CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

 

There was something about Mister Gull's house that itched at the nape of Mrs Rosenfeld's neck.

It wasn't the wards thrown up around the fence line, or even the glamour thrown across the rotten boards. She could see through illusions like that easily enough. After all, they were tricks created by queens, and she'd been born to tear those tricks in half.

It was the arrogance of it all. To think he could squat here in the centre of someone else's creation and dictate terms. Cut chunks out of the old queen's power and twist it into something new.

Rosenfeld was no fan of either queen, but she was even less a fan of little creatures like Gull stealing their power and rising up to fill their shadows. It was like watching a child play with a grenade. Only so long before they figured out how to pull the pin and turned themselves and everyone around them to paste.

Gull wasn't home. She could sense that from the way the air around his bungalow vibrated. An empty house sounded different to an occupied one in ways she couldn't describe.

Sometimes she wondered if that was the rule everywhere, or only in Rustwood. The town wasn't like other towns, she reminded herself. More like the old queen's playground. It ebbed and flowed with her moods. Grew overnight with an influx of new memories, concepts, souls. Collapsed into dust when buildings and streets had served their purpose.

Gull's house was the same. Grown, not built. Blood in its walls, staining its foundations. Prick it just right and it would scream, buck, lash out with teeth of stone and claws of plaster.

Better not to walk beyond the gate. Excise the whole structure and stitch the wound.

For that, she needed blood.

She told the Raconte twins to keep watch before crouching in the rain and dragging one thumbnail up the inside of her wrist. A sluggish spatter of blood ran into the cup of her palm, spilled between her fingers. She walked the perimeter of the house, not bothering to meet the suspicious glances of passers by – a couple in yellow rain jackets, arms linked, eyes shadowed; a pigtailed girl with her school backpack rushing from the bus-stop, frantic to escape the rain; three old men in plaid shirts, heedless of the storm, swearing and spitting as they reminisced.

Rosenfeld's blood was thicker than the rain. Where it touched the sidewalk, it stuck fast. The stain spread into the concrete, pooled between the cracks, expanded hungry tendrils into the earth. Ants skittering across the concrete refused to cross it, and a single cockroach caught outside the circle turned in helpless circles before being washed away by the rain, carried helplessly down the gutter.

She took her time circling Gull's house. She had to climb two fences to ring it properly, and her arm was throbbing by the time she was done, but it was worth it. A perfect chain of power.

The weathervane atop the peak of Gull's house creaked and cawed in the wind. The rain sleeted sideways, forcing Mrs Rosenfeld to squint into the gloom.

"You." She pointed to the first twin and waved for her to stand at the east edge of Gull's block. "And you, over there." It would've been better with four, to properly encircle the property, but three would do. Three was a number of power. Also a number of destruction, if you looked at it from the wrong angle. Even so, better a triangle than an octagon. Now, there was a bad shape. Eights always brought ill-tidings.

The girls were in place. The blood net was complete.

All she had to do now was snap that net shut.

 

Kimberly's first and best instinct as the corpse began to talk was run. Sprint up the stairs no matter how many flights awaited her on that almost infinite climb, kick down the front door and vanish into the rain.

But then where would she be? Same place as the day before. No answers, no direction.

So she waited, forcing her heartbeat to slow, calming her hands until she could clench them into controlled fists by her sides. She looked over the edge of the stairwell. Only a few yards below her - although she was sure it'd been a blot of colour in the distance only moments before - was the corpse. It'd twisted, glaring up at her sightless, rotten sockets. Its lower jaw hung open, teeth gleaming in receded gums. It had no tongue, and yet, it spoke.

"Mr Gull," she said. "Using a dead guy as a megaphone is low, even for you."

"Dead girl, actually," the corpse said. "And what would you rather I do? Make it dance? Wave semaphore flags? I use what I have, and I have what Rustwood provides. Bodies. There are always spare bodies around these parts."

Gull was probably far away, Kimberly told herself. Maybe hundreds of miles distant, chatting to her using the same strange powers that'd allowed Rosenfeld to locate her using an incantation and a bowl of blood. Gull was a pragmatist and a coward. He minimised risks. Wouldn't get close enough to let Kimberly grab him and mash his face into the floor.

He can't hurt you, not anymore. She told herself that, and remembered the scalpel descending. Her paralysis as he held the skittering creature over her mouth and forced it down her throat.

"You knew I'd come here."

"It's what I'd do," Mr Gull said, through the corpse. "You've been looking for answers a long time, and this is the best place for them, isn't it? Well, what would you like to know?"

Too many questions to contain inside a single angry request. She could've screamed at him for hours, but instead she settled for, "Are you the same Gull as in my town?"

"What's your town? What's my town? I crossed the borders as well, you know. Every Rustwood is identical to the one beside it. Well, almost identical. Like apartments in the same block. Same layout, different curtains."

"So you're not the same."

"I'm close enough to the Gull you left behind."

"So was there a different Kimberly here?"

"Different to you? I suppose. Haven't known you long enough to tell. You're cut from the same cloth, Ms Archer. Near enough as makes no difference to me. You both escaped over the mountain, after all."

"And you did the same thing to her? Put a..." She touched the point on her chest where the creature pressed outward against her skin. "Why did you do all this?"

"Right for the jugular. That's why I like you, Ms Archer. No screwing around. We have such similar minds like that. We choose our targets and hunt them down. I didn't mean for you to become my target, not like this, but there wasn't really any other way. There's a war brewing that's going to eat this town alive, and I couldn't wait long enough to spell out the whole situation. Drastic times, drastic measures, et cetera, et cetera."

"That's a whole lot of dancing around and not much answer."

"The art of avoiding a question is something you should practice at the first opportunity. You'll need those sorts of skills when you're the queen."

A fist of ice unfurled in Kimberly's guts. "I thought you wanted to bring them all down?"

"More than anything. They're twin poisons, mother and daughter carving this town down the middle. For a long time I thought that simply killing them both was the answer. Then I realised that some nations need to be ruled. That monarchs are the keystones holding the structure together. We could remove the queens if we wanted, but what would happen to us? What happens to all the people of Rustwood? Do they vanish? Get eaten by the void? We'll never know. I don't want to know. So I had to create a replacement. Now," Gull said, "I know what you're thinking. But it couldn't be me. I'm not built for that sort of responsibility. You, Ms Archer, you have all the right stuff. Anger when it counts. A disregard for rules. A willingness to break everything in your path. A firm boot on the back of the neck - your boot - will keep this town alive."

"I'm not going to be your queen."

"Not my queen. The people's queen." The corpse's eyes were terrible pits. The voice came from somewhere deep, reverberating inside the dead woman's chest before boiling out between yellowed teeth. Not spoken but intoned, forced into existence across a great cold distance. "Because that's what they want. That's what everyone wants, in the end. Someone to make the tough choices. Tell them where to go, who to love, what to think. That's what these queens do. They position us on their board and give us orders."

"I'm not-"

"Oh yes, even you. They're in our heads. All the people of this town follow orders even when they don't realise it. Me and you and Fitch, we're not outside the broadcast range. But for some reason, those commands... don't sink in. I never figured that part out, but there's always time for more experiments. All you need to understand is, you're one of the very few who can resist that call. That's why your little gift listens to you, not them. That's why it obeys. It won't hurt you. It's all insulated and you're its mother."

Gull's voice was almost drowned out by the whistle of fury rising in Kimberly's head. "You bastard. You don't get to decide-"

"Has it started working for you yet? Playing tricks? Teaching you how to twist the world?"

She could barely breathe. "Is that how you do it? You've got one of them inside you, too?"

"No, not me. Barely a sliver of a fragment of the power you have inside your hands, now. I'm only an imitation. You're the real deal. You're already on a road to something greater and by the time you're done..." A long pause. Kimberly imagined Gull on the other end of some terrible corpse telephone, drawing breath, trying to find the right words. "I hope you'll remember who made it possible."

She knelt on the stair. "I'll remember."

"Good. That's good, Ms Archer. And every queen relies on her advisers. I have several recommendations, but-"

"I'll remember how you lied. I'll remember the needle. I'll remember how much it hurt when that thing went down my throat." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I'm going to gut you, Gull."

No reply, not for a long time. Then, finally, breathless: "Something bad is happening to my home. I can feel it. Take care of yourself, Ms Archer. And if we meet again... be charitable. I did all this for the town, you understand. The town is everything."

The corpse fell silent. Kimberly didn't dare creep back down the stairs to poke it. Instead she pressed her palms to the wall.

She felt it. A shudder, rattling, like the strained breath of a man choking on phlegm.

She ran.

 

"That's it. Gentle, now. Don't want to mess up the weave."

Mrs Rosenfeld had once, on late night TV, heard the universe described as a rubber sheet stretched tight. That everything inside that universe - planets, suns, Rosenfelds - were weights distorting that sheet, drawn toward one another by the lumps and folds in the fabric. That sometimes the sheet tore. That things fell through the gaps... unless, the dour-faced presenter had explained... someone quickly stitched the tear together, or joined two tears with a fresh sleeve of fabric, allowing all those planets and suns to pop out somewhere else, somewhen else.

None of it made much sense to Rosenfeld at the time. She'd still been the pretender's catspaw then, a servant with a clear set of instructions and little wiggle-room for interpreting the foundations of the universe. But now, as the ritual took hold and Gull's home began to waver, she wondered whether that show had been right all along.

The ritual was simple. Most rituals were. Blood as a catalyst, intention as the driver. Together, she and the Raconte twins were taking a small section of Rustwood and excising it. Slicing away infected flesh and suturing the wound shut.

It was for the best. The more stains Gull left on Rustwood, the harder the town would be to clean once the war between the queens was over.

Problem was, it took a lot of force to erase a whole house from existence. Cutting out a chunk of the world tended to leave scars. She'd seen them before: Canif Street was one of the worst. A place where stolen power had been used indiscriminately, without control. It'd burned living men into the red brick walls on either side of the street, twisted that rubber sheet into a nasty knot.

It was easier to remove something small - a sofa, a mug of coffee, an abandoned shoe. The sort of weight that didn't distort the fabric too much. But a home was a home, and Gull's house was bigger than any bungalow had right to be. She could feel it from the street, the outward press of air that signalled how space inside those clapboard walls was larger than it looked from the outside.

The first step, then, was to reduce that space. Squeeze out all the inconsistencies. Reduce Gull's fortress to a tight, compacted ball of matter and send it on its way.

It wasn't a ritual she enjoyed. The queens used it sometimes when parts of town had run their purpose. Crushed them down, chewed them up. Did whatever the queens did with the wadded-up rubber sheet that was their private universe.

The blood circle shimmered. The Raconte twins were statues in the rain.

Gull's house shuddered.

It was slight at first - a tremble along the weathervane, like the bungalow was waking from a long and restful sleep. Then a creak of wood against wood, brick foundations flexing, shifting in the earth.

Strangers passed, hidden beneath wide black umbrellas. They didn't look at Mrs Rosenfeld, or what was happening with Gull's home. They'd learned not to pay attention when things got strange.

Flakes of paint fell from the awnings of Gull's bungalow. A roof tile clacked and shivered against its neighbours. Behind glass, the curtains swayed in an impossible wind.

Inch by inch, breath by breath, an invisible fist closed around Gull's house and squeezed.