Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“Sometimes, in dreams, even men see things. You read me Blake yourself.”
“Blake was a damned schizophrenic,” the hungry ghost replies. “They just hadn’t invented the word back then.”
“How often is a changeling of such worth offered up to them? Maybe once in a century? Once in five hundred years?”
“That doesn’t change what you are, Narcissa,” Aldous says and snaps a tibia between his insubstantial fingers. “More important, that doesn’t change what you are
not.
There’s not half-enough of the blood of the hounds in your veins to make a decent poodle, much less a
ghul,
and all the pretty gifts on earth can’t change that. They don’t bargain with humans, and that’s all that you are. Never mind what you stole from them, never mind you blackmailed them.”
“You’ll see,” she says, and then Chance begins to blow the horn over and over again.
“Your guest is growing restless,” Aldous cackles. “Perhaps she needs fresh linens.”
“No. She just has to piss again,” Narcissa says. “And it’s about time for another injection,” and then she catches the pattern in the blats from the Thunderbird’s horn. Three short, three long, three short, and Aldous must have caught it, as well, because he begins to giggle from his seat on the fallen sycamore.
“Better watch yourself, child,” he snickers. “Maybe this one here’s got her own sort of Mother Hydra.”
Narcissa shakes her head, wipes some of the dried blood from her lips and chin, and when she’s sure that Chance isn’t going to stop blowing the horn, isn’t tiring of her pointless SOS, she leaves the ghost of the old man alone in the woods and goes back to the car.
A few miles past Red Bridge, the crest of Kittatinny Mountain rising hazy in the west to catch the morning sun, and the werewolf pulls into a combination diner and Texaco station because the Ford’s gas tank is getting close to empty and, besides, Chance thinks it must be tired of listening to her complain about being hungry and needing to piss. The whole long night spent behind the burned-out motel, and the werewolf is growing impatient, Chance can see that, doesn’t understand why, but even through the drugs it would be hard for her to miss the anxiety building behind those hard yellow eyes. When Narcissa came down out of the forest, blood drying to tacky smears on her face and hands, she gave Chance another injection that swept her along to dawn, and then another before they rolled back out onto the highway. After the second shot, the child in the backseat grew suddenly quiet, sullen, and then went away altogether, and she has to keep reminding herself it was only an hallucination to begin with, that they didn’t leave it behind somewhere, that the werewolf hasn’t murdered it.
“I’m going to fill the tank first,” Narcissa says, glancing nervously towards the big diner windows decorated with gaudy, smiling Halloween pumpkins and skeletons. “I can’t use the cuffs because there are people watching, but you’re going to sit your ass right here and not move a muscle, you got me?”
“Yeah,” Chance tells her. “Sure. But then we’ll get something to eat?”
“Whatever,” the werewolf growls and slams the door.
Chance looks forlornly into the empty backseat, then across the parking lot towards the diner, then at the backseat again.
“It doesn’t really matter if you’re real or not,” she says, whispering, in case Narcissa is listening. “You can come back if you want. I miss you, butter bean. I’m afraid.”
But the child doesn’t reappear, and she turns and stares out the Thunderbird’s dusty window at the diner, the three other cars and one pickup parked out front. The car is filling up with gas fumes and the smell of asphalt warming in the bright morning sunshine, so she cracks her window just enough to let in some fresh air, then realizes that’s where the bad smells are coming from in the first place. A red-orange neon sign in the diner window spells out
GOOD HOMECOOKING
, and even with the gasoline and blacktop fumes working their way up her nostrils and making her nauseous, the sign gets her mouth watering. Her stomach gurgles loudly, and the baby kicks.
“Yeah, I know you’re hungry, too.”
The pump makes a dull whirring sound, and she looks away from the diner, watches Narcissa and the gray LCD numbers ticking off pennies and ounces, dollars and gallons.
“We’re going to eat in a little while. She promised,” Chance says and gently massages her belly through her overalls and the T-shirt underneath. “If I had your books, I’d read you a story, and you’d forget you’re hungry. I’d read you Pooh or Dr. Seuss, but they’re all back in Birmingham. I could sing to you, instead. Would you like that?”
Sometime later, and for all Chance knows it’s hours or only a few seconds, the werewolf opens the driver’s-side door and glares in at her with its wide jaundiced eyes and she stops singing “Hey Jude” to the baby and points at the diner.
“I need to eat,” she says. “
Real
food.”
The werewolf frowns and gets back into the car, sliding in behind the wheel, but never takes its eyes off her.
“I keep my promises,” it says, and then Narcissa looks at herself in the rearview mirror. “Fuck,” she growls.
“You don’t look so bad,” Chance says hopefully, and her stomach gurgles again. “I think the burns are better than yesterday.”
“It’s not the burns I’m worried about, crazy lady, it’s the eyes,” and Chance sees that she’s holding a white contact lens case in her left hand, but can’t remember where it came from; something Narcissa might have gotten out of the trunk while the gas was pumping or maybe it came from somewhere else entirely. She opens the right side of the case and dips an index finger into the clear solution inside, removes a translucent lens and slips it into her right eye. She blinks two or three times and then turns towards Chance.
“See? Just like magic,” the werewolf growls at her, and now one of its yellow eyes has gone a deep, discordant blue. “And if anyone asks about the burns, I’ll tell them it’s a skin condition, a sun allergy.”
“Fine,” Chance says. “Just put the other one in. That’s really creepy looking.”
“If you think that’s creepy, then you got a whole lot of bad shit ahead of you, Mrs. Silvey.”
“I’m hungry,” she says again, insistent, watching while Narcissa puts in the left contact and blinks until it slides into place.
“Now,” the werewolf growls, its new blue eyes like something stolen and plugged inside its skull. “I’m only going to tell you this one more time, so I really do hope you’re fucking listening.”
“I’m listening,” Chance replies and decides she’d rather look at the front of the diner than those phony blue eyes.
“I do the talking.
All
the talking. If you say anything, to anybody, one single fucking word, a whole lot of people that don’t have anything to do with this are going to get killed. And it’ll be your fault, understand?”
“I won’t say anything to anyone,” she murmurs. “I need to eat, that’s all.”
“I know you’re not awfully sure right now exactly what’s real and what’s coming out of those syringes, but I need you to believe me when I say that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever killing anyone that tries to help you.”
“Anyone who,” Chance says.
“What?”
“Not ‘anyone that,’ but ‘anyone
who
,’ because—”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” the werewolf barks in its coarse, sandpapery monster’s laugh. “Here I thought you were some sort of geologist, not a goddamn English teacher.”
“Well, there’s no point in sounding ignorant,” Chance replies, wondering if restaurants this far north serve grits.
“I speak nine languages,” Narcissa says. “Three of them don’t even have names anymore, and I don’t need a lecture on English from a rockhound on morphine. Now,
s’il vous plaît,
are you going to behave yourself in there, or should I just keep going until we come to a drive-thru?”
“I’ll behave,” Chance says. “Do you think they have grits?”
“I don’t even know what the hell a
grit
is. You just sit still, and I’ll come around and open your door.”
“I can open it myself. I’m not an invalid.”
“I said sit your fat ass still,” the werewolf growls, and Chance wonders where it’s from, that no one there eats grits. Someplace cold, she imagines.
Chance unbuckles her seat belt, wiggling free of the shoulder strap, and waits while Narcissa walks around the front of the Ford and opens her door. The werewolf reaches in and takes her hand, and Chance pulls away instinctively, not wanting that filthy thing touching her, because if it’s touching her, it’s touching her baby, too. Those scalded, blistered hands that were stained in rabbit’s blood last night, the same hands that tried to kill Sadie Jasper and that murdered the kid that Deke called Soda. The same hands that killed Alice. Unclean hands that have done unspeakable things. “I don’t fucking need your help,” Chance says sharply. Narcissa shrugs and takes a step back, giving Chance room to haul herself slowly out of the Ford.
“You just remember what I told you,” the werewolf growls. “Not a word to anyone.”
“I’m pregnant,” Chance says, “not deaf.”
“You’re stoned, and you’re scared,” the monster says. “That makes you two kinds of stupid.”
A minute or two later and Chance is finally out of the car and standing on her feet, her legs weak and shaky from the dope and hunger, so many hours on the road, and she has to lean against the Thunderbird until her head stops spinning and she begins to feel a little stronger.
“People are starting to stare at us,” Narcissa mutters, jagged flickers of anger showing at the edges of her words.
“So what?” Chance asks, trying to get her breath, wondering if she can walk as far as the diner’s door. “Maybe the women in Pennsylvania don’t get pregnant and shoot up.”
“You’re making a scene.”
Chance shuts her eyes, looking for some still point deep inside, well beyond this morning and the morphine, beyond the small distractions of her hunger and thirst, her full bladder and aching body, beyond her fear and the werewolf’s contempt; the dead calm of a hurricane’s eye to give her the strength and resolve to do whatever has to be done next, to keep moving ahead until Deacon can find her.
He is coming,
she thinks.
He is, soon. He’s almost here.
The safe, inviolable place beyond the counterclockwise spin of the towering indigo and charcoal edges of the cloud wall, and she’s only a small boat, bobbing at the still heart of the tempest.
Wherever she’s taking us, it’s still a long way off. And Deacon’s coming fast.
“Look, bitch,” Narcissa says. “I’m not going to stand around until someone in there decides to play Good Samaritan.”
“Fine. Then
you
help me,” Chance spits back, impressed that she can sound so angry herself. The storm spins madly around her, eternal, insane, unearthly, but she’s found the center even it can’t reach.
“I don’t think I can walk that far.”
The werewolf growls and puts an arm around Chance, supporting her, buoying her up. For one long, disorienting moment, Chance feels weightless and imagines she could fly away, sail high above the hurricane, above these craggy mountains, and then she’d be able to find Deacon on her own.
But he’s almost here,
she reminds herself.
No point wearing myself out. He’ll be along any time now.
“Come on then,” Narcissa says, and Chance opens her eyes as the werewolf slams the Ford’s door shut with her free hand. The day seems even brighter than before, a summer’s day lost in late October, dazzling sun dogs flashing from the front of the diner and the roofs of the cars and truck, and Chance has to squint to see.
“It wouldn’t hurt to smile,” the werewolf growls.
“What the hell have I got to smile about?”
“You’re still alive. How’s that?”
“Not very encouraging,” she replies, but manages a weak smile to keep the monster happy.
“That’s better,” Narcissa says, and then a big candy-apple red 4x4 bounces into the parking lot and pulls in beside the other truck.
“That just fucking figures,” Narcissa grumbles, and so Chance squints at the man who gets out of the 4x4, smiles at him and he smiles back. Sturdy man with his hair cut down to stubble, blond stubble and a baggy camouflage jacket and pants like deer hunters and army men wear.
“Don’t you say a goddamn
word,
” the monster whispers in her ear so the man can’t hear what it’s saying.
“You two ladies need some help this morning?” he asks, still smiling, and
He doesn’t even see what she is,
Chance thinks, disappointed, but not surprised.
He can’t see that she’s a werewolf.
“We’re fine,” Narcissa tells him. “But I’d appreciate it if you could get the door for us.”
“Yes ma’am,” he says. “You got it,” and when he opens the plate-glass door, Chance hears a cowbell jingle. The delicious aroma of frying meat, bacon or sausage or ham, maybe all three, wafts out of the diner and makes Chance’s stomach rumble again.