Miriam wipes her face and hisses. "That's helpful. And since three times is a charm: fuck you."
"The river is rising."
"Fuck. You."
"You've got work to do."
"Fu–" But before she can get it out, Annie Valentine and the raven are gone.
Upstairs, though, the real Annie Valentine screams.
A scream swiftly muted. It turns into a gurgle.
Footsteps cross the floor above.
Is she dead?
Then Miriam hears him start to sing. She can't make out the words, but she hears that grim, sing-songy quality. The song of "Wicked Polly" again?
The mockingbird's song? Or the song stolen from the swallow so that it can no longer sing?
Get up.
She tries to move. Her body is not cooperating. An elbow slips out from under her.
Get up!
Her legs feel like meat without bones, tendons like blown elastic. She can't get them to comply. They move, but not as she wishes.
GET UP.
Miriam rolls over. Hands beneath her. Knees, too. Prop up. Body a bridge.
She sees the water heater.
Propped up, like her. Not on hands and knees. On short cement blocks.
Miriam crawls over. Wraps her hands behind one of those blocks. Pulls.
It doesn't budge.
Pull, pull, pull–
The porous cement bites into her palms, and she feels fresh blood from the slash-marks in her hands opening up. It lubricates her grip and that's not helpful, not at all–
You stupid twat, if you can't pull this out everybody dies.
Valentine.
Tavena.
Wren.
You.
How many others?
Above, the song continues. The smell of ashen roses clings inside her nose. She hears him crossing back the other way. Probably with the axe.
She loops her right arm around the block, squeezing it under the water heater. She knows it could crush her arm if she does this too slow.
She squeezes her eyes shut.
Finds herself praying. Not to God. But to the Trespasser.
Miriam gives it her all – puts all her energy into the shoulder, tugs the arm. The concrete block scrapes against the bottom of the heater, which suddenly tilts and dips –
But does not hit the ground and does not make a sound. The other blocks support it.
She lets go a relieved breath, almost cries.
At least one thing went right.
And now, Miriam holds the concrete block
Hefts it with both bloody hands.
It's time to kill Carl Keener. Time to silence the Mockingbird's song.
FORTY-ONE
Turn From Your Sins,
Lest you Despair
The door swings open. It's blessedly silent, as if doing Miriam some kind of favor, a favor of objects granted by the parliament of doors.
An absurd thought. But that's how everything feels. Crossed wires. Synaptic misfires. Skull pulsing so hard it feels like her heart is now in her head.
The cement block, the gray streaked with red,
her
red, sits comfortably in her grip.
Ahead of her, the door. The exit.
She could just go.
Go and leave and come back another day.
Or don't. It doesn't matter.
These girls don't matter. Miriam is a selfish creature. Designed to survive. The cockroach. The crow. The hungry vulture.
Miriam goes to the door.
Stares out. The hard rain is hissing. Urging her outside.
Cleansing. Baptismal. A hymn sung by the heavens.
To her right, here somewhere in this house, another song. Floating. Shrill and trilling. With it, a chorus of whimpers, the miserable cries of Annie Valentine.
That, and the mockingbird's own ditty.
"Your counsels I have slighted all, my carnal appetite shall fall…"
Miriam turns away from the door. Her path chosen.
She creeps deeper into the house. A house without decoration. Water-stained wallpaper. Mid-century furniture gone to pot. Not dirty like she expects. Clean. No television. No books. Unadorned by anything: an eerily sterile environment. As though anything else would be an affront, would be a corruption, a filthy poison. Her mother's voice rises to greet her–
You've been lying to cover up this filth. This is not God's work in this box. This is not how your Mother raised you.
The room beyond the living room – what a normal family might use as a den or a sitting room – tells a different story.
Lights dim. Tarp on the floor.
An old wooden doctor's table.
A small card table. On it Miriam sees an array of objects. Some she doesn't recognize, some she does: her clothing, her bag, Katey's phone.
A coil of barbed wire sits in the corner and, atop it, a pair of wire cutters.
Annie Valentine is strapped down. The wire wound around her mouth.
And there stands Carl Keener.
Facing away from Miriam, toward the girl. His right bicep is wrapped in dark, wet gauze where she stuck him with the blade.
He holds the axe with one hand. With the other, he grabs a Zippo lighter from the card table. Flicks it open, gets a flame. Lifts it under his mask's beak.
She can hear the crispy sizzle of flame consuming dead flowers.
He inhales it, then exhales – two oily plumes of smoke like the smoldering breath of a conquering dragon.
He sings:
"When I am dead, remember well, your wicked Polly groans in Hell."
He raises the axe.
"She wrung her hands…"
Miriam creeps forward. Raising her own weapon, the cement block, high above her head. It's a cavewoman's weapon, no finesse, only brutality.
"And groaned and cried…"
You have work to do.
"And gnawed her tongue before she–"
Miriam smashes the cement block hard against the back of Keener's hooded head.
He staggers forward, using the base of the axe to prop himself against the doctor's table, preventing his fall.
Miriam brings the block back again. She feels slow, like her whole body is caught in molasses, a mosquito stuck in cooling amber. But where she is slow Keener is fast, and he brings the base of the axe handle in a wide arc, connecting with the side of her face, opening her cheek. She reels.
The block falls from her grip, and she staggers against the doorframe.
Stars–
Exploding–
Dark shadows like birds between the bursts of hard light–
Keener's hand winds around her throat.
She smells burning funeral flowers. A fog of rose. A fume of carnation. Little embers burning bright beneath the leather-punched noseholes.
Keener rears back a fist. Snarls.
Hits her once. In the mouth. Rocks her head against the frame. Everything hurts and everything tastes like a mouthful of copper.
He rears a fist back again.
A phone rings.
Katey's phone.
It's enough. He flicks his gaze toward it, startled, irritated, confused. His grip on her throat relaxes.
He breathes in the smoke of those flowers because he does not want to be tainted by your impurity.
Miriam gets her own grip–
On his beak.
She plants her numb and bloody mouth against the two noseholes of his plague doctor mask, draws the deepest breath she can muster, and blows all her air into those two cavities.
Oxygen stirs the embers to fire and blasts a searing whirl of ash into his mask. She sees orange cinders like fireflies swirling behind the glass and suddenly he's flailing, knocking over the card table, screaming inside the beaked leather hood, trying desperately to pull it off his bare shoulders–
And when he finally does, there stands Miriam.
With a pair of wire cutters.
She plunges them into his throat.
Again.
And again.
Until there remains no throat to ruin.
PART FOUR
The Mockingbird Echo
Hush little baby
Don't say a word
Mama's going to buy you a mockingbird
And if that mockingbird won't sing
Mama's going to buy you a diamond ring.
Child's song
FORTY-TWO
Missed Call
Don't tell anyone I was here.
Louis, please… come get me.
You're safe, now
–
safe.
Hurry.
Don't tell.
Hurry.
Midnight in the harsh light of the hospital. Antiseptic stink. Making it smell so clean somehow makes it smell all the filthier.
She's not in a room. There's no need to be. For her, it's all here in the ER. This cubicle isn't much more than a closet. When the attending examined her, he sat down on a blue medical waste bin like it was a chair.
They tell her she has a concussion. No brain bleeding. Just beaten up pretty good. They took out a tooth, too. In the back. So she doesn't look like some kind of hillbilly whistle-britches.
No fracture. And to her surprise, no stitches. Instead, something called Dermabond. "Skin glue," the attending said. The cuts on her hands and feet and face are smeared with yellow-brown iodine. Reminds Miriam of being a child. Holding a grasshopper and the bug spits a brownish goo. Some kind of defense mechanism.
"Hospital again," Louis says. His heavy hand rubs circles around her back. His hand feels good. Warm. "You have to stop making a habit of this."
"I hate this place," she says, her voice throaty and rough, like she's been eating fiberglass insulation with a whisky chaser. "This is my last time." But she wonders:
is it really?"
He kisses the top of her head – where no wounds wait. She can't tell if it's brotherly, fatherly, or the gentle kiss of one lover to another.
She doesn't give a shit. It's nice.
"Your call saved my life," she says. "And the girl's."
"What do you mean?"
She tells him: If he hadn't called, Keener wouldn't have been distracted. That moment was critical. Even that half-second gave her the upper-hand.
Louis cups her chin in his hands. Pulls her face toward his.
"Are you okay? That was pretty… messy back there."
It was. Her blood flecked on the walls. Annie's blood dripping to the floor, purple dots on a blue tarp. And Keener…
He stands behind Louis. Tall and mean. He's not real. Miriam knows that. But he looks as he did back there, at the house. Throat a pile of red ambrosia salad. Miriam doesn't remember how many times she stuck him with those wire cutters. Not enough to take his head off. But not far from it.
The manifestation of the Trespasser tilts its head back like a Pez dispenser, speaking out of the ruined esophageal hole.
"Go get 'em, killer," the throat-hole burbles.
She hears the excitement of wings. Then Keener is gone.
"I'm good," she says. Once the phrase that plagued her was
it is what it is
. Now, though, she feels like it has become
I am who I am.
Go get 'em, killer.
"You sure you don't want to speak to the cops?"
Miriam called Louis first. She called the police once he got there – but she called anonymously.
"Real sure. I've been at too many crime scenes already. Eventually they're going to think that's a bit strange. I don't need cops sniffing around and making trouble."
Especially if this is who I am and what I do
. "I feel bad, though. Just leaving that girl behind."
"That's all right. The police will help her out."
"Still. Her being alone like that. Even for five, ten minutes. In that house. She's already messed up. Physically. Mentally." Mind like a plate of scrambled eggs."
"She'll find peace. You saved her life. Give yourself that. I've been there, remember." He kisses her cheek. She's not sure what it means. "
And
you saved those other girls, too. I just wish you would have looped me in."
"You were gone. You seemed to want to be gone."
Maybe I wanted you gone, too, if only for a little while.
"I won't let that happen again. I'm here to protect you. You've got your mission, and I've got mine. My wife…" His voice trails off.
She can't imagine what he's thinking. Something about how he lost one woman and now might lose another? That's not healthy, him tying his dead wife's memory to her. A psychological boat anchor like a boat anchor. But healthy or unhealthy, Miriam likes the feeling. She's sinking into it. Drowning, maybe, but the drowning feels good.
"We'll figure out all the other stuff," Louis says. "Just know that I have your back. From here on out."
"Thanks," she says. She offers him a smile.
There's a commotion. Down the hall. A familiar voice rises, a voice slightly panicked.
Katey appears at the door. Out of breath.
"Oh, Lord," she says, flying into the room and wrapping her arms around Miriam.
Miriam grunts and clears her throat and gives an awkward hug back.
"Kind of sore all over," Miriam mumbles with a wince.
"Sorry, sorry." Katey backs away. Gets a good look at Miriam. "I'm glad you called. And I'm glad you're okay."
"Here's your phone," Miriam says, grabbing the cell off a nearby counter near a jar of swabs. "Saved my life."