean, what did it look like?”

She shook her head. “Like—I don’t know—like impossible things. Bad dreams. Sometimes it’s hard to even know what really happened. It was all so crazy, and I was little. I try to remember and then think I must have imagined half of it.”

She took a deep breath and hugged herself like she was trying not to shiver. “There were birds everywhere, falling out of the sky. Some of the trees got gnarled and turned black, and others were tossing around all over the place, smashing out windows like they were alive. I saw animals coming out of the woods and they didn’t look like any animals I knew of. It was like the whole world had just . . . sprouted teeth.”

“Are you saying the reckoning was like craft, but stronger?”

Shiny nodded. “Not just stronger, though. It was like the world was getting mixed up. Flowers were turning to dust everywhere. The top of the birdbath caught fire like it was full of kerosene instead of water. The creek looked like black paint and smelled like poison.”

I tried to picture it, to live that day like she had lived it, but all I could see was that one wrong tomato, the day the stone things and the growing ones had stopped being separate and there were no rules about anything anymore.

“So the whole town got taken over by craft, and it all just happened one day, like for no reason?”

Shiny leaned forward and shook her head. “I think it was slower than that. After, people started talking about all the little things they’d seen, days or sometimes
weeks
before. I think it started slow—so slow people hardly noticed. And then just got faster.”

The catch in her voice made me look up. “And now you’re worried about that fish.”

Shiny nodded. “That fish,” she whispered.

I reached across the quilt and patted her arm. “Maybe it’s not anything. Maybe it’s only that catfish are ugly.”

“Or maybe it’s the reckoning all over again.”

I shook my head. “How can that be? That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“It does,” Shiny said, and now her hands were both over her mouth. “It
does
make sense.”

“How, though?” I said, and I’d meant it to sound calm, but the longer she wouldn’t look at me, the raspier my throat got. Suddenly, my heart was beating almost too hard to stand. “
How
, Shiny?”

She raised her face to mine and her mouth was trembling. “Because I keep going around and around it in my head, and as much as I don’t want it to be true, someone had the sense to lock you away last time. Someone made it a
point
, and now there’s a crooked horror of a fish lying in the ground down by the creek and the only thing that’s changed since yesterday morning is you.”

The words were like a slap, and we sat in the tiny room, looking at each other. I was holding my breath, waiting and waiting for her to take it back, and when she didn’t, I stood up.

“Clementine.”

With an awful knot in my throat, I dragged the old suitcase out from under the bed. It rattled messily and when I opened it, the bottom was full of screwdrivers and chisels and loose nails. I left them in and began to pack the camping blanket and the sheets, folding them carefully at first, and then piling them in willy-nilly. I dumped in the mess of clothes I’d taken from the cardboard box, then the broken comb, the hairbrush, and all the socks and underwear that Shiny had gotten for me at Spangler’s.

She stood in the corner of the room with her arms around herself, watching me pack. “Clementine, wait. I didn’t mean to go running off like a crazy person. What are you going to do? You can’t just
leave
.”

I shut the suitcase and fastened the clasps.

“Clementine—come on, don’t! We’ll figure this out.”

I straightened and stepped into my canvas sneakers that used to be hers.

“Clementine, please!”

I picked up the suitcase, tools and all. I could feel them sliding down into the bottom of the suitcase the way sugar sinks to the bottom of a glass.

I gave her a quick, shaky kiss on the cheek and walked out.

* * *

I walked fast down the driveway and out to the Crooked Mile, but I couldn’t walk faster than the thoughts that circled in my head, telling me I was the thing that had brought ruin to the Willows. That I was nothing but loss and destruction and death, and without me, my pretty green house would still be standing. Shiny’s life would be whole and bright and better. My mama would still be alive.

I walked with my head down, afraid to look around me, afraid that anything I laid eyes on might somehow be changed by the very strength of my gaze.

The road and fields and ditches all seemed so normal, though, and the more things stayed the same, the more my heart loosened in my chest.

Down in the cellar hole, time had been endless, a snake clamped onto its own tail. A bad dream could last a lifetime, but already, the panic was leaving me. The breathless, scrabbling fear that had gripped me in the bedroom didn’t grip me now, and I began to think that maybe when you were out in the world, feeling things in your body, in your waking mind, you couldn’t feel them forever.

I was better by the time I crossed the Foxhill Bridge, and much better the closer I got to my mama’s house and to the hollow. If I couldn’t be wholesome or harmless, at least I could stand in my mother’s garden and feel like I belonged there. I could go home.

As soon as I came up the weedy driveway, though, it was clear that Fisher hadn’t been lying about the state of things, not even a little. There was no house to be in.

Nothing was left but the foundation, burned black in feathery streaks, and even after all this time, nothing grew in the scorched dirt around what had once been my house.

The ground crunched under my feet, glittering with melted glass and bent nails. Whatever they’d been trying to burn out, they had gotten it—every last brick and board. Everything but me.

I left the suitcase on the edge of the foundation, and started down the concrete steps into the cellar. Most of the brick and the lumber had been hauled away—by Greg Heintz, to build his hateful zoo, by anyone else who needed scrap—but there was still a fair amount of trash lying around.

I kicked my way through it and over to the canning closet. The spot where Fisher had dragged me out was an explosion of loose bricks, but the rest of the opening was still walled up, covered with a thin coat of cement. Unless you got very close and knew right where it was, the doorway looked just like the rest of the cellar.

Peering inside the closet gave me an uneasy feeling. My toy bear was lying on the dirt, so wet and moldy it hardly looked like a bear at all anymore, just a rotting lump of flannel. I left it where it was and climbed back out, picking up the suitcase and toting it around the side of the house.

The yard had all gone to weeds and tangles, making it hard to tell where the woods started, or even exactly where my mother’s garden had been. The squash and strawberries were gone, but here and there, tomato frames still stood, weather-gray and overgrown with knotweed.

I stood in the tall grass, feeling small and strange and lost. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but I’d been expecting
something
. Some kind of secret or revelation, but I had stood there in the cellar, right at the place where it had happened, and there were no answers. Nothing to prove that the decision to lock me away hadn’t been the right one.

Then from far off, I heard the roar of an engine. The sound cut off and the whole place was still again. From the garden, I could look down the driveway and out to the road. A car had pulled up on the shoulder and even from where I was standing, I could tell it was the sweet candy-blue of Fisher’s Trans Am, but I didn’t see him anywhere around.

I circled the foundation and stood at the spot where the back porch had been, so that I had a clear of view of the pasture. The grass was long and someone with wide shoulders and dark, shaggy hair was walking down toward the hollow. I grabbed the suitcase and took off after him.