Fiendish (6 page)

I stepped down off the curb. “Well, I’m going over there to say hello.”

Shiny grabbed my arm. Her breath smelled like warm bread and bubblegum, but under that was a tight, perilous smell, like the air of a stormy afternoon, right before the lightning starts. “Excuse me, you
what
? Did you not just have the pleasure of meeting Mike Faraday?”

“Fisher dug me out of that cellar and brought me home to you. Without him, I’d still be down there. I don’t know how
you
were raised, but I was raised to say thank you.”

“Do what you want then,” Shiny said, letting me go. “But I am not going over there to stand around with him and play neighbors.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

Already, something in me was finding it a struggle not to turn and look. It was hard to keep my back to him for very long.

The air around Shiny had gone hot as blazes and her eyes were flickering. “Then I guess what you’re saying is you can find your own way home?”

Rae didn’t say anything, only cut her gaze at me. Her expression was mild, but her opinion was clear. No matter how evenhanded she might be, she did not think much of Eric Fisher.

There was something more to it than thanking him, though. A nagging whisper had taken hold of me, like the closer I got to him, the less frantic my heart might feel. It was there in my chest all at once, tugging me across the street, telling me I wanted to stand near him.

When I came up to the pack of boys, I was careful to keep well away from Mike Faraday, who eyed me with his lip stuck out and his hat pulled low.

The rest of them, I didn’t mind so much. I knew half their faces in blurry ways, and some of them had changed so little in the time I’d been gone that I could even put names to them. I saw Matthew Allen and Tony Watts, who had a crooked tooth and a dent in his chin, and Brandon O’Radley, whose hair was just as red and as curly as his sister’s. The rest were strangers, but the kind of strangers who had only to offer a name or a shared recollection and then you would know them again.

Two were gangly and blond and looked fair enough alike. I wasn’t sure, but I pegged them for the Maddox brothers, who’d wanted to leave me in the cellar. I was
entirely
sure a minute later, when they caught sight of me and both flinched like I’d tried to bite them.

Fisher still had his back to me. He was watching the men from the public works crew raise the walls of the bandstand and didn’t turn or look in my direction, but I was fairly certain he knew that I was there. That he could feel my very presence with the same insistent, nagging itch that I could feel his.

I reached out, barely brushing his arm. “Hello.”

When he turned to face me, he did it slowly. His eyes were a dirty shade of hazel, too light to be called brown, but not quite gray or green either, and he had a hard-boned face, with flat cheekbones and a square jaw. His hair was shaggy and almost black, but his complexion was fairish, burnt, and freckled. He was a whole mess of almosts, of mismatched pieces.

The other boys all watched me without a word. I could feel them looking, and maybe Shiny hadn’t been able to do much about my matted curls, but I was very glad to be clean of soot at least, and wearing my new bra.

Fisher stared down at me. His hair fell over his forehead, hanging in his eyes. “What do you want?”

The way he said it was so rude that I had to wrestle with an urge to step back. “I wanted to say hello. I thought I should let you know that I was grateful to you for coming out to the Willows this morning and finding me. But maybe I just shouldn’t bother explaining friendly gestures to you, seeing as you’re not friendly.”

“That’s ’cause I’m not your friend,” he said. “I don’t even know you.”

I stood looking up at him, no idea what to say. It seemed impossible that someone could do the best thing anyone had done for me in a long time and then tell me not to count them as a friend.

Around us, the other boys all stared daggers at me but didn’t say a word. Mike Faraday stood against a streetlamp, with a lump of tobacco in his cheek and his arm hooked around Tony’s neck, watching me. There was a black mark on the collar of his T-shirt where Shiny had scorched him.

I was beginning to understand, deeper than I ever had, that the crooked side of things could be a hard place to live. Shiny got along by flash and hellfire, and Rae by dimples and smiles and making nice, but neither of those seemed to fit quite right with my own disposition. I didn’t know which way was mine, but I knew I’d have to find it soon enough.

“You must have had
some
good reason to come calling for me,” I said to Fisher, talking up at him like there was no one else around. “I mean, since we’re not friends and all.”

He raised his eyebrows and didn’t look at any of the other boys, but I could almost feel him weighing their opinions, like everything he said, he was saying it for them. “That’s a little bold, assuming that I came for you.”

“I’m not assuming, I’m just saying. After all, if you weren’t there for me, then what were you doing in my house?”

He laughed, but it was dry and not at all friendly. “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s no house out there to be in.”

I was quiet a minute, trying to decide what new, grown-up Clementine did when someone was short with her. I felt relatively sure that she did not put up with it and so I stepped closer. “I don’t know if you know
this
, but that is not an answer.”

He turned away so that his hair hid his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he wouldn’t look at me because he found me not worth looking at or if he was worried I might see something he didn’t feel like showing.

“Do you not want to talk about this in front of your friends?” I said, trying to sort out what was happening on his face.

“Get away from her, Fisher,” said one of the Maddox brothers suddenly, like he’d only just now worked up the courage. “Get away if you don’t want her to hex you in a minute. You saw how she was down there—all stitched and shut away. She’s got to be crooked as they come.”

Fisher stood with his hands in his pockets. His shoulders were hard and the look he gave the rest of them was unimpressed. “I didn’t see shit but a dirty little redneck girl that had got stuck down in a caved-in cellar hole, and we pulled her out. So don’t go blowing this up into some kind of thing.”

It was the second time that evening that someone had lied for me, and I wasn’t at all sure why he was bothering. Rae was my friend—it only made sense that she should try to help me—but Fisher had been very clear that he was not. All at once, I didn’t believe him.

The way he was watching me was a bit too fixed, and I could feel the flush hit my cheeks, but I didn’t look away. My mother had always told me never to be bashful or drop my eyes, and so I stared back at him. When I squinted, I could almost see the blur of light that had shone around him in the cellar, and I thought that no matter how steadily he looked at me, the truth was, I scared him a little. Just maybe not the same way I scared the Maddox boys.

The moment thudded between us like a heartbeat and I had an idea that any dare or challenge I gave him, he would take it. Maybe he’d do it to prove something to his friends, maybe just to make them nervous or think that he was brave. I didn’t care.

“I’m going down to that zoo on Crooked Mile,” I said. “Do you want to come?”

For once, he didn’t have anything smart to say. He shook his head, looking disgusted. “What do you want to go someplace like that for? It’s completely cruel.”

“I know. I’m going to go let the badger out.”

He raked his hair out of his face and squinted. “Serious?”

“Do I look like I’m lying?”

His eyes were softer now. When he smiled, the shape of his mouth made my blood go hot.

He glanced back at the other boys, who watched us with their hats pulled low and their hands shoved deep in their pockets, gumming on their chaw and spitting brown streams of it onto the sidewalk.

Across the street, Shiny and Rae were looking at me with their heads cocked and their arms folded, but I was out in the world now. I could find my own way home. The night was coming on, and I was ready to do something wild.

When Fisher smiled again, it was sharp and fierce. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”

THE ZOO

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
’d thought we might be going to walk, since that was how Shiny and I had come into town, but Fisher paused at the corner of Main and Chester and steered me across the street.

It was just starting to come down dark, and the streetlamps were flickering on. His car was sitting by the curb, nearly glowing in the light that shone above it.

When he’d driven me out to Myloria’s, the car had sounded so loud and vicious I’d had an idea that it wanted to pull loose from the road and tear up the whole world. So I’d known what to expect, and still, I had not expected it. It was jewel-blue with a white stripe, all long shark’s nose and hungry body and a saucy little flip at the tail. The words
TRANS
AM
were printed across the back, tiny flowers of rust flaking around the edges.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked, marveling that someone my same age could own something so fancy.

“Used to be my dad’s,” he said, throwing himself into the driver’s seat. “Now it’s mine.”

I got in on the passenger side. “Oh. Did something happen to him?”

Fisher didn’t look at me, just shrugged and jammed the key into the switch. “If disappearing in the middle of the night when I was five counts as something happening.”

He said it like it didn’t matter, but when I blinked, I could see the strange trails of light again, shining around him in the dusk.

Under me, the vinyl seat was smudged with ash and dirt, and it was peculiar knowing it had come from my own bare legs—that just a few hours ago, I’d been sitting in the same seat, with my eyes stitched shut, feeling the sun and the air on my face for the first time in years.

Then Fisher turned the key and it was hard to think about anything at all. The engine roared as we swung away from the curb, aiming down Chester Street and out of town.

We drove with the windows down, dust flying up around us, and the back end of the Trans Am squirreling on the gravel whenever Fisher put his boot on the gas.

We stayed quiet, not because there was nothing to say, but because the road was loud and the night was mysterious and electric. Then we turned out onto County Road 5, toward the Willows, and Fisher killed the engine and the lights.

“The zoo’s farther down,” I said in the sudden quiet, squinting through the windshield at the road.

He nodded, coasting onto the shoulder and setting the brake. “I don’t know about you, but I see no reason to go announcing ourselves to the whole neighborhood right before we start turning the animals loose.”

Then he got out and shut the door, and I got out and followed him.

* * *

At the zoo, nothing was moving. The sky had darkened to an inky shade of blue and the packed dirt yard was sunk in shadow. Up at the house, all the lights were out.

“Are they in bed already?” I whispered, mindful of what Shiny had said about Greg Heintz shooting at us. Growing up in the Willows had instilled in me an understanding that if there was one thing you weren’t supposed to do, it was walk right up into someone else’s yard without being invited. And it was probably worse if you were planning to steal their badger.

Fisher shook his head. “It’s early, still. They’re probably in town, watching the tents go up like everyone else.”

We let ourselves in through the gate and followed the long, weedy driveway up to the house. We walked without talking, but now and then, Fisher lost his footing on one of the hard ruts or slid a little on the gravel. I had an idea that maybe he couldn’t see in the dark as well as I could, but I didn’t know if that was because his eyes were bad in the dark, or because mine were very good. I thought I might just be more used to it than most people.

We crossed the yard to the low chain-link fence that wrapped around the zoo, and Fisher reached over the top of the little gate and unlatched it.

Inside, the rows of cages went on and on. As we picked our way along, we passed something with a huge humped back that looked like a raccoon, or maybe a groundhog. It was sitting with its face turned to the corner so all that I could make out was a mass of thick brown fur.

Fisher stood in the middle of the zoo with his shoulders set, like he was about to explode at any second. His mouth was hard, but as soon as he saw me looking at him, his face went blank again.

When I kept looking, he glanced away. “This place is sick.”

“Why does he do it?” I whispered. “Keep them like this?”

Fisher shrugged. “It’s just how he is, collecting anything he can get his hands on, storing it up, selling shit to people who need it.”

“Like what? Animals, you mean?”

Fisher shook his head. “Other stuff. Moonshine, guns with no numbers on them, stuff you don’t need to know about. Living things, though—I guess he likes to keep those for himself.”

I was a little offended that he should be telling me what I did and did not need to know about, but the list he’d given me was all kinds of unlawful, dangerous in ways I didn’t even fully understand, and so I just nodded.

We wound our way through the zoo, past the cages of ducks and possums and rabbits. I was headed straight for the badger, but Fisher stopped at one of the dove coops, looking in through the mesh. “These guys could come out too, if they want.”

There was a metal bolt on one side of the door, but even just running my fingers over it, I could tell it was useless. Rusted shut. Whoever was in charge of the doves just poured the feed in through a slot at the front and changed out the watering tray from time to time. Looking at the scum of feathers floating on top, it seemed to have been awhile.

Fisher didn’t even bother with the door. Instead, he hooked his fingers in the wire and yanked. Wood creaked and then the staples popped out in a silver spray all over the ground. The whole side of the coop peeled away in one big sheet.

When he went to throw it away, the edge of it sliced across his arm, leaving a neat row of gouges, like the dotted line in a book of paper dolls. He hissed and dropped the screen.

For just a second, there was nothing but that patch of torn-up skin. Then blood rose in round drops all along his arm. In the moonlight, it looked black.

He wiped the blood away, and when he did, I nearly gasped aloud. His skin was closing as I watched, sealing up as easily as it had torn.

Almost without thinking, I grabbed his wrist, pulling his arm up close to my face, but the marks were gone. There was nothing left but that smudge of blood, already drying. In my hand, his skin felt rough and warm and I let him go so fast it was like I was flinging him away. “How did you
do
that?”

“What?”

I stared up at him. “You must be out of your mind, saying
what
at me! You just cut yourself open and now there’s nothing.”

The power to heal was a power of the dirt, and I thought of Rae saying in her prim, clever way,
He has a particular skill with living things
.
What I had just seen was a lot more than that, though. This was no run-of-the-mill dirt-work like Myloria and my mama had liked to do, but pure, undiluted craft. This was the living, breathing body of the world.

For maybe five seconds, neither of us spoke. Then I moved closer. “What
are
you?”

Fisher didn’t answer right away. In the light from the moon, his face looked ghostly and far away. After a minute, he laughed, but it wasn’t a good sound. “That’s a pretty personal question.”

“Well as that may be, I think it’s one worth asking. Are you trying to tell me that that what just happened is
normal
?”

“Let me put it another way. That’s a pretty personal question coming from a girl who survived being buried alive. What are
you
?”

At our feet, the birds were marching out of their ruined coop in a wobbly line—quail and pheasants and doves. They trooped past like they barely minded that we were there, and waddled off toward the middle of the yard, too stupid to know that they were free. The white peacock came last of all, pecking along the ground.

“I’m Clementine,” I said, watching the birds scratch aimlessly in the dirt.

But I said it to the darkness. To no one.

Fisher was already walking away, heading deeper into the zoo. After a second, I kicked the screen out of my way and followed him.

We wound between coops and hutches built from wire and the rotting salvage boards that used to be my house. There was something wholly satisfying about watching Fisher break them all to pieces.

The badger was at the corner of the yard closest to the road, locked inside its small scrap-wood cage.

Fisher stopped in front of it. “This is who you wanted, right?”

I nodded, peering in at it, just a white stripe in the dark.

“Well, let it out, then,” he said.

When I tried the padlocked door, though, it wouldn’t budge. I got down on my knees and started pulling at the latch. The ground under me was rocky and shot through with tree roots.

“Hurry up,” said Fisher, glancing toward the house. “They’re not going to stay gone forever.”

I held the lock with both hands and closed my eyes. The inside was complicated, all little pieces of metal. I stared into the heart of it, looking for the part that would make it open.

The way I felt when my eyelids came down was like every dream and vision I’d had in the caved-in cellar, like I was crawling outside myself and into something greater. Shiny might be fierce and forthright, and Rae might know the delicate truth in objects, but I had a trick or two myself, and I knew how things worked.

“Can you break it?” Fisher asked in a voice so low it was barely louder than the sound of his breathing.

“No,” I whispered back. “But I see how it opens, sort of. It has these . . . things—they go up and down and let another thing turn. Do you have something skinny, like a wire or anything?”

“No. But we don’t need one. Move.”

It took less than a second to see what he was going to do, and then I scooted away on my butt so fast the backs of my legs scraped the gravel.

His boot swung right past my face, leaving a long, glowing afterimage. He hit the frame with his heel and the hinges tore away from the wood as easily as the staples on the bird coop had done.

The door clattered into the yard.

The badger trundled up to the edge of the cage and sniffed curiously at the opening before stepping out into the night. It stood over me where I sat in the dirt, a hulking shape against the starry sky.

“Leave,” I whispered, but for a second, it just stood above me with its paws on my leg, sniffing the air around my face. I could feel its claws on my skin, leaving dimples where they pressed down. “You’re out now. Just leave.”

Fisher gave a short, barking laugh. “Looks like you made a friend.”

The badger didn’t move until I put my hand against its side and gave it a push. Its fur was bushy and not soft. It prickled against my hand, leaving a dark, oily smell. Then it turned and lumbered off into the dark.

Fisher was already yanking open an old rabbit hutch, turning free a mangy fox with a torn ear. He took care to stay in front of it, steering it away from the milling flocks of birds and toward the back of the property.

When every cage had been broken into and every animal set loose, Fisher turned and made a beeline for the tin-roofed shed at the back of the yard. It was set apart from the others, with a set of rusty bars across the front. The air around it was thick with the smell of something mean and hungry. The cougar crouched in a corner, staring back at me with eyes like kerosene lamps.

“I’m turning that one loose, too,” Fisher said.

I shook my head and took a step back. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well,
yeah
.”

I stared at him, but didn’t know what to say to explain how the idea was crazy, so I didn’t say anything.

“Look, if you’re worried about it, go stand over there. No reason everything else should go free and that’s got to stay locked up. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to let out everything.”

I took a step toward the gate and then, when it became fully clear that he was going to open the door, I took another.

Fisher slipped back the bolt and eased the door open.

For the first few seconds, nothing happened. The cougar sat crouched in the corner. Then, with its ears stuck flat back against its head, it slunk out, glaring around the yardful of empty hutches.

I stood perfectly still as it crept past me, holding my breath, but it didn’t turn or come closer. Suddenly, it took off toward the back of the property, moving close to the ground. With a last backward glare, it bounded across the yard, then scrambled over the fence and away into the dark.

Fisher turned to look at me. “There, nothing to it. Now, what are you so scared about?”

“I didn’t feel like getting bit is all. But I think
you
must have some kind of death wish. Or maybe you just heal up so fast you don’t care.”

He laughed at that and tossed his hair out of his eyes. “You don’t really lie about how you feel, do you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have any reason to.”

We stood looking at each other in the long, jagged shadows thrown by the trees. Above us, the moon shone down into the yard, making patterns of light and dark.

His expression was complicated, and I had a sudden idea that he was going to ask me something else, something private, and if he did, I wouldn’t lie.

He opened his mouth, closed it again. The moment stretched on and on.

I was about to tell him to just go on and get it over with, when someone else spoke out of the darkness by the cedars— a tiny, fretful whisper. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The nearness of the voice nearly made my heart stop, and we both whipped around. A pale shape stood in the shadow of the trees, looking ghostly. Then Davenport Heintz stepped out into the yard. Her feet were bare and she was carrying a metal bucket. Her hair seemed to glow almost white in the moonlight.

Fisher and I stood in the middle of the ruined zoo, staring at her.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, clutching the bucket. “Are you
crazy
? Do you think—”