The Curiosities Page 15

  Before she can respond, Father walks into the circle of coal-fires. Behind him is Rhun and his father, pulling a skittish Fourth Wind. My fists clench. I close my eyes as my sister takes my hand and leads me into the line. In darkness I walk. Out into the fields again, where the light of the sun does nothing to steal the chill from my cheeks. I do not join in the quiet humming. Nor do I watch when they cut his throat and his blood pours into the earth. It soaks into the cracks of the field, splattering the dead yellow grasses.

  I stand with my arms wrapped around myself as they quarter the corpse. Parts are taken to each corner of our land, a boundary of blood and bone to tell the dead where we are.

  But the head is taken back to town. Old Miss Marion’s cauldron is set over flames, and Wind’s head is stripped of skin and meat. Eyes go to Mother, who will save them for burying with honey half a year from now.

  The skull goes into the cauldron. Two hours’ hard boil, with the bubbles roiling and popping so hard the children play at getting as close as they can without burning their faces. After that, it will be picked clean and returned to a simmer for the rest of the day. Come night, come night—the final night—Fourth Wind will invite the dead to feast.

  . . .

  [3]The third night we wait in our houses. My back presses against the inside of the front door, my shawl clutched around me. Father and Mother wait in the center of the little house, holding hands. My sisters flank them like a flock of geese fleeing south.

  The red glow from the setting sun traces along the dining table, highlighting generations’ worth of nicks and gouges. I know every single one and have run my fingers along them. I wonder what the table of the dead will feel like under my hands.

  The door vibrates with the first knock, and I close my eyes. The second comes, and Father nods to me. At the third knock I turn and throw open the door.

  He is there.

  White bone glows in the moonlight: a horse skull grinning down at me. His shoulders are covered in a horsehair cloak, and leathers from last year’s beast wrap around his legs. Braided tails spill down his back.

  And I can just see his slow smile hiding in the shadows under the jawbone.

  He spreads his arms and steps back, tossing his head like a prancing horse. Inviting us out. I take a deep breath and reach for his hand. It is warm, and we weave our fingers together. He pulls me into the road toward our neighbors. I hear my family lining up behind us.

  Together we knock on every door, calling the town to join us, to dance with us to the dead feast. Through houses and gardens we weave: a cold snake, a death snake, but now with our own death’s-head.

  Around and around the bonefire, through the bloody smoke we dance. His hand firm in mine. We do not laugh or shriek or call with the rest of the town. The moon rises higher, and we spin into the field where Fourth Wind died.

  He stops. The town pours around us in a massive crescent. A shield between us and the town. And at the edge of the trees the dead wait.

  Crouched and huddled, peeking through branches, crawling up from the ground. Meat in their teeth, blood under their nails. Pale as light, hard as stone. They are everything dead: maggots and rot and perfect airy spirits. Floating, reaching, begging. One holds a horse hoof in its hands, another braids tendons together into a bracelet. They have our quartered offerings, and they wait. They stare at Fourth Wind’s skull.

  His hand trembles. I grip it between both of mine. He steps forward. He must go to them. To dance with them in the death-mask. To survive the night on his feet, leading them a chase through the woods so they cannot come back to town before dawn.

  My mother calls wordlessly, unwilling to say my name before the hosts of the dead. She has realized what I mean to do.

  I glance back once and wave.

  Then, before Rhun charges, I leap away from him, running toward the dead.

  His steps beat after me, and I hold out my hand.

  Our fingers link.

  The dead slather gleefully and lick their lips.

  It is the third night of Samhain, and we run together.

  [1]BLUE AS GOD

  by Brenna Yovanoff

  A lot of short stories go like this: There is a girl. There is a man, and he is bad. Terrible things happen to the girl, and she is never the same. A lot of Brenna’s short stories go like this: There is a girl. There is a man, and he is bad. The girl is worse, and the man stops breathing[2]. Sometimes I’m afraid of Brenna, but mostly I’m glad I’m a girl. —Maggie

  Sometimes I write stories about timid, sheltered girls who don’t know who they are and who are forced to learn their own stories because they suddenly don’t have any other options. This is not one of those times. —Brenna

  I woke up in the dark. The room was big, without a lot of furniture, and I could see the bone-white sheen of my legs. I could see my reflection on the ceiling, sprawled on the bed like a sad, busted skeleton. What kind of pretentious jackass has a mirror on the ceiling?

  I’d come up the canyon for the party because I wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t my apartment, be my same self, but in a different place. I was tired of my own thoughts. The time ticked on like a leaky faucet, and let me tell you one thing: L.A. can suck it. It’s where nice girls come to die. Not that I would know. I came from Spencer’s Branch, Idaho, home of nice girls, but I can’t make the case that I ever was one.

  I just wasn’t built for a small town. I didn’t curl my hair, didn’t cook Hamburger Helper meals or wear sweaters with kittens. Had stopped closing my eyes when I prayed. Okay, once maybe, I was a good girl. I guess. As long as we’re being honest. I kept my smile decent, my eyes downcast, and I never used to say yes, but now yes was the only thing that seemed to come naturally.

  When the director came up to me on the roof, I knew who he was, of course. It was his house. The night was hot, and the Santa Anas didn’t quit. Fifteen miles inland the fires had been raging for days. Even in the refrigerated chill of the house, the air smelled burned.

  He said, “You have a certain look. Hard. I like that.”

  He was young for a director, and the industry rags said that he was some kind of genius—all the best festivals, the jury prizes, the speeches, the very best parties.

  He touched the side of my arm. “I think I could use you.”

  [3]All around, the girls laughed and rolled their eyes like jackals, giving me looks. Like they wouldn’t have jumped headfirst if he’d said the same thing to them.

  He said I should stay and we’d get to know each other, talk about a project—he thought it would be perfect for me. His smile was honest, and I knew there was no project, but I was ready to buy the other lie, the one he sold as often as that fictitious starring role. A warm fantasy that he’ll pet and hold and cherish you for twenty minutes or an hour. That he’ll want you for longer than a heartbeat.

  Around us, the crowd was sweating, glossy like otters. My hair stuck to the back of my neck, and my makeup was melting off my face.

  He took me down the wide, curving staircase to his room and we drank red wine and listened to records on a 1940s turntable. He was pretentious, but charming, and kind of solemn.

  He said, “Stay here with me. We can work out some of the fine points after everyone goes home. Just don’t go wandering around—it’s a big house and a person could get lost. Then I’d have to look for you.”

  Later, I woke up in the dark and he was gone.

  I got up and put on my crumpled dress, found my shoes and my purse. Everything was so quiet.

  Out in the living room there was no one. Not a single mumbling cokehead or blackout baby slumped on the couch, and no one on the roof. I crept through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement. It was cream-colored. I mean, the whole thing was. It was white like a hospital and went on forever, cut right out of the hill, and I kept thinking I should leave, I should get out. The farther I went, the worse the emptiness got.

  I wandered down hallways and turned corners, looking for someon
e, anyone. Even a cat or a houseplant would prove that I was still real.

  The door was narrow, painted a cracked, peeling blue. It wasn’t locked.

  The room was full of video equipment—handheld cameras and computer monitors and a whole stack of memory cards with paper labels. Every label had a name and date. I picked up Becca, June 6–7 and put her in the media slot on the one of the cameras. When I pressed play, the screen lit up, showing a blonde, smiling girl, fresh-faced and juicy like a blueribbon pie.

  “Well, I’m from Clement,” she said to the camera. “That’s right near Houston. I moved out here because it just seemed so exciting! I mean, my whole life, I’ve wanted to be an actress.”

  From offscreen, the director’s voice sounded raspy and playful. “What would you say your greatest strength is? Your greatest weakness?”

  I forwarded through the slop to see if it got better. It didn’t. But it got interesting.

  The director set the camera on a tripod and moved into the shot. His voice was sharp and excited, and then he was doing things to her. Not sex things, but bad, sick things, and I yanked the card out, feeling breathless. But I have never believed in knowing when to stop, and I stuck in another one.

  I watched Susan, who spent three miserable days in July down in the director’s cutting room, and Cara, who only lasted part of July 18, and Valerie on August 12, and it didn’t ever turn out okay. And there was a stack of other ones, this whole stack, too many to look at, and I put the camera down.

  The girls all ended up with their heads slumped forward and their hands tied. All his beaming, corn-fed girls. By the end of the movie he’d taped over their mouths, but their eyes all had the same hunted look.

  As I backed away from the monitors, the door shut behind me, and then I heard the key whisper and the lock slam home, because of course it bolted from the inside.

  “I told you not to wander off,” he said. “I told you not to go snooping around, but some girls just don’t listen. As long as we’re down here, though, why don’t we get started on the project? Have a seat.”

  You already know the way this ends.

  She finds Bluebeard’s secret room and sees his murdered wives, and then she tries to cover up and act like she didn’t. But I’m a pretty worthless liar. I’ve just never seen the point.

  Out on the rooftop, the sky would be hazy and black. No cloud of dust on the horizon to signal rescue. The moon was long gone, and the sun wouldn’t rise for another couple hours. Up in the hills, the fires were burning and the smoke was everywhere.

  He stood in the middle of the cutting room with the camera trained on my face. “Tell me about yourself—your hopes and dreams. Your fantasies, your fears.”

  So I told him my story. It was short. I said, “I came to L.A. with nothing. I don’t know why I stay here. I came from a poor little cow town, and trust me, there was nothing there either. I don’t have much family. No brothers, no sisters. I pray like a dyed-in-wool hypocrite in church, and if I don’t bow my head for God, what makes you think I’ll bow for you?”

  He said, “Everybody bows eventually.”

  I said, “Really. Is that a fact. Well then, let’s skip the whole interview process and get down to business.”

  “You don’t really mean that.”

  “Try me.”

  The thing about pepper spray is, it’s effective from a distance of up to ten feet. If you discharge it from four inches, the burn is something else.

  The key ring was dancing, jangling as he thrashed. I yanked it off his belt and shoved past him, coughing and raging like the autumn fires, eyes streaming. He knew she’d lied because the key was magic, an everlasting charm. It betrayed her. What a way for the lie to fall apart—undone by an inanimate object.

  He caught me by the wrist, dragging me down to the floor, down to where he gasped and swore, face red, eyes puffy and squeezed shut. I raised my other hand and slashed. You can do a lot of damage with a two-inch strip of metal.

  The stories are baffling. They don’t make sense. She married a maniac—what, she didn’t notice?—but in the gruesome context of the tale, it sounds random, circumstantial, just another little victim.

  Still, they were right about one thing.

  The key had blood on it.

  THOMAS ALL

  by Tessa Gratton

  Now, here’s a piece that showcases Tess’s ability to scare the bejeezus out of me. While “Thomas All” is indisputably a faerie story, it’s one that also happens to feel a lot like a horror story. The sheer perverse creepiness and the modern setting both serve to keep it well out of high-fantasy territory, but there’s also this bright, adventurous quality that keeps it from falling too far into the realm of real life (not to mention a massive, mysterious world winking at us from just below the surface). —Brenna

  Every once in a while I try to write a novel about [1]Thomas. Someday I’ll manage to. I love my plastic sword–wielding fifteen-year-old psychopath. —Tessa

  [2]We’re all called Thomas, because it’s easier for the old ones, who hardly notice the difference between us.

  And most of us don’t ever realize we’re only one of many. But it’s been happening forever, and we’re each of us only good for ten years on the outside. I think I was about fourteen when I escaped, and I don’t know how young I was when I was taken, but I had to have been four or so because I have dim memories of my mother and father. She had milky green eyes and black hair, though I have black hair and so might be conflating the two because I want to remember. Father was missing two fingers from one hand, and I remember when Hop came for me, its grip was like his against my wrist.

  . . .

  I track her because she’s been elf-touched, and once touched you become like a magnet for others of their kind. She wasn’t stolen like I was—I can tell when you’ve spent time in their castles and rocks. Perhaps she’d been to a mushroom dance: one night when she was out late with her boyfriend, she followed a light around her house and beyond the edge of the backyard. She woke in the morning hungover and frightened and unsure what had happened. If her boyfriend was lucky, she recalled that he’d dropped her off and driven away first.

  She appears normal to everyone around her, though maybe a bit distracted. Her fingers twitch at things no one else sees. To me, when my eyes are anointed, it is as though she’s been dipped in oil and a rainbow shimmers over her skin. I wish for her sake it was a rainbow that washed away, but even a swim in the ocean might not remove the taint.

  The attraction she holds for them makes her perfect bait.

  . . .

  My prince was not the worst, by all I’ve gathered, but he was bad enough. He was beautiful like stars are beautiful, like angels are supposed to be. Cold, alien, pristine. Being with him was like drinking the most delicate champagne all the time, until I didn’t care that when he laughed there were [3]teeth all the long way down his throat.

  Hop would take me from the toy room and limp before me, dragging its crushed leg along as we twisted through the rocks and roots to the prince’s feast hall. I asked Hop once what happened to the leg. It told me a tragic story of a human girl it had loved who’d betrayed it to her village, and they’d laid in wait at its hovel-hole and, as Hop emerged, they’d thrown salt water from the sea. The salt shriveled the skin of its leg and cracked its bones into millions of tiny pieces. (I saw the prince’s daughter grow tired with a tatterfoal once, and she swallowed his hind leg as he scrambled from her boredom. After long moments where his screams harmonized with the song I dared not stop singing, she released him. The bones were shattered and skin shredded. I thought of Hop’s story and knew they could lie, sometimes.)

  I could not help loving Hop, for I was a child and it looked after me and brought me food. It cradled me against its chest when I cried, hard enough that I could feel bones through the velvet of its doublet.

  I cried against that same chest after I shoved a hawthorn wand up into its brain. The salt in my tears seared his neck and
chin. But Hop’s blackened blood soaked into my pores as I rubbed it onto me, as my disguise and means of escape. I could smell my sin for weeks. Every time I breathed, I tasted it on my tongue.

  . . .

  [4]As I follow the girl, I watch the crowd to see who notices her. I search for odd bits of anachronistic clothing or an eye that cannot seem to glance away. We are walking through a crowded outdoor market near the Mississippi River. There are teenagers and tourists everywhere. I blend in. None of them wonder why my shirt is inside out (I’m not the only one) or why I’ve drawn labyrinths on both my palms. They can’t see there’s salt in my jeans pocket or smell the marigold and clover scent of the ointment on my eyelids. The wand in my hand is only a stick to them, smooth and buttery gold, that I’ve picked up to poke at bugs or fight invisible enemies.

  There is a boy, over there by the hot-dog car, crouched as though he is just picking something up. But his gaze follows her and his hair is dripping. There is no rain today. But a small pool of water has formed beneath him. As he stands and goes after her, he leaves two footprints: bare feet, although he appears to wear boots.

  [5]I shift my attention fully to him. As I walk, I rub a pinch of salt over my eye-ointment to cancel out the magic. The water horse should not smell it over the stink of his own breath. I also shove the wand up my sleeve so it runs like an exoskeleton from my wrist to my elbow.

  Picking up speed, I come alongside the water horse, and my nostrils flare at the overwhelming scent of rot. He slides a glance at me when my shoulder brushes against his. I see the red flash in his eyes as he notes the rainbow shimmer over my skin. I smile at him. “I can’t find the marina,” I say.