The Night Country

9

At least someone in the car had a god who listened. The guy in scrubs had been praying with his eyes closed for only a few minutes when the train started to move again. The mother was crying, though her baby was quiet. When we reached the next station, they all watched rabbit-eyed as I walked off, their phones stuffed into the front pocket of my stolen sweatshirt.

I felt like I should turn around and say something scary to them as the doors closed. But my mouth still tasted like freezer-burned death and all the places I was hurt were running together, pain pumping through me like central air. I let the moment go.

I stood at the very edge of the platform and let three trains pass by, woofing my hair back and sliding their doors open to show me their insides. Half of me was sure the lights would turn off, and the figure would come back to net me with fairy-tale rhymes in the dark.

Little spider

Twitch twitch …

I shook my head sharply and spat onto the tracks.

They must’ve had a knife tucked somewhere. They wouldn’t have come after me with only their teeth and nails. When I imagined that knife going in between my ribs, sliding down my arms to unpeel me, I could only think of pressure and a sudden, sheeting heat. What piece would they have taken from me? My hand. Ice-white and malevolent, curled in like a Hand of Glory. Or my eye, a plucked marble turned black from end to end.

Right foot, said a sensible part of my brain. To make a matched set with Hansa’s left.

Finally anxiety chased me onto a car nearly filled with what appeared to be a single, sprawling tourist family, all of them upsettingly bright-eyed. They looked at me in my hoodie and my sunglasses and my bitten face. The smallest one, too little to be awake at this hour and swinging in dizzy circles around the pole, froze in place when she saw me, making a sound like an injured dog.

I gave her a thumbs-up and sat between a big man in bigger shorts and an alarmed-looking grandpa holding a walking stick. I wondered what stories they were telling themselves about me.

Coke addict, I decided. Clipped her chin falling down in a bathroom.

They wouldn’t be far off. The Hinterland had crept toward me like a waking dream, crashed in like a wave, and receded. I was left adrenalized and salt-starred. Remembering, completely, what it was like to feel power. Not the kind you got drunk on and forgot by morning, but the real thing.

I was sick with it, shivering, busted up in three different ways. And I was high on it, clinging as it left me, feeling the delirious ache of its retreat. I ran over everything that had happened in the dark. The Hinterland rhyme, the smoothness of the skin around the rhymer’s mouth, the nothing feel of their breath. That voice. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew it.

The sky was warming to gray when I finally climbed out of the subway. When I peeked at my fingertips, they were warming too, an almost acceptable shade of pale. I bought a bottle of water at a bodega and splashed the blood off my face and hands, but didn’t dare peel my T-shirt away from the mess over my ribs. My gouged-up side was a burn and an ache and a hideous numbness, like it couldn’t decide what kind of awful it wanted to feel. My vision went prismatic as the corner of some asshole’s duffel bag strafed my rib cage as I walked down Bowery.

I wasn’t heading home yet. The place I was going to was one I’d only heard about, and never wanted to visit. I didn’t want to go there now. It was a narrow brick building on a windy stretch of Lower Manhattan, its front laced up with flaking iron balconies. Letters crawled down its side: an H, then an EL, the missing OT between them punched out like front teeth. Of course everyone who lived there called it Hell.

Which was fitting, because all of them were Hinterland. It wasn’t clear what state the hotel had been in when they got there, how its rooms were turned over to them one by one, but they’d made it their squat in the end. I pictured bellhops stuffed in closets, old ladies who’d spent half a century in their rent-controlled rooms shoved out into the streets.

It wasn’t quite five in the morning. The sidewalk in front of the hotel was empty, spangled with broken glass. Across the street, a man with a green juice in one hand and a yoga mat in the other powered by, like a messenger from another planet.

I watched him disappear, then pushed through the tarnished gold and smeared glass of the revolving doors.

It was three steps down into a sunken lobby, but it felt much deeper. There was a subterranean taste to the air, of must and hidden water. The room was lit by a flotilla of lamps on low tables, their stained-glass shades shining like fish.

On a semicircle of long velvet couches, seven sisters reclined like fussy, card-playing cats, their hair the color of old pewter against their dark brown skin. I knew them a little. They liked to tell everyone they’d been princesses, but that wasn’t what I’d heard. They always wore thin satin gloves that stopped just above their wrists, in hard-candy colors. On one girl it would’ve been odd. On seven, it was creepy.

The guy behind the desk sat perfectly straight, hands folded in front of him and fleshy mouth resting in a vulpine half-smile. He was asleep. I brought my hand down hard on the little desktop bell and watched his eyes shutter open. They were cloudy, pupilless, yellow as a cat’s. Then he blinked, belched, and stretched all at once. By the time his eyes fixed on me they were sandy, the same basic color as his skin and hair. In his tacky taupe suit, he was a study in monochrome.

His gaze slid from my torn chin to my fingers. He snuffled at the air, lifting his chin, and looked at the place where my sweatshirt hid the worst of the blood. “Interesting night?”

I didn’t take the bait. “Is Daphne around?”

“Who’s asking?”

“You’re not in the mob, Felix,” I snapped. “The sun’s barely up, I know she’s here. What’s her room number?”

“You don’t know the hours she keeps,” he said starchily, and jerked his head toward the elevator. “Ninth floor, room nine oh three. Knock before you open the door.”

“I know how doors work.”

As I crossed the lobby, one of the sisters gave me a languid wave. At least I thought it was a wave. Those girls would look half asleep running out of a burning building.

The elevator was barely big enough for one, and smelled like an apartment where a chain smoker had made cabbage soup every day for a year without ever cracking a window. To distract myself from the pain in my side I focused on the pain in my chin, then switched to my hand, and around again. On the ninth floor I stepped out into a hallway with the flat look of a trompe l’oeil, like a badly painted set. The door to room 903 was beat up even worse than the rest, its paint scuffed and scored. There was an old bullet hole just below the lock.

I knocked with my uninjured hand. When Daphne finally opened the door I stepped back before I could stop myself. I’d never seen her without her lipstick on. Bare, her mouth was the same color as her skin. Her red hair and long red robe flickered around her like flame over bone, and her skin breathed a multitude of sins. I was grateful she was wearing her veneers.

“Morning,” she said, leaning into the doorframe and looking at my chin. “Take a fall?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Actually, you don’t have any Band-Aids or anything, do you? Or some painkiller?”

She turned without answering, and I followed her in. Her room had a baroque little sitting area and a tiny kitchenette by the windows. Through half-open French doors I saw a tumbled bed, a pair of long legs sticking out of white sheets. Daphne shut the doors when she saw me looking.

“You came all the way here just to get patched up? I thought your mama would want to do that for you.” She put a sugary venom into the word mama.

I put my hands up. I wasn’t taking her bait, either. “You don’t have to do anything. I’m just here to talk.”

“What about?”

“I got attacked by someone on the train. I’m pretty sure they were trying to kill me.”

I told her all of it, and it was like I was telling the story to myself, too. I don’t think I fully believed it had happened till I said it out loud. Halfway through I had to sit down, a hand over one eye, my vision glittering with the beginnings of a migraine.

She kept her mouth shut till the end, fiddling with a matchbook and staring at a point over my shoulder. “Say the rhyme again,” she said.

I did. It was circling in me like a restless dog.

“They were trying to kill you.” Her voice was dangerous. “You’re sure of that.”

I thought about it. They’d been reaching for me, hadn’t they? I came at them, but they’d reached first. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

She was angry. I couldn’t say how I knew it, she was perfectly composed. But her anger made the hair rise on my arms. It made the air thicken.

Then she leaned back, legs flashing beneath her robe as she crossed them. “So why’d you come to me?” She laughed at my expression, the sound of it catching like rock sugar in her throat. “What? I know you don’t like me. I thought I’d be the last one you’d ask for help.”

“I’m not asking you for help, I’m telling you because they listen to you. It didn’t end with Hansa, they need to know that. You have to tell them.”

“I have to, do I?” She eyed me. “You’re paler than I am. How much blood did you lose? Look, I’ll play nurse if you keep it a secret.”

There was something surreal about watching her gather up a grubby first-aid kit and a cup of hot water and a wad of brown coffee shop napkins. She gestured at me to peel back the T-shirt from my side, which hurt about as much as getting scratched. The mass of napkins softened to sludge as she blotted.

“I don’t think you need stitches, but you got opened up pretty good. It might close quicker with a drop of glue. You want me to send someone down to the store?”

“Hell, no.” I was staring through tears at the ceiling. “I’m not a birdhouse, I’ve got skin.”

“Suit yourself.” She painted livid stripes of Mercurochrome across my ribs, each feeling like the rough scrape of a cat’s tongue. Even in this crummy light, her hair looked like treasure. Her hands were blunter, more capable than I’d figured they’d be. Slowly, almost resentfully, I could feel myself blooming in her direction.

“I heard what happened in Red Hook,” she said, not looking at me.

I let a few breaths go by. So she knew what I’d done, while I still didn’t.

“What’d you hear?”

“That you’re not the nice little girl you’ve been pretending to be.” She assessed me, top to bottom. “What I’m wondering is, why now? After all these months of good behavior?”

It took me a minute to decide what kind of honest I should be. “Because he deserved to be scared. Because nobody else was going to.”

“So it was a good deed?” She put away the disinfectant and started unwrapping a stack of Band-Aids. “I guess I can’t blame you for trying to play out your tale.”

I dug my nails into my palms. In my tale, he ended up dead. “I don’t really know my tale.”

“Really? Your mother doesn’t want you to know, is that it?”

She’d already brought Ella up twice. I didn’t like that. “My mother…”

I paused. My mother what? My mother survived the Hazel Wood. She survived Althea Proserpine. My mother’s not scared of you.

Saying it felt too close to a dare. “My mother’s got nothing to do with it.”

Her long fingers pressed a Band-Aid over my side, then another. “You’re afraid of knowing, then.”

But that wasn’t it, either. Not anymore. Finch had told me half my tale—the tale of Alice-Three-Times—in a diner on Seventy-Ninth Street. His hands around a coffee cup, the whole place leaning in. He loved those stories. His love was a halo. If I was going to hear the end of mine, I wanted him to be the one to tell it. And if that was never gonna happen, I could live without knowing.

But I wasn’t about to give her all that.

“How about you?” I said instead. “What’s your tale?” Sophia and I had speculated on that before. I thought stepmother. Daphne thought queen.

“One day you might earn the answer to that. But not today.” Daphne tilted her head, looked at my bandaged side, and gave it a slap. The pain of it filled my eyes and sent me speechless.

“You’re all patched up, princess. I’ll send you the bill.”

There was more I wanted to ask, more I needed to say, but I couldn’t find it around the pain. Someone tried to kill me, I wanted to shout, but she already knew that.

I was halfway out the door when she said my name. Just the shortened, human part of it.

The sun was higher now, filling the window behind her and making her features indistinct. “You don’t know your tale,” she said, “but I do. You don’t know what you did in Red Hook, but I do. You bit him. You bit a chunk of him clean off. Then you pressed those icy hands to his skin and you nearly killed him.”

Her robe trailed behind her as she moved closer, revealing the spidery sprawl of her limbs. “You didn’t know you could do that here, did you? I bet you didn’t. Hiding out with that woman you call your mother, playing house. I bet you thought you were human all the way through.”

She took another step forward and I stepped back and I no longer had a handle on the game we were playing. “You bit him and you tried to kill him and your friend had to pull you off. You can thank her for that. And don’t worry about retribution, I got that indiscreet fucker out of town. For that, you can thank me.”