We Are All Completely Fine (11 page)

He ran for the back steps of the building. There was a rear door, made of rusting metal. A chain and padlock held it closed.

He heard voices and looked up. From the open windows, female voices chanted in a strange language. Chanting was never good.

Jan appeared behind him. “I’m going around front,” he said. “Just . . . guard this door.” Before she could argue with him, he jumped off the steps and ran for the side of the building. The space between buildings was narrow and dark, the walls seeming to pinch shut above him. He bashed his knee against a hunk of metal—an air conditioning unit? a refrigerator?—and stifled a shout of pain. He squeezed past the obstruction, then hobbled toward the mouth of the little alley.

A group of people was walking down the sidewalk toward him. He stepped back into the shadows, but really the whole street was in shadow: The sky above the rooftops was the color of a bruise; the sole patch of light glowed from a distant streetlamp. Three women, silhouettes in long skirts, passed within feet of him, talking in low voices. Arabic? Persian? He couldn’t tell.

Wood shrieked. He risked a peek around the corner. The front door of the building was a wooden slab that looked like it had been chewed off at the bottom. A wedge of light spilled onto the sidewalk, then vanished as the door closed with another shriek. He waited ten, perhaps twenty seconds, then limped toward the entrance.

The door did not quite meet the frame. He leaned closer, but could see nothing on the other side but a dim light. He could not hear the women’s voices, or the chanting he’d heard earlier.

Greta was wrong about him. He’d never been brave, even as a boy. Everything he did felt like a forced move, the only option he could think of at the time. And now here he was again, creeping around in the dark, playing Monster Detective.

He put a palm against the door and pushed.

The lobby was lit only by an electric lamp that sat on the floor. Rows of metal mailboxes gleamed along one wall, some of them open like black mouths: eels waiting in the rocks. A door once guarded the stairwell, but that was off its hinges now and lay flat on the garbage-strewn floor.

He’d stepped three feet into the lobby when a figure came down the stairs: the tiny woman in the sweater scarf. Her pink lips opened in surprise. They stared at each other for what seemed like seconds, but could only have been a moment. Then her eyes narrowed and her right arm jerked up. Her hand was full of metal.

He threw himself backward and slammed into the wooden door. It opened halfway and dumped him onto the cement. The Sister ran toward him, the pistol twitching at the end of her arm.

He scrambled backward. “Don’t shoot!” Once, when he was younger, he would have been stupid enough to say something clever.

The Sister halted just outside the door, framed by the dim light of the electric lantern. She aimed the gun at his face. He was on his back, arms and legs splayed, a crab caught in mid-scuttle.

She glanced left, then right. He thought, Maybe there’ll be bystanders! She wouldn’t shoot him in front of witnesses, would she? But the street was as dark as before, and there was no one on the sidewalk.

“How the fuck did you find us?” she said. Her voice was nasal, the accent pure Brooklyn. That threw him. He was expecting something more exotic.

She took a step forward. “Talk, you piece of shit!”

The woman did not quite finish the word “shit.” A black shape came out of the dark to her right and enveloped her, knocking her out of the wedge of light. The two figures hit the ground and rolled, then rolled again. The new attacker clung to the tiny woman’s back.

It was Jan. One arm was cinched around the Sister’s neck, the other around her chest and arm, pinning the gun to her side. Her legs were wrapped around the woman’s hips.

The Sister tried to get to her feet; she got one hand under her and pushed, but Jan shifted her weight and rolled onto her back, keeping the woman pinned against her chest. The Sister struggled, but the choke-hold was unrelenting. The woman’s pink lips worked as she tried to get air. The pistol dropped from her fingers.

Harrison reached them. “Jan,” he said. “Dr. Sayer.”

The doctor’s face was distorted by some crazed emotion. The whites of her eyes had nearly vanished; her pupils were black and reflective as oil.

“Jan! Stop. Please.”

The Sister had stopped moving.

Jan seemed to see him then. Her mouth went open in surprise, and she pushed the Sister’s body from her. “Did I—?”

He touched the Sister’s face. “She’s alive,” Harrison said, though in fact he had no idea. He stared at Jan for a long moment, then held out his unbandaged hand. She took it and pulled herself up. Her strength was alarming.

In that moment several questions in his mind were answered, or rather became one answer, like notes resolving into a chord. He knew who she was—and who she used to be.

Perhaps she saw the understanding dawn on his face. “Not now,” she said. “Greta.”

They dragged the unconscious Sister into the lobby—Harrison thought it best to get her off the street—and then started up the stairs.

Their way was lit by fire. Every half-dozen steps sat a glass bowl filled with oil and a floating wick, but the inconstant light was almost worse than pure darkness; the stairs seemed to shift beneath Harrison’s feet. Stabbing pain in his knee twice made him catch himself against the grimy walls.

Jan seemed to be having no trouble, though. She pushed past him, and he had to lunge after her to keep up. He felt like he was making a tremendous amount of noise, clumping up the stairs, huffing in the thick atmosphere of scented candles and stale urine.

At any moment he expected another Sister to appear, walking down to check on Pink Lips. He wasn’t sure what Jan would do, or what he would do. He didn’t know if he could cope with another gun aimed at his forehead.

On the second landing they heard the women’s voices chanting above them. Jan threw herself up the remaining stairs. “Wait,” he said, trying to keep his voice down, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

He reached the third-floor exit. Jan was halfway down the corridor. At the end of the hall an open doorway quavered with candlelight. The singing was loud now, a chorus that made his skin itch.

Jan reached the doorway and stopped. Harrison caught up to her a moment later.

Everyone in the room had turned to look at them.

Inside were a dozen women, sitting or standing around an open space in the center of the room. The tall, Indian-looking woman who’d come for Greta stood there between two wooden chairs that faced each other. Greta sat in one, and in the other sat a young girl, perhaps eight or nine years old. Greta had stripped down to her wife-beater and boy shorts, and the girl was dressed similarly, in a white T-shirt and shorts. Her skin, too, was an echo of Greta’s, their twin scars glowing and dancing in the flickering light.

Greta held the girl’s hands in her own, and had been leaning toward her. Now they’d turned, like the rest of the women, to see who was interrupting them.

Greta looked at Harrison as if he was a stranger. No: an enemy.

“Don’t do it,” Harrison said. “Don’t do it to her.”

He’d had it wrong. He thought Greta was going back to the Sisters to be their queen. Instead she was going to pass her mate to the next bride in the list.

“Out,” Greta said.

Jan said, “Greta, please . . .”

“Both of you,” Greta said.
“Out.”
One of the women on the floor nearest them began to get up.

“OUT!” Greta shouted.

Then it was in the room with them: the Hidden One revealing itself, shuddering into the world. Someone screamed. Harrison threw up his hands to shield his eyes, but that was an animal gesture, useless against the non-light that burst from it. It was not a “fire creature.” This was what fire aspired to. The heat that frightened the flames.

The thing churned toward them like a whirlwind. Harrison yanked Jan backward, into the hallway. The creature halted there on the other side of the doorway.

The door slammed shut. And then the women on the other side began to scream in earnest.

Jan shouted Greta’s name. Harrison hauled her back. The door shook in the frame; glowing holes popped through the surface like tiny meteor strikes.

“We have to get out!” Harrison shouted at Jan. “It’s—”

The door exploded outward. Shards of blazing wood bit into his skin. He grabbed Jan’s arm and yanked her toward the stairwell. Flames raced along the walls ahead of them. A roar filled his head, and he didn’t know whether it was the sound of the fire or the voice of the creature.

The stairwell was clear. They threw themselves down the stairs, Harrison barely staying on his feet, tripping over the oil candles and sending tiny flames bouncing ahead of them into the dark. At each turning of the stairs they caromed off walls, slamming shoulders.

Then the fire found them. Flames rippled across the peeling paint, and in an instant the stairwell became a furnace. They ducked their heads and ran, Harrison keeping one hand on Jan’s back, pushing her forward. Smoke jetted ahead of them. He could see nothing. He’d lost track of the number of floors. Somewhere above him, Greta’s mate was burning down the house.

I’ve got one play.
He’d misunderstood everything. First he thought she was going to be their queen, their Aunty Greta. Then he thought she was going to push the Hidden One into the new bride. But thatwasn’t something Greta could do. Not to another little girl. So she had to finish what she’d started years ago—and make sure the Sisters never did this to anyone else again.

Jan dropped to her knees, then reached back and yanked him down. “Stay low!” she shouted.

Jan crawled forward—but “crawled” was the wrong word. She scuttled forward, moving on palms and toes. And so
fast
. He’d never seen anything human move like that.

They were on a flat surface now. He kept falling behind and she would stop, reach back for him. Her hand would touch his face or shoulder, then she’d lurch forward again.

The smoke enfolded them. He could not see his hands, much less Jan. He was coughing, and his eyes were watering furiously. The heat was like a weight pressing him to the ground.

Jan stopped short, shouted something back to him. It took her several tries for him to understand that the way ahead was blocked. He crawled up beside her and touched hot metal: the building’s rear door. The padlocked door. But how had they gotten back here? The lobby should have been right in front of them. Somehow they’d missed it, turned one too many times.

Jan started banging on the door. He joined her, hitting it with the side of his fist, but his blows were feeble. Then he started coughing, and suddenly he couldn’t lift his arms. He dropped flat against the floor, trying to find oxygen.

So strange. All his life, he was sure he’d die in water. He’d nearly drowned when he was a toddler and had not gone back into open water until a very bad night in Dunnsmouth. Even after surviving that night, he’d never lost his certainty that the sea would eventually suck him into the dark. Death by fire had never occurred to him.

Jan still banged away. Or else someone else was banging to get in. Sorry, he thought. Come back later.

A rush of wind and heat blew past him. Then he felt hands on his arms, and he was dragged out of the building, into the parking lot.

“Hey, Martin,” he said. Or tried to say. One breath and he was racked with coughing. Martin stood over him, still holding the tire jack, as Harrison rolled onto his side and attempted to hack his internal organs onto the gravel.

The building was in full torch. Every window blazed, opera boxes bursting with madly clapping flames.

“I could see Jan,” Martin said. “Behind the door.”

“Thanks,” Harrison said. He raised himself to his elbows, coughed some more.

“But Greta . . .” Martin asked. “I think she’s still in there.”

Jan was sitting up a few feet away, looking at the building. Her eyes were shining. “Oh God,” she said.

Harrison twisted to follow her gaze. The door they’d been trapped behind was wide open, the interior rippling with orange and yellow. A pair of figures walked down the corridor through the flames. No, not
through
. The flames parted around them.

Greta and the new bride stepped out of the doorway, holding hands. They were untouched. Radiant.

A few feet from the door, Greta stumbled, then righted herself. The girl looked up at her, concerned.

Greta turned. The building seemed to swell with new heat like a great beast inhaling. And it
was
a beast. The creature proudly shook the walls, bellowing from every open window. So large! So mighty!

Then: An explosion knocked Harrison onto his side, shook the ground. Debris rained down. When he looked up again, the building was shuddering. Then, thunderclaps. Internal structures gave way as floors collapsed.

Greta and the girl were still standing, facing the building. Greta opened her arms.

Fire burst from every window. Rivers of flame bent through the air toward her and in an instant engulfed her.