Fiendish (7 page)

Then, up at the little frame house, the porch light went on.

The glow was yellow, spilling down into the yard, and I saw on Davenport’s face that we were about to be in a whole lot of trouble.

She darted past us and pointed toward the gate. “
Hurry
, before he sees what you did!”

But even as she said it, her father was already shouting down from the house. “Davenport, is that you? If someone’s up on my property, in about three seconds, you will be very sorry.”

For a moment, all three of us stood perfectly still. Then Davenport opened her eyes very wide, pointing to the gate again and mouthing the word
gun
.

Fisher and I didn’t wait to be told twice. We took off running toward the road, pounding down the driveway, away from the house and the empty cages.

I was halfway across the ditch when there was a terrible shriek, like a rabbit caught in a snare, and I stopped to look back.

Greg Heintz was silhouetted in the light from the porch. He was ten years older than when I’d seen him last, tall and slope-shouldered, but I knew him, just like I knew everything about the Heintz place was wrong, wrong, wrong.

He was down in the yard, standing with his back to the road. He had Davenport by the hair.

As I watched, he shook her hard, then leaned down to bellow in her face. “What are you thinking, setting the critters free?”

“I didn’t,” she said in a thin, pitiful voice that floated to me across the yard.

He gave her another shake and her hands flew to her scalp, but she didn’t cry out, even when he dragged her toward the ruined zoo, her hair wound in a knot around his fist. She was bent over at the waist, stumbling along behind him. It seemed to me that she must dream a thousand times a day of running away.

They disappeared through the little gate into the dark, but even as they did, I could still hear him shouting. “Where in the goddamn shitfire hell is my cougar?” he roared in a voice that echoed through the trees.

My mouth was dry suddenly, and when I turned to Fisher, my voice came out in a numb little whisper. “How can he do that to her?”

Fisher shook his head, and I thought that if he answered me the same way Shiny had explained about the zoo, if he told me that this was just what a man did in his own house, with his own things—if Fisher said that, I would lose my mind and scream.

But he didn’t. Light glowed behind him in a pale circle, making it hard to see his face. I looked for the haze of colors that seemed to spill out of his skin sometimes, but I couldn’t tell if the glow around him was just the Heintzes’ porch light or if it came from my own eyes.

“Come on,” he said finally, taking me by the elbow and turning me toward the road. His voice was low. His hand left a warm spot on my arm.

We walked without saying anything, down the road, past the broken beech tree that marked the edge of the Heintz property, and I realized Fisher was leading me in the direction of Myloria’s.

“What about the car?” I said, glancing over my shoulder.

He shook his head. “I’ll come back for it. You’re just down the road and it’s no good making a bunch of noise for Greg to hear.”

Then he stopped walking and caught my arm, yanking me around to face him.

“Clementine,” he said. His voice was low and suddenly, I was very nervous about what he might say. “You never did tell me how you wound up behind that wall.”

“My mother died and someone burned my house down.”

I expected him to do any of the polite, regular things—offer his sympathies or say how terrible it was. But he didn’t. He stood in the road, looking into my face. Just watching me.

The dark was closing in, making me doubt my own presence, and I needed to know that I was here with him and not still down in the closet. Not someplace else altogether.

The way he was looking at me seemed too full of secrets. Like he already knew me.

“Did you ever dream of me?” I said suddenly, even though it wasn’t the kind of question you were supposed to ask.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but he glanced away when he said it.

I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “I’m talking about dreams. Any sort of feelings or visions—just something that might have told you how to find me.”

According to Rae, the spell that had hidden me in the cellar had been powerful, made to keep anyone from ever setting me free. Now the more I thought about it, the more it seemed nearly impossible that Fisher could have stumbled upon me by chance.

He didn’t say anything. The night was warm and still. Far away, an owl called out in its sweet, ghostly voice.

Nothing showed on his face.

I touched his hand because he was standing so still it was like he was too scared to move. I wanted to protect him from whatever was making him hold his breath.

“What are you so afraid of?” I whispered.

He only jerked away like he’d been stung. “Nothing.” But he kept his face toward the ditch when he said it.

“I think you’re lying,” I said.

He shrugged, but it was slow and tired. “Think all you want. I don’t care.”

Around us, the frogs and crickets sang their sad nighttime songs, filling the air with their cries. I didn’t think that last part was true, but I didn’t say so.

“Thank you for coming out to the zoo with me.”

He laughed at that, his harsh, unguarded laugh, and shook his head. “Do you
always
just do whatever you want?”

“No, but I do what I think is right.”

He looked at me, that strange unfathomable look, painful around his eyes and blank everywhere else. “That’s an upright way of thinking, but around here, it can get you in an awful lot of trouble.”

“I know how bad things can get,” I said. “I’m not a total fool.”

Fisher didn’t answer. The look on his face was like he was wanting something—wanting and wanting until I was sure that nothing in the world could fix it.

Then he hunched his shoulders and turned away, shaking his head.

I’d thought he might walk me all the way to Myloria’s door, but when I started up the driveway, he didn’t follow.

I left him standing in the road with his hands in his pockets and his head down. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was only a white smear where his shirt stood out against the black outline of the trees. Everything else had already sunk back into the dark.

* * *

In the house on Weeping Road, all the lights were out.

I made my way through the maze of halls and into the back bedroom, keeping my hand against the wall, but it was only habit, a trick from when I was little and would crawl out of bed for a drink of water. I knew the shape of things now, knew the stained paper and the scorched walls by heart, like they’d been printed on the palms of my hands.

Shiny must have lost her patience with town, because she was already in bed, cozied up under the blankets even though the night was warm. The room was full of the slow sound of her breathing. As I stepped inside, the chimes on the walls rustled and jingled to themselves, like a friendly little breeze had blown through. Then they stopped.

I stood for a minute and listened, thinking how strange it was to be near another person. To really hear her. The room was dark—almost willfully dark. It made my breath turn hoarse, but strange enough, I felt at home there too.

I peeled out of my dress and sat on the floor. Shiny had left me an old T-shirt and a pair of flannel shorts, along with a rolled-up camping mattress and some mismatched sheets and blankets.

The room was so narrow there wasn’t much but a little space between the bed and the wall. I unrolled the camping mattress, then shoved the whole production underneath the bed.

There was a dusty suitcase in the way and I had to push it down to the foot before I could crawl under.

Up top, Shiny didn’t move. Her hand hung over the side of the bed, phantom-white in the moonlight. I lay on the mattress pad, which was too thin and full of lumps to really be comfortable, but after my willow roots and my pile of dirt and my ten years’ sleep, I wasn’t feeling picky. I pulled the blankets up, shivering a little. It had been so long since I’d slept in a bed, even a makeshift one, that I’d almost forgotten the way the sheets always felt a little damp at first, clammy against my legs.

The space under the bed was dusty and cramped, and I was suddenly deathly afraid that if I woke up in the dark, I would think that I was still underground.

When I closed my eyes, there was only the feeling of a great nothingness pushing in on me, getting closer. I was suddenly so sure that I would wake up to find this entire day had been just a dream and in my real life, I was still down in the cellar hole, forever and ever.

Then I reached my hand out, sliding my fingers along the floor, reminding myself that there was a whole wide world out there. That I could always get out again.

THE CREEK

CHAPTER EIGHT

E
ven before I opened my eyes, the air hit my face in a damp wave, reminding me of where I was and what had happened. Outside, the cicadas were whirring, and I could tell the day was going to be a hot one.

Shiny was already up, standing at the mirror and running her brush through her hair like the world was a hateful place and her reflection most of all.

I got up too and buttoned myself into another of the ancient dresses. I’d have rather had some pants, but there were none in the box. I considered seeing if I could borrow some of Shiny’s, but it didn’t take more than a glance to know that all her things were likely to be too tall and too skinny.

I sat on the bed, looking at the chimes that covered the walls and dangled above us, still now, in the quiet room.

“What are these for?” I said, reaching to touch a tin star that hung with a whole galaxy of other tin stars. “Don’t they belong outside?”

Shiny set down her brush, but didn’t turn around. Her voice was strange and flat. “They’re supposed to make noise if any kind of demon or spirit walks through.”

“Do you think that’s likely?”

But I was remembering the way they’d jingled softly the night before, light and cheery, like someone was in the room waiting for me. Like they were welcoming me home.

Shiny shrugged. “Every old family’s supposed to have a fiend that wanders through the house once in a while to check on them. Whoever was their first link between their craft and the regular world. The Blackwoods are so deep in relations with fiends, though, we’ve probably got more like eighty.”

“If they’re supposed to watch over us, why bother with all the chimes?”

She leaned over the dresser, examining herself in the foggy mirror. She twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head, then let it fall again. “Because if someone’s going to be wandering around in my house, I want to know they’re coming.
So
. Did you have a good time ditching me for Eric Fisher?”

“He’s not as bad as you keep acting like.”

Shiny rolled her eyes like I’d said something so backward it hurt. “Don’t even give me that. He’s ten times worse than any of those raging assholes he hangs around with.”

“Really,” I said, in a voice meant to show just how unconvinced I was. “You think Fisher is so much worse than someone like Mike Faraday.”

“Mike and them, they’re just doing how they’ve always done, being ugly like they always have. But Fisher? He goes around pretending he’s just like them, so redneck and regular. He tries to act so ordinary in town, like he belongs there, but his family is just
full
of the old blood, and he’s as wild as they come, always running off to Wixby Hollow. And no one even gets after him for it! They pretend like it’s not even true.”

For a second, I just stared at her.

It was commonly held that every piece of craft in Hoax County came from down in the hollow. It was supposed to be a wild place, full of strange plants and hell dogs and fiends with glowing eyes and more power than a person could even properly conceive of—foreign things, bound by the hollow like creatures in a book, or else bound to the families that served them. The hollow drank its craft from them, and all the old families got theirs from the hollow.

But even though the mouth of it was directly behind my mama’s house, I had never been there. My mama was happy enough to use the plants that grew there to make tonics and medicines, but she was scared of the animals and of the fiends, and had never let me go past the fence that divided our backyard from our neighbor Harlan Beekman’s pasture.

I turned to face the mirror, working my fingers through my tangled hair, already knowing I was never going be able to do a thing about it. “Now you’re just telling stories at me—he can
not
be going down there.”

Shiny was putting on her eyeliner now, drawing a hard purple smear along the base of her lashes and waving around her free hand the way people did when they were spouting gossip. “He can and does. Anyway, he’s just as crooked as the rest of us, and everybody knows it. Everybody knows that’s why his parents got out of town.”

“What does that mean, got out of town?”

“Just that Randall Fisher got married to one of the Wallace sisters—Marcy, I think—and they had Eric, and then one day, they ran off. Spirited him away to Alabama or somewhere, and no one hears a word. Then one August,
she
comes slinking back alone in the middle of the night and leaves Fisher with his grandma. He was about nine, I think, and it was the biggest scandal in years. Them running off was bad enough, and Isola was about ready to just blame the whole thing on a bad gambling debt or something—save face and pretend none of it ever happened, and then his mom brought him
back,
and him being how he is? I mean, no wonder Isola hates him.”

I nodded, thinking of how careful he’d been to seem plain and regular in front of his friends. “So, you’re saying he’s like Mama and Myloria then?”

“Oh, no way. The things people say about him, his craft is the real deal—none of this powders-and-pills bullshit that the Blackwoods are so in love with, but full-on, to-the-hilt magic.” Shiny was brushing her hair with a vengeance again. “Anyway, now he goes around acting like the prince of Hoax County. Like being left on his grandma’s doorstep is something so great. Whatever,” she said, making a thin, purposeful line with her mouth. “That boy is the devil.”

“Well, I’m going to kiss him.”

It was the kind of thing she used to say about boys when we were little, sitting out under the apple tree in a tent made out of sheets. She’d say, “I’m going to kiss Andy Buckner,” or whoever, and then she’d slap her hands over her mouth and we’d both laugh like crazy people, and sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t, but the thrill was all in the saying it.

Instead of laughing, though, she just put her hands on her hips and looked at me, this long, judging look that said my store of common sense was about what she’d figured. “Clementine.”

“What?”

Shiny sighed. “You can’t just go around deciding to kiss boys. You have to be smart about stuff like that. You have to make them work for it.”

“Why?”

“Well, because . . .
because
.” Her eyes flashed, and I remembered all the ways we’d been like best friends, but now none of that was evident in her face, and it was like I didn’t even know her.

Suddenly, I had a clear recollection of my mother’s voice, low and singsong, making a game of it once when Shiny was having one of her bad spells.
There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid.

I sat on the bed and looked up at her, trying to figure out the thing that had changed since last night. “Why are you being so mean today?”

Shiny glared at me. “Because you ditched me! I’m your
family
, and he’s just some down-hollow creep who likes to pretend so hard that he’s not. He’s nothing to you.”

It bewildered me that she could say that like it was some kind of fact. How you went about knowing if a person was something to you. I couldn’t help the way I wanted to stand close to him. I couldn’t help that when I closed my eyes, I sometimes saw the world through someone else’s, or that it was like he found me even before he came to find me.

I slumped against the wall, remembering the dark silence of the cellar, and suddenly, even the tiny room seemed like too much, because my hair was tangled and there were blisters on my pinkie toes from Shiny’s sneakers, and I was so ungodly hungry.

“Will there be breakfast?” I said finally, scooting up to the edge of the bed.

Shiny sighed and sat down next to me. “Probably not. Myloria isn’t really bothered about things like that—food and clothing and keeping things clean.”

Even just saying it seemed to take the fire out of her, and we sat side by side, daunted by the empty kitchen and my fascination with a boy whom Shiny believed to be everything wrong in the world.

“We could go down to the creek,” she said finally. “See if we can catch some bass or catfish.”

I nodded, but I was not entirely optimistic. We’d played at fishing when we were little, tying lines onto crooked sticks and letting the ends dangle in the water, but it wasn’t like we’d ever caught anything.

Shiny was already heading toward the door. “Come on, we’ll drop in over one of the lower bridges by the county line. The holes are really deep there and the channel cats come in close during the day.”

In the front hall, she took down an old-fashioned fishing basket that had clearly seen better days. The bottom looked like it might fall out at any second.

Outside, she got down on her hands and knees, feeling around under the front steps. She pulled out a plastic margarine tub and I watched with interest as she tucked it into the basket. Then she got up from the ground and led me around the side of the barn.

A truck was sitting in the grass behind the hay crib. It was very old and very rusty and very white and green, with a big bald spot on the hood where the paint was fading off. Shiny slipped into the barn and came back carrying a gas can. She popped the cap and slopped some into the truck tank. She did it fast, with her foot propped on the tire and her shoulder braced.

I watched her wrestle with the can, balancing it on top of one knee. “Can’t you just go into town and fill up at the pump? I
know
Carter’s has a pump.”

Shiny flipped the gas cap closed and set the can in the bed of the truck. “I am not going to waste a single dime on fuel just to burn it up on my way back out to this hellhole. I buy a couple gallons, take it home, and just pour it when I need it.”

When the gas was in the tank and the fishing gear was in the bed, she opened the driver’s side and hopped in. Seeing her sitting up there in the cab was like seeing a wish come true, but something in my throat hurt anyway.

We had talked about this, made up stories about it, but now that it was here, it just made something ache in my chest. I’d missed so many things, and every bygone holiday and birthday left a kind of hole that couldn’t be fixed, even sitting in the cab with Shiny beside me, remembering the wild plans of two little girls who’d once hooked pinkies and sworn to drive away.

We headed down the Crooked Mile, away from town and toward the county line, to the widest, deepest part of the Blue Jack Creek.

The truck hit every rut and pothole like it was looking for them, and the radio didn’t work, but I was too pleased to be riding around the back roads with my cousin to even care. The truck was high as a house, and Shiny drove like she was getting away from somewhere.

We crossed the low-water bridge, rumbling over the creek, and when I looked down, I saw that there were people in the water, wearing all white and standing waist deep. The way they raised their hands and looked to the sky was so reverent it made my neck prickle. Their faces were pure and peaceful, lit up with a powerful kind of devotion.

“What are they doing?” I said, nearly leaning out the window to see better.

Shiny hardly even glanced over. “Oh, they’re just getting dunked. A lot of the folks outside town do it at the start of summer so the devil won’t get at them.”

I leaned my elbows on the window, watching the preacher tip them back and dunk them under. Their white robes billowed in the water and stuck to them like wrinkly skins as they came up again. One by one, they waded back up onto the bank, looking eerie and beautiful, like creatures in a fairy tale.

I pulled my head in and turned to Shiny. “Are you dunked?”

She laughed like I’d said something clever and shook her head. “Are you kidding? That is not for people like us, okay?”

“Do a lot of people do it?”

Shiny tossed her head and gave a little shrug. “Naw. I mean, Rae’s family’s Baptist, but the in-town kind, not dunkers. And some of the folks in town aren’t anything at all. Or else, they traded out one thing for another. Like the Fishers are originally supposed to be from Moravia, I think. In the beginning, they might have been some other kind of religion altogether—Jewish, maybe—but now I’m pretty sure they’re Pentecostal.”

“What are we, then?”

Shiny just shrugged and stared straight ahead. “Wicked.”

The way she said it was like she was sounding angry so she didn’t have to sound sad, and after that we rode in quiet, rattling along through the open fields and into the far bottom of the Willows.

The longer we went without talking, the less sure I was of my own true whereabouts, and I started to think about the cellar again. The cab of the truck was feeling smaller and smaller, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was going fishing. I was out in the world and we were going to get ourselves something to eat, and that was almost enough to make me feel free.

“Hey,” I said finally, looking around the empty road. “Do you think you can you teach me to drive?”

Shiny raised her eyebrows. “I guess. But just out here. I don’t want anyone giving us a hard time because you haven’t got a license.”

She pulled up to the shoulder and switched places with me, leaning across the seat to point out the positions on the shifter. “Okay, now the Ranger’s a three-speed, and it is really awful for upshifting, so you have to just hope, pray, and stomp down the clutch like you mean it. Do
not
try to baby it, or it will know you’re scared.”

The steering wheel felt warm and cracked in my hands. When I was little, I’d always figured the pedals and the gears had their own special kind of magic, but now, with the engine rumbling through the floorboards, I could almost see the parts that made up the clutch, feel the tug of the drive-shaft moving to turn the axel. When I stalled out the first time, I could almost see what had gone wrong.

The second time, I knew it was coming before it happened, but I still didn’t get the clutch down quick enough to beat it. The truck coughed and died, rattling to a stop.

Third time was a charm, though, and I took us rocking and shuddering along the shoulder of the road and then pulled out into the lane.