The Replacement (12 page)

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Authors: Brenna Yovanoff

BOOK: The Replacement
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Luther smiled and touched the brim of his hat. "Home, sweet home."
"So, you live in the slag heap?"
He twitched his shoulders, almost a shrug. "Well, to be more accurate, underneath."
Then he reached inside his coat and brought out a knife. The blade was long and yellow, made of ivory or bone. I stepped back.
He laughed. "Don't be a fool. I'm not going to cut you."
Then he jammed the knife into the base of the hill, all the way to the handle.
When the blade sank into the slag, nothing happened for a second. Then a sheet of gravel slid away, exposing a narrow door.
He pocketed the knife and pushed the door open, waving me through. The entryway was dark and smelled like mildew. The opening was low and the air was wet and cold, but when he ushered me in, I didn't hesitate. I stepped inside and Luther followed me into a low tunnel. When I looked back, all I could see was the faded black of his coat as he guided me down.
We moved slowly, and I kept one hand on the wall. It was rough, crusted with loose debris, but the tunnel didn't seem to be in danger of collapsing. The floor sloped steadily downward as we went and I was increasingly aware that we were deep underground. Deeper than cellars and basements and the water mains that ran in a complex network under the streets. The weight of earth above us was almost suffocating, but something about it was comforting, too. I felt surrounded, like I was being held in place.
As we kept going, the tunnel widened, and the air got wetter and colder. A long way down, there was light.
When we reached the end of the tunnel, Luther stopped, straightening his collar, adjusting his lapels. The light came from the narrow crack between a pair of heavy double doors. He caught hold of twin handles and dragged the doors open.
Then he swept off his hat and bowed low. "Welcome to the House of Mayhem."
I was standing in a kind of lobby, with a stone floor and a high ceiling. Torches burned in rows along the wall and the smoke had a black, oily smell like kerosene. The handles were mismatched, made from dead branches and baseball bats and one that looked like the handle of a garden shovel or an ax. The walls were lined with other doorways, lower and narrower than the one we'd just come through. On opposite sides of the room were two massive fireplaces, but neither of them was lit.
A group of girls stood around one of the fireplaces, watching us. All of them had on long, grimy dresses and stiff vests that laced up the back. The smell coming off them was worse than the girl at the party. It made me think of a morgue.
At the far end of the lobby, there was a big wooden desk. It was the kind that a librarian or a receptionist might sit behind, but no one was in the chair.
When Luther put his hand between my shoulders, the weight and suddenness of it made me jump.
"Come now," he said softly. "No need for alarm. She just wants an audience with you."
He pushed me closer and we leaned over the desk to look behind it.
A little girl was crouched on the floor. She had on a white party dress that looked like it was made of old surgical gauze and also like it might have been on fire at some point. She was sitting with her legs pulled up, drawing on the stone with a burned stick. All the pictures looked like eyes and giant mouths full of teeth.
Luther leaned against the desk and pressed a little brass bell. "Here's your boy."
The girl turned and looked up at me. When she smiled, I stepped back from the desk. Her face was young and kind of shy, but her mouth was crowded with small, jagged teeth. Not a nice, respectable thirty-two, but closer to fifty or sixty.
"Oh dear," she said, putting down her stick and reaching out a dirty hand. "I ought to have been more cautious." Her voice was soft, and her train wreck of a mouth made her lisp. "You think I'm ugly."
The truth was, yes. She
did
look ugly, maybe even horrifying, but her eyes were wide. She was going to be terrifying if she grew any bigger, but for now, she was cute the way even a turkey or a possum can be cute when it's a baby.
She patted the heavy, high-backed chair beside her. "Here, sit and talk with me. Tell me about yourself."
I didn't sit down right away. It was hard to know what to think of her. She was different from Luther and different from the girls at Stephanie's party. Her jagged teeth and her tiny size made her seem more implausible, more impossible than all the rest of them.
When I took a seat on the edge of the chair, she went back to drawing on the floor.
"I've been curious about you," she said, scraping a new charcoal mouth with her stick. "We were so pleased that you survived childhood. Castoffs generally don't."
I nodded, staring down at the top of her head. "Who are you?"
She stood up and moved closer, staring into my face. Her eyes were dull black, like the feathers on a dead bird. "I'm the Morrigan."
The word sounded strange, like something in another language.
"I'm so pleased that you could find it in your heart to visit us," she whispered, reaching to touch my chin. "It's wonderful that you need us because we need you, you see, and business arrangements are so much more satisfying if they're reciprocal."
"What do you mean 'need you'? I don't need anything."
"Oh, darling," she said, smiling and reaching for my hand. "Don't be silly. Of
course
you need us. You're becoming
so
frail, and it's only going to get worse. This really is the best solution for all of us. You'll help me, and in return, I'll make sure you're supplied with all the remedies and analeptics you need and you won't have to live out the rest of your days in slow agony."
I watched her, trying to see the reason behind why I was even here. "What do you want?" I said, sounding more nervous than I would have liked.
"Don't look so alarmed. I won't ask you to do anything you don't already desire in your heart." She turned away and knelt on the floor again, picking at her hair. "While music is hardly the most powerful kind of worship, it's fine and adequate. We're always looking to bring new blood to our stage."
"What does that have to do with me, though? I'm just . . . no one."
"You have a good face," she said, crossing her legs and fidgeting with her dress. "An undamaged body. Your wholeness makes you immeasurably useful to me. If it's agreeable, I'll send you out onstage with the rest of my musical beauties to stand in front of the town and receive their admiration." Each time she pulled out a clump of hair, she set it carefully off to the side of her drawings, like she was starting a collection.
"Rasputin, you mean? When?"
"Tomorrow, at that estimable venue, the Starlight."
"But I just saw them. They played last night."
"We're in a bad time," she said. "Don't tell me you haven't seen the signs."
I thought of the rusting grates and brackets at the Starlight and nodded.
"The town is drawing away from us. The rains dishearten them, and their attentions are half felt at best. We need all the adulation we can get. If the season is bad enough, I'll send them up every night until the worst days have passed."
"What do you want
me
to do, though?"
The Morrigan smiled. "Now we come to it. Your sister has been a busy girl, as I'm sure you know. She appealed to us on your behalf, asking for medicines and cures, which we were only too happy to provide. It's easy enough to mix the medicines you need. All we ask is that you help us in our endeavor for applause."
I didn't ask what the point of applause was or how she even knew that I could play. Instead, what came out of my mouth was dazed and stupid sounding. "Why is it important to make them happy?"
The Morrigan ripped out another clump of hair. "They're better at loving us when they're happy."
I was beginning to get the feeling we were just going around in circles. "What does it mean, love us? How can they
love
you? They don't even believe you exist."
"They have to love because otherwise, they fear and they hate, and we'll all spiral down in one long decline. They'll hunt us--they've done it before. If we don't keep the peace, they kill us."
I knew that was the truth. All my daily concerns and everything that defined my life--it all came back to what had been done to Kellan Caury.
The Morrigan scowled and it made her look terrifying. "They can be very dangerous if they take it into their heads, so it's imperative that they remain placated. Their admiration sustains us, and our music makes them smile, even if they don't realize it's us they're smiling at."
"You live off groupies?"
She shrugged and drew a large, lumpy animal on the floor. "Off their attentions and their little favors." She added a pair of eyes, drew two slashes for pupils. "It's not the only form of tribute, but it's a good one."
"If it's not the only form, what else is there?"
"I have a sister who believes something else." She said it lightly, but she was looking away and her voice sounded thin and high pitched. "She's a right vicious cow, though."
"That's not a very nice thing to say about your sister."
"Well, it's not a nice thing, snatching away children. It makes the town uneasy." She dropped the stick and crawled over to the corner of the desk, peering around it at the main doors. "And it means giving up our own precious babes to replace theirs."
The two girls from Stephanie's party had come in from the long tunnel that led up to the slag heap. The one with the torn throat leaned in the doorway, while the little pink princess skipped around her, waving the star wand.
The Morrigan stood up and pointed to the rotting one. "The family knew her for what she was. They took her out into the hollow by Heath Road one night and cut her throat with a sickle."
I tried to breathe, but for a second, my lungs wouldn't cooperate. The girl was horrific, but the story was worse.
The Morrigan only nodded and patted my hand. "Terrible, isn't it? She was very young. Only a baby, really."
The girl stood by the double doors, tall and ragged. She was running her fingers over her torn throat, playing with the edges of the gash. When she caught me looking, she smiled.
I glanced away and turned back to the Morrigan. "How could she have died when she was a baby, though? I mean, she's not little anymore--she grew up."
The Morrigan nodded. "And why shouldn't she?"
"Because when people are dead, they don't
do
that--they don't get older."
She waved me off, shaking her head. "That's ridiculous. How on earth could I keep a proper house if I had to spend all my time looking after infants who never learned to look after themselves?" The Morrigan smiled, sounding pleased with herself. "The dead mind me. It's not a hard trick to make them live again if you have the right tokens and charms and the right names to call them by."
"I don't know, but I think most people would say that's a pretty hard trick to pull off."
She looked up at me, shaking her head seriously. "Mostly, people just don't want to."
"People like your sister?"
She grabbed the stick and slammed it down on the floor. "My sister lives on blood and sacrifice. She cares nothing for what's already dead. But then, she has the distinct advantage of being born heartless."
"It's heartless to think dead things should stay dead?"
"No," said the Morrigan. "It's heartless to use children so callously, to toss them away simply because she'd rather have something else. But look at me, I'm going on. You've come for the hawthorn analeptic, and I intend to give it."
When she came around the front of the desk and reached for my hand, I followed her.
She led me out through a narrow door and down a short flight of stone steps. The air smelled damp and mineralized, but it was nice and I wanted to keep breathing it. I followed her through doorways and tunnels, amazed by how far the House of Mayhem seemed to sprawl.
We turned down a wide hallway and into a huge room, far bigger than the lobby. The floor of it was covered in patches of standing water, so much in places that there was no way to avoid it.
The Morrigan splashed happily, jumping into the smallest puddles and kicking at the surface so that water sprayed up around her. I followed more carefully, walking around it where I could.
"Mind the pools," she said, pulling me back from the edge of a wide puddle. "Some of them go quite deep and I would have to call Luther to fish you out."
I looked closer at the puddle I'd almost stepped in. The edges were steep, cut straight down into the stone, and the puddle was so deep that I couldn't see the bottom.
At the end of the room, we skirted around a pool that was even bigger than the others. A woman lay on her back, floating in the water. Her arms were crossed over her chest and buckled to her sides with canvas straps, but she drifted on the surface without going under. Her dress was stuck to her legs, sinking down so the hem of it disappeared into the murky water. Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling, and her hair fanned out around her head, tangled with leaves and twigs. There were deep scars running down her cheeks, crisscrossing and overlapping, like someone had carved a grid into her face.

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