Bewere the Night (54 page)

“Are you one of ’em?” Ace asked. “One of those pest-people?”

“No!” the man shouted. “And they’re not either! So you just leave us alone!”

“You should turn them in to Pest Control,” said Hazel, reciting what she had heard at an assembly. “Vermin spread disease and consume resources, even the ones that don’t start off as people.”

The man scowled. “You two can go to hell, and take this damn city with you!”

Upstairs, Hazel hesitated before re-entering the apartment. Her back was still sore. She was afraid that she had been cast out of her father’s fortress. Paige and Charlie were shrieking at each other inside—it was almost like old times. “Did you see its teeth? What did she tell you about the cat, Charlie? Is that what she said it would look like?” “Look, you better get a hold of yourself before the kids get back . . . ” “Or you’re gonna
what
? You’re gonna what?”

Ace fearlessly opened the door and grabbed Hazel’s hand. He said “come on” and Hazel went in, even though she saw this castle sinking.

In music class, a boy named Abel Farrow shoved Ace so hard that he cut his lip open against a plastic desk. Abel had chosen Ace as a victim back in September—skinny, bug-eyed Ace, out of all the fourth-graders at Independence Elementary. The substitute didn’t know what to do—their regular music teacher, whom no one liked, had not been to school all week. Rumors were running rampant that she had been turned into some kind of pest, probably one of the slick black crows that circled the nearby cathedral.

When Hazel saw his bruised mouth, she tried to teach him tricks to stay invisible. But Ace didn’t want to be invisible. He wanted payback. “Paige knows where to go,” he said.

They got the chance to ask her when their father went out for “supplies”—public health officials were going on about the need for heightened pest control in case of an infestation—and told Paige to put his children to bed.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Paige, leaning against their bookshelf.

“Because I want to curse a kid at school,” said Ace.

Paige tipped her head back against the wall, eyes on the smoke detector. “Can I tell you a story first, about the curse?” They shrugged, so she went on. “My boss, Mr. Robson, was running a race—not a
race
race, but a popularity race, do they have those yet at your age?—against a man named Mr. Malachi. He asked me to help. So I went to the Rattle and I said to the sorceress, ‘Please turn Mr. Malachi into a rat.’ But just before the sorceress started working her magic bone, she said to me . . . ” Paige lifted her hands as if to conduct a chamber choir. “‘Magic comes at a price! I hope you’re ready to pay it!’ I didn’t want to believe her. I thought she was just trying to scare me, the way witches do.”

They asked what happened next, but Paige seemed distracted. She was running her finger over her little white teeth. “Even little pests can bite,” she mumbled.

“Did Mr. Malachi turn into a rat?”

“Oh, yes,” said Paige, and then abruptly raised her voice. “Has your daddy ever told you where we met?” No, he hadn’t. He just said,
I’d like you to meet someone
, and
I want you to be nice to her
. And then there she was at the zoo, the dead woman in the nice dress—but Hazel didn’t mention that. “He was next to me in line to see the sorceress. She warned us both.”

“You’re lying!” Ace shouted. “My Dad wouldn’t curse anybody!”

Paige turned her glacial smile upon him. “You can hope so, sweetie. You know if you wish for something hard enough, you can start to believe it—until you find something else that proves you wrong, of course. Just like you can hope that ghosts aren’t real until you meet one under your sheets.”

Ace looked at the little blanketed hills—his feet—at the end of his bed.

“Who did Dad curse?” Hazel whispered.

Before Paige could answer, something small darted across the floor of the apartment above theirs. Paige jumped away from the bookshelf and grabbed at her scarf. She was ashen. The children gave her funny looks. “I’m scared of rats,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“A rat ate out the neck of Mr. Robson’s child. They follow me now, the rats do.” She looked from Ace to Hazel. “I shouldn’t have brought them here. You have your own vermin to deal with, and anyway . . . yours wouldn’t like me being here.”

“You’re scaring Ace,” Hazel said. Indeed, Ace’s thumb was back in his mouth. He looked like a baby again, not the boy who’d said something back to Abel Farrow and called a cut lip no big deal. Hazel’s memories of baby-Ace always included their Mama, holding him tucked in the crook of her arm. “Dad wants us to stay together.”

Paige shuddered as if throwing off a heavy coat. “No,” she said, and the despair in her voice made Hazel stop trying. “But you kids should be all right.”

Their father came home with bags of pesticides and traps from Safeway. He had already arranged them on the kitchen table—spray cans and bottles in the back, repellent paste and traps and poison pellets in a mandala in the center—before he noticed that Paige was gone, and his children were watching coverage of the infestation well past their bedtime.

“Where’s Paige?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “Maybe the rats got her.”

“What rats?” Charlie paused. “Hey, look at me. Something you want to tell me?”

Hazel shook her head. She at last recognized her father’s pink, wide-eyed anger as an expression of his fear.

The Channel 8 reporter stood in a building that was silver-plated like a suit of armor, pointing at a small blue door. Pest Control officers in cardboard-colored jumpsuits passed behind her, yelling into their radios. “Shots were shots fired around six thirty this evening—calls started coming in of . . . 
bats
, it looks like, several bats the size of dinner plates attacking residents and service personnel starting at three p.m. today.”

Charlie sat down behind his children. “What is this garbage,” he said, but he couldn’t quite turn it off.

“A forty-two-year-old man and a twenty-nine-year-old woman were taken to the hospital with
severe
facial injuries. At least three other people were also injured. Jim, the residents of the Coldhook claim that the bats are actually
pest-people
, former tenants who were apparently
cursed
 . . . if so, tonight’s events certainly confirm reports that these so-called pest-people are unusually aggressive and extremely dangerous, in spite of their size . . . ”

“So Paige left, huh.” Charlie sank back into the couch, deflated after all his excitement over the pesticides.

“You can’t trust nobody, Dad,” said Ace, and Charlie lightly cuffed him on the chin.

“That’s right, son. Look at you. Big tough guy.”

“Where’s Mom?” Hazel asked.

Charlie seemed flustered. “Don’t know how many times I gotta tell you. I have no idea.”

Maybe he wasn’t lying. Their mother could be anywhere in the city’s innards by now. On Channel 8, a black bat straight out of a Transylvanian castle swooped out of the basement door—Pest Control officers lifted their guns but the bat had woven itself into the feathery strands of the Channel 8 reporter’s hair. The audio feed was quickly cut but they could see the terror and anguish on her face. It was cosmic, sublime; truly something to behold.

Traffic cones made a ring around the subway at 27th Street. Yellow tape and a metal safety gate stretched across its entrance. The children lurked around the corner and listened to sounds of battle—shrieks and bodies falling and flat slams of bone hitting bone—rising from below. “It’s the pests,” said Ace. “They took over the subway.”

“But it doesn’t sound like animals, does it?” said Hazel. “It sounds like people.”

Ace’s high-pitched whine—“Oh,
ma-an
”—drew the attention of one of the patrol cops guarding the subway station. He sauntered away from his post slowly at first, glancing both ways as if to cross the street, before lowering his shoulders and hurrying toward the children. They ducked behind a shuttered newsstand, but he found them there.

“You kids take the Red Train home from school? Station’s closed today. It’s nothing to worry about, it’s just . . . ” He was interrupted by a wet underground scream. He looked embarrassed. “It’s not safe. Y’all better get along.”

Hazel squeezed Ace’s hand—it was cold and wet, like an aquarium eel. “There’s the stop on 56th,” she said to him, but the patrol cop cleared his throat.

“I wouldn’t take the subway at all, hon.” He whispered this as if he was himself scared, this big tall barrel-chested man in military colors. The absurdity of it almost made Hazel laugh, but she had learned long ago that adults did not want their emotions laughed at.

“We’ll take the bus,” she said.

“Good girl,” said the patrol cop, and left.

They had not taken the city bus for years, not since the winter strike, and the bus shelter looked like an abandoned war bunker now. A glossy perfume poster was hidden behind Missing Pet and Missing Person signs, as well as Beware: Dangerous Pest notices. These came complete with pictures of snarling, bright-eyed rabbits and raccoons, and details of the pest-person’s crimes against society:
Thief. Addict. COMPULSIVE LIAR.

The children sat next to a teenage girl dressed in rags whose bare knees were pulled up to her chest. She smelled of sewage. She was gnawing at herself. An older woman with bursting grocery bags sat down on their left and sifted through her purchases, checking her receipts. Hazel took a peek at the bags and saw the same emergency stocks her father had started collecting during the war—freeze-dry food, cans of peaches, horrible whole grain crackers. “It’s gonna get bad,” the woman whispered when she saw Hazel looking. Her eyes were gleaming with joy. Hazel could bet she had already hoarded pesticides, and fantasized about introducing her to their father. “You know we’re in for a fight. Oh, God, there’s one of them there.”

The woman’s gaze had shifted to the ragged girl with soiled nails on the far end of the bench. “Kids, you’d better squeeze in close to me,” she grunted. “She’s a
pest
.”

The girl was tugging at her matted hair. “I don’t—don’t—don’t know what happened. I don’t know how I got here, I just want to get home.”

“Oh, I’m sure you know exactly what you did. They’ll have boarded those doors when you get home, sweetie, I’ll promise you that.”

The girl’s moan was bloated, like the sound of something rising through layers of mud. She spat up a bit of soap scum: hard to imagine what all she had been eating. It must have angered the woman, because she pulled a can of Home Defense out of her purse and sprayed it in the girl’s eyes. The girl yelped—a shocking, harrowing noise—and fell forward onto her hands and knees on the pavement. There her muscles seemed to settle into a familiar, easy space. Her joints locked into position and her fingers caressed the gritty asphalt. The children wondered who she’d been before the change: a rave angel, a shoplifter, some anonymous angry sixteen-year-old that pissed off the wrong person? Whichever—she was something else now. Even semi-blind the girl scurried down the street, scraping the skin off her knees.

The woman settled back proudly, but there were others—shabby, disoriented people who jerked and stumbled down the sidewalks as if searching for something lost. They were side-stepped—with the city so nervous and quiet, this was not hard. Some passers-by did spit at them and hiss things. “Curse you,” it looked like; it was what all the kids at school were saying. The returnees always snarled back. Everyone said that pests were twice as aggressive as natural animals, and no wonder, they had more to resent, more to grieve. Ace and Hazel watched this drama from the slow, shuddering safety of the city bus, but whenever they hit a stop light and one of the pest-people stared back at them, they’d duck down, breathing hard. What awful eyes those people had. Naked in their desperation.

Charlie was in one of his slow, smoldering bad moods, so they didn’t tell him about the subway. People at work were going AWOL, he said, and he was sick of picking up their slack—but Hazel suspected he was worried.

They ate in silence because the television had become a nightmare-flood of infestation footage: cheap triage, shaky cam, people screaming with fear and rage in the dark. The hall outside their apartment filled this silence, not with rustling shopping bags or jangling keys or the neighbors’ usual bitter mumbles—those comforting sounds had been absent for the past week—but with deep, slow creaks that came from right up against the other side of the wall, like an old boatman was rowing through the slate-blue carpet. “Maybe it’s the super,” said Charlie.

“I don’t think so,” said Hazel, and then someone knocked on the door. It startled all three—Charlie picked up his knife, Ace pushed away his plate, and Hazel stood. She walked to the door despite her father’s yells, looking back over her shoulder once to say, “I’m just going to see who it is,” and see Charlie stuck at the table, halfway between sitting and standing. His eyelids were trembling. He looked a little like Ace.

Hazel went up on her tiptoes and looked through the peephole. In the few seconds that she could balance without falling, she caught a flash of blond hair and clammy, dirty skin, like their visitor had been swimming in the Sound. She tasted salt and thought of the time they had gone—all four of them, back when their wounds were still whole—to the Sound and eaten hot dogs on the pier. The water had been too cold to swim in.
Wrong time of year
, their father said.
I told you so.
Dazed, Hazel unlocked the door.

“Hazel!” her father shouted, but it was too late.

The door handle began to turn and Hazel jumped back. After the door swung free of its latches, a pale hand snaked inside the fortress, followed by a pale woman. She had draped herself in plastic. She had no shoes. She smelled a bit like rotten fish—probably all she’d been able to get on good days. Despite all this, she grinned broadly when she saw the children. The corners of her mouth lifted to reveal two long and yellowed fangs.

Here she was, returned. Smilodon. Their mother. The children smiled back. Her expressions had always been contagious, and they had missed the warmth of her burning heart. Charlie sat. He was strangely calm. Maybe some tiny raw place in his heart was glad that she’d come back, even now and even like this, that she wasn’t such a quitter after all. Lisa Cunningham pushed her heel against the door as if she was just coming home from the office—
tired, spent, flinging off her purse
—and shut it with a soft, finalizing click. The weight of the old plastered walls finally settled on their bones.