M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

When I’d climbed out my window and headed out for Arizona, I’d broken with the past. That it hadn’t gone spectacularly seemed less important now than the bare fact that I’d done it. If everything back then seemed different now, well, so what? Maybe it didn’t really matter what past I’d broken from.

I shifted, pulling the pillows up over my head. In the corridor, someone tromped past, the squeaking of a suitcase’s wheel as identifiable as a finch’s song.

“Did you know?” I asked the darkness. “About Eric and putting all those different riders into Mom?”

For a long moment nothing happened. The footsteps outside my room stopped. The muffled sound of a door lock, a hotel door opening, then closing. Some random stranger whose life story intersected with mine just this much and no more.

“No,” my mouth said without me. “I did not know what he did to our mothers.”

Our mothers. Well, that was true. There were two of us and there were two of them. We’d been made together. Her mother and mine had both been bound, and we were both the products of that profoundly unclean ritual. I wondered if the rider was more upset than I was. I wondered if there was any way to comfort her. I turned the pillow over, putting the cool side against my cheek, closed my eyes, and willed myself to sleep.

I’d heard descriptions of people having strokes whose first symptoms weren’t weakness or confusion, but an overwhelming sense of wrongness. Between one breath and the next, something like that washed over me. The pillow was the same, but the crisp, ghost-white cloth was suddenly nauseating. The walls of darkened room seemed to be at subtly wrong angles. I turned on the light, thinking the brightness would push sanity back into the room, but the bulb seemed sickly too. Morgue light.

Ozzie lifted her head, growling deep in her throat. I sat up slowly, using both hands. I couldn’t tell if I was dizzy or not, only that something felt wrong. That I felt wrong.

“It’s okay, girl,” I said, but Ozzie wasn’t buying it. She jumped off the bed and started pacing the room, the growling getting louder. The hair on her back was raised, her lips pulled back to expose yellow, blunted teeth. She stopped at the window, her nose to the thick blackout curtains, and barked once.

“Shh,” I said, rising uncertainly to my feet. “It’s okay, girl. Keep it down or we’ll wake the neighbors.”

A sickening chill came over me, like the touch of a dead fish that had gone to rot. For a moment I thought I heard someone crying. Or maybe laughing. It was hard to breathe.

“Okay,” I said. “This isn’t just me, right?”

The rider didn’t answer, but I imagined her perched behind my eyes, waiting and alert and ready.

Ozzie barked again, the angry sound of an animal defending its territory, and I walked to the window. The dog’s barking was constant now, angry and wild and threatening. She didn’t turn to look at me when I got to her side. Her full attention was on the window. I didn’t want to pull back the curtains.

I pulled back the curtains.

Outside, the world looked the same and debased at the same time. The scattering of cars was just like it had been, but it meant something different. Decay, emptiness, the aftermath of disaster. The tires on the highway were a threat until they passed, and then they were hope retreating. I put my palms against the glass, and the cold bit my fingers. Dreams were like this. The way the meanings of things came unglued, and anything—an apple, a desert, the flicker of a match—could be a reason for bone-crushing fear. Madness was leaking into the world from the cracks, and I didn’t know where the flood was coming from.

And then I did.

It stood at the edge of the parking lot, not far from where I’d been sitting when Curtis called me. It was small. Maybe three, three and a half feet tall. No bigger. It had the frame of a kid, a black rain poncho with the hood up, so that all I could see was the pale face. It was too far away to make out the details, but I had the sense of profound deformity. Of wrongness distilled into something so pure, the fumes from it burned.

It saw me, and a wide, toothless smile split its face. I was afraid it would wave at me or clap its hands, but it was still. A pair of headlights from a passing car played over the thing, making it bright for a moment. Ozzie’s barking was a frenzy now, flecks of foam sticking to the glass. An unfamiliar voice was shouting at me to shut her up. It was like something from another world.

We stood there, the evil little thing and me, staring at each other through the glass, and then I was running across the room, out the door, sprinting for the stairs faster than a human body should have been able to. I vaulted the handrail, dropping to the flight below and out the door into the darkness of the night, charging the spot where it had been with a shout boiling up out of me, carrying the will of the rider along with my own. The pavement nipped at my bare feet, the cold slapped me, but I didn’t care. In all my life I had never been so pure—or so ready for murder. It was instinct, and I didn’t even want to restrain it.

The thing was gone.

“Come back here, you bastard sonofabitch!” I screamed in a voice that wasn’t only my own but also something deeper, wilder. Not more dangerous, though. I was already feeling plenty dangerous. “Come back here and I will feed you your fucking heart !”

The last word came as a detonation. Behind me, three car alarms went off, their whoops and beeps like a pack of confused dogs barking because someone else was barking. It was too late. The unclean presence was already fading. The winter air was just air again. The wide sky above me lost all its malevolence and turned back into stars and clouds, impersonal and distant. The snarl on my lips wouldn’t let go, though, and even with the cold I didn’t move.

I heard Chogyi Jake and Ex coming from the hotel. Their footsteps were as identifiable as their faces. I didn’t even turn to look at them, my gaze locked on the darkness, searching for the twisted little figure even though I knew it wasn’t there.

“Jayné,” Ex said. He had a gun in his hand. Chogyi Jake did too. They were both in pajamas. So was I for that matter. It wasn’t the first time I’d been happy that I’d never gotten the habit of sleeping naked.

“Something was here,” I said. “It was right here.”

Chogyi Jake moved forward, his pistol held low but ready.

“You saw it?” Ex asked.

“From the window. It saw me too.”

“You recognized it?”

I hesitated.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t know what it was.”

“But you came out after it on your own?” The disapproval was actually second to the confusion. Why attack it? And why go out on my own like I was taking on an army with my hands? It was a fair question.

“It scared the hell out of me.”

Ex looked around. There were lighted windows in the hotel now. The silhouettes of people looking out into the parking lot at us. Ex put the gun’s safety on and held it under his shirt. I crossed my arms and wondered if Ozzie was still in the room. I didn’t have any idea if the door had closed after me. I counted windows until I saw mine. She was there, her paws against the window. From the slight shifting of her head, I guessed she was wagging.

“And this is how you react when something scares you?”

“Apparently so.”

“Remind me not to pop any unexpected balloons around you.”

“Don’t pop any unexpected balloons around me,” I said, because it was the right line to follow with. Something to let the tension slip. I couldn’t let it stand there. “It wasn’t like that, though. I wasn’t startled. I was afraid .”