The Night Country

7

I blinked.

I closed my eyes and light shifted over my lids, moonlight and lamplight and the delineated scatter of stars fading out as the sun dragged itself over the skyline. Streetlights buzzing, blinking out, headlights white and the yellow flicker of the subway. I knew something, wanted to hold on to something, but it was like clinging to a flashlight’s beam. Another blink, and it was gone.

I opened my eyes on early morning coming through my bedroom window. A zip line of nightmare slid through me, retreating to its hidden place. For a moment, my head was an empty room. Then the night rushed in.

Drinking at Robin’s. Walking to Red Hook. Slithering in through the brother’s window. The claustrophobic apartment, the sweet awful rip of his lip. His scorn turning to fear, and Sophia looking at me. Alice. Your eyes.

There was a weight bearing down on me, making it hard to breathe, and I thought it was panic till my fingers followed the feeling up, to my neck.

Something was there, wound around my throat, hard and warm and too tight to see. I kicked free of the sheets, tumbled out of bed and ran down the hall. The bathroom mirror reflected the cold hollows of my eyes. The faded eyeliner vines.

And a necklace of fat red rubies circling my throat.

I’d bitten the man from my tale. I thought I’d done worse than that, but there was a void in my memories, its borders tidy as an egg’s. His blood made rusty swirls around my lips. It was a slaughterhouse flavor on my tongue. And where the worst of the blood had been, where it ran down my chin and settled in a brutal collar, lay this circle of stones.

They gripped my neck like a row of ticks. I scratched, frantic, feeling my way to the back. There was a hook under my hair; I unclasped it. The necklace slipped off, coiling over my hands, rubbing red on my skin. I flung it into the sink and turned the water on. The stones bled and ran under its stream, melting away like paste, till there was nothing left of it but the pattern of its claws and catches imprinted in my skin.

I thought it was a cry, bubbling up in me, but it was laughter. A low sound, boiled thick as campfire coffee.

This was magic, and it wasn’t benign. It was a world I wanted to forget and a night I couldn’t remember, and a dark gift left to strangle me. The Hinterland was tugging at me, blowing its breath in my face, wrapping its fingers around my throat. My laugh cut off clean.

Be sure, Sophia had told me.

I said I didn’t want to see any lambs. Daphne.

“What did you do?” I asked the girl in the mirror.

She looked back at me. She showed her bloody teeth.

I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the shower. The water started out tepid and shifted by degrees to just this side of scalding. When my skin, at least, was clean, I dried off with one of the scratchy towels Ella stole from the pool at the Y, hard decisive strokes that burned. The vines were washed away. The blood, the liquorish sweat, the night.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. I combed my hair back, put on ChapStick. No eyeliner, my face scrubbed. Fresh clothes, old sneakers, my stomach a mess but I ate toast and jam anyway, washing each bite down with a flood of cold tea.

No missed calls from Sophia. I pulled up the internet and considered it for a moment. A quick news search: red hook.

I put the phone away. My ChapStick had come off on my toast. I went to the bathroom to put on more, staring at my soft eyes, the eyes of a damsel, circling the stick round and round till my lips were waxy. Then I jerked away sharp from the mirror because—

No because. No need to think too hard. If you poke around too long in the dark, you’ve only got yourself to blame for what you find. I had a feeling in my chest, a persistent asthmatic ache I couldn’t quite rub away. A walk would help. It was early yet, so early Ella was still sleeping. I didn’t have to be at work for hours.

I checked my phone again. No texts. I looked toward Ella’s closed door. Typed and deleted, typed and deleted.

Out getting coffee, I said finally. Have a good day.

The sidewalk ran with morning commuters holding cups and phones and briefcases, flowing around me like water breaking itself on a rock. A terrier recoiled from my feet, growling through its teeth. Its owner looked up to apologize, then said nothing, his jaw tightening as he sped away.

I walked for a while without really seeing where I was going. Some uneasy frequency hummed off my skin. Men playing dominoes under awnings looked up warily as I approached, an old woman pushing a shopping cart veered into the gutter to avoid me. When sirens shrilled a block away, my hands went sweaty, my mouth dry.

Two police cars hurtled around the corner, passed me.

When they were gone I could breathe again.

The ache in my chest was climbing, it was a weight in my throat. When I realized I would throw up if I kept walking I dropped onto a stoop and texted Sophia. My fingertips trembled over the screen.

What happened last night?

Her reply came almost instantly.

Wait you don’t remember

I waited for a follow-up. Waited, waited, unshed tears making rainbows over my sight.

Nothing to worry about, she said finally. Really. Talk later

The sounds of the city crashed in on me. Birdsong and morning traffic and children screaming for the sheer joy of having lungs. I wanted to scream, too. For about half a minute all was bright, and the sun on my face felt like a benediction. Then the wicked math came back.

Three murders. Two hands. One foot.

Under the industrious light of seven a.m. I felt suddenly exposed. I imagined how I must look from behind: the flapper tangle of my grown-out hair, my sparrow-weight bones, everything about me crushable or ripe to be sliced. I was awash in adrenaline and relief and a jittery fear, and I didn’t want to go home. But I was too edgy to stay out here. I figured there was one place I could hide.

Months ago, when we first moved back to New York, I made a pilgrimage to the coffee shop where I’d worked before leaving town. It was gone, a children’s shoe store sprung up in its wake. More remnants of my old life absorbed into the whirlpool of the city. For a while I’d worked at a co-op, but I wasn’t really the cooperative kind.

I stumbled into my new job by chance, or luck, or fate. On a wandering evening last winter, I hid out from a snowstorm in a bookshop on Sullivan Street, narrow as a corridor and lit the color of coffee milk by old bulbs. The guy behind the counter had a chin-strap beard and little wire-rims, and was yelling into an ancient flip phone.

I’d pretended to look at books as I listened to him dress down some guy named Alan.

“It’s not about their quality, Alan,” he kept saying. “It’s about coming through with what you promised.”

I pulled an old hardback off the shelf, tea-brown pages and a cover illustration the colors of a heraldic flag. Creatures of the Earth and Air: A Compendium. I flipped gently through it as the man behind the counter became sarcastic.

“God forbid you waste your time coming to me,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a full-time job burning through your trust fund.”

I was trying not to laugh when the book I held fell open to a place where something was stuck between its pages.

My breath caught. I didn’t take lightly things found in the pages of a book. But this was just a playing card. A jack of spades, its back the classic red Maiden design. I flipped it over and back, not noticing the bookseller had hung up till he was standing next to me.

“Found that in a book?” he asked, taking the card.

“This one.” I held up Creatures.

“Huh.” He bent over the playing card, then made a triumphant sound. “There. Look at that.”

I looked close. The Maiden held up her flowers, and fork-tailed women chilled in the card’s four corners.

“Her.” He pointed at the mermaid in the upper left. Where the others’ hands reached toward flowers, hers extended toward a spinning wheel. Stylized, but unmistakable. You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking.

“What does it mean?”

He looked gratified by my curiosity. “It means it’s from a marked deck.”

“Like, marked by a gambler?”

“Or a magician. It’s an odd marking, though, doesn’t really correspond to the suit or number. I tell you, I find the strangest things in books.”

I’d followed him to the front of the shop, where he brought a cigar box out from under the counter and slipped the card inside. “Like what? What else have you found in a book?”

“Well…” He looked around, like the walls might have ears, and reopened the cigar box, faced toward him so I couldn’t see its contents. “Things like this.”

He showed me a pressed blue flower as big as my fist, its stamens flattened in all directions like a fireworks spray. A cookie fortune that read, simply, “Woe betide you.” A neatly clipped page of personal ads dated September 1, 1970, from a paper called the East Village Chronicler.

“Funny stuff, right?”

It was. I liked it, the thought that you could find harmless, interesting things tucked inside books. A reminder that the world contained mysteries that didn’t have to write over the entire narrative of your life.

“Once I found a Polaroid in an old book,” I said, watching his face for a reaction. “A collection of fairy tales. The weird thing was, it was a Polaroid of me.”

“Holy crap,” he said, his eyes bright with respect. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be lying. I wasn’t, but I could’ve been.

“Are you guys hiring?” I asked him.

He’d run a palm over his beard, in a way that made it clear he was proud of it. “We might be. If you like odd hours, I think we are.”

That’s how I started working at a cramped used and antiquarian bookstore, where the odd hours warning was for real. Beard guy’s name was Edgar, he owned the place, and he never sent my schedule more than a week in advance. My shifts ranged from two hours to ten, and sometimes when I got there the shop was closed without warning. It was the buyers who bought rare books by mail that kept the lights on, not the random college kids popping in to browse and walking away with a five-dollar used copy of Howl.

The oppressive heat had picked back up after yesterday’s rainstorm, and I was sweating through my T-shirt by the time I hit the shop. It wouldn’t open for a couple of hours yet, but luckily Edgar was a terrible judge of character: I had keys.

My heart settled as I walked in, breathing coffee and paper and sunburnt dust. Like all good bookshops, Edgar’s was a pocket universe, where time moved slow as clouds. Mainly I read on the clock, or listened to him enumerate his various grievances with the world, or drank coffee in the surreal quiet till my fingers started to quake.

Edgar and I had a running contest going since the day I’d first come in: whoever found the weirdest thing in a used book wins. Since discovering the marked card that first day, I’d found an extremely formal typed breakup letter, a photo-booth strip featuring a man posing with a pineapple, and a business card for a “Noncorporeal Matchmaker” based out of South Florida (and called her; the number was out of service). Edgar was currently ahead, with the flattened toupee he’d found in a copy of Pamela.

Today was the day I would win our contest for good, though Edgar would never know it.

I circled the store when I got in, checking the spaces between shelves, my head full of rubies and blood. I plugged my phone into the bookshop speaker and listened to Pink Moon on repeat, prodding at the missing memories of the night before like a rotten tooth. When Edgar opened the front door a couple of hours later, he made it a few steps into the shop before he saw me, and screamed.

“What is wrong with you?” he shouted, ripping out his earbuds. “Do you live here now?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. God bless Edgar, he had no follow-up questions.

By ten a.m. we were sharing a bag of Swedish licorice in companionable silence, and I was feeling halfway normal. By eleven the bookstore was busyish, my nerves winding tighter with every jingle of the bell. It didn’t feel right, that one city, one life, could hold all these things: A rush of shoppers carrying clever tote bags. A night in Red Hook colored by liquor and blood. And three dead ex-Stories, pieces of them spirited away. Finally, during a lull, I sidled to the front and turned the sign to CLOSED, flipping the lock shut.

Just for an hour, I reasoned. Then I’d go buy Edgar a compensatory coffee. He was too lost in his book to notice anyway.

For some reason the carpet was squishiest between English Literature and World Mythologies, so I sat there and pulled down Persuasion. I’d been reading it on shifts for the past week, and sank back into it now like cool water, letting my fevered brain trapdoor into Austen’s amiable world. I started out distracted, but soon I was reading headlong because I was getting to the sexy part, where Captain Wentworth writes Anne the letter.

I can listen no longer in silence, it began. I’d read it a hundred times, sometimes out loud to Ella on the road. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach.

I sped through the pages toward the letter. Anne had her conversation with Harville, Wentworth stood stricken at the other end of the room. He scribbled something on paper, rushed from the room, then returned to press the letter into her hand. I swallowed my last half inch of coffee, gritty with undissolved sugar, as Anne opened it and began to read.

I am lost and stupid and doing this all wrong, it began. Maybe you’ll never read this.

I sat straight. Reread the words, not Austen’s. They stayed the same, in bleary black text on a page that smelled like paste and old houses.

I am lost and stupid and doing this all wrong. Maybe you’ll never read this. If it reaches you, the magic worked. And if the magic works, that must mean we’ll meet again. I think we’ll meet again. I think we’re meant to. I don’t know what I think anymore.

Have you forgiven me, for not coming back? Do you think of me out here, banging around the stars? Sometimes the image of you hits me so hard and sudden I believe the only explanation is you’re thinking of me at that exact moment, too. But I might be kidding myself. Maybe you’ll never read this. Or maybe when you do, you won’t let yourself believe in impossible things.

But I don’t think so, because you are one of those impossible things. When you left, I was lost. But I think I’m finding my way back now. Will we meet again? Some days I think yes, others, no. You’ll never read this, will you? I’ve said it three times now, it must be true. I don’t know how to end this. How do I end this? Maybe I just stop