The Rust Maidens Read online

  And for the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

  NINETEEN

  All of the girls are here in Jacqueline’s bedroom, a never-ending slumber party. In the peeling paint, I catch a glimpse of Dawn, eyes lonely no more, her body her own at last. A leak in the roof plink-plunks in the corner, and Lisa grins out of every droplet. If I squint hard enough at the blades of the overhead fan, sagging and yellowed and crumbling with time, Violet and Helena are there, hand in hand.

  They’re everywhere and nowhere. As big as a shadow draping the wall, or as small as an antique thimble. Their faces flash in and out on the trim, the plaster, the cobwebs.

  It’s no wonder they can live in this house. There isn’t a clean spot in the whole place, everything peeling and warped and long past its prime. On the wall hangs a brass swing lamp, corroded and limp on its hinges. Next to a disintegrating mattress is the vanity table, cracked and gray and covered with rotting emery boards and rusted cuticle scissors and bent tweezers like the ones I used while trying and failing to save Jacqueline from herself. Shattered eye shadows and smears of lipstick and a dark puddle of old perfume, still vaguely sticky, array the shag carpet. Deterioration anywhere and everywhere it can find a space to live.

  Behind me, in the hallway, a figure wavers back and forth. Not a Rust Maiden this time. It’s my aunt, her face gray and her body so much smaller than I remember. In a half-mad state, she’s let the entire house devolve. This is a form of bewitchery, of conjuring decay like she’s calling to the dead. Her way of saying she’s sorry. It’s also her way of trying to reach her daughter. The one she lost. The one she betrayed.

  And she’s done a good job. Her daughter is here, after all.

  She comes to me last, as though it’s a game. But I can feel her, swirling in every crevice. Jacqueline. She smiles out at me, though it’s almost difficult to call it that. How does the dust from a shadow smile? But that’s what she’s doing. It’s what all of them are doing.

  I drop to the floor next to her, and here I am, sitting with my best friend. We’re together again. With melancholy half-choking me, I tell her all about my life, how I ran from this place after she vanished. How for the past thirty years, I’ve never stopped running, even when I was standing still, doing nothing, being nothing.

  I tell her that I hate her and love her and miss her with every iota of my heart.

  That I hope she forgives me.

  That I hope she doesn’t think I need to be forgiven. That I did my best, even if I failed to keep her here with me.

  Jacqueline listens and laughs and tells me it’s all okay. Her voice is a rhapsody of everything I left behind—an industrial lullaby, the waves at midnight, a city that’s forgotten but never forgets.

  This is what I need. What I’ve always needed. And it’s what she needs too, one more moment together.

  Then I ask her for something. A request she doesn’t have to grant.

  “Let Quinn go,” I say. “Give her the chance that you didn’t have. That we didn’t have.”

  All five girls materialize before me, their shapes more defined now in the decay, and it’s a dizzying sight. Helena and Violet giggling together. Dawn singing her lullabies, the ones she still hums in secret to her daughter. Lisa twirling in the shadows, babbling nonsense. And Jacqueline, gazing at me and seeing me in a way no one else ever can.

  They hear me, and somehow, beyond words, I’m sure they say yes. They’re a force of nature, but not a cruel one. And every cycle needs to be broken. Even they know that.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  Nearby, Aunt Betty moves like a ghost through the shadows. She passes me, undisturbed at the invader in her space, the one she used to chase out every chance she got. I wonder if she remembers me. I wonder if she remembers anything.

  I asked the girls to save Quinn, and now I have to try to save someone too. I clamber to my feet and follow my aunt down the hall. With her body hunched and weak, she barely looks up at me, but I look at her.

  “Come with me,” I whisper. “Don’t stay here like this.”

  Even after everything, she deserves better. She deserves to extract herself from this withered house, to cobble together what’s left of her life.

  But she shakes her head.

  “You go,” she says, and clasps my hands in hers. “I stay.”

  A long moment passes, an eternity that aches deep in my bones.

  Then a glimmer in her face shifts, and Aunt Betty looks into my eyes and gives me a smile that might as well be a sob.

  “I’m sorry, Phoebe,” she says. “You know that, right?”

  Everything twists inside me, a jumble of what was and what won’t ever be, and I nod, my eyes blurred. Before I can say a word, she untangles her hands from mine and drifts back into the shadow, back into the decay of her life. She disappears before my eyes, a Rust Maiden, one that’s lost and living and all her own.

  I hesitate and wait, until I know it for sure: that I’m done here. Part of me wishes I wasn’t, that I could stay forever, but that’s not the way this works.

  I move away from the dark and toward the stairs. At the last moment, I seize up. There’s one more thing. The word blossoms in my throat, and I say what I should have said to Jacqueline twenty-eight years ago.

  “Goodbye.”

  It’s so simple, but it’s right too. The whole house quivers in reply, a giggle in the walls that sounds like the flow of a river, and the sparks from steel heat, and the strange and lonely pang of freedom.

  Jacqueline ripples in the shadows, and I watch her quietly. Her face is arcane to me now, but somehow, she looks like herself. A girl, the one I remember. Finally, with a grin, she disappears. Back to where she belongs and where I can’t follow. Exactly the way it has to be.

  I smile at the places she’s been. Then I walk down the steps to the front door and back out into the world.

  Another house down the block tumbles, and the foreman yells commands back and forth. I glance back at the notices tacked on the door. Some are from the construction crew. Some are from the city. They know Aunt Betty is inside. Someone will come for her soon. Then they’ll take down this house along with all the rest, and among the decay, this will be the girls’ neighborhood again. They’ll belong more than we do. They always did.

  A gust off the lake cuts down the block, and I pull up my collar. What I’d always believed was wrong. I didn’t fail Jacqueline. I let her go. That’s what she wanted, and in the last moments all those years ago, I helped her do that.

  I need to help someone else do that too.

  Quinn’s house waits at the end of the street. I knock on the front door, and she answers. Her eyes are brighter than last night, and though a ragged bandage is still on her arm, the wound is no longer weeping or glinting or doing anything at all. It just looks like a scratch, plain and simple.

  “This is for you.” I pass her the withered envelope my mother gave me this morning. “If you have any trouble cashing it in, let me know.”

  She stares at me, confused that I’m back and that I’m giving something to her, a girl who’s been given nothing in life. Her fingers fumble with the envelope, and with her lips pursed, she peeks inside.

  “Phoebe,” she whispers. “This is too much.”

  I smile. She doesn’t know yet that it’s worth triple that amount, but I don’t tell her. Let it be a surprise.

  “Get out of here,” I say. “Before it’s too late.”

  Quinn looks up at me. “Where will I go?”

  “Anywhere you want.” I breathe deeply to steady myself. “You can come back, too. Cleveland will be waiting for you.”

  It has a tendency to do that. To wait for those of us who left to find it again.

  “Thank you,” she whispers, and I squeeze her hand before turning away.

  That bond money won’t last her forever, and it’s certainly not all the answers in the world. But it’s a chance. It’s a choice. That’s what the girls needed back then, and
it’s what Quinn needs now.

  Down the street, I look up at my old bedroom window. A shadow moves past the moth-eaten curtains. Someone’s in my house. Not a ghost, though. For the first time, I’m sure of that.

  The front door is still unlocked, and I go inside and climb the stairs. I find him there. Adrian, sorting through the pictures and diaries I abandoned in this room that’s no longer mine. My mother must have phoned and told him that I left all my artifacts behind, things he could use for the museum.

  When I walk in, he glances up at me, his face wan. “Hello,” he says.

  I crouch next to him, and my fingers graze the edge of a Polaroid. Jacqueline smiles up at me, and I smile back. Then I turn to Adrian.

  “I’m not working for you,” I say. “But I’ll work with you. On the monument for the girls.”

  He stares at me a moment. “Okay,” he says finally. “Do you have an idea for it?”

  “I do.” I turn to the last page in my never-finished diary, and with an old, mostly dull pencil, I sketch it out for him. A crude drawing, but it works.

  “It’s a butterfly house,” I say as he examines it quietly. “That’s what should go there.”

  One in the shape of a triple moon. Jacqueline’s sign to me. This is what she and I should have always had. A sanctuary for us and for others like us, all those things that frighten everyone else.

  Adrian traces over the drawing with his fingertips. “This will work,” he says, and smiles.

  And that’s it. It’s that simple. Me with a job in Cleveland, working at Case Western all these years after I should have been a graduate.

  I’ll stay here in this city. For now. Once the monument is done, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe I’ll leave again, or maybe I’ll stick around and tend to the butterflies. They’ll need someone. I’ll need someone too.

  This afternoon, I’ll go to Sweet Evergreen, to find my mother and tell her what comes next. I hope she didn’t expect our farewell this morning to last too long. If so, she’ll be disappointed.

  But first, I make one more stop.

  Bayton Beach is colder than I remember it. A little cleaner, too. Not sparkling, of course, but not as terrible as when I came here with Jacqueline. The girls are still here in the city, but they haven’t poisoned this place. None of this decay is their fault. If anything, they’re the ones fighting it, the ones who want to see it all turned around. That means the transformations won’t repeat themselves. That others won’t fall to the same fortune. Those five girls will be here no matter what. That’s their fate, and their choice.

  I sit back on the shore and watch the waves come in. No algae is blooming. The lake is quiet and blue and ours.

  A shuffling in the sand, and then someone’s standing over me.

  “Thought I’d find you here.” Eleanor plops down next to me, her breath fogging in front of her like smoke. I smile and shake my head. She knows me better than I give her credit for. This was a place I used to go, somewhere that reminds me of Jacqueline. She wanted to find me, and this is where she knew to come. This kicked-aside girl, more astute than anyone realizes.

  “Quinn told me what you did for her,” Eleanor says. “Do you think it will help?”

  “I hope so,” I say.

  Eleanor plucks a piece of broken glass from the sand. “I hope so too.”

  We gaze together at the skyline. Far off, the clouds swirl with a storm that might come in. Or it might not. We’ll have to wait and find out.

  Only I can’t wait anymore. I’m suddenly saying something, the words tumbling out of me.

  “I helped them,” I say. “The girls. That last night, I helped them leave us.”

  This confession I’ve ached to make. Here it is, spoken to the only person left who was there too.

  Eleanor is quiet for a long time, and I’m sure she hates me. I’m sure she’ll always hate me now.

  “Is it what they wanted?” she asks at last.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  She nods. “Then it’s not your fault, Phoebe,” she says, and I finally believe it.

  “Your mother loved you,” I say. “She still loves you, Eleanor.”

  Despite the cold, her face reddens. “I know.” She pulls her legs tight into her chest. “I mean, I figured that.”

  She won’t look at me. She won’t admit how much she wanted to hear it. How much that’s all she’s needed all these years. Now I’ve given it to her, that first kernel of truth, and I’ll give her so much more. I’ll tell her anything. Whatever she wants to know will be hers. What her mother was like before the transformation. What her father was like, fool that he is. How the Rust Maidens became what they were and are and will always be. I’ll tell her more about that last day too, with her blue in the cradle, and the girls vanishing from us. But Eleanor doesn’t ask, not right now. We have all the time for it, and she understands that. So we sit together, boots buried in the dirty sand, watching the end of the day settle over Cleveland.

  A faraway loneliness tightens in my chest, and I want to tell her I’m sorry. For leaving this city and the girls behind. For abandoning her that summer when I knew she’d need someone.

  But I don’t say that. I say something else instead.

  “I’ll race you to the sun.”

  She turns to me, her eyebrows twisted, and I almost start to explain what I mean, how this is what Jacqueline and I used to do, the way we’d run and pretend we would never stop.

  But then she exhales a sly laugh, and she’s off, already ten leaps ahead of me. I’m up on my feet too. We’re both running, sand kicking up, broken glass shattering beneath us. Headed down the beach into whatever lies ahead.

  And we don’t look back.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gwendolyn Kiste is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, her debut fiction collection available from JournalStone, as well as the dark fantasy novella, Pretty Marys All in a Row, from Broken Eye Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, and LampLight, among other publications. A native of Ohio, she resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. You can find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.