Finch stopped talking. The diner rustled around us, spoons chiming on cup brims and plates set to tables with a smack. I felt a sharp sting and looked down: I’d ripped the cuticle on my right index finger to bloody shreds.
“Is that it?” I asked, finally.
His eyes were worried, staring over my shoulder. “No, it’s just—” He half-stood, then sat again. “I thought I … never mind.”
“What is it?” My head pulsed with a three-a.m.-black-coffee feeling, and my teeth chattered twice before I clamped my jaw shut. I jerked a look back over each shoulder but saw nothing out of the ordinary: three girls younger than us drinking coffee and wearing sunglasses at night, a table of old men in work jackets, a dark-haired woman biting into a sugar cube.
“What did you see?” I whispered.
He ran a hand through his hair, made it bigger. “Nothing. I’m on edge.”
I took a last look around. Nobody looked back.
“You remembered a lot,” I said.
He’d jammed another wedge of sandwich in his mouth and was chewing mechanically, his eyes darting around. “When I love a book,” he said around the sandwich, “I read it more than once.”
“How does the story end?”
But Finch was out of storytelling mode, his eyes still flicking past my shoulder every few seconds. “Bloody revenge, obviously.”
“Revenge for what?”
“The usual. Neglectful mom, criminal dad. Shades of ‘Thousandfurs,’ in case I didn’t make that clear.”
“Coffee?” Finch and I jumped as our waitress swung by with a fresh pot.
“You’re more on edge now,” I said when she was gone. “Telling the story—it made you nervous.”
“I’ve never told one of them out loud. It made me … it almost made me think I was seeing things.” His head twitched as he checked out the table behind us: a college-aged guy and a woman in her forties, neither of them talking.
My own nerves were raw as rope, almost rubbed through. I couldn’t have him breaking down, too. “Fine, no more story time. Just … why do you think my mom named me after that story specifically?”
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe whoever left the page is trying to mess with you. She could’ve named you after, I don’t know, Alice in Wonderland. Or nobody at all.”
He took a swig of his coffee, rolled his neck. Calm, laid-back Finch was returning, sliding into place over his skin. It bothered me that he got to see me broken and all I got was the same candy shell he showed everyone else.
“Still, maybe she did,” I said, letting the story’s strange rhythms play over in my mind. It was different from what I thought it would be. It rattled around in my skull, unfinished. I’d assumed Althea’s work would have a strong feminist message, allegorical undertones, a clear arc of story. I’d expected Angela Carter at best, Animal Farm with princesses at worst. But this story had no allegiance to anything. It was winding and creepy and not even that bloody. There were no heroes, no wedding. No message.
“You know who my dad is, right?” Finch crushed oyster crackers into his soup.
“Um. Sort of.” Of course I knew who his dad was.
“So my name, my full name, is Ellery Oliver Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch.”
“Does that fit on a Scantron?”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” Of course the touchy-feely grade schools Finch must’ve attended didn’t use Scantrons. His middle school had probably graded with hearts and flowers.
“Ellery was my dad’s grandfather’s name, but guess where they got the Oliver.”
“Oliver Twist?”
“Nope.”
“Oliver Wendell Holmes?”
“I wish. But no.”
“Oliver … Hardy?”
“My parents aren’t that cool.”
“Fine. I give up.”
“My mom’s brother. He lived in the States for a few years before I was born, when my mom was still modeling. Then he moved back to Ghana when I was a baby. My stepmother has never once called me Ellery. She only calls me Oliver. She likes to pretend I’m not related to my dad at all—because I don’t look like him, I look like my mom. Like my uncle. She’s trying, through, like, power of sicko suggestion, to imply I’m not my dad’s. That I’m, like, my uncle’s.”
My stomach kicked like a rabbit. “Are you sure she means it that way? That’d be a pretty sick accusation.”
“She’s a pretty sick woman. She’s trying to get pregnant right now, and she’s at least forty-five. It’s straight out of a fucking fairy tale—like someday she’ll convince my dad I’m not even his, and her baby will inherit it all. Like I even want it. Like I’d ever want to be a man like my dad.”
Finch’s smiling, vaguely cloudy aspect had burned away. His face was a fierce beam of bitterness. The way he was gripping his coffee cup, I thought it might crack. I reached out to lay my hand over his before I could think.
He sat up straighter, his eyes refocusing on mine. The serene smile inched back onto his face, but now that I’d seen beneath it, I could tell it wasn’t a perfect fit.
“My mom used to let me swim in fountains,” I said, leaning slowly back and pulling my hand away. The memory came from nowhere; I hadn’t thought about it in years. “I always wanted to jump face-first into any body of water bigger than a puddle, and most moms would never let it happen, right? Because of security guards and waterborne diseases or whatever. But what Ella would do was put on her sunglasses and sit a little ways away, while I jumped into the fountain and shrieked and partied till someone noticed. Then she’d have to pretend to be mad, but she never made me get out till the last possible second. This happened in malls, courtyards, parks. It was awesome.”
“My mom punched my stepmom in the stomach once.”
I choked on my water. “What? Was it at the wedding?”
“God, that would’ve been even better. I’m telling it that way next time. But no, it was right after she found out about her and my dad. Total cliché, my stepmom was my dad’s personal assistant. So my mom cabs over to his office, and my stepmom’s all, ‘Good day, Mrs. Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch,’ because of course she’s really proper about those things, the bullshit things, and my mom hauls off and socks her in the stomach.”
“Wow. Did she sue for assault?”
“Nope. According to my dad’s business partner, she pretended like it didn’t even happen. Once she could breathe normally again, I mean. She’s a Vaseline-on-the-teeth type.”
“Damn. Your mom sounds ballsy.”
I stuttered to silence, remembering I had the tense wrong. Wondering if he knew I knew she was dead. But before I could feel worse, I saw something over Finch’s shoulder that made my vision tunnel.
It was the boy in the cab, the one who’d offered me a lift after school. In the weirdness of everything that had happened since, I’d forgotten about him. He was slouching in a vinyl seat at the back of the restaurant, holding a coffee mug in one hand and wearing his ratty flat cap. Everything in his posture said he didn’t see me, and for a second I mistrusted my racing heart.
Then he shifted slightly and winked at me, before turning his head toward the waitress.
“Finch,” I said quietly, “we’re going. Now.” He looked at my face and nodded, dug out a few bills to throw on the table. The boy in the cap was getting his coffee refilled when we slid from the booth and back out onto Seventy-Ninth Street.
“I think there’s a guy in there who’s following me,” I said, giving up on the idea of not sounding insane. We’d turned a sharp corner and were careening down the street, dodging clumps of tourists. For once I was glad they were there, to offer cover.
“What’s he look like?”
“College age, but kinda old-timey. Like a … I don’t know. A good-looking cabbie during Prohibition.”
“Good-looking?”
His stupid question hung in the air. I was looking back over my shoulder so often, it took me a minute to realize we were weaving toward his place. Where I would, what? Spend the night? I felt a pang of self-loathing. Freeloading again, off a boy I barely knew. A boy whose eyes were the alert, shiny color of sunlight through Coke, with a kinetic energy that made him seem like he never slept.
By the time we reached his block I was seriously considering heading to Lana’s. Or Salty Dog—I had a key. I could lie across two tables to sleep, sneak out before it opened the next morning.
“Look, Finch. You don’t have to take me back to your—”
“Stop.” His voice was so harsh that I did. But he wasn’t looking at me. He grabbed the back of my jacket in his fist and pulled me toward the low wall surrounding Central Park, across and a couple of doors down from his place.
“Get down,” he hissed. He was staring hard at a figure standing just beyond the spill of light beneath his awning.
At first I just saw a girl in black—black dress, black boots, a brief stretch of pale leg between them. My eyes adjusted, and I started picking out details. Her hair was a sweep of piled-up dark, with a white comic-book stripe blazing down the center. Her eyes were so light I could actually see them from where we crouched—they cast a glow. They ticked back and forth, watching the sidewalk. My skin crawled when I considered the possibility of them landing on me. When she shifted a bit in the shadows, I saw the messy scar that ran down her right temple and cupped her chin like a palm.
“Over the wall,” Finch said in a rough whisper, tugging me backward toward the park. We crouched in the shadows of a juniper bush. The air was resinous on my tongue.
“Do you see that girl?” Finch asked. His eyes were glittery and weird. “That’s Twice-Killed Katherine.”
It took me a minute to place his words. It was the title of one of the stories in Tales from the Hinterland. “You mean she looks like her?”
“Is her. That girl is Twice-Killed Katherine.” He looked at me with a face like a subway preacher, lit and fierce.
“What, like you’ve seen her before? This is New York. She looks like a million fashiony girls.”
“You’re just saying that because you haven’t read it. Look at her scar. And her hair. And—oh, my god. Do you see what she’s holding?”
I squinted at the thing she held to her chest but couldn’t make it out.
“It’s a birdcage. It’s what Twice-Killed Katherine carries. This is it,” he hissed. “This is the Hinterland!”
I started to respond, but the girl did something so strange and terrifying it shut both of us up for a long time.
A man in a heavy gray overcoat was walking down the street toward her, smoking a cigarette and talking into his cell phone. As he passed her, he did a subtle double-take, maybe noticing her scarred face. Before he could get too far, she opened the birdcage.
The thing that came out of it was canary-shaped, but it wasn’t a canary. It was small and darting and looked like it had been hole-punched out of shadow. It unfurled its wings wider and wider, till it was the size of a hawk.
It went for the man. As Finch and I gripped hands and knelt like cowards in the park, the thing latched onto his neck. He went down noiselessly, and the creature dropped heavily onto his chest. It stretched its wings so we couldn’t see exactly what it was doing. I looked back at the girl. Swallowed a scream, squeezed Finch’s hand harder.
Her black-and-white hair shivered with red. Her skin turned from pale to peach, her lips curled, even her scar plumped up into unmarked skin. But the expression on her face was worse than anything. It was a kind of … selfish ecstasy.
The bird lifted off the man, folded itself back into a tiny wedge of nightmare, and winged toward its cage. The girl clasped the door shut and backed deeper into the shadows between streetlights.
“Is he dead?” I whispered. My voice was a skeleton leaf.
The man on the ground rose shakily to his feet. He was swimming in his coat and had the air of a person who had forgotten something. His hair was ash white. He staggered over the sidewalk like a zombie.
“Run,” said Finch, and we did. We pounded through the park, pools of lamplight strobing over us and dead leaves clutching at our ankles. The air smelled silvery, with a hint of mulch, and the cold wind made my eyes stream. Sweat had pooled on my back by the time we dropped onto a bench.
“That was … that was not possible,” I said hoarsely.
Finch’s pupils were blasted wide. He looked strung out. “That was the Hinterland. Fuck.”
I couldn’t respond. It was my first true glimpse of the Hinterland—my first solid proof that there was something terribly real behind Althea’s messed-up tales. I should’ve been reeling.
But I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe it wasn’t the first glimpse. All my life I thought we’d been stalked by bad luck, in the form of weather and disasters and acts of God and strange human viciousness. Maybe all this time, we were being stalked by the Hinterland.
“What she did to that man,” I asked. “Does she do it in the story?”
He breathed through his open mouth a few times and fell back against the bench. “It’s not how I pictured it, but yeah. It keeps her young. Or alive, maybe. It’s also her revenge.”
“On the people who killed her.”
“And worse. Yeah.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I should call my dad. Make sure he’s at home, or talk him into staying away if he isn’t.” But he didn’t make a move toward his phone.
“Finch,” I said. “Do you think…”
“Katherine wouldn’t hurt your mom.” His eyes flicked to mine. “She doesn’t target women. What we need is a place to stay, get some sleep. Then we figure out what’s next.”
His expression mirrored what I felt—the black-hole suck of exhaustion that strikes after a trauma. When everything has changed and your messed-up brain is flying around the stars—then your body and all its needs imposes itself, cutting you off from madness.
My situation hit me hard. Homeless. Without my mom. Being stalked, by something I couldn’t see the breadth of or understand. I was wrung out, and without Finch I’d be totally alone. “Thank you” was too small, “I’m sorry” so inadequate it made me cringe.
“Okay,” I said. “Lead the way.”