There’s a rustle of movement behind her, and when she turns she finds a girl with pigtails, who stands half-hidden by a tree trunk and looks like she could be seven or eight years old except that she’s at least as tall as Temple—like an overgrown baby in a checkered dress.
The girl peeks out from behind the tree trunk and picks at the bark nervously with her thick fingertips.
Temple gazes at her, trying to hold her vision in place.
Where’d you come from, little miss? Temple asks.
From town.
Temple can hear the engine of her car still running in the distance.
How long’ve I been out?
The girl doesn’t answer. She keeps her eyes trained on Temple and picks at the tree bark.
Come on, Temple says. I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you lurkin back there for?
The girl says nothing.
Did you see the monster? The one that hit me? You don’t have to worry—I ain’t gonna let him get you.
The girl looks around, but not fearfully. She mumbles something that Temple can’t quite hear.
What? What you sayin?
The girl repeats herself in a curiously deep but still frail voice:
I said I’m gon kill you.
For the first time Temple can see there’s something wrong with the girl’s teeth—instead of being in neat rows, they seem to stick out every which way, some of them even poking out from between her lips when her mouth is closed.
I’m gon kill you, the girl repeats.
What you wanna kill me for?
Y’ain’t no kin-mind.
Kin-mind? What you sayin?
Y’ain’t no kinnamind.
Kin of mine? You sayin I ain’t no kin of yours?
I’m gon kill you.
I don’t think so, girl. Go play somewhere else. It’s time for Temple to rise and shine.
She lifts herself to her feet, balancing herself with her arms outstretched as though she were walking a tightrope.
When she’s steady, she looks up and finds the girl has come out from behind the tree. For the first time she sees the girl’s bulk, thick all around like a walking log. There’s something wrong with her arm, and when Temple looks more closely she sees that all the skin of the hand and forearm has peeled back to expose the bones, the tendons, the brownish meat and muscle. It doesn’t seem to be a wound—she can see the muscles roiling with strength. In some areas there even seems to be a white chitinous crust formed in patches over the arm.
Not to mention the long kitchen knife gripped in the skinless hand.
I’m gon kill you.
Easy there, Miss Muffett.
The girl comes at her, the knife raised. Temple trips the girl and dodges the blade. But she takes the full impact of the girl’s body against her own. She’s knocked to the ground and all the wind goes out of her. Coughing, she hops up into a crouch, her head swimming, the girl standing over her with the knife.
Let up, little girl, Temple says. Or I’m gonna have to hurt you.
But the girl stretches out her leg and thrusts her foot into Temple’s chest, and it feels like a sledgehammer driving her backward. She drags herself back, away from the advancing girl, watching those exposed fingerbones tighten skeletal around the handle of the knife.
Then a man’s voice, in the trees:
Millie, what the hell you doin girl? I tole you just to watch her till I got back.
A man, different from the one she saw before, but big, like the other, graying skin pulled away in parts, one eyelid sewn shut over a sunken hole.
He points to the knife in the girl’s hand.
Mama’s gon kill you she finds out you been in her kitchen. Come on, now, Mama told us to bring this one back too.
And they lift her, one on each side, and she can smell the reechy rot of their skin, and her head swims and her stomach bubbles, and she tries to use her legs to keep up, but most of the time she just feels her feet dragging along the ground.
THEY CARRY her to the road, and she notices, through the blurry haze of her vision, that the car is empty. Maury is gone. She wonders where he could have gotten to. She wonders, in a distant way, if they have taken him away.
Farther down the road they come to a town, little more than a crossroads with small brick shops. She can feel her feet bump over the rails of an old railroad track running east and west, one of the long red-striped wooden guards pointing straight up to the darkening sky, another broken off a couple feet above the base.
She tries to walk on her own but stumbles and lets herself be carried. Her shoulders ache and her arms are sore where their bony hands are gripped around them.
The streets are empty. They drag her in the direction of a building on the corner. It is shaped like a town hall or a municipal building. It says something over the door, but she doesn’t know the words.
Then a voice she recognizes—a man’s voice—calls out from behind them.
Just one goddamn second, the voice says.
The hands let go of her, and she drops to her knees and keels forward. Her head turns in circles, and her stomach, and the gravel on the street digs into her palms. It takes all her effort, but she turns and lifts her head enough to see.
Moses Todd, she says.
It’s him, sure enough. There he stands, like some kind of cowboy, in the middle of the intersection, a broken stoplight swaying slightly over his head and in his outstretched arm a pistol leveled at the man standing over her.
Step away from the girl, Moses Todd says.
But something happens, and the man with the sewn-shut eyelid moves behind her suddenly and closes his hands around her skull like a vise and lifts her upright so she has to reach up and grab his wrists to keep her neck from snapping.
Put yer gun down, the man says, his voice wet and loud just behind her. Put it down now or I’m gon kill her.
Moses laughs and keeps the gun steady.
Look at the pickle you got yourself in, little girl. Seems like everybody in the world wants a share of your final breaths.
I swear hell I’m gon kill her, says the man again, wrenching her head slightly to the side.
Then Moses Todd raises his gaze from Temple to the man, and a serious look comes across his face.
She ain’t yours to kill, he says. She’s mine.
And the gun explodes and she feels a wetness spray the back of her head and the hands holding her up go slack and she drops to the ground and looks behind her and sees the body of the man collapsed on the tarmac, the back of his head spilled open and a soft mushy hole in his face where his left cheek used to be.
The girl Millie who was standing on the other side of her is already running away around the corner of the brick building.
Temple manages to lift her body up to a sitting position, her knees numb beneath her.
Moses Todd walks over and towers in front of her. He looks down at her, almost sadly.
Now it’s your turn, little girl. I told you you should of killed me.
You did, she says, trying to find out where in her body all her strength was hiding at the moment. You sure enough did.
I reckon your life is mine twice over now, he says. Once by debt and once by forfeit.
I reckon it is.
You got anything else you want to say?
Her head swirls like a stirred pot. She feels for any spare force in her arms, but it’s not there. They hang limply at her sides. She’s tired. She’s never been so tired, and that’s saying something because she’s been tired a lot in the stretching span of her lifetime.
Don’t worry yourself about it, she says. I guess I could of seen Niagara Falls once—that would of been nice. But it don’t matter much.
Niagara Falls. How come?
Beats me. It’s just big is all I know. One of God’s marvels.
Moses Todd nods his head.
Yeah, he says.
She looks up at him, and the corners of his mouth creep up into something like a smile, a smile that says, It’s okay I’m with you there in your smoky little girlhead, and he sighs heavily and looks on down the road into the distance.
All right, then, he says and raises the pistol to her forehead. It’ll be quick—you’ll start dreamin of heaven before you feel a thing. But you might want to close your eyes.
She does, she closes her eyes and thinks of all sorts of things, Malcolm and Maury the dummy and the lighthouse where you could see the vastness of the ocean, and she thinks about flying over that ocean and watching it unfold under her for ever and ever, skimming the surface and going faster and faster until everything blurs from speed and up and down don’t mean anything and the air becomes thick and solid around her and the face of God is right there too, nuzzling up against her, and amen she says, amen, amen, amen—
She hears the shot—and something’s wrong, because she knows she shouldn’t hear anything. But her head is mixed up, and she’s sweating a lot now, and part of her mind is still flying over the surface of the ocean—and she opens her eyes and sees Moses Todd before her, dropping the pistol to the ground and gripping his shoulder, blood coming out brown from between his fingers.
Son of a bitch, he says and starts to back away from her.
Then, from behind, a number of figures, there must be six or seven, large and malformed, move around her and tackle Moses Todd to the ground where he continues to shout out, Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, until she’s breathing so hard that she can see little light explosions in her eyes, and she eases herself to the ground and wonders when she will actually die because she’s awfully tired, so terribly tired, and Moses Todd is right—there are debts she owes to the perfect world and she feels like she has cheated them for too long already.
INSIDE THE town hall are rows of desks scattered with the detritus of a different age. Dusty computer screens, mugs full of ballpoint pens, framed photographs, ceramic pots with viney plants long dead, their dry tendrils snaking along windowsills—here and there smears of black-brown dried blood across the blotters.
The screen of one of the computer monitors is broken out and propped up inside, grinning and still bespectacled, is the ancient dried head of a man.
They take her to the back of the building, through a pair of swinging doors and down a flight of marble steps into the basement, a large central room with a row of five or six jail cells against the back wall. Against another wall are two tables built high with teetering lab equipment—the kind she’s seen in meth dens, but not exactly. In the middle of the room there’s a metal table with high edges and a drain—an autopsy table—except this one is jury-rigged with belts to help keep the body down. And next to the autopsy table is something that looks like a dentist’s chair. The linoleum floor is crusted over with flaky blood and dried bits of gore.
