Thistlefoot, p.34
Thistlefoot, page 34
“What town?” There had been nothing but oil fields for miles.
He rubbed his temples. “Nothing. Never mind.”
What do the dead dream? Bellatine wondered. She supposed she would find out eventually.
* * *
“Here,” Bellatine said, handing Isaac a steaming mug. “Sorry it’s not coffee. Seems we’re out.”
He sipped the green tea absentmindedly. Hubcap was curled in his lap, nuzzling against him. She purred, but Isaac’s attention was on the window, where a flap of plastic had blown back, revealing the world outside. His eyes, fixed to the horizon. Searching.
“Is he all right?” Winifred whispered, appearing beside Bellatine.
“He’ll be fine,” she said. She hoped it was true.
Wind knifed through the gap in the plastic, passing through Thistlefoot like breath over a flute. It whistled through the eaves, almost as if the house itself were trying to speak.
As Bellatine walked back toward the kitchen, she caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. Her cheeks were bright. Her hair, lustrous and thick. Even the bones of her face seemed softer, younger, and the worry lines that had begun to creep along her brow and eyes had vanished. She traced her lips, her throat. Every inch of her skin was rosy and smooth. Only her hands themselves remained unchanged—still as rough and worn with callouses as they’d ever been. Hands with memory. Hands with knowledge. Hands that could be of use. A smile teased at her mouth. She didn’t stop it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
It was nearly sundown by the time they reached the Walmart lot where Bellatine had told the Duskbreaker Band to wait. When Thistlefoot had first broken into a sprint, the bus had tried to keep up—but the wheezing engine was no match. Now, Shona sat on the bus’ hood, her legs splayed on either side of the horse-skull fender as she chewed on a corn dog. Sparrow was leaning against the bumper, dragging a bow across their fiddle to pass the time. Thistlefoot shimmied, lowering to roost.
“The prodigal son returns.” Shona glowered at Isaac.
He shrugged, lighting a cigarette. He hadn’t spoken much, but minute by minute the old hawk-gleam in his eye had grown stronger.
Rummy emerged from the bus, a toothbrush dangling from his mouth. As soon as he got near Isaac, he halted as if he’d hit an invisible wall. Bellatine could only imagine the energy he must be picking up from her brother right now. A radio broadcast from the beyond.
“So,” Sparrow said, trilling on the E string of their fiddle, “now that the circus is back together, what’s next?”
Shona finished her corn dog and reapplied her cherry lipstick, blotting it with a paper napkin. “I hope you enjoyed your little constitutional, Pinocchio. Where’d you dash off to, anyway?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bellatine said, too quickly. “What matters is we’re all here now. And we need a plan.”
“The plan,” Shona said, “is to kill him.”
“By ‘him’ I’ll assume you mean the other guy and not me,” Isaac said on an exhale of lavender smoke. Good. He was talking.
“Hard to kill Longshadow before we know what he and his creeps even are,” Rummy interjected.
“…A when,” Bellatine muttered. Memories of the previous night’s visitation careened back.
“How’s that?” Shona said.
“ ‘I am not a what, I am a when,’ ” Bellatine recited. “That’s what he said.”
All day, the encounter had hovered just out of reach, a dream she’d forgotten upon waking. She’d risen with a hazy sense of dread she couldn’t place, her jaw sore as if she’d been clenching it—but no memory of why. Rather than dwell, she’d thrown herself straight into more post-battle repairs, resetting segments of joinery loosened in the jump. Then Thistlefoot had started bolting toward Isaac. The midnight apparition sank even further from her thoughts while she gripped the railing, panicked, not knowing where the house was dragging her—or what it might be fleeing. The visitation felt like years ago, as if an entire life span had taken place in the time between. She glanced at Isaac; in a way, it had. But she could see it all now: The doorbell’s chime. The samovar billowing fragrant steam. The butler of living smoke. The man who’d sat across from her, as sterile and precise as a scalpel. She recounted it all aloud as the others listened on.
“And out the window,” she added, “there were flaming buildings. I’d forgotten, but I saw the same thing in the cemetery, after I was poisoned. The buildings weren’t there, really. They were like a mirage.”
“Somewhere you’ve been before?” asked Sparrow.
She shook her head. “They were old, foreign. The architecture looked a little like Thistlefoot, but different. And there was a town square, with a clearing in the center. A marketplace.”
Isaac wrinkled his forehead, as if trying to reclaim something lost.
“What I don’t understand is why, if the Longshadow Man’s spent all this time tracking us down, did he breeze right in and out of the house without leaving a mark?” Shona asked. “Why not destroy the place outright?”
“I don’t think he was fully there,” Bellatine said. “Nothing seemed quite solid, and—”
“It wasn’t time,” Isaac spoke up. “The Happening isn’t here yet.”
“The what?”
“Tiny,” he continued, “you said there was a pogrom in Gedenkrovka. When?” He was growing agitated.
“1919, but I don’t see how—”
“What was the date?”
“I don’t know. Hold on.” She clicked on her phone, returning to the website where she’d found the shtetl record. “December first.”
“That’s in three days,” Rummy said.
I am a when…
Bellatine read on. “The start of the pogrom occurred at sundown on Monday evening. After weeks of loose threats, along with the execution of a local stone carver accused of colluding with the Bolsheviks, the December massacre began with the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy, shot dead in the street. This was followed by the burning of a nearby mill and the murder of four other Jews. By morning, the majority of the town had been burned. Forty-two Jews were dead, twelve injured. The rest were driven from the town, fleeing to Cherkasy and Smela. Among the refugees, eighty percent died of famine or disease within the following year.”
“And you think the Longshadow Man is connected to this pogrom?” Shona asked.
“Yes,” Isaac said. His voice rang with a certainty that sent a needling chill up Bellatine’s spine. Some knowledge came from study, Bellatine knew. Some from trial and error. From hours spent tinkering in the workshop, collecting splinters. Some knowledge was taught, handed down by mentors or friends. Some came from mistakes. But where had Isaac’s knowledge come from? Not, she feared, from the living.
Thistlefoot wriggled in the parking lot. Setting sunlight dappled its whitewashed walls, and the chimney stood with stark clarity against the sky. A relic. A living memory of a bygone place. A slaughtered people. A town singed from the map. The house was a walking memorial. The lone survivor. One last stain…
Truth traveled through her like a bullet. What kind of beast cultivates mobs out of common citizens, using fear as bait? In the real world, these weren’t the traits of monsters. They were the traits of men seeking power. Traits of war. The Longshadow Man had shown her the burning shtetl with pride. He’d spoken to Isaac of eugenics, to her of cleansing a nation, the anathema of genocide. His weapon wasn’t a gun, wasn’t a knife; it was a charming invitation, a toast to a better tomorrow. It was fear at your back. Illa had written of seeing flickering soldiers, of feeling a flame-bearing dybbuk crouching on her chest. Bellatine had mistaken these visions for the girl’s own mental baggage—but what if they were more than that? What if those traumas had grown bodied? All this time, Bellatine had thought the real world had abandoned her. That she’d been dragged into a fantasy realm, ruled by magic. But she was wrong. The world and its cruelties had been there all along. The Longshadow Man, this dybbuk and his wraiths, he wasn’t a who, or an it—he’d told her this outright. He was a when. An event made manifest.
“He isn’t connected to the pogrom,” Bellatine realized aloud. “He is the pogrom.”
“Excuse me?” Shona said. “What exactly are you saying here?”
“I’m saying,” Bellatine said, buzzing, “why does a ghost have to be a single person? What if there could be a ghost of an experience? A point in time so broken that it becomes something else? Something solid?”
Rummy nodded. “If all it takes is a single disaster to create a living house, then what would an entire massacre unleash?”
“One last stain,” Bellatine continued. “That’s what he kept calling Thistlefoot. What if Thistle is the only survivor? Even those who made it through the pogrom would have died off by now. And the town itself was burned.”
“He’s completing his massacre,” Sparrow filled in. “Completing himself.”
“We need to know more,” Bellatine said. “More about what happened.”
“We could find someone else to translate the rest of the papers,” Rummy said, “and hope there’s something useful in them. But that’s a gamble.”
“It’s not enough time,” Isaac said. “He’s going to try for us sooner.”
Us. Something in the word landed on Bellatine like a dragonfly, glossy and strange. For once, her brother wasn’t planning for an I. He was planning for we.
“How do you know?” Shona asked.
“Come on,” Isaac said, “where’s your poeticism? What do memories want?”
Sparrow flopped down on the concrete. “Hell if I know. A ham sandwich?”
“They want to be remembered,” Winifred murmured. “Commemorated.”
Isaac tilted his head. “This kid has literal rocks for brains, and she gets it.”
Bellatine was relieved to see the reference pass over the Duskbreakers unquestioned. And twice as relieved to see Isaac’s acerbic bite returning.
“And re-creating itself on the anniversary is the ultimate remembrance,” Rummy followed.
Shona cast a look at Thistlefoot. “By finishing the job.”
Isaac snapped his fingers in affirmation. “Tally. He won’t be able to resist.”
Bellatine imagined Thistlefoot engulfed in blue flame. Imagined its walls crumbling to ash. The house was more than her salvation from herself. It was her ancestor. Her family.
“We won’t let it happen,” she said. “We’ll fix this.”
“Not everything can be fixed,” Rummy said gently.
“Then we’ll run,” Bellatine insisted. “We’ll do things Isaac’s way this time. We’ll run and keep running and not look back until he’s given up.”
“And let him keep hurting people?” Shona said, anger rising. “Every mile he’s tracked you, he’s left casualties in his wake. The longer you stall, the more civilians die.”
“But if he finds us, Thistlefoot will die! We could die!”
“I’ll burn that house to the ground a thousand times myself if it means saving one innocent life,” Shona spat.
“Cool down, everyone.” Rummy held up his hands, his shoulders soft. “We’re all on the same side, remember?”
“What I don’t understand,” Winifred said, “is if he’s a manifestation of a specific memory, a specific event, why does he target random people?”
“They aren’t all random,” Bellatine muttered. He’d confirmed it. She remembered now…“Li Fen.”
“And Nina,” Isaac said.
“He’s covering our tracks. Going after people we’ve been in contact with.”
Sparrow tapped at their jaw. Internal gears spun. “If Isaac is right about the anniversary, Longshadow’s mirroring the way trauma behaves in the brain, neurologically speaking. Traumatic memories do grow stronger on the date of the event; it’s called the Anniversary Effect. But of course, you don’t think of your worst moments just once a year. They’re there all the time. Those kinds of memories replicate. Bloat and warp. Take over.”
Isaac wrung his shaking hands. “They want to be told and retold—like all stories do.”
“It’s about the memory, for him,” Sparrow said. “The repetition. Maybe in some cases, it doesn’t matter who the people are, they’re just a means of acting out a scene.”
“And with those you knew,” Rummy added, “he’s doing damage control. So his version of the story can be the only version.”
“He’s duplicating himself,” Shona picked up. “Forcing the smokefed to perform new versions of the pogrom.”
Sparrow nodded. “Reenactments.”
“If that’s true, how do we even know he’d stop repeating history if he caught Thistlefoot?” Bellatine asked, desperate.
“We don’t,” Rummy said.
“Yes we do.” Shona said. She threw up her chin. “Because we’re going to face him—and kill him.”
Rummy exhaled. “No more running.”
Sparrow’s eyes flashed. “No more running.”
Behind them, Thistlefoot bobbed on its haunches. A great feather shed from its belly and floated to the earth. It turned in the breeze, rolling off like a strange, downy tumbleweed. Bellatine trembled.
No more running.
“Back in Green Mount Cemetery, there was a funeral for a woman named Anne Bratcher,” Winifred interjected. “Well, if you could call it a funeral. Only her husband attended, and the priest. During the service, they said she’d perished of demonic possession. That they’d attempted an exorcism but failed.”
Shona squinted at Winifred. “You’re a little rosy for a job in a cemetery, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I didn’t work there, I used t—”
“Used to live nearby,” Bellatine interrupted. “What’s your point, Win?”
Winifred crinkled her nose in thought, and Bellatine pushed away the startling urge to lick it. “What if an exorcism could work for this?”
“Come on,” Sparrow urged. “Exorcisms are nothing but an excuse to beat on mentally ill folk and keep little girls in line. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”
“Maybe so. But in this case,” Isaac said, “the demon’s real.”
An exorcism. Even if the Longshadow Man was an event incarnate, he was still a ghost, wasn’t he? And couldn’t a ghost be banished?
“You mean exorcise the smokefed?” Bellatine asked. “Attack the passengers?”
Winnie shook her head. “Even if they could be harmed, I doubt that would affect the Longshadow Man. It would be like stepping on a worker bee to kill the queen.”
“But exorcisms cleanse a body—and the Longshadow Man himself isn’t in anyone.”
“Your house,” Shona said. “It’s alive, right? Freakish, but alive. If the Longshadow Man steps inside, isn’t that like a possession?”
“No,” Bellatine blurted. “We aren’t letting him in.”
Sparrow patted her shoulder. “Honey, sooner or later he’s barging in, even without an invitation to dinner.”
Bellatine’s heart sank. She dug the black-and-white photo out of her overalls pocket—Illa, Malka, their mother, and the legless Thistlefoot behind. Her thumb brushed over the speckled image, as if the subjects might return from the dead to speak the answers aloud.
Isaac snatched the photo out of her hand. He squinted. He kept staring, silent, for a long while, as if his mind had stepped off into another room.
Shona snapped her fingers next to his ear. “Hey, zonzo, we’re in a conversation here.”
Rummy shushed her, which she protested with a toss of her ponytail.
Bellatine’s throat constricted like a fist. Was her brother slipping back into that Other Place? What if, like all her Emberings before Winifred, the awakening was only temporary, and he was about to vanish back into that unbearable mannequin-stillness?
“The Drowning Fool,” Isaac muttered. He tapped a spot near the center of the picture. Then, thrusting the photograph back at Bellatine, turned on his heel and strode purposefully toward Thistlefoot.
The Drowning Fool? If he hadn’t just had one toe in the River Styx, Bellatine would have slapped him. Even now, he still only cared about the tour. About making his money.
“The show is over, Isaac,” she grumbled.
“Not the show,” he said, pointing back at her. “The puppet.”
Isaac flung a leg over the lowered stage and hoisted himself up. He vanished into the parlor. Dragging sounds followed. Vinyl against wood. The click of the road case opening.
She looked down at the photo, studying the spot Isaac had tapped. Young Illa peered back up at her, her crow-black hair rivering down her shoulders, a doll dangling from one arm. The doll…that’s where Isaac had been pointing. She looked closer. It was a large doll, a good eighteen inches tall, wearing a tattered cloak and trousers. A male doll. Had that been common? His face and hands were carved of wood, and as she looked closer, a nauseating familiarity overtook her. He was so small in the photograph, she hadn’t noticed. And the black-and-white, it had camouflaged what would have made the figure recognizable in an instant—his bright red shoes.
Isaac reemerged with the Fool in hand.
“Mira told us she’d had him since she was a girl…That he was older than the other puppets,” Isaac said. “But we never asked how old.”
It was true. They’d never known where Mira had gotten him from as a child. How long he had been in the family. The Fool…Bellatine realized. He had been there. He would have seen everything.
“Wake him up,” Isaac growled.
Then, he tossed the Fool into the air. The puppet spun, his rag-wrapped arms and legs splaying out like his body was a star taking its place in the firmament. As if pulled toward a magnet, Bellatine raised her hands. The Fool made his descent—landing firmly in her strong, present grip.
