The Shining Girls

Harper ^{NO TIME}

There was a bantam cockerel on the farm that used to have seizures. You could bring them on by flashing a light in its eyes. Harper would lie on his stomach in the long grass that made his head feel ripe in summer, and use a bit of broken mirror to stun the rooster. (The same shard he used to cut the legs off one of the chicks, pressing down on the back of the silvered glass with his hand wrapped in an old shirt.)

The cock would be scratching in the dirt and twitching its head in that stupid way chickens have, then suddenly it would go blank and stand frozen and glassy eyed: a vacant thing. A second later it would be back, wholly oblivious. A stutter in its brain.

That’s what the Room feels like: stuttering.

He can sit in here for hours, perched on the edge of the bed looking at his assembled gallery. The objects are always here, even when he takes them away.

The names of the girls have been traced over again and again until the letters have started to fray. He remembers doing it. He has no recollection of doing it. One of these things must be true. It tightens something in his chest, like a gear in a watch that’s been wound up too far.

He rubs his fingertips together and finds them silky with chalk dust. It doesn’t seem clear any more. It feels like doom. It makes him feel defiant, like doing something just to see what will happen. Like with Everett and the truck.

His brother caught him with the little chick. Harper was crouched on his haunches over it as it flapped its stubby wings and dragged itself forward, peeping-peeping-peeping. Its stumps left thick snail-trails of blood in the dust. He heard Everett coming, the slap-slap of shoes that would get passed down to him, the heel already peeling off. He squinted up at the older boy, who stood watching him without saying anything, the morning sun behind his head so he couldn’t make out his expression. The chick squeaked and fluttered, making broken passage across the yard. Everett disappeared. He came back with a shovel and smashed the bird to a pulp with one blow.

He tossed the crush of feathers and gluey innards over-arm into the long grass behind the coop, then cuffed Harper hard enough to knock him on his ass. ‘Don’t you know where our eggs come from? Stupid.’ He bent to pull him up, dusted off his front. His brother never stayed angry with him. ‘Don’t tell Da,’ Everett said.

The thought hadn’t occurred to Harper. The same way it didn’t occur to him to pull up the handbrake the day of the accident.

Harper and Everett Curtis drove into town to pick up feed. Like the start of a nursery rhyme. Everett let him drive. But Harper, maybe eleven years old, took a corner too hard in the Red Baby and clipped the edge of the ditch. His brother grabbed the wheel and yanked the truck back into the road. But even Harper could tell the tire was punctured, by the flap of rubber and the way the steering went flabby in his hands.

‘Brake!’ Everett yelled. ‘Harder!’ He braced himself against the steering wheel and Harper rammed his foot down on the pedal. Everett’s head bounced off the side window, splintering the glass. The truck slewed sideways, the trees spinning and blurring together, before it came to a juddering stop across the middle of the road. Harper turned off the ignition. The engine clicked and tutted.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Everett said, holding the side of his head, where a knot was already swelling. ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let you drive.’ He swung the door open into the hazy morning, already humid. ‘Stay here.’

Harper turned in the cab to see Everett digging around in the back for the spare. A breeze rippled through the cornfields, too slight to do anything but move the heat around.

His brother walked round to the front with the jack and the wheel spanner. He grunted as he levered it under the truck and cranked it up. The first nut came off easy, but the second one was stuck fast. His scrawny shoulders strained with the effort. ‘Just stay there, I can do it,’ he shouted to Harper, who wasn’t planning to move.

He started kicking at the handle of the spanner. And that’s when the truck slipped off the jack. It started rolling slowly forward towards the ditch again.

‘Harper!’ Everett yelled, irritated. And then, higher-pitched, panicky as the truck kept coming, ‘Pull the handbrake, Harper!’

But he didn’t. He sat tight as Everett tried to push the truck back, his hands on the bonnet. The weight of it knocked him off his feet before it went over him. His pelvis made a sharp snapping sound, like a pinecone in the fireplace. It was hard to hear anything else over Everett screaming. It went on and on. Eventually, Harper got out to see.

His brother was the color of old meat, his face a purple-gray, the white of his eyes shot with blood. A shard of bone stuck out his thigh, shockingly white. There was a thick pool of grease around the tire where it was resting on his hip. Not grease, Harper realized. Everything looks the same when you turn it inside out.

‘Run,’ Everett croaked. ‘Go get help. Run, dammit!’

Harper stared. He started walking, looking back over his shoulder. Fascinated.

‘Run!’

It took two hours to fetch someone from the Crombie farm up the way. Too late for Everett to be able to walk again. Their father tanned Harper raw. He would have beat Everett too, if he weren’t a goddam cripple. The accident meant they had to hire a man. Harper had to do extra chores, which made him mad.

Everett refused to acknowledge him. He went sour like potato mash left too long in the still, lying in bed, staring out the window. A year after that, they had to sell the truck. Three years later, the farm. Don’t let anyone tell you the Depression was the beginning of farmers’ troubles.

The windows and doors got boarded up. They loaded everything onto a truck they borrowed from a neighbor to go and sell whatever they could. Everett was so much luggage.

Harper jumped off at the first town. He went to war, but he never went back to where he came from.

That’s a possibility, he supposes. To leave the House and never come back. Take the money and run. Set up with a nice girl. No more killing. No more feeling the knife twist and the hot slip of a girl’s insides spilling out, watching the fire die in her eyes.

He looks at the wall, at the stuttering objects. The cassette tape leaps out at him, urgent, demanding. There are five names left. He doesn’t know what happens after that, but he does know that hunting them through time is no longer enough for him.

He thinks he would like to switch it up a bit. To play within the loops he’s already discovered, courtesy of Mr Bartek and the good doctor.

He would like to try to kill them first and then go back and find them before, when they are innocent of what is going to befall them. That way he’ll be able to converse politely with their younger and sweeter selves, setting them up for what he has already done to them, with the images of their deaths playing in his head. A reverse hunt, to make things more interesting.

And the House seems willing. The object that shines most brightly now, willing him to take it, is a pin-on button, red and white and blue with a flying pig.