The Rust Maidens Read online

  “We have to play nice, Sarah,” he said. “We’re already in trouble. The hospital’s saying I didn’t act in the best interest of public health.”

  I inhaled a sharp breath. That was why he didn’t push to quarantine Lisa. He didn’t want them to steal Violet too. Now he was going to pay for that.

  His wife sniffled. “Will they take your medical license?”

  A pause. “I don’t know.”

  Another sob, throaty and desperate. “I just want her to be okay. I want everything to be okay.”

  “I know,” he said. “So do I.”

  This felt wrong, eavesdropping on their sorrow. Kathleen and I should go. We should be anywhere but here.

  I glanced one more time through the window at Violet. Her father shuffled back into the den, and with Adrian next to him, he huddled close to Violet on the sectional, collecting vital signs, scribbling notes, whispering apologies to which she only shrugged.

  “What are we going to do?” Kathleen asked.

  A prickle of hope bloomed in my chest. The doctors and government men were keeping track of this. They had answers. That meant that maybe I could solve this on my own. The government men would help me, even if they didn’t know it.

  ***

  That night, I waited until their rented car vanished down Denton Street. Suppertime. That meant they’d be gone for an hour, maybe more.

  The spare key was where we’d always left it. It was more valuable to me now than before, all those lost nights spent partying in this basement.

  I scoured the house for the case files until I found them upstairs, in Adrian’s bedroom. I recognized his jacket and tie crumpled on the mattress. Naturally, what I wanted was in his bedroom. My gaze avoided as much else as I could, convinced I’d find some unmentionable that would make me blush. Me, the invader, intrepid but easily embarrassed.

  Besides, I had work to do. A stack of documents was piled in front of the nightstand. File after file, a thousand statistics and measurements and ridiculous anecdotes that didn’t mean anything to anyone. A story about when Lisa got mono in the fifth grade, or how Dawn had worse-than-usual morning sickness.

  The door creaked open behind me.

  “Find anything you like?” Adrian was standing in the doorway.

  I hiccupped a strangled moan. I should have heard the downstairs lock or the creak of the steps or something, but I didn’t, and instead, here I was, caught by the worst person possible.

  “I thought you’d gone to dinner,” I said.

  He smiled. “Jeffers and Godfrey took the car downtown. I just went to the corner store for a sandwich. Saw your aunt heading home.”

  “Lucky you.” I glared at him, waiting for the handcuffs. These types always had handcuffs.

  But tonight, there was no arrest. He just motioned at the files.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “You know the girls better than we do. You might be able to make sense of it all.”

  At first, I thought it was a trick, but when he said nothing else, I went back to rummaging through the files. Not that it did me any good. There was nothing here. They didn’t have any good theories. After everything, they knew no more than we did.

  “I’m sorry,” Adrian said, sensing the disappointment in my face.

  “It’s not your fault.” My lips pursed and relaxed. “I just thought you’d know something by now.”

  He exhaled a strained laugh. “So did we.”

  I closed up the last manila folder and thought about what Lisa’s father said today. “You said before you weren’t going to take the girls away. Have the doctors changed their minds?”

  Adrian whistled through his teeth. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “That’s why they keep monitoring them. To see what we find.”

  I stepped toward him, fear coursing through me. “I don’t think it’s contagious. Honestly, I don’t.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, an obvious ploy on my part to protect someone. Pathetic and dumb and dangerous to Jacqueline. Way to go, Phoebe.

  Adrian inspected me. “Why do you believe that?”

  A shiver cut through my body, and I shrugged. “It’s a theory I have, that’s all.”

  It was a theory, to be fair, and a good one. Since Jacqueline had whatever it was, then I should have it too. Heck, I’d been around all the girls and hadn’t caught anything. No sign of transformation anywhere on my body. I was proof there was no contagion, but I couldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t have him asking questions about me, and especially not about Jacqueline.

  Adrian leaned against the wall. “So what other theories do you have, Miss Shaw?”

  I almost laughed in his face at this. Miss Shaw. Like I was some Girl Friday in an old black-and-white movie. Or, better yet, the femme fatale. They always had more fun. They also died sooner, but it seemed better to live it up in the moment than to never live at all.

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, and handed the snarl of folders back to him. “Nobody does.”

  He put the files back where I’d found them. “So now I’ve helped you,” he said. “Maybe you could help us.”

  I scoffed. “How’s that?”

  “Nobody on Denton Street likes us very much.” He stacked and rearranged some scattered papers. “It would be good to have someone who knows this neighborhood.”

  “An inside man.” I glared at him. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s a shame.” Adrian stepped forward, and we were suddenly face to face, closer than we’d ever been. “Because it would help the girls more than it would help us.”

  That wasn’t true, and I knew it, but it would haunt me anyhow. I would lie awake tonight, wondering if he was right, if helping him meant helping Jacqueline.

  My skin buzzing, I trudged downstairs, and Adrian followed. At first, I assumed he was testing to see how I got in, but he never asked.

  As I moved through the empty living room—these government men were nothing if not spartan—I closed my fist up around the key and decided not to put it back in the garden. Better to have a way in, just in case I needed it again.

  He crossed in front of me and opened the front door, pretending to be a gentleman or something. I skittered onto the porch.

  Chuckling, Adrian lingered at the door. “Next time,” he said, “just knock, Phoebe. I’ll answer.”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder, and Jacqueline’s words echoed again in my head. A good time and trouble.

  On the street, I hesitated, the humidity of June wrapped like heavy lace around my shoulders. I should go home. I should talk to my father and tell him how he and the other men were wrong about the Rust Maidens, how it wasn’t their fault and never would be. How I needed his help. How Jacqueline needed his help.

  But then I glanced up at her house right next door, to her window looming over me. Those familiar curtains fluttered, and there she was, motioning me upstairs.

  Me. I could protect her. I could stop this. We didn’t need anyone else. We just needed us.

  The front door was unlocked. Not Aunt Betty’s carelessness, but Jacqueline’s careful plan. She knew I’d come.

  I moved without sound up the stairs and past Aunt Betty’s room. Inside, she was asleep between swing shifts, murmuring in the dark.

  “Charles.” Her voice rose up like a dead thing from the past. “Charles, where are you?”

  This stopped me cold. Charles, my uncle, Jacqueline’s father. Gone for almost ten years, but still here in his own way, in the nightmares that wouldn’t end. A heart attack that had shattered my aunt’s heart too. Shattered everything for her and turned her into what she’d become, thorny and resentful and disgusted with the idea of my mother and me. She hated us more the moment she had less.

  But her pain didn’t matter tonight. Jacqueline was all that mattered.

  I reached the end of the hallway and opened the door.

  “Hi, Phoebe,” she whispered.

  She sat inside, cross-legged on the floor, beneath the glow of
the brass swing lamp. Since this morning, everything about her had changed.

  The skin on her arms and legs looked thick and strange, like puckered leather, and her hair had wilted around her face. The same as Dawn’s. The same as Lisa’s. As though it wasn’t hair at all anymore, but something thin and stringy, the consistency of seaweed. She was soaking wet, too, but that seemed so minor, so silly, compared to everything else, to a body that had turned so irrevocably against her.

  On instinct, I reached out to her, and she reached back, but she withdrew just as quickly. She didn’t want to touch me, not with those hands, jagged at the edges. Not with those fingernails that had turned to broken glass.

  I tried not to tremble. “Has your mother seen you like this?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. I’ve been avoiding her all day.”

  That meant Jacqueline had been alone. I should have been here with her. I shouldn’t have left her to transform in the quiet, all by herself.

  Everything in me turned inside out, and I dropped to the floor next to her and took her hands in mine. The glass skated across my palms and sliced me open, again and again, but I wouldn’t let go. Red dripped onto the shag carpet, and a sour, faded gray dripped there too. Jacqueline and me, mixing together. Blood sisters of sorts.

  I touched the sharp edges on the ends of her fingers. “I could get tweezers. Maybe if we can extract it from you. Maybe that will help.”

  Jacqueline nodded. “Okay,” she said, quivering.

  But I was pushing her again, trying to make her do what I thought was best, and that hadn’t helped us so far.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure of anything, Phoebe,” she said, her eyes whirlpooling with desperation. “I don’t know if it’s better to leave it or to remove it. I don’t know if anything will help.” Then, with a sob, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  Half stunned, I sat back, our fingers still entwined, my hands still bleeding. “We’ll wait,” I said. “It’s fine. It’ll all be fine.”

  But the moonlight crept into her bedroom and glistened off the glass, and we both knew, both thought the same thing. This wasn’t something you could just wait out.

  “No,” Jacqueline said, suddenly resolved. “Let’s try to get it out of me now.”

  At her vanity table, I dug through cuticle scissors and emery boards and pots of broken Coty eyeshadow until I found a pair of tweezers. It seemed like such a good idea, like if I could just remove these pieces, then she’d be herself again. Then everything would be okay.

  “Are you ready?” I asked as I kneeled in front of her, and she nodded.

  My fingers slick with blood, I did the best I could, which wasn’t nearly good enough. The tips of the metal tweezers prodded at Jacqueline, and the glass slipped this way and that inside of her.

  She winced, and tears the color of bile streaked both cheeks.

  “Do you want me to stop?” I asked, my voice rasping, but she shook her head.

  It didn’t matter, though. The glass wasn’t an extraneous part of her. It was all of her. Each time I dug the tweezers deeper into her fingers to remove a jagged shard, I might as well have been ripping out her bones. Even when I extracted a piece, another one would surface. Over and over, her never-ending supply of decay.

  She set her jaw. “Keep going,” she whispered, and I hated myself for listening.

  I tried again, but this time, I excavated too deep. The metal slipped in between her skin and what was left of the marrow, and I lost the tweezers inside her. Everything about her was peeling away, or oozing, or filled with pockets too deep to fathom.

  “It’s stuck,” I said, fear rising in my voice. The tips of my fingernails groped inside her, and I twisted the edge of the tweezers, desperate to free them. But it was too much. The pain she’d been swallowing finally overwhelmed her, and with her mouth slack, her head drooped back.

  And she cried out.

  It was like nothing I’d ever heard. That scream so otherworldly but almost familiar too, like the lullaby of a factory. Like a thousand rusted nails dragged against a plate of steel. The sound shuddered through me, and I wanted to scream too. But I couldn’t. Jacqueline doubled over into my arms, and I held her as we quivered together. Then we pulled back and stared into each other’s eyes, knowing what we’d done, knowing it was too late, and having to wait until it happened.

  It took almost no time at all.

  “Baby?” A voice, that hideous voice, in the bedroom on the other side of the house. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  There was no stopping it now. It played out in my mind before it happened, as inexorable as the tides.

  The footsteps down the hall, heavy and determined.

  The slow twisting of the doorknob, as if by a spectral hand.

  Aunt Betty, emerging from the darkness, from a sleep that shouldn’t have been disturbed.

  Her startled face, as she saw me, but more importantly, as she saw Jacqueline, and the truth drifted behind her eyes, like a bad dream that couldn’t be undone.

  And then, in an instant, everything that had ever mattered was gone.

  EIGHT

  Aunt Betty’s mouth slipped open, and the cry that followed echoed to the slate roof and beyond. It didn’t sound like Jacqueline’s, though it was almost worse. It was the wail of a mother who’d just lost what was left of her life.

  “What have you done?” Aunt Betty’s voice was guttural and strained, and when she spoke, she wasn’t looking at Jacqueline.

  She was looking at me.

  “I didn’t do anything.” I stared back at her. “Do you think I’d ever hurt Jacqueline? That I could do this to her?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Betty said, kneeling right in front of me now. “I do.”

  With an open hand, she slapped me hard across the mouth. I fell backward to the carpet, more stunned than hurt. The tang of blood filled my mouth.

  She started at me again, but I lunged and caught her arm midair. Taking hold of both her wrists, I held her convulsing body away from mine, and I thought of waltzing her right to Jacqueline’s bedroom window and tossing her out of it. If I didn’t, it would only be a matter of time before she tried the same thing with me. In a way, this would only be self-defense.

  But Jacqueline knew me too well. She knew the look on my face, dark and not worth trusting, and she couldn’t let me hurt her mother or let her mother hurt me again. Her head tipped back, Jacqueline parted her lips and screamed again. Only louder this time, and different. Gone was the sound of a factory. Now everything about her was sharp like glass breaking, or like a cathedral bell crashing down from a turret.

  The noise sent shockwaves through my body, turning me to porridge inside. It must have done the same to Aunt Betty, because she collapsed in my arms. Even once the moment passed and we could both stand again, we were too shaky to pick up our fight where we’d left off. For once, Jacqueline got what she wanted.

  I curled in the corner as Aunt Betty went to the phone in her room and called my father. He arrived a minute later to claim me, like I was a misdelivered package.

  “Please get her out of here.” Aunt Betty was openly weeping to him as his footsteps fell heavy in the hallway.

  “I won’t go,” I said, and clung to Jacqueline, my hands wet and stained with rust and blood. “Don’t make me leave.”

  But my father, the turncoat in my own family, took me by the arm and dragged me out of the bedroom. Behind me, Jacqueline called my name, and I wailed and reached for her, but nobody except us cared.

  When we were back on the street, my father seized me by the shoulders. “You need to leave them alone, Phoebe,” he said. “They need time to process this.”

  I let out a rueful laugh. Time wouldn’t change what was happening to Jacqueline. Time would just get away from us, and then it would be too late.

  My father kept talking at me, and I breathed in, ready to scream, but as I looked past the sidewalk, something inside my chest twisted.
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  We weren’t alone.

  Down the block, Lisa leaned against her family’s sagging mailbox, her bare feet slick with grass. Closer still, there was a creak of an old wooden swing, as Helena rocked back and forth on her porch, grinning at no one in particular. Across the street, Violet stared out from her bedroom, her gaze flicking up at us whenever she thought we wouldn’t notice. Even Dawn’s front window was dark with her silhouette.

  Why were they watching? Had they heard Jacqueline’s screams? Maybe. But if so, why hadn’t the whole neighborhood heard? Why were they the only ones to respond?

  My father droned on, lecturing me as though he had a right, and rage blossomed inside me as I remembered what the men had said in the kitchen.

  “Then maybe we should just give the doctors what they want.”

  My father hesitated. “I never said that.”

  “No, you didn’t.” I looked right at him, though I no longer recognized his face. “But you never argued with them, either. Right, Dad?”

  I didn’t wait for him to answer. I just ran. Down the sidewalk and away from the girls, who kept staring after me even once I was gone. I didn’t stop until I reached my own backyard. Nothing looked familiar here, but I pretended not to notice as I climbed up to the treehouse and pulled the rope ladder up behind me so no one could follow.

  ***

  All night, I thrashed and dreamt of them. The Rust Maidens, their bodies weathered and torn and no longer their own.

  I woke up screaming, but unlike Jacqueline, I couldn’t make a sound.

  As the butterflies drifted by me, I blinked into this new day. It was Sunday. A day of sermons, a day of gathering. Usually a day that I hated, but maybe this one wouldn’t be so bad. Even the Rust Maidens had to be included in this. After all, their mothers and fathers probably thought they needed the Lord’s blessings most of all. That meant Aunt Betty would bring Jacqueline, and I could see her then. I could talk to her.

  I headed to the church alone, not bothering to wait for my parents or even change yesterday’s clothes.

  In the morning light, Denton Street was different. Overnight, new signs, cheerfully homemade, had popped up in windows.