Strange Creatures Read online

  “Speak up, Boy,” I told him. He laughed uneasily.

  “It has to be a blood tithe. Like—like a person. Or an animal.”

  “Excuse me?” Nina was still holding out the money, but just then, she stuffed it back into her pocket. She laughed at us, incredulous. “You want me to kill an animal?”

  “I mean, no . . . ,” Jamie began, and I watched as he tried to explain the way we played, striking down imaginary foes with imaginary weapons.

  Nina was still laughing, high-pitched, fake laughter. “G-d, you two are so weird,” she said at last. Then she looked at my brother, a sour smile twisting her gloss-sticky lips. “Sorry, James. I’m out of here.”

  She spun around until she faced her house back through the woods, her hair spinning after her like a honey-brown cloak. And then she left us there, the two of us, alone.

  We were silent for a minute. Jamie’s hands were fisted at his sides. I’d seen my brother cry before, as a little boy and as an older boy, when it was just the two of us alone. But I don’t think I’d ever seen him get angry. Especially not at me.

  “Fuck” was all he said.

  He stalked off toward our house, walking almost too fast for me to follow.

  7

  IJAH AND THE NAMELESS BOY went hunting one day, when the sun through the trees was green-golden and the wind had the scent of blood on it. They borrowed a pair of saw-toothed daggers from Annit, leaving a pile of stones in their stead. Ijah carried his on a holster in his coat. Boy buckled his knife to his thigh.

  They weighted their trap with miniature Snickers bars and white bread smeared with peanut butter. Then they crouched in the bushes to wait. While they did, they spoke in low tones, first gossiping about the other children, then Annit, then the pirates whose ships had sailed too close to the island recently for either of their liking. At last, Boy fell silent.

  There was a rustle. Then a snap. Then a scream, so raw that it made Boy’s hair stand on end.

  The boys bounded over to the trap. Ijah winced as blood splattered his face. Inside the iron jaws was a delicate body, small and girlish. Boy had the jumbled impression of filamentous wings, blue and green in the daylight, gossamer thin and broken.

  I followed my brother in through the screen door. Mom was standing by the sink talking on her cell phone. Jamie opened the fridge and started rummaging through it, but before he could grab anything, Mom said, “Oh, here they are now. I’ll talk to you later,” and tapped the screen.

  “You guys?” she asked, which was how she always spoke to us. Dad would say later that she was the reason we had so much trouble with Jamie, because Mom couldn’t be counted on to be firm. “That was Dawn. She said Nina came home with the weirdest story.”

  I looked at Jamie, and my lip curled. He glanced over the edge of the fridge, arching an eyebrow back at me. His body looked tight with anger. It was a new sight, and terrifying. But I was used to standing as a shield between Jamie and the world. When he was sad, I took his sadness for him. Now I squared my shoulders.

  “It’s not our fault she can’t follow the rules,” I said simply.

  That’s when Jamie let out a noise that was halfway between a growl and a scream. “G-d, Annie!” he bellowed.

  I flinched. Mom shouted Jamie’s name. He didn’t look back at me, his eyes full and wounded. He didn’t look at Mom, either. He just looked at the kitchen tile.

  She sighed. “Her mom said that you told her she had to kill a squirrel if she wanted to play with you.”

  “Not a squirrel,” I said plainly. Nina was so dramatic. Besides, I’d only been trying to get rid of her, so that Jamie and I could be in Gumlea alone. Like always. “I just told her that she had to make a sacrifice of flesh—”

  “Annie,” Jamie growled. He was right. I was revealing too much. I shut my mouth, fast.

  “Okay,” Mom said, and she sighed again, lifting her hand to her face and pinching the bridge of her nose. “No killing squirrels. Or chipmunks. Or deer. Or each other. No killing anything, okay?”

  We both looked back at her. My eyes felt big and guilty. But Jamie’s were brick walls, cemented in anger. He didn’t speak. I spoke for him.

  “Okay.”

  “And play nicely with Nina. I don’t want to get any more phone calls. You know I can’t stand Dawn lately,” Mom said, and she smiled a little, like it was a secret between us, so I smiled, too. I knew how to play this game.

  “Okay,” I said again, in a smiling smiling smiling tone. But Jamie wasn’t smiling. He was leaning against the fridge door, his face bright red beneath his flop of dark hair, crushing Elijah’s day-care art beneath his weight.

  “Jamie?” Mom said.

  It all happened in a flash. One moment, we were there in the kitchen, standing at a stalemate. The next, Jamie had slammed his hands on the refrigerator door behind him, sending the magnets rattling to the floor.

  “No!” he roared, like an animal, one I’d never seen before. I knew my brother had big feelings inside him, but they’d never been this wild—this unpredictable. He took off down the hall, shouting, “I don’t want to play with Nina! I don’t want to play with anyone!”

  His eyes went to me for just a split second. He saw my fear. But instead of acknowledging it, he tore his gaze away in disgust and stormed up the stairs. Like a moon, I continued to orbit him, drifting toward the foot of the steps, watching him stomp away from us.

  “No no no no no!” he screamed. I took one step up, an almost- instinctual response. But Mom was behind me then and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Let him go,” she said. She let out a third sigh, three sighs too many for me. She went back to the kitchen. I stood in the hallway, staring up into the angry dark.

  Dad got back from the supermarket with Eli, and when he saw Mom’s expression, he plopped my little brother down next to me, in front of the TV. Over the rustle of grocery bags, their voices rose, terse and fretting.

  “We should put him in therapy.”

  “Leave it alone, Marc. He’s busy enough. And hand me the peas.”

  “There’s no shame in it.”

  “He’s just started middle school. It’s normal to be moody—”

  “Right. He’s a normal eleven-year-old boy. And you’ve never been one. You don’t know how hard it can be.”

  “He has us,” she said, but it sounded insufficient, even to me. Because this was his constant refrain: Mom wasn’t a boy, wasn’t a man. Mom could never, ever know.

  They went back and forth like that for a while. Finally, Dad convinced Mom that Jamie would be happier if he and Dad went running together every morning. Better to pound pavement than fists, Dad said, like it was a joke, but I had trouble seeing what was funny about it. I didn’t think Jamie should have been pounding anything, anyone. But Dad knew best, so Dad decided.

  Dad was still talking when I pushed out of the recliner and made my way upstairs. Nobody noticed I left, not even Eli. But if they weren’t thinking about Jamie, then they certainly weren’t thinking of me.

  I knew Jamie. I knew how to talk to him. How to see him, even when Mom and Dad didn’t. I pressed my face to his door. “Jamie?” I whispered.

  His voice came back swiftly, like he’d been waiting for me.

  “Leave me alone.”

  I closed my eyes and let my forehead rest on the hollow square of wood. I felt like I was broken inside, splintering. But I’d always been able to fix this before. Jamie needed Gumlea to feel better, to feel himself. So I wandered into my room. I stood in the dim light of twilight, watching the wallpaper go gray. I searched for something—a key, a talisman—that could unlock my brother.

  My eye fell on the old drawing I’d done of him: Jamie with an eye missing. Jamie with magic streaming out. I could see now that the hands had been drawn poorly, that the likeness was vague. But that picture had once meant the world to him. We’d told so many stories about Gumlea, but now, as we careened toward adolescence, the epic saga of the Nameless Boy had become
his favorite. With every passing day, the mythology had become more elaborate. Shadowed by his familiar, a wise old hare, the Nameless Boy walked through Gumlea’s wilds searching for a home. He wasn’t a Feral Child, although he’d lived under the Emperata’s care for a time. He wasn’t a Winter Watcher, either. He wasn’t a pirate, and he certainly was no mermaid, though both the mermaids and pirates had tried to claim him for themselves. He was a traveler, an itinerant, and he belonged to only himself.

  And yet according to our prophecies, this anonymous boy was heir to all of Gumlea’s riches, the greatest protector of her magic, and the one who would somehow, someday, kill the King. And once that happened, he’d use his knife—his trusty old scalloped blade with a ruby set in its hilt—to open the Veil between the worlds. That’s when Emperata Annit would lead her armies into our universe and kill everyone who had ever hurt us.

  It was a satisfying revenge fantasy.

  We hadn’t gotten there yet in our stories. Right now, the Nameless Boy was still sojourning with the Feral Children. But soon, he would leave them. We were dancing closer to the climax of our story, day by day by day.

  That picture was a promise to my brother, in a way. A promise that Emperata Annit would keep him safe. A promise that she—that I—understood him. So I plucked it down from the wall.

  I went to Jamie’s door again and pushed the single flat sheet below the gap. I was going to knock, but I didn’t have to. The door swung open. There stood my brother, paper in hand, his face puffy from crying. He didn’t tell me to come in. He didn’t need to tell me anything. He shut the door behind me, and we sat together on his bed in silence for a long time. He stared down at the page and cried.

  I put my hand on his. Squeezed it. But there was something in me—an angry shard. You could hear the flinty edge when I spoke.

  “You brought Nina into Gumlea. You didn’t even think about how that would make me feel.”

  He was quiet for a long time. When he answered me, he sounded like a little boy. “I thought she would understand.”

  Well, of course she didn’t. It was weirder to me that this was news to Jamie than it had been that he’d brought her at all. “What do you care about Nina all of a sudden, anyhow?” I asked, and if I’d tried to make my voice sound neutral, I failed miserably.

  He looked up at me, his eyes empty vessels, and my heart sank down into my gut.

  “You like her?”

  “I thought if we showed her Gumlea, she’d—I, I don’t know what I thought.”

  “She’s ridiculous. She’s always been ridiculous, Jamie—”

  “No.” My brother drew in a shaking breath. “I want to go by James now. Jamie’s a little kid’s name. And this stuff, Gumlea. I— You’re right. I made a mistake. It has to be a secret. We can’t tell anyone. Nobody.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really sure why I was agreeing to something so obvious. It’s not as if there was anyone I wanted to tell; Gumlea belonged to me and Jamie alone—no one else. If I was honest with myself, though, the word felt bitter on my tongue, because I suspected Jamie’s reasons for saying it were not the same as mine for agreeing. I wasn’t embarrassed by what Nina had said. Why should Jamie be?

  “Dad’s going to make you start running, you know,” I said, changing the subject.

  “Cool,” my brother replied faintly. My stomach squeezed painfully. But then he looked right at me. His eyes weren’t empty hollows. They were my eyes, and they were grateful. “Thanks, Annie,” he whispered.

  I didn’t answer. There were no words for what I was feeling. Instead, I got up and left my brother alone in his room.

  8

  HE UNSHEATHED HIS BLADE AND crept closer to the creature. His hand still shook, but less now. He was making plans: first, he’d sink the blade into her throat, just a nick, then draw it across the thin flesh there. It would be easy. She’d bleed out fast. He’d have to skin her later, but he knew that Ijah would show him how to arrange the parts for proper ceremony and burning.

  But when he got there, the fairy’s breathing had stopped. Her chest was still. Her eyes, between rivers of now-still blood, had a dull, waxy look.

  Ijah, sensing Boy’s dejection, raced to his side. “She’s gone,” he said, as if it weren’t obvious. “You were too slow. You missed your tithe.”

  Boy let out a roar of frustration. He turned to a tree beside them and hurled the knife into it, striking true and deep. Years later, when the Nameless Boy was just a legend, the children would gather at this tree to tell stories about him, leaving offerings tangled in the roots.

  We may have felt like the woods out back were ours alone, but they belonged to everybody in the neighborhood. Even if the other kids couldn’t penetrate the Veil between our world and Gumlea, there was no keeping the other kids out of the tangle of forest that bordered their yards, too. After what happened with Nina, Jamie was worried we’d be discovered, and so we learned how to slip out of Gumlea more quickly, the way we peeled off our synagogue clothes as soon as we got home. One moment, we’d be storming the King’s tower, demanding a ransom for our captured familiars; the next, we would be sitting on a log, pretending to play rock paper scissors for the right to pick a family movie that night. We’d pretend to be totally normal kids, for the benefit of kids like Neal and his brother who had just wandered out to play with mine.

  That year, around our parents, we began to deliberately mispronounce it as “Glumly” or “Gummy,” as if that concealed what we’d been doing out in the woods every single day after school. Around the other kids and our teachers, we were silent. Jamie never admitted to them that he read fantasy novels, much less that he’d been working on a grand fantasy of his own. If someone asked him, he’d tell them that he liked books about sports. Nonfiction, mostly.

  Somehow, Nina never told anyone except her mother about that day. So to strangers, my brother was still cool. Still functional. Still brilliant. And over the course of sixth grade, separated from me, he bloomed into a full-fledged popular kid. He was a sports star who won spelling bees and math contests, though he was smart enough to pretend that he didn’t know how to write a poem or a story. Those were gay, he’d tell his friends in his woods, snorting. All the while, he was saving his poetry and his stories for me.

  So of course I kept Gumlea a secret, too, for him. After what happened with Nina, he decided that there were only ever two people in Gumlea anyway: the storyteller and the archivist. He was the one who created our legends, and I was the one who wrote them down. And in the months after the Nina Incident, I even helped him chronicle the punishments that would befall either of us if one of us let the truth spill out. We’d bleed for the King to make up for our sins. We’d leave our own teeth or fingers or eyeballs inside his tower. We promised each other, signing our names at the back of the leather notebook I’d saved up to buy at the witch store downtown.

  It seemed like a small price to pay to keep Gumlea alive, to keep going back there. I didn’t have any reason to tell anyone, anyway. Not until Miranda.

  It was an ordinary spring morning, until it wasn’t. I got on the bus and my usual spot, right up front behind the bus driver next to the window, was taken. It was a girl I’d never seen before, about my age, with a pointy little nose and high cheekbones and eyes like drops of ink. She looked kind of like an elf, and she was even wearing this silver cuff over one ear. Swirling loops of metal. Like something a warrior might wear.

  I sat down next to her. “That’s my seat,” I said. I wasn’t angry. Confused, though, by this strange, sugar-spun creature who was suddenly occupying my world.

  “Sorry,” she said, and I thought maybe she was doing that apologizing thing that some girls do. But she didn’t sound sorry.

  I felt something new. A bright crack of dawn. I liked this girl.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Here. Wiltwyck. I was going to Springtown Valley, but they kicked my family out because we watched too much television.”
>
  Springtown Valley was in Elting, the next town over, a hippie school that my mom liked but we couldn’t afford.

  “What’s wrong with television?”

  “I don’t know. Something about our souls. Are you going to tell me your name?”

  It was kind of like talking to myself—someone who didn’t care about what others thought about her, or maybe did care and wanted others to think the worst.

  “Annie [Redacted],” I told her, and I held out my hand. We shook firmly, like men might.

  “Miranda Morganson,” she answered.

  “That’s like a superhero name,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered, and when she smiled, her nose wrinkled just a little.

  Maybe it would have been love at first sight, if we’d been older than fifth graders. Instead, it was the first flash of friendship I’d ever felt. Our heartbeats weren’t paired like mine and Jamie’s were. We didn’t share secret languages or secret mythologies. But on that day on the bus, and every day after, we began to turn over the rocks of one another’s pasts. She told me about her parents’ divorce, the summers she spent at her uncle’s farm, the little sister her mother would be having soon with her new husband. I told her about Elijah, and how I’d hated him at first. I told her about drawing. About books. About Jamie.

  But there were things I never spoke of, secrets I kept. I never said anything about Gumlea, of course. But as the weeks passed, the temptation kept rising up over and over again. Was this what had happened with Jamie, just a few months before, with Nina? But Miranda and Nina were nothing alike—Miranda would understand. Probably. And soon, I found I actually wanted to tell her.

  It was weeks before I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, one evening when he was draped over the living room chair, reading a library copy of The Wind Through the Keyhole.

  “Jamie?” I asked. Standing in the doorway, I saw how the evening light silhouetted him. He was like a shadow on a throne. More an absence of a thing than a thing itself.