Chime

silhouetting twisted trees. Lightning played darts on the Flats, with wolfgirl as bull’s-eye.

Despite the trees, the Slough provided no shelter. The wind tore at the treetops, tossed about handfuls of oozy leafsplats. I’d never known such dark. It leaned in all about me. It pressed at my eyes with great, hard thumbs.

Expose my murderer.

Her name is Briony Larkin.

The memory came to me in bits.

I’d never tried to kill an eel. I could not have imagined it would be so hard, that it would wriggle and writhe and slam itself about. I had to skewer it to the table to cut off its head. I skewered it through the middle, but still, it thrashed and writhed. It writhed when you cut off its head; it writhed when you gutted it; it writhed when you skinned it.

What got ye for your supper, Lord Randal, my son?

How can you skin an eel when the skin is tough as leather? When even after it’s dead, it thrashes about? Here’s how I did it.

What got ye for your supper, my bonny young man?

I fetched Father’s pliers. The eel flung itself about, but I grabbed its skin with the pliers, tore it off in strips. The pot was already on the fire. I tossed in the eel. Oh, how it jumped!

I got eels boiled in eel broth; Mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m sick at the heart and I fain would lie doon.

I’d sung “Lord Randal” dozens of times, never once thinking about Lord Randal’s sweetheart making that eel broth. I’d sung it before I knew the writhe and grit of eels. Before I knew their stink sinks into your skin, that you scrub and scrub but can’t get it out. Before I grew afraid of my own hands, afraid I’d carry the eel-stink forever. Before I discovered the lemon juice that washed it away.

Remember when you asked yourself why you hadn’t turned into Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Why you hadn’t tracked Stepmother’s murderer down?

That’s poetical irony for you.

“Mistress!”

I whipped round, into the smell of algae and dead fish, into the foam and roar of Mucky Face. “Mistress, tha’ lad be busking the swamp for thee, an’ the Dead Hand, it be draggling behind.”

“Behind Eldric?”

“Aye, mistress.”

“The Dead Hand, following him!”

“Aye, mistress. It draws ever nigh.”

I made a sound like peeling paint. The Wykes sparked up, laughing, teasing, trying to lead me astray. The wind screamed and boxed my ears, but it couldn’t hide the other scream.

“Briony!”

The Wykes skittered and sneered.

“Briony!” Eldric’s voice was a rusty nail. My teeth cringed.

Thunder gnashed its teeth.

“Eldric!”

I followed his voice through the rabid underbrush. “Briony!”

Only thunder now.

“Eldric!”

Yellow flames skittered ahead of me. “Briony!” Eldric’s voice, raw and tattered. The Dead Hand glowed beside his writhing shadow, beside a long darkness of screams. I dove upon the bloated flesh of the Dead Hand, releasing the sweet, rank smell of death.

I pried at its fingers. My nails sank into its flesh. Eldric had brought no Bible Ball—the fool! I wrung out yellow ooze, like curdled cream.

The Wykes watched the witch girl. They saw she couldn’t budge the dead fingers. They crackled and cackled.

“Briony!”

I stabbed my fingers into the fleshy web between the Dead Hand’s forefinger and thumb. I stabbed at the join between the oozing web and Eldric’s warm, living wrist. But they might have been fused together. Not even a shadow could have slipped between.

“Briony!”

I tasted my own sick, I swallowed it down. I let go the hand, tore at my frock. It resisted. I set my teeth upon it. On my feet now, yanking at the placket. Buttons exploded. Off with the frock, tearing at the shoulder seam. Damn you, Pearl, for those strong, tiny stitches. Tearing again, tearing. Curling my finger through a tiny hole, ripping. Tearing and swearing.

I couldn’t save the hand, I could only save Eldric.

The Wykes sparked up again, yellow, blue, glinting, laughing. I flung myself to my knees, fell into a slippery wetness. The Wykes, yellow, sparking, glinting, lighting the wetness to crimson. A fountain of Eldric blood. Don’t look! You’ll be sick if you see his non-hand. You’ve no time to be sick.

I twisted the sleeve round Eldric’s forearm.

The Wykes ebbed and vanished. Dawn sifted through the trees like ashes. The Dead Hand melted away. Did it carry away its prize—don’t look!

My petticoat was a crimson stain. Eldric’s lips were pale worms. His face raged with bruises. “Help me up,” said the worm lips.

He held out his left hand. His eyes were empty rooms.

I took his hand in both my own. I pulled; I pulled again. Finally, I stooped and slipped my shoulder under his left arm.

“One . . . two . . . three!”

He did a great deal of the getting up himself. But he staggered at the end, crashing onto my shoulder. I waited, swallowed the pain, before I said, “We’ll get you to Dr. Rannigan.”

Eldric stepped, stumbled, clutched. His fingers bit into my bones.

“That’s right,” I said. “Wrap your arm around my shoulder.”

He wrapped, he leaned. “Talk to me,” he said.

Talk? There was only one thing to talk about. Murderess. The word hung in the air between us.

Only one thing to talk about, but nothing to say. If only I had some excuse, something to explain it. Even witchy jealousy would be better than nothing. I remembered the how of it, the eel and the pliers, but I couldn’t remember why. It must be in there, someplace, but you can’t get at a memory as you might get at a splinter. You can’t poke about in your mind with a sterilized needle.

Eldric’s forearm, his good forearm, dangled past my shoulder. I held it in a crisscross of my own forearms—as though that would help anything. That wasn’t the arm that needed Dr. Rannigan.

But there it was, pressed against my middle, bulging with bad-boy veins. He’d offered his own red blood from those veins, offered it even though I wouldn’t tell him anything, not about the Boggy Mun, not about the pumping station. I might tell him that, at least, tell him about Rose and the Boggy Mun.

I meant to start at the beginning with the ghost-children and go straight through to the end. But I ended up jumping into the middle and splashing about in both directions, talking about the swamp cough and the draining and Rose.

My shoulders screamed under Eldric’s weight. But if he could keep going, I could keep going.

“Talk some more.”

My memory of those days is always of the time after Mucky Face roared through, leaving the Parsonage smelling of paper bloat and cellar scum. Of sitting on the library carpet, in a patch of sunlight, finding myself staring at a scatter of mouse droppings.

Storybook characters are always praised for keeping their houses neat as pins. But no one writes about characters who are too weary to clean, characters who can’t be bothered to care. No one writes about a character who sits on the floor and looks at mouse droppings. Who looks and looks and leaves them be.