The Night Country

27

“Pick up your goddamn phone, pick up pick up pick up.”

Sophia did not pick up her goddamn phone. And the ghost hadn’t come back. Not when I’d yelled for her, not when I’d recited “The Raven.” I thought about running out for whiskey, but I didn’t want to waste the time.

Instead, I walked the winding hallway and let myself back into room 549. I’d shower again first, then head to Sophia’s place. I stank, like curdling milk and burnt carnations and the solemn breath of the dead, and my ears rang with the ghost bride’s prophecies. Ghost within, ghost without. Tell her she won’t have to wait too long. I threw the chain and security locks before stripping down and stepping into the shower.

The water took ages to get hot. I looked at it running around my feet and saw

Genevieve in the bathtub, blue and white

I closed my eyes. Counted to ten, twenty, thirty. Imagined Ella’s hands in my hair. Soaped away the outward traces of the night. But when I left the bathroom, I could still smell something awful, like the scent had crawled into my nose and roosted there. Or like it had been in the room all along, covered up by everything I’d just showered away.

I took a step forward, and stopped.

There was someone in the room. In the bed.

“Soph?”

No reply. I watched the long lump under the bedclothes, waiting for them to sit up and reveal themselves. The covers were over their head, but there was something showing on the pillow, the unlikely color of cotton candy.

Hair. Pink hair. I sagged against the wall, relief and confusion striping through me. It was the woman from the front desk.

“Hey. Vega. Wake up.”

No response.

Gingerly I walked toward the bed, wondering if she was messing with me. “Vega. Hi, good morning. Night. Whatever.” I poked where I thought her shoulder might be. “Excuse me. I’ve had a very shit night, and I need my bed back.”

Nothing. My body was trying to tell me something, pumping a queasy poison into my stomach and my limbs, telling me no good would come of staying in this room, but I didn’t listen. Instead I pulled the blanket back, and back, peeling it away from the figure on the bed.

First I saw the full fall of her flossy hair, then her startled, mottled face. Ice crystals gathered under her skin, bruises raised like the ghosts of old traumas. Her mouth hung open and there was so much

Blood. A broad black road of it. Maybe there’d be even more if she hadn’t been frozen like a butchered animal before she was cut. Before she was plundered. The blood came from her mouth, from the root of her stolen tongue.

If I screamed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound in my head.

Bare feet and a towel, running down the carpeted hall. The elevator or the stairwell, each felt equally perilous; I chose the elevator. Four floors up and down the hall to Daphne’s room.

Her caps were off, and her lipstick. The fine needles of her teeth flashed behind her pale mouth.

“Another?”

I nodded, wordless.

In my room she turned on every light, pulled the blanket over the dead, opened the window. Took a bottle from her robe pocket and put it into my hand while she made a phone call. I drank it down. Much later, when my head was clear enough to think, I figured it must’ve been something more than alcohol, something she got from Robin, I’d bet, because from that point on I felt okay. I felt detached, like I was watching a movie. The liquor turned up all the lights in my head and took the fearsomeness from the shadows. The room filled with people whose faces I couldn’t keep straight, till I realized they were three people with the same face: the creepy milk-pale brothers who lived with Sophia.

They’ll take care of it, Daphne told me, her words pressing funny on my ears.

It was the body. It was a woman who was alive a few hours ago, till she made the mistake of talking to me.

More activity, lights turned higher—no, it was the sun coming up. Then the room was empty and my bed was stripped, and when I looked at my face in the mirror the imprint of Daphne’s lips lay over my temple, like she’d tried to kiss the worst of my thoughts away.

Her words before she kissed me came trickling through, hours after she’d spoken them. They’ll think it was you. Then the kiss, cold and glittering, as the room turned gray. Watch yourself carefully now, they all think it’s you.

I let myself into Sophia’s building, twitching with nerves and sleeplessness. Banged on the apartment door till Jenny opened it, then immediately slammed it with a shriek.

“Go away, murderer!”

“Jenny, goddammit, I didn’t do anything! Get Sophia!”

“What, so you can murder her? No way!”

I rested my head against the door and changed tactics. “You really think I can’t kill you through a door? I’m fucking dying to. Get her.”

A few seconds of silence before she spoke. “She’s not here. And that’s not my fault, so you just leave me alone!”

I believed her. Jenny would sell her own mother up the river for a peppermint stick.

Now I was walking down Seventh Avenue, tracing my night, looking for pockets of lost time. I reviewed my path at the wake, ran my nails over the sealed black box that held my memories of the night I broke into the apartment in Red Hook. I hadn’t seen my attacker on the subway, but I’d heard them. I couldn’t have been fighting myself in the dark.

Unless I was losing more than just time. Unless some crucial part of me had come undone.

I was heading back to the bookstore, planning to sleep behind the desk till Edgar got in. The hotel was two kinds of haunted for me now, and whoever killed Vega had no trouble getting into my room.

I saw her right away when I turned onto Sullivan Street. Half a block down, back against the bookstore’s front window. When she spotted me she stood up straight and rushed forward, her arms half open like she didn’t know if she wanted to hug me or hit me.

“So you are alive. You unbelievable, irresponsible, thoughtless asshole.”

I was already crying. Just the sight of her face had done it.

“Mom,” I said, and ran into her arms.

I didn’t know till that morning that some bars stayed open twenty-four hours.

I don’t think either of us could’ve handled the grind and chatter of a coffee shop, and I didn’t want to talk on the street. So we found a no-name place with a lit Amstel sign in the window and an unlocked door. Inside, we breathed the sour overlay of decades of spilled beer and watched a bartender cutting limes down at the far end of the gouged-to-shit bar. The only other patron was slumped next to the sleeping jukebox, one hand around a bottle.

“Tell me,” she said.

And I did. I was exhausted, clinging to reason. I wanted someone to hold all the unwieldy, sharp-edged pieces of my slipshod investigation, to tell me what they meant or just to take the weight for a while. I wanted someone to tell me I was good, way down at the very bottom where it counts, and not capable of the things some of them thought I’d done.

I told her about the meeting in the psychic’s shop on graduation day, what I’d drunk at Robin’s. Red Hook, the necklace of blood. I told her about the murders. The shortest version, no details. It was harder to save her when I got to the stalled subway car. She gripped the table’s edge and glared at me, gesturing fiercely for me to continue when I faltered.

The knife, the rhyme; the Hinterland, the ice.

The hardest thing was telling her I’d gone to Daphne when I was hurt, instead of coming home. Then I had to tell her about the wake, Genevieve’s body and the blood on my knees, and that was even harder. I told her just about everything but that Finch was sending me letters. For now, those were just for me.

I thought she’d look wrung out when I was done. Broken. Instead she looked hard, her eyes flinty and her mouth pressed thin.

“It’s not me. I would never—I don’t understand how it’s happening, but it’s not me.”

“Of course it’s not,” she said, her voice so scornful and certain I breathed deeply for the first time in days.

“There’s one more thing.” My stomach turned; it was, quite possibly, the ugliest thing. “The person—the murderer—whoever’s doing this. They’re taking something from each body. They’re taking a part.”

Ella was holding her lime and tonic loosely, rolling it from hand to hand. Now her hands went still.

“What parts?”

Her voice was taut.

“Um. Feet. Hands. And Vega … Vega’s tongue.”

“Oh,” she said in an altered tone.

“What? Does that mean something to you? What does it mean?”

She lifted a hand, signaled to the bartender. Reluctantly he sloped over, tossing a dirty towel over his shoulder.

“Can I get a glass of whiskey, neat?”

“We don’t serve till eight.” He looked pointedly at the clock hanging over the bar, a giveaway from some prescription drug company. “It’s seven forty-five.”

Ella pulled out her wallet and laid two twenties on the bar. “How about you give me the whiskey now, and you take my money at eight?”

He shrugged, poured a long few fingers of Wild Turkey into a Solo cup because it was that kind of place, and took the money.

She picked up the cup and drank half of it down, not even a wince. Then she placed it gently back on the bar.

“Do you want to hear a story?”

In my family, that was a loaded question. I wasn’t so sure I did.

“There’s a tale I almost forgot I knew. Althea told it to me once, a long time ago. Did I ever tell you—” She stopped, shaking her head. “Of course I didn’t. I never told you shit about my mother. I still don’t, even now.”

“It’s okay. It’s hard for you, I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You never will. It’s nineteen years’ worth of complicated, and we’re not getting into it now. I grew up in the Hazel Wood, remember. I grew up in that cracked-up, fucked-up, broken place. Between two worlds. Not of one, not of the other.

“You can’t imagine what it was like, living there with her getting sicker and sicker. And those creatures crawling in from the woods, and me sneaking out, half convinced I was one of them. But that’s—” She took another swallow. “That’s a story for another day.”

It wasn’t. We both knew she’d never tell me the entirety of that tale.

“It wasn’t easy being Althea’s kid, even before we moved to the Hazel Wood. But one thing I’ll say for her, she could spin a hell of a bedtime story. Stick with you for months. Give you nightmares for years.

“Althea and the Spinner, they were … not friends. Old adversaries, at best. They used to meet for tea sometimes, at the edge of the Halfway Wood.” She smiled at the look on my face. “Didn’t expect that? Well, boredom makes strange bedfellows. This was after my stepdad died, long after people stopped coming to stay. Althea would get all dressed up for it, like she was Norma Desmond or something. Even when I was little it was hard to watch. And she’d come home and tell me all the things they’d talked about, like it was this normal social call. I guess for her it was. I guess it was the only kind of social she got. The Hinterland treated me like a mascot, like a little changeling kid—untouchable. Althea, though, they messed with. Or worse than that, ignored. My god, you cannot fathom the depth of her loneliness.

“Okay,” she said, putting down her cup. “Okay. So there was one day when Althea came home from one of her tea parties and told me a story. She told me lots of stories, enough to make you sick on, but this one I remember. Because she told me—and she said this like it was an honor that she knew it, because even if she resented the Spinner she drank her Kool-Aid, too—she said it was the very first tale the Spinner had ever told.

“This story is called ‘The Night Country.’ And it is not a fairy tale.”