Stonebird (13 page)

There are no lights on.

That's the first thing I notice.

What time is it? My watch is broken. It must have smashed when I fell. But the night is dark and pinpricked with stars. Even Jess's room is pitch black.

Mom's going to kill me . . .

Every few seconds I glance over my shoulder, expecting to see Stonebird. I didn't hear him in the church, so I doubt I'll hear him if he comes after me now. But there's nothing there.

I sneak across the drive, moving slowly so the gravel doesn't crunch beneath my feet. Then I'm onto the big stone step by the front door.

One more quick glance over my shoulder. Still not there.

Maybe he's stopped chasing me. Maybe he was
never
chasing me. But the way he appeared out of nowhere . . . his hands, the blood, the gleam in his eye . . .

I grab my keys, squinting in the dark and jabbing at the door until they fit into the keyhole. The lock clicks as I turn it. The door creaks open, and the whole time I'm thinking,
Pants pants pants
, because it's so loud, everything's so loud. I'm just wondering why everything has to be at its loudest when you're trying to be at your quietest when I tread on Mom's foot and she lets out a yell loud enough to be heard in France.

“Wha—?!
Liam!
” she hisses, jumping up from the chair she was asleep in. “What are you
doing
? Where have you
been
?”

One more glance back as I close the door. I can't help it.

Nothing.

“I was just—”

“You had me so worried!” Mom says. She grabs my hands and pulls me into a hug. All around her there's a strong smell of wine, and I wonder if she's been crying, but I can't see because she's squeezing me tight and my face is pressed right up against her cardigan. “I heard about Matt. When you didn't come home I went out looking for you but I couldn't find you and—oh, Liam.”

She holds me for a minute, then pulls away and leads me through to the living room. Daisy's asleep on the sofa, legs stretched out as if she owns the place. Every now and then she twitches and yips and yaps.

A sudden twinge of pain in my jaw makes me wince, and I clear my throat to try to cover it up.

“Are you hurt?” Mom says.

“No, I'm okay, Mom.”

“Please talk to me,” she says, sitting down on the sofa. I slump down next to her. “What happened? Why are you back so late? Gary said you were coming straight home. Are you . . . ? Are you avoiding me?”

“What? Why would I be avoiding you?”

“Well,” she says. “Because of Grandma, maybe? I know it's hard, seeing her like she is. God knows I understand. But I need you to know you can talk to me.”

“No, Mom, it's nothing to do with Grandma.”

It's a little bit of a lie, but I can't exactly tell her the truth.

The truth is I told a story with Mrs. Culpepper's egg, and Stonebird came to life and acted out my words and attacked Matt and put him in the hospital. And now he's got blood on his hands. And—and—if Stonebird's got blood on his hands, then I've got blood on my hands too.

There's no difference between him and me.

It's got to stop. No more stories. No more Stonebird.

“What?” says Mom. “What is it? You're frowning.”

“It's all right, Mom. I just needed a walk. It's all right. I'm sorry for not telling you where I was.”

She doesn't believe me. I can see it in her eyes as they fill up. Her lip trembles, and silently the tears trickle down her cheeks, so I hug her close, and she hugs me back, and
for a while we just sit there hugging. Not saying a word. Just hugging.

And in her dreams, Daisy wags her tail,
thump thump thump thump.

It's not long before Mom falls asleep again.

“Goodnight,” I whisper.

I'm just about to go upstairs when it hits me.

Claire.

Just like that, it pops into my head.

Why she sounded so familiar. Why January 16 is such an important date.

I saw her grave outside the church when I was chasing Jess with Daisy. I'm sure I did. But there's only one way to be certain.

Glancing over quickly to make sure Mom's still asleep, I sneak back out of the front door. I close it as quietly as possible, then jog up the lane and slip into the church grounds.

The dark is thick around me now.
There's nothing to worry about,
I tell myself, but every time a shadow moves, I flinch.

It's hard to read the tombstones, but I can just about make out the names.

Ryan Brooks.

Sophie Reynolds.

And there—

Reading it again makes my stomach clench. All this time I've thought the church was safe, but that's not true. Because Claire Smith died on the day of the missing entry: January 16.

Right around the time she was bullying Grandma.

Matt isn't at school the next day.

I sit down at my desk and glance at his, but it's empty.

Cheesy and Joe scowl at me from the back of the class.

“Hey!” they hiss. “We heard what happened.”

I look around, but Mrs. Culpepper's busy wiping the board clean. Everyone else pretends to be working, but I know they're listening in.
They know about Stonebird . . .
News in school travels faster than fish when you tap on their tank. There's no such thing as a secret. If Cheesy and Joe know the truth, then soon the whole class will. I open my notebook and start scribbling to take my mind off them, but then I see the list again. At the bottom, it says,
Stop Matt once and for all.
I didn't mean the words in a bad way, but reading them now makes me feel sick.

“It's your fault he got hit by that car,” says Cheesy.

Car?

I was right. They must have run before Stonebird got there.

I can feel their eyes on the back of my neck. Part of me wants to shrink down and hide under the desk, even though I know they'll just get worse if I do. But I've got to say something, or it'll never stop.

“You're dead,” says Joe.

“No,” I whisper.

“What?”

“No,” I say, turning back to face them. “It's not my fault. It's your fault, for being scared of a stupid story. You ran off. You're the ones who left him.”

Their eyes bulge in their red faces, but I'm more surprised than they are. I can't believe I just said that. The words just came out, but now I don't know what to say, so I turn away quickly. They might not see that I'm shaking.

“You what?” says Joe, scraping his chair back and bolting up.

Mrs. Culpepper turns around at the noise. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” he says. He sits back down, breathing heavily.

Cheesy and Joe can't say anything to that. There's nothing
to
say, because it's true. Yeah, it was my fault Matt got attacked by Stonebird—but they think he got hit by a car. And if we're living this weird lie, then they're as guilty as I am.

Mrs. Culpepper writes the timetable on the board, and what it says is this:

“Miss?” says a girl at the front of the class.

“Yes, Himali, what is it?”

“There isn't any time for the magic egg.”

“No, you're quite right,” says Mrs. Culpepper.

“Aren't we going to be telling stories?”

“Not today. We're going to have a break from stories for a while.”

Everyone groans. No more stories. I look away, thankful that they don't know the truth. Mrs. Culpepper glances at me, then turns back to the board.

The rest of the class might not know, but she does.

She must do.

After school we go to visit Grandma.

Her eyes flutter open when the nurse introduces us, then quickly close.

“She's very tired at the moment,” Mom says.

Jess hugs Mom from the side as I walk up to Grandma's bed and look down at her. Her light-blue nightgown looks massive on her. It's baggy all over. Her wrinkly white arms poke out like bones.

“Hi, Grandma,” I say, but she doesn't stir.

Her breath is so quiet.

The other day when Grandma said,
I've killed before
, it was easy to pretend it was just the demon in her. But Claire Smith died on January 16, and Grandma ripped out her diary entry from that day, and why would you do that if you didn't have something to do with it?

I realize I'm frowning at her, and try to cover it up by looking around the room.

On the bedside cabinet there are three photos. The first one is Grandma and Granddad on a vacation in Hawaii. They've got pink-and-yellow-flower necklaces around their shoulders and these big, big smiles that mean they're Truly Happy. You don't see smiles that big very often. People on TV smile in shows and movies, but you can't see the happiness behind their eyes. I've seen about a million photos in my life, and there are only a few with smiles like this.

The second photo is of Mom. She's holding a baby in her arms, and her face is chalky and there are bags under her eyes, but you can see she's happy too. The baby is me.

And the third photo is Jess. She's grinning the kind of grin where her teeth stick right out like a monkey's.

Three photos, and all of them are so happy, in a room that's quiet and colorless and nearly empty except for my tiny Grandma.

“It's okay,” says Mom, behind me. “We can come back later.”

But I don't move. I need to know. I need to find out if she really did kill Claire.

Grandma turns over in bed and looks up at me. It's funny how the only things that don't get old and wrinkly are a person's eyes. They're so shiny. Brand-new, almost. Bright and marble-like, as blue as summer. But there's something in them that lets you know they're old. Or not old, exactly. Just that they've seen a lot of things.

“How are you, dear?” Grandma's voice creaks when she speaks, making every word sound as though it needs a walking stick.

“I'm okay,” I lie.

“You look a hundred miles away,” she says, and chuckles to herself. Every word comes out of her mouth so slowly, but her eyes are bright. “My mother used to say that about me, you know. We would walk to the beach up in Whitley Bay, and on a summer's day the sea would lap at the shore and I would look out at it. Watching the mist rising. Watching the never-ending blue.”

I look at Mom, heart racing. Jess is surprised too, I can see it.
Maybe Grandma's getting better.
Mom just smiles sadly at me, as if she can read my mind but doesn't want to let me down. She shakes her head and turns back to the bed.

I follow her eyes. Grandma's chewing at the top of her nightgown, gnawing it with her back teeth. A second is all it takes and she's completely different, a whole other person.

“Oh, hello, dear,” she says when she sees me watching, as though it's in no way weird to chew your clothes. “You look a hundred miles away.”

She stops chewing, lies back, and chuckles to herself.

“Do you know,” Grandma says, “my mother used to say that to me, when I was a young lady.
You look a hundred miles away
, she'd say.”

I step back from the bed. I can't ask her. Not now. Not like this.

A hand touches my shoulder. It's Mom, with that sad smile still on her face.

“Hi,” Mom says to Grandma, and I can hear the strain as she tries to sound happy. “It's us. It's Sue and Jess and Liam.”

Grandma jolts back, frowns slightly, all the blankness gone. Her eyes move from face to face, and then it hits, and she smiles again, although it almost looks like a grimace.

“Oh, how lovely!” she says.

For the rest of the visit, she drifts in and out of sleep. When she talks, she says random fragments about nothing, things that don't make sense.

Like, “Where did it go?”

Like, “I did look after them, didn't I?”

Like, “What are we doing, Arthur?”

And when you ask her what she means, she's already forgotten what she said.

When Grandma falls asleep for the fourth time, Mom taps me on the shoulder and says it's time to leave. I'm last out of the room, because I stay there looking at her for a minute, just trying to work it out.

Where does the demon come from? How does it choose what to eat? And how can Grandma remember some things from her life so clearly, but recent stuff is there one second and gone the next? Like someone flashing past on the train. You see them and they might notice you and you wonder about them for a second, but then they're whizzing off and a few moments later they're gone from your life.

Walking back down the corridor to the exit, I spot something that makes me stop.

The name on the plaque beside one of the doors says Isabelle Higgins.

Mom and Jess are farther up the corridor. Soon they'll be at the door and going out to the car. But the name tugs at something in my mind.

The door's half open. Through the crack I can see into a room laid out just like Grandma's. Even the window's the same, but this one doesn't look over the garden. The view is of the edge of the parking lot leading onto the street.

In the bed there's a woman. She's not like the others in the retirement home. She's younger. She's got long blonde hair, and her skin has real color to it and no wrinkles. Her nails are painted red. The room is bursting with color from flowers and paintings and the TV. It's alive.

But the woman's just lying there. I can see her eyes are open, but she's just staring at the ceiling, not doing anything much at all. And—

No, it can't be.

The picture in Matt's house. This woman looks just like her. A bit older maybe, but not much.

I inch closer. She's talking to herself. Whispering things.

I hold my ear to the gap between the door and the wall. It feels like my heart's in my throat. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be seeing this.

“Liam!” calls Jess from down the hall.

They're waiting there, both of them, standing in the doorway.

It comes to me when we're in the car on the way home:
Higgins.

It's Matt's surname.