Afterward, Rebecca would never shake the idea that Kaylene had caused it all. That she’d gotten careless, let Jess’s Stockade and the San Juan Island mists lull her into believing she was safe or invisible, and so uncovered a little too much of her light. And her light had lured the world back to them, and restarted everything.
Of course, that was ridiculous, and Rebecca knew it even at the time. Down deep, she knew the world had always been coming, is always coming. And nothing ends until everything does.
But until that moment, savaging her drums on that garishly green dive-club stage, she’d let them both pretend they’d forgotten. She’d stopped admitting having the dreams, even to Kaylene. She’d never mentioned the three separate instances during the past two years, all on late-night, rain-swept ferry crossings, when the water churned in the wake of their slow passage and the misty, landless night seemed to suspend them in the Strait, when she’d glanced up from the rail or the cabin bench where she’d huddled and saw …
Thought she saw …
What?
A ghost. A hint of wet, blond hair under a hood. A glimpse of a pale, too-wide face, smiling, wreathed in fog, as though hiding behind a curtain. The face she’d smashed to pieces. The one inside the other face she’d smashed to pieces. The face of the woman who’d warned them about monsters, saved them from monsters, and was one.
But she wasn’t here. She could not be here, even if she’d survived. Which she couldn’t have. Not through the hailstorm Rebecca had unleashed, the back of the shovel slamming down, down, through, smashing and splintering. Mashing and pulping.
Even if Sophie had survived that, how could she possibly have found them? Why would she want to?
She couldn’t be here. Rebecca knew that. And so she’d decided that imagining her presence, or worse, admitting those imaginings, naming what she’d imagined, could only give the ghost power. Saying aloud what she thought she’d seen would poison what Jess had so miraculously salvaged. What she’d rebuilt and reclaimed. What they all had. No one in Jess’s compound had ever made a rule about not mentioning monsters. But that was only because none of them imagined it necessary. Because they all understood.
The Stockade was a Monster-Free Zone. More, actually. It was a zone where monsters had never actually been, or even existed. Joel, Jess, Eddie, Benny, they all instinctively clung to that.
Kaylene, too. Maybe Kaylene most of all. She’d done battered-women’s shelter work, after all. Gotten training. Kaylene, more than any of them, knew the role of sanctuary space in recovery.
That was why, at the moment it happened, Rebecca was probably thinking less about Halfmoon Lake woods, or Halfmoon House, or the friends and loved ones she’d lost there, or the creatures she’d killed there, than at any other moment, waking or sleeping, in the five years since.
They were, mid-show and mid-song at the Caiman Club, way down at the still-ragged edge of the Drive, with the Vancouver rain they could no longer hear battering the roof overhead, and the green and gold Caiman Club lights strobing and spattering the stage. Rebecca had her sticks whirling and pummeling (not like her killing shovel, or just like that shovel, but she wasn’t thinking that), her mouth streaming words Kaylene was shrieking up front in the dry-ice whirl. She was watching the stripes on Kaylene’s dress suck light into themselves, watching Kaylene’s tights pumping like pistons as she caught Rebecca’s rhythm and stomped it down into the stage and through the crowd. There really was a crowd when Sock Puppet played, now, so many wild-eyed teens and Simon Fraser girls and Hewlett-Packard office escapees still in their office wear, almost all of them shrieking along. Some even knew the words, and every single one of them rattled and shuddered and smacked into gobs of light that broke over their faces like eggs, colored them caiman-skinned, remade them new and strong and wild. Like sock puppets Rebecca and Kaylene had knitted out of nothing, out of notes and air, and shaken to life. Like a whole new species, mostly but not entirely female, fierce and armored and numerous enough to be safe, savage and joyful enough to be free.
Kaylene had brought her bag onstage, but Rebecca hadn’t asked what was in it. She just kept working her arms, driving the drums, herding the beat harder and faster ahead of her. She was hunched low on her stool to ride it harder, still, and when Kaylene spun momentarily out of the lights, the lights followed, chasing, but couldn’t catch her. Rebecca laughed, delivered another cannonade on her snare, shout-sang and laughed as her best friend—the last one she had, the one who’d made it, and with whom she’d made all of this—dropped to her knees.
In slow motion, it seemed—in jerky, flipbook lurches through the strobing smoke—Kaylene slashed down at the strings on her guitar, freed a buzzcloud of a chord, and fumbled at the mouth of the bag. The bag fell away, spun off on a current of air, and Kaylene rose, her hands rising with her, unfolding as they came, reshaping. Resurrecting.
The thing in her hands rose on its own. Seemed to. Like a winged thing. It flew up over Kaylene’s head, darting and bobbing through the shafts of light, and settled in her hair. Grabbed hold there.
The Whistler’s hat.
Before Kaylene had even straightened her guitar on her shoulders, Rebecca was off her stool, off the ground, sailing through and over her drums, light streaming from her skin and screams from her throat as her hands rose to meet it.