The Bridge Page 19

  In the shadows cast by the lemon tree, Mag watches with her .303 trained on the customers.

  Sometimes they stop for a while, whether born or Made, and sometimes they tell a story. Sometimes but not always their own. Heard maybe, or dreamed. Told standing up or leaning across the stone wall, and because of what they have forgotten, or never knew, the stories rarely start at the beginning and the ending is usually somewhere in the middle. Narn listens to their confessions and accusations, their excuses and lies, and helps stitch them together with her own, words they only pretend to understand, but which somehow help to make the stories, and those who tell them, whole again.

  “Poor bitches,” Kai says, from where we both watch behind the curtain. Her fingers leave a trail of rank slime. I swat away the flies.

  Above the door is a .22, for snakes mainly. Or rabbits for the pot. Mag has shown me how to use it and keep it oiled and cleaned, just in case. The just-in-case-ness of our life in the hidden hut is something that gnaws at me, takes me away from my play and my chores. My sister’s larger-than-life return is in opposite proportion to the decay that eats at her skin and makes a gluey strip slop off the inside of her arm and onto the worktable. Another batch of expensive betony oil ruined. But Narn doesn’t scold her and neither do I—I go to paste her skin back on her arm like papier-mâché and she fondly slaps away my sisterly fussing. Kai’s idea of a joke to “snap me out of it” is unchanged. She flicks a black fingernail in my tea, laughs like a loon when I spit it out in disgust. She pulls worms from her ear and leaves them on Narn’s pillow, and Narn farts in surprise. But this pretend cruelty, the obsessive hoaxes and practical jokes, the love and fear that is pretend until its real—it is Kai as she was in life, so why not in death?

  On dark days, she is quieter than usual, stinkier too. She fills out Narn’s grimoire with pages of her round left-handed cursive, properly recorded measurements, equivalents and substitutions, the difference in properties between say, Witch’s Hair and Wizard’s Beard, between Hermes’ Semen and Head of Snake. Narn’s scattershot recall, her impatience with me, only goes so far. It is thanks to my twin’s posthumous pedantry that I teach myself the science of lichenology. How for instance, to suspend lithophiloides dust in Baboon Tears, to evaporate it into a powder so fine that it feels like a lover’s breath on your lips just before it kills you.

  On these days it is me who tries to cheer her up. I buy a Scrabble set from the charity shop in Norman and I make the missing letters out of cardboard and bring it to her and she says, “How are we even twins?”

  But she plays with me anyway. And she wins of course, by adding R-E-V-E-N-A-N to the “T” of my stupid word, ANT, managing, as she hoots triumphantly, to “get a seven-letter bingo across a Triple Word Square on my second-to-last move, a statistically impossible to prevent win except, you know, if one player totally sucks!”

  I like to see Kai happy.

  And if there is one thing that I am better at than her, that is scoping out botanicals for our stock in trade. Eric and I search lower in the canyon for exotic lichen, fragile stalks of Xanthoparmelia convoluta to stack in a corner of the apothecary, like broken bones. Kai brings it to her nose and sniffs it. “This is one of my favorite lichens,” she says (I know), “because of how it just moves around in the wind.”

  “It’s vagrant,” I say. “It lacks rhizines to hold it down.”

  “Just like us,” she says.

  But however Kai has become philosophical in death, she has grown up somehow and there is damage in her empty eye.

  “Is it hard?” I ask. “Being dead?”

  She shrugs and I hear something crack. “Sometimes it just makes it easier.”

  Makes what easier? These are the things I don’t like to ask. Because as much as I love having her back, I’m not sure I completely trust her. That she has been broken by the Father, and put back together by Narn in a place of darkness, makes me wonder what can crawl into the gaps or what maybe already has.

  One day, coming back from feeding the chickens, I find a page from a notebook blown onto the path. The paper is not from the grimoire or from the cheap exercise book I use (at Kai’s insistence) to record and observe my lichen findings. It’s parchment, the skin of something. Thick and yellowed with age, and ridged with indentations. There are words written on the page, heavily scrawled—ravelings, slavering, triangles, grievants. The almost anagrams of the forbidden word march across the middle of the page in a horizontal strip, like a bridge, and another piece has been sheared off the lower edge, as if someone (else) maybe wrote (Starvelings) there and wanted to keep it for themselves, or keep it hidden.

  The word is not to be written.

  I don’t tell anyone because Kai didn’t write it. I know her southpaw script. And I know Narn’s labored runic print. It wasn’t either. I fold the paper up and throw it in the fire, and then I skulk past the brooding Mag to find my sister.

  “We’re lichenelicious,” Kai says. “With your imagination and my memory, it’s like we’re two halves of the whole world.”

  Most of the time I happily admit the symbiosis of bacteria and fungus in lichen is like Kai and me—the living cohabiting with the dead. The righter of wrongs and the finder of lost things. She is the mind and I am the eye. Her memory is sharpened by death. My powers of imagination are heightened by life. I impress her by clocking a rusty bloom of Caloplaca a kilometer away. The weird creep of a Cladonia colony hidden under a fallen tree scrapes at that place in my heart that sees things hiding in the dark. The purplish Pannaria pops at the edge of my eye, and Eric and I bring it back to swing lazily from the roof of the porch, nebular, our very own universe—two twins, one brought back from the dead by the strength of the other’s refusal to let her go.

  * * *

  The Hunter left a wet patch on the bed.

  “Did he say wretch?” Trudy sounded on the edge of hysteria. “Or witch?”

  I couldn’t remember if the Hunter pulled his ghostly trigger before he lowered his gun. Before he turned and melted into the white noise from which he’d come. His outlines had become jumpy, nightmarish. I’d struggled against my paralysis but I couldn’t move properly, until dawn had entered the room in his place.

  “It’ll never wash off.” Trudy examined the bed, her rising voice shrill enough to break glass. “It looks like he shat himself. Look at the hollow left at the end where he was sitting. It’s like a riverbed. Or a grave.”

  I brewed some calming tea for us both. Chamomile, valerian, nothing too magical. Sitting against her pillows she said, “I thought I was done with all that.”

  “Seeing ghosts?” I said. “We’ll never be done with that.”

  Trudy frowned over her tea. Her tilted eyes were puffy. She’d had eyelash extensions and they clumped with her tears. “It smells of rotten eggs.”

  “River mud often does.”

  “Did you always have the Dead-See?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even in the Blood Temple?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too,” she said, picking a tea leaf off her lip. “I never told anyone.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “Why did he come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He could have killed you.”

  “I think we both know that isn’t true.”

  “Is that why, d’you think?” she asked dully. “To tell us that he’s not the one killing Mades?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe to say he’s sorry, you know, for being such an ass about witches? Maybe to try and redeem himself?”

  “That’d be pushing it.”

  “You’re a bitch, you know.”

  We both smile.

  “You’re not going to tell anyone?” she asked.

  “Neither of us are.”

  We looked at the pool of muddy goo on my bed.<
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  “He was heavy.”

  “The things they carry,” I say.

  “Did he actually shit himself?” Trudy asked.

  “Everyone does when they die.”

  “You can sleep with me?” She said it like a question and answer rolled into one.

  My phone buzzed with a text that I knew would be Pagan with a second reminder about the Gatherum on Sunday, pissed that I hadn’t replied to her first one.

  “I don’t think I’ll sleep much.”

  She widened her black-smeared eyes in alarm. “You won’t leave me alone?”

  “I promise.”

  “Lara’s still with her Halloween date.”

  “Yes.

  “Can we tell her?”

  “She won’t believe you.”

  “No,” Trudy said. “They never do.”

  She put the tea down and folded her hands in her lap. “After the Blood Temple, and back in South Rim when we were trying to survive, there were tales of three witches who brought themselves into being.”

  My flesh crawled. “I heard those stories too.”

  “Do you think . . .” she paused, trying to find the words. “Do you think that if witches conjure themselves into being, they can conjure themselves into unbeing too?”

  I looked over at her, twisting her fingers around the bedsheets. “I don’t think you have to be a witch to do that,” I said.

  “Does being able to see ghosts make us witches?”

  I thought about it. “Does it matter?”

  “It does if they ever go back to the old ways. I mean like before the Apology—when they’d hang us and dump our bodies outside the walls of graveyards—where we became ghosts. That’s the how and the why of who we are—Made into ghosts.”

  I stared at her moving mouth. The graveyard, she said. Was that what the Hunter was trying to tell me with all that babble about wretches and vultures? Corby had quoted something similar from the cemetery where the witches lay—wretched. Vultures. Cursed.

  But why?

  I didn’t really want to sleep on the Hunter’s wet patch so I got into bed beside Trudy. I thought of the aspirin the girls had brought me, the term papers they’d written for me. How they took care of each other like real sisters. In a sense every Made was related. At one level we were all sisters from the same mister. Trudy curled on her side and fell asleep hiccuping. Maybe it was that which decided me. Which made me answer Pagan’s text, finally. Because I knew there would be no going back.

  I’ll be there, I wrote.

  I fell asleep wondering if I’d be able to get in touch with Narn tomorrow, and what she would come up with for the next story.

  Reception was back to normal on the bridge Friday and my conversation with Narn was brief and businesslike. She’d barely finished gibbering her story at me before I hung up. There had been news of another attack on a Made and although it could have been a false alarm, crowds were still sparse. On the other side of the river, even Wellsburg looked chastened after its Halloween revelries, wet strips of toilet roll hanging limply from leafless branches. I labored through the night, trying to make sense of a variation on the eye-crushing raven-head tale that had triggered so much panic in the beginning. Again I struggled in the depths of it all—each scrap of unintelligible verse hiding another thought behind it. Each repetition ambushed by a hidden difference, each cadence rising, or falling to some screechy imperfection—forcing me to improvise, to make up the bits I couldn’t fathom. I thought of the Father and his dream of sexless speciation and the seductive power that came with that. Narn, too, alone in the lab with her hell-broth, boiling and bubbling Kai and me into being. And now here I too sat alone in my Tower with my broken ghosts and amputated dreams, stitching them together with the blunt needle of my imagination and nothing else. Outside the window, the bridge glowed like an artery and the alien constellations wheeled. From the roof of the gatehouse the uninvited shadow that had clawed up from under the bridge, stood guard over my process. Because the fantasy of self-speciation was just that—fantasy, a contradiction in terms. By daybreak, I had what I needed, and slept.

  On Saturday afternoon I read my story back and at the appointed time on Sunday, left my Tower and headed for the bridge.

  Hunter frenzy had all but emptied the Corso, even for a Sunday night, when it was usually scattered with end-of-weekend die-hards. Despite all that had happened, my skin was tingling with anticipation. I’d unwrapped the new outfit Pagan had delivered, promising myself to repay her from my scholarship stipend, but as soon as I stepped off the bridge into Wellsburg in new red tights and a pink woolen dress with a bodice crisscrossed in black ribbon, all was forgotten. I felt a sense of crossing through a membrane into some kind of truth. One or two faces in the town nodded their recognition. The unsmiling photographer friend of Pagan’s sat drinking in one of the taverns. He lifted his head as I passed. I expanded in his gaze, and in the gaze of this place. I was becoming more real, and everything else—the Hunter, Narn, the Blood Temple, the Starvelings (especially)—less so. I was beginning to feel free as if it were me cut down from that hanging tree instead of her. My soul, not Kai’s, freed from the grasp of the restless dead.

  But when I arrived in the turret room at eleven, I panicked to find only a scattering of guests, all but outnumbered by the dreadful hale waiters, waiting in a row with their hands hidden behind their backs. The food table was piled higher than usual, with plates of game bird and cheese and steaming plates of bloody meats. Orange cake in gooey syrup sprinkled with edible flowers.

  But no guests. Surely Regulars had no reason to fear the Hunter, so why had they stayed away? Had they forgotten me? Or maybe they had heard about my story and been put off. Had I gone too far? What Narn had said about the conjure tales—had the story gotten away from me?

  Had I blown it?

  My reflection bounced back at me from the beveled mirrors and windows, from the green swell of the bottles and the crystalline stemware. There were dozens of me in the room—it was all Meera. My face in the reflection was doubtful, unreal, as if I had no place to be here, no place at all. Pagan hadn’t showed. Sasha was nowhere to be seen. Here I was with no one but myself and a dozen sneering waiters, the corkscrews in their black aprons gleaming like scalpels.

  I ordered another drink and kept my eye on the door. The barman slid a berry-red cocktail toward me, a Cosmopolitan. “On the house,” he said. Meaning Sasha Younger. Eventually, the Regulars trickled in, even more extravagantly dressed up than before, the air sweet with perfume and the tinkle of precious metals, but with an edge to their talk, an anticipation that verged on aggression. They seemed to bare their teeth at me as they smiled. My armpits prickled, and I unsuccessfully tried to find my reflection in the crowd. Soon the turreted suite was even fuller than before, expectation crawling spider-like across the walls. More candles lit by an unseen hand. Pagan had arrived without me noticing, and shot me a thumbs-up from between a sea of sculpted shoulders, and soon, after the mandatory collection of phones, it was time to begin. My heart was in my mouth as I searched for Sasha in the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  Three or four other girls—one a Made, I thought with a pang of bitterness—read their stories, all to muted appreciation. Then it was my turn. Dispirited by Sasha’s absence, I took a seat in the electric chair, the cap lower than normal and pressing against my high hair. Once again, I couldn’t feel my feet. My vodka-fueled confidence deserted me. A fat pregnant cat had chewed off my tongue. My mind was blank. As if everything had been erased. What bad joke was I the punchline to? I closed my eyes, that word scrawled on the Redress acceptance form flashed across my eyelids, and when I opened them and looked across the page, that is all I saw, the word gni vrats written over and over in the same indigo ink, a broken reversal that I couldn’t place to save myself.

  The cap squeezed my skull and time stopped. The joke
-trial had grown old. My hands gripped the arms of the chair, and my body jerked. Heads turned in my direction, indulgent smiles at my “theatrics.” I clenched my teeth—so far from gnivrats and never ever far enough. As long as I lived.

  I closed my notebook.

  The story told itself.

  A swagman in a cloak made of raven feathers stalks a forgotten land, feeding on a rare species of pink moth that breeds in lost places, pulling off first their wings and then their little pink antennae and then their heads. He places the bits, like edible flowers, onto a boiling billy, and drinks it beside the fire, dancing to their tiny screams. He swirls their pain around his mouth, savoring it. Chew, swallow, repeat. He takes out his fiddle. Some real ravens from another world hear the shrieks from his bow, and swoop down on the swaggie, tearing off his imposter’s cloak and then pulling strips of his skin from his body—his thighs and belly and face—until he is nothing but a carcass with a heartbeat, as flayed and glistening as a newborn. His torment is unimaginable. But the unimaginable has only just begun. The boss raven carefully places the strips of skin on the swagman’s coals, while another holds open his mouth and two his eyes, feeding his own flesh to him piecemeal—for an eternity, or long enough for his skin to grow back—and they start all over again. And the more they feed him the hungrier he gets, until they don’t have to pull his skin off anymore. He does it for himself. He has gotten a taste for it, and no other flesh will do for his hungers, but his own. He wants to stop. He begs for his hands to be tied, for a bullet in his brain. But the Starving Hills are nowhere, and no one hears his screams.

  One guest threw up halfway through the reading. Another rushed into the hallway and began to sob. The token Made headed toward the river and was never heard of again. The Regulars stomped their feet and called for another. And another. But I knew the rules. No cliff-hangers. When I looked across the room, Sasha had appeared from nowhere. She lounged on her chaise, her lips parted, tracing lewd figure eights along her bare breastbone.