2. Chapter 2
Chapter 2
I t took me an hour to make it from the gas station to my shitty studio. At least the pimp who lived in 214 wasn’t on the corner with his girls tonight. When your luck was as fucked as mine, you celebrated the little things.
Sonny Rule #18: Appreciate the little things. Odds are, it’ll be all you get.
So, I did just that, I put a little skip in my step as I wandered down the moldering halls of my apartment building. No pimp meant no screaming through the hallways tonight. Which meant I might get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. It’d been a few weeks since I had that treat.
I was mentally salivating over the idea of four hours, even getting a little greedy and hoping for a full five hours without nightmares or screaming, when I finally unlocked the four deadbolts—each in varying states of unreliability—and announced to Cricket I was home.
She looked up from her warming lamp and stared at me in that lidless way she had. I liked to think that the flick of her tongue was her way of saying, “Ah! Human. You have returned. Make with the wiggly things.” Which I imagine was as close to a warm greeting a ball python could manage. Appreciate the little things.
I flopped onto the couch and clicked on the TV for background noise. Something about the silence in this apartment had always weirded me out. It was as if there was someone standing in that absence, watching me. I liked to fill it up with meaningless chatter every chance I got.
“Got fired again, Cricket,” I called over my shoulder. She didn’t have the good manners to even slither around her cage a bit to pretend to care. “Late again, of course, why else do you think? You saw me hauling ass out of here this morning. I’d have been on time, too, if the stupid sack hadn’t broken again.”
I opened the job search app and started applying to random jobs. It didn’t matter which I applied to—a job was a job when the rent was due, and I had to figure out exactly how long I could stretch the box of Hot Pockets and Totino’s I had in the freezer.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t worry, Cricket. Mama’ll find a new job. Wouldn’t want to deprive you of the sweet, sweet lil squeak wigglies. Plus, it’s almost winter. I can’t just let you loose and hope you come back.”
I’d done that in the summer, letting her into the fenced-up, empty lot next to the building, hoping she’d come back. It wasn’t the responsible thing to do, wasn’t even the sane thing to do, but it was either that or let her starve, and only one of us had lost their job. She shouldn’t be punished just because her mom was a fuck-up. There had been field mice aplenty, and I’d found her sunning herself in an old tire two days later, fat as can be. She didn’t even flinch when I gathered her up and took her back inside to her tank.
No experience necessary. $19 an hour. Must have driver’s license, health panel, and library card. Elder care.
A library card? I hadn’t seen a library since I was a kid, but who really needs a library card to take care of old people? I fired off the PDF that held more creative wording than reality and tossed my phone as I rose. I only managed to get three steps away from it before it was chiming with a text message.
“No way, Crick.”
Cricket flicked her tongue in annoyance at the lack of mice falling from the roof of her tank, completely uncaring as to the reason I was frowning at my phone and snatching it up.
Unknown Number: Hello, Ms. Raith. Thank you for inquiring about the position. Are you available for an in-person interview tomorrow at 2pm?
That was . . . suspiciously quick.
Sonny Mac Raith: Mac Raith. Yes, I can be there. What’s the address?
Unknown Number: 1533 Church Street. The interview is a formality. You are more than qualified for the position.
A little itch started in the back of my brain. I ignored it when I flipped to the job listing.
No experience necessary. $29 an hour. Must have driver’s license, health panel, and library card. Elder care.
Didn’t it say nineteen? It didn’t change anything, but this job could change a lot for me and Cricket.
Sonny Mac Raith: Sounds great. Who should I ask for?
I waited for two hours, and there was no response. When I woke up the next day and checked, still no response. That little itch in the back of my head turned into a rabbit kicking at my skull. I kept ignoring it as I showered and got dressed in my favorite interview outfit.
“Well, Cricket, you know the drill. I’m leaving the top off. Mommy’s either going to get murdered by some weirdo, or I’ll be back in a few hours. Either way, if you’re here, great. If not, you’re an ungrateful bitch, and I hope you get scale mites.” We stared at each other while I finished pulling my dark-russet hair up into a ponytail.
Cricket never talked back. She was a snake, after all, but talking to her filled that dreadful looming silence of the apartment and made the walls feel less like they were inching closer and closer. Every time I left the house, it felt normal to tell someone I was leaving and when I’d be home. It was a little slice of that American dream we were all shilled, to have someone waiting for me to come home, even if that someone was a ball python in a tank that took up more room in my apartment than I did.
I had started the routine of leaving her enclosure open when I was . . . delayed the first time. The woman from the ride share app seemed normal enough until she started going into the industrial area instead of into the suburbs, like I had asked her to.
The only thing I could think of was, Who’s going to feed Cricket? The idea of my poor slithery baby curled up under her heat lamp, staring at the top of the enclosure, waiting for a rat to come wriggling down and no one there to feed her, not even a way for her to get out and survive, with her pudgy, tubey body withering away in the tank made me figure out how to get home.
Even the best-made cars have a weak point at the latch of the door. If you kick it just right while pulling up on the handle, even if it’s locked, it’ll pop free.
No one tells you in action movies, where the stars jump from moving vehicles, that the pavement is a lot harder than you’d think. And there’s no time to tuck and roll. Or at least, if there is, I wasn’t quick enough. I’d broken my nose and fractured the bone around my eye that day. The medical bills alone would have killed me, but that was Shona Richards’s problem.
Who’s Shona Richards? No clue. That’s between her and Detroit Community Health—none of my business.
The air in the apartment felt stale, heavy, and oppressive, like the thing that lived in the silence was holding its breath, waiting for something. Waiting for some sort of cue. I didn’t want to find out what the thing was waiting for. I had places to be—hell, I could be planning nothing more than to sit and watch TV for the evening, and I’d still find somewhere other than here to be. I didn’t want to find out what it was waiting for nor what it would do when it finally got the signal.
I shivered under its imagined glare and set Cricket’s top to the side before collecting what I would need for the interview, then crept out of the apartment.
The bus ride to Church Street was longer than I wanted, mentally checking off the speed and time it should take so I knew what my commute would be like. Getting a job had never been the hard part, but keeping it was a totally different skill. I could charm the pants off anyone I needed to when given half the chance—it was the keeping it that was the hard part. That took an entirely different set of muscles I was not built with. I was built for losing jobs, making bad decisions, and figuring it out when I got there.
The address was three blocks from the bus stop, nothing too bad. The problem wasn’t the long bus ride nor the walk. The problem was, the GPS on my phone was saying the address was for another one of Detroit’s empty lots. The two-story Craftsman-style home in front of me sat at odds with the cracked blacktop and boarded-up brick buildings that surrounded it, like a big cane toad amid the shelves of a library.
A shiver scratched and clawed its way up my blouse-covered spine, and the hairs on the back of my neck began to, one by one, prick up. Something was off here. Every instinct in my finely tuned system was saying to beat feet. But I kept thinking about what twenty-nine whole dollars an hour could do for Crick and me. She could get a bigger tank and better meals. I could get out of the dump of an apartment not big enough to house a toothbrush let alone a twenty-seven-year-old woman and her five-foot python. I could even start a little savings account if I survived long enough.
A woman about my age with eyes too large for her face and a medical mask over her nose and mouth stepped out of the That-Should-Not-Be-There house. A hidden smile crinkled at the edges of her too-pale sky-blue eyes as I climbed the three steps to the porch like a moth drawn in by the flame of her presence.
“You must be Sóna.”
A slight accent curled loving fingers around her vowels, one I couldn’t quite place.
“Sonny. Everyone calls me Sonny.” I smiled back to her and tapped my cheek, indicating her medical mask. “Sorry, I didn’t bring one.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Sóna—Sonny. It’s for your comfort, really.” Her eyes crinkled again as she shook my hand. “Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Ben is waiting for you in the parlor.” She gestured to the closed French double doors inside the foyer.
Sunlight danced over the polished hardwood floors. The inside of the That-Should-Not-Be-There house was the exact opposite of my too-small studio. The air inside was cool, refreshing even, but most of all, it felt clean and open. I stepped over the threshold and into a puddle of golden sun falling in over the pristine white bars of a paneled window across the space from the front door. This house was like every fever dream I’d ever had while huddled in a corner of some shitty foster home with a threadbare sheet for a blanket. It reminded me of the houses I had seen on one of the PBS shows, maybe Anne of Green Gables .
A soft, wistful smile whispered over my balm-tinted lips as I gently knocked on the curtain-covered glass doors. I didn’t wait for the command to enter, letting myself in as the older gentleman rose and tilted his head.
“You must be Sóna Mac Raith.”
He spoke with a similar accent to the woman who had let me in, but his was thicker and just as unplaceable.
“Sonny. Most people call me Sonny.”
“That’s a very old name you have there, Sonny,” he said as his eyes took their time appraising me.
I wasn’t uncomfortable with being looked at. There wasn’t much to look at, really. I was no beauty by any means, and I was perfectly okay with that. My hair was thick and dark reddish- brown, my eyes a deep hazel with flecks of the forest. A spray of freckles adorned my nose and cheeks. But aside from those distinguishing features, I was just another waif who’d never grown into her womanly shape. I’d stayed thin from lack of nourishment, though, and not from a sense of fashion. I was too familiar with the song of longing my stomach sang to me most every night. I envied anyone who had the good luck to have a full table and a quiet belly all their lives, regardless of their size.
“Is it?”
He stared, as if cataloging me from head to toe.
“Mac Raith or Mac Craith. It means good fortune.” His words curled around my head and made me feel sleepy as he stepped around the desk and came closer. “Are you lucky, Sonny? ”
I laughed, a full-belly, raucous laugh stained on the edges with years of bitterness. “Lucky? Sir, with all due respect, I’m the furthest thing from lucky as one living being could be.”
Mr. Ben’s face shivered like his skin was floating atop a liquid sea hit by a storm. It was only a few seconds, but that flash had every alarm bell ever minted in my mind ringing loud and clear.
It was time to get the fuck out . It was time to be anywhere but here.
“I can tell,” he hissed when my hand landed on the bar of the door handle.
Every cell in my body froze at the sound.
It was the same voice I had heard from The Woman Who Walked The Paths Between the lake and the house. It was the same sound of frozen lake water grinding against itself in the dead of winter. It was the same voice calling my name from under the windowsills all through the freeze.
The bar melted away from my grip like sugar left in the rain, my gaze dumbly following the brass droplets as they fell to the carpet.
“Anyone with even a drop of luck wouldn’t have answered that listing. But lucky for you, I peddle in the unlucky, the unfortunate, the unscrupulous,” he continued to my back.
I could tell he wasn’t moving, though.
“Is that so?”
Keep ’em talking. That was the best way to go about these things. Most people don’t like to punch on things that are sweet. Most people .
“Oh, yes. Very much so. So, imagine my amusement when a blessed one, a fortunate one, waltzes into my office and presents herself for my trade.” The sound of a match being struck and the fizzle of it against something decades-long too dry filled the empty spaces in my head. “Oh, do come away from the wall, dear. We both know you can’t use the door anymore.”
The painful sensation of someone watching me intently scratched at the space between my shoulder blades as I dumbly stared at the puddle of brass pooling on the dark-gray industrial carpet. Thoughts left my head on startled wings as I clawed to make sense of the door handle melting in my palm. Mental fingernails scratched at my Rolodex of rules, trying to find one that fit the situation, something to anchor myself to and keep me from drifting out into the sea of the unknown yawning before me.
Slowly, my gaze lifted from the carpet to the flat wall in front of me. The door had disappeared. No longer were the golden rays of an afternoon sun melting in through the sheer-curtain-covered French doors. What was left was a flat wall painted in a soft buttercream. Simple drywall and plaster stood as unassuming as it could be as if it had always been there.
Disorientation spun me, my eyes darting around the room, trying to figure out how I had moved from holding the drippy door handle to standing in front of an empty wall. My gaze stuttered over the unassuming man leaning against a cheap industrial desk, puffing on a cigar that stank of stale leaves and bad choices.
There was no door.
We were standing in an impossible room. A room that held me, Mr. Ben, a desk, and four enclosed walls. No windows, no doors, nothing. I felt myself short-circuiting. Felt the panic creeping up my throat and choking my voice as I locked eyes on the one thing that seemed to make sense in the newly minted madness surrounding me.
Mr. Ben leaned without a care, rolling a coin on his knuckles as he exhaled a black plume of smoke, something pink sparking in the cloud. “Take a moment, Sonny. You people aren’t exactly bright, so I will explain what’s going to happen from here. You’re dead. Well . . . not truly—not yet, at least. But you will never see life again, so might as well be dead. I tell you this mostly for my own amusement while your cage is being readied. Passes the time, you see.”
I began slamming my fists on the wall. Pummeling it and kicking it, trying to find a weakness in the drywall. Stubby nails dug into the thin plaster. It felt like I was punching and tearing at solid metal painted with a cheery little color.
Mr. Ben ignored my outburst and went on as I clawed and fought the wall. “This modern world, it has truly yielded some amazing things. It’s made my job ever so easy. There was a time when you people would be reluctant to venture out to a place you’ve never been, to meet a person you’ve never met. But you’ve become complacent little sheep. You no longer fear the voice in the woods, the shadow on the wall, the whisper in the night. You tell yourselves that magic was never real. You tell yourselves that monsters were never real. You lie yourselves to sleep, and what comes of it? You are so trusting of the things that walk between the worlds that you no longer even see us.”
“I’ve seen you,” I whispered to the small little chunk of dust I had managed to pry free.
“Do speak up, might as well. I doubt you’ll have much to say when we get to the Market.”
“I said I’ve seen you.”
I poured all the false concern and compassion I had ever seen performed by the line of convincing fosters into the simple words.
“Oh, have you now? And what did you see when you walked in here? Hmm?”
He was amused. So damned amused.
A little laughing man in a suit with a big-boy cigar.
“I saw a nice woman and a handsome gentleman who are lonely. I can hold you if you want. I can take away the loneliness.”
Keep them talking. Be sweet. Be the thing they want. All the lessons I’d learned from Lifetime movies of women getting kidnapped started flooding my brain with ideas. Maybe I could survive this. Maybe I could get free. Be sweet until I see an out and then take it.
A plan was forming, little bricks stacking themselves along the interior of my mind, as I tried to think my way through what was happening. Ignore the things that don’t make sense. Focus on the things that do. Focus on the things that seemed real. Maybe there was drugs on the door handle. Maybe that’s why I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.
Mr. Ben snorted and pushed off the desk, stalking me until my back pressed against the wall. “Oh, dear Sóna, you are but a lost little girl in a world that you have no idea about. You will, though. Soon enough.”
A slimy, cold finger that didn’t match the look of his skin traced a line down my cheek, and the world went black.