Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘But how—’ Trista tried again.

‘You ask a lot of questions.’ The Architect’s voice was suddenly viper-intense, and vibrant with suspicion. Before Trista could come up with an answer, there was an explosion of laughter from the other end of the line. ‘Ah, if you could see Theresa’s face right now! What a miserable, puling little miss she is. How she whimpers when we go on our midnight rides! And yet her parents set such stock by her – I can see their love, tangling all around her like a cat’s cradle.’

‘Is she there with you?’ Trista asked quickly. ‘Is the other me there?’

‘Oh yes, listening to every word I say.’

‘Can I speak to her?’ Again Trista channelled her resentment of the Crescent family, and made her voice hard and gleeful. ‘I want to tell her everything I’ve done. I want to tell her I’ve been sleeping in her bed, and eating her dolls, and making her friends and family hate her. Can I? Please?’

For a long moment, there was nothing from the earpiece but a distant, papery crackle.

‘Why not?’

There were a few scuffling clicks, and then Trista could hear shallow sobbing breaths on the other end of the line. She felt pins and needles tingle over her skin.

‘Hello?’ Trista could barely give the word breath.

There was a ragged gasp.

‘It’s you , isn’t it?’ And Trista could hear her own voice speaking to her, just a little higher in pitch, more wobbly and more miserable. ‘You’re… the thing they talk about, aren’t you? The thing pretending to be me! What have you done to my parents? What have you done to Pen? ’

For a tiny moment Trista felt a burst of panic. They were too alike. There was only room for one of them. She felt an impulse to fight back and claim the one Triss-shaped space in the world. Then, with difficulty, she swallowed down the feeling.

‘Listen!’ hissed Trista urgently, before her other self could say anything more. ‘Can the Architect hear what I’m saying?’

‘I…’ The other girl’s voice was tear-drenched, uncertain. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Good! Now listen – please! I’ve tricked the Architect into letting me speak to you – he thinks I just want to torment you. You must pretend that’s what I’m doing. Please, while I’m talking, you have to cry as if I’m scaring you!’

‘You are scaring me!’ wailed the girl on the other end, so loudly that static crackled in Trista’s ear.

‘I know – I know I’m frightening – but I didn’t ask to be made. I haven’t hurt Pen or your parents. The Architect doesn’t know this, but I’m not on his side. I want to rescue you! Is he still there with you, listening to what you say? Shout, “I hate you!” for yes, and, “stop it!” for no.’

‘I hate you!’ It was screamed with enough tearful force that Trista was not quite sure if it was the signal or just a sincere declaration.

‘So he’s still there.’ Trista racked her brains. ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘Stop it!’ was faintly sobbed. The signal for no .

‘Do you know anything that might help us find you?’

But how could Triss answer without the Architect hearing? And how could they come up with a message system in no time flat? Desperately Trista scanned Triss’s memories, trying to see whether she and Pen had ever shared a secret language or code. No, they had not. Perhaps if the sisters had ever been closer, shared more memories…

Memories.

‘Triss, listen! We share memories. If there’s something you want to tell me, then give me a clue that’s linked to it in your memory – our memory.’

For a few seconds she could hear only sobbing, and then just very faint two words.

‘The frog.’

The frog? Trista floundered, wondering if she had misheard.

Click, click, rattle.

‘Did you have fun?’ The Architect sounded as if he was trying with difficulty not to laugh. ‘The poor creature looks more terrified than a mouse in a trap. Good work! The sight of that silly, trembling little face has put me in much better humour. In fact… little Cuckoo, I think I might do you a favour. Do you want to live longer than seven days?’

‘Yes.’ Yes yes yes yes . But it was impossible. He was teasing her. He had to be.

‘I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to you already, to be honest. If you are eating Theresa’s dolls, then you must have realized the key to keeping yourself intact is to eat things that are important to her . And you will need more and more of them, as time goes by.

‘If you are to survive longer than seven days, you will have to devour something very important to her indeed, something rooted into the very core of her heart and being. But you actually have something of that description. You know what I mean, don’t you?’

Trista gripped the earpiece and tried not to know, even as the Architect spoke again.

‘Theresa’s little sister. Penelope. Eat her, and the future is yours.’

There was a final click, and the earpiece went dead in Trista’s shaking hand.

Trista could not meet Pen’s eye as she left the telephone booth. Her insides felt like gravel, and for once she was glad that there was no time for conversation.

He told me to eat you, Pen. As they hurried out to the motorcycle, the unspoken sentence lay like a penny on Trista’s tongue, cold and metallic-tasting.

When they scrambled into the sidecar together, Pen all elbows and scraping feet, Trista could not help flinching away from the other girl. It had never occurred to her to think of Pen as something she could eat. Now she realized that Pen did have the same tingling, tempting quality as Triss’s possessions, but a hundred times magnified. The gaping, ragged hole at her core told her that, yes, the younger girl would fit inside it, like a ring in the velvet niche of a jewellery box.

When they were all back in the attic room, Trista tried to tell Violet and Pen all she could about the conversation with the Architect. Her words sounded flat and dead to her, however. They were cold after-dinner scraps, handed to people who could never have appreciated the meal.

All the while, she was trying to decide whether to tell them what the Architect had told her to do with Pen. The trust of each had been hard won. What would they do if she transformed herself before her eyes into a child-eating monster, a creature of the darkest fairy tale? How could they bear to be near her if they knew her life might depend on gobbling up Pen?

She was going to tell them. She was not going to tell them. She had to. Yes, but later. No, now or never…

And then she reached the end of her story and the coin still lay there on her tongue, numbing it. The silence stretched, and both Violet and Pen looked up, realizing that she had finished talking. Trista’s heart sank into a morass of misery and self-loathing.

‘Good,’ said Violet. ‘We’ve learned much more than I expected. Well done, Trista.’ Her smile was kind, but Trista felt a sting of self-reproach at its very warmth.

‘You say Triss mentioned something about a frog – do you have any idea what she meant by that?’

‘No,’ answered Trista. ‘It must be something she remembers, something that should be part of my memories too. But it doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘It looks like it means something to Pen though,’ Violet remarked.

Sure enough, Pen had withdrawn into herself once more, like a belligerent little hedgehog, and was staring down at her own knees while kicking her heels against the bedpost.

‘It was just a frog ,’ she said defiantly. ‘And it wasn’t my fault! I thought it was dead! I was trying to…’ She let her face droop into a pout again.