Nothing to Devour Page 4

  Mostly, almost always, she let them live.

  She’d come to love the ferry so much that she even enjoyed the cold, in a way. Not that she had a choice, because she was always cold, even before the boats shrugged free of their lines and docks and harbors, got out from under the lee of the land and leaned into the wind to run. Even indoors, on wet nights, the cold circled and swarmed at the windows, erupted through the cabins and up and down stairwells like a pack of screaming six-year-olds every time some idiot opened a door. Sometimes, the chill got so ferocious that it pinned her to the walls. Sometimes, it seemed so elemental and gleeful that she wanted to throw open her arms and embrace it.

  Inevitably, dealing with the cold became another of Sophie’s ferry-games, a constantly changing challenge. Some nights, she tried lurking indoors without collecting onlookers or unwanted attention. Some nights, she prowled the decks outside for warm spots, steamy places where the engines vented, or bench seats a couple or family had just vacated, leaving their heat in handprints on the railings and their scent in the air. She’d sit or stand in their absence and watch seabirds skim the wake, which is what those birds mostly did. Only rarely did they dive, snag whatever it was in the water that had caught their eye at just that wrong moment, and rise with their prey dripping and flapping in their long mouths.

  They were her, she realized. She was them. Sophie Seabird, skimming the Strait or the Sound.

  Was that why she’d stayed in the Northwest so long? Because she’d at least found other living things to identify with? Why had she even come? There were whole stretches of time she genuinely couldn’t remember, now, when her mind really did go blank as a seabird’s and she just rode the rumbling engines through waves and wind. They scared her, those times, when she stirred from them. Though while they were happening, and she was just gliding …

  Later, eventually, when she did stir and remember, she’d sometimes laugh at the flukiness of it all. The serendipity. Unless it was fate, or God’s hand, or even Natalie’s. Maybe sweet, stony Natalie was guiding her still. Sophie’s mother would have called that idea flat-out blasphemy. At least, she would have during one of her dried-out times, when she could talk sensibly at all. And even back then—at age eight, say, in their rusting trailer with dead flies and Cheez-It crumbs for carpet—Sophie would have challenged her to explain the difference.

  Because it really had seemed so strange. Almost miraculous.

  There she’d been, not twenty-four hours removed from finally giving in and giving Dr. James—poor, curly-haired Dr. James—the reward he’d craved, had begged so pathetically for, had certainly earned, and hadn’t deserved. Regretful in a way she rarely let herself feel, unsteady on her twitchy legs, fully expecting to topple off them with every step, Sophie had caught a midnight bus back to East Dunham, New Hampshire, to collect what remained of her things from the locker where she’d stored them. She’d particularly wanted the bag of cassettes Jess had made of Natalie speaking. Not only were those cassettes the closest Sophie would ever get to the one true friend she’d had, she suspected they were the closest she’d get to anyone, ever again. Ever, in this case, meaning a very long time indeed.

  When she’d emerged from the bus station, weaving and wobbling her way toward Campus Avenue with the taste of Dr. James still slicking her tongue and strands of his hair coiling on her palate and around her tonsils and making her gag, she’d paused for a single moment by the side of the road in the drizzly, late-September dawn. The very first car to pass her was a police cruiser, with the big, reedy black guy from Rebecca’s orphanage—Joe, she thought his name was, or Joel—riding in the back.

  That had stunned Sophie, at first. She’d assumed they’d all fled months ago, right after that night in those woods. And indeed they had, it turned out. Joel had been brought back as a witness, and also a potential suspect. A Person of Interest. Pretty amusing, that. Sophie could have told them he just didn’t have the teeth for it, if anyone had asked her.

  Eventually, of course, the police had let Joel go. And for lack of anything better to do—or maybe because that guiding hand was propelling her yet again—she’d trailed behind him as he left the station, followed him right onto the bus to Boston, and hopped his plane to the wet and windy west. She’d tracked him north from Sea-Tac under a mercifully overcast sky, through Seattle and up the coast, onto a boat and out to the island Jess had somehow already found, where her surviving clan and the new strays she’d collected could hole up together.

  That very night, without really considering why, Sophie had set up camp all by her lonesome on the other side of the island. And so she’d gotten to see orcas, and stars whose reflections glinted way down in the depths of the Strait, as though everyone and everything that had ever lived was floating around in those waters. And because that sight had transfixed her for so long, and because she had nowhere else to be or go, she’d decided to stay. And because she’d stayed all this time, she’d finally met Eddie. Re-met Eddie.

  Natalie’s child. Whose weight had once felt as familiar in her arms as her own baby’s. Whose heavy-lidded, brooding eyes were his mother’s, but whose smile was very nearly Sophie’s. Wide as the world.

  That was interesting. Getting more interesting every time they met.

  Meanwhile, she had ferries.

  Because she really did have all those things to occupy her, now, she only hit nights like this occasionally. They always seemed to be lurking, though, anytime she let herself become undistracted. Every time she fully surfaced behind her own eyes, in her own skin. Sophie Seabird, returned once more to her nest. Even then, the worst thoughts only seized her at particular instances: when she was alone on deck, with rain banging on the windows of the passenger cabin or sweeping in and around her, the cold so cold she no longer felt it, really, more dissolved into and became it, the way water became icicle. Or Sophies became seabirds.

  These were the times—the only ones—when the Emerald City and its star-strewn, whale-haunted surrounding isles didn’t glow, when the mist stopped sparkling and instead just closed off her view of mountains, moon, sky. Sometime in the midst of her four or five or fifteen crossings on nights like tonight, she’d look down into the spray, over the water, and there the wake would be. The only bright and winking thing left in her world, flung wide on the black surface of the Sound like open arms.

  Those were the only times Sophie actually considered just letting herself topple over.

  What stopped her, every single time—at least, it had stopped her so far—was the sight of just one of her fellow passengers, in the midst of one of those things they always seemed to be doing to pass time or acknowledge it or avoid acknowledging it. She’d catch a glimpse of a pilot or crewwoman up in the window of the bridge house, staring right out over the prow of the boat into the misty blackness with her chin in her hand, a Silver Surfer comic book clutched against her chest like a bible. Or some sad homeless woman muttering or singing to herself inside the cabin, just on the other side of the window from Sophie, as she tried somehow to tuck her sopping newspaper-blanket more tightly around herself without shredding it. Or a kid and his dad, out way too late, on their journey home from some secret adventure, playing iPad checkers. Sometimes, the kid or the dad would even look up and smile at her. Sometimes they did that so fast that Sophie realized she wasn’t even making it happen.

  Other times, of course—rare, and getting rarer, which made them that much more satisfying when they did come—she just got hungry. She’d cut down so much, these past years. It amazed her how much she’d found she could. Her hunting evenings occurred quarterly, now, maybe less.

  When the Hunger did come, her main challenge, just as Natalie had predicted, had turned out to be choosing. So far, Sophie hadn’t so much solved that problem or developed a system for dealing with it as rejected its problem-ness.

  How did she choose? The only way she could. The only way that seemed fair. Meaning, the same way people chose packs of chicken at the market, or sea
birds selected fish: she simply picked the one who presented an opportunity at the moment the need became acute and the circumstances appropriate. She’d tried to take looks or smiles or any sort of attraction out of it, poor Dr. James being the notable exception. She still preferred indulging people she was drawn to, or who were drawn to her, rather than devouring them. She’d toyed with the superhero thing, seeking out shitheads in the midst of trashing other people’s lives, but that had proven too much work when the need got on her, and involved too much frantic prowling around. And in the end, picking meals that way had felt just as random and prone to unintended consequences—for herself, her victims, her victim’s victims—as any other.

  She also tried not to be vicious about it. She never sought to enjoy or prolong it. She had in fact taken to thinking of herself as a sort of kosher predator. Humane. If, when the need finally swamped her, she could find someone lost … someone sleeping … someone too focused on being a shit or a psycho to someone else on a cell phone … and if those people were alone, out in the fog or by themselves in their cars down on the auto deck …

  Sometimes, it was that easy.

  Regardless of circumstances, she always tried to imagine herself appearing in a shimmer of sea mist, lurching, moving wrong, her arms spread wide and her smile wider. She’d hover in their presence, lure them rather than dive down on them. She’d give them what she could, whatever they seemed to want, time and surroundings permitting. That was only right, and also fun, in assorted ways, for all concerned.

  Then she’d take what she needed. Afterward, she’d wrap whatever was left in whatever was nearby and handy and heavy, and nudge it all gently over the side into the sea.

  She’d vanish, too, along with her victim, and make sure that her next victim came from one of the hundreds of other ferries cruising the waterways between Tacoma and Vancouver.

  It was a good system, or not-system. The best thing about it, for Sophie, was that it had a sort of rhythm, a narrative. It had become a story she was living rather than an endless, circular skein of nights. When the time came for her to leave the Northwest, as it inevitably would—when there was no longer a reason to stay—she’d already decided she would send a sort of accounting to The Stranger, her favorite regional alternative paper, since this whole area seemed to love its monsters even more than most places. Everyone here still talked about the Lady Killer, and the Green River Killer.

  Ha.

  In her accounting, when she wrote it, she’d include whatever details she remembered for as many specific victims as she could, hopefully providing an extra bit of closure for any still-mourning survivors.

  And she’d give them her new name, which she’d come up with herself. Maybe she’d even sign it across a selfie. An appropriately blurred one, haloed in sea shimmer.

  With Love, she’d write, because she had loved them all in her way, and still did. From the Ferry Godmother.

  5

  Kneeling with her phone to her ear, Kaylene snapped open her guitar case. She checked for spare strings and brushed the black and orange Halloween pom-pom she’d affixed to the top of the tuning pegs. She’d first started clipping baubles there right after she got the instrument, long before she and Rebecca started playing live: ribbons; a shell bracelet Eddie had made her on her last birthday; a cutout cardboard square from a strawberry Twinkie box she’d dangled there in honor of her murdered friend Marlene. When Rebecca saw that one, she’d cried, but she hadn’t made Kaylene strip it off.

  Once upon a time, not so long ago—before the whistling freak first stepped out of Halfmoon Lake woods—the decorations would have been instantaneous, automatic, the kind of thing she had always done without even thinking. The practice necessary to get good on guitar, on the other hand, never mind write songs on it, would have taken more time than she was willing to give any one activity, and demanded far too much single-minded attention.

  But these days, practicing music distracted her. Playing it live, in lights, onstage, with Rebecca blasting away on her drums from the shadows, positively dissolved her. Decorating her instrument, meanwhile, and tricking it out, had become ritual. Sometimes, Kaylene was convinced she had accidentally transformed her instrument into a fetish, or, as Rebecca preferred to say, spirit animal. It had even given them their band name, the night Trudi grudgingly donated one of her threadbare, obsidian-eyed creations from her dresser drawer.

  From that moment on, she and Rebecca were officially Sock Puppet. The screaming, slamming strawberry Twinkie-accented scourge of the isles. The scourge you screamed along with. Or to.

  Who would have believed it of either of them?

  “I know, Mom,” Kaylene said into the phone now, because somehow her mom was still talking. Standing, she checked her elbow-length black pigtails, yellow-striped shirtdress, and violet knee socks in the closet mirror. She looked like a Heffalump in the midst of a Winnie-the-Pooh honeypot dream, without the insta-grow trunk and with harder eyes. “I wish I could explain.”

  Tonight, though, her mom wouldn’t let up, couldn’t stop herself. She kept right on talking, talking, blaring her loneliness into Kaylene’s life like a searchlight and thereby lighting up Kaylene’s own. This was why she hated talking to her mother, these days. If she was being honest with herself, she’d hated talking to her mother ever since Halfmoon Lake woods. Just one more good thing the freak in the hat had ripped from her.

  “I know you’re my family,” she heard herself say, automatically, same as she always did. “I know Jess and Joel and Benny and Rebecca and Trudi and Eddie are just…”

  Fellow survivors, she thought, while her mother pleaded, begged, sighed, and missed her. Just the people she’d wound up marooned with on an island off the other edge of the country, three thousand miles from her childhood home, which was already six thousand miles from her parents’ childhood home.

  “Want to know what I’m eating? Kaylene, are you still there?”

  Even now, Kaylene instinctively stiffened when her mother cracked that voice. She held her breath, waited, realized her mother wasn’t going to let her off that easy. Tonight, she was going to make her ask for it.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Bao,” said her mother. And then she actually did it. Crafty Fox-demon. She took an audible bite, right there on the phone, and made her bao-eating moan.

  “Pork and shrimp?” Kaylene whispered.

  “Red bean,” said her mother through her chewing.

  “Bitch,” Kaylene said, and she got the tone just right, for once. She knew she had even before her mother laughed.

  “I miss you so much, Little Dug.”

  “I miss you, too, Mom. I really do.” She really did, she realized. So much.

  “Come home, Kaylene. Soon.”

  Come see me, she almost said, turning to the window and drawing back the curtain. The problem was that the second she said that, her parents would be on a plane. Both of them. And somehow, the thought of them here, in this secluded compound that only felt like a fortress, and only because everyone who lived here needed it so much to feel that way, was ridiculous. Disturbing, even. Just the idea of Laughing Dad on Skis and Mom of Warm Bao and Sunday Crosswords appearing in the rain at the pinewood front door, introducing themselves to Jess, trying to make sense of their daughter’s relationship to Eddie and Trudi, coming to a Sock Puppet concert and getting an earful of the racket she and Rebecca had taken to unleashing …

  Across the grass, in the shadow of the firs and western hemlocks that ringed the compound, Kaylene saw a girl-shaped silhouette glide behind the drawn curtains of the single, upstairs window in the stumpy windmill shed out back where Jess, Benny, and Trudi slept. Since Jess was downstairs helping Benny with dinner, Trudi had to be alone out there again, brooding over her books or her knockoff not-nearly-iPhone, texting whoever the hell she texted. Beyond the windmill shed and the trees, above the cliffs and the Strait, the red in the sky intensified as the sun sank. The glow permeated the trees, turned even
the evergreens orange.

  “Kaylene,” her mother snapped again, startling her. She’d forgotten, again, that she was still in the middle of a call.

  “Sorry, Mom. Listen—”

  “Dinner,” said Rebecca, appearing at the door in her stage blacks, brown hair bound up tight at her neck, her drummer’s arms positively ropy in her sleeveless sweater. No trace of gooseflesh, despite the cold. She looked ready, Kaylene thought. Rebecca always looked ready, these days. Like an astronaut prepped to climb into the big suit, head out into the void, and just fix something.

  Or else she looked like a cage fighter. A larger-than-life (but smaller-than-life-size) gladiator. “A drummer you run from or duck under as much as dance to,” as that wanky critic-kid from The Stranger had put it in his first review of one of their shows. He kept coming back, though.

  He also hadn’t been wrong.

  Because, really. Who’d have thought the Rebecca Kaylene had known in East Dunham, New Hampshire, could ever hit anything that hard?

  “Be right there,” Kaylene said, touching the pom-pom at the top of the guitar’s tuning pegs. She almost asked Rebecca to come touch it, too.

  For luck. As ritual. Wondersurvivor powers … activate …

  Right then, she almost blurted out her little surprise, the one she’d finally decided to spring tonight. Her Halloween addition, which she was almost sure constituted the next great leap in their mutual, ongoing life-reclamation project. She was only slightly less sure that Rebecca would think so, too. And yet, Kaylene knew she should probably say something. Give her friend a trigger warning.

  She would have if her mother hadn’t squealed, “You will? You mean it? You’re coming?”

  Flinching, Kaylene scrolled back through the last few seconds of conversation. “Wha … No, Mom. Hang on. I was talking to Rebecca.”

  “Joel claims Benny made squirrel,” Rebecca said.