Monstrous Beauty (6 page)

Hester shrugged, and after a minute of silence Linnie blurted, “I happen to know that the real rule is … that you mayn’t go inside a church—on a weekday—unless you’re carrying a Bible.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Please.” Linnie shook her shoulder. “I dare you to go in the church carrying a Bible.”

“I don’t have a Bible here.”

“I have.”

Hester opened her eyes at this. “You do? Where?”

Linnie scrambled to her feet, grabbed Hester’s hand to hoist her up, and dragged her over to the tombs facing School Street.

The tombs were in a long building made of granite blocks, nested into the hill and overgrown with bushes and weeds. There were four square iron doors on the front, and a marble tablet dating the building,
A.D. 1833
. Two of the doors had antique black padlocks on them, with keyholes for skeleton keys. Standing in the middle of the row, Linnie looked over both her shoulders, making sure they were alone. Hester looked around, too, and when she turned back, Linnie had pushed aside a curtain of ivy that dangled over the center portion of the building. Hester was surprised to see a fifth tomb that she’d never noticed before. It had the same black door and the same thick, round ring pull. There were two striped snails clinging motionless to the mortar above the door. Looking down the row of tombs, and at the spacing of the doors, she thought she might have guessed there was another tomb if someone had asked her.

“I hide my treasures here,” Linnie said in a hushed voice. “No one goes inside the tombs anymore.”

There was no padlock, just a large sliding bolt at the bottom of the door that was jammed deep into the ground. Hester tried to tug the bolt up, but it was tightly wedged in the packed, dry dirt.

“Hold the ivy so it won’t catch my hair,” Linnie said.

She lifted the bolt with little effort. She opened the door a crack and reached inside, bringing out a dusty, decrepit Bible, which she passed to Hester. The dank smell of mildew and earth wafted up from the book and pinched the back of Hester’s nose.

“Now, I dare you to go in the church,” Linnie said, forcing the iron door shut and pushing the bolt back into place. Hester let the ivy fall, and the tomb disappeared again, in full sight.

“Okay,” Hester said, wondering if she had been tricked into the dare. “But if I get in trouble, you have to tell them it was your idea. Promise?”

Linnie’s eyebrows furrowed with worry, and she shook her head. “I can’t promise that.”

Hester held the Bible out to her. “Then I won’t do it.”

Linnie’s eyes darted toward the door of the church. Hester shifted on her feet.

“No, wait.” Linnie looked back at her. “I promise.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die? Stick a needle in your eye?”

“That’s awful!”

“You have to
do
it.”

“Stick a needle in my eye?”

“No.” Hester laughed. She lifted Linnie’s pale hand by the index finger and brought it to her chest. “Cross your heart, dummy.”

With Linnie peeking from behind a tombstone, Hester tiptoed into the church. She went into the cool sanctuary and sat in one of the pews. There wasn’t a sound other than the rustling of her own clothes as she moved—a noise that was amplified by the still air and stone walls, making her feel like she was the only person on earth. The Bibles in the racks on the pews had bright green fake-leather covers, with shiny gold lettering. Her own was black, with cracked leather peeling away from the corners, exposing damp, splayed layers of binder’s board underneath. She opened the ruined Bible on her lap and then dropped it with a cry.

It was teeming with insects. Their segmented, fishlike bodies writhed in a silvery-blue mass. There were no pages left in the book: what was once paper was now a pile of silverfish, engaged in horrific stages of fighting—or mating. The mass rose and billowed and overflowed, an undulating ocean of squirming bodies and trembling antennae. Hester stood on the bench screaming as the silverfish fanned out from the floor upward in numbers impossible from one small book—hundreds of thousands of insects—swarming the pews and invading the newer Bibles. She leaped into the aisle and ran toward the back door of the church, her heart beating fast, her stomach feeling sick.

Just as she reached the exit, a pastor blocked her way.

“Don’t go,” he said huskily, putting his hands on the doorjamb.

Hester squeezed her eyes shut and ducked under his left arm, pushing his jacket flap aside and ramming past him to sunlight and freedom. When she reached the stairs she took them up and over the hill, two by two, toward the west exit of the cemetery, glancing back only once. From the darkened doorway she heard him shout, “Hester, please!” as she crested the hill and disappeared on the other side.

Linnie was nowhere in sight, even though she had crossed her heart.

Hester ran home, out of breath, brushing tickling phantom silverfish off her arms, swearing that she’d never be friends with Linnie again, not in a million years.

*   *   *

Hester uncovered her face and rubbed it. She hadn’t thought of Linnie in ages. She had never seen her again after that day. She’d changed her walking route home from school to avoid Burial Hill, and her family had stopped going to church for a decade—until Nancy had recently declared it necessary to tame Sam before he entered high school.

Hester remembered that the Sunday after the silverfish incident Malcolm had marched the family home—with little Sam snoozing limp over his shoulder—muttering about last straws, and how any congregation that inflated an ordinary insect infestation into a haunting was not worth an hour and a half of his time each week. Hester had decided then and there, huffing as she skipped to catch up, that it was probably best not to tell anyone that Linnie’s Bible had caused the whole ruckus.

Chapter 8

1872

S
YRENKA REALIZED WITH HORROR
that Ezra had become limp in her arms and was dying. She put her mouth on his, but it was only a fleeting kiss—not enough to save him—before he was jerked loose from her grasp by another massive tug on the net. Having almost no air in his lungs, he sank. She strained to reach him and summoned all her strength to push him to the surface. She held him from below, with his face out of the water, until a spasm of choking racked his body and gave her hope that he might fight to live.

Olaf pulled hard on the net again until the tip of Syrenka’s bound tail was on his boat. Much of her long tail and all of her torso were still in the water, but she could no longer reach Ezra.

She curled on her tail like a snake and clawed her way up the netting, wild with rage. She was no longer focused on freeing herself, but on killing Olaf. He reacted quickly. He had hauled aboard many powerful bluefin tuna, as heavy and slick as her, with as much fight in them, and he had the skill and burly weight to pin her to the deck on her stomach. She screamed in desperate frustration. She tried to reach back to slash him, but he was ready for her. He used a strong rope to tie her elbows together, above the sharp wrist fins. She was at his mercy.

Olaf flipped her onto her back. He had a knife attached to his belt, and he unsheathed it. She did not stop fighting, even while bound. He had intended to stab her in the heart, but he instantly regretted that it meant facing her as he killed her: even in rage she was eerily beautiful.

Syrenka sensed his hesitation and took advantage of it. She stopped resisting.

“Please, let me go,” she pleaded.

“You’re a killer,” he said. “And with God’s help Mr. Doyle will be your last victim.”

“I could never hurt Ezra. He’s alive, I am sure of it,” she said. “You must believe me … I love him.”

“That’s repulsive. It’s a sin against God. You aim to damn Ezra’s soul for eternity.”

“If you release me I will stay away from humans forever. I swear to you.”

“Oaths from a monster are worthless.” He raised his knife.

“I’ll consign myself to the deep! Please untie me, I beg you.” Her eyes were imploring as she thought of this to say: “I only wanted a baby.”

“You disgust me.”

“You of all people can understand. You who longed for a son, who placed hope in his future, only to have him taken from you too young.”

“How do you know that? That’s none of your concern!”

“I hear you talking with your friends on the water. I have … I have wept with you,” she lied. “I want to help.”

He was beguiled by her voice. In the lamplight he could see that her white skin was firm and young. He devoured her nakedness with his eyes, but hastily and furtively, because it was wrong. No, more than that: it was savage and depraved. Yet it had been so long since he had seen his wife, Eleanor, unclothed. So long since she had barred him from their marital bed, declaring that her age had shut off hope of another child.

He used the knife to cut away some of the net entangling Syrenka’s tail. The slickness of her body was sensual and inviting. He could see where he might enter her. He set down his knife with a trembling hand. He unbuttoned the fall front of his trousers, and then stroked her hip with his fingers splayed.

“Don’t…” Syrenka said.

Then, suddenly, he was angered and embarrassed by his thoughts. What was he doing? She had tempted him with unholy magic. She had deliberately cast a fog around his conscience—he, a good man and a God-fearing Christian! She had made him want her—she, a beast, and a monstrosity of nature! She would not trick
him
the way she had tricked others for hundreds of years.

He kissed her violently, in punishment. She spat a viscous green mucus in his face and began to fight again. He threw himself on her to stop her writhing. Her movement beneath him electrified him. His hot, panting breath spilled onto her face.

“You’re jealous of Ezra,” she hissed, “because he has a lover who wants him.”

“Stop talking!” he shouted, spraying her with spittle. His body felt a rush of power and hatred that he was sure now he could not control. He pushed inside her.

“No! Please!” she screamed.

“Stop talking!” he repeated, over and over again with each thrust, until he could no longer speak and his body shuddered.

He heard her cries too late. He pulled away from her and onto his knees, wheezing. His eyes were wide. He quickly buttoned the front of his trousers, hands shaking. As if he could erase what he had done by setting his clothing right.

“Kill me,” Syrenka said. Her voice was gravelly and dry. She was motionless now, with her arms behind her back.

Olaf realized with shame that she had been bound the whole time. He wanted to erase that, too.

He rushed to cut away the netting from her tail.

“Kill me,” she said again.

He cut the rope on her arms, intending to push her back in the bay. He would accept her oath to stay away from shore. She would disappear into the depths forever. He could forget what he had done. He could repent in his heart, for the rest of his days. Eleanor would never know. God would forgive him.

As soon as the rope snapped, Syrenka struck, seizing him around the neck with her left arm.

“You should have killed me,” she said into his ear.

She forced his chin up and slashed his throat with the fin on her right wrist.

She laid him at the bottom of the boat, with a pool of dark blood growing beneath him. She had to make her decision now, while his heart still quivered in his chest and his life ebbed away. She peered out over the black ocean, hoping that Ezra was alive.

She would take the chance. She might never have another. To give herself human form, she ripped open the fisherman’s chest, broke his rib cage, and ate his warm, moist lungs.

Chapter 9

I
T WAS ONLY HER SECOND
S
UNDAY
of church in ten years, and Hester could not concentrate on the service. The smell of the wood and the wax from the candles, the hushed echo of the sanctuary, and the rich red of the runner flooded her with the awful memory of the silverfish. She wondered if Linnie had known that the book was infested. Now that Hester was older and more mature it didn’t seem likely: why would Linnie have set a friend up like that? And yet Linnie hadn’t wanted to take equal responsibility if Hester got caught, and she had disappeared rather than stand up for her. Hester thought of the tombs—dank and dark, a perfect breeding ground for those insects; but Linnie couldn’t have known that. And then she thought about the graveyard, which she hadn’t visited in years. She struggled in this way through a hazy mental fog, transported by disjointed visions of her time with Linnie for the better part of an hour.

*   *   *

In the three months that they were friends, Hester and Linnie only ever played together on Burial Hill. Hester had loved the old churchyard: it was on her way home from school, it was loaded with spots for hide-and-seek, and she liked imagining that the graves held the deepest, forgotten memories of her town in safekeeping. The hill overlooked Plymouth Harbor on one side and was dotted with several large trees for shade, thousands of chipped and mossy headstones, and a few benches for resting. No one had been buried there for more than half a century, so she and Linnie usually had the hill to themselves, giving them the freedom to climb trees, run races around the graves, and watch the fishing boats and cruise ships crisscross their own wakes.

Hester was in the spring of first grade, carrying her lunch bag and her favorite baby doll, Annabelle, when she met Linnie for the first time. Annabelle had a plastic head, plastic legs, and a soft stuffed body. When she was new she’d had real-looking blond hair in a wavy bob, but during a particularly hot summer Hester had given her a trim to make her feel cooler. Annabelle’s hair was now a dirty stubble, and you could see the plugs planted like rows in a garden. Hester had long ago lost the hooded bunting Annabelle came with, but she had replaced it with one of baby Sam’s graying snapped undershirts.

Linnie was building a twig fort by one of the graves on the hill when Hester walked by. Hester hadn’t noticed her, but Linnie called down, “
That’s
a sorry-looking doll!”