Skin Folk (9 page)

It was all that stupid girl’s fault, playing with her toy.

Tinkling, twinkling, the river ground coldly by. A swirl of breeze abraded Sheeny’s cheek. Kay’s lips, his cold-chapped lips
had brushed across her cheek so. Absently she wiped her hand over the irritated spot on her face, and brought it away blood-streaked.
“Shit!” Alarmed, she yanked her concentration from the playscreen. Untended, the picture froze.

Sheeny looked up the valley. Damn. There
was
a glass wind coming, like she’d thought her head had said: blowing down the valley out of the deadlands, making the splinter-scoured
trees rattle their deceasing branches. She got to her feet, no longer interested in the spring tumble of water chuckling between
the river’s banks, roiling with masses of ground glass too fine to see, too deadly to drink unless it’d been sifted and filtered
and filtered again. She looked up the valley; across parched, bare, red earth for miles, nothing to relieve the eye but a
few almost-expired trees like clutching hands, towards the two mountain shoulders with the deadlands sitting between their
collarbones. No head, only that deep, parched, hollowed-out valley. She could just make out the dark haze of the glass wind
swirling down. She could hear it now too; a pleasant tinkling sound at this distance, like ornaments on the Christmas trees,
Before. So Mumsie said they’d sounded.

She shouldn’t have been by the riverbank, daydreaming of Kay. But it was the only place to go to avoid the eyes of her neighbours,
gone cold with blame at the sight of her. And Mumsie’s accusing eyes. How could Sheeny have known what would happen? She tugged
at the filter hanging from weathered elastic at her neck, pulled it up over her nose and mouth. Fat lot of good that would
do if she got caught out in the wind. She hugged the playscreen to her chest and started running for home.

The rhythmic pounding of her feet covered a little the sound of the wind whistling down. She sent her mind wandering, to keep
it calm…

She’d read about Christmas trees, seen pictures in Kay’s old picture book, the one possession he’d brought with him when her
family took him in. Christmas trees used to have this green… fuzz on them, not just bare, sandpapered branches that only stayed
up one day and were used for fuel the next. Christmas trees didn’t have glass ornaments anymore. Mumsie said the soft clinking
sound would drive people crazy with fear, thinking they were hearing the glass wind, the crazed, screeching, splinter-whipping
gale that would flense flesh from bone in seconds. Sheeny ran faster, ignoring the way her boots pinched where she had outgrown
them.

Never mind the Whetherman. Old Delpha knew what the weather would be: Glass. Winter’s cold first, then a great big bang boom,
then glass. Molten hot, running like rivers and beautifully red. Cold again, descending with the dark ash cloud. A keening,
cold iridescence that could freeze your eyes solid as marbles. Then all you saw, peering through ashy light, was the last
thing before the freezing. If a glass wind got into your eyes, you had only one point of view forever after. If it slid into
your heart, then you were really in trouble. There you’d be, your heart hardened to a lump of frigid, frozen meat, just offal
from the butcher’s. Shake the picture up all you want, this one won’t change. Unless the girl made it home safely, re-drew
her playscreen. Could happen. The picture wasn’t solid yet. Weird, how it had made a world where the girl could hear her,
only her. “Run,” Delpha whispered into the otherworld, the one behind the glass.

Mumsie had a cow’s glass-scoured thigh bone. Thick, like a young tree trunk, and half Sheeny’s height. Mumsie kept it on top
of the bookshelf, to remind herself and to scare Sheeny.

“Was Dodder, that,” she would tell Sheeny, jerking her sharp chin in the direction of the bone. “An old cow of ours, born
Before. Me and Jeff, we’d taken the cattle out to the water troughs and she wandered off. Didn’t have the sense to get in
when she heard the glass wind coming. We shoved in the house with the cows and all, but Dodder, she was way out, heading for
where she remembered the pasture to be, never mind it’s just dirt and rock there now. No time to roust her back. Wind singing
through the valley, blowing down fast. Me and you—you were just two, you wouldn’t even remember—and Jeff, we all clambered
with the cattle down the basement, hunkered down there in the mouldy hay. The cow farts smelt like fermented grass.”

Mumsie didn’t tell the story much anymore, because she’d have to say Jeff’s name when she did. Sheeny’d been with her stepdad
Jeff when he’d coughed his last. Mumsie’d come home with her buckets of splintery water to find Sheeny cradling his head,
weeping. Sheeny’d looked up to see sorrow and blame burning deep behind Mumsie’s eyes. Sheeny never knew whether Mumsie blamed
herself for not having been there in Jeff’s last moments, or whether she blamed Sheeny because Sheeny had.

Sheeny ran, the howler at her back.

“Just keep going, girl!” Delpha hissed. The child obliged, pounding her bounding way to home and safety. And when she got
there, she’d make a new picture with her toy. She didn’t know that the thing altered worlds. No one knew, yet.

Delpha had to admire the little chit’s strong lungs, not even thinking of tiring yet. She was so young, hadn’t breathed in
much glass. Yes, Run. Like that. Be a gingerbread girl, not yet baked solid. Run. Save us all. Run.

Slamming across bare earth, Sheeny trod on a stone in her too-small boots. It shifted under her foot; she stumbled, crying
out as she felt her ankle twist. The playscreen went tumbling. Something cracked inside it. No time to mind that. Sheeny straightened,
gritted her teeth against the crunch of pain, and ran on, leaving the playscreen making unhappy grinding noises on the ground.
Behind her, the wind sound was louder now, a buzzing like the sky was full of angry bees.

She shouldn’t have been by the river. It was too far away from home, from safe windowless cement enclosures and steel doors
abraded to a smooth shine by the wind. But the river, it called her. Mumsie knew that’s where Sheeny was nowadays, if she
couldn’t be found. Mumsie scolded her for it, beat her sometimes, but she couldn’t stay away. She needed to spend time just
crouched by the river, away from Mumsie’s silent accusations, staring at the only thing that lived free beneath the sky, never
needing shelter. Kay had jumped into that river when he couldn’t face living under glass any longer.

“That wind hit dead soon,” Mumsie had told her. The Dodder story. “Scraping, scraping against the house, and screaming ’cause
it couldn’t get at us. I dunno if Dodder screamed too, when it caught her. Couldn’t hear nothing but that scraping, screeching
wind. Could feel you though, sobbing in my arms, clutching at my bodice, and me sobbing right back, but soft, so you wouldn’t
feel it. So you’d learn how to be strong.

“Jeff, he went up the basement steps, checked to make sure the hatch was bolted. Good, thick steel, that door. He’d checked
it twice already, and anyway, no wind would have made it all the way through the tunnel upstairs, but that was Jeff. If he
could do something, he felt better.”

Sheeny’s ankle stabbed with each step; sickly jolts of pain that made metallic-tasting saliva squirt in her mouth. She glanced
over her shoulder. In the distance, an army of black cones twirled, screeling. The wide, flat land made it hard to tell how
close; too close. The sound they made was a granular scraping, like sandpaper grinding away. She sobbed, stumbled on.

“When it was over,” Mumsie had said, “we went out. Up to the upper level, out through the tunnel. We had to unhook the carpets
from the wall. Laid them down, crawled through the tunnel on them. Glass all the way inside the first two doors. The outside
one was blasted open. Mound of glass sand as high as my knee in front of it. Left Jeff sweeping up, you trying to help. I
went to find Dodder. Was still a bit of breeze. The glass had gone on in front though, so it was safe enough by then.

“All left of Dodder was great ropes of flesh that the breeze was stirring about on the ground. They glittered with grindglass,
so pretty… And the ground soaked in blood, and bones scattered everywhere, scoured smooth and white like they’d been bleaching
in the sun for years. And her skull. I remember. Gaping up blind at me from the ground. After that, we slaughtered all the
cows, gave the meat out to the whole town. We couldn’t look out for them all the time anymore. Besides, the mouldy hay was
making ’em sick, and we couldn’t grow no more.”