“If you don’t get Mabel to hush it right now, so help me. . .” Jessie throws a glance to the back seat. The hen hasn’t stopped squawking since Mary Frances plucked her from the chicken coop behind the cottage.
“She’s scared, Aunt Jessie.”
“Her brain’s the size of a walnut. Only emotions she has are eat, lay eggs, poop, repeat.”
Mabel squawks. The hen’s body twitches like a live wire under Mary Frances’ hands. “Actually, chickens have complex emotions and can predict future events.”
Jessie twists around sharply in the front passenger seat. The twitch in her right eye is so bad, Mary Frances thinks it might pop out of its socket. “Discussing the inner lives of chickens is the last thing I want to do right now.” She turns back around, presses her fingers to her eyes. “If the people in this town only knew what we go through to keep them safe.”
“Maybe not everyone deserves to be safe,” Mary Frances mutters. Jessie is too busy poking around her fanny pack to hear this, but Mary Frances catches Aunt Fab’s glance in the rearview mirror. Mary Frances ducks her head, sings softly to Mabel, as she runs her gloved fingers along one of the bird’s wings. The hen begins to purr and her plump body stills.
“It’s going to be alright, Jessie.” Fab pulls over to let a police car, siren yowling, fly down Main Street. Mary Frances shifts forward on the back seat until her head is next to Aunt Fab’s. Fab gives Mary Frances a sideways smile, runs her fingers down the black and white feathers on Mabel’s chest. The hen trills. “It’s going to be alright,” Fab says. She puts the pick-up into drive and merges back onto the street.
“What happened to the Sayre boy at their place last night. . .God knows he’s no angel, but no one deserves that.” Jessie gnaws on her thumbnail.
“We don’t know for sure it was the creature.” Fab makes a right turn towards the back entrance to the old shopping mall.
“That’s what you said when the Sayre’s dog got shredded to bits. And what you said about the bloodbath at their goat dairy. What else could it be?”
“Well, it’s strange it’s going back to the same place over and over again. The creature feeds more randomly than that.”
“I never should’ve listened to you, Fab. We should’ve cast the darn thing back the day county health said the chicken pox outbreak was over.” Jessie’s gaze flicks to the rearview mirror. “Mary Frances, what on earth are you smiling at?”
“Nothing.”
Jessie’s head whips around. She stares at Mary Frances. “Something’s gotten into you lately and I don’t like it. I thought your personality would improve once we started teaching you, but you’re weirder than ever. No wonder you don’t have any friends.”
“Jessie,” Aunt Fab says. The word is short and sharp as a rifle shot. “Your Aunt Jessie’s stressed out about the creature, but she shouldn’t take it out on you. We’re glad you’re helping us. Isn’t that right, Jessie?” Fab’s tone brooks no contradiction.
“Yeah,” Jessie mutters. She returns to gnawing on her fingernail. Mary Frances looks out the side window while Mabel clucks and nips at her gloved fingers.
Daisies are as dumb as dirt, according to the aunts. This makes the strip of land behind the abandoned Kmart and between the surrounding woods the perfect place for the ritual.
“Sweet baby Jesus. Could it be any colder out here?” Jessie covers her head with the hood of a navy “Women’s March Charlotte 2017” sweatshirt and tucks errant strands of her rainy-day colored hair behind her ears. She, Fab, and Mary Frances stand on the strip of land, just beyond the last sodium light in the Kmart parking lot. The once well-tended grass is mostly bald and brown now, what green areas remain taken over by tufts of wild daisies.
Fab tugs a green wool hat over her short dark hair and wraps her arms around herself. Mary Frances shifts back and forth on her feet, Mabel tucked into the front of her bomber jacket. The hen’s purring warms Mary Frances’ chest but her body still shivers in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.
Jessie looks up from her fanny pack, gives a defeated sigh. “Fab, do you have the knife? I thought I put it in here before we left the cottage, but now I can’t find the darn thing. . .”
Fab pulls a brown leather scabbard from her coat pocket, along with a scrap of chamois. She murmurs as she removes the knife from the scabbard and wipes the five-inch blade, down one side, then up the other. When Fab stuffs the chamois back in her coat pocket, the blade gleams as if it’s caught the light from a moonbeam, even though the moon is hours away from rising. She beckons to Mary Frances. “It’s time. Hold Mabel to the ground. Let’s do this quick.”
Mary Frances’ stomach tightens when the hen’s distressed squawks cease as Fab slices the knife across Mabel’s neck. Hot blood spurts from the hen’s neck onto Mary Frances’ gloved hands and the dumb daisies, the dead grasses. Jessie dips her fingers in the fresh blood, makes a wide circle on the ground, and draws the creature’s symbol inside.
Fab gently nudges Mary Frances with her shoulder. “I’m sorry about Mabel. I know she was your favorite.” Mary Frances shrugs, lets her gaze drift to the Kmart building. The trees sway and rustle with an odd insistence. A tall shadow emerges from the trees, moves toward Mary Frances and the aunts. As it passes under the closest sodium light’s cool flare, the shadow becomes the creature. The aunts’ inhales are sharp and simultaneous.
“It’s so tall,” Jessie says. Her body is rigid as a telephone pole. “It shouldn’t be this big.” There’s a dark unspoken thought in the glance the aunts exchange and they miss the small smile that flickers across Mary Frances’ face. There’s a heavy grinding sound as the creature makes its way towards the circle. The wet tang of clay, rainwater, and crushed pine needles fills the air. The closest sodium light flickers, then goes out.
The light change breaks Jessie’s stunned daze. She speaks, unleashing a flash flood of words, and the blood circle and symbol she made begin to glow. The creature emits a low, rumbling moan that makes the daisies quiver.
“Now!” Jessie stands, legs spread wide, fists on hips. Blood trickles from one nostril.
“Is it bound?” Fab says.
“Yes.” The creature moans again, louder. “Do it. Do it now! I can’t hold it forever, Fabia!”
“Take my hand, baby girl,” Fab says. “You remember the words?” Mary Frances nods, winces when her aunt clasps her gloved hand. The creature moans and cowers. The aunts link hands and speak in a rush of long, winding words which, at first, rise and fall on independent, discordant strands before cleaving together in one otherworldly voice. When Fab nods at her, Mary Frances joins in, her voice wrapping around her aunts’ words, strengthening the magic. The blood circle and symbol pulse and flare as if they’re made of collapsing stars.
Jessie presses a hand against the creature’s chest. The creature’s groans get louder, as if it’s resisting the weight of her hand. Jessie’s eyes widen and her mouth parts. The creature roars. There’s a sudden wave of uplifting pressure and Mary Frances and the aunts fall to the ground. Then footfalls, loud, inhuman, and moving surprisingly fast back to the woods. The sodium light flickers back on and Aunt Jessie scrambles to her feet.
“It has a different name stone.” Jessie’s voice punches up into the night sky with the urgency of an emergency flare. “Fab, how the fuck does it have a different name stone?”
Mary Frances gazes towards the woods, not bothering to hide the gleeful smile spread across her face.
The aunts gave Mary Frances the idea to take control of the creature in the first place.
First was Aunt Jessie, four days after the Sutland County health department declared the chicken pox outbreak in Holystead contained. Mary Frances came home from her after-school job at the Dollar Tree to find the aunts in the kitchen, knee-deep in argument.
“We can’t keep the creature here any longer, Fab. High time to send it back.” Jessie opened cupboard doors and shut them in syncopated rhythm with the pops and smacks from her nicotine gum. She dumped some biscuit mix into a mixing bowl. “We won. Yay.” She made a half-hearted wave with a teaspoon before plunging it into a can of baking powder. “Mary Frances, make yourself useful and crack two eggs into this bowl.”
Fab rolled her head to one side, stretched her neck. “It’s a pointless victory,” she said as Mary Frances cracked eggs and let them fall with wet plops into the mixing bowl. “You know another outbreak will pop up soon enough, and the way things are, it’ll be worse than what came before. A lot worse.” Fab rolled up the hem on her liver-colored nursing scrubs, propped a foot across her knee, and began to massage it with her thumbs from ankle to toes.
“Why can’t we let the creature stick around?” Mary Frances asked.
“Creature’s made of rock, right? Rocks hold impressions,” Jessie said and stirred water into the biscuit mixture. “Here,” she pointed down, “was once part of a mountain range.” It took Mary Frances a moment to understand her aunt was talking about the land and not the faded kitchen linoleum. “Tallest in the world, higher than the Swiss Alps. But then there’s time, wind, rain. Mountain gets ground down, not so mighty anymore. The rock remembers, though. It remembers how powerful it used to be. And if it gets the chance, it’ll work hard as hell to be that powerful again.”
Mary Frances pictured the creature bursting through Holystead High’s foundation and continuing upward and outward to splinter apart the cafeteria, the gym. The creature as tall as a fast-food sign making Beeman Sayre cower in fear.
“The creature needs to be controlled. Without control, it won’t be satisfied with feeding on a virus. It’ll keep feeding on more and bigger fare, getting stronger and larger.” Aunt Jessie lit the stove burner with a match, greased the cast iron pan with oil. “The name stone I put in the creature helps, of course. Longer it’s here, though, harder it is for me to keep it under control. That’s why we always have to send it back to the earth after we’re done with it.” She spooned batter into the pan, flattened it into a pancake. “Isn’t that right, Fab?”
Something dark and unpleasant flickered across Fab’s eyes. “Supposed to be clear skies tomorrow night. We’ll do the ritual then.” She stood, then trudged down the hallway away from the kitchen and towards the bathroom.
Later that night, Mary Frances wheels into the parking lot of the abandoned Kmart on her bike. Loose gravel and bits of broken macadam pop up as she brakes hard, catches her breath. The tops of the pine trees bend in the breeze, stroking the bottom of the rising moon like the tips of paintbrushes. Faint hush of traffic from the main highway, where winter tourists blow past Holystead on the way down to the South Carolina beaches.
It was easy to get away from the cottage. The aunts are distracted, hunkered around the kitchen table, picking up every moment in the evening’s ritual to banish the creature, examining it, and setting it back down again, none the wiser about what went wrong.
Mary Frances adjusts her backpack, walks to the side of the Kmart building. She carefully picks her way through a broken window and uses a flashlight to skirt around the detritus. Mannequins with half-melted faces and spray-painted with genital parts. Used condoms. Sweet, syrupy aroma of dried-up beer spills. Old cigarette smoke that seeps from everything, even the concrete. Then she catches another familiar scent that makes the back of her neck tingle.
Somewhere, water drips onto metal with a steady, resonant plonk. In the open center of a smashed-up jewelry counter, a shadow rises, defines itself. The familiar scent gets stronger: wet clay, pine resin, rainwater.
There’s a slick sudden heat between Mary Frances’ legs. Here, in the old Kmart at night, she’s a different Mary Frances. This Mary Frances isn’t mocked by Beeman Sayre when she brings homemade sausage rolls and pickles for school lunch. This Mary Frances doesn’t go silent when Beeman Sayre drowns out her opinion about The Scarlet Letter in English class with his stupid misogynist views. This Mary Frances doesn’t have to go to the 2nd floor girls’ bathroom and sit in a stall until her knees stop shaking after Beeman Sayre, whose breath reeks of something sunbaked at low tide, corners her in the basement library during free period. This Mary Frances doesn’t have to hide the thin scratches she makes on the soft flesh along her inner upper arm. This Mary Frances doesn’t turn the other cheek.
“I’m here,” she whispers. The creature goes still, waits until Mary Frances takes off her backpack, denim jacket, and flannel. She peels away the winter gloves that hide the burn marks on her right palm, the tips of her fingers. She puts her arms around the creature’s smooth cool mud outsides. With what could be a mouth, it sucks at the scratches on her upper arms, the burns on her right hand. Limbs clutch and bind Mary Frances’ waist and backside, a dry unvarnished murmur in her ear. Her undershirt and pants rustle, leave her body.
Mary Frances falls into the deep sleep she always falls into after being with the creature. She dreams she’s standing on top of a tall, craggy mountain. Before her, a pine forest blankets a long stretch of valley. Mary Frances squints, tries to make out the valley’s end, but an unseen force yanks her aloft and away from the mountain top. She tries to fight it off, get her feet back on solid rock, but there’s another yank, a sharp pain in her hand and then she’s awake.
Two pairs of familiar eyes, tired and grim, stare down at her in the semi-darkness inside the abandoned Kmart. Mary Frances’ mind says “run” but her body won’t obey.
“You were right, Fab,” Jessie says and squeezes the burn marks on Mary Frances’ hand. She yelps and the creature rises, grinding and growling, to its feet.
If Aunt Jessie’s explanation about the creature’s power was the match, then Aunt Fab’s story later that night was the spark that lit Mary Frances’ determination to take the matter of what to do about Beeman Sayre into her own hands.
When Mary Frances stepped into her bedroom after dinner, Fab was perched on the edge of the unmade twin bed, legs still speckled with water droplets from her shower. She wore a men’s flannel robe, sleeves rolled up, and her short hair lay in a sleek, wet cap against her skull.
Fab held out her cigarette for Mary Frances to take, but it slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. A curse, blurry around the edges, tumbled from her aunts’ mouth. Mary Frances snatched up the fallen cigarette before it could burn the high-traffic carpet Aunt Jessie had scavenged from the public housing unit down the road before they demolished it to build the Dollar Tree where Mary Frances now works.
“One time, when I was around your age, I called a creature. It was a bad time to do it.” Fab’s tone seesawed between defiance and regret. She motioned for Mary Frances to hand her the cigarette, took a long drag. “It was a bad time to do it,” she said again. “But I could not help myself.” She tilted her head to look up at Mary Frances. “So many women, good women, rounded up, tried, hung. And if they did not get the noose right. . .well, then they would slowly strangle.” She took a deep breath. “Me and Jessie could do nought but stand and bear witness. I hope ye never hear that sound. Aye, nor see rows of women’s mouths gaping like fish drowning.” Fab’s speech pattern reverted to what she and Jessie called “the time before we came to Holystead” whenever she drank more than her usual single glass of coconut vodka after her shift at the hospital.
She patted the bed next to her. Mary Frances sat down, rested her head on Fab’s shoulder. Raindrops pinged against the bedroom’s skylight, the one Aunt Jessie had made from scraps of wood and old wine bottles the previous summer. A reminder that she’s not all sharp tongue. Aunt Jessie sees the unexpected beauty in discarded things.
The tip of Fab’s tongue rested on her bottom teeth. “It was the guilt that made me do it. My anger at all the sins so-called good men hide. So, I went down to the village’s shoreline and made a creature from sand and broken seashells and foam and my blood. And I told it to take the ugliness away. . .” she raised a hand, let it float into the air and follow the thin line of smoke drifting upwards from the cigarette’s tip. “Is Beeman Sayre at it again, baby girl? Do we need to come down to the school and-” Fab’s hand grazed the bruises on Mary Frances’ forearm.
“No, Aunt Fab. I’m ok. Really.” The words were thick and curdled in Mary Frances’ mouth. Meetings with school staff, come-to-Jesus talks with Beeman Sayre’s parents, never made anything better. What will make it better the aunts refuse to do.
But recently the aunts had begun to teach Mary Frances about their work. It occurred to her as she rested her head on Fab’s shoulder and inhaled her aunt’s scent, a mix of homemade black soap, artificial coconut, and cigarette smoke, that maybe she didn’t need the aunts’ help to deal with Beeman anymore.
It takes both aunts’ magic to bind the creature to the floor of the abandoned Kmart. As Mary Frances puts her clothes back on, one thought runs through her head on repeat: the mighty mountain remembers. When the creature realizes it is bound to the floor, it grunts. The sound reminds Mary Frances of what a cartoon villain makes when an unexpected twist foils their plans, and the thought sets her to giggling until Jessie slaps her across the face. The creature growls and tries to lunge towards Mary Frances, but the aunts’ bind holds it in place.
“How could you?” Jessie says. “We thought we did something wrong, but it was you all along. . .when I think of that blood bath at the Sayre’s dairy farm last night. . .all those poor goats. . .and Beeman all banged up, not to mention the dog. . .thank God, thank God, the police don’t believe a word of his story. You realize what you’ve done? The danger you put us all in?”
Mary Frances doesn’t feel sorry for what the creature did to the goats at the Sayre’s farm. She doesn’t care about Beeman Sayre’s broken arm. Even the thought of the disemboweled dog leaves her numb. The place where Aunt Jessie slapped her throbs with a thrilling, electric feeling. As Jessie continues to rant, Mary Frances looks up through a raw hole in the Kmart roof at the cloudless night sky. She wants to smash a fist into the stars and make them tremble and scatter.
Fab puts a hand on Mary Frances’ shoulder. Her touch is light and warm and a hairline crack opens in Mary Frances’ stony anger. “I just. . .Aunt Fab, it was like you said. I wanted the creature to take the ugliness away.”
Understanding dawns in Fab’s gaze as Jessie whips her head around. “You told her that story? Oh, Fabia. . .” Jessie’s shoulders slump and she stares at Fab in a way that gives Mary Frances a glimpse of a different, long-ago Aunt Jessie, someone impossibly young and sensitive and uncertain. Fab gazes up at the creature as it moans and struggles against the bind.
“Beeman Sayre is a bad person. He’s been bullying me since grade school.” Mary Frances feels as fragile as a piece of old paper. “And you’ve never done anything to stop him.”
Fab winces but Jessie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Never did anything? You have got to be kidding.” Jessie’s tone turns brittle. “We went to your school and talked with the principal. We talked with Mr. and Mrs. Sayre, I don’t even know how many times. We did all we could.”
“No, you didn’t!” Mary Frances insides feel like they’re boiling over. “You could’ve used your magic. You could’ve stopped Beeman hurting me a long time ago, but you didn’t.”
“We use what we know only to help and heal, never to hurt or take revenge on people. Ever. That’s how we’re allowed to do our work. You know that.” Jessie says.
“What about my hurt?”
“’What about my hurt?’” Jessie’s voice is a mocking whine. “That’s what a little girl says. Mary Frances, you’d better stiffen your spine, if you want to follow in our foot-”
“Jessie.” Fab’s voice is quiet, but there’s an edge to it that draws Jessie’s gaze. The aunts regard each other for a moment and then Jessie throw her hands up, turn away.
“Aunt Fab?”
Fab smiles, cups Mary Frances’ cheek and pulls her close. “I’m so sorry, baby girl,” she whispers. Mary Frances lets herself sink into Fab’s calm comfort and the creature sighs.
Summoning the creature was both easier and harder than Mary Frances expected. Easy: a bloody tampon in a plastic bag, thanks to it being her time of the month. Hard: wrapping her tongue around the creation incantations from the spell book the aunts stored in the hall closet, the same spell book Mary Frances had taken photos of with her phone. Harder still: binding the newly formed creature to herself. It was, as the aunts liked to say, a whole other ball of wax.
Mary Frances chased the creature through the grove of bore beetle-infested pines behind the cottage, leaving a trail of churned-up soil in her wake. The creature was short and wide and faster than Mary Frances expected, considering the dense Carolina clay mud and water-logged pine needles from which it was made. But Mary Frances moved fast too, spurred on by an urgency that vibrated from the center of her bones.
She cornered the creature in a place where the sickly pines gave way to sparse brush at banks of the Bald Cypress River. It wouldn’t cross the water and paced along the riverbank and whined and ground its parts together. It sounded like a car engine revving and made Mary Frances’ pulse race. She sliced her finger with a paring knife, used the blood to trace the symbol she’d seen her aunts use in previous summonings on the ground. The creature went still, and so did everything else: the rushing river, the wind shush-shushing through the pines, the vibration in Mary Frances’ bones. She pressed one hand against the creature’s chest and after a moment of resistance, it sank into cool muddy flesh. Mary Frances’ fingers collided with something round and hard. Aunt Jessie’s name stone. The girl grasped the stone, cried out in surprise as it burned her fingers and palm. There was a wet, sucking sound as she wrenched the stone from the creature’s chest and threw it away, into the river.
Mary Frances leaned against the creature, and took out a small, smooth stone with her name symbol on it her pants pocket. Her burned fingers throbbing, she pressed her name stone into the creature’s chest. It began to hum, low and soothing and its muddy flesh enveloped hers in tender coolness. Mary Frances shed her clothes so she could feel that comforting sensation all over. She crawled on top of the creature, which let her sink and fold herself into itself like a secret. Downriver, the alarm at the textile thread plant called out the shift change.
Afterwards Mary Frances told the creature what she wanted it to do to Beeman Sayre, and it stilled against her nakedness and listened.
“I’m sorry,” Aunt Fab whispers and kisses Mary Frances’ forehead. “I’m so sorry for your hurt. But now what’s been done must be undone.” Her voice turns flinty and when Mary Frances tries to pull away, Fab holds her fast by the shoulders.
“The undoing will hurt less if you take your name stone from the creature yourself.” There is an unyielding tautness to Fab’s face that Mary Frances hasn’t seen before. It is a hard look for hard times. It is a look that says her aunt will not hesitate to force Mary Frances’ hand.
The creature groans and the soft yearning in it makes Mary Frances’ heart lurch. She looks up at the creature that looms over her and the aunts in the decrepit building’s semi-darkness. As she takes it in, this blocky form that is nearly as tall as the defunct industrial lights hanging from the Kmart’s ceiling but quakes and rattles in fear, a feeling sneaks up on Mary Frances. It’s like when there’s a pop quiz at school and what surprises her isn’t the test itself, but the fact she already knows all the answers.
True or false? Her hurt doesn’t matter at all.
True or false? Push comes to shove, the aunts will always make her turn the other cheek.
Mary Frances moves past the aunts, kneels at the creature’s feet. She says the words she’s heard the aunts use before, and the creature lays down like an obedient dog and starts to hum in its low, soothing way. Keeping her voice sweet and steady, Mary Frances thrusts a hand into its cool slippery insides and pulls out her name stone.
Mary Frances pulls out her name stone and the creature howls. Its howls become keens that make her feel as if all her skin is being peeled away from her body and slapped back on inside out. As the creature’s clay limbs tumble and crumble down into the trash on the Kmart floor, Mary Frances feels a part of herself crumbling away too. In the space of a handful of heartbeats, all that remains of the creature is the faint scent of rainwater and pine needles.
Jessie holds out Mary Frances’ denim jacket, but Mary Frances ignores her, so her aunt drapes it over her shoulders. Jessie opens her mouth, starts to say something, gives a tight shake of her head, and turns away. Flashlight in hand, she picks her way toward the broken window at the side of the abandoned Kmart.
Fab nudges the trash, pebbles, and pine needles in the place where the creature stood. “There will always be ugliness in this world. I wish it wasn’t so, but. . .” she pauses, “even when you take revenge on the cruel and the wicked, the pain and anger stays with you. These feelings will be your constant companions and, if you keep using magic to feed them, they’ll take more and more of you until there’s only pain and anger left. You’re going to hate us for a while. God knows I hated your Aunt Jessie when she made me do the same thing you did tonight. In time, you’ll see it was the right thing to do.” Fab gives the trash and rocks one more nudge with her tennis shoe. “God meant for us to walk in the sun, baby girl. Don’t dwell in the shade.”
Mary Frances pretends. Pretends she’s learned her lesson. Pretends to be good.
The aunts are extra tender with her. Jessie’s love slinks in like a shy, feral cat. Cheap hot cocoa magicked into something richer and finer and left on the stove top in the morning. A pretty fleece blanket draped across Mary Frances’ bed with the Dollar Store tag still on. Fab teaches her how to make protection spells. “We will do everything we can to protect you,” her aunt says, her voice shimmering with a forced brightness.
Fab turns out to be wrong. Mary Frances doesn’t hate her aunts. What she feels for them is sorry: for the way Jessie’s eyes droop at dinner when Fab brings up a possible measles outbreak in the county, for the hard lines of distress that appear between Fab’s eyebrows when she talks about caring for an ER patient whose boyfriend broke her arm in two places. Mary Frances feels sorry for them because they don’t know what she knows: that if God had meant for them to always walk in the sun, he wouldn’t have created the shade.
Beeman Sayre still bullies Mary Frances, but she doesn’t cut herself anymore. Cocooned within a protection spell, she drinks in his taunts, absorbs his liquid snickers. She drinks it all in, every, last bitter drop and she bides her time.
Mary Frances bides her time for the day when she’s learned enough magic. When that day comes, she’ll crack her thin veneer of goodness and push it away piece by piece, the way a newborn chicken breaks through its shell. She’ll dip the shards in her blood and call forth creatures and terrors to right all the wrongs, hurt the ones who need hurting. When the time is right, Mary Frances knows she’ll make them all dwell in the shade.
Nicole’s short fiction has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Apparition Lit, Apex’s Strange Machines anthology, and The Future Fire, among other publications. Her work has also received an honorable mention from Writers of the Future. She is a member of SFWA and Codex and currently does all her living and writing in North Carolina.