The Thread (18 page)

He doesn’t move, so I fumble for it, take it from him, and shine it into the room. There’s a light on the ceiling, a bare bulb with a string hanging from it. I reach up and pull the string.

The light shows a tiny rectangle of a room, much smaller than the Grandmother’s room or the one where Ayana was. There’s no window, only metal shelves along the back. On the shelves, are three boxes. Two of them look like the sort of cardboard filing boxes Mom uses to store her old work papers. The other one is longer, the shape of a shirt box, but deeper.

Kirin makes a noise behind me, a sort of choking sound. I can do this more easily than he can. It’s not my brother.
This
isn’t my father. I can do this for Kirin.

So I do it. I reach out and lift the lid off the longer box.

19

Kirin

The skeleton didn’t look as bad as it had in the nightmare. In the dream, when Amir had showed it to him, the bones glowed in Poppy’s hands with a sickly green-white shine, as though they were phosphorescent. Still, the real skeleton was worse, because scraps of fabric clung to it, bits of white cloth printed with tiny red Santas. That was the worst thing, somehow. The small skull and the tiny fragile hands didn’t bother him as much as that fabric with Santas on it.

“Baby,” Callie said. “Oh, baby.” She sounded the way she had when they found Ayana, and he found himself feeling relieved that she wasn’t horrified or sickened. Instead, he heard the anguished pity in her voice, as though she would have picked up Amir and held him if she could.

“It was my father,” he said. “Poppy killed Amir and hid him here. And then my mother took Ayana. It was them both. They’re the ones we’ve been looking for. Who did these—” He stopped, swallowed. “These terrible things.”

Callie swung around and looked at him. “No,” she said slowly. “No, I don’t think so.” She dug into her pocket and held something out to him. “At least your mother didn’t take Ayana. Look at this.”

She was holding a kid’s barrette, a little piece of yellow plastic shaped like a duck. “It’s Ayana’s,” she said. “I found it in my father’s pocket tonight while I was doing laundry.”

Kirin’s brain felt as though it could no longer function in its usual way, as though it were a computer with a little spinning circle, trying desperately to load a new program.

“My father took Ayana.” He heard the horror and disgust in Callie’s voice. “He—” She broke off and swatted at the air above her head, as though a fly was buzzing there. “It wasn’t your mother, Kirin. It was my father.” She wrinkled her nose, rubbed it, then flapped her hand in the air. “Oh come on!” she cried. “Really? Now?”

She sighed, and then her fingers curled around something he couldn’t see. “It’s the thread,” she said. “It’s pulling me.” She held out her hand to Kirin. “Come on.”

• • •

They left the light on in the storage room and the door open. “We’ll come back,” Callie murmured, but Kirin didn’t care. There was no point trying to hide any more secrets.

They tumbled down the flights of stairs, skipping steps, sliding on the landings until they reached the door that led out onto the street. Outside, the night had the strange hushed feeling Kirin remembered from another night. He looked up and down the street, saw only cars from the early nineties.

“It’s happened again,” he said. “We’re back in time.”

Callie nodded. “It’s pulling me this way.”

She tugged his hand, and he followed her down the dark streets from more than twenty years ago. They turned a corner, turned another corner. Ahead of them, a shadow moved along a building, then turned into the shape of a boy.

“There he is again,” Callie whispered. “Ricky.”

The boy crouched on the sidewalk in front of them, wearing the same plaid shirt he had before. As they came nearer to him, he looked up, and Kirin saw that his face was streaked with tears and dirt. “I tried,” he said. “But I couldn’t. I was too late.” He gulped, sobbed, choked on his snot.

“It was your father?” Callie asked. “He killed the little boy?”

Ricky nodded. “He told me. Pop told me. And then I went and found the body. I dug it up, but I was too late.” He sobbed again, then rubbed his face with his sleeve, smearing the snot and tears across his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”

Kirin let out a breath he felt as though he’d been holding forever.
It wasn’t Poppy
. He put his hand on the kid’s shoulder. “You’re just a kid, Ricky. There’s nothing you could have done.”

Callie had been hanging back, as though the poor kid scared her, but now she stepped forward. “What did you do with the body, Ricky? After you dug it up? Where is it now?”

Ricky turned to look at her. “I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell the police. Pop would have killed me. I couldn’t tell
anyone
. But I couldn’t leave him there.”

“So what did you do with him?” Callie’s voice was sharp.

Ricky heaved a long sigh. “I put him back where I found him. And then I waited a while. A long while. But I couldn’t sleep at night. The nightmares were too bad. So when he didn’t stink so much, when he was mostly just bones, I dug him up again.”

“And then what?”

“I put him in a box. And then I took him to his parents. They were on the news all the time, and I know where they live. I found out the number of their apartment, and then I took the box there. I left it outside their door. On the welcome mat where they couldn’t miss it.”

Callie’s eyes met Kirin’s. “Your father must have found it,” she said.

“And he didn’t want Mum to see it. So he hid it, up in the storage room.” Kirin thought for a moment, picturing what his father would have done, how it must have been. “He was protecting her, he didn’t want her to see it. And then time went by, and he didn’t know how to tell her. After a while, he
couldn’t
tell her. It was his secret. He kept it because he loved her, but it must have driven him crazy.” His parents had been locked in their separate horrors all those years: Mum haunted because she never knew what happened to her son, and Poppy haunted because he did know.

“Wouldn’t it have—well, smelled still? At first?”

“It was winter, and it’s cold up there. Then in the summer, there are always mice and rats dying in the walls. No one would have thought anything.” Kirin shrugged. “He wasn’t very big.” As he said the words, he remembered his brother’s tiny skeleton, the shirt with the Santas, and he blinked away tears.

They weren’t the terrible tears he’d been holding back all night, though.
It wasn’t Poppy
.

And it wasn’t Mum.

Ricky sniffed, a long, bubbly sound. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said again.

Kirin squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said. “You tried. You did what you could. It will be okay.”

Ricky looked up at him. “Will it be okay? Really?”

Kirin thought of all the long years that had passed since this moment. He thought of his mother’s misery, and the weight his father had carried on his shoulders for more than twenty years. He thought of the way he had grown up never knowing anything but their broken version of a family. And then he made himself nod at the boy, because all that was the truth, the terrible truth he had to accept. “It will be okay, Ricky.”

Ricky’s face lit up. He started to say something, but his body flickered, rippled—and was gone. The night lost its hush. A Chevy Sonic drove by them, and the driver turned his head to give them a curious look.

“Come on.” Callie’s voice was small and dry, as though it had been flattened by all that had happened. “The thread is pulling me back now.”

They stumbled back through the streets, both of them so weary that they had to hold on to each other to keep from falling down. “I’m tired,” Callie muttered. “I don’t want there to be any
more
. I just want to go to bed. I’ll figure out how to deal with it in the morning.”

But apparently the thread paid her no attention, because inside their building, they trudged once more up to the thirteenth floor. “We should at least turn out the light, I guess,” Kirin said. “And shut the door.”
And then what? How do I tell Mum? Because I
have
to tell Mum. I can’t keep this secret anymore.

“Later,” Callie said. “The thread is pulling this way. Toward the room where the Grandmother is.”

Great. Mr. Giant Blue Man and scary blue lady
. But he kept hold of Callie’s hand and followed where she led.

He tried to push the image of the tiny skeleton dressed in its Christmas clothes out of his head. Instead, he pictured the grown-up brother in his dream, the young man who seemed happy and strong, unfazed by his own horrible death.
You gotta find me, little brother,
Amir had said.
Mum needs you to do that for her.

Well, he had done what Amir asked. And whatever came next for his parents and him, it couldn’t be much worse than what had gone before.

“We’ll call Safira,” he said. “She’ll help us both. She’ll figure out what we should do.”

Callie looked up at him, started to say something—and then suddenly swung around, staring into a wide room that was illumined only by a faint light shining through the dusty windows. “She’s not here.”

No electric blue mist, no Kali with all her arms and eyes and skulls. Kirin couldn’t say that he was disappointed.

But then something moved in the shadows. It stepped toward them. A man. Kirin tried to make out who it was.

The man coughed loudly, then bent over and coughed some more, as though he would never stop.

Callie dropped Kirin’s hand. “Dad,” she said.

20

Callie

D
ad is standing there, coughing just like he was the last time I saw him. After all I’ve seen in the past weeks, all the weirdness and horror, I realize that Dad, ordinary Dad, the man I’ve known all my life—he’s the worst thing of all.

“You did it, didn’t you, Dad? You took Ayana. You kept her up here and you hurt her.”

Dad rubs his eyes. “Callie? What are you doing?” His eyes swing away from me, and he sees Kirin. “Why are you with him? In the middle of the night?” The resentment in his voice—the
jealousy?
—makes me laugh, a laugh that’s so sharp and full of rage that I feel like it could slice off his stupid coughing head.

“Didn’t you hear me, Dad? I know what you did. You’re the one who took Ayana.” I have to stop to swallow something sour that’s risen into my throat, and then I say, “Why did you take her, Dad? Wasn’t I enough for you? You had to have
another
girl, a
little
girl?”

Dad takes a step back, coughs. “No, Callie, I—” He coughs again. “That’s not what I was doing. You don’t understand.”

I shake my head. “No. I don’t understand. You’re sick. You’re a monster.”

My anger feels like something that’s been inside me for a long time, like something that’s been hidden way too long. At the same time, it’s brand new. I feel it flowing through me as though it’s inflating me, making me stronger, bigger, while Dad is getting smaller.

He really is smaller. And I’m taller and stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. I look down at him from my new height, and I know now what I’m going to do.

I reach for the knife that’s still pressed against my back beneath my coat. I’m going to make sure Dad never hurts another little girl.

21

Kirin

Kirin stared at Callie. He didn’t understand all that she was saying to her father, but what he saw on her face, he recognized all too well. It was the same look his mother wore when she held a knife in her fist or heaved a bottle of milk at Poppy. It was a look of such utter rage that Callie’s face looked almost exactly like Mum’s.

But no, that was wrong. She didn’t look like Mum. She looked like—

Kali.

Callie was somehow taller than usual. In fact, she was taller than Kirin now. And her skin had turned blue. She held a long, glittering sword in her hand. Before Kirin could take in what was happening, she swung the sword at her father.

“No!” Kirin shouted and pulled her back. “No, Callie. Stop. We’ll call the police. Stop.”

But Callie had tipped over some edge that his mother had never quite reached. She was nothing but Kali, nothing but clattering skulls and dancing finger bones and stamping feet. Kirin jumped out of her way, then shoved her father onto the floor, away from the sword’s swinging arc.

“No!” he shouted. “Callie! Callie!”

Callie turned toward him, her beautiful hair flowing away from her fierce, blue face. For just a second, he thought she faltered—but then she gave him a terrible smile, and he saw that her teeth were red with blood. “I will destroy him!” she roared in a voice he had never heard before. “I will
devour
him!”

She reached for her father, but again Kirin pulled him out of the way. They dodged from side to side, Kirin pulling her father first one direction and then another to keep him away from those four blue hands. Callie moved back and forth too, Kirin’s partner in some terrible dance.

Finally, she stepped back and panted for a moment, her red tongue hanging from her mouth like a dog’s. Kirin stood still, panting too—and then her sword whistled through the air. As he thrust her father away, Kirin felt the blade skim the back of his head. A hot trickle of blood slid through his hair.

“Callie!”

It was what he had always feared, his old nightmare, the one where Mum killed Poppy. Except it wasn’t Mum.

It was Callie. And maybe Kirin was the one who was going to die. He stared at her, wishing he could run away. She wasn’t really Callie, not anymore, and she could so easily kill him if she swung her sword at him again.

It wasn’t only that he didn’t want to die. Even more, he didn’t want Callie to be Kali. How could she have all that anger inside her, the same furious anger that was inside Mum—only worse? This couldn’t be Callie, pretty Callie Broadstreet he’d had a crush on so long.

If it’s not Callie, not really, then it’s okay to run away.
Let Mr. Broadstreet fend for himself, especially if he were the one who had hurt Ayana.
He deserves it
, a voice inside him was insisting.
He doesn’t deserve to be protected. Let Callie kill him, if that’s what she wants.
Kirin sucked in a breath and stepped sideways, leaving Mr. Broadstreet unprotected.

The huge woman raised her sword—and then, just for a second, her gaze shifted toward Kirin, and he knew the truth. They were Callie’s eyes, the same eyes he had painted over and over inside the pearls of Indra’s net, the same eyes he loved to look into. Inside the terrifying blue woman was Callie, his friend. He couldn’t leave her here. He couldn’t let her commit murder, no matter what her father had done.

“Callie,” her father was saying. “Oh Callie. Please—”

“Inshallah,” Kirin whispered. He stepped forward again, stretching out his arms to protect Mr. Broadstreet.

Kali—Callie—shoved him aside. She slammed one of her blue fists into her father’s face, and he dropped like a stone to the floor. She looked down at him, and then she licked her lips. The sword swung up again, ready for its downward sweep.

“Stop!” cried a new voice. “Don’t do it, Callie. He’s not worth it.”

Kirin turned away from Callie, just long enough to see who was there. He was hoping it was someone bigger than Callie was now. Someone who could stop her.

But it was only Ricky. He was shivering in the same thin shirt he’d been wearing before, his face just as grimy as when he had disappeared out on the street—but he held his head higher than he had, and he looked straight at the blue woman without faltering. “Don’t do it, Callie,” he said again. “Don’t ruin your life. Not for him.” And then he did what Kirin had tried to do. He stepped between Callie and her father.

“He’s already ruined my life,” she screamed. “I have to
kill
.” The last word was a shriek.

Ricky nodded. “Okay.” He wiped his nose with his sleeve, leaving a smear of snot on the frayed plaid cuff, and then he squared his narrow shoulders. “Go ahead then.” And then he dropped flat, face down on Mr. Broadstreet’s body, fitting his smaller arms and legs to the man beneath him.
Great
, thought Kirin.
Now she can get them both with one blow.

Ricky twisted his head around so he could look up at Callie. “It’s me, Callie. Me, Ricky. Go ahead. Kill me.”

“No, Callie!” Kirin shouted. He grabbed her arm, but she was too strong for him. Her sword was on its downward swing, straight toward Ricky’s neck.

Kirin shut his eyes, unable to watch. The moment seemed to hang there forever, as though time had stopped moving.

And then he heard Callie sob. “I can’t kill you, Ricky.”

Her voice was her own again. Kirin opened his eyes and saw a normal-sized Callie. “You’re an ugly little kid,” she said, “but I can’t kill you.”

She only had two hands now instead of four, and her skin was no longer blue. Kirin let out a long shaky breath, then reached into his pocket for his phone. “Callie?” he said. “I think you should put that sword somewhere else. Because I’m calling 911 now.”

She looked down at her hand, as though she were surprised to see the sword. “Okay.”

But the sword was only an ordinary kitchen knife now. As Kirin made the call, she slipped it inside her coat, and then she reached a hand down to Ricky.

“Why did you show up?” she asked when she had pulled him to his feet. “Why would you come
forward
in time—to protect a man who’s as bad as your father was?” She nudged her father’s unconscious body with her toe, and then pulled back, as though even that was too much contact for her. “
Why
Ricky?”

Ricky didn’t answer her. Instead, he turned to Kirin. “Tell the police to make him stop,” he whispered.

Kirin swiped at the blood that was trickling from the wound on his head. He was trying to think exactly what he was going to tell the police. When he glanced at Callie, he found her looking at him with eyes so wide they were like black circles in her face.

“Did I do that?” she whispered.

Kirin turned back to Ricky. Answering Ricky’s question was easier than Callie’s. “I’ll tell the police, Ricky. He’ll never take another little girl. It won’t be like what happened with your father.”

“No.” Ricky blinked, squinted, blinked again. “That’s not what I mean.” He looked confused, as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say, and his outline wavered, rippled like liquid. Then he shook his head, as though coming to his senses once again, and took a step closer to Kirin, staring up into his face. “He’s hurting Callie. Over and over. At night. He has been doing it for years. Tell the police. Make him stop.”

“Callie?” Kirin turned to her. He wanted her to tell him it wasn’t true. “Callie?”

But she wouldn’t meet his eyes now, and he saw at last the secret she had been hiding from him. Sirens screamed in the street below. He pressed his hand to his chest, because suddenly it hurt so much he couldn’t breathe.

“I’ll tell them,” he said. “I’ll make him stop.” He forced himself to look away from Callie’s burning face, to turn toward Ricky.

But Ricky was gone.