The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart (8 page)

By Saturday morning, Mrs. Mannerd was very suspicious, especially at breakfast, when Lionel ate his porridge with a spoon rather than lapping it up with his tongue.

After the bowls had been cleared, Lionel and Marybeth remained at the table with perfect posture and their hands clasped together.

“Well?” Mrs. Mannerd said. “Aren't you going to go outside and play?”

Marybeth and Lionel exchanged glances.

“Actually,” Marybeth said. “We'd like to walk to the library.”

“The library?” Mrs. Mannerd said. “I could have sworn your books weren't due back until Tuesday.”

“We've finished them, and we'd like to check out something new,” Marybeth said.

Mrs. Mannerd hesitated. All week there had been something strange in Marybeth's demeanor. Sometimes, in certain lights, Mrs. Mannerd could believe that Marybeth's eyes turned blue. And Lionel had kept very close to her—much closer than usual. Even as Marybeth sat on
the bottom step and read for hours, Lionel napped curled by her feet. Odd as it was, she didn't want to discourage them. Closeness of that sort was rare enough for people who had families, and rarer still for those who didn't.

Perhaps it was those supernatural books that had frightened them, Mrs. Mannerd had thought. It was the only explanation.

“I suppose the walk would do you some good,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “But wear thick socks, and no more scary books. Pick something nice this time, would you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Mannerd,” they said together.

Dutifully, they buttoned their wool coats to their chins, pulled on their boots, and left the house with their library books under their arms.

Mrs. Mannerd stood at the storm door and watched them walk down the dirt driveway. Lionel stooped to bite the head off a dandelion. Even on his best behavior, he would always be just a little bit wild.

CHAPTER

9

“Can you feel it now?” Lionel asked. He was talking about the blue creature's heartbeat.

“Yes,” Marybeth said. “I couldn't this morning, but it started up when we left the house.”

They had been walking up the road for a quarter mile before the graveyard began to show itself in the distance, like a tiny abandoned city that would never again be inhabited.

The heart sank in Marybeth's chest and disappeared. She staggered when she felt it stop. “It's all right,” she told it, and walked ahead of Lionel. “Look. See? There's nothing that can hurt you in there.”

The older ones would hold their breath when they passed the graveyard. They told Marybeth and Lionel that
if they dared to breathe as the car rolled past, the ghosts would come to their beds at night and drag them to an empty grave and bury them alive.

But Marybeth wasn't afraid of the graveyard. Death itself had never startled her. Her clearest memory of her father had taken place in a graveyard. It was a clear memory, much clearer than a photograph or even the oil painting of Mr. and Mrs. Mannerd that hung in the dining room.

She had been three years old, or maybe four. She had been picking the dandelions and buttercups that grew wild in the grass, gathering them in her pocket. Her father asked if he could hold them, and then he placed them on a headstone and told her, “Say hello to your old mom.”

“Why's she down there?” Marybeth had asked him.

“You always put people in the ground when they die,” he had said. “The soul is much lighter than the skin and bones. You bury them in the dirt so that they don't float away like a balloon. They just sleep peaceful instead.”

Though she was nine years old now, and she knew that death was not the same as sleep, she still believed there was truth in what her father had said. Perhaps the blue creature's spirit had floated up from its grave and gotten lost.

Lionel ran to catch up with Marybeth. They were at the graveyard's entrance now. A low stone fence bordered it, with a high rusty gate emblazoned with iron roses.

Marybeth took a deep breath.
Here goes nothing
, she thought.

The graveyard was more than a hundred years old, and the only one in walking distance, so they both hoped this would work. Even if they weren't sure what they were doing exactly.

Lionel reached for her hand, and Marybeth took his. She hadn't hissed at him in days, and Lionel sensed that the blue creature was coming to trust him. And this was a good thing, because at the sight of all those headstones, Marybeth's eyes flashed blue.

Some of the headstones had fallen to ruin, cracked, chipped, and neglected, because anyone who might have visited them had long since died. Others were newer, with fresh flowers tied with ribbon, letters to the dead tucked in the grass.

If the blue spirit's body was buried here, she didn't know where to begin. She didn't know if the blue spirit had died a hundred years ago, or two hundred, or just last month.

She walked slowly through the rows of headstones.

Lionel walked behind her at a cautious distance, and Marybeth could feel a low growl in her throat that she didn't make. The blue creature was still uncertain about Lionel, but it was coming around to him. Still, there was this fear that Marybeth could feel, as though anyone could
be a threat. Even a boy with messy hair who sometimes thought he was a coyote, or a monkey, or a fox.

When the panic began to bubble inside her, it started deep in her stomach. Sometimes the fear made her hide when the doorbell rang, or when the older ones got too close.

Marybeth did her best to calm it. She hummed music in her head, or she concentrated hard on the lines of her favorite poems. She told jokes.

Sometimes it worked, and the blue creature went to sleep inside her skin. But sometimes the fear was unlike anything Marybeth had ever known. Worse than being locked in the closet or missing an answer on a test.

“We could try over here,” Lionel said.

His voice was far away, as though Marybeth were hearing it from underwater. She shook her head, trying to clear away the water rushing through her ears, but it only got worse.

The gravestones blurred first, and then everything became a blur. The blue creature darted between her bones, trapped in her rib cage like a fish swimming frantically in a bowl. It was trying to push her out of the graveyard. Wrong, it was telling her. This place was all wrong.

In all the frenzy, she could see Lionel's worried face. She knew he was saying something, but she couldn't hear him. All she could hear was a voice in her mind telling her that this place was wrong, wrong, wrong.

She tried to tell the blue creature to be calm. She tried to hum. But it wouldn't listen.

Lionel had crouched low to the ground, and he approached cautiously. The blue creature snarled.

It took over her legs, and she ran from the graveyard, only distantly aware of the road beneath her feet, her breathing hard, her lungs aching. The worst part about this surge of panic was that it dulled her senses. She had no control of her arms and legs, and everything appeared as though underwater.

From somewhere very far away, she heard Lionel cry out, and she saw the car coming toward her, and felt something swoop her out of the way.

“Hey there,” an unfamiliar voice said. “You've gotta be more careful.”

Marybeth, her eyes glowing blue, scrambled behind Lionel.

And at last, feeling safe, the blue creature subsided.

When her vision came into focus, she saw a man standing at the edge of the road. His face and clothes were smeared with dirt.

“The road's no place to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” the man said.

Lionel was finding it difficult to act like a human. He wanted to growl or hiss, to protect both Marybeth and her secret.

It was Marybeth who spoke first. “Yes, sorry, we'll try to be more careful.”

Lionel was grateful that at least she knew how to talk to people. That even with this blue creature and its erratic behavior, she could still convince adults that they were just two normal children playing where they ought not to have been.

“Isn't your mother nearby?” the man asked. Now that Marybeth could see him clearly, there was nothing intimidating about him. He hardly looked much bigger than some of the older ones. “Does she know you're playing around outside a graveyard?”

Lionel bit back a growl. The only things more unnerving than people were people that asked questions.

“She isn't here,” Marybeth said. “We didn't come here to play. We were visiting a grave.”

“Go on, then,” the man said. “But be calm about it. Just because these folks are dead doesn't mean they don't deserve respect.”

“Yes, sir,” Marybeth said. She nudged Lionel, and he echoed an uncomfortable “Yes, sir” of his own.

They turned back into the graveyard, and Lionel whispered, “Did it go to sleep?”

“No,” Marybeth said. “I can still feel it. Like goose bumps, but on my bones.”

Lionel was quite angry with the blue creature. It could have killed Marybeth, and more than ever he wanted it gone. He had never been so infuriated by a creature in all his life.

But even so, the blue creature had hidden behind him for sanctuary, and that was progress.

Marybeth stopped walking. She squeezed her eyes shut and balled her fists, and whispered, “Be calm, you silly thing.”

“What is it?” Lionel asked. He was getting much better at managing conversations, he thought.

“It doesn't like it here,” Marybeth said. “I don't know how to explain it. It just feels . . . wrong. All wrong.”

She looked as though she wanted to cry, but she didn't. She walked to the gate and picked up the library books where they'd left them and said, “Let's go.”

Lionel followed her. “Go where? Is it telling you something?”

“It doesn't matter. I'm done listening to it today,” Marybeth said. “Let's just return the books and go home.”

After they returned from the graveyard, Marybeth was subdued. Lionel invited her with him to feed the squirrels, but she went to her room and closed the door instead.

At dinner that night, when Mrs. Mannerd laid out the serving dishes, Marybeth didn't even put any food on her plate. She just sat there, staring at the empty white plate with tired eyes. No one noticed, of course. They never did. No one except for Lionel.

And no one but Lionel saw the way she went up the stairs after the dishes had been cleared. Slowly, and against the railing as the older ones ran past her.

After she had brushed her teeth and washed her face, Lionel was waiting for her in the hallway.

“Is it you in there?” he asked.

“Yes, it's me,” she said, and to Lionel's great relief he knew she was telling the truth. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But I don't know for how much longer.”

She hugged her arms across her chest. A few weeks ago, Lionel might have compared her to a hatchling whose mother would never return to the nest, leaving her to fend for herself against the predators that lurked when the stars dotted the evening sky. But there was something different to her now. Though she looked the part of a hatchling, when the shadows loomed around her under the darkened sky, she would not be their prey.

She would be a predator.

CHAPTER

10

When Marybeth climbed down from her bunk bed early Monday morning, she was quite awake.

It had taken more than an hour, but she'd gotten the blue creature to feel calm inside her skin. She hummed to it, a melody that she'd heard the late Ms. Gillingham, Mrs. Mannerd's spinster sister, hum as she tended to things around the house. Perhaps it belonged to a song she had heard, or perhaps she had made it up. But Marybeth had always liked it. It seemed, to her, the sort of melody that would fill a nursery's walls as a mother lulled her baby to sleep.

The blue creature had liked it as well. It was fond of Marybeth. Somehow she knew that. It enjoyed soft voices and gentle melodies. Perhaps that was why it had taken
to her. There was no other soul so patient and soothing as Marybeth in that red house.

But fond of her or not, the blue creature had to go. Marybeth did not enjoy hissing at the mailman or running out into traffic when the creature was spooked. But worse than that were the dreams. Strange, haunting visions of a boy with a face made from a mosaic of blue buttons, and an ache in her chest, and a terrible sense of grief.

The blue creature made Marybeth know things that she didn't understand. This morning, she knew that the blue creature had left something in the barn of the old farmhouse. Something important.

Maybe, Marybeth thought, she could retrieve it and the blue creature would move on.

She also knew that the blue creature was wary of Lionel, and that if he came along, the blue creature might attack him, or refuse to search for whatever it was it wanted in that barn.

When she opened the bedroom door, she could just barely see Lionel asleep by the threshold. He was there every night to make sure she didn't wander off. Mrs. Mannerd had given up and stopped pestering him about it, and Lionel didn't seem to mind that he got kicked and tripped over when someone got up for a late-night glass of water or to use the toilet.