Black Feathers (43 page)

“You don’t like it?” He danced a few steps, and when he stopped to tip his hat—

—his hat—when had he gotten a hat?—

—she recognized him. He looked like one of the flying monkeys from
The Wizard of Oz.
They had terrified her the first time she’d watched it; she had cried so hard she had thrown up.

“Why … why are you doing this?”

The monkey was still growing, his features still wavering. It wasn’t that the two faces were alternating or shifting; he was both of them at the same time, like those puzzles in the books where the picture is an old lady and a young woman, depending on how you look at it.

A vase or two faces.

Two monkeys. One that had been her best friend for as long as she could remember, and one that was one of her oldest memories, the first thing she knew that could terrify her.

“Doing what?” Mr. Monkey asked, dancing again. Grinning.

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Dancing. Tipping his hat. Mocking her.

“I can’t—” She broke off, not able to go any further. It was all too much. She could feel parts of herself shutting down, going to sleep.

“No,” the monkey snapped, leaning toward her, his freakishly long body seeming to stretch even farther. “You can’t, can you?” He spat the words, tendrils of thick drool hanging off his fangs. “You can’t do anything.”

“It’s all too much.”

The monkey stopped stock-still and cocked its head, studying her with its yellow eyes.

“I’m sorry,” it said, and Cassie couldn’t be sure if it was still mocking her. “Is this better?”

The room was gone. It didn’t vanish, it was just gone, all of it—the rows of stacked wood, the stove, the blanket, her father’s body, her father’s blood, gone. Like they had never existed.

Cassie was standing outside. Snow was falling in huge white flakes, and there were several inches on the ground between her and the monkey. But there was nothing else: no light, no dark, nothing hinted at in the distance, no distance. Just endless grey, and the snow, and the monkey, and her.

“Is this better?” The politeness, the concern, they had to be a show.

“What is this place?” She looked around herself, trying to get her bearings, but there was nothing. There was snow on the ground, but she didn’t even know if there was really ground under it. The snow was falling, but it didn’t seem like there was any sky for it to fall from.

“This?” The monkey gestured around. He was as tall as she was now, but he seemed to have stopped growing. “What, you don’t like it?” His every word seemed to have the edge of a taunt, of a joke at her expense.

Cassie shook her head. “It’s awful.”

“That’s too bad,” the monkey chattered, dancing a bit in place. “You don’t recognize it?”

Cassie hesitated. It was something she was supposed to know. “No,” she said carefully.

“It’s you!” the monkey shrieked, turning a hands-free back-flip. “It’s all you!”

Cassie took a step back.

“We’re in your heart!” the monkey screamed. “Look around! Don’t you recognize it? Cold and grey. Empty. This is the very heart of you. This is where you live, no matter how far you run!”

The snow burned against his face, melted against the blood soaking the front of his coat.

It was all Harrison could do to open his eyes, to pull himself onto his side. There was no hope of standing up. The way the world was swimming around him, shapes twisting and distending, it was almost impossible even to orient himself.

It wasn’t until he saw the tracks in the snow, the long streak where he had been dragged, that he knew: the door. The door was that way.

Pressing his left hand as hard as he could against the wound in his belly, he began to follow the footsteps, planting his right elbow in the snow, pulling himself forward, almost collapsing each time.

He had to get inside. He had to stop him.

“No,” Cassie said, her voice little more than the bubble of a thought, powerless.

The monkey leaned in close, close enough for her to smell the rankness of its breath. “Yes,” it whispered.

“No,” she repeated. “It can’t be. There are people—”

“What people?” the monkey asked, stepping back.

Tapping both paws to his chest, the monkey seemed to explode, black fragments spraying into the air, taking wing, a flock of crows, hundreds, thousands, wheeling and arcing and cawing against the white sky, swooping over Cassie, close enough she could feel the breath of their wings, coiling back together, taking on form again.

“People who love you?” her father asked, standing where the monkey had been a blink before.

She took a sharp step back.

“Why do you think anybody would love you?” her father asked, stepping toward her. “You’ve pushed away anyone who’s ever cared for you.” He looked at her sternly. “You told such terrible lies about me, and then you ran away. You left your family to worry about you.”

“You didn’t even try to help me,” Sarah said, standing where her father had been, her body odour sharp and biting in the empty space. “You left me to die alone in the cold.” Every word she spoke spilled a fresh gout of blood from the slash across her throat, down the front of her drab grey clothes.

“You said you’d always be there for me,” Heather said.

Cassie stepped back.

“You left me to die,” Skylark said, and the look of pain on her face made Cassie’s heart ache. “You ran away, and you left me with him.”

“Who?” Cassie asked, in a whispered gasp of tears. “Who did this to you?”

But all Skylark did was smile. “You did,” she said, the sadness at odds with her smile. “If you had stayed … That’s not what you do to someone you love. You fight for them.” She shook her head. “But you ran away.”

“You ran away,” Heather said.

Her father.

Sarah.

“Stop it,” she cried out, covering her eyes with her hands, trying to block out the images.

But the voices still drifted around her, echoing her failings in the dark, fathomless void.

“You tried to kill me.”

The words were an accusation, but they were spoken gently, sadly.

When Cassie took her hands from her eyes, Ali was standing in front of her. Ali the way she had first seen her, in the restaurant, her dark hair sleek, her black jeans, the T-shirt that rode up a little when she moved, revealing the pale line of her stomach, the small of her back.

“I took you into my home, into my life,” Ali said. “I came looking for you, and you tried to kill me.”

She lifted her hand to Cassie’s gaze—she was holding the knife. The knife that she had bought at the department store downtown. The knife that she had bought at Schmidt’s.

Cassie took another step back, shaking her head. “No,” she whispered, knowing what was about to happen, but unable to stop it, unable to look away.

“Is this what you wanted?”

Ali lifted the knife to her throat. Tilting her head back, she slid the point into the side of her neck. Blood sprayed on the snow as she tugged the knife across her throat, pushing it in deeply, jugular, trachea, carotid, severed in a slow series of dull pops.

Blood rained from the not-sky, hot and bitter as it splattered on Cassie’s face, in her mouth, in her eyes, soaking her almost instantly, drenching her red.

Then snow, and Ali speaking in a low, burbling singsong.

“This is what you wanted, right?” Her head lolled loosely, still tilted back. Her voice came from the wet, red gash across her throat, the blood-rimmed second mouth she had carved into herself.

Cassie cowered back. “I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t.”

Opening her hand, Ali let the knife fall. Cassie watched it spin slowly down, down, until it disappeared in the snow.

“No,” Ali said, her head flopping loosely. “But you wanted to. You dreamed about it.”

“But I didn’t—”

“It was only a matter of time.”

Ali raised her hands to her neck, gingerly touched the edges of the gash in her throat with her fingertips. “It doesn’t even hurt,” she said quietly.

More firmly, she ran the fingertips of her right hand along the top edge of the cut, tracing the full length of it from just under her left ear to just under her right.

With her left hand, she did the same thing along the bottom edge of the cut. Both her arms were quickly soaked, blood dripping from her elbows onto the snow.

She slipped the four fingers of each hand into the wound, pressing them in when they met resistance. Past the first knuckles. The second.

Then, curling her fingers, she tugged. With her right hand pulling up, and her left pulling down, Ali tore the remaining flesh of her neck, a crunching, shredding sound as the wound widened, blood spraying upward as she wrenched back on her own head.

One final, brutal rip, and a snap echoed through the snowy air as she broke her own neck.

Cassie tried to hide her eyes, but she couldn’t look away, not even as Ali tore her own head off. Not even as she held it at her side for a moment, fingers clenched deep in its throat, before dropping it into the snow.

There was a dull thud.

Cassie doubled over at the waist, gorge rising in her throat, spilling out of her mouth with a sulphurous burning.

Feathers.

Black feathers spilling wetly into the snow, steaming yellow in the still air.

Ali’s sightless eyes stared at her from the snow across the null space, blood soaking the white under the ragged edge of her neck.

Cassie heaved again. Nothing came up but feathers.

Ali’s body was still standing, like gravity didn’t exist: the body didn’t waver, didn’t move, simply stood. Snow fell on the bloody stump of her neck, sizzling against the blood.

All else was still. Silent.

The snow swirled.

And then Ali’s hands reached up, began to dig at the bloody meat of her neck, fingers working with wet, squelching noises, pulling at the flesh, tugging at it, yanking it down.

As she pulled, something seemed to be pushing up, a bubble of what almost looked like skin slowly pushing at the stump,
Ali’s hands seeming to guide its rise, pulling down on the flesh.

It looked like her mother helping Heather pull on a sweater, the collar tight, the head pushing up through the hole—

Not a head.

The membrane split, and there was the monkey’s little hat. The hands kept pulling, and the monkey’s head slithered up the bloody remnants of Ali’s neck like it was putting on her body.

And then it was just the monkey, grinning at Cassie from both its faces at once.

“You see,” it said, every word a laugh. “This is all you. This is your world. You made it.”

Cassie didn’t move, didn’t speak. She stood helplessly as the monkey danced, as it drew back and kicked Ali’s head, which arced into the non-distance and disappeared.

“You’ve been building it your whole life. This place”—the monkey stopped dancing, straightened up into a show of respectability and stepped toward her—“is yours.” He leaned in, like he was going to try to kiss her. “And you”—he touched her under the chin with a finger that felt like soft leather—“are mine.”

She cringed away, tried to pull into herself.

“No,” said a voice from beside her. “She’s not.”

Ali took her hand.

In the bedroom, he watched as the flames roared between the two girls, building from red to orange to blue to a pure white, a fire that lit the room, a heat that warmed even the cold of him.