Whistling Past the Graveyard (3 page)

Above them the nightbirds wheeled in the sky. Then one by one they peeled off and followed the SUV down the boulevard. Soon only the big roadster was left, alone and waiting.

Without haste Doctor Nine reached forward and touched the Mulatto’s shoulder.

“Follow,” he murmured.

The Mulatto nodded and turned the car around and then turned again to enter the boulevard. Spike and Zasha exchanged a glance.

“Something…?” Zasha asked casually, hiding the interest that brightened her eyes.

Doctor Nine nodded.

“What?” Spike asked. “That car we just passed?”

Another nod.

“Too late, Boss,” muttered the Sage. “We’ll never find it again.”

Zasha jabbed his shoulder with a long fingernail. “Of course we will,” she said, looking to Doctor Nine for approval.

They all looked at Doctor Nine, and he endured their stares mildly. After a long while he said, “We’ve been invited to a coming-out party.”

He smiled at them.

Soon, all of the others laughed.

The night followed them like a pack of dogs.

-4-

Bethy wondered how it felt for Millie to die. It was something she tended to think about, even when she was killing a cat, or a dog. Poison sometimes hurt and so she stopped using it. Not because she wanted to spare pain—that was just a silly thought—no, it was because pain was such a distraction. Medicine was so much easier. No pain, just a fuzziness and a sleepy feeling that was warm and a little fluttery, like moth wings in the head. Bethy knew because she had tried the pills herself. First one of them, then two. The most she’d ever taken at once was six.

According to the Internet four was supposed to be fatal. She tried six just to confirm a theory…a suspicion, or a hope. The moths had fluttered around in her head for a deliciously long time, during which Bethy had so many strange thoughts. Almost feelings, but not quite. Close enough so that she guessed that anyone else taking the drug would have had true feelings. It gave her perspective on what Millie’s reaction might be.

Millie was probably having such feelings now. And thoughts, too—Millie wasn’t completely incapable, Bethy had to remind herself of that and to be fair to her sister. Millie’s expression kept changing as if she’d had a sudden idea but when she spoke, which was less and less often now, her words were a junk-drawer jumble of nonsense, half-sentences and wrong word choices. Bethy found it interesting and she wished she could read minds. She bet that a mind-reader could make sense of what Millie was trying to say. Mind-readers didn’t need actual language, she was sure of that. Then she wondered if a mind-reader could read an animal’s mind, and if so, could they translate the thoughts into human words? Would an animal’s thoughts change as they died, especially if they realized that they were dying? She hoped she would find out one day.

Maybe she could ask Doctor Nine. She was sure that he was coming tonight. She was sure that she had seen him out there, driving in a big car that was the color of night. When she looked at the window she could see that there were dark birds lined up on the sill and on the power lines across the street. The birds belonged to
him
, she had no doubts.

“B…Bethy…?”

Hearing Millie speak now—very clearly except for a purely understandable hitch—broke Bethy’s reverie.

“Yes?” Bethy asked, utterly fascinated by anything Millie would say at this point. She pulled her diary onto her lap and picked up her pen.

“I don’t feel…” Millie lapsed back into silence, her eyelids flittered closed.

Hm. What did that mean?
I don’t feel
. Feel what? Bethy wondered. Was Millie losing her emotions? Did they die first before the rest of the body?

No, she didn’t think so. She’d read about dying confessions, which was guilt; and about dying people saying nice things to comfort the people sitting around a death bed, which was compassion. Weird, but there it was.

Then she got it. Millie was trying to say that she didn’t feel good. Or maybe that she didn’t feel quite right. How…ordinary.

“It’s okay, Mils,” Bethy said. “It’s just the medicine.”

Millie’s eyelids trembled, opened. There was a spark of something there. Confusion? Bethy could recognize emotions even if she didn’t have any. Or, at least she could recognize emotions that she didn’t share. She saw fear there, and though she didn’t understand it she enjoyed seeing it.

“I’m…not sick.” With a furrow of her brows, Millie whispered, “Am I?”

“Sick?” Bethy replied with a comforting laugh. “Oh no, honey! You’re not sick.” She patted her hand the way Aunt Annie sometimes did. “No need to worry.”

She saw relief in Millie’s eyes and Bethy took a taste of it.

“Not…sick…?”

“No, sweetie…you’re just dying,” Bethy said, and wondered if teasing this way was being greedy, and…was that okay?

Millie’s eyes snapped wide and she tried to move. Bethy estimated that it took every ounce of her strength to move as much as she did, but all she could manage was a flap of one hand and a slight arch of her body. Then she collapsed back onto the pillows they’d brought down from the bed.

Bethy wrote a quick description of it in her diary.

The clock ticked, Mr. Whiskers’ eyes flicking one way, his tail swishing the other. Bethy counted seconds. She got to one-hundred and sixteen before Millie’s eyes opened again.

“Why?”

Just the one word, and it was clear that it cost her to get it out. Bethy wondered how many words Millie had left to spend.

“Because, Mils. It’s for me. And for him.”

Millie looked confused. Her lips formed the word ‘who,’ but she could not afford the breath to say it aloud.

“For
him.
For Doctor Nine.”

There was another flare of expression—mingled confusion
and
fear. Nice. Again Bethy wished she could read minds, though she was pretty sure she knew what Millie was thinking, how she would be sorting it out. Doctor Nine was the boogeyman. Bethy’s imaginary friend. Something she and everyone else laughed about behind her back. A dream, a nothing.

Even before Bethy had started experimenting with Aunt Annie’s pills she had wanted to kill Millie for that—though strangely, and appropriately, that’s not why she was killing her now. It wasn’t revenge because revenge was soft. Revenge would disappoint Doctor Nine the same way rage would. There was no beauty in a lack of control.

Besides, this was not about punishment…it was about rewards.

Bethy thought about that as Millie’s eyes focused and unfocused over and over again. ‘Rewards’ wasn’t exactly the right word either. She chewed her lip and thought about it as her sister died, bit by bit.

There was a sound and then blades of light cut into the room between the half-closed blinds, and Bethy got up, excited, knowing who was outside. She started to run to the window and then in the space of two steps slowed to a walk and then stopped, still yards away. Running was silly. Running to check if he was out there was bad. It wouldn’t show faith, like that Bible story about Moses tapping the rock and then not being allowed into the Promised Land. After everything he did right, he was reminded that
everything
had to be done right, and so Bethy turned around and sat back down, picked up her diary and pen, and continued making notes until Millie stopped breathing. It took nearly forty minutes, and she would have been lying if she didn’t feel the tug of that window and the image she would see through the blinds. But feeling a thing and becoming its slave were different. Doctor Nine had told her that in her dreams.

When Mr. Whiskers said that it was two-thirty in the morning, Bethy put down her diary, set her pen neatly on top of it, and took a couple of slow breaths just to make sure she was calm. She reached over and touched Millie’s cheek. The skin was still soft but it was already cooling. Bethy sat back, leaning on both palms, and watched for a little while longer. There had been no more words from her sister. No additional emotions had crossed Millie’s face. After that last outburst she had simply gone to sleep, and in sleeping had settled down into a deeper rest. Her body had not visibly changed except that her chest no longer rose and fell. While she watched now, though, Millie seemed to shrink in on herself, to become less solid, and it took Bethy a while before she realized that it was just the blood draining from Millie’s flesh and veins to the lowest possible point in her body. She’d read about that on the Internet, too.

When she had surfed the Net, Millie had read a lot about killing. About the laws of it, the history of it. The art of it. There were so many killers that she felt happy that she would always have new brothers and sisters. Some of them even killed in the name of God, which was a funny thing. She’d have to ask Doctor Nine about that, but she already knew what he would probably say—the essence of it, at least. If God is All then God is killing, too. And really, God kills everything, from microscopic life forms to whole worlds. Maybe that was why so many have worked so hard to make killing a ritual and an art: it was their only way to try and connect with God. Even at nine Bethy understood that. If God made man in His image then man reflects the killing nature of God. To kill is to be godlike. That should be obvious to everyone.

And yet they didn’t call killers ‘gods’ or even ‘godlike.’ They called them monsters.

Bethy got up and walked across the bedroom and stood in front of the mirror that hung on the door of their shared wardrobe. She still wasn’t letting herself look out of the window. Instead she looked at the monster in the mirror.

It still looked like her. The
her
she had always seen.

“Monster…” she murmured. Not for the first time she wondered if every one of the godlike monsters she’d read about on the Net had stood in their rooms, just as she now stood, and looked at themselves and announced who and what they were.

She hoped so. It felt like a family thing to do.

Finally Bethy turned away from the mirror and walked past the cooling meat. Millie was gone now; the body was nothing to her. She paused for just a moment, bending to pick up her diary and trying not to feel disappointed. Millie had been her first, but she hadn’t learned as much from her as Bethy had hoped. Maybe next time she would use less of the Vicodin. Or maybe she’d re-visit pain. Perhaps she’d been too hasty in deciding that it had no place in the process.

Doctor Nine would be able to advise. Bethy was sure he would have something interesting to say about that.

Bethy changed into jeans and a t-shirt, put on her sneakers and brushed her hair. She put her diary and a change of clothes into her backpack.

When she was ready she took her pen and tested its point against the ball of her thumb. It seemed sharp enough. She held out her left arm and held the pen tightly in her right fist. She wasn’t afraid of pain and so there was no hesitation at all as she abruptly jammed the point into the soft flesh of her inner forearm. The pen bit deep as she knew it would and blood—so rich that it looked more black than red—welled out of the puncture. Bethy licked the pen clean and put it in her bag and then she walked around the room and dribbled blood here and there. Then she put a Band-Aid over the puncture and put the wrapper in her pocket. Then she picked up a pair of bedroom slippers and used the sole of one to scuff some of the blood, drawing the line in the direction of the window. She left the slipper lying on the floor by the wall a few feet from the window, just where the hem of the long shears would brush against it. She put the other slipper in her backpack. The effect was pretty good.

Satisfied, Bethy finally stood in front of the window. She grasped the cord and pulled the blinds all the way up. The line of nightbirds scattered from the sill, their caws sounding old and rusty as they flew to join their brothers on the power line. The window was already raised a few inches and she raised it the rest of the way and for a moment she looked out and down at the street.

The big black roadster was there, idling quietly, parked across the street in the glow of the sodium vapor lamp. Just as she always knew it would be. There was almost no traffic, not this late. No pedestrians. And just for a moment—for a single jagged second Bethy stared at the roadster and saw that it cast no reflection, that the fall of lamplight did not paint its shadow on the street. Doubt flickered like a candle in her heart.

What if it wasn’t real?

That voice—sounding more like Millie than Bethy—whispered in her ear. What if Doctor Nine wasn’t down there at all? What if Doctor Nine was never down there?

Millie’s voice seemed to chuckle in her mind.

What if…

What if Doctor Nine was not real?

“But I’m a monster,” Bethy said aloud. Millie’s voice laughed, mocking her.

Then the roadster pulled away from the curb…very slowly…and moved into the center of the boulevard on which they lived. Bethy watched, suddenly terrified. Was Doctor Nine a ghost of her mind? Was he leaving now that she had started to believe that he was only part of whatever made her a monster?

Bethy’s stomach started to churn.

“No!” she said firmly. “No…he’s here for me.”

Another car came down the street and Bethy realized that it would have to either veer around the roadster or pass through it. If it was real, the car would veer. If Doctor Nine lived only in her head the oncoming car would just pass through it, reality passing through fantasy.

“No,” she said again. She felt that her feet were riveted to the floor, held fast by nails of doubt driven through her flesh and bone. All she had to do was wait there, to see the car and how it reacted, or didn’t react. Just five more seconds and then she would know whether she was a godlike monster or a mad little girl.

“Doctor Nine…” she breathed.

The car was almost there. Moses doubted, he tapped the rock.

The cartoon cat on the wall mocked her with its swishing tail.

“No,” she said once more.

And Bethy turned away from the window before the car reached the roadster. Her decision was made. Without proof either way. She picked up her backpack, slung it over one shoulder, and left the bedroom. Left Millie and the blood and the fiction that she had constructed. She left her room and her parents and her Aunt Annie. She left her life.