We ate the dark a novel, p.5
We Ate the Dark: A Novel, page 5
Experience had taught her that wherever Sofia was, Frankie would likely follow, as she had for the past year. Marya was a little more surprised at the prospect of running into Frankie than the corpse of her twin sister.
It was like the universe wanted her to suffer, she thought, as her boss rounded the corner with two others trailing after her. The specter of Sofia’s hand flickered away, and the canister of vanilla icing, in its impervious plastic casing, thudded to the floor with an echoing slap. It rolled to a stop at the toe of Marya’s sneaker. She shifted the weight of her basket to the other hip in an awkward shrug and raised a hand in greeting to the surprised faces of Frankie and her friends.
Sofia dappled like bits of scattered light, and Marya watched the vague pockets of her crushed skull deepen and warp, the periwinkle edges of her skin blurring where the world bent around them.
Yes, she liked Loring. She liked it because it wasn’t her mom’s apartment in Queens. Because Nina wasn’t there to stir up guilt in her for leaving Raleigh, because some days it was so beautiful that it made her want to cry. Because she might be a body with no homeland but maybe this could be hers, the hazy pink skies, the tender blue mountains, the huge ash trees. She liked how impossibly lush it was in the summer, and how viciously dense it became in the winter. She thought the way the mountains held the valley town made the whole place feel a little more heavenly and loved. Maybe she liked to feel heavenly and loved.
Or, maybe, perhaps, Marya liked it because she had never seen a haunting like Sofia’s.
Since the first day at the studio, Sofia’s incorporeal form had clung to her sister, buzzing in and out of sight, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. Marya understood that kind of apparition to some extent—a body needed energy to be seen, and Sofia could only leech off those around her for so long without a flicker.
But there was a fine line separating Sofia from the familiar, and Marya was a curious animal. Sofia was not the old woman Marya used to see in her mother’s bathroom mirror, not the little girl who lived under the front step of her apartment building, not the man who turned the faucets and stood over Marya on nights when she forgot to salt the floor before her bedroom door.
Sofia had a shadow with a mind of its own, that defied all the laws of a haunt that Marya thought she knew. It was an inky and menacing shape, opaque enough to block out the light, shimmering and gray where its size and matter staked a claim. It followed. It stole from Sofia, left her silent and sullen and faint. Sometimes it attempted to sink its way into Sofia’s skin, sometimes it tried to peel itself away, always pulling at her, ever prodding. It filled every room with a malignant presence—too physical, too imposing, too present. Now it pressed itself up against boxes of brownie mix and bags of chocolate chips, fuzzy at the edges in a way that encouraged a headache at the base of Marya’s skull.
If her mom could see her like this, she’d warn Marya away from it. That was how she had raised her, after all, with a healthy fear of black corners and apparitions in the hazy pockets of dawn, a shared and familial understanding that had kept them safe for years to come and go. There was nothing to be salvaged from the unknown. It was smarter to step back—to remove herself from the equation, turn from the begging haunt and give it the space required to move on, with a prayer said in the night to a whole and watching moon.
Marya had never been afraid of the dark before. But she looked at Frankie, wearing the face of a dead girl unseen beside her, and thought her fear had the potential to grow.
5
THE HEN HOUSE AND ITS UNSTEADY LEGS
There was no discernible point in time when the night became unsafe.
It was like this: Once, the shadow cast by the house was just that—a shadow. Mass blocking light. A space that the pomegranate sun tried and failed to paint crimson with its glow. Trees that showed their bellies for oily rain. Birds that shied away from rusty sunlight to steal tomatoes from the garden.
Finder fed the geese beyond the porch. There the grass grew tall and wispy as an old woman’s hair, peppered with ants, white flowers dotting the field like spilled flour. She’d take the stairs two at a time, grain in her basket and one of Mother Mab’s patterned kerchiefs holding the hair out of her face, and step into cast shapes made purple by the absence of illumination. It was special: an opportunity for Mab to trust that Finder would get the job done without needing visual proof.
When Finder thought back to those moments, it was always with an ache. Maybe it would have been better if she’d never known the difference between day and night. If the sun had gone on, a brilliant, red, shaking mirage overhead, so glazed and warm that it never failed to remind Finder of the shift into evenings when her nose bled into the sink without sign of stopping and each drop dyed the water copper. If the moonless night had never come so all-encompassing that seeing her hand before her face was impossible without a candle held in the other.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so awful if the Ossifier agreed when she talked about the sun. If now, when she returned from feedings within the fence prickled with fear, Mother Mab didn’t snatch the grain basket from her hands and the kerchief from her hair, spitting somewhere on the floor to punctuate her scolding.
“All this night and day again and again, Finder chick,” Mother Mab would say, her gnarled fingers tight around the stolen kerchief as Finder rubbed her sore scalp. “I’m tired of your prattling on about imagined light and invented fantasies. Keep it up and I’ll toss your skin-quilt out in the woods and let something eat you for a change.”
The Ossifier would stand quietly in the corner by the stove where the room was warmest, hands clacking as he rubbed them together. His breath would rattle and shake. His sniffles would suck the air from the room like the bellows of an accordion perched against a thin, trembling knee.
“Don’t you remember it?” she would ask the Ossifier on the rare occasions that he’d meet her gaze with milky eyes, desperate for someone else to say yes Finder, the sun was red and rotten like the inside of your cheek and the underside of your tongue, and the light made everything a blushing pink just after dawn, and the Hen House cast a jagged outline on the dry grass every day after two and a quarter.
Instead, the Ossifier would flinch away when Mother Mab snapped at him, her hair wild in every direction gravity could tug it, wrinkled face screwed up with a mixture of irritation and impatience. Finder’s question would go unanswered as tasks were doled out. She’d spend the rest of her everlasting night scattering grain for the chickens in their hut with a candle perched on the porch railing. The fence delineated the breadth of her world. In the distance, she’d watch the trees stand upright in the pitch, listen to something hunt beyond the dark.
Now, in mornings distinguished only by the faint gray that tinged the horizon, Finder would watch as Mother Mab counted seeds for their breakfast. Five in the left hand, six in the right, and then with gusto! Tossed down into a bowl of cream, thick and sour. Eleven was such a wonderful number when paired with lovingly pared fruit.
She hadn’t always been called Finder. First, she was just Creature, barely a girl at all but a thing with two legs and ten fingers, skin mulled like wine beneath the red sun’s glow. On one of her worst nights in those early years of living with Mother Mab, the Ossifier had prodded at her elbows to feel the bones beneath that skin, rubbed his white thumbs along her knees until she could almost see the tracks his dusty fingerprints left behind. It’d taken Mab’s broom thudding into his chest to get him to back off. Finder caught him rubbing his fingers together for nearly an hour afterward, her skin staining them a burnt rouge.
She had arrived in a basket on the porch back before the world went dark, smelling of the starched crispness of freshly hung sheets. The house had nearly bucked her off. She couldn’t blame it—it was used to creatures coming out of the woods in search of something to feed on, half-dead wraiths with no right mind of their own. But when Mother Mab opened the door, she’d found not the dead but Finder squalling and a great brown bear pressing its nose against hers, tugging at the basket handle with its teeth.
Superstitious to a fault, Mab brought the bear inside first and fed her a plate of fish. Then, after they finished their respective breakfasts, she went outside to retrieve Finder.
“You’ll be called Creature until you can earn a name,” Mother Mab said to Finder once she was old enough to know what the words meant, drying her palms on an apron so dirty it barely managed to bend around the wrinkles of her skin.
“Yes, Mother Mab,” Finder had answered.
The thing was, she hadn’t been sure what was worthy. Before the thick night came, she spent her days working, washing clothes and stirring pots on the stove. Afternoons passed picking berries in the woods, lying on her back in the grass as the blood-red sun crawled across the sky.
Her answer came in the form of a seedling.
She’d been the first to spot the crack in the floor. While the Ossifier sat in the next room, settled in Mother Mab’s second-favorite armchair and whittling a bleached bone, and Mab bundled bouquets of river reeds by the woodstove, Finder read from a thin volume of stories on the kitchen floor. Finder was a little over seven years old then, signaled by the cauterized lines burned into her thigh, rising taut, a tally for each passing collage of days. She was just tall enough now to reach the fourth shelf, the one with familiar titles like Transmutation in the Form of a Bone and Assisting a Spirit in Passage and Shapeshifters: The Goat Man Walks after Three.
That day, years before the sun winked out of the sky, a page splayed open about a demon that grew from spilled blood like seeds planted in earth. It was a rooted thing that latched itself into whatever could feed it, whether that be body or loam or liquid, and it was said to obey the ones that learned its name and called it from their reflections. She was a little too scared to look directly at the illustrations and had to cover them with a hand while she read—the demon’s gnarled head and the shadowed shapes it tore into with its teeth left her sick with near hallucinations of her own outline stepping into the light.
Mother Mab stalked past and gave Finder’s book a kick, shutting it with the pointed toe of her boot. “Don’t read things like that,” Mab said. “I won’t be the one to ease the nightmares that will come with it.”
Finder looked up from the closed book, annoyed, and her eyes landed on the seedling.
Somehow, underfoot and fickle, it had crawled its way through the floor. The fresh green of its leaves left spots at the corners of her vision. She brushed a tentative finger against it and felt something sing deep in her blood. It was a warning sensation, like the hum of insects right before a storm.
“Mother Mab,” she called from her place on the floor. “There’s a plant.”
The Ossifier let out a wounded noise and sucked at his thumb where his knife had nicked it. Sparse pale hair fell across the lines of his forehead. The house keened as Mother Mab stopped beside her. “What are you talking about, chickling?”
She pointed at the sprout. “It’s growing through the floor.”
Mab’s kneeling was a messy ordeal. Her skirts were mud caked at the hems and her ample hips didn’t take well to bending low. But she got down beside Finder and peered at the seedling. A deep-set wrinkle bisected her narrowed eyes. The Ossifier watched them, thumb held between his lips.
“Oh, Creature,” Mother Mab breathed. “Do you know what this means? It’s a tree, come to bear us fruit and join our house.” She reached out, quick as the crack of a whip, and caught Finder’s chin. Her fingers pressed dimples into Finder’s cheeks. “This is a wonderful thing you’ve seen.”
Mab released her, worked her way back up to standing. She smiled down at the girl on the floor—an eerie sight. “I think it’s time we gave you a name, Finder.”
So she became indispensable to Mother Mab, always spotting something just before it was needed. Until the night. Until she watched the sun drain from the world.
Before bed, she’d blow her candle out and paint the room a million shades of black. Stare at the slanted ceiling of her attic bedroom, knotted eyes peering at her from the wood. “It happened,” she’d whisper back at them. Maybe Mother Mab and the Ossifier sleeping beneath her would hear it, feel the words seep behind their shut eyelids.
Maybe it bothered her most because she knew it had to be her fault.
One moment, the window beside the door to the porch was awash in red, scarlet pouring through the panes of glass like wine. In the distance, it melted with the smoke of village chimneys and cast a wide berth over the mountains, dirt so fiercely tanned that the whole world might as well have been leather. One moment and she’d been memorizing the shape of those hills, the dips and arcs, the landscape she had known her entire life. Then the next second—fast and painful as a breaking bone—a black curtain dropped over the land and her vision had no chance of adjusting.
And what Finder saw was different, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that what Mother Mab had always said? So why wouldn’t they believe her, when they had lived in the red world, too, before the woods became too dangerous to step into and the grass grew too high to wade through?
Sofia would believe her, Finder knew. If she would only come back—if she would only answer Finder’s whispers into the tepid surface of the bath, if she would only feel the way Finder shook when she sat by her window and begged the glass to show her the other girl’s face.
Sofia had loved the tree. When Finder brought her to it in the sleeping house, pressed Sofia’s hand up against the bark, showed her how it twisted its way through the floorboards, Sofia’s eyes had welled with tears.
“Oh, it’s beautiful, Finder, it’s lovely,” she had said, her voice shaking harder than her white hand against the purpled bark.
Finder had thought it would make her happy, to see the magic of it all unfolding before her. After all, there was nothing Sofia loved more than magic.
But Finder knew what it felt like when something was so beautiful that it hurt to see. It was how she used to feel when she looked at the sun.
Sofia had always understood her better than anyone else.
6
ROTTEN LIKE FALLEN FRUIT
The dress didn’t fit. Frankie pinched the waist, felt the black fabric give, watched it pillow away from the plane of her stomach in her reflection.
The house was loud as a body, with all the same digestive hums and groans. Downstairs she could hear the music of them—Cass and Oph arranging flowers in the collection of vases Frankie had ferried home from the studio, Poppy distinguishable by the third set of footsteps pacing in the kitchen.
Frankie felt lucky to have slipped away—it ached to picture the heavy hanging heads of Oph’s peonies, cut and clustered.
In an hour the house would fill with everyone she had spent the last five years attempting to avoid, well-meaning mothers and overcurious classmates and fraudulent lurkers preparing to drink in the grief. Frankie turned from the mirror and dragged a harsh breath in through her nose. It was too much—her mind a mess, her body ugly in the dress, her heart a fractured thing slamming against her rib cage.
A creak sounded in the hall. She snapped her head up and watched the empty doorway. Some traitorous part of her hoped that she would find her sister standing there, waiting to be invited inside.
Sofia had always been a size smaller than Frankie, something that reminded her that they had been different beings after all. That Frankie hadn’t lost herself inside of the myth of her sister. But now they were almost the same—Frankie shrinking and changing while Sofia remained stagnant.
She slipped out of her bedroom and down the hall to Sofia’s door. The hesitation lasted only a moment, her breath a brutal stone in her throat and her hand hovering over the knob, before she pushed her way in.
The air inside was stale, duvet mussed like it had never been made after the last person to sleep on it. Frankie avoided looking at the photos on the wall or the scattered papers and pens on Sofia’s desk—instead she went right for the closet and began to flick through hangers.
The floor gave another whisper and she glanced over her shoulder. Downstairs, Cass laughed. Here the shadows were deeper, faint buzzing clinging to the quiet corners. The hair on her arms stood on end, electric.
“Hello?” she mumbled, testing. But silence answered.
She faced the task with new determination. The closet was exactly how it had been since they first moved into Oph’s. Messy, unorganized, packed as a finch’s nest. The dusty scent of jasmine. Heady woodsmoke clinging to a sweatshirt, so faint it could have been conjured by memory alone. Frankie brought the sleeve to her cheek and inhaled, her eyes shut, her chin trembling.
Hinges creaked somewhere down the hall and she dropped it immediately. She snatched a dress off the hanger instead and laid it out on the bed. There it made a corpse of its own—a sister-shaped space against all the quilted thread.
She made quick work of the too-big dress over her head before stepping into Sofia’s. It was still a little small—the zipper caught halfway when she tugged it up—but at least it didn’t make her feel like she was drowning.
“Do you need some help?”
“Jesus Christ,” Frankie gasped, hand pressed to her throat as she spun and found Poppy in the doorway.
“Sorry,” Poppy said, uncomfortable. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing up here?” Frankie asked.
Poppy glanced around the room before her eyes rushed back to Frankie, who stood with her hands pressed to the collar of the dress, zipper hanging open and exposing the flayed fabric of her bare back. She felt entirely too exposed. Something in Poppy’s face sharpened, burned by the sight of Sofia’s preservation.
