St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (6 page)

Don’t get me wrong, there are some perks. I get to go to sleep disorder camp, after all. And I’ve been runner-up in the history bee for four consecutive years.

It turns out that our tardiness is not a problem, because Zorba himself has yet to show. Annie keeps glancing from her watch to the door. We are just picking teams for the inaugural game of moonball when Zorba bursts into the cabin. He is sweating profusely. His face bulges like an eggplant, shiny and distended.

“
Here
he is,” Annie sighs. “Campers, I’d like to present you with our founder and director, my husband, Zorba Zoulekevis….”

“Heimdall is missing!” he thunders in his Mount Olympus baritone. A ripple goes through the crowd. Heimdall is a woolly Houdini, escaping his pen at least once a day. But the campgrounds are small, and walled in by trees. If Heimdall’s gone missing, that means he’s wandered into the marshy woods, towards the sinkhole.

All the color drains out of Annie’s face. “Oh no. Oh, Zorba. What if the dogs are back?” Her voice drops to a whisper. “We musn’t panic the children.”

The microphone is still on. The cabin echoes with the whine of feedback. Dozens of eyes dart around, searching for unseen dogs.

“Dorry worry,” I whisper to one of the new campers. “There aren’t any dogs around here. Not that we can see, anyways. Annie’s a little, you know…” Ogli points at his temple and twirls his index finger like an unraveling kite string so as to indicate
nuts.
Ogli and I know that Annie’s just flashing back to her dream contagion again. Annie, prior to her recovery, caught a virulent strand of nightmare from somebody. For years, she dreamed of black dogs, wild dogs, a shadow pack running behind the green screen of trees and killing her lambs. In a separate assembly, Zorba warns us to avoid all mention of our canine pets in Annie’s presence.

Zorba eases the microphone out of her hands. “We must find the missing sheep!” he intones. His voice booms through the mess hall with a messianic thunder. Annie passes out flashlights, and we all file out of the main cabin. We split off in pairs to comb the shallow end of the woods. I grab Emma’s wrist and drag her towards the shoreline. It’s a clear night, and the lake glints mirror-bright in the darkness. I steer her towards our reflection in the water. If I can just get her to
see
how right we look together, I think, see it the way I do, rising out of the lake with the eidetic, rippled force of dreams.

“Emma…”

A high, piercing shriek erupts from behind the trees. Emma and I exchange glances. Zorba has found the sheep.

We keep a fuzzy flock of sheep, mostly as a testament to Zorba’s melancholy sense of humor. They huddle together in a pen down by the lake, next to the red turkey coop where Zorba fattens the Tryptophan Flock. There are only three sheep, so you can’t exactly induce sleep by counting them: Heimdall, Mouflon, and Merino. Even so, they still follow herd logic. Heimdall is our outlier. He was the brazen ram, pushing past the known limits of his grazing world. Mouflon was the bellwether sheep. If Mouflon decided it was safe to follow, then and only then would the rest of the herd, Merino and the occasional disoriented turkey, come trotting over.

We all run to the source of the screaming. And there’s poor Heimdall, splayed out like a murdered cloud. He’s lying facedown in a puddle of tadpoles and woodsy murk. “His throat is slit!” someone shrieks, but I don’t even register this. Somehow, I just keep staring at Heimdall’s pink ears. They’ve flopped inside out, and I have to resist a powerful urge to flop them right side in. They look sad and veiny and indecent. Zorba kneels in the dirt and holds Heimdall’s head in his lap, sobbing with an island abandon, a salt-buoyed, voluptuous grief that no Mainland man would permit himself. Staring at Heimdall’s furry, triangular face, I feel a pulsing flood of adrenaline. I have never felt more awake than I do right now. Finally, “before” and “after” in their proper order.

“Oglivy,” I whisper excitedly. “Something is killing the sheep. Do you know what this means?”

“Gee-ros for lunch tomorrow?”

I point back towards the pen. “It means we have to sneak out and stand watch tonight.”

Oglivy frowns. “Couldn’t we commemorate the dead sheep my way? With pita, and Annie’s moussaka?”

“Ogli, this is serious! Don’t you see how great this is? This isn’t like the dreams—this is a real tragedy! This is happening right now, in real time. And we can stop it.”

I break off abruptly. Zorba comes lumbering out of the crowd, sweeping Annie into an ursine embrace. He buries his curly head into her shoulder. “Oh, Annie, our only ram!” The wiry hairs on his knuckles are flecked with blood.

“My children,” he bellows, gathering himself up to his full height of five feet four inches. “Be not afraid. We will sleep through this!” But his roar is all volume and no conviction, the tinderless fire of a faithless preacher. “To your cabins! Lights out!”

“The poor children,” we hear Annie sigh, “must be lidless with terror!”

Heimdall’s death is the best thing that’s ever happened to us here at Z.Z.’s. All night, the air is charged with a giddy, carnival air of terror. The Insomniacs have a reason for their involuntary vigil. The Night Terrors feel justified in their fear. And we Others have another mystery to focus on besides our own disorders. Now that there’s an outside threat to unify us, the regular social hierarchy has been suspended. Apneics, Others, and Narcos all gossip merrily on the walk back to our cabins. I’m lucky, because I have Oglivy, so I’m never really alone at night. But you can see how for the other kids, Heimdall’s death is a real treat. It’s a bridge between our private terrors, this killer skulking around in our woods. Finally, the whole camp has a nightmare in common. It’s something to celebrate, like Christmas.

“Who do you think did it, Elijah?” Ogli’s ruddy face is hanging upside down in front of me, his tall body arcing over the top bunk.

Lights out was announced over an hour ago. Outside, rain drums down in silvery curtains, pasting the purple ferns against the screen. The walls bulge with it; you can almost hear it humming, the drowned sound of swollen wood. Bullfrogs chorus below our windowsill.

“I dunno. Annie was acting pretty strangely. Did you know she used to be a scryer? She had her spoon out with her tonight. Suspicious. Could be one of the Narcos having a hypnagogic seizure. And then there’s—”

“Keep it down over there,” the counselor growls from the corner. “Try to sleep. Fake it to make it. Close your eyes and do your lulling exercises.” God help him, he would administer a Kentucky sleep remedy if he could, the counselor tells us, and club us over the head. Our jubilant paranoia means that he can’t sneak off to refill his flask.

I close my eyes. The cabin is full of comforting sounds, snores and orchestral cicadas, the dromedary rasping of the sisters. But lying in my bunk, listening to the other Others breathe, I get this empty-belly loneliness. It’s both too much and not enough, somehow, to be this close to my brothers and sisters in the dark. Espalda and Espina are the luckiest ones. They have a special dispensation to sleep in the same bed. They get to sleep back to back in their matching sailor pajamas, nautical embroidery along the open, lewdly enticing back flaps. I picture their humps sharking together, their vertebrae interlocking in a columnar ladder to their separate brains.

“Are you scared, Emma?” I whisper.

“
I’m
scared!” Espalda says.

“
I’m
scared!” Espina says.

I feel Ogli shift in his bunk, and know he is smirking into his pillow above me. “If you’re scared,” I continue, more firmly, “you can come sleep in my bed.”

“What?” she hisses. “Here? In front of the twins?”

“We don’t mind!” says Espalda.

“
I
mind,” whispers Espina.

Emma gives me a long, assessing look. Then she fluffs her pillow. She drags her blanket past the bored, whiskey-blurred gaze of the counselor. She crawls into my bed. I annotate the moment with a historian’s portentousness. This is it. The event that I’ve been waiting for all summer.

We spend the next two hours squirming around miserably, trying to get comfortable.

“Elijah, it’s just not working,” she finally sighs.

“Well, if
somebody
would quit hogging all the covers…”

“We just can’t sleep together,” she says sadly. “Maybe it’s your lullaby….”

“Maybe it’s
you,
” I say, hating and hating myself, “have you ever thought of that? Maybe
you’re
what’s not working. Maybe
you
can’t sleep with other people.”

We even lie back to back, fused at the base of our spines, curling out from each other like fetal twins. But it’s nothing like I imagined it would be. It’s an empty warmth, an only-bodies touching. We listen to the New Kid itching and baying. We watch Felipe flinch beneath invisible grenades. I feel guilty; Ogli has started his midnight divination without me. I shut my eyes, and will myself to sleep.

The following night, I am running towards the sheep pen, flanked by Emma and Oglivy. We take a willfully, gleefully stupid shortcut through the woods. We are Others, I pant to myself, equal to any nocturnal danger. And tonight, we are wide awake. Instead of dreaming about the past while the slaughter continues, we’ve made a pact to protect the flock.

“Zorba’s going to kick us out!”

“Annie’s dogs will get us first!”

“You mean the muuuurderer,” Oglivy whoops. He mock-stabs us both in the back and then runs past us, vanishing into the marsh.

The forest at night is full of friendly menace. It blurs and ashes all around us, a dark dream of itself. Rain runs down the skinned black hands of the trees, down the white mushrooms that push their tiny faces from the logs. Frogs jump from the branches like spry blemishes. We flinch beneath the leaf-swung shadows, the winged attack of lunatic moths. The forest gives me all sorts of reasons to reach out and hold Emma’s hand.

“Blah!” Oglivy yells, pushing Emma and me into a pile of wet leaves. We roll around, a red flail of limbs and hysterical laughter. We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest. I breathe in the sharp odor of cold stars and skunk, thinking,
This is the happiest that I have ever been.
I wish somebody would murder a sheep every night of my life. It feels like we are all embarking on a nightmare together.
And we will stop it in progress!
I think, yanking Emma and Ogli to their feet and hurtling towards the lake. We will make sure that the rest of the herd escapes Heimdall’s fate, we will…

Emma lets out a low, strangled cry and stops short. We are too late. The unlatched gate of the pen is swinging in the wind. Ewe’s blood glistens on the tiny leaves. She steps aside to reveal the humped form of Merino.

“Oh, Ogli…”

This isn’t the ashes to ashes of our dreams. This is Merino, our living, bleating lamb, now a heap of meat and sweaters.

“We failed.”

When she hears Emma moan, Mouflon comes trotting over from the far end of the pen. She steps blithely over her murdered sister, nosing our palms in search of poppy buns. But Emma is looking past Mouflon, past Merino, to the other side of the fence.

A wraithlike figure is rising out of the mist on the far end of the pen. “Do you think that sheep have human ghosts?” Ogli wants to know. But it’s just Annie. She is drenched, her white nightgown sopping wet, water pooling at her bare feet.

“Children?”

She blinks at the dead sheep with a dreamy incomprehension. She stoops and touches a wondering hand to the slick grass.

“Annie, we can ex—”

“Emma,” she barks, suddenly all business. “Go back to your cabin. I need to have a word with the boys.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Emma squeaks. She goes doe-leaping off into the woods without a backwards glance. Blue clouds race past her over the tall pines. Then the clouds part, and the moon blinks open above us.

That’s when I notice a bright spatter of blood on the hem of Annie’s nightgown.

“Boys,” Annie says, “my prophets, I need you to be honest now. Have you had any postmonitions about the dogs?”

We stare down at the blood drying on Annie’s hands.

“The dogs, boys,” she prods, her hazel eyes shining with a marbled hardness. “The
dogs.
”

“Uh, no, ma’am.” I cough politely. “We had the Typhoid Mary dream again last night. No, uh, no dogs.”

The scariest thing about the blood on Annie’s hands is the fact that Annie doesn’t seem to know it’s there. She’s busy scanning the ground for paw prints.

“Oglivy,” she asks, taking his hand, “did you dream them? Have you dreamed the dogs? Your dream log has been blank for days.”

“Oh,” Oglivy gulps, looking down at his clownish feet. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Annie. I, uh, I haven’t been remembering them. You know, the dreams.” He won’t look at either of us.

I elbow him sharply.

Annie nods. “Well. We musn’t let the little ones see her like this.” She turns to me. “Elijah, I need you to help me to drag Merino to the sinkhole.”

“Me?” I ask, horrified. “Um, Oglivy’s probably the man for the job….”

But he is already slouching off behind the red bushes. He mumbles a hollow apology over his shoulder.

Annie takes hold of Merino’s cloven hooves and grunts. I take up her forelegs, careful not to touch her still-warm body. I nearly drop her, shocked by the tactile revelation that beneath the airy wisps of fur, she is gristle and bone. Merino is easily the heaviest weight I have ever carried.

“Come on, Elijah,” Annie huffs. “Good job, Elijah. We’re almost to the sinkhole. Unh!” Her muscles shudder. “This is what’s necessary, you know, for the little ones to sleep easy.”

I wonder which part of this Annie considers to be “necessary,” the murder or the cover-up. I wish Ogli had stuck around to help me carry the body. I feel Merino’s damp nose brush against my thigh and let out an involuntary groan. When a blood-glutted tick jumps down her haunch and onto the white rim of my thumbnail, onto my sweaty wrist, it’s all I can do not to scream.