Fiendish (20 page)

We stepped inside, dragging the boat behind us, the bottom scraping against stones.

The ground was damp and rocky, and witchgrass grew in coarse tufts. I wound my way through the rows of graves until I came to one that was newer than the rest, sunken and weathered but without a crust of lichen and moss. The stone said:

MAGDA MARIE DEVORE
SISTER,
MOTHER, FRIEND

I stood in the weeds, looking at it—the last evidence of my mama.

The sight was like a slap in the face and suddenly, I remembered. I remembered everything.

The night and the men and the voices, but more than that, I remembered hands grabbing me from my bed, leading me down into the cellar, and the tight, painful grip of fingernails digging into my wrist.

Hold still
, the voice had said, and now it had a face. Bright black eyes shining in the dark of the cellar—Isola standing over me, pinning the trickbag in my collar and then taking out a needle. My mother behind her, crumpled and sad.

After that, though, the memory stayed white. No sting as the needle went through, no pain. Just a blank sheet that spread all the way to the corners of the world, eating up time in huge, hungry bites.

I wanted so much to sink down in the dirt and cry. To be heartbroken, standing over my mother’s grave. I knew it was what I was supposed to do, but it had been so long. The wound was a deep one, but old and knotted. Full of scar tissue.

“Hey,” called Shiny behind me. “Hey, he’s got the hole dug over by the—oh.” She said it softly, coming up to stand beside me.

I only nodded, raking my hands through my hair and turning my back on the headstone.

Fisher was already gone, farther into the hollow or else home, or just somewhere the three of us couldn’t wind up his craft anymore. He’d left a long, narrow hole in the corner of the graveyard, flanked by a mound of weedy dirt, shallower than I liked, but it would have to do. It seemed awful to just dump her into the ground like that, without a service or a coffin, but we bent and dragged her out of the boat. The ground left smears of dirt on her wet legs, and caked on her bare feet.

I stood at the edge of the pair of graves, looking down at her. “Is this how they buried my mother?”

Shiny turned on me, wild and fierce as ever. “
We
buried your mother. And we did it in the evening, with songs and flowers, and we said a prayer. There wasn’t a preacher, but goddamn it, Clementine, it was a real funeral, and it was a good one.”

I nodded, looking down at the fiend. “This one should be a good one too.”

We covered her, taking turns with the shovel. Shiny was the fastest, working like a demon, and I was pretty sure she would have done it all, but it seemed better to split the work between the three of us, so that we each had a hand in it.

When the grave was filled, we stood over it, not speaking. After a time, Shiny reached out and took my hand, twining her fingers through mine.

We stood in a huddle over the grave of a stranger, in the back of a small, secret graveyard, surrounded by all the old families—crooked families, fiend families. My family.

BLACK WATER

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

B
y the time we started home, the clouds were coming in.

All three of us were exhausted, covered in dirt, and none of us were talking. I was lost, stuck deep in the knowing that Isola had done this to me. She had taken me down into the cellar and left me there to disappear, to rot and shrivel and be forgotten. The idea was black and hateful, even for Isola, but the thing that made it so much worse was that my mama had let her. My mama had stood by and watched as Isola put me away. Her pale, frightened face had been the last thing I’d seen, and I went over the memory again and again, turning it in my head, trying pry it open. No matter how closely I examined it though, nothing would come clearer. My mother and Isola had put me in the cellar, and the memory was only what it was.

Out on the Crooked Mile, Shiny strode past the driveway that led up to the Heintz place, swinging her shovel and heading for home, but Rae pulled her sweater tight around herself and said, “I don’t know, but I think we should see about stopping by to check on Davenport.”

The way she said it was light, overly casual, like we were just stopping by to be neighborly. It was not like the way a person would stop by to make sure someone was doing all right since we’d last seen her. To make sure her father hadn’t done something violent to her in the few hours since we’d left her.

We came up the driveway, dragging our tools. Greg Heintz’s red truck was pulled up crookedly by the porch, with the driver’s side hanging open and the engine running, and for a minute, that was the only thing I could get my head around, it was so eerie and strange.

Then we saw something so much stranger and so much worse that we all just stopped, watching the scene unfold with a cold, unearthly horror.

Davenport was standing in the dooryard, slump-shouldered and windswept.

Her father lay in the dirt at her feet, and everything about him was and would be and
could
be nothing else but terrible.

“Oh, God,” said Shiny, grabbing my arm and squeezing hard. “You think he’s having a heart attack?”

But whatever had afflicted Greg Heintz was no heart attack. He lay on his back, water gushing from his mouth, pooling around his head while Davenport stood over him, her arms limp at her sides and tears streaming down her face.

The water was everywhere. It seemed to seep straight from his hair and his clothes, washing across the ground in a pool.

I tore loose from Shiny and ran across the yard. The water was coming too fast and unforgiving to stop it, but I got down next to him anyway, trying to roll him over on his side to keep him from choking on the flood that was filling up his mouth. He only gasped like a stranded fish. I could hear a deep rattle in his chest and knew that he was already dying.

Davenport stood over us, slack and wordless.

The sky was nearly black behind her as she watched—me in my soaked dress and her father on the ground. She looked into his empty, blue-lipped face. His eyes were open, but the light behind them was gone. His chest stopped moving and he only stared at the gathering clouds.

“Davenport,” I whispered, still cradling the back of Mr. Heintz’s neck and knowing, knowing with a slow, dumb hopelessness, that there was nothing I could do to help him. “What happened?”

But I understood that this was the creek. The craft was in her blood, and now it was working through her, filling up her daddy’s lungs even as she stood over me, tears dripping off her chin.

“Don’t you look at me like that.” Her hand was against her mouth. “He was ready to kill me, and I did what I had to.”

The note in her voice was like steel, and cold to the bone.

As soon as I reached out to her, though, her face crumpled. She flung my hand away, then turned and bolted for the house. The door slammed, and then came the sound of Davenport shooting the bolt. I wanted, more than anything, to run after her, try to find out just what had happened, but I couldn’t see how the answer mattered in the end. Mr. Heintz was already gone.

I laid his head gently on the ground and stood up, trying to wipe my hands dry on my dress. It felt wrong to leave him lying in the dirt with the pool spreading around him, but there was nothing else to do for him.

Shiny and Rae were standing back by the gate looking shaky and stunned, so I folded his hands on his chest and left him.

* * *

At home, we went around back to where Rae had left her bike, but she didn’t make any move to leave. None of us knew what do next.

Shiny sat down on the back steps, staring out at the pasture. “I didn’t think a person could be down-hollow, in secret,” she said, after a minute. “I didn’t think it was possible to be
anything
without everybody and their brother knowing.”

And it was true that no one ever let her forget it. And even when Fisher pretended a story that his grandmother had been telling the whole town since he was kid, everybody still knew, even if they didn’t like to admit it. It was the kind of secret that about a hundred people were all busy keeping.

Rae was looking thoughtful though, shaking her head. “That’s only ’cause you don’t listen to any sort of trashy stories,” she said. “But people still tell them.”

“Stories about what?” I said.

“About Greg Heintz. Like that he had a real taste for the hollow and liked to get at the fiends down there. That his family was an old creek-born family and so he liked the creek fiends best of all.” Rae’s voice was icy. “And when Davenport was born and he was living alone out here with a new baby and couldn’t say exactly who her mama was, well everybody assumed things. Stories like that. Like nice people don’t listen to.”

“So she’s been living low this whole time,” I said. “She’s been covering for herself, and he’s been covering for her too.”

Rae nodded. “And now look at her. Just as wild as anything they got down in the hollow. The creek is a big kind of craft, and goddamn but it’s getting away from her.”

“Because of me,” I said, seeing Greg Heintz and his blue, swollen face every time I closed my eyes. “I’m the one who did it to her. Just by being here, I made her into something dangerous. She’s too powerful to hold it in, and it’s all because of me.”

Rae didn’t answer right away. Her eyes were narrowed and she was biting her lip, shaking her head in a slow, considering way. “Maybe, yeah—maybe it came from you at first, but not anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe your being here is why Shiny’s been so ornery lately and Eric Fisher can’t get a handle on his urge to overgrow the county, but you are not why Greg Heintz is dead, okay?”

“How do you know?”

Rae pursed her lips. “He killed a fiend and left her
lying
out in the creek, seeping craft everyplace! He treated his own daughter like shit for her whole life, and now that she’s come into some power, you think bygones are bygones? Creek is all feelings, Clementine, and he didn’t drown up there because of how much she wanted to give him a
hug
. So yeah, maybe you’re the pointiest point on the star—maybe that’s true. But he didn’t die because of you. He’s been messing around with all the wrong things, pulling craft out of the hollow for ages and look what it finally—”

She broke off though, looking behind me, watching something that made her voice die and her eyes go wide.

I turned with an ache in my chest, knowing that whatever I was about to see, it could be nothing good.

At the edge of the field, the creek ran high and dark, slopping over its banks, too black to be normal. Too black to be water. It had changed in a matter of minutes.

As we watched, a huge shape rose toward the surface. When it broke through, we all gasped. The fin broke first, then the tail with spines that stood a foot above the water. The thing was bigger than the biggest catfish, bigger than a rowboat or a bull, bigger even than Shiny’s truck. It seemed to fill the creek, rising up from nothing, and then the head broke, and I saw the gleaming horror of its face.

It was slimy and flat-nosed, its skin gray-green and its mouth a huge, hungry gash evil with teeth, its eyes like lanterns, glowing yellow-green in the afternoon light.

Shiny screamed, a sharp, short little scream that echoed across the yard and then cut off, but I just stood with a hand against my mouth, afraid to breathe or look away. Rae was huddled against me with her hands clasped under her chin and her whole body shaking.

“What was that?” she whispered, her voice sounding thin and high-pitched.

Shiny answered in a flat, faraway voice. “Does it matter?”

Off in the distance, the sky had started to turn colors, and they were all the wrong kind—blacks and greens and poison.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered.

Shiny was standing perfectly still, the way she got when the feeling inside her was so powerful she might explode if she dared to move. “I don’t think we have a lot of time. If it’s the same upstream, the coalition is going to be coming down here, and I think this time, they’ll burn the whole Willows to the ground.”

I looked up. The clouds overhead were dark as thunder and there was only one person who might have any idea what to do.

PART V

LIGHT

BAD MAGIC

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I
ran.

All around me, things were moving in the tall grass, and the sky overhead was darkening. I didn’t want to leave the road, but it was faster to cut straight through the fields and so I did, plowing through the empty pastures and the trees.

I ran full out, crashing through the weeds, jumping the ditch that butted up against Foxhill Road. From the top of the hill, I could see lines of trucks, pulling out of the long farm driveways and onto the blacktop.

The sun was still shining in places, yellow and watery through the clouds, but they all had their headlights on. The lights looked like giant pairs of pale, staring eyes.

The sight of them all together nearly made my heart stop, but then I saw they were all headed into town, full of men with toolboxes and stacks of boards. I still had time.

In town, I walked tense and fast, not daring to look around in case any of them saw me, saw my face and decided I was someone worth dealing with. But they were all deep in their own tasks and no one said a word to me. The wind was ripping through the streets and everyone I passed was busy with the shops, taping over the windows and tying down the awnings.

By the time I got to the Fisher house, I was shaking and out of breath, covered in scrapes and fallen leaves.

“Isola!” I shouted, slamming into the kitchen. My voice sounded rageful and raw, like someone else screaming.

She was at the table, rolling out a pie crust like the world wasn’t falling apart in one big smear outside her window.

She looked up, hands covered in flour. “And there’s a fine way to invite yourself in.”

I stood at the head of the table, looking at her across the spread of flour and pastry and all the little homey things. “The reckoning is here,” I said. “You know what that means for us out in the Willows—I know you do. I
know
it was you that buried me alive.”

There was a minute where I thought her blank eyes meant she didn’t understand a word I’d said.

She gazed at me with her cool stare and her thin, ruinous mouth. “And kept you alive, too. For all the good it did. And here you are again like a bad penny, out in the world to wreck everything.”

The way she looked at me was black with blame, and I understood it, but in my heart, I knew she was wrong. I was not a person who broke things. I was the one who found ways to fix things, the one who wanted to see things mended.

“I didn’t
do
this, Isola. But in another minute, it won’t matter. Shiny says they’ll come for us, because at the reckoning, it’s what they do. They’ll drive us out or kill us if you don’t tell me how to stop it!”

Outside, the wind was buffeting the house, making harsh, hungry noises that I’d never heard a wind make. Someone’s freshly washed day dress flew against the window, one clothespin still clinging to the shoulder. The dress stayed for a second before peeling off again and flapping away across the yard. I could hear the steady rumble of the storm, and under that, another sound. A low, foreboding sound, like something waking up.

Isola only sat at the end of the table, the cut-glass window behind her. Her hair looked terribly thin with the light shining through it, brittle and crunchy like spun sugar. Finally, she looked up.

“You and your cousin were born too late for this place,” she said. “Back in the day, the old kind were welcome in the town as any normal folks. Oh, but we had a wild time when we were coming up.”

“You and Emmaline Blackwood. You and my grandmother.”

Isola nodded. “This town wasn’t always the sick little armpit you see now, and not so hateful when it came to having dealings with the old kind.”

“Fiends, you mean.”

Isola’s smile was thin and hard. “Sure, but folks don’t usually go around naming themselves an ugly name. That’s for other people to do for them.”

“But the town—you’re talking about a time when the . . . old kind lived here like regular people?”

“No,” she said. “But they came and went as they pleased, and they took care of it like it was their own. And back then, maybe it was.”

The idea was too incredible to think of though. It seemed impossible that a place could change so much and so badly. That people like me and Shiny could be hated for things our grandparents and great-grandparents had done by people who didn’t even seem so much better.

“What can you tell me about Greg Heintz?”

Isola snorted. “The things I know about Greg Heintz would make your hair curl.”

Her eyes flashed dark and wicked, leaving a shimmery feeling in my head. I understood that I was seeing just a glimpse of her power, seeing into her store of secrets. She was the one who knew all the dirtiest games in town, knew every scandal and lie and whisper.

“Greg was a mean creature,” Isola said. “Even as a boy. And when he was grown, he got to going around with some sort of creek fiend. I think he thought he was going to start himself a powerful crooked family, just like in the old days, but she was what she was—too wicked and too wild—and he got his heart broke.”

The way she said it was self-satisfied and I nodded, but I was picturing wicked and wild. I was picturing the pure opposite of Davenport and her pale, see-through skin. Her woeful, shining eyes.

“Any other, they would have just gone on by, but not Greg. When his girl out-the-creek was through with him, well, he let it be known that he was not through with her. No one had heard a peep from the coalition in thirty years, but next thing anybody knows, he’s handing out tracts and calling meetings. Going around grilling people about their family trees, and what do you know but there are some around here just young enough and dumb enough to join up.”

“There were enough people to start a whole coalition, just because one man said so?”

Isola laughed, a dry, ugly sound. “There always are.”

“Underneath that, he was so
crooked
, though. Fisher told me Greg’s been taking stuff out of the hollow for years and selling it. I saw a craft shack back in the woods on his property. It was all full of fool’s light, all going to rot.”

Isola nodded. “There’s nothing like someone that’s angry and afraid for being a hypocrite.”

It seemed to me, though, that Hoax County was a whole place of hypocrites, full to the top with hate and fear and loss.

“And what can you tell me about Davenport?”

Isola scowled and pressed her lips together. Then she set down her rolling pin and looked me square in the face. “Why do you want to know it?”

I stood at the head of the table, trying not to come undone, but my hands kept shaking. They kept wanting to go into fists. “Because an hour ago, I saw her murder Greg Heintz by some kind of magic.”

Out in the road, a gun went off with a sound like the very sky was breaking in two, and someone screamed, but I was scared to go to the window and look. I was sure that if I did, I would see every savagery and horror from the hollow come to life out in the world.

Isola stared back at me with her mouth mean and her eyebrows raised. “Then it looks to me like he made his bed. What do you say about that?”

“I say I need to know exactly what bed this was.”

She laughed, but it wasn’t a good one. “The kind of bed that’s a long time coming.”

“When the creek fiend left him, that was a good thing, right? It should have been the end?”

Isola nodded heavily. “Imagine how my jaw fell when I heard that that little shitweasel had got himself a baby, left on the steps like a bag of flour. Who knows—it’s possible that his creek-girl brought him that child willingly, thinking it would persuade him to leave her be. More likely, he just went down in the hollow and took it from her as his way of making her sorry.”

“But Davenport—why didn’t you
save
her, Isola?”

Isola looked back at me, and her eyes were dark and dry and furious. “Because it wasn’t my
business
what that man did in his own house, raising his own child!”

Outside, the sky was dark and livid as a bruise.

I threw my head back, belting out a huge, shrieking laugh at the absolute cruelty of it all. “
Everything
is your business!”

Isola stared at me like I’d slapped her across the face. “You
can’t
,” she said finally. “Try all you want, but you can’t save everyone, and even the times you get it right, they’ll hate you for it.”

The way she said it was mean and sad, bitter as horehound.

“Fisher doesn’t hate you,” I said, because her eyes were bright with trouble, and it was the truth. The truth in his thundering rages was that he loved her every minute of every day, even when he was deep at war with her. Even standing in the room where he’d been trapped.

“Well, he should,” she said. “I tried to do right by him, but his mama brought him back here when she didn’t want him weighing her down no more—after I had said and said how he couldn’t be raised here as long as all you girls were around, and what was I supposed to do with him then? But I couldn’t turn him away.” She looked away, shaking her head. “Not even after the reckoning began and the whole world began to slide, I couldn’t put him out. He was my flesh and blood.”

“Is that how come you locked him up in the attic?”

Isola drummed her fingers on the table and looked away. “They would have taken and left him for dead in the hollow. Or else, more likely just dragged him out in the yard and ended him right there.”

I wanted to reach for her hand and cover it in mine, but something in her face stopped me. “Was that really the
only
way to stop them? Fisher’s so strong, and you’re a regular . . . witch.”

Isola shook her head. “I might have a drop or two of the old blood in me, but it’s breath—weakest and most wanting of all the humors—and I was an old woman even then. And he was just a little thing, most of his powers still laying quiet, and not the big troublesome creature he is now.”

The catch in her voice made me think of the photo albums put away upstairs in a secret room, stories of a secret life. The truth was clear in her stooped shoulders. She had never once considered him a troublesome creature.

“That was Fisher’s hair in my trickbag, though, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “I had to bind you to someone free in the world so the trick would take. He was the clear choice. Dirt’s powerful kindling for a trick. It can give and give and give. But Lord knows I didn’t think it would mean him getting an itch to dig you out!”

“You didn’t feel guilty, using your own grandson for fuel?”

“Someone had to be put away, and if your mama hadn’t offered you up, it would have been him. As long as one of you five was put by, the light from the hollow would sleep.”

I shook my head, horrified at how she could talk about a person like some heirloom dish or china figure. “Why, though? Why save me? You could have just let them burn me and it would have been over. Why
not
me? You let my mother die.” The last part came out raw and shaky, but I looked at her straight on.

“The deal I made with your mama was one that eats me up to this day.” The way she said it sounded too brisk and careless to mean much, but her face was dark and I believed her.

“Then why? You didn’t have to. You could have said no.”

“I could have, but the upshot would have been no better, and there’s still some of us that believe it’s a regular sin to let a child die. The choice was no choice at all. She loved you, God bless her. She knew what she was asking.”

The way Isola said it made something go tight in my throat. It was painful to be sitting there in the kitchen with someone who remembered that once, I had belonged to someone, belonged to love and home and family, and could say so with absolute certainty.

“Couldn’t you do anything to save her, though?”

Isola shook her head. “I did everything I knew. I helped her hide you and did every trick I had to keep you safe. They burned her out, though, and then when that was done, they went on down to your aunt’s. I did
everything
to stop it. The reason you got your life is that I know how to make a trick, and the reason they stopped is ’cause after you were put away, the reckoning went quiet, and I went down there and told them to go home. But the reason your aunt’s house is still standing is thanks to a lot more than me. Your cousin has a powerful way with fire when she feels like it.”

I nodded. “And we’re more powerful than ever now—that’s something, isn’t it? The reckoning star might be what’s tearing up the town, but it works both ways, I think. We’re stronger than we’ve ever been, and so I need you to tell me how to stop it now.”

“They way I see it, you got two choices.” The brittle crack of Isola’s voice made something in me go cold. “Either you work between you to fix the trouble filling up this town, or one of you has got to die.”

The way she said it was heavy, full of resignation, and the breath all went out of me. The five of us were young. We were wild and uncertain and just kids. I wasn’t ready to go back in the ground.

Isola was looking at her hands. The way her skin crinkled around her mouth was mean and bitter. She didn’t say anything else.

We were still sitting in silence when the kitchen door banged open. Fisher stood in the doorway, looking windblown. There was blood on his shirt and fallen leaves in his hair.

“What are you doing here?” he said, and his voice was tight.

I stared back at him. “I had to see Isola. What happened? Is everything all right?”

He shook his head. “I was just down at Carter’s Garage, and no one there is listening to any sort of reason. They’re getting ready to go down to the Willows—Mike and them. I tried talking to them, but they didn’t hear it. They’ve got a lot of gasoline.”