The Chaos (21 page)

“Lady,” I said, “we gotta run.” I grabbed her hand and tugged her out of the way just as the bird took a swipe at where she’d been a split second before. I took her behind the legs of the witch’s house.

“Is this safe?” she asked, looking up at the underside of the house.

“So long as it doesn’t sit down.”

“I was more afraid of it
s
hitting
down.”

“Oh, crap.”

“Precisely. How about behind that car over there?” She pointed to a yellow Prius that was on the sidewalk, kissing a telephone pole. So we went over there to watch what would happen next. “This is so exciting!” she said. “Much better than Sunday afternoon classes at my dojo.”

The bird, which had been wobbly on its feet anyway, plopped back down in a puddle of its own congealing blood. The house put itself right in front of the bird. The bird cocked its head sideways at the house. The house’s eye shutters opened and closed.

The house’s front door flew open so hard that it cracked against the outside wall. “Dyevuchka,” came a voice from inside, “where are you? What are you doing, ordering my house around as though it’s yours? Come and take your punishment, brazen child. You know you can’t hide.”

True. I couldn’t. I might be in a witch’s soup pot tonight, and
all for what? A big, half-dead dinosaur bird that’d just as soon kill me as look at me. “I’m coming!” I stepped out from behind the car and began making my way back over there. If this didn’t work, I was toast. “Just take a look outside first, will you?”

“I will not. Come along, now. Izbouchka, let her in.”

Izbouchka did nothing of the sort. She had a good look at the injured bird. Where an ordinary bird would have cocked its head to look at something that had made it curious, Izbouchka had to cock her whole body to stare at the giant bird. I heard stuff tumbling inside, things breaking as the witch’s house tilted at an angle, with her inside. “Izbouchka!” she yelled, then a string of words that didn’t sound polite at all.

“I’m sorry!” I shouted. “Just come out, please? Just for a second?”

“Oh, I’m going to peel your skin off to make myself a new pair of boots. I’m going to string your teeth together for a necklace. I’m going to roast you like a suckling pig and feed your bones to Izbouchka.”

Izbouchka righted herself.

The old lady stuck her head out of a window that hadn’t been there a second before. She was wearing curlers in her hair. I dared not laugh. Instead, I pointed at the bird. “Um, this—whatever it is—got into a fight with my aunt’s pet rolling calf.

She looked. “Oh, my,” she said.

“I know, right? It looks like it’s lost a lot of blood, and I can’t take care of it. My parents’d freak. Besides, I think it’s more likely to eat me than be grateful. Anyway, I, um, I just thought that you’d know how to handle a big flying creature that’s pointy at most of its ends, and I wanted to ask your advice, you know? I’m really sorry to inconvenience you.”

She gave me a stern look. “We’ll see.”

What’d that mean? But I couldn’t ask her. She’d pulled her head back inside Izbouchka,
and the window had disappeared. A second later, a door appeared. Izbouchka crouched down, and a set of stairs from the porch to the ground appeared. The door opened, and the old lady marched out. She’d tied a scarf around her curlers. She came down the stairs and went over to the bird. It just crouched there, tar soaked into and dripping from its feathers, panting for breath and trying to blink more tar out of its reddened eyes. It looked like it’d been caught in the biggest oil spill ever. Plus there was all that blood.

The witch shook her head. “He’s done for,” she said. “His injuries are too serious. And there’s no way to get all that stuff off without taking his feathers and skin along with it.” She made a tutting noise. “Pity the feathers are ruined. They would have made me a wonderful cloak.”

“Gross. You mean he’s going to die?”

“Yes.”

Izbouchka stood. The strangest noise came from inside her; kind of a
whump
!

The old lady’s eyes went wide. “Dacha, no! Stop that this instant!”

But she didn’t. The house tilted her body until her roof was pointing at the bird. Inside the house, I heard the crash and bang of things being tossed around and breaking. “Izbouchka!”

A chimney slid out of Izbouchka’s roof. “Run!” said the old lady. She hustled me over to the side of the road. She could move pretty quickly for an old lady.

Izbouchka coughed, an almost ladylike sound. “I’m sorry,” the old lady said to me.

“For what?” I turned to look at what was happening.

Flame came spurting out of Izbouchka’s chimney; a roaring torch of it a good six feet long. People who were still watching shouted in surprise.

Izbouchka aimed her flame at the bird. The bird was covered in tar; it caught fire right away. I yelped. The crowd backed farther away. “Stop her!” I yelled. “She’s going to kill it!”

The witch shook her head. “I can’t stop her.”

The tarred bird was screaming now, trying to stand. It threw its head back and extended its wings. Flame licked all the way along them, outlining them in orange light. It was glorious to see, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. “She’s hurting it,” I moaned. Tears were running down my face.

The burning bird collapsed in on itself. For a second, it glowed from within and I could see its bones. Then the flames disappeared and the lump left in the road was just a big piece of coal. “What did you do?” I screeched at Izbouchka. I started to rush toward the house, but the witch held me back.

The charred corpse of the giant bird flared into flame again, so bright. No, not flame. A bird-shaped body was rising out of the ashes. Its plumage was red and orange, shiny new and glowing in the dark. It stretched its wings out and cawed so loudly that it hurt my ears. People in the crowd covered their ears, too. Over by the pretzled Prius, the bus driver watched, her face alight with wonder.

“Is that the same bird?” I asked the old lady.

She gave a rueful smile. “No one has ever known.”

“My bio teacher never told us that the Archaeopteryx could do that.”

“The arka what?” asked the old woman.

Izbouchka righted herself again. More sounds of china and glass breaking. “I so hate it when she does that,” said the witch. “How would you like to be my next Vassilisa? Just a little light cleaning work.”

I put my hands on my hips and glared at her. “Tell me you did not just offer me a job as your maid!”

She shrugged. “Your choice. It would have been a way for you to make up for your offense. But as you wish.” The threat in her voice made me shiver.

The giant bird turned its eagle gaze on Izbouchka. It hissed. Then it extended its neck, cocked its head sideways, and looked Izbouchka up and down. It made a rumbly inquiring sound in its throat. Izbouchka made her own question sound back. I guess that was the answer the other bird wanted, because it leaned over and nuzzled Izbouchka’s awning with its beak. Izbouchka’s ceiling tiles ruffled up, making a sound almost like a girlish giggle.

“Well!” said the witch. “Who would have thought?”

Izbouchka’s chimney was nuzzling the bird back. The bird tried to climb on top of her. I wasn’t sure I was old enough to be watching this, no matter how much porn I’d scoped on gottabejelly.com. The witch yelled something at Izbouchka in Russian. Izbouchka slid out from under the bird and slammed open her front door. The witch said to me, “Maybe luck is with you this time. Perhaps you won’t have to pay the price for presuming to summon me.” Before I could ask her what she meant, she swooped up her stairs and into Izbouchka again. The door slammed shut and disappeared. The stairs rolled themselves back up.

Izbouchka took a running start, then leapt into the air. The giant bird squawked. That was “
Come back, hot thing!”
if I’d ever heard it, and I had. A little unsteady on its new feet, it stood. It leapt into the air, too, and flew after Izbouchka. They headed south, in the direction of Animikika. I guess a little molten lava wasn’t the kind of thing those two needed to worry about. Pretty soon, they disappeared into the volcano smog.

I rode another bicycle I’d found to Aunt Maryssa’s place. People had just abandoned their rides all over the place. The bike was a little short for my long legs, but its gears were sweet smooth. Even though Auntie had my jacket, riding kept me warm. But it didn’t do anything to help the chafing. At least the blemish didn’t seem to have spread much farther. I had a couple of near accidents, because as I rode, I kept peeking down at the leg the fire bird had gouged. I could see the smooth, rubbery skin of the blemish where there should have been an open wound. It didn’t even feel tender anymore. It didn’t feel anything. What was that black gunk that had come out of the cut just before it had healed over? It’d had the same consistency as blood. I touched my forehead. The cut I’d gotten from the piece of flying eggshell was gone. Man, I wished that I had Ben and Gloria to talk to right now! But Gloria was probably never going to talk to me again. I wished I had Tafari to hold me and argue with me until I did something sensible about the weird shit that was happening to my body.

If only I knew what that sensible thing was. I wished I had Rich to tease me and make fun of me and laugh at Mum and Dad behind their backs with me. Hell, I even wished I had Mum and Dad.

My life had been so simple. Yesterday, all I’d wanted was to win that street dance battle and make enough cash to put down on an apartment with my big bro. Today, I was dodging boggarts and abominable snowmen in the streets, my missing brother was sending me creepy phone messages, the countries of the world were in chaos, and with every passing hour I turned into more of a tar baby; a freak on the outside as well as on the inside.

At least I had Aunt Mryss. She was a one-woman Chaos all by herself, but that only meant she was dealing with all this strangeness as though it were a normal day for her. Maybe it was.

That humongous bird; was it a different one from the one Izbouchka had torched? Or had she just helped the injured one to somehow heal itself?

I stopped the bike at Aunt Maryssa’s bungalow on the corner of Dufferin and that little side street with the butcher shop. She came out onto her front porch to let me in. She was dressed warmly, and her color was back. Boy, was I glad to see that.

I didn’t have any way to chain the bike up. “Can I bring it inside?” I shouted to her.

She replied, “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” I guessed that meant yes. She always talked that way, like a combination between church and a wizard’s prophecy. I went to open the gate. Her hedge rustled, and the two Horseless Head Men popped out of it. I jumped. “Don’t fear them,” Maryssa called out, “for the lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

All that talk about lambs. She was making me hungry. I opened the gate and wheeled my bike past the Horseless Head Men. One of them burbled at me as I passed. “Nice day,” I said to it.

When I reached the foot of the short set of stairs up to the porch, Maryssa said, “Bring the bicycle come. Put it inside. But brush off the wheels-them first. Nah want no mud on my nice carpet.”

I knelt by the bike and started brushing the wheels off. “You’ll never believe what happened to that big weird bird!” I told her.

“Poor thing. Don’t tell me it dead?” With her strong accent, she sounded so much like my dad that I started to tear up. I’d heard white people ask her where in Ireland she was from, or Spain. Because she was white it never occurred to most of them that what they were hearing was Jamaican.

“No, it didn’t die. Well, it did and it didn’t.” I stood up. “The thing is, I’m not sure. But it was alive again at the end, and I think it’s okay.”

She nodded. She seemed satisfied with that. “You hungry?”

“Like a horse.”

“Come and eat, then.” She put her two pinkie fingers to her lips and whistled. The Horseless Head Men were there instantly, squabbling with each other. “Behave yourselves,” she said. “Plenty of room for the two of you.” To my surprise, they settled down and shuffled into place on her left shoulder. Not that they actually sat on it. They bobbed in the air just above it.

“They have to come inside with us, Auntie?”

“Feeding time.”

Horseless Head Men ate? This I had to see.

Auntie Mryss waved me on in ahead of her. Behind me, I heard a sharp knock. Didn’t need to turn around to know what it was; Maryssa, rapping on the doorjamb. “Out, Spot!” she said. Out of habit, I said it along with her. Not as enthusiastically as I used to, though. Now that I knew what Spot was, I wasn’t so keen to have it come out of anywhere. Well, it had seemed to listen to Auntie Mryss. I was going to have to put my trust in that. I leaned
the bike up against one wall of the hallway and waited for her to lock the door. She turned toward me, smiled, and opened her arms. I went into them, closed my eyes, and sighed with happy. Someone I knew. Who loved me. Someone solid and familiar, and just a little mad. That was the thing about Mryss; everybody else I knew tried to keep their madness under wraps, to pretend they were normal. Even me. Mryss had never bothered to try. “Auntie Maryssa,” I said, “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“I thought I was unlucky because I had no shoes. But then I met a man with no feet.”

“You betcha,” I responded. I had no clue what she was on about. And what was making that quiet humming sound? I opened my eyes to find myself nose to snouts with the two Horseless Head Men, who were peering curiously at me. They were the ones humming. “Uh.” I stepped out of Maryssa’s arms, away from them. “What smells so good?”

“For I have prepared a table in the presence of mine enemy,” replied Maryssa, “and killed the fatted calf.” She was walking down the hallway, in the direction of the kitchen. “I know you. You always hungry. Eat more than your brother, even.”

I scurried after the sound of her voice. I wanted to put off the moment when I told her how badly I’d been messing up. I asked her, “You going to tell me more about Spot?”

The kitchen was the same old kitchen. Dunno why I’d half-expected it to have changed. Same white walls. Same small Formica table with the brown-on-beige flowers and that silver plastic fake aluminum rim running along the bottom of the tabletop. Same faint smell of the bleach she cleaned everything with. But everything here was the same, as though all the good hadn’t gone out of my world. I sniffed.