The Night Country

8

There was no signature. The letter ended, Anne swooned. I paged forward, my fingers clumsy. Wentworth got his girl, and she got her captain. I paged back—the detestable Mary Musgrove, poor Captain Benwick, Louisa falling from the wall. All of it unchanged, except for the letter.

All my anxious thoughts gave way under a wave of wonderment. The world went bigger and smaller at once, closing in on the page and expanding around me into a place of impossibilities.

Where had we gotten this book? It was old, though in perfect condition, and the letter—the wrong, new, not–Captain Wentworth’s letter—matched the type in the rest of it. The page fit snugly into the binding. If I asked Edgar about it, he’d grow suspicious—he had a Spidey sense for weird, it was why I liked him. But I had the silliest, headiest feeling anyway: that I knew who wrote this. That it was meant for me.

I troubleshot the notion, trying to keep my head clear. It could be an extremely unlikely printer’s error. A very old joke. A newer joke, neatly done. Or it could be—could it be?—a letter written to me.

I’d found stranger things in a book.

Someone battered the front door with the heel of their hand. The floor creaked as Edgar wandered toward it.

“Why are they—wait a minute. Alice, did you lock the door?”

I crouched between shelves, listening to him let someone in. Before he could come find me, I shoved the Austen under my shirt, into the waist of my cutoffs.

“I’m buying you a coffee!” I announced, springing to standing.

“Yah!” Edgar pressed a hand to his heart. A grad student–looking dude stood behind him, browsing the overstock table. “Did you lock the door, then hide? Why, Alice?”

“I need more coffee. I’ll get you one, too. I’ll be back in ten, okay?” I was barely listening to my own words, I just had to get out.

The heat and noise and bright insult of the sun were a shock after the shop’s quiet. It was coming on five and he was everywhere.

There, on the corner, leaning over a bucket of bodega flowers to fish out a fistful of daisies. Jumping onto the bed of a truck, the back of his T-shirt thin with sweat. Headphones over his ears, holding a blue-and-white paper cup, gaze gliding over me as he walked by. All of them, for a moment, were Ellery Finch.

The air felt thin, the sun felt close, the sidewalk gave under my high-tops like it was made of rubber. The guy behind the counter of the coffee shop was him, too, staring back as I stared too long, before shaking myself and ordering something cold. And decaf. My blood was already buzzing.

That boy, the one who’d saved me, then let me go. In my memory he was soft and hard and shining. Eyes a carbonated color and smile with secrets in it, good ones and bad.

You are one of those impossible things.

I didn’t remember walking back to the shop, but I got there somehow. A couple my age were prowling the shelves when I walked in, and Edgar was looking at me expectantly.

“Oh.” I brought a hand to my face. “No. I forgot your coffee. Want me to…?” I gestured at the door.

He rolled his eyes. “Forget it. Just … go talk to a customer.”

I stashed my bag, the Austen shoved to the bottom of it, beneath the counter, and went to give the couple some extremely cursory service. They left with books anyway, and Edgar was appeased.

He headed out soon after they did, leaving me to close. I read the letter a dozen times, slow then fast. I read the chapter leading up to it, trying to recapture the feeling of finding it for the first time. I read it all at once and in pieces. It never wobbled, or turned back into Austen’s words, and every time it sent fire through my veins.

By nine I was doing laps of the shop. All of yesterday’s angst and terror and confusion had burned off like fog. The world felt limitless, its bright spaces brighter. I craved high skies and open sidewalks and to run flat out till I couldn’t breathe. Finally it was closing time. I counted out the drawer, locked the door behind me, and headed to the train.

Persuasion was nested under my arm like a talisman. But untethered from the shop, I became less certain. The sticky press of anxiety settled itself back around my shoulders, like it had been waiting all day for me to be alone. I wanted to be sure. I wanted to know. So I didn’t take the subway down, back to Brooklyn. I took it up, toward him.

The train was full of teenagers with good shoes and too much confidence. I wanted to put sunglasses on to block out their light. I’d felt younger than them once, and older than them now, but we’d never really been the same age. I didn’t know what age I was. I wedged in between a dude pointedly reading a scuffed copy of Siddhartha and an Orthodox woman bowing her head over a child, the subway light bouncing greenly off the smooth brown wings of her hair. At Eighty-Sixth Street I climbed out and into our old life on the Upper East Side.

We’d lived here when Ella was married, when I briefly attended private school. I was afraid now of seeing someone from my past, but nobody I knew showed their face among the scatter of summer-dressed women and men in suits, the tourists with their heartbreaking, shower-damp hair. The summer light had held on tight, but now it was finally gone. I walked to Central Park first, skirting its edge till I was across the street from his old building’s front door.

It had been a while since I’d come here. In the early days I kept my head down, but now I didn’t bother. I looked so different. I’d grown an inch, my hair was darker and grazed my neck.

The building looked like it always did: imposing and implacable. There was no sign that a boy had lived here once, with his books and his wishes and his questing heart, and that he was gone now, farther than you could reach with money or longing.

What would Finch think of me now? He’d given so much to save me from my own monstrousness. What would he think if he saw me wading back in? I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, coming here, but all I got was the empty feeling of calling down a cut line. There was no secret knowledge waiting for me, no final chapter. For a minute I’d felt sure of something at last—sure of him. But staring at the building’s indifferent face, my certainty drained away. He was distant. He was gone. And the letter in the book was just words on a page.

And three of the Hinterland were dead.

And this morning I’d brushed blood off my teeth.

It was late and I had better reasons than the hour to hurry back home, but the park was an appealing patchwork of dark and light, and I just felt so damned low. Finch and I had walked here together once. Well, we’d run. From the sight of fairy-tale horror unfolding on the sidewalk, our very first glimpse of the Hinterland. Back before I understood what I was running from was me.

Now I walked its paths alone, breathing the sweet and toxic city air. Along the water a while, then down toward the lawn. Couples kissed on benches, or poked at their phones. A little girl too young to be alone watched me from atop a rocky embankment. When a jogger zipped past, I whipped around without thinking, to see who was chasing them.

There was music coming from somewhere. Silvery champagne-glass music, combing itself into the breeze. I followed it a long while, expecting at any moment to come upon a late-night wedding party, a dance floor lined with lights. But I never could trace it to its source.

It was so late now it was early, the park long since closed. My body felt heavy, full of too many things, more than I could possibly contain. A little grief gnawed at me, and fear I held off with one arm, and my brain kept circling back to the question of what I’d really done last night, what Sophia called nothing to worry about. I tried to float over it all, but the crash was coming. I wanted to be home before it happened.

I made my way back to the subway. It was late, the train to Brooklyn took forever to come. When it did, the car was almost empty. A few stragglers spread out among seats: a teenage boy playing hip-hop on his phone, a man in scrubs, and a woman with an old-fashioned pram, sleeping with her head against the window. The pram was pink and lace-trimmed and way too big to be hauling down the subway steps. There was a woven blanket inside it, but I couldn’t see the baby.

Everyone looked sickly under the lights. I closed my eyes and listened to tinny cell phone hip-hop flicker and pulse. The guy in scrubs was watching me, I was sure of it, but every time I checked, he’d just looked away. The air smelled vaguely of weed and French fries.

We were rolling slowly between stations when I heard a noise coming from the pram. Something like a huff, something like a whine.

I looked at the mother again. She was in her early twenties, her closed lids frosty with shadow. Her hands were hidden in hoodie pockets and there was a collapsed purse on the seat next to her, its top spilling over. Nothing about her said Hinterland, but. But. The train inched along, the kind of slow frictionless roll that feels like falling. Then the sound repeated itself. Doubled up, a huff huff whine.

We were underground and suddenly I felt it, the weight of pavement and dirt and city pressing down. I stood. The guy in scrubs looked at me again, and this time I caught him. The mother was still sleeping, one of her feet propped up on the pram’s front wheel.

I moved closer, making like I was looking at the map behind her head. My brain spat awful images at me as I edged toward the pram, hair and tooth and bone and blood, all of it wiped away when I got near enough to see inside.

A baby lay in a cocoon of blanket, snuffling its odd animal breaths. It was so new it looked uncooked, its face as sweet and secret as something found inside a seashell. I exhaled hard, starting to back away, but my nearness had woken its mother. She blinked up at me like I was inside her house, standing over her bed. Like I was the nightmare.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She opened her mouth to say something back, and the lights went out.

All the way out, all of them. No safety lights, no lights in the tunnel. The car stopped moving. The music had cut out, too.

The dark weighed more than the light. A three-point constellation came out, almost in unison: phone lights, illuminating nothing. They were bright, but they didn’t bend the dark.

“Dude.” The man in scrubs. “I can’t see shit. What’s wrong with the lights?”

Instinct kept me from taking out my phone. Made me move away from the mother and child. I burrowed through the blackness, toward the door at the far end of the car, feeling my way from pole to pole. The skunky scent of cheap weed was heightening, sharpening, becoming an impossible breeze. It ghosted through the closed car, touching my face with cold fingers.

Behind me, on the far end of the train, the door to the next car slid open.

“Is that the conductor?” someone said hopefully.

The door banged shut. The silence that followed stretched so long I started to hallucinate other sounds: scratching. My blood pumping triple time. Something outside the windows, beating itself against the black.

Whoever had let themselves in started walking. The dark heightened the sound of their shoes trudging over the floor. As they passed the baby, it let out a cry, hopeless and thin. The walker paused.

“Shh,” the mother said, urgent. “Baby, shhhh.”

“Who’s hiding there?” said the hip-hop kid, his voice high and younger than I thought it’d be. “Yeah, asshole, I’m talking to you.”

I think he was trying to draw them away from the baby. But when the steps resumed, moving toward him, he sucked in a breath and went quiet.

The step was a steady shush shush, mocking and slow. It moved past the boy, past the man in scrubs, and on toward me.

When I reached the door at the end of the car, the latch wouldn’t turn. The baby had hushed, the car was filled with frightened breathing and the slide of someone’s shoes. I was scared, too, but the fear was changing: chilling, hardening, making my fingers flex and my head fill up with a cold white hum.

The person stopped an arm’s length away. The locked door was at my back and my vision was pulsing, fracturing the dark into purples and reds. They were so close we could’ve touched.

“Who’s there?” I said.

They took a breath, and sang in a whisper.

Little mouse

Scratch scratch

Hasten to your home

Lock and latch, do up the catch

And pray that you’re alone

Little spider

Twitch twitch

Run to seal the gate

Weave and sew, stitch stitch

Pray it’s not too late

Something about that whisper tugged at me, distant but familiar. The words they spoke were a Hinterland rhyme. I knew by the way it played over my tendons like a rosined bow. The tide of the place was lapping at me already; the rhyme drew it over my head. The cold in me was a frozen wave climbing. As the rhymer reached for me, the wave broke.

Their hands were fast and certain. But I slipped around and behind them; I slithered like smoke. Then I was on them. Running my fingers over their body, searching for skin. I felt the rough drag of cotton and the rasp of knit—they were wearing something over their face, like a balaclava—before plunging my fingers into the slit over their mouth.

Their teeth were sharpened pearls and their breath felt like nothing. I could feel my eyes clotting black, my mouth filling up with ice, but this time my head stayed clear. I wasn’t going to forget this: breathing in the subway’s stale air, transmuting it into cold. Into death. I held it in my mouth like a marble, trying to twist their face toward mine. They gave a noiseless shudder and bit down. I grunted and ripped my hand free, feeling their teeth dig bloody grooves. I jerked a knee into their gut and they folded over, spinning in my grip like a fish. A flash of heat lightning skittered down my side and I screamed: their nails, hard as glass.

The air smelled like a fairy tale, glitter and green things and blood. The person’s nothing breath was in my ear, with a catch in it that made me think they were laughing. I yanked them down by the shirt and pressed my arm to their covered throat. I hovered over them, my mouth all ripe with ice, and now they were quiet.

I lunged down to press my mouth to theirs. When we touched, the air between us puckered with static. I recoiled just long enough for them to dart forward and bite me.

They caught the edge of my chin and bit all the way through. I felt warmth before I felt pain, banging my head against an empty subway seat as I fell back clutching my face.

The air was still. It didn’t smell like magic anymore, it smelled like a stalled-out subway car laced with blood. The person stood up, and I braced myself. But I must’ve made them think twice. They walked the few steps to the nearest doors, peeled them open with a straining mechanical clang, and dropped to the tracks below. I heard the wood-and-metal thump of their falling. The doors shrugged shut, and they were gone.

A few swollen moments. Then the lights came on, their milky yellow glow revealing the wreckage that had been made of me. Holding my head, pressing the hem of my T-shirt to my chin, I stood.

The other passengers stared with open mouths. At my arms, an ombré of whites to my elbows, and my eyes, I was certain, a galactic black. Blood dripped from my bitten hand, my bitten face, the mess over my ribs. The guy in scrubs was peeking down at his phone, its camera angled discreetly toward me. He stiffened as I stalked over and slapped it out of his hand, stomped its screen twice, and kicked it down the car.

“What are you?” asked the teen boy, his voice reverent. “Are you a supervillain?”

The adrenaline and the ice would recede. Soon I’d be shaking. Soon I wouldn’t be able to stand. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m a supervillain. Now gimme your phones. On the floor, slide ’em over. And you.” I said it to the mother. “I need your sweatshirt.”

Her face was stone as she shrugged it off, throwing it after her phone so it pooled at my feet. Pulling it over my head made my scratched side throb. New blood soaked into the waist of my jeans as I crouched to gather their surrendered phones. “Sunglasses. Somebody here has sunglasses.” I snapped my fingers. “You want me to get them out for you?”

The boy took a pair from his pocket and slung them at me, wincing when they hit my chest. “Sorry. You can keep those.”

I caught them, shoving them on and tugging the hoodie’s sleeves over one hand, using the other to put pressure on my bleeding chin. A seat hit me behind the knees and I collapsed into it, feeling the first tremor roll through me, the aftereffect of shock and ice and magic. But my thoughts were edged finely as frost.

I’d almost become the fourth Hinterlander to die. Whoever had tried to kill me, they were Hinterland, too.