30 BUILD A BLUE HEARTH AND KNEEL BESIDE IT
30
B UILD A B LUE H EARTH AND K NEEL B ESIDE I T
When I woke, the house was eerily dark and silent. Sweat slicked my body. I sat up in a rush, T-shirt contorted around my torso.
The door to my bedroom sat open. Its rectangular cutout was completely black, the kind of darkness so thick you couldn’t make out your hand before your face. It took a moment for my mind to register its wrongness—the exit sign’s light was out. No more red.
I hesitated, perched at the end of the bed, listening. Something thumped far away in the house.
I scrabbled over the bed, hands seeking a weapon, and landed on the heavy tome of ANTHROPOMANCY . I pulled it onto my lap. It pulsed with heat, like the book itself had a heartbeat.
There were options. If morning hadn’t come yet, I could turn over and try to will myself back to sleep. But if the exit sign was out, then maybe the rest of the power was too. Amrita would be scared. She hated to be alone in the dark.
My first step out of bed emitted a low creak. I listened. Waited. Watched. The flashlight on my phone would have been an enormous help, but I had no idea where it was and couldn’t remember seeing it since I’d found Caroline. The fear that it might be sitting out in the woods next to Finch’s half-formed doll was all-consuming. Now the hall’s lightlessness was so heavy that some part of me believed I would look down at my clothes and find them stained with shadow. Even with the curtains drawn back, no moon poured past the glass. The night was too new.
I felt for Caroline’s door and found it shut. If I wanted to, I could go in. Rouse her from a restless sleep. But I was scared of who she might be upon waking. I pressed my ear up to the door. The Manor remained silent. Maybe she wasn’t in there at all. Maybe the darkness had summoned her from her rest too.
Someone’s footsteps fluttered at the bottom of the stairs. I turned and waited.
“Saz?” I called.
ANTHROPOMANCY was an uneasy weight in my arms. I kept it clutched to my chest with one arm as if it could form a shield between me and whatever was in the house. The other hand gripped the stair railing for stability, each step cautious in the dark.
“Amrita?” I tried again. And then, against my better judgment, “Caroline?”
The sleeping pill had left my mouth dry, my head stuffed with cotton. I kept swallowing around nothing. It would have been smarter to stay at Finch’s for the night. We could have talked things through, moved on and pretended none of it ever happened. But in that universe where I stayed, would Caroline have completed the ritual? Would I have woken to find her body in her bed with my arms still locked around it? Would the two of us have gone down together?
Saz’s bedroom door sat open. I peered inside, unable to decipher movement or shape in the lumps of her blankets. I tried whisper-calling her name again. Something clicked distantly, like a lock sliding into place. This time I didn’t stop to listen. I just pushed on until I was outside Amrita’s room, one fist raised and knocking.
I waited. My pulse was a white roar in my ears. “Amrita!” I called, voice trembling. “Are you awake?”
Nothing. I could hear something sigh past the door, so I knocked harder. Still no answer. I turned the knob and felt something resist, as if a hand was holding it shut on the other side. I could taste copper. I threw my shoulder against the door and shoved.
The door slammed open to show me an empty room. Amrita wasn’t in bed. The sighing stopped immediately, all sound ceasing as if I’d been sucked into a vacuum.
And then the screaming began—a disembodied wail rising around me in every room and on every floor of the house. I tried to cover my ears but couldn’t find it in me to drop the book. Instead, I fell into a crouch with ANTHROPOMANCY pressed between my chest and my knees, as if protecting it might keep me safe too. I shouted my throat raw, calling their names into the empty Manor as the shrieking just went on and on. I staggered to my feet and hurried down the stairs. I had to get out of the house and find where everyone had gone.
Outside rain spat and soaked everything like a dewy spiderweb, until it felt as if I could walk right through the world and find it tangled in my hair. The promenade’s path to Grainer was pocked with puddles—past the film of rain, I could see the illuminated studio windows and silhouettes moving behind them.
Without my phone, I had no concept of what time it was or who might be in the studio to witness me as a barefoot, underdressed mess. The chilly night racked me down to the bone. Chattering teeth were the only sound. Inside Grainer I could escape the rain but not the fear that something was following me—and the recognition that I’d never be able to banish it.
Faint voices carried as I climbed the endless stairs. I was numb with cold and sick from sleeplessness. Finch’s pill’s effects wouldn’t leave me, a fuzziness that clung to everything.
I could hear Caroline’s voice warring with another as I neared Grainer’s summit.
“What, you don’t want me to hit you now? You were so ready to let me last time.”
Someone’s response was muffled and wet—they sniffled as I nudged away the brick propping the studio door open and let it quietly close behind me. “Stop it,” Saz pleaded. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I’ll break your nose and black your eyes again,” Caroline called. “All you have to do is ask!”
They were gathered in a triangle where our critiques unfolded. Amrita stood between Caroline and Saz. One of Caroline’s paintings hung on the wall—that piece from our first days with the swans and its pulsing heart in the center. There was a jagged cut down the middle of the painting and a pair of scissors in Caroline’s hand. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet and announced me—three sets of eyes turned to look.
“Nice of you to join us,” Caroline said. “Here to fuck me over again?”
“What?” I said, at the same time Amrita commanded, “Go home, Jo.”
I balked. Saz looked at the book in my arms and the color drained from her face. “Where did you get that?”
“What’s going on?” I asked, avoiding her question.
Amrita’s eyes flickered between me and Caroline. She seemed reluctant to take her gaze off the scissors in Caroline’s hand. “I said go home, you should be asleep. What are you doing up?”
“You left me alone,” I said, voice small. “The power went out. I was—”
I was afraid, I wanted to say. I went looking for you.
“Why did you all leave?”
“That’s my fault,” Caroline sighed. Her hair was a mess, strands slicked to her forehead, her body still cloaked in that same pale nightgown. Now it was smeared with mud. “It’s like you all have a fucking nanny cam on me or something. I wanted to work in the studio for a bit, and everyone just had to join me.”
“You were slamming doors and screaming loud enough to wake the dead,” Amrita snapped. “We wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Well, I’m fine, aren’t I?” Caroline made a wild gesture in the air, pointing loosely at her shredded painting. Her eyes were wide and feral, her mouth red. Her tongue kept darting out to wet her lips.
“Caroline, you destroyed them.” Saz’s voice wavered. As she spoke, my eyes wandered across the room and landed on the them she was referencing—Caroline’s paintings. She had shredded them down to rags. Now they were piles of smashed canvas, strips ripped from their frames.
“They weren’t good enough,” she said simply. “I was going to create something better, something suited for Solo. But Jo interrupted me.”
The eyes trained on me again. I dug my fingers down in the warm leather of ANTHROPOMANCY .
“What’s she talking about?” Saz whispered.
I swallowed around my pounding heart, afraid that speaking Caroline’s intentions aloud might manifest them into reality.
“You didn’t tell us the ritual came from the book,” I said shakily.
Amrita turned to Saz. “Is that true?”
Saz’s already weepy expression fell. “It’s just a book,” she started. “How is that any worse than the internet? It’s not real. None of it is real.”
“We killed him,” I said.
“Jo. Enough.” Amrita said, deathly serious. “Don’t say shit like that.”
Fury bubbled up inside of me. “We killed him, we killed him, we killed him! And Caroline planned to do the exact same thing to Finch, I saw her in the woods. We killed him and we raised something awful and it’s coming after every last one of us until we kill each other, too.”
Caroline rolled her head in my direction and grinned. She brought the scissors an inch from her throat and pretended to draw them across. “Snitch,” she sang. “I was just trying to help. I could cut my belly open now if you want. You could use my entrails and tell the future. Is that better for you, Jo? You want the real thing offered to you, so you don’t have to get your hands dirty?”
“Caroline, please,” I said, fighting the sting in my throat.
“Where’s Finch now?” Amrita asked. “Is she okay?”
“I texted her, but she never replied,” Saz answered.
“Oh right, run to Finchard, she’ll save us all,” Caroline said. “You’re delusional if you think she could do anything. I’m the one who’s helping us. I’m giving us a chance at Solo, and I’m taking out the trash in the process.”
“Your chance at Soloing relies on killing Finch? That must make your work pretty worthless,” I snapped, leering closer to Caroline. “I thought you had more talent than that.”
The smile slipped from her face, and her knuckles tightened around the scissors.
“It’s rude to assume. Didn’t your mother ever teach you that?” Caroline said, her eyes needling down to the core of me. “Or was she too busy reminding you how to hate yourself?”
“Enough,” Amrita declared, but I was already lunging forward, my face hot with unbearable fury. This Caroline was no longer mine. She was a creature wearing her skin. She was a shadow walking upright. She was—
“Go ahead and hit me,” Caroline coaxed with her arms thrown wide, coming closer and closer and closer. “Go ahead, Jo, I dare you, go for it, swing, don’t be afraid! Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!”
Saz barreled forward and shoved Caroline. They went sprawling together—and Caroline’s head slammed into the corner of a metal easel. The scissors skidded across the room.
I stood, frozen, as Saz crumpled to a heap on the ground, tears streaming down her cheeks. Caroline pulled her hand away from the back of her head. Her fingers were slicked with blood so dark it was nearly black—it stained strands of her hair and ran down her wrist. A smile claimed her face, faint but still present.
“That’s more like it,” she said lightly, struggling to pull herself up to her knees. One hand slid across the studio floor, leaving a sanguine smear. “Blood sacrifice. Sexy. I knew you had it in you, Saz.”
“That’s enough,” Amrita said again, but her voice was full of more horror than insistence. Caroline dragged herself up until she was kneeling on all fours and spat once, twice, three times on the floor.
“Fuck. I think I’m gonna be sick.” Her chest heaved, and she spat again. “Do you hear that ringing?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—I—” Saz whispered. “Caroline, we need to get you to a doctor. You’re probably—you might have a concussion.”
Caroline turned her eyes on me. Spit trailed down her chin and pieces of hair hung in her eyes. “Your turn, Jo. I said, hit me. You want a fight? Let’s fight. Let’s see who Solos after all.”
I raised the book. I was still trembling, so hard I could barely keep my grasp on it. But instead of swinging ANTHROPOMANCY at her, I just held it out in front of me. “I’m not—I’m not going to hit you, I just want to fix it, there has to be a way to fix it. The ritual came from this book. It worked once. There has to be something else in here that tells us how to cancel it out, or how to close the spell of what we did to Kolesnik.”
I splayed the book open and thumbed through until I landed on the ritual’s bookmarked page. Text across the top read “Resurrection Exchange of Godly Creation.” Beside the blurb of text was a picture of a person spread out on the ground, entrails spilling from the belly. I tore the page from the book and held it up for the others to look at.
“See?” I said.
ANTHROPOMANCY erupted in flames.
Grainer was a tinderbox of solvent and wood and cloth and accelerator. I dropped the book with a shriek, and Saz scrambled away from it, screaming the whole time. As soon as it hit the floor beside the mess of Caroline’s paintings, the pile caught, flames licking across the paint, erupting in a cloud of fire.
“It’s not real,” I stuttered, rocking back. “It’s a hallucination, it’s not real, it’s not real—”
But Caroline, kneeling on the floor with her head hanging low on her shoulders, began to laugh. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Amrita pulled Saz to her feet. “We need to get out of here!” Amrita shouted, and just as she turned to leave, the studio door burst open to reveal Finch.
The fire painted her in a million shades of gold as Finch leaned away from the rising flames. “What the fuck is going on?” she cried.
The book’s pages fluttered and crackled as the flames spread. From the spine of ANTHROPOMANCY a black figure rose—a tusked creature lifting itself from the devastation, head rearing back, limbs snapping and expanding and tearing itself out of the book. It let out a horrible cry, that pained death wail that had clung to me for so many months. That plea sounded like HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME except now I didn’t know where it was coming from, who to go to, how to keep the world from ending.
“Caroline, get up!” I screamed, arms coming up to block my face as another whoosh of heat rose like a wall between us.
The fire devoured, the creature heaving and gasping and swinging its body through the burn. I tried to plunge forward to reach Caroline but had to duck away as a crumbling section of Grainer’s roof came crashing into the burning debris. The figure roared, sparks alighting off its body as it rippled like an oily mirage.
“What the fuck is that?” Amrita cried.
“The Boar King,” Finch answered, awestruck, her fingers closing around my wrist.
The oil drum of disposed solvent sat beside the sinks, half-full. If the flames reached it, there was no chance of survival—the whole place would go up like lighter fluid on a bonfire. Fire worked its way across the room, crawling up the walls, blackening everything in its wake. The heat was unbearable. I felt as if my skin would melt away and leave only bone. The creature stood tall in the blaze, its roaring head tipped back and rippling with heat. Caroline’s delighted gasp was nearly buried beneath the crackle of fire as she took in the sight.
“Get up. We need to go,” Amrita begged Caroline, keeping Saz on her feet with an arm beneath her shoulders. “Please, Caroline. We can’t reach you, you’re going to get hurt, you have to try to step across—”
Fire engulfed the painting hanging on the wall. It curled in on itself as smoke and fumes tangled in the air. Saz stumbled toward the door. Amrita tried again, pleading for Caroline. Her pile of paintings had created an impasse between them—it stood like a burning hill.
Through the blazing light, I could see the perfect frame of her face. Her eyes circled with purple and her hair slicked with blood. Caroline looked back at me. There was so much feeling there, in the twist of her smile and the pleased glimmer of her eyes. Between us stood the Boar King’s figure and the echo of its roar as the fire devoured it.
“No,” I said, “no no no no no.”
Amrita pushed Saz out the door, her eyes never leaving the Boar King as it grew with the fed fire.
Caroline raised her hand to me—the right one, with her heartline cut in two—and I went for her. Finch’s grasp yanked me in the opposite direction.
“Let me go!” I shouted, “I need to get to her!”
Everything was enveloped by the blaze. I couldn’t see Caroline anymore. Finch’s hand was a vise around my wrist.
“Jo,” Finch said raggedly, “I’m sorry. We can’t.”
The ceiling—that high white ceiling with its ever-spinning fans, those brilliant windows, that cathedral of a room—buckled further, pressing close, threatening to smother us all. I watched the Boar King expand until it was a plume of smoke, the heart of the fire itself, a massive ember pulsing with heat.
Finch dragged me past the studio door. The fire flashed and oxidized. I couldn’t see the flames catch the solvent tank, but from the first floor I heard the resulting boom of gallons of accelerant bursting into the air. The sound shook all of Grainer. Glass shattered, raining down on Main Lawn. We fled into the night as the sound of sirens picked up, carrying toward us, Caroline left behind in a burst of white light.
Saz collapsed on the promenade with her head between her knees. Amrita crouched beside her and gripped Saz’s shoulders. She had her phone pressed to her ear, saying, “We need help now! Should I go back in? Should I try to get her? Do you think I can bring her out?”
Glass rained and rained. Grainer melted in on itself. The building groaned beneath the weight of the collapsing burn.
Finch held me to her and looked me over, hunting for wounds. If I was hurt, I was too numb to feel pain. I just stared back at her and buzzed with adrenaline as I finally said—
“We let her die.” And then—“You saw it too.”
Finch’s face fell open, like I’d let her down, like she’d hoped to find someone better inside of me. Her fingertips dug down into the meat of my arms. Left bruising impressions of her grasp.
“Yeah, I saw it too,” she whispered.