Fiendish (3 page)

“How do you know?”

Shiny sighed and looked away. “Because she mostly is. And if she isn’t, sometimes I just have to pretend she will be.”

Her hand was so warm it was almost hot, tugging me along. The little cloth bag was still sitting in the middle of the table and I reached for it, not trusting it, but not wanting to let it go, either.

SHINY

CHAPTER FOUR

W
hereas the kitchen had been shabby, the hall was entirely ruined. It was papered in a striped pattern that might have been nice once, but was now burned black in huge smudges, peeling down in strips. The floor slanted under my bare feet and the paint had blistered up from the baseboards and started to flake off in ragged scales, like a snakeskin.

I followed Shiny through the house, wondering how anyone could live in a place like this. Doorways interrupted the burned walls now and then, but all of them were boarded up.

We turned a corner that led nowhere except to the end of another useless hall. There was a heap of cardboard boxes sitting piled in the corner, and Shiny dug through them. They were full of old clothes, and not old like the shirts at the back of my mama’s closet. They were old like the antique store, or like something straight out of the movies.

Shiny pulled out a rumpled green dress and tossed it at me.

“Most of this stuff used to belong to Grandma Emmaline and hasn’t been in style since about the dust bowl, but it should fit all right,” she said. “But first, you are a pure mess. Before you do anything, you need to get washed.”

The bathroom was at the far end of the house from the kitchen, little and dark, like everything else. There was no window, only a deep, old-fashioned bathtub and a pink toilet. No mirror and no sink. The tub had long-toed animal feet and took up nearly the whole room in a way that tended to suggest it hadn’t always been there. That this had once been a powder room, but someone had dragged the tub in from someplace else and hooked it up where the sink used to be.

The blue-fairy nightgown was impossibly small, stuck to my body like another skin. Both the shoulder seams were out and the lacy hem that used to brush the floor only came down to my knees. Shiny wrestled with the zipper, yanking so hard the plastic teeth tore apart. Then she ducked out of the room and left me to deal with the state I was in.

I ran the faucet and washed. My arms were covered in ash up to the elbows, like I had on smudgy gray gloves. My hair was one big knot, but with no mirror or brush, it was hard to work out the tangles. I wrung it under the faucet until the cherries and the soot washed away and the water ran clear.

There was a towel hanging on the edge of the tub and I dried off, trying not to think too much about how I was a completely different person from the one I’d been. Every time I caught a glimpse of my body, it was like looking at a stranger.

I changed into the green dress, which buttoned down the front and had a bow at the neck like a sailor’s. The top was tight, with barely room to move, and I knew that I was going to need what my mother had always referred to as
support garments
, if she had to refer to them at all.

When I left the bathroom, Shiny was waiting for me. She led me back to the kitchen, through the crooked door where I’d first seen her, and into a cramped, narrow room. It wasn’t much more than a closet, with a rickety little bed pushed into one corner, and the rest of the place taken up by a giant water-stained dresser.

The walls were plank instead of plaster, and hung all over with wind chimes. They were nailed straight to the bare boards and tacked haphazardly to the ceiling. Among them, Shiny seemed like the only useful thing, and everything else was completely silly.

It was strange and dizzying to stand and look at her, when the last time we’d been face to face, she’d still had messy pigtails and a missing tooth. The way she looked at me, I knew she was feeling the same, like I was something that had been stored away, and now that I was unpacked and out in front of her, she could only stand back and count all the ways that I had changed.

“How is it you remember me, but Myloria can’t?” I said.

Shiny leaned against the dresser, chewing on her thumbnail and scowling. “If I could tell you that, I’d feel a lot better, if you want to know the truth. She’s right about it being craft, for sure. And there are tricks for keeping secrets or messing with someone’s memory, but I’ve never known one strong enough to just paper over a whole person. That’s something more serious than I know about.”

“Then how can you be certain it’s really me at all?” I said, wondering how to ever trust a world where my own aunt could forget me. “I mean, what makes you so sure?”

Shiny laughed, tossing her hair over her shoulders. “Sure that you’re my cousin? I’d have to be crazy to forget. I missed you every day,” she said. “I used to just sit out back in the tire swing and think of your face, like if I forgot a single thing, even an eyelash or a freckle, something bad would happen. I feel like I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.”

The way she said it was so raw and fierce it showed in her face, and I felt a rush of gratitude to know that someone had been waiting for me after all.

She leaned closer. “You still look right, you know. Or at least, how I’d have thought you’d look. Except your hair—now
that
is really something.”

“What do you mean?”

She turned me by the shoulders, steering me in front of a heavy mirror propped on top of the dresser. For the first time in forever, I looked at myself.

A part inside me wanted to cry or scream, or just do something to show how awful it was to be lost for so long and then come back looking nothing like myself.

At first, I couldn’t do anything but stare—at my hands on the top of the dresser and the wide, unfamiliar shape of my mouth and my cheeks, and my eyes, the way they gazed back at me, full of hurt.

After a minute, though, I began to pick out things I could almost recognize.

I looked less like myself and more like my mother, with her high, smooth forehead and her chin. My nose had grown from a button into the long, straight one common to the Blackwoods, but my mouth was big and soft like a stranger’s, like it belonged to someone else, and no matter how far I tried to open my eyes, they stayed heavy-lidded. Half-closed. The skin around them was dotted with little scars.

What Shiny had spoken was the absolute truth. I looked right, more or less, for someone belonging to the Blackwood family. And also, the strangest thing about me was my hair.

When I was little, it had been a plain dog-brown that promised to darken to mahogany, the same color that Shiny’s was now. Instead, it had gone red. Not an unfortunate carroty red like the O’Radley girls had, or even beauty-parlor red. My hair was the deep, bloody red of cherries, black at the roots and getting brighter as it went, nearly glowing by the time it got to the ends.

“What happened to it?” I said, holding my hands away from myself, like I was marked with something dirty.

Shiny came and put an arm around me. “Hey, hey, don’t act like that. It’s not so bad. It just needs to be brushed out.”

I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t the color or the tangles making me seem wrong. It was my broken voice and my scarred eyes and my strange new body. And my cheeks and my chin and my grown-up nose. I stared at my reflection, trying to get friendly with the fact that I wasn’t myself anymore.

“Okay,” I said finally, after I’d looked and looked and it had changed nothing. “Okay, you can help me fix my hair.”

Shiny got out a comb and had me sit on the edge of the bed. She settled down next to me, holding a matted handful straight out from my head and clucking to herself. Her nails were painted a deep, sticky purple.

“Well, this is a devilish state of affairs,” she said as she went to work on the tangles. The comb bit at my scalp, yanking my head back, and at first I thought she was talking about my hair.

Then she leaned around me, peering into my face. “You want to tell me where you’ve been this whole time?”

“In my house,” I said. “Buried in the cellar.”

She stopped combing. “All this time? Since you were seven?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said after a second. “You’re definitely not seven anymore.”

“No,” I said, looking down at the front of the dress. “Definitely not.”

She laughed a breathless little laugh. “I mean, not in your head, either. You’re like a real person.”

It was true. I could feel the difference between now and then, a plant that had outgrown its pot, and now the roots were forcing their way between the cracks.

“I knew things,” I said, trying to put a name to the dreams that weren’t dreams but more of a cross between visions and memories. “Sometimes I lived on old pictures, like looking through a photo album, and sometimes, it was more like I flew out into the real world and floated there. I saw things. I was part of the world, but not
in
it, if that makes sense.”

Shiny’s face made it plain that it didn’t, but she nodded anyway, frowning to herself. Then she went back to work on my hair.

I held as still as I could and looked around me. The bedroom was impossibly small and like a carpenter’s mistake, growing straight off the side of the main house.

I winced, grabbing at the back of my neck to keep her from combing me bald. “I don’t remember this place.”

Shiny shook her head. “
She
had it built a few years ago. When I finally just about lost my mind and told her that maybe wandering around at all hours was good enough for her, but I needed a bedroom. So, she went out and paid a bunch of the O’Radleys’ cousins two hundred and forty dollars to build me
this
.”

The room was decorated with a little rug and had a window at the back, but I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t a lot bigger than the closet I’d been buried in.

“It doesn’t seem like much,” I said.

Shiny let her hair fall over her face and looked away. “‘Not Much’ is kind of the name of every damn day around here. Things are—well, they’re not how you remember.”

But in truth, it seemed that what I mostly remembered were only the recollections of a little girl, overjoyed by dragonflies and Fourth of July sparklers. Every other fact and feature was missing, covered up neatly by that clean white sheet.

“Where does Myloria sleep?” I said finally, because it seemed better to say anything than to let Shiny keep sitting there with her hair in her eyes and her shoulders slumped. Better than to keep dwelling on all the things I’d lost and could not get back.

“Are you kidding?” She started picking at my tangles again. “Myloria doesn’t sleep. All she does is wander around like a crazy person, vague as hell and scared of everything.”

I considered the Myloria I’d known when I was little, tall and proud, full of flash. “She didn’t used to be.”

Shiny shrugged and looked away. “And the dinosaurs didn’t used to be dead. Do you know that your hair is like trying to put a comb through wire? It’s breaking off the teeth.”

She set the comb down, and then there was a strange tickling feeling at the back of my head. She was running the tips of her fingers over my hair, but the knots were so matted and thick I could barely feel it.

When she spoke, her voice was smaller than before, and kind of lost. “It used to be so soft, like a bunny.”

I reached for the dropped comb, touching the gaps where the teeth had snapped off. “Shiny, how long have I been gone, exactly?”

She sighed and took her hand away. “You mean how long has it been since the Coalition for Purity flipped their shit and started burning out all the old families before Myloria or your mama or any of the church people could stop them?”

I nodded, running my finger along the broken comb.

“Pretty near ten years.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you were dead,” she said, keeping her chin down, fiddling with the corner of the crazy quilt.

“I guess I should have been, right? A long time ago, I should have been.”

Shiny nodded. The light shining between the boards of the room made thin golden lines on her face. “I thought you were dead, and at the same time, it was like you were this invisible friend I’d had. I believed so hard that you were real, while everyone else just forgot you were ever alive.”

I reached into the pocket of my dress and held out the tattered trickbag that had been pinned inside the collar of my nightgown. “This might have something to do with that.”

Shiny studied the bag, but made no move to touch it.

“Rae Dalton knows a thing or two about trickbags,” she said finally. “And she knows a thing or two about you. She’d be one to ask.”

I remembered Rae—her small, easy smile and her hair twisted into five fat braids, the ends fastened with plastic ponytailers shaped like gum balls. She was one of the clean, well-tended in-town kids, but her parents would visit with my mama over the sorts of things that other folks would only frown and whisper about, and they brought her out to play sometimes. I had liked her. Maybe not in the fierce, frantic way I’d liked Shiny, but Rae had been my friend.

“If this kind of craft is too big for anyone to explain,” I said, “if it’s too powerful or bad, does it mean that I was put away by fiends?”

All my life, I’d heard stories of the fiends that had settled Hoax County, but even in my family, where most folks were born with the power to do things, the fiends themselves were half a fairy tale. Now, sitting on the bed, holding Shiny’s broken comb, I was suddenly sure that if I could be shut up and forgotten so completely, it must be the work of something too huge and powerful to be accounted for by anything else.

Shiny looked absolutely scandalized, though. “What? No, are you crazy? Why would you say a thing like that?”

“When they took me out of the wall, one of the Maddox boys—Luke, I think—he said that bringing me to you and Myloria was messing around with crooked people. ‘Hexers and fiends,’ he said.”

“Luke Maddox is an idiot. The Blackwoods may be crooked as they come, but he wouldn’t know a fiend if it punched him in the dick.”

I laughed at that, a hard, rasping laugh, like a crow shouting over a button, and Shiny laughed too, tossing her hair back over her shoulders.

I watched her, thinking how strange and glorious it was that I could be sitting on this wobbly little bed with my cousin, when just that morning, I’d been so sure that I was going to spend the rest of my life in the dark and never be anyplace else ever again.