Not Flesh Nor Feathers

“Yeah, sure. All right.” I didn’t have the energy or motivation to argue. I had hit a wall of the fuck-its and I honestly didn’t care what he learned or what he saw. “Come on in, but prepare to duck and run. She’s got one hell of a throwing arm.” I tilted my head to indicate the room, which was still a wreck from my last visit.

The lights were off. Nick knocked the nearest switch with the back of his hand and stood aside to let me in, and to let the door shut behind us with a soft click. I walked past him and found the next light, the one for the big lamps at the corners. Then I went to the bedside lamps and flipped those switches too. Bring it all in, all the light. Every stray ray or beam.

Let her see us.

“Hey Caroline,” I called, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Hey Caroline Read. We know who you are and we want to talk. Show yourself, you crazy old broad. We want to know what’s going on, and we think you can tell us.”

Nothing. Nick froze, deer-in-the-headlights.

“Come out and talk. You remember me—you beat me up and threw me out a few days ago. Work with me, and I’ll see if I can’t help you.”

And there she was, in the mirror. I hadn’t realized I was facing it until I caught the movement above my head, from the corner of my eye. There she was, holding still and steady, eyes narrow and hair wild.

I don’t need your help.

Nick didn’t see her, but he saw me looking at her, so it must have looked like I was talking to myself in the mirror. She appeared over my right shoulder. Kneeling on the bed behind me. I didn’t feel it, though. I didn’t detect any pressure on the mattress, or see any crinkling of the covers to indicate a body’s pressure on it.

“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But everyone else thought you needed help, didn’t they? That’s why they sent you away. You wanted help, or you needed help, but you didn’t know how to ask for it.”

You don’t know what you’re talking about. She didn’t move or lash out, and she was speaking in full sentences—which was an improvement over our last meeting.

“Then explain it to me.”

No one to tell. No one to hear.

“You’re not making any sense.”

They did it to make me quiet. I couldn’t tell on them, even when I tried. No one believed. No one listened. And I’m the crazy one? I’m the crazy one? I’m . . . where’s my other glove?

She looked confused for a moment. It’s a riddle, she told me. Have you heard it?

“What are you talking about?”

They have not flesh nor feathers, nor scales nor bone, but they have fingers and thumbs of their own.

“I don’t get it.”

My gloves. I lost one, and now you can see the cut I made.

“Caroline, did you kill yourself?” I tried to get a better look at her naked wrist, but she wasn’t solid enough to see much there.

I know what they said. I know what they told people, and I know why. Because if I’m mad, if I’m mad like a hatter in a storybook, then nothing I say matters. None of the truth means anything because it came from me. So if I’m mad, then no one has to listen.

“Caroline, no more riddles. Say your piece or we’re leaving.”

Leave then. I don’t care.

“You should. We might have news. Better yet, tell us the truth, and we might believe you.”

Nick kept his mouth shut but watched where my eyes went, and watched me close. I appreciated his patience. I knew it looked like I was talking to myself, but I also knew that he trusted me and would wait.

I saw what they did, she said. When she said it, her hair—which had been shining and swimming around her head—began to settle, lying down against her scalp and to sit on her shoulders.

“What did they do?”

Killed them. All twenty-nine of them. In the church.

“You’re right,” I whispered to Nick. “She’s said something about the church.”

Burned the church down to hide what they did. Blamed it on the flu. She stopped. For a second, I thought she was going to fade away altogether.

“Don’t—no, don’t. Caroline, come back. Caroline?”

They killed them all, but it was too cold to bury them. Not enough wood to burn them. Weighted them down and threw them in.

“What’s going on?” Nick asked, since the moment was slipping.

“Not sure. She came on strong, and now her mind’s wandering. Caroline, who killed them? Can you tell me who killed them?”

She sharpened around the edges and her hair began to crackle again, signaling something the way a cat’s tail does. Wrong question, she said.

“All right. Not the killers, but the killed. Who were they? What happened?”

It was a good church, and they were good people. It was insistent, the way she said it—an apology for something else, too. Or maybe I was reading too far into it.

Outside we heard a hint of commotion, like an argument was brewing. Nick and I turned our attention to the door, but then let it drop when nothing followed the initial outburst. When I turned back to the mirror, she was gone.

“Caroline?”

My fault. They’re coming for me. She’s coming for me.

I didn’t see her, but I heard the words as clear, soft, and sharp as if she’d breathed them into my ear. The room felt lighter, and changed. It felt empty, even though Nick and I sat together at the edge of the bed.

“She’s gone.”

“I felt it,” he said. “It was quick, like the air letting out of an untied balloon. Did she give you anything helpful?”

“Here’s a better question—where’d she go? She doesn’t ever leave the hotel, does she?”

“No, but she’s been seen out in the halls, and on the mezzanine. Maybe she went for a walk.”

“Sure. Why not?” I rose then, and the bed squeaked underneath me when I left it. “We could go looking for her, but I don’t think it’d do any good. She’s finished talking for now. And she might have told me enough. It’s hard to extrapolate from crazy dead people, though. Especially—especially right now. God, I’m tired.”

“Me too. But what do you want to do? Sleep? We might miss something.”

I smiled at the thought of it, knowing he was right. We were acting like little kids who won’t take a nap for fear of being left out—and for the horror of it all, and the fascination. I couldn’t sleep yet, not anymore. I’d nabbed a couple of hours at the Choo-Choo and that much would have to suffice. I didn’t know when Nick had last slept, but we were in it together now, regardless.

“Do you think the Starbucks downstairs has any coffee left?”

“They did an hour or two ago. How do you think I’m still able to hold myself upright? But the odds are good they’re running out now, if they haven’t already. I told you, there’s a retreat beginning. People are getting the hell out of the river area and working their way back here.”

“Well, I’d hope so, if what you’ve told me is even close to right. Let’s see if we can scare up a cup of caffeine from them, and then sit down or something. I need to think, but I’m out of energy for thinking. I think I used it all up getting here.”

He lifted himself up off the bed with sleepy reluctance. He led the way to the door and opened it, feeling around with his foot and saying, “Pardon me,” to whomever he nearly stepped on.

“Sounds like a plan to me,” he said. “And I meant to say—if I didn’t already—that it was really cool of you to make it here so fast. After we talked on the phone,” he turned sideways to let me pass, “I felt sort of bad about it. I kept hearing these stories from the cops and firefighters who were filtering back here. They were talking like it’s a war zone out there. I know you were coming from the heart of downtown—not the river—and I thought maybe it’d be better that way, but I hear it’s not. I hear there’s looting.”

“There is, in fact, a lot of looting.”

“Yeah. Gunshots? I heard there were gangs running the streets—”

“The most quickly organized gangs in the history of gangs, you mean? I didn’t see any gangs—just groups of loosely affiliated people breaking shit and stealing things. If you want to call that ‘gang activity’ in a press report, you can go right ahead. But it’s a reach.”

He was quiet and I thought maybe I’d annoyed him, though I wasn’t sure why or how. “I wasn’t thinking about it that way,” he said with a touch of complaint. “I wasn’t thinking about what a great story it was. I was thinking that I was an asshole for asking you to come hiking through it all to appease my curiosity.”

“That’s not what I meant, either. We’re too tired to talk, I think. We’re just going to piss each other off if we keep it up. You think I’m calling you a mercenary jackass, and I was just trying to anticipate . . . well . . . that you might be one at a later date. Wait, this isn’t coming out right. Let me put it this way,” I backpedaled as I stepped carefully over a sleeping pair of little girls, wrapped up together in some large man’s jacket. “It was bad out there, but it wasn’t as bad as it could be. And it sure as hell wasn’t bad enough to stop me, and I don’t hold the trip against you.”

“Okay,” he said, and it was a tired sort of surrender, offered under duress. We backed up against a wall in order to let a pair of harried-looking paramedics carry bags of supplies through a hall and over the people who were already camped there. When they were gone, he turned to me again and asked, as if I knew how to answer it, “Then, now what?”

I closed my eyes and leaned the back of my head hard against the patterned wallpaper. “God, I don’t know. We’re out of leads here, aren’t we? What do we chase next?”

“Caroline was my only idea, and she wasn’t too helpful, was she?”

“Yes and no. She’s conflicted, and willing to lie to herself or to us—whichever makes her feel better. And she said what you said, that the church was burned and it was blamed on the flu. What church was it? I forget.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">