Ella left in shambles, more disturbed for what she’d seen and couldn’t understand than Sophie, who’d been its source. Sophie, who she’d left sitting on the bank of the creek, dripping and stunned, watching her walk away. Collecting herself on the walk home, Ella assembled a fake story about how mellow things had been at her tia’s house—which tia not important, her story would be brief, vague, delivered with a shrug, the low-grade sulkiness her family had come to expect from her, dismissing it with humor as hormones. What a relief to get some time alone! Ella would cry, grateful and complaining at the same time. She would be a regular girl, a teenager, a fashion magazine rolled glossy in the hand. Not a girl whose best friend had almost died from a freak drowning accident while not actually in any water. Not a girl whose best friend had lost her mind. Ella’s heart felt tight with sorrow and panic. What if what was wrong with Sophie was contagious? She rued their choice of the creek as their secret meeting place. Who knows what toxins had seeped into the banks, what invisible fumes had wafted up from the crumbly dirt, poisoning them? Ella’s mind spun. She would go home to her computer and google remedies for toxic waste exposure, she would find the antidote and she would scrub the vapors from the inside.
* * *
AT THE CREEK, Sophie lingered. She wasn’t ready to go home, to walk her changed, stranged self into her regular old house, to see everything so normal and dull when she felt extraordinary. She sat at the bank, the night around her ringing in empty silence. The echoes of her fight with her friend had faded, but Sophie felt charged from the conflict, from the mermaid. How would she be able to sleep? How would she ever be able to sleep again?
Stabbing at the ground with a dusty stick, Sophie half-wished she smoked. It gave you something to do when you weren’t sure what to do next. She dropped the stick, took a snarl from the base of her skull into her hand and began to unweave it. The untangled hair frizzed in a kink, like the strands were just dying to snarl themselves together again. Sophie smoothed them with her fingers. She thought of the mermaid’s hair. It would be a full-day project, untangling that mess.
Sophie heard the pigeons before she saw them, alerted by the music of their feathers. The bamboo whistles fluted gently, almost like wind in a tree. The flock of them descending before her was something. Their dark mass not fully visible in the night, just shapes landing, the noise of their flutter, the wind of them coming to a stop in the air and settling to the ground.
Sophie faced them. Am I crazy, she asked herself, or have these pigeons come to see me? The head pigeon waddled forth from the pack, her tiny, bobbing head flicking on her neck, trying to get the best angle with which to regard Sophie. Her bamboo flute stuck stiffly behind her, like the cumbersome but dignified sword worn by a long-ago soldier. Behind her, the flock took a collective, respectful step back. Not crazy, Sophie decided, and pulled her sea glass from her shirt. It didn’t have quite the regal affect she wanted it to have, strung as it was to a piece of grimy cord, her house key dangling beneath it. It should be on a golden chain, Sophie thought. It should be hung from a rope of pearls. Still, it caught the bit of moonlight the night sky had to offer and lit with a dull gleam, an echo of the undersea glow it had shared with the mermaid.
“Is it okay,” the pigeon began, “if we talk to you? We don’t want to scare you.”
The pigeon’s voice was beautiful. It was a soothing sound, melodious. It was a lullaby, a noise made with love to address the beloved, a coo. Sophie wondered if the bird spoke in such a way to everyone, or if she were special. Then she realized that a pigeon was speaking to her, and realized she was in fact quite special. Special, not crazy.
“You don’t scare me,” Sophie responded. “Are you Livia, Dr. Chen’s pigeon?”
The bird ducked its head in a deliberate nod. “Dr. Chen takes care of us. We roost in the home she keeps for us on her roof. But we are all our own birds.” The flock cooed in agreement.
“Sophie,” Livia began. “We know so much about you. We’ve been waiting for you for so long; generations of pigeons speak of your coming. We can’t believe we are so lucky to be here, in Chelsea, at the time of your arrival. We’ve been keeping your story for you, and the greater story you are to become a part of. We’ve taken such care to repeat the story carefully, to remember all the details and not confuse them. Your story is so old, none of us can trace its origin, it’s just the story we have always been told and have grown to tell our fledglings. Back when there were carrier pigeons, the carrier pigeons told the story of you. Back before we were degraded, when we were called rock doves and lived in barns and trees and were regarded by humans the way other birds are regarded, respected, even then we told your story.”
“But then there was rebellion—” another bird stepped forwarded, his waddle more pronounced. Sophie could see that one of his pink bird legs ended not in a pronged claw, but in a mottled bundle, a blob. It looked painful to walk upon, and she watched the bird shift its weight, holding the wounded foot gingerly above the ground. “When the wars with the humans began, when they started leaving us poison, poison to eat and poison to land in, just poison everywhere, and that foolish rice they think we’d be dumb enough to eat, and throwing nets over our homes so that we were separated from our babies and our babies would die, and when they nailed jagged things to where we slept so that we had to roam the streets, looking for a safe place to sleep that wasn’t netted or poisoned or nailed with jagged things—”
“Arthur,” Livia cooed at the bird, who had gotten quite heated, his feathers trembling.
“All I mean is, throughout all of this, still we kept your story, all of us here.” Arthur’s wing swung out from his side and motioned to the shifting crowd behind him. “Many birds refused. They almost had me convinced, too, after my accident.” Arthur shook his melted foot at Sophie. “I was so hurt and in such pain. I thought, Why should we do anything for people, when they are trying, day and night to kill us?”
“Arthur,” Livia cooed.
“I know,” he assured her. “Livia brought me to my senses. It’s the darkness in the humans that makes them do such things. I tried to explain this to the rebellion, but they didn’t want to hear it. They refused to keep your story, or worse, they tried to scramble it, tell a false story, and fill it with misinformation.”
“Why?’ Sophie asked, distraught at the thought of a flock of shit-talking pigeons out to smear her name.
“Because they hate humans,” Arthur explained with a feathery shrug. “And you have been sent here to save them.”
“Save humans?” Sophie asked. “Save them from what?”
“From themselves, dear,” Livia spoke. “From the darkness inside them. You have felt it, is that correct? How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” Sophie said. The birds cooed and fluttered.
“Well, thirteen, yes, surely you would have felt some of this, this human darkness? The mermaid, there in the creek. She showed it to you, is that right?” The bird spoke with a politeness that seemed to belong to another era. If she were a woman, Sophie thought, a straw hat would sit on her head, and her hands would wear white gloves. Sophie held on to this idea of Livia as the reminder of what happened in the creek began to curl the edges of her memory. If all the pain the world had ever felt, the pain of the predator and of the victim, if all that madness had been stuffed into a cave to fester and ferment for a hundred thousand years—that was the hole Sophie had been dropped into. The recollection made the hair across her body stand as if surged with electricity, and her bowels churned like she’d eaten something foul.
“Oh,” said Livia, waddling toward the girl. “Oh, now, I didn’t mean to—” Livia lept upon Sophie’s shoulder and placed the soft tip of her wing to her clammy forehead. “Salt!” Livia barked, and a handful of birds took the sky, scattering in different directions. Livia unfolded her wing and fanned Sophie’s sweating face.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie murmured. “I don’t know why I feel so sick all of a sudden. If I could lie down…”
A trio of birds swept the dirt with their wings, brushing back rocks and chip bags, plastic soda cups and smashed glass. Sophie laid her head on the soft patch of dirt they’d combed for her. She could feel where her wet hair had crusted to her cheeks, stuck there with mud and creek grime. She placed her hands to her gurgling stomach. “The creek water,” she said to the bird. “I was in the creek… or the water got in me, I don’t know…”
“It’s not that, lovey,” cooed the bird, pushing cooled air through her feathers and into Sophie’s face. Sophie inhaled the smell of the bird. Not the stink of a rat, though Sophie now realized she had never smelled a rat. Livia smelled like hay, Sophie imagined, something woodsy and warm. Like the pavement, yes, but like the pavement on a hot day, baked like clay, a clean-dirty smell. Livia smelled like Sophie did after a day playing in the sun. A sort of golden sweat. But she smelled like flowers, too. Like lilacs, that faint, watery fragrance. It calmed Sophie.
“You smell nice,” she complimented the bird.
“Oh, why thank you,” Livia cooed. “I try to take care of myself, you know.”
Beside them two birds soared to the dirt, their wings high, their beaks stuffed. Quickly they spat onto the ground.
“I’ve got rock salt from the big pile,” said the one, his words twisted with the terrible taste of the salt. Sophie had never seen a pigeon spit before, and watched with interest as the bird spat and spat again, its tough little bird-tongue sticking out from its beak.
“That’s enough,” Livia scolded. “Thank you very much.” The bird waddled away, an agitated sound like an endless sneeze coughing from its beak. The other bird dropped its offering.
“Salt packets,” it explained proudly. “From the McDonald’s on the parkway.” The small paper packets sat in the moonlight.
“Very good,” Livia praised. “Both of you, well done.” The second pigeon waddled back into the flock, indistinguishable.
“Sophie,” Livia said, “you must eat the rock salt now, please. You will feel better.”
“The mermaid gave me salt,” Sophie said.
“Yes, that salt saved your life, dear. That is a powerful salt. But this will help.”
“Help what?” Sophie said, tossing the gravelly salt into her mouth. The searing sharpness soothed her. She sucked on it like a piece of candy.
“When you experience the darkness, it takes a toll. A very real toll. On your mind and your body. The salt is purifying. It’s healing. You will need to take in a lot of salt, Sophie, after what you’ve seen. You’ve seen the—the—well, I’m not sure what to call it. The darkness? The, the evil?”
“Hell?” Arthur suggested. “I mean, it sounds like hell to me.”
Sophie imagined all the words and images she knew to represent that place, hell. What she had seen contained all the despair, all the violence and eternity of those pictures of wailing humans and creepy demons, but worse, because words and pictures weren’t feelings. No matter how hard a writer or painter would try to make someone feel the pain of such a place, they could never come close. Only the mermaid could, and Sophie, and the conduit of the talisman, and the water, the charged and salty water, with all its contaminants.
“You must take lots of salt,” Livia said. “To heal yourself. So that you may remember without becoming sick.”
“But—that?” Confused, Sophie tried to make sense of too much. “I’m going to do something about that?”
“Oh, yes,” Livia nodded, which, Sophie noticed was a different motion than her regular constant head-bobbing. It was deeper, with a stronger purpose. “You will train for it, with the mermaid and with others, but—yes, Sophie You are going to take that, all of that, into your body. And from your body it will be released. Here.” The bird tore open the McDonald’s salt packet with her beak and waggled it at the girl. Sophie took it from the bird’s tiny mouth and poured it onto her tongue.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Of course.”
“What if I don’t want to do it?” Sophie asked. It felt like worrying a cut, poking a loose tooth with her tongue. Maybe she didn’t want to know the answer.
“Oh, you will,” Livia insisted.
“But, what if I don’t?”
“Impossible,” chimed in Arthur.
“No, I can! Like I can just be all, No, sorry you guys, sorry mermaid, peace out, and take off. I can never come to this creek again. I can leave Chelsea, even. I can run away.”
“No, no, you can’t!” Livia’s melodious voice sounded anxious. “It just never, ever would occur like that. You are the one. We’ve all been waiting, longer than I can understand. You will do it.”
“It’s a done deal, kid,” Arthur seconded. “It’s as if it already happened. You won’t go nowhere. You’re one of us.”
“So,” Sophie said, not exactly glumly, but with very little cheer. “I’m going to feel everyone’s pain and eat a bunch of salt.”
“Well, ultimately, yes.” Livia nodded. “But so much is going to happen between now and then.”
* * *
SOPHIE SAT WITH the birds late into the night. The flock of them clustered around her. Some hopped into her lap and cooed, not unlike purring cats. Sophie felt like a bizarre Snow White. She half expected a happy creek rat to join their gathering, or a pompous sea gull or goofy raccoon. She petted the pigeons’ feathers and found they enjoyed being scratched deeply on their necks, like dogs or cats. “Ooooh, that feels good,” said a bird hunkered on her thigh. All of the birds spoke in the most calming of voices, the sound of the first drift of sleep as it washes over you. Even Arthur, rankled and crotchety, had a voice that lulled, even as it shared tales of injury and battle.
“There are some you can trust and others who mean you harm,” Livia said solemnly.
“Angel,” Sophie said quickly. “Angel is good. She knows things. She gave me my necklace.”
Livia bobbed her head affirmatively. “Yes, Angel is good. Hennie, too.”
“Hennie? The old lady at the grocery store? The weird grocery store? She’s—good?”
“She’s on your side,” Livia said. “She knows things. You can trust her.”
“She looks like a witch,” Sophie said uneasily.
“She is a witch,” Livia confirmed.
“See?” Arthur snapped. Even his snapping was still sweet to the ear. “See what I mean about humans? Oh, she looks like a witch. What does that even mean? She’s old? She’s, what, she’s a fat lady? She wears a funny hat on her head, what, she’s got a big nose or something?”
“I didn’t mean anything,” Sophie said quickly. “Her place is just sort of creepy is all.”
“Creepy,” Arthur spat with a coo. “Why, it’s all dusty inside? Dust is of the earth. Feathers are of the earth, your skin is of the earth. All of it will be dust.” Arthur rose up on his feet, one good and one bad, and he stretched his wings grandly, beat them upon the air. “Never think you’re better than any other living thing.”
“Arthur,” Livia chided.
“Here, here,” some birds in the back cooed, clapping their wings against their bodies.
“I have kept your story,” Arthur addressed Sophie. “Even when I haven’t felt sure it was the right thing. The right thing for pigeons. So I am here to help you, but you are not a pigeon.” Arthur stared his tiny orange eye into Sophie’s large brown one. “And my trust in you is not complete.”
“Okay,” Sophie said.
“Anyway,” Livia continued. “We’ve only been waiting hundreds of years to tell this girl these things, may I continue?”
“Continue,” Arthur said, with one last, grandiose beat of his wing.
“Hennie is a witch, and she will help you always. Angel—you knew that.”
“My mother?” Sophie asked.
Livia twitched. She bobbed her head at Arthur, at the others. The pigeon on Sophie’s thigh looked up at her briefly, and then buried her face into her feathers.
“We are unsure,” Livia said, regret in her voice like a new harmony. “This is the thread of the story that has been tampered with. Even with all our watching and observing, we have not been able to say for certain. She is either to be trusted, or she means you terrible harm.” Sophie could detect sadness in the pigeon’s eye.
“Okay,” Sophie said. She supposed she knew that already. “My grandmother?”
“Kishka—” Livia began.
“The worst!” Arthur shouted. “The absolute worst, most wicked woman in all of humanity. Oh, the pigeons she’s killed! With poisons, with her own hands! She has wiped out generations of our young! She’s even used a gun! She’s a cold-blooded murderer! Shooting at pigeons for fun, for a thrill! She’s a psychopath,” Arthur said darkly. “She’s evil to people, too.”
“You cannot trust her,” Livia said simply.
Arthur carried on. “She treats humans like pigeons, pigeons like humans, rats like humans, pigeons like rats, humans like rats. If it’s alive and it gets in her way, it’s all the same. A terrible woman, a monster.”
“She does not have your best interest at heart,” Livia said.
“Really?” Sophie pushed skeptically at the birds. “Are you sure Kishka just isn’t—I mean, I know she is very bad to pigeons, and I know she is a cranky old lady, but—what did you call her, Arthur? The worst, most terrible—”
“The absolute worst, most wicked woman in all of humanity!” Arthur proclaimed. “And no, it’s not just because of all she has done to hurt pigeons—though that would be enough! But she does not stop there. She means great harm to every living thing on this earth. She is barely of this earth, she comes from another place, a terrible place where everything awful in the world comes from.”
“But—” Sophie wanted to debate the bird. Kishka? Kishka was not a warm woman, but she was not very different than most old women in Chelsea. Old women who had had hard lives, worked tough jobs, who had immigrated, had left a whole other life behind. All the losses they’d had in this world. It’s hard to be an old woman, with all the bad parts of life piling up on your old lady shoulders.
“No buts,” Livia said sternly. Sternly, but softly. “It is important that you trust us. That you beware of her.”
Sophie shifted uncomfortably. It was true she felt a little scared of her grandmother, but everyone did. That didn’t make her evil. But there were things about Kishka, there always had been. She knew everything Kishka did—things that happened at home, at school, in her own head. Sophie had thought it was just something that grandmothers had, some special sense of their grandkids, because they were old and wise or something, but it was sort of weird. The cold feeling Sophie got when Kishka studied her like that. The way her perfume smelled, like nothing Sophie had ever smelled, lovely from a distance but close up—almost like a poison. Maybe she was just allergic?
But there were also her nightmares of Kishka, where her grandmother morphed again and again into figures and creatures, strange monsters that followed Sophie and could see her always, Sophie could never hide. Kishka was evil in these dreams, and when Sophie awoke from them her room always felt thick, like the air had become spongy, and she would pinch herself to be sure the dream was gone, because she could still feel this monster version of her grandmother there inside the room with her. Sophie shuddered.
“I don’t mean to scare you,” Livia said gently.
“I’m not scared, exactly,” Sophie said. “I’m just—you know, this is all a little crazy. It’s a lot crazy. I don’t think I’m crazy, but you got to admit all this is pretty seriously crazy.”
“Deciding you’re not crazy,” crowed Arthur, “is always a step in the right direction.”
“I will consider the possibility that my grandmother is evil.”
“You better consider it, kid. For all of our sake. Whatever stuff that mermaid showed you, that’s your grandma.”
“And what about the mermaid? She’s good, right?”
“Syrena is very good.” Livia nodded. “She has done you a wonderful favor, to come so far. You must take care to obey and respect her. She will teach you very much. Be kind to her. A little kindness goes far.”
“And Ella? My best friend, Ella?”
Livia was thoughtful. “It’s not that you can’t trust Ella,” she explained. “It will just take her a little while to understand.”
“By a little while, she means years,” Arthur butted in. “Don’t sugar-coat it, Livia. The girl needs to know.”
“People in their ignorance can often seem bad,” said Livia. “Ella will not be of help to you for years to come.”
“Years?” Sophie asked. “This—thing—is going to take years?”
Livia clucked, and the flock cooed behind her. “Oh, darling,” her lovely voice soothed. “This is going to take the rest of your life.”
