St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

The City of Shells

Barnaby is busy hosing down Paundra, that hoary old carapace, when he first hears the screaming. He tells himself that it’s just the wind. Barnaby has spent the whole day scrubbing seagull excrement with a Sisyphean fury, and now it looks like the storm is going to hit after all.

“Goddamn it,” he mutters to the smirking gulls. “Never fails. As soon as I suds up these bitches, it pours.”

The City of Shells closed to the visiting public over an hour ago. Now the boardwalk is deserted. Silent, except for the medleyed roar of the waves and the distant rumble of thunder. Gray, rain-bellied clouds are rolling in. Farther out, the sea is sluicing into night. There’s a hushed, tingly feeling in the air, as if the whole world is holding its breath. Only the silvery gulls dot the horizon. They peck at used condoms and empty Dorito bags with a salt-preened serenity.

Barnaby stares at the massive thunderheads, full of misgivings. Ever since closing time, he’s been on edge. He generally tries to punch out right at seven. You’ve probably heard the rumors, too: there are strange noises in the City after dusk. Legend has it — if you can use legend to describe the booze-fueled tales that get passed laterally within a janitorial staff of two — that the Giant Conchs are haunted. On stormy nights, they echo with the radular skitterclatter of their extinct inhabitants. The teenage kid who works this job on weekends, Raffy, gets all lyrical-hysterical on the subject. “This place turns into a motherfuckin’ ghost town after hours! The shells start singing.”

Raffy says that if you hear the ghost music, it earworms into your brain and infects you like an auditory virus. It plays at subliminal levels, alien and resonant as insect song. The boss dismisses Raffy’s reports as inner-ear dementia. “Had an uncle who suffered from musical hallucinations,” the boss once told Barnaby sadly. “Poor bastard. Spent the last decade of his life deaf to everything except the opening bars of ‘Who Can Be a Toucan? You Can!’” He shook his head. “I don’t envy that Raffy. Must be a tough row to hoe.”

The screaming is coming from inside Cornuta. Not real, Barnaby thinks. He leans on his broom and wonders, for a delicious, sky-tilting second of vertigo, if he might be going crazy. But this is no phantom music. This sound is scary in a different way. Too real, too human.

Cornuta is off-limits to guests, roped off on the other side of the park. She got banged up during Tropical Storm Vita and is currently under repair. The boss rented a crane and lowered her so that she’s lying sideways on the beach. Now she’s a bitch to clean, cracked at the tip of her nacreous dome and always filling up with trash and irascible crabs. For a Giant Conch, Cornuta is one of the island’s tiniest, forty-five feet from end to end, about the size of a small trailer. The overlapping whorls that lead into the shell never widen beyond the circumference of a sewer pipe. It’s not exactly the kind of rabbit hole you can tumble down by accident.

“Who goes there?” The ancient elocution bubbles up out of nowhere, making Barnaby blush. “I mean, is somebody in there?”

Abruptly, the screaming stops. Barnaby takes a shaky breath and peers inside the Giant Conch. All he can make out are two glittery eyes, blinking out of the preternatural darkness at the bottom of the shell. It’s back, he thinks, feeling foolish even as he grips the toilet brush like a weapon, the thing that used to live in the shell is back.

“Excuse me!” a child’s voice honks miserably. “I’m stuck. Do you have any Band-Aids, or food?”

Big Red had been looking forward to this field trip all month. The City of Shells is touted as “A Merman’s Stonehenge!” They have to take the ferry to get there. It isn’t, technically, a city: it’s a megalithic formation of Precambrian Giant Conchs. The brochures make it look like some Neptunian version of Easter Island. The cover illustration shows a dozen of the Giant Conchs, arrayed in a weird half-moon formation along the beach. Each of the shells is a swirly, pearly licorne, some the height of a house. Gulls wheel in wicked circles around their marble parasols. Salt-bleached skyscrapers, the caption says, cast onto the shore by Cretaceous tsunamis, and set upright by our very own island progenitors! And there they are, in a photo inset: the ancestors. A small, furry people, their cheeks swollen like those of prudent rodents, lighting holy fires in the shadow of the giant shells.

Grades five through seven take a field trip there every August. The City of Shells is owned and operated by Laramie Uribe’s father, and he gives the kids paper conch hats and a special discount. Laramie sat next to Big Red on the bus ride over. She and Big Red are best friends by default. Although she is only two grades above Big Red, puberty has been inordinately kind to Laramie. Teachers refer to Laramie as “sophisticated” and “mature for her age,” but Big Red knows that Laramie is neither of these things. Laramie still snorts milk through her wide nostrils. She reads at a fourth-grade level. She defends herself against bathroom calumny by flicking snot berries at her detractors. What the teachers actually mean is that Laramie has huge boobs; that she smells like coconut oil and unfiltered Camels; and that she gives it up to high-school boys named Federico.

“Wait’ll we get there.” Laramie grinned slyly at Big Red. “I’ll give you a tour of all the shells where we did it.”

Big Red bit her lip and stared out the window. She had only a squeamy, abdominal sense of what “it” could be.

When they got there, Big Red pushed past Laramie and thundered off the bus. She raced down the beach, raced right into the sunlit center of the City, and then stopped short. She shielded her eyes and blinked up at the Giant Conchs, oblivious to the other children swarming around her. She thought: What the heck is this? These conchs were giant disappointments. The City had fallen into seedy disrepair. The pinky-white turrets were covered with seagull excrement; the interiors shimmered with grout. Mayo packets and pickle sticks slimed the axial ribs. Mr. Uribe had rigged the conchs with miniature speakers so that the tourists could hear the roar of the primordial seas — but the electricity was on the fritz. Tintinnabula was the only one working. She sounded like a giant refrigerator. If these shells had ever been the Fourteenth Wonder of the World, as touted on the tattered banners, they had definitely slipped in the rankings. Sweaty women took glamour shots in front of Sweet Venus. A froggy man rubbed his cigarette out on her speckled ventral side.

The kids yawned through a lecture on conchology. They ate a picnic lunch of corn dogs and strawberries. A hairless woman snapped their class photo in the City center—“Say chelicerae,” she rasped — below the barnacled awning of Possicle. They gathered their things to go.

“Wait a sec!” Big Red interjected, tugging at sleeves. “When do we get to go inside the shells?”

“Well, of course we’re not going inside them, Lillith.” Sister John patted her head affectionately, as if Big Red was a sainted retard. “Who promised you that we were going inside the shells?”

Big Red bit her lip. She couldn’t remember who had made her that promise, although she felt certain that someone had. Big Red felt a dull, cuckolded rage, but she wasn’t surprised. For her first nine years on the planet, Big Red had lived a life of compromise. She wanted to be beautiful, but she’d had to settle for being nice. She wanted to see the Aquanauts for her birthday, but she’d had to settle for the gimp lobsters at the Crab Shack. She wanted a father, but she’d had to settle for Mr. Pappadakis. Mr. Pappadakis smells like Just for Men peroxide dye and eucalyptus foot unguents. He has a face like a catcher’s mitt. The whole thing puckers inward, drooping with the memory of some dropped fly ball. Big Red’s mother has many epithets for Mr. Pappadakis: “our meal ticket,” “my sacrifice,” “vitamin P.” He is an obdurate man, a man of irritating, inveterate habits. He refuses to put down toilet seats, or quit sucking on pistachio shells, or die.

Laramie tells Big Red that she is lucky. Mr. Pappadakis doesn’t know when she’s home in the first place, so she never has to sneak around. Laramie sneaks out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. Laramie bragged to Big Red that she had personally defiled eight out of thirteen Giant Conchs.

“See that big ’un over there?” she whispered.

They’re all big, Laramie.

“That’s where I sucked off the chlorine vendor.” Her voice got low and slurry. “See that curly black hair stuck to your shoe? That’s his son Lyle’s—”

Laramie shut up abruptly. A second later, her father came striding down the boardwalk. At five feet three inches, with wrinkly skin and a bright, bald face, Mr. Uribe looked like an animate peanut. Too short, too fat, Big Red thought. He couldn’t even be the understudy for a TV dad. But at least he didn’t look like cadaverous Pappadakis.

“All right, kids,” he said, clapping his hands. “Tour’s over. Don’t forget to buy your plush conchs and conch accessories in the gift store. The ferry is waiting for you.” Most of the kids went stampeding towards the dock. Big Red hung back. She stared over the railing, sucking salt from her braid. Her orange hair was knotted with sand. Below her, the sun was drowsing on the surface of the water.

“Look!” Big Red breathed. She pointed at the marina. Manatees were pushing their bovine wings through the water, emerging in ones and twos from under the pier. They swirled through motor oil in slow, graceful circles. “How beautiful…”

“They look like giant turds!” Rogelio squealed. “Giant turds, giant turds!” The other children sniggered.

Infidels! Big Red thought. She had just learned this word in social studies, and liked to walk around thinking it with religious furor. Sometimes, she fantasized about a great pyre, where she burned all of her heathen classmates. Manatees are God’s creatures, not turds! she would roar. And my…name…is LILLITH!

“Get it, Big Red?” Rogelio elbowed her.

“Ha-ha,” Big Red laughed. “Turds.”

She followed the others into the store. Much more excitement was generated by the Giant Conch sea-salt shakers than by the shells themselves. Big Red didn’t even have to wait until the coast was clear; nobody was looking. She slunk back down the dock to where the toppled shell was hunched on its side. She took a darting look around, then slipped under the yellow CAUTION ropes. Big Red crouched on her hands and knees and inched forward along the crimson outer wing that spun into the shell. Cornuta’s inner chamber seemed to pulse with light, purpling inward to some effulgent, unreachable end point. Down below, the scooped-out hollow looked irresistibly snug.

Sucking in her stomach, knowing better, Big Red pushed her way inside. She slid down the canal and oomphed onto the floor. It was a much bigger drop-off than she had expected. Inside, the shell had a clean, blue smell, like the memory of salt. It took a while for her eyes to adjust to the twinkly dark. The shell body bowled out to the size of a walk-in closet. Big Red wished that it was even smaller, the width of a cabinet, a cupboard. She pressed both hands to the parabolic sides of the shell. She closed her eyes and smiled — it felt like being parenthesized. When Big Red looked down at her palms, she saw that they were covered with beach grit: sand and cigarette butts, wet gull feathers. Someone had covered the white, harp-shaped ledges with graffiti. Nasty words, bad words. It was a language that Big Red recognized without understanding. She mouthed the words to herself — ——. They made her feel too many things all at once, hot-faced and dizzy and scared and ashamed. She didn’t draw a total blank; instead, the words smudged Big Red’s mind with fleshy blurs. Something opaque and darkly familiar, like two bodies moving behind steamed-up shower glass. On the far wall, she noticed more scrawled graffiti: LARAMIE ♥ RAFFY 4EVA!

Big Red stared up at the opalescent canopy above her. The spines radiated outwards, pink to puce to a speckled orange. She could see tiny perforations in the walls. Good. Big Red pressed her cheek to the cool floor of the shell with a martyred glee. I hope the Giant Conch has one million gajillion cracks and fills up with rainwater and I drown. Then they’ll be sorry. It gave her a smug satisfaction to picture beating Mr. Pappadakis, the come-from-behind victor in a race to the grave.

Ever since they moved into Mr. Pappadakis’s cavernous house, Big Red has sought out tiny spaces. She climbs into the clothes hamper and pulls the lid on behind her. She sits for hours under the sink, eyes closed, listening to the gurgling of the pipes. Some nights she crawls into the neighbor’s dog house and holds Mr. Beagle’s tight, squirmy body until she can feel all of its bones. And sometimes, if she sits long enough, it happens. Beneath the hum of her own blood, beneath the hum of the world itself, she thinks she can hear the faint strains of another song. It’s a red spark of sound, just enough to cast acoustic shadows of the older song that she has forgotten. It sounds like this:

When Big Red opens her eyes, long-jawed shadows have overtaken the shell. Outside, the tide is coming in. The foamy rush of unseen water laps at her ears. Big Red shimmies to the back of the conch and holds her eye up to the fist-sized opening like a telescope. The visible sky is purple and clobbered with stars. Lightning licks the palm fronds. The whole conch hums with the promise of rain.

At first, Big Red is just pretending to be trapped. It isn’t until she tries to get out of the Giant Conch that she realizes she really is stuck. She can belly-crawl back down the spine of the shell, no problemo. But when she tries to pull herself onto the calcite ledge that angles up and out of the siphon, she keeps sliding back down. The opening of the Giant Conch seems to have narrowed, somehow, and Big Red can’t find purchase on the slippery shell walls. She tries to backtrack, but she can’t wedge her pudgy body through the crack in the tip of the shell. Oh God, she thinks, how embarrassing. Please just leave me here to die.

But as the minutes tick by, she starts to feel increasingly uneasy. The fear of being found, of the sisters’ wimpled censure and Rogelio’s fat jokes, melts into a new fear: What if nobody is looking for her at all?

Don’t panic, the grown-up voices in Big Red’s head say sternly. They sound a little bit like Coach Crotty, the phys ed teacher, and a lot like Margarita, the TV mother on Guess Who Loves You More? Stay calm.

But the next thunderclap undoes her. Suddenly, the prospect of spending the night here seems too terrible to bear. Big Red’s body heaves with panic. She bloodies her hands on Cornuta’s horny clefts; she writhes on an invisible hook; she goes salmon-leaping towards the top of the shell, again, and again. And again and again she slumps back, battered and exhausted.

“Help!” Big Red squeals in the empty shell. Hot, oily tears roll down her face. “I’m stuck, I’m stuck, help!”

Nobody is coming, the grown-up voices intone, a tribunal of icicles. Correction: the rain is coming. So you’d better help yourself get out of this mess before it storms.

But then there he is, looking inside the shell with a worried expression. Big Red stops blubbering. Those piercing blue eyes, that gosling-soft hair. The doomed, affable face of the World’s Greatest Sensational Mystery.

“What are you doing in there, kid?” Barnaby barks. “Park’s closed.”

The first raindrop hits the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. The sky is a seething, cobalt blue; it’s going to start coming down any minute. What a nightmare. Barnaby knows that a better man would be feeling sorry for the kid, a roly-poly redhead who is staring up at him. Instead, Barnaby is thinking: I’m going to miss the big game, and possibly the last ferry. The boss is going to find some way to pin this fat kid’s misfortune on me. And I’m not even getting paid overtime.

“Didn’t you see the sign? Cornuta’s out for the count.”

“I just wanted to look around,” she squeaks, “but now I can’t get back out.”

“Well, you got in, didn’t you?” Another raindrop slides down his nose. “Why don’t you give it another try?”

Big Red holds up her bloody palms and shakes her head. And Barnaby finds himself in an awkward sort of hostage situation, negotiating with the prisoner for her own release.

“Listen. Do you hear that?” he says through gritted teeth. “It is going to start raining any minute, kid. And we will have many sodden problems if we miss that ferry. So I need you to give it one more try.”

She puts a hesitant hand on the jagged underlip of the ledge out. She tries to do a pull-up and winces.

“Careful! Can you move your leg? Can you wiggle your toes? You may have sprained something.”

Big Red wiggles all five of her toes inside of her sneaker. She looks up at her Houdini and says nothing.

“Well? If you can’t move them,” Barnaby sighs, “I’ll have to come in and get you myself.”

Big Red withdraws her hand. “I can’t.”

He groans. “This oughta be good.” Barnaby has never worked hard enough to develop the tawny musculature of a career broom pusher. His muscles have long since gone soft and turned to fat.

“Okay, kid, you’ve got to help, too….”

Barnaby finds himself thinking many ungenerous thoughts.

“I can’t get you out of there if you don’t cooperate, you know….”

Thoughts such as: I probably can’t get you out of there at all, you goddamn butterball. He is thinking: winches, pulleys. Goggled men blowtorching the chubby lass out, the boss somehow blaming Barnaby for the lost revenue.

“Jesus, kid, would you just—”

“You’re hurting me!”

“Put your right foot there, and push with your…goddamn it!”

Barnaby looks at his watch. Seven minutes till the ferry leaves.

“Okay. Clearly, this isn’t working. Just hang tight. I am going to go tell the ferry driver to wait for us. And then I’ll call for help….”

Thunder booms through the City and they both jump. Barnaby watches the poor kid bang her head on the chitinous dome of the shell. Her gray eyes are filling with tears.

“I…I’m sorry, sir,” she gasps. “I can’t. Please, please don’t leave me here.”

Barnaby stops in his tracks. Oh, he wishes the kid hadn’t called him sir.

“All right,” he hears himself saying. “Let’s give it one more shot in the dark.”

They seesaw together in a sweaty dance: Barnaby pulls, and Big Red pushes. Big Red pushes, and Barnaby pulls. And in the middle of their pendular wrangling — while Barnaby is pulling, the blue tendons throbbing on his spindly arms, and Big Red is pushing, pigeon-toed on the polished floor — she falls backwards for a second time. And pulls Barnaby in after her. Cornuta reverberates with their strangled cries, and the splintery crunch of bone.

“Are you still angry with me?”

It’s been almost an hour since they heard the last ferry engine gunning in the distance. Night seeps into the City, an implacable blackness. Barnaby’s face is inches from her own. Big Red is acutely aware of every pore on her face, every follicle of hair on her head. Her smile feels huge and strange.

Barnaby doesn’t answer. He is rubbing his leg and staring morosely out the small portal where Cornuta’s spiral opens to the sky. A few fat raindrops plink into the sand. Goosebumps prick up along his arms. He shivers, snaps up his top two shirt buttons. The floor, the walls of the shell have become freezing to the touch.

“How long till your boss comes?”

“I told you, kid. At least twelve hours.” He is holding his curly brown head in his hands. “Jesus. Any guesses as to when your parents are going to sound the alert?”

Big Red tugs at her shoelace. “Hard to say.”

Big Red’s mother is away on business. She is “on call,” and often has to leave at a moment’s notice. This is confusing to Big Red, because her mother is also unemployed.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” her mother sighs. Then she gives her the scary, slack tightrope smile, and Big Red knows not to press.

Mr. Pappadakis is estranged from lucidity. On his bad days, he thinks Big Red is a figment of his imagination. On his good days, he lives around her, in the polite, damning way that he will eat around certain loathsome foods on his plate.

“What about your dad, then?” Barnaby asks. “I mean, your real dad?”

Big Red has never met her biological father. She heard her mother refer to him once, with a dismissive wave of her hand, as “a rainy afternoon at the Bowl-a-Bed.” She’s never even seen a picture. But Big Red hates him just the same. She is learning about genetics, and she envisions her father as a big, bow-legged X. Pumping out the evil chemical that accounts for Big Red’s glandular woes, the orange injustice of her stupid hair.

“Kid? What’s your name anyways?”

“Big…” She bites her lip. “Lillith.”

“Big Lillith?” He smiles. “You look like a Lillith.”

“Really?” Her face mushrooms out of the darkness with a terrible hopefulness. “I do?”

Lillith is the name of her old self, the one she left behind when they moved to the island. On the Mainland, her nickname used to be Lil. That was before her body swelled into something loafy and unrecognizable. Now the kids at her new school have rechristened her: BIG RED — BIG RED!

They chaw imaginary wads of gum like truckers when they say it. They chaw it so often that even she has started to think of herself this way, “Big Red,” in the cheery singsong of her tormenters.

Sometimes Big Red can hear the ghost of Lillith haunting this new body. At night, Lillith goes wailing down the corridors of Big Red’s limbs. She swings angrily in the belfry of her hips, the nave of her breasts. “Growing pains.” Her mother shrugs. Hearing her real name spoken aloud, Big Red sheds her awkwardness like a mantle.

“You know,” she grins, “who you look like?”

Barnaby looks at her blearily and shakes his head.

“Harry Houdini.”

“Houdini, huh?” He grins in spite of himself. “That’s a first. I guess you could call me a magician. My name’s Barnaby. I’m the janitor. I make the trash disappear.” His laugh echoes hollowly in the dark conch. “It’s a limited bag of tricks, kid. I’m no great escape artist, clearly. I couldn’t crack us out of this shell.”

“Houdini is my favorite,” she says shyly.

He snorts. “Shouldn’t you have a crush on one of those boy bands? Gregorian Chowder, or whatever their name is?”

Big Red makes a face. “Everybody will come to their senses and stop liking them in three months, tops. Houdini is perennial.”

For a ten-year-old girl, Big Red has a rich fantasy life. Pirates tie her to their tattooed shoulders and stroke her parrot feathers. Impish, asexual jockeys named Nate or Stan nudge their heels into her flanks with a stirrupy gentleness. Zookeepers put her in cages filled with clean, soft straw. They ask simple things of her — Honk this rubber ball with your nose! Eat a banana! — and applaud softly when she succeeds. “Even better than the ocelot!”

But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him. In the Houdini fantasy, she is curled inside an iron nautilus that sinks slowly to the dark sea floor, sending up silvery columns of bubbles. She has shackled dreams in blue meadows of sea grass, an inert argonaut. The nautilus is nothing like this porous, polluted shell. It is a seamless wedge of stone, impregnable. The keyhole subsumed back into the metal, and no suggestion of a lock.

“Do you think that’s normal?” Big Red asks Barnaby. “To daydream about that stuff?”

“Sure.” Barnaby shrugs. When he was her age, he fantasized about robots and cartoon mermaids.

Outside the shell, Barnaby can just make out a single star, hung low in the violet sky. Now that he has lost all feeling in his left leg, things are much more pleasant. The pink island moon bounces off the whorled roofs of the City. Intermittent moonlight makes the spiraled domes appear to be moving, somehow, spinning to the beat of an off-kilter carousel. The whole skyline ripples in jolly waves, as if the invisible world is casting material shadows.

Raffy was wrong, though, Barnaby thinks; there are no ghosts in the City of Shells. It’s been dark for hours, and the only thing that’s materialized so far is a cloud of mosquitoes. The storm has held off for longer than Barnaby dared to hope. Even so, he can’t take much more of this. His leg is bent under him at a wrong-feeling angle, and it’s colder than a meat locker inside Cornuta. He wonders if his injury qualifies him for workman’s comp. Surely we’ll hear the ferry motoring up at any moment, Barnaby thinks. Surely somebody is out looking for us.

Big Red, however, seems downright jubilant. She is squidged up under his right elbow, staring up at him with a moony grin. He smiles back at her uneasily.

“Are you hungry?” Barnaby fishes around in his pocket. “Here.” He produces five lint-furred peppermints and a silver flask. “It’ll take the edge off.”

Big Red takes a sip and blanches.

“Well, hand it over if you’re not going to finish it.”

She stares up at him and takes a long swig.

Barnaby takes the bottle back and downs a few gulps himself. He hasn’t spent any real amount of time inside the shells. It’s depressing. He can see all the spots he’s missed. The hose reaches only so far, after all, and Barnaby isn’t known for his janitorial scruples. The dark stains are like Rorschach tests, each one diagnosing his professional shortcomings. Even by Cornuta’s muted glow, Barnaby can see the tarry footprints where his boots slipped, a monument to his most recent failure.

“Geez,” he coughs. “Pretty filthy down here.” He doesn’t tell the child that he, Barnaby, is the reason that these ancient shells resemble waste receptacles. Sponging baby oil and bleach onto Giant Conchs all day — this is not his vocation. When Barnaby was a boy, about Big Red’s age, he wanted to be a real forest ranger. He wanted to be the steward of eternal landscapes, gashed rock and petrified woods. He would protect the cud-chewing noblesse of the buffalo; he would wear a badge and a hat. Now here he is, scraping expletives off Possicle for minimum wage. One thing never led to another. Mr. Uribe would have fired him long ago, if he hadn’t made himself indispensable by hiding all the cleaning supplies.

Barnaby tries not to think about this too much. He looks at Big Red, her eyes welling with some dopey-kid sentiment, and he gets a sudden image of a jack-in-the-box with its crank broken off. A child’s box with no handle. That’s how Barnaby feels when he thinks about his own kid ambitions. This cold, coiled music in the pit of his stomach and no hope of release.

“Yup. Pre-tty filthy…”

Keyhole light spills through the minuscule cracks in the conch. The kid is moon-spattered and covered with dust. She just sits there, staring and staring at him.

“Say, you know what we’re sitting in, kid?” Barnaby does his nasally tour guide impression. “A megalithic exoskeleton. Why, we can only conjecture about what used to live here—” He breaks off abruptly. Hearing his own voice echo in the dark, he has accidentally terrified himself. All of a sudden, the shiny penumbral walls seem oddly malleable.

“Say, kid?” Barnaby coughs. “You haven’t, uh, heard any strange noises out here, have you?”

Her ears turn bright pink. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” he says with a whistling nonchalance. “My, er, colleague says he hears funny noises sometimes. Coming from inside the shell.”

“Oh.” Big Red says flatly. “That.”

“Oh, what?”

“That’s just Laramie.” She scrunches up her nose. “You know. Doing it.”

“Laramie Uribe? Doing…it?” Now Barnaby blushes, too. He is going to give Raffy some major shit about this in the morning. Leave it to Raffy to mistake that terrestrial yowling for a ghost song. Unless Raffy was just messing with him all along — Raffy has a bad reputation around the City for pranks that are more cruel than funny. And Laramie! She can’t be older than twelve. He almost preferred the ghost explanation.

“So the boss’s kid sneaks into the conchs.” He shakes his head. “What about you? What’s your story? Were you going to meet a boyfriend, too?” Barnaby elbows her in the side, perhaps a little harder than is strictly necessary. “Playing hide-and-seek? Pretending to be a sea slug?”

Big Red sniffles once. Her eyes get that melty watercolor glaze. Jesus, Barnaby thinks. Here come the waterworks. He pats her shoulder uncomfortably. “There, there.” She nuzzles into his shoulder, tentatively at first, and then with a purring abandon. “There, there.” He watches a single louse walking a white path through her frizzy red thickets of hair. He reaches over, tender as he can manage, and flicks it off her. And out of nowhere, Barnaby feels a rush of love for his pudgy shell mate. He’s full of wild fantasies: I’ll adopt her, I’ll raise her as my sister-daughter. We’ll go to magic shows on the Mainland. It’s unexpected, and deeply reassuring, this feeling. I’m a good person, Barnaby thinks wonderingly, stroking her hair. I’m an okay person.

“Don’t worry, kid.” He burps, patting her damp back. A drop of water plashes onto the grimy shell floor. “You’re safe.”

Big Red smiles like she believes him. She doesn’t know how to answer the man’s question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there’s something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year. Big Red curls up in a cold recess of the conch. That’s the way to do it, the grown-up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.

Outside, the wind has died down; the water is tinged with a firefly light. In the illusory calm that precedes the storm, everything has quieted. Blue moths make rococo loops in the watery glow of the City. The moon glints like a clock face with no hands. A quick, ticklish thrill monkeys up Big Red’s spine. Something’s going to happen, Big Red thinks, heart pounding. It feels like an invisible hand has turned up the volume inside the Giant Conch. She hears the humming with her bones. If Big Red closes her eyes and really listens, she can hear a boxed-in roar beneath the ocean. The shell air crackles. The grown-up voices inside Big Red have vanished. Please God, let something happen, she prays. She stares at the black, gnawed-on nails of Barnaby’s hand. She isn’t even sure what to hope for. Something.

Big Red has felt like this only once before. It was her first evening in the new house with Mr. Pappadakis. Mr. Pappadakis was watching TV, and she’d skirted his chair on her way to the kitchen. Without warning, he did a pincerlike crab-grab and pulled her onto his lap. Big Red was too surprised to resist. His liver-spotted hands went limp on her thighs. That had been the worst part of it, his palsied, noncommittal grip. And Big Red just sat there awkwardly, staring straight ahead, all the way through two commercial breaks. Who Loves You More? was on the TV, and she remembers laughing crazily at a joke that wasn’t even very funny. Very slowly, Mr. Pappadakis craned his neck to look at her. He stared at her in a blank, idle way. Then he pushed her away, his lips curling with faint disgust. It was identical to the expression that he wore when he looked inside the fridge for a long moment, sniffed at something sour, and then shut the door.

For the next few weeks, Big Red walked around full of wonderment and confusion. A damp furry rage like a rag in her mouth. She took to parading by Mr. Pappadakis’s recliner, her watermelon skorts hiked high, half daring him to grab at her again.

That unshucked, unsafe feeling. It was with her all the time, now.

“Um, kid?” Barnaby asks. “Everything okay? Do you have allergies, or something?” There is something wrong with her face, he thinks. Her eyes are shut, her cheeks are swollen, she’s pursing out her tiny lips. She looks like a rhesus monkey miming human passion. And then suddenly she comes hurtling towards him in the dark. She smells like a white mix of things, soap and clean hair and grass and apples, so much like a kid that it makes his heart lurch. Her baby teeth click against Barnaby’s crowns, a porcelain, tea-party clink.

“Kid?” he says, pushing her off him. “Lillith? What did you do that for?” Outside, the City reverberates with a low growl of thunder. The wind picks up. Their labored breathing echoes up the walls.

Barnaby never gets an answer. Big Red goes sliding away from him, cringing like a kicked dog. The wind swells into an apocalyptic howl, as if the world can’t keep its secrets any longer. Some celestial artery opens up, and rain bursts from the sky. The whole conch rings like a tuning fork. And then the sound that Barnaby had forgotten he was waiting for trumpets in the dark.

The Giant Conchs start to rumble in tandem. Big Red has heard her mother say, “That struck a chord with me” and it is one of the many phrases that she only thought she understood. Because now her bones really do ache and snap as if her body is a tendon-strung instrument. Her spinal column feels like a xylophone, each vertebra trembling in a mute vibrato. Cornuta quivers with columns of air. Big Red discovers that if she slides forward or backwards, she can alter the pitch of the long canal, using her body like a fist in a brass instrument. All of the Giant Conchs blast the same low note. It throbs through the City of Shells like an ancient alarum, bouncing around the circular monoliths. The music moves in a logarithmic spiral, spooling around Cornuta. And below it, Big Red can hear the other song. Ghostly tones, a minor key that goes silking through the membrane of her skin. It sounds like seagulls and cymbals and rainfall flashing into dark water. It comes whorling out from deep within the shell, and it would be terrifying if it wasn’t so familiar.

“Do you hear that?” Big Red yells over the din, her eyes round and horsey white. Barnaby is shouting something and waving his hands, and Big Red thinks of Houdini again, conducting a magical escape. The sound is getting louder all the time. Cornuta throbs like the fisted pumping of a heart, amplified to unbearable volumes. Barnaby holds his skull as if it is about to split apart.

“C’mon, kid,” he hollers. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Already, the floor of the shell is filling with cold water. Bits of sand and ashes float up to the surface. Barnaby starts to drag his busted leg through the rising tide of rain.

“Kid? What are you doing? Get back here!”

Big Red ignores the man’s cries. She doesn’t try to worm her way out of the shell, but deeper, until the pain in her head pulses like song. She pushes her soft body as far back into the shell as it will go. Back, back, through a curtain of stinging salt water. She can hear the man clambering after her. Wind and rain come piping through the cracks, peeling her lips away from her face, lifting her wet hair. She reaches blindly along Cornuta’s rain-slicked sides, searching for the origins of the music. Her knuckles rap up against the seahorse coil of Cornuta’s apex. But Big Red finds only angled walls and blistered pearls, the small bumps where the shell plates have puckered and fused together, like vestigial knobs to vanished doors.