We ate the dark a novel, p.33
We Ate the Dark: A Novel, page 33
“Get out or I shoot. It’s your choice!”
They got out. With the gun pointed at their backs, the sheriff and Mrs. Glasswell urged them deeper into the woods, where the brush swallowed them whole.
41
A WOMAN WILL BUILD A NEW WORLD
Finder woke to darkness. Her tongue was a fat insect in her mouth, heavy and crawling, and her head spun, that way and that way and that way and that—
“Oh,” she said, more a groan than a word. She was on her back. The floor was hard and cold, even through the bunched-up layers of her dress. She pressed against it and closed her eyes, trying to stop the turning sensation that claimed her.
For a moment she forgot where she was, and fear took over her body. The feeling was too painfully familiar—her jaw stung just as it had the night Mother Mab caught Sofia in the house. Finder felt the rush of blood to her head with the rise of desperation. Run. Don’t let them catch you. Then the slap that spun her thoughts like a clockwise ladle in a pot of herbs.
She let out a wounded sound.
“Thank you,” came a voice to her right, “thank the spirits, thank the earth, thank the sunless sky.” Hands cupped her face, fingers careful as they pressed along the bones of her jaw. “Finder? Can you hear me?”
“Obviously,” Finder answered, though her head was ringing with the kind of buzz reserved only for insects. Beneath it came a rhythmic beat. Was that the calling of a bird, far in the distance, or the recollection of her brain crashing around in her skull?
“Still rude,” the voice answered. Her eyes started to adjust. The soft line of the boy’s jaw outlined itself in the gloom. She reached for the skin of his cheek to prove that he was real, but she faltered and snagged on his sleeves instead.
“Where is he?” Her hair was stiff, drying to her cheek and her throat.
“The Ossifier is upstairs, I assume,” the boy answered easily. “He locked us down here. Got me good in the chin.” He tapped for emphasis. The movement was molasses slow as Finder tried to catch up to it. “I’m glad you got to sock him before he left, though. That was incredible. Top-notch.”
She laughed and then cried out, the tightening of her stomach pulling on the raw wounds the glass had made against her abdomen. She twisted her head until her cheek pressed against the ground. With her eyes shut, the spinning slowed. Her ears rushed with the pounding of her heart, so loud that she thought for a moment it might be coming from the ground itself. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and fought through the pain.
“No rush,” the boy said. “It’s not like we have somewhere to be.”
“Why didn’t he kill us?”
“Oh, he gave it his best shot.” He rested his chin against his knee. “I tried to hold him off you after you conked out. But Mab returned when he was, um, well, thoroughly choking me. He told me to stay in the cellar or he’d kill both of us and went up to meet her. I figured I’d hang down here. They fought for a while, until it went quiet.”
Finder felt dread pool in her stomach, hot and violent as it mixed with her appreciation. Quiet didn’t seem to be a good sign. “Thank you,” she said, quickly.
He smiled. “For what?”
“You didn’t have to protect me.”
He scoffed, the sound passive. “I wasn’t going to sit here and watch you die. Besides, he would have killed me, too, eventually, if I didn’t try.”
“Still. You defended me.” She smoothed over her dress, imagining what hurts hid beneath the stained fabric. “I know it’s not really my place to give you one, but I think you deserve a name.”
“Oh, great and mighty Finder, thank you for bestowing upon me this gift that I am undeserving of—”
“Don’t make me regret it,” she said, unable to prevent herself from smiling back, even in the basement’s blanket of dark. “I think you should be called Keeper. You’ve protected me and this home. It’s only fair.”
“I guess it’s better than what they gave me when I was born,” he said, wry.
“Don’t sound so excited about it.”
He nudged her shoulder. “Really. I like it, I think I’ll keep it. Ha ha. Get it?”
As a response she rolled away from him and his laughter, stomach soothed by the cool dirt. With a heaving push she got to her knees, only crying out when her abdomen bent. A success in her book.
“You shouldn’t be moving around,” he said.
“Like you said, I’m not going to wait for him to come finish the job.” The thudding sound continued even as she raised her head. She felt along her scalp, the hair matted and dried with blood, and sucked in a hurting breath. “We have to get out of here.”
“I mean, yeah, that would be amazing,” Keeper said.
She got to her feet. Took a few wobbling steps. She listened, closely, for any kind of movement above them, but the house remained quiet. “You don’t happen to have a lantern, do you?”
Keeper’s teeth gleamed. “’Fraid not.”
Finder grimaced back, the muscles in her cheeks pulling at her tender skin. Above them roots twisted through the air, snaking across the beams of the ceiling. Finder felt her way along the walls. The room seemed bigger than she remembered it. Over time it had warped and changed in places, but the walls remained cool, the floor packed and hard as stone, all radiance leached away by hungry earth. Her fingers dragged along the dirt until she reached the table at the back of the room, vines digging into the wood and curling around the unsteady legs. Keeper stumbled over to where she stood.
Bone piled high on the table. Wire wrapped itself in neat little spools. Wicked-looking tools sat among a line of rusted pliers and a sharpened whittling knife. She followed patterns of bones arranged to shape doll bodies, the same as the figures nailed along the path from the lake.
“So he is making them,” she whispered, “but why?”
Footsteps creaked overhead, followed by the low lilt of the Ossifier’s voice, too quiet to make out the words.
“Maybe he’s bored,” Keeper muttered.
“Must be it,” Finder answered flatly, pressing her abdomen to try and ease its throbbing. She ran a fingertip along a slender bone, pale and amorphous. “Can you imagine how many creatures he had to kill to get this much bone?” she wondered aloud. Then she froze, finger pressing hard into a neat little wing joint as the realization dawned.
“It was him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He slaughtered the chickens,” Finder said, “to make these.”
With a sweep of her arm, she knocked the bones from the table, scattering them across the room. They clinked to the ground and Keeper flinched hard. Footsteps crossed the floor again, slowing as they crept closer to the cellar door, and Finder curled her grip around the handle of the whittling knife.
“What the hell are you doing?” Keeper whispered fiercely.
“Listen to me closely,” she said. “When I tell you to grab onto me, you do it. No matter what.”
“Finder—” he started, her name tart in his mouth.
“Promise me,” she hissed, circling his wrist and tugging. The door at the top of the stairs rattled and a key clicked into the lock. She shook him, hard. “Promise.”
“I promise!”
Finder clutched the knife in the hand that wasn’t touching Keeper, her grip sure around the hilt. She glanced down at the speckled gleam of the blade, the ragged edge of her dress already bloodstained. If she could make a cut—if she could spill enough—
The door creaked open. A trickle of yellow bounced down the stairs. Finder squinted against it, barely illuminated but bright enough to make her eyelids ache.
“Hello,” the Ossifier said pleasantly, and then he pushed something down the stairs.
They staggered back as it thumped. When it hit the ground, it sprawled wide, a twist of flesh and cloth. It let out an enormous, pained whimper. It was Mother Mab.
The Ossifier descended behind her, his steps eerily soft and lingering. He took them two at a time. He held a lantern, golden and gleaming, and it lit up his face like scattered shards of glass. The skin around his right eye remained dark even in the light; she’d blackened it. Satisfaction curled in her stomach.
“Have you both been good down here?” he asked.
Mab looked a lot like Finder imagined herself to appear, hair matted with blood, dress torn and stained. “I command you,” she said, sharp as splintered wood. “I command you to—”
The Ossifier hopped down the last stair and delivered a swift kick to Mother Mab’s abdomen. Finder cried out like the hit had landed on her. She held little love for Mab, but loyalty was a strung-out thing. She’d never had anyone else to pledge herself to before.
“I command you,” the Ossifier said brightly, “to break the ward before I cut it open myself.”
Mother Mab could only whimper and curl in on herself. Finder had never seen her look so small.
“What is he talking about?” Keeper asked, at the same moment that Finder said, “We know what you’ve been constructing.” She eyed him, warning him to stay quiet, to honor his promise and follow whatever she asked of him.
“Well, it’s decently obvious,” the Ossifier said, still grinning. “I assume that’s what you spent your time frolicking after in the woods? My trinkets?” He nudged Mother Mab with the pointed toe of his boot. “Did you happen to run into anything else along the way? Serpents? Creatures? Things that go bump in the night, with hooves and horns?”
All Finder could do was watch the lines of Mother Mab’s face, her knotted hair, her pleading eyes. Finally, when it appeared that the Ossifier actually wanted her to speak, she answered: “I don’t know what you expect me to say.”
“It’s a breadcrumb trail!” the Ossifier exclaimed. “It’s a constellation map!”
Finder waited, skin numb around the slick handle of the knife. She held it out in front of her as if suddenly remembering it was there, trying her hardest not to shake.
“Cute,” the Ossifier said. His lantern flickered against his glassy stare. “Allow me to teach you something. Pain demands pain. Suffering demands suffering. Everything is an exchange, power given for power. That’s how magic works. You can’t ask for something without giving something away.” His eyes darted across Mother Mab’s supine form. He set the light down beside his feet, burning against the ground. “It’s an offering.”
“Don’t,” Finder pleaded, feeling dizzy, like she might crumple at any moment. “She’s your family. She takes care of us.”
He reached down and tugged Mab up by her hair. The old woman cried out, thrashing, snarling. Her eyes met Finder’s, and her fury flamed with the kerosene. The Ossifier flicked out a little blade. His preferred whittling knife, handle worn smooth from hours of use. It glimmered among the lamplight and the shadows cut his face into pieces.
“There is a creature that waits in the woods,” he said, smiling wide. “I know her name.”
“Good for you,” Finder spat.
“I know her name and she knows mine. That’s an offer, Finder. Don’t you love to take notes? We made an offer. And as a part of our bargain, she provides me power. She makes me strong and ancient. I will never do something so pathetic as dying. And in turn, I feed her, and watch her grow. She has called to me, and she has told me that it is time. She is ready to eat.”
Mother Mab twisted and cursed in the Ossifier’s grip.
“Mab here thought she could keep this creature away, but you can’t keep a demon from its rightful place.”
“You will regret it,” Mab hissed, “you will lose everything.”
“You think you’re so powerful,” the Ossifier chided. “You thought you could stop every witch that came to your door. You thought you could banish that girl and her mother, that you could keep Finder ignorant. You’ve failed every time, Mab. They always slip through your grasp.”
His fist tightened against Mother Mab’s scalp.
“And you’ve learned from her over the years, haven’t you, Finder? I’ve watched it happen. She’s taught you about the magic she holds. Witchery. Kitchen spells. How to cloister yourself away from the world and grind your bones down into dust.”
Finder kept her mouth pinned shut, knife still outstretched. Her eyes locked on Mother Mab’s and the hand knotted in her hair. They were evenly matched.
“Fine, then,” the Ossifier sighed. “Tell me, Mab. Does she know how to break the ward?”
“Just kill me already,” Mother Mab ground out.
“What do you think, Finder?” the Ossifier asked, buoyant and jovial. “Would you like for me to kill her? Break the ward myself? Or will you help me, and save her life?”
The problem was—the fact of the matter was—Finder didn’t know what he was talking about. She knew Mab had abilities the rest of them didn’t. Knew her to be wise beyond the years and years that clung to her, that rooted deep within her. Knew there must have been something protecting the house from darkness all these sunless days, if creatures like the one that paced the perimeter of the fence hadn’t crossed the threshold yet. And while she’d washed the windows with buckets of cinnamon-heavy water and rags soaked in lavender oils, while she’d boiled orange peels on the woodstove and drunk deep cups of chicory root, while she’d read book after book and tried to understand why the world operated the way that it did, Finder had never been taught the mechanics of magic, the reasoning behind it, the meaning that held it in place.
“Don’t speak, Finder chick,” Mother Mab said. It was a final command, her last chore. Mab’s mouth was a thunderstorm. Blood ran down her chin. The wicked scar that bisected her cheek had a fresh cut running beside it. Finder felt grief splice her apart, welcomed the sting of it.
“You’ve forced my hand,” the Ossifier said wistfully, and he cut Mother Mab’s throat.
Keeper cried out. Finder went limp, the knife landing on the dirt floor. The sound that left her mouth belonged to some other girl’s voice, some other animal’s pain.
It was over quickly. The blood bubbled from Mab’s throat across the floor in a black pool, lamplight flickering against it.
The Ossifier raised his hand. Blood trickled down his white wrist. “Come,” he sang, and Finder was prepared to argue until she realized he wasn’t speaking to her. It seemed for a moment that the shadows in the room flocked to his waiting palm, the dusk deepening, corners of the basement stretching and bending. Distantly, a scream sounded, a nightmare coming to life. “Feed on what I offer you.”
“Keeper,” Finder said, still staring at Mother Mab’s limp form. “Grab onto me.”
Keeper did as she asked and the Ossifier laughed. It was the dry sound of paper crinkling in a flame. “He has a name now?”
Finder bent to the floor as the Ossifier stalked closer to them. Her body groaned in protest, her mind whirring, her eyes shockingly wet at the corners. She wanted to catch the tears that waited there, bottle the salt.
“I thought the first time might have taught you something,” she said roughly, all bravado and bile in her throat. Above them the house shuddered, caught up in an unnatural wind, shutters banging and doors thudding open. Keeper’s skin was so warm against her arm. She grounded herself in that feeling as she pushed her splayed fingers into Mother Mab’s blood.
Please, she thought. Let it work. Let me be capable. Let her life be worth it.
The Ossifier realized a beat too late. He lunged at them, snarling as a roar sounded around them again, closer now, in the house.
Away, she thought to the mirror of Mother Mab’s blood, her heart an empty chasm.
Together they flickered. The Ossifier’s hand wisped through the memory of Finder’s throat.
42
SECRETS SEWN IN FRAYING CLOTH
Is this what her sister had felt in those final moments, what the end looked like? Fear, sharp as a spark in Frankie’s chest. Betrayal cooling deep. Goose bumps rising along her arms—dread.
The trees were lush with last season’s dead growth. Kudzu ate everything. Frankie’s shoes sank where rain had churned the ground to marsh over the past few weeks, never enough light poking through the leaves to sap the water back skyward. Each footstep made a dull sucking sound. Honeysuckle rose hot and lazy among the green and wasps torqued between them as they walked, single file, toward the house slumping atop the hill.
Cass led the way. Marya stayed close behind. Frankie followed and tried not to feel the world imploding around her as Mrs. Glasswell remained at the rear with her gun raised. Frankie glanced back once to see if the sheriff followed, too, and received a prod in the back with the barrel. She caught only the top of his ugly hat, but it was enough to confirm her fears.
“Keep moving,” Mrs. Glasswell insisted.
Frankie conjured a million retorts and stuck with biting down on her tongue until she tasted blood as an answer.
Past the line of trees, the house rose splintered and angular against the unshattered blue mirror of sky. The porch drooped like the shoulders of a weeping woman, caution tape fluttering in the breeze from the skeletal columns. Flickers of open space shone through the shattered windows, and she could almost make out branches where the tree had torn through crumbling walls.
As they walked, she held her elbows across her chest. Twining her fingers together made little roots of pain sprout from her knuckles to the spots beneath her ears, and leaving them to hang at her sides felt like losing control. Soft breeze bit into her skin, made the hair on her arms stand on end. It had been a breezy night when Sofia disappeared. Summer just a dead green. The fire rising too high. Frankie remembered the aftermath, how she’d stepped outside the next morning and found the petals of peonies scattered across the yard, torn from their stems and tossed into the wind.
Maybe, years before, Sofia had been led here like Frankie, the doomed Lyon girls, each of them meant for nothing other than annihilation.
In some ways it was an omen, in others, a comfort. It was that dream that kept Frankie’s footsteps steady. She hadn’t been permitted a goodbye, but she could have this—an echo, a repetition, an exchange of energy.
