The Rust Maidens Read online

  A darkroom. That was what this was. Violet’s darkroom. A final rebellion against her parents for what they’d denied her.

  My eyes adjusted, and the setup emerged around me. Dishpans of shallow liquid dotted the floor, and in the corner, gathered together, were bottles of Spotone and stop bath and developer. That was what they’d stolen from Kathleen. Her photography chemicals.

  The pictures dangled in front of me, still trembling from where I’d disturbed them. With the flashlight shaking in my hand, I picked the photographs off the line, one by one.

  A waistline corseted with metal that could never be removed.

  A hand on a table, all five fingernails gnarled and overgrown with shattered glass.

  Something dark and shiny. An eye perhaps, watching me from somewhere I couldn’t see.

  My fingers quivered and gripped the thick white paper. The prints were all muddy. I could guess why. There was no sink in the room. To rinse the images, Violet had to use her own body, the murky water almost certainly drained out of her, strange and thick as amniotic fluid. But the tactic had worked. The images had developed.

  My flashlight beam searched the room. Something else was missing too. There were no red lights dangling overhead, no electricity wired to the place anymore. How could Violet work in here, dipping the pictures and pulling them out at precisely the right moment, before the images went past developing and kept bleaching out in the chemicals?

  Dread coiled through me. It was simple, really. That light was meant to aid human eyes. But you didn’t need a red light to develop pictures if you could see in the dark.

  “Phoebe?” Clint’s voice outside the door.

  I shoved the wet images into my back pocket. The boys shouldn’t see these. Nobody should.

  Out in the hallway, I rejoined them and a babbling Eleanor. She was the only one of us who wasn’t terrified.

  We went through a pair of double doors, the once-gilded trim now grayed with neglect. This must have been a ballroom or a vast master bedroom. Quite a place in its day.

  Just inside, Clint tripped over something. It was large and curved, almost person-sized.

  His hands searched inside the contraption, and it rocked back and forth, making almost an eerie whistling sound.

  “A bassinet,” Clint said. “Dawn must have made it for Eleanor.”

  Grinning, he placed Eleanor inside, and she cooed sweetly. But something strange tugged deep inside me. It couldn’t be a bassinet. Why would the girls have a bassinet just waiting here? They didn’t know we were coming. Whatever it was, it must be something else, but I didn’t know what, so I said nothing. I kept moving, deeper into the dark. The floors were soft here. I leaned down and picked something up.

  A blanket. It was just a regular blanket.

  “What is this place?” one of the boys asked, and it gripped me all at once. Their bedroom. We were in their bedroom. And perhaps they didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “Maybe they’ve gone,” Clint said, and at that, a chorus of steely voices giggled.

  Then they were everywhere.

  The flashlights vanished from our grasp, flung to the opposite side of the wall by hands we couldn’t see. Bits of light remained, a beam here or there, but nothing to guide us. Nothing that could show us the way out.

  How there could be only five girls in this room, I didn’t understand. Something moved at my feet, whispering past. Something else overhead, clinging to the ceiling. The walls crawled, and shadows devoured us. There was movement everywhere, and whimpers that weren’t their own. They belonged to the boys. Fear had gripped them, marrow-deep, as they intuitively understood it: that here in this place, we were the invaders. And now the girls were evicting us the only way they knew how.

  “Clint, I think—” I started to say, but it didn’t matter. The terror had already boiled over in the room, and the boys were running. In every direction, without purpose, without logic.

  A body not made of metal, but of flesh and blood, rammed into me, knocking me to the floor. I reached up in the dark for a hand to guide me back up, but no one was there. Whoever had sent me toppling down had gone off, vanishing without a worry about what became of me.

  Footfalls all around me in the shadows. Heavy boots—men’s work boots with their thick, unforgiving tread—trampled my hands, my arms, my legs.

  “Please,” I tried to scream, but my voice was lost in the din of the boys’ mewling fear.

  But even as I got a heel to the jaw, I wasn’t the one in the greatest danger.

  The baby.

  I had to get to Eleanor. Before those boots turned her tiny body to powder.

  I crawled back to the thing that Clint called a bassinet, but it was empty. Desperate to find her, my hands followed the curves inside the contraption. The curves like a waist and hips. I was right. This wasn’t a bassinet. It was part of a molted skin, an exuviae like the ones my butterflies discarded in the spring. But these were thicker. Tougher. The empty bodies of girls who no longer needed a shield to shelter them. They were their own protection now.

  The girls had changed. Whatever they were meant to become, they already were.

  I snapped back to this place. Eleanor. I still had to find Eleanor.

  Back along the floor, I crawled on hands and knees, past Mr. Carter, who hadn’t run with the rest. He stood his ground. He came for a fight, and that was what he was getting.

  In the pale beam of the flashlights, limp and discarded on the floor, I caught glimpses of what came next. His sneering, hideous face, everything about him twisted and angry for no good reason. The hammer from his toolbelt lifted over his head, ready to strike whoever or whatever he found in the dark, even if it was his own daughter.

  A shadow gliding back and forth, disorienting, until it was ready. Then a heavy metallic foot crushed the last of the flashlights, and darkness consumed the room. At once, the world was reduced to sounds, not images.

  A wheeze like a sick rabbit caught in a trap.

  The crack of bone. Fingers first, one by one, followed by something bigger. An arm, maybe. Or both arms.

  The scream of a man who was broken and beaten and could no longer pretend he was anything else.

  Mr. Carter ran now, faster than the boys, faster than anyone I’d ever known. Defeated by whatever was in the gloom, he ran and screamed and pissed himself on the way out the door, the stench of urine permeating everything.

  A laugh now from inside the room, throaty and metallic and so jubilant it set my skin buzzing. It was the most joyous laugh I would ever hear in my life. Something beyond triumph. Something like freedom.

  Her face was obscured, but I knew it was Lisa. There was no one else it could be.

  More movement, more boys traipsing through the shadows, desperate to find their way out. Unconcerned when they trampled me.

  I dragged myself along the floor, still searching for the baby, still coming back with my hands and heart empty.

  In the corner, there was a door to another room. A smaller space, a closet maybe, a place that should be safe from the ruckus. I pulled myself in and closed the door behind me. It was just to catch a breath, anything to escape being crushed, anything to be alone for an instant.

  Inside, bits of light were coming in through a window. Although this room had been mortared up with decay the same as the rest of the mansion, a tiny spot in the glass was left untouched. I peered through it. I could see Clint’s house from here, situated right next door. I squinted harder at a first-floor window below, and realized I was looking directly down into Eleanor’s nursery.

  A babble behind me, and I whirled around. Someone else was here, and she was holding Eleanor. The baby’s chubby hand was wrapped around a glassy finger.

  “Hello, Dawn,” I whispered. Of course this was her room. Even in her exile, she’d been keeping vigil over her child, watching her through this lonely window.

  I moved closer, and while I couldn’t see her face clearly, there were hints here and there in th
e moonlight. A glint of a pewter cheekbone. A few strands of long hair, thick and wet as seaweed. But even in the dark, Eleanor knew who this was. Every child could recognize her own mother.

  “How are you?” I asked. “What’s happened?”

  Where’s Jacqueline? is what I wanted to say. The only question that mattered to me, but I couldn’t form the words.

  Dawn couldn’t form the words either. I wondered if the transformation had stolen all her speech from her, or if she simply didn’t want to speak to me. I couldn’t blame her for that.

  Instead, she murmured something, a lullaby perhaps. The best she could do for the child she couldn’t care for.

  We crouched in the dark as Dawn held Eleanor in those gnarled, rusted arms. With every breath, she was careful not to move too quickly, or else she’d cut her own child.

  But the two of them together like this couldn’t last. The sun would soon sneak up over the lake, and the other parents would come looking for the baby. Dawn knew that. Thick tears seeped down what I could see of her face, and a strange sob trembled in the back of her throat. As much as she wanted to keep Eleanor, that was no longer possible.

  With shaking hands, she passed the baby over to me.

  She trusted me with her daughter. Never could I have imagined an infant to be such a heavy weight in my arms. I didn’t want to steal her from her mother, but I couldn’t deny Dawn either. Not if this was what she wanted.

  She opened the door and nudged me back into the master bedroom. Her hand was cold and strange on my back, like an anchor pulled up from the dark depths of the lake. Then the door clicked closed behind me, and Dawn retreated back into the obscure corner she now called home.

  I was alone with Eleanor. The flashlights had all gone dim, and there was no sound, not in the entire mansion. No more laughter. No more boys.

  No more girls, either. If this was their bedroom, I expected them to be fluttering about, preparing for the coming daylight, preparing to sleep, but maybe they didn’t rest during the day. Maybe they didn’t rest at all.

  With my arms wrapped around the baby, I moved along the wall, feeling for which direction to go. It didn’t help. Almost instantly, we were hopelessly lost in the mazelike house. I started down a hallway but was quickly turned around, tracing and retracing footprints, always ending up back in the bedroom with no windows.

  I breathed out and tried again. Searched for the staircase. It had to be here somewhere. I’d found it once before. That meant I could find it again. Even the darkroom would help. If I discovered that, I could follow the hall, reversing my steps from earlier. I could do this.

  Eleanor fussed, and I held her closer.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered, but she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either.

  We went down a corridor and around a corner. This had to be right. This had to be the way.

  But something glinted in the dark. That grayed, once-gilded trim. Still in the bedroom. Still trapped.

  I clutched Eleanor tighter and closed my eyes. We couldn’t get out. I’d come here, and now we couldn’t escape. I wanted to protect the girls, but I couldn’t even protect myself.

  A fluttering next to me. Everything in the world stood still.

  “Hello?” My voice was thin and sounded far away. “Who’s there?”

  A hand on my arm, tugging gently, guiding me.

  My breath caught in my throat. It was Jacqueline’s hand, chilled and damp, yet still so familiar, so achingly familiar.

  With elegant footsteps that never quite made a sound, she led me out to the long, winding hallway and down the elusive stairs. We were back in the kitchen, moonlight creeping in around the edges of the door, the same way we’d gotten in earlier. Almost out now. Almost safe.

  But not safe, not unless Jacqueline came too.

  “Don’t stay here,” I whispered. “We can still run away together. It’s not too late.”

  She moved closer to me, and for a moment, I could almost see her. The curves of her face were the same, even though all the flesh had withered away. Then she wrapped her fingers tighter around me, burying the sharp edges of herself into my skin, as if to remind me who she was now. How everything about her was dangerous.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, my voice wavering as the pain of her touch seared through me. “You’re still my best friend.”

  A moment of hesitation. One that might as well have lasted a lifetime.

  But it didn’t last a lifetime. It didn’t last nearly long enough.

  The back door opened, and Jacqueline pushed me through it, her hand tender but final too.

  I blinked, half-dizzy on the porch. The moonlight was dim, but everything outside looked lit up and almost garish after the darkness of the mansion. No more than an hour had passed since we’d crossed into the place where we weren’t welcome. As a group then, but now splintered, the boys scattered into the night like buckshot. Even the echoes of their screams were long gone. I had outlasted them. Of course I had. For all the good it had done.

  The door slammed shut, and Jacqueline’s serrated hand twisted the lock. But she did more than that. On the other side, I could hear her mortaring up the seams of the door like a bee at a honeycomb. She’d sealed me out. I couldn’t reach her now, because she didn’t want me to.

  Eleanor fussed softly in my arms as I collapsed to my knees on the back porch and tried not to scream.

  FOURTEEN

  My bedroom is more cluttered than I remember it. Vinyl caked in dust, faded-out bell bottoms, and yellowed diaries with their locks and secrets rusted out. All of Violet’s old Polaroids, and Jacqueline’s notes too. Eighteen years of a life packed beneath a bed and bulging out of splintered dresser drawers, every crevice that should have been cleaned out long before I left. My mother had probably told me to clean it out that summer, but, of course, I didn’t listen. None of us were very good at listening that year.

  From the bottom of the stack, I pull out a picture of Jacqueline and hold her in my hand. This one was taken at her eighteenth birthday party, the last birthday we celebrated together. I wonder if they still celebrate where she is now. Are there cake and streamers and foil-wrapped gifts there? Does she ever think of me and wish I was at her side? Because I think of her all the time. Every day. Even when I tell myself not to.

  I drop the picture on the hardwood floor and bury it beneath a sprawl of records. At the bottom of the drawer, there are other pictures, murky photographs developed in the dark. Nobody but me and the girls has ever seen those. There are too many things I’ve never talked about to anyone. Not my mother or my father or a string of boyfriends and therapists, all of whom failed due to no fault of their own. All because I won’t remember. Because I can’t let myself think of it. That last night.

  A knock on the downstairs door. I leap toward the hallway, relieved to have any excuse to escape the past for another minute.

  “I’m coming,” I say. Maybe it’s Quinn, or Eleanor. Someone who can help me unravel this.

  I bound down the stairs and swing open the front door.

  A gust of wind off the lake slaps me in the face, but that’s the only thing that greets me. No one else is here, not on the porch anyhow. The construction crew is around, their hard hats glistening in the cold sun. A holler for safety, a creak of a crane, and down the block, another Denton Street house falls. It’s Violet’s this time. That strange triple moon sign in the plaster is only dust now. Every trace of the Rust Maidens will soon be scrubbed clean from this neighborhood.

  I shiver in the December afternoon. Someone knocked on the door, but there’s no one here. I should be surprised. I’m not. This is what I’m starting to expect. Each day since I’ve gotten back, I’m convinced I’ll find someone—find them—only to realize I’m still alone.

  My mother is out picking up a few more moving boxes. Only five days now. We’ll be out before Christmas. Happy holidays to us.

  No more house. No more Denton Street. No more Eleanor or Quinn. I c
ould wait this out. I could run for good this time and not look back.

  But I don’t want to do that. I want to help them. These two girls, both of them as good as strangers to me, but that doesn’t matter. I need to do something, so they don’t end up the same as me. Or the same as the Rust Maidens

  There’s still one person I haven’t seen yet. Someone from that summer who might be able to help me, or at least might be able to help Eleanor.

  I grab my coat just inside the living room before I return to the porch and lock the door behind me. It seems like a silly thing to do, sealing up a home that’s almost empty, but I do it anyway. I do it because it feels right.

  Then I start walking. Past the houses with expiration dates. Along a sidewalk that hasn’t been repaired in years, maybe even since I still lived here.

  At the end of the street, past the old corner store, I see the Presbyterian Church. There’s a light on inside. Despite the cratered walls and the crack in the stained glass window, they haven’t marked this place for demolition. Instead, there are girders holding it up and a brand-new sign. under construction.

  I roll my eyes. How fitting. The church will stand longer than our homes, longer than the people who inhabited this neighborhood.

  I should keep going. This isn’t where I need to be. This has never been a place I’ve needed to be.

  But this city is a tricky one. It never misses a chance to confound you. When I’m almost past, I hear it. A faraway giggle, sing-song and devious, and something else that sounds like a lullaby. I whirl around and gaze upwards at the steeple that never seemed so tall before.

  Are they inside? If I walk through those double doors, will I discover the girls waiting there?

  Another giggle, strained and distant and dancing away from me, and I can’t help myself.

  The pews stink of mouse droppings and failed righteousness. I expect a team of people working on repairs, but it’s only one man. He looks up when I walk in without knocking.