Fiendish (4 page)

Shiny must have been thinking it too, because she reached over and gave my hair a tug.

“Not to be indelicate,” she said, with a long, knowing look that was mostly about my chest. “But we should probably go down to Spangler’s. You’ve got a whole little situation going on right around here.”

I crossed my arms and leaned away from her. “I know.”

“So we’ll go into town, get you a bra. I’m supposed to meet Rae, anyway. We’ll get it sorted out about your piece of craft.”

* * *

Out in the front hall, Shiny stopped to dig around in a Florida Orange crate by the door. She yanked on a pair of beat-up cowboy boots over bare feet and was scrounging me up some sneakers when Myloria came shuffling in.

The way she looked at us was like she was seeing something else—not Shiny and Clementine, but Shiny and the ghost of something monstrous. Her eyes were pink, like maybe she’d been crying.

“Where are you going?” she said, sounding stuffed up in the head, and also like she was scared we might tell her.

I started to explain about Rae Dalton and the trickbag, but Shiny stuck her elbow in my side and said, “Nowhere. Just showing Clementine the town.”

I wondered whether Myloria might argue over that, or say it was off-limits, but she didn’t. The way she studied my face was grave, like she was really seeing me for the first time. “You say you know me.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And Bastiana, she remembers you from way back.”

“Yes.”

The way Myloria spoke was careful and slow. I could see her wanting something from me—needing something—but I didn’t know how to give it to her. Her eyes were red and wet, and I crossed the hall and reached for her hand. There was a split second where I was certain she’d pull away. Then she let me take it.

Her hand felt fragile and cold in mine and she leaned closer, like she was whispering a terrible secret. “You look so much like my sister.”

I nodded, because her voice was sad, and it was true. When I’d stood at the mirror in Shiny’s room, it had nearly been my mama’s face looking back at me.

“But you’re not her,” Myloria said, leaning so close that the messy wisps of her hair almost brushed my cheek. “What are you?”

“I’m her daughter,” I said, so afraid that she would shy back from me again, call me a liar like she had in the kitchen.

Her eyes were so sad I could barely stand it and she held my hand like she was clinging to a past I could never quite know. Sisters and mothers were different people. I thought that I had never seen someone look so undone.

“You be careful where you go and who you talk to,” she said finally. “And stay well away from the boys hanging around Carter’s Garage. Town is town, and they’ll leave you be for the most part, but those ones are not good boys. And don’t go around mentioning yourself to anyone if you can help it.”

Shiny was standing by the door, picking off her nail polish. “And just how are we going to explain where she came from, if we can’t mention her?”

Myloria hugged her elbows. She didn’t look much braver than before, but she put her shoulders back, like she was pulling herself together. “This whole business is a bad one, but I’m not so sure that whatever trickery is at work here doesn’t work a little in our favor. If the craft is as strong as I think it is, and Eric Fisher and his Maddox boys don’t go shooting their mouths off about digging her out of what’s left of the DeVore house, I don’t imagine we’ll have to explain at all.”

It took a second to realize what she was saying—that I’d been put under a spell so strong that no one in the world would remember me. And for all the questions I might be able to avoid, it wasn’t reassuring. The other part was even less so, as it seemed to depend a lot on Fisher being right and the Maddox boys being too scared to say a word against me.

Even Myloria looked doubtful, like maybe she was considering that, but none of us went so far as to remark on it.

“You look nice,” she said finally, as though it were an afterthought, or like someone remembering their line for a play a beat too late.

I knew I was supposed to tell her thank you, but the words felt wrong. She was still watching me like she expected me to go wild and tear up everything, and anyway, I didn’t even really know what it meant for me to look nice anymore. When I was little, nice was a pink dress and a pair of shiny shoes. Now I was just some strange, grown-up girl, with matted hair and someone else’s clothes.

“You be good in town,” she said, and then glanced at Shiny. “Because I know this one won’t.”

Her voice was almost too thin to hear. I wanted more than anything to make her back into the aunt that I remembered, make her not be scared anymore. Not just of me, but of everything.

TRICKS

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he front of the Blackwood house was nearly as bad as the inside. The porch sagged where the boards had begun to rot, and everything felt squishy. There was a jar of sun tea at the top of the steps, the Lipton bags floating like giant soggy beetles.

Shiny clomped past it and down into the yard, kicking at some of the milkweeds that were taking over the flowerbed. I started to follow, then turned back to look at the house.

Most of the top floor was gone, and where it wasn’t, the boards were burned nearly to charcoal. The only spot that hadn’t been touched was the kitchen corner of the ground floor. There, the windows still had their glass and the paint was a watery yellow instead of just charred.

“It’s ruined
,
” I said, and my voice was dry and ragged. “Oh, Shiny . . . it’s awful.”

She twitched her shoulder and looked away. “Fire will do that. This place went toe-to-toe with the reckoning and didn’t even creak, but a few cans of gasoline, and there it went.”

I waited for her to tell me the story of the fires that had taken our homes, or at least say what a “reckoning” was, but she turned and started across the yard and the only thing was to go after her. For a second, though, I just kept staring at the house.

The flowerbeds were choked with weeds, and a dirt lawn wrapped around the front, ending a good hundred feet before the road. The porch roof was strung all the way along the eave with wind chimes and tin cans clanking against each other.

Standing there at the bottom of the steps, I had a funny kind of double vision, like I could see the shape of the house as it had once stood, big and yellow, three stories against a tick-gray sky, with hollyhocks and sugar-pink peonies growing in the yard. I remembered playing in the shade of the porch, lying in the peony beds, looking at the way little clusters of ants swarmed up the stems, and for a second, it was like coming back to the Blackwood house of my memory, as though I’d never left it.

Then the picture went fuzzy and I looked away. It didn’t matter what the house had been when it was whole. It wasn’t that anymore.

I followed Shiny out to the end of the driveway, where the turn-off was marked by a faded board nailed to a post. All it said was
BLACKWOOD
and then under that,
WEEPING
ROAD
.

Ordinary folks might be disinclined to call a place
Weeping
, but this was the lowlands, and Myloria’s house was set even closer to the creek than mine had been. In another county, they might call the whole place just that—the lowlands—or else the bottoms. Around here, though, everyone called it the Willows, after the thickets that grew along the creek, and with that in mind,
Weeping
didn’t seem quite so strange or so unlucky.

Out on the road, the air was damp and hazy. Shiny walked with a purpose, like going into town was nothing, when I’d never even been allowed to walk down past the gate by myself. I followed her, trying to work out if the pale shimmer that hung over the fields was really the air or just my eyes. The day was sticky, and cicadas screamed in the trees.

We’d only gone a little ways up the road when we came to a house. I knew it, but like everything else, it was changed.

People down in the Willows tended toward the wild, the headstrong, and sometimes toward the trashy, and Greg Heintz was all three. More than once, my mama and Myloria had stood comfortably in our kitchen, mixing medicines or peeling peaches and talking about Greg and the devilment he went in for—his nasty way of chopping down trees and trapping rabbits and squirrels and all living things.

The Heintzes’ gate was right up by the ditch, but the house itself was set far back from the road. It was small and narrow, with a covered porch, but even as ramshackle as it was, there were no missing walls or broken windows or burned places. It was hemmed in by trees, not nice ones like Myloria’s beeches, but mostly loblollies and red cedars.

Greg lived there with his half a dozen mangy dogs and his daughter, Davenport, who was a shade younger than Shiny and a shade older than me. She’d been the kind of girl who always looked blurry and a little bit tangled, and even though she lived directly between my house and Shiny’s, she hadn’t been allowed to play with us. That wasn’t such a remarkable thing, though. To the best of my recollection, Davenport hadn’t really been allowed to play with anyone.

Now the house looked smaller and shabbier than ever, and under the big cedars near the gate was one of the oddest sights I’d seen in my life. Instead of weeds or grass, the whole yard was just a big dirt patch, filled with a collection of coops and pens and cages.

There were so many that at first I thought it must be some kind of farm. After all, sometimes farmers did keep rabbits and birds, and there were a fair few in the cages. But there were other things too, and they were not the kind of creatures you ever raised for eggs or meat.

The whole place was built from scrounged boards, all painted a peeling, bubbly green that flaked off and ran to black in places. I stopped in the road, tasting metal in my throat. I knew the color and the burned, blistered paint.

The Heintz zoo was made from pieces of my ruined house.

I climbed down through the ditch and came all the way up to the chain-link fence. On the other side, the animals crouched in their cages, staring back at me. There were doves and quail and a scraggly possum, some baby raccoons and a white peacock, but those were nothing—they were almost normal—compared to the weasels and the foxes. There was a speckled bobcat in a wire run, and a coyote, and there in the back corner of the yard, a bony-ribbed creature too big to be anything but an actual cougar. It crouched in the dirt, glaring out from under a tin-roofed lean-to like it wanted to tear me down.

Up close to the fence was a badger in an ugly little hutch that had been hammered together with pieces of my own front door. I’d never seen a badger anywhere but in books, and its face was broader and shrewder than I’d pictured. It peered out at me with small, bright eyes. Not pitiful, but patient, like it was just waiting for the right moment to break out and get going.

I stared over the mismatched roofs of the zoo and toward the house. With a start, I realized that a girl was watching us from the porch, slumped on the bench swing with her pale hair in her face. She raised her head and even from the ditch, I could tell that it was Davenport, as see-through and wispy as ever.

Behind me, Shiny made an ugly noise. “The weird-as-shit apple does not fall far from the crazy-tree.”

“It’s not her fault,” I said, because the way Davenport sat huddled on the swing was as sad as any of the animals in their cages, and I could think of nothing worse than having to live in the middle of it.

Shiny just shrugged and turned away. “Her dad is plain out of his mind. Shit like this should be illegal.”

“
Isn’t
it? Illegal?”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not like anyone ever comes out here and does anything about it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s his business, wanting to own every kind of creature around. And anyway, to do something, they’d have to go up on his property, and no one’s going to risk that. He
will
shoot you.”

I knew that was probably true—folks in the Willows could be very particular about their land—but still, it seemed to me that some things were ugly enough that fixing them was worth trespassing. I didn’t tell Shiny that if I had my way, something was going to be done about it.

We turned our backs on the house and started walking. The county road that led into town was number 5, but everyone called it the Crooked Mile, though it was more wiggly than crooked and quite a bit more than a mile. We walked along the gravel shoulder, because even though it was faster to take a straight line through the woods, I’d had it hammered into me from birth not to step in other people’s pastures.

The way into town was marked by bridges. The Blue Jack Creek wound down through the hills and hollows, snaking back and forth across the lowlands and the road, all the way down to the county line. The land around the creek was mostly pasture, marked by nothing and nothing, with one rickety water tower rising in the distance.

As we got closer to town, the road got paved and the woods got thin. We crossed the last bridge, past a faded tin sign that said
WELCOME
TO
NEW
SOUTH
BEN
D
:
HOME
OF
GOOD
PEOPL
E
AND
GOOD
WATER
.

Town itself was ten blocks long, low and slow and sleepy. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a heartbeat. As we went, I tried to see the place as it had been, but it was older and deader than the town in my mind. Everything was smaller than I remembered.

I read off the names of the streets we passed, Chester and Peyton and Main—names like old songs or people I’d known once. At the corner of Broom Street, a pair of ribby dogs loped slowly down the sidewalk. Their shadows made long slashes on the pavement.

A truck went rattling by with a stack of metal poles laid out in the back, and on top of that, a big roll of canvas, striped like a circus tent.

Shiny saw me looking after it and said, “That’s the public works crew. They’ll be setting up revival tents and all the bake sale tables and the booths for Green Week.” Then she stopped and squinted at me. “Do you remember Green Week?”

I started to nod, but it wasn’t really true. Mostly, I remembered a bobbing rainbow of balloons and the warm, sugary smell of cotton candy. No revival or anything green.

She shrugged. “It’s mostly just like a fair, you know? A carnival. There’s a big camp meeting on Friday night, but no one goes to that, and some games and rides and a funnel cake stand.”

We crossed the road and turned down Main Street. So many of the stores were empty now, with boarded-up doors or missing windows—a hardware store and a bar and the Tracy Ann Boutique, where Mrs. Ralston had sold perfume and magazines and smoked long, skinny cigarettes that turned her fingers yellow. Now it was nothing but empty shelves.

Farther down, though, things were more lively. Men in dusty shirts were unloading boxes and sawhorses from flatbed trucks.

Behind them was another long stretch of deserted buildings, but someone had been hanging up a set of huge painted canvases on the fronts of these ones, at least. All along the block, the canvases hung down almost to the sidewalk.

Most of the paintings were everyday scenes—bright, pretty gardens and flowery orchards—but the one hanging over the old train depot was disturbing. In it, a dark, proud woman with long hair and a hard face was in the middle of cutting a man down from a bony winter tree. He had a rope looped around his neck and the woman stood on a little stepladder, sawing at the knot with a buck knife. She wore a dark green dress, and at her feet, a whole mess of vines were climbing up the bottom of the ladder, twining around her legs.

I was inclined to stop and look, but Shiny hurried past like she had someplace to be, so I turned and followed her.

In front of Carter’s Garage, a bunch of boys were sitting out on the metal bike rack, looking bored and sunburned. They were a few years older than us, hard to tell if they were boys or men, and I didn’t like to get too near, but Shiny strode past like they weren’t even there, although one of them whistled loud enough to make me jump.

“Hey, crafty girl,” he called, with his hand on the front of his jeans. “I’ve got a piece of craft for you and it’s a doozy!”

Shiny whipped around so fast her boots left scuff marks on the sidewalk. “You couldn’t find your piece with a jacklight and three hands.”

She was smiling, but there was an edge in her voice that made me think the smile was mostly for show. Her hand had moved to the pocket of her cutoffs.

I stood beside her, wishing we’d leave, but she didn’t move as he pushed himself away from the wall and came rambling over. He had a loping, uneven gait, like he’d just gotten off a horse.

“Shiny Blackwood,” he said, and I did not like his grin, not one bit. “You’ve got a nice little walk on you. I’ve only got two hands, though—maybe you can lend me one of yours.”

Shiny sighed and pulled out a silver cigarette lighter. “You do not want to test me, Michael Faraday, so step away while you still have your eyebrows.”

And for a second, it seemed like he
would
step back, but the other boys had followed him and were elbowing each other. I knew that whatever happened next would be less about what he felt like doing and more about saving face.

He smiled, moving toward her with his hands held out. “Aw, Shiny, don’t be like that.”

“I will be however I
want
to be,” she said, hammering down on each word.

He was nearly on top of her now, but Shiny wasn’t giving him an inch. Then, without warning, his hand snaked around to land square on her bottom.

She sucked in her breath.

The moment seemed long. It seemed so long it was impossible. Something white-hot was happening in the air around her. Her smile was a fixed, blazing thing that burned through her eyes and shone in her skin like starlight. I wondered how he could possibly stand to be so close to it.

Then she flicked the lighter.

It was hard to say where it started. It was like the air between them went up in flames, burning in an orange sunburst, and he yelled and stumbled back. The wall of fire climbed toward the sky and then went out, leaving a trail of smoke that floated over them in a wash of dry, scorching air.

“I hate this place,” Shiny said, turning on me with an expression so ruinous and black that I leaned away from her. “Some days, I would not be sorry if it burned right to the goddamn ground. Some days, I’d happily to do it myself.”

Behind her, I watched Mike Faraday and the others take off rambling down toward the end of the block, trying hard to look like they were only going because they felt like it.