The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart Page 3

  Lionel was at the table early for once. He hadn’t overslept; he had been awake all night. He rarely worried, but when he did, it made him nocturnal like the coyotes and spiders.

  He sat at a chair so that he could keep an eye on Marybeth, and he didn’t acknowledge Mrs. Mannerd’s words of encouragement and praise as she spooned oatmeal into his bowl.

  Marybeth had not bothered with her braids this morning, and Lionel could see how long her hair truly was. It disappeared under the table, straight and smooth like the ribbons that hung on spools in the tailor shop window.

  She stared down at her bowl and drew patterns in the oatmeal, her mouth pensively puckered off to one side.

  “Too slow!” one of the older ones, a boy, shouted as he reached across the table for her toast and jam.

  He was a boy that Lionel had long ago decided was a hyena, and when he had told Marybeth she had agreed. He had large ears, small eyes, and hunched shoulders.

  As the hyena boy bit into the toast and let out a taunting “Mmmmm,” he did not see the sudden, vicious glare in Marybeth’s eyes. He did not hear her low growl.

  In an instant, Marybeth had scrambled over the table, knocking over glasses of milk and scattering the bowls, and she bit the hyena boy in the neck.

  He let out a cry, but Marybeth had latched onto him. She kept her teeth in his skin even as he pulled at her hair and fell backward onto the floor with a crash. By the time Mrs. Mannerd grabbed the collar of Marybeth’s dress and pulled her away, the hyena boy was in tears. Blood was trailing from his neck. “She bit me! The little brat bit me!”

  Startled, Marybeth looked around the dining room. All the children were staring at her now. The hyena boy’s blood stained her lips, and she was breathing hard.

  “Marybeth,” Mrs. Mannerd gasped, but before she could get a good look at Marybeth, she was gone. She ran from the dining room, through the kitchen, and outside, forgetting her shoes and coat; the storm door slammed shut behind her.

  Lionel had been the only one looking at her the moment before she lunged, and he was the only one who saw the flash of blue in her irises.

  He ran after her. Mrs. Mannerd threw her hands up in exasperation, muttering that those two would be the death of her one of these days.

  Lionel was not going to let Marybeth disappear this time. He kept his sight on her maroon dress and its white sailor collar that fluttered behind her. He caught up to her when she at last stopped at the river’s edge.

  She sat on the big rock, hugged her knees to her chest, and buried her face in them.

  Lionel approached cautiously. He crawled with his belly low to the rock, and then he sat across from her. He didn’t speak, only watched her with his head canted.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she finally said, her voice muffled. “I didn’t want to bite him.”

  “It’s okay that you did,” Lionel said. He could hear the distress in her voice, and it caused him a great deal of pain. “He took your toast. Eagles will fight to the death over something like that.”

  “I’m not an eagle, Lionel. I’m a girl.” She looked at him. Her eyes were their usual brown again. There was still blood in the corner of her mouth. “I’m a girl.”

  Lionel had never seen her this way before. Whenever the humans in the house were upset, he made a habit of avoiding them. One of the things he liked about Marybeth was that she was never upset. They both had an animalistic approach to things, he thought. They survived and didn’t bother with the emotional nonsense.

  But now that she was upset, he could not avoid her the way he avoided the others.

  Slowly, he crawled beside her and patted her shoulder. “I don’t think you bit him very hard,” he said.

  “There’s something wrong with me.” She looked at him. “The night before last, I saw the blue animal from my bedroom window. I tried to wake you, but I couldn’t. So I went out alone. I chased it all the way to the river.”

  Lionel thought back to the trail he had followed when he searched for her, and now he understood. The yellow threads, the dropped lantern. That’s what she had been doing out there.

  “I fell into the river, and I couldn’t find my way out,” she went on. “It came in after me. I think—I think it jumped inside my skin.”

  Lionel looked at her bare arms, welled with gooseflesh from the cold. “I don’t see it.”

  She shook her head. “It can’t be seen. But it’s still there. I feel it. I think—I think it wants to protect me. That’s why it got so angry when one of the older ones took my food.”

  Lionel considered this. “There aren’t many animals that burrow under the skin. Some insects, maybe. Did you get a good look at it?”

  “Not very. It was underwater,” Marybeth said. “It glowed.”

  “Could it have been the moonlight reflecting?” Lionel asked.

  “It was cloudy. There was no moonlight. And, anyway, it couldn’t have been something like that. It glowed like it was made of light itself.” Without her spectacles, the fear in her eyes was that much more prominent. “Are there any animals that glow?”

  “Jellyfish. But there aren’t any in this river.” Lionel shrugged. “Lightning bugs.”

  “It wasn’t a jellyfish or lightning bugs,” Marybeth said.

  Lionel lay on his belly and dipped his head into the river. He saw nothing but minnows and roots and rocks. Water was dripping from his hair when he emerged. He hadn’t found anything, but Marybeth already knew that he wouldn’t.

  “Don’t worry.” He looked just like a boy when he smiled at her. Marybeth was the only person in the world who ever got to see his human mannerisms. “Whatever it is, I’ve never met an animal I can’t reach.”

  Marybeth wasn’t consoled by this. She looked as though she might cry.

  Lionel thought back to yesterday, that horrible moment when he saw the lantern by the river and thought she had fallen in. He thought he would look down and find her floating there with her lungs full of water, gone forever.

  In that moment, he had known with certainty that if Marybeth had drowned, there would be nothing human left to him at all. He would have forgotten how to speak. He would not have been able to hear words—only angry growls coming out of human throats. Things like porridge and tables and houses would have been meaningless, and he would have disappeared into the darkest shadows of the trees.

  But Marybeth was still alive, and so whatever happened next couldn’t be too terrible to fix.

  He ambled back up to her side. “I’ll help you,” he said.

  Some of the tension eased from her frame, and she rested her head against his shoulder.

  “Oh, Lionel,” she said, very softly. “How?”

  CHAPTER

  5

  The older ones attended school in town, and they had left the house by the time Lionel and Marybeth returned.

  Mrs. Mannerd was scrubbing dishes at the kitchen sink, and when she saw the pair of them shuffle through the door, she sighed. “The tutor will be here in an hour. Just this once, do you think the two of you can get through your lessons without howling at the moon or biting anyone?”

  “It’s morning,” Lionel said. “There is no moon.”

  “Heaven knows that hasn’t stopped you before. Brush your hair, both of you. You look a mess.”

  For Marybeth’s sake, Lionel behaved during their lessons. He drank the glass of orange juice Mrs. Mannerd brought him, and he didn’t purr or twitch his nose even once when the tutor complimented his poise.

  But just because he didn’t behave like an animal did not mean he didn’t listen like one. As he and Marybeth sat across from each other at the dining room table working on their fractions, he listened to Mrs. Mannerd and the tutor whispering in the kitchen.

  He put his hand over Marybeth’s pencil to still it.

  She raised her head.

  “Shh,” he said. The pencil’s scratching against the page was making it harder to hear.

  Marybeth only heard murmuring, whi
le Lionel heard the words being spoken.

  “Something awful happened to that little girl out there,” Mrs. Mannerd said. “You should have seen the way she lunged at Marcus during breakfast.”

  “Do you suppose someone took her?” the tutor asked.

  “I can’t get her to say two words about it. But she’s different. I can see it on her face. She’s lost her spectacles, and now suddenly she swears she doesn’t need them.”

  “Whatever did happen, you must handle it delicately,” the tutor said.

  Lionel looked at Marybeth, who was twirling her pencil between her fingers, waiting to get back to her homework. “What is it?” she whispered.

  “You have to act normal,” Lionel whispered back.

  For the rest of the morning, Marybeth did just that. She spoke softly, and after her lessons she sat outside, her face half-covered by her scarf as she read through a stack of encyclopedias, looking up as many animals as she could think of. She studied the details of the sketches and looked for something that resembled what she’d seen in the river, but there was nothing.

  When she began to grow frustrated and scared, she felt the blue creature’s heart beating in her chest right beside her own, and felt oddly soothed by it.

  She came inside only when she was called to supper. Lionel was not permitted to read the encyclopedias for another week, but he was allowed to help Marybeth carry them inside and arrange them on the shelf that was built into the staircase.

  During supper, Mrs. Mannerd saw the tension between Marybeth and Lionel versus the older ones and she declared that nobody was allowed to speak, and any child to utter so much as a burp would be sent to bed with an empty stomach.

  The hyena boy glared at Marybeth, but she paid him no mind. She had been feeling hungrier than usual all evening, and now that she had food, she was ravenous.

  Lionel, who had brought his plate under the table, handed Marybeth his buttered bread. He would have given her his slice of meatloaf, which he was never going to eat despite Mrs. Mannerd’s best efforts, but one of the older ones had stepped on it.

  After dinner, Mrs. Mannerd lit a fire and sat in her wingchair to knit scarves with the yarn she’d found at the consignment shop.

  The older ones were upstairs, fighting about who got to use the bathroom and who had been standing in front of the mirror for too long.

  Usually, Lionel would be hiding somewhere. It made him very nervous to be in the house when it was filled with children, and he had a way of blending into the wallpaper.

  But since Marybeth’s return, he had become like her shadow, Mrs. Mannerd noticed. He followed Marybeth as she made her way to the fireplace and sat on the floor with some scrap paper and a pencil.

  Marybeth lay on her stomach and began to sketch. Lionel curled up beside her like a cat, his eyes following the movement of her hand as it went.

  Mrs. Mannerd looked up from her yarn. “What are you drawing?”

  “A kite,” Marybeth said.

  It was a sensible drawing for a sensible girl, Mrs. Mannerd thought. At last things were returning to normal.

  There was a loud crash upstairs, and Mrs. Mannerd grumbled. Before she could take so much as a breath to ask what happened, she heard the children arguing over whose fault it was.

  With a sigh, she set down her knitting and made her way up the creaky stairs.

  Lionel was still watching Marybeth. Her fingers tightened around the pencil, and her arm trembled, as though she was fighting to keep control over it.

  “Marybeth?” he whispered.

  When he looked at her eyes, they were blue.

  He sat up slowly. “Marybeth.” At once his tone was a coo, the way he talked to the fat mother rabbit.

  Her head twitched in his direction. She was in there, fighting for control.

  “It’s all right,” Lionel said. “Listen to my voice. Come back to me.” He didn’t dare allow himself to sound frightened.

  Marybeth drew a shaky breath. She tilted her head down low, so that her hair covered her face. The pencil in her hand began to move.

  Lionel kept a wary distance, and he watched as Marybeth’s practiced drawing of a kite transformed into something that resembled a face, with dark eyes staring through a murky haze.

  Then, the pencil dropped. It rolled across the floor and gently hit the brick fireplace.

  Marybeth’s face was still hidden. Lionel inched toward her—slowly, slowly—and reached for the paper.

  But the blue creature was faster. It snatched the paper from the floor and threw it into the fire. Its edges curled up immediately. The face was still staring out as it burned.

  Marybeth was close, too close, to the flame. Still with that eerie blue gleam in her eye, she held her hand out to the fire.

  Lionel grabbed her hand. The blue creature snarled and hissed and tried to bite him, but just this once he was faster. He wrapped his arms around Marybeth’s elbows and pinned her back against his chest.

  The blue creature within her howled like a wolf caught in a snare.

  “Marybeth!” he said. “Come back.”

  He knew that she had heard him when the tension left her body. She awoke, breathing hard. “Lionel?” It was Marybeth’s voice. No blue fox or other creature could ever duplicate that.

  She began to tremble, and he didn’t let go of her. “It’s all right,” he said. He didn’t know if that was true, but the words didn’t matter. It was all in the tone. None of the wild creatures spoke a word of English, and yet he communicated to them in much the same way.

  “It’s trying to tell me something.” Marybeth was trying not to cry. “It wants me to know something.”

  “Know what?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Something terrible. Maybe it’s a trick. Maybe it’s trying to kill me.”

  “I won’t let it,” Lionel said. “I’ll always help you find your way back.”

  They watched the paper burn to nothing, and he didn’t tell her that he was starting to truly feel afraid.

  Mrs. Mannerd returned to her knitting, muttering something about the children always breaking the few valuables she owned.

  Marybeth sat huddled by the fire, with her eyes fixed on the flame.

  “What happened to your pretty drawing, Marybeth?” Mrs. Mannerd asked.

  Marybeth winced, as though the question had awoken her from a dream.

  “I ate it,” Lionel said. He was sitting beside her. “It wasn’t a pretty drawing. It was bark, and I needed it to survive the winter.”

  Mrs. Mannerd was looking at him closely. This did not seem like one of his typical games. Rather than the usual mischief she normally saw in his eyes, there was ferocity. And she almost could believe that he was a wild thing, protecting its family against the cruel darkness of night.

  At bedtime, Lionel grabbed his blanket and slept huddled by Marybeth’s bedroom door. If he had gone with Marybeth the night of the storm, none of this would have ever happened, and he would not let her down again.

  Hours passed, and late into the night, the clatter of Mrs. Mannerd’s sewing machine came to a stop.

  When at last everyone in the house was asleep, Lionel was awoken by the creak of a floorboard and he opened his eyes.

  Marybeth was halfway down the stairs, and from the moonlight in the window he could just see the outline of her white nightgown. He followed after her on all fours—he could be much quieter that way—and watched as she moved for the front door.

  “Wait,” he whispered.

  Marybeth spun around. For a second her eyes glowed blue. She hissed, startled.

  Lionel knew better than to approach all at once. He knew that the blue creature did not yet trust him as well as Marybeth did.

  “I was only going to say that you’ll need your coat.” He rose to his feet and edged along with his back pressed against the wall, as far away from her as he could be. When he reached the tattered wool coat that hung by the door with all the other coats, he removed it and held it w
ith his arm extended.

  The blue creature eyed it warily. Lionel tossed it onto the floor at Marybeth’s feet and hoped that the creature could be reasoned with.

  He did not like to see those blue eyes on Marybeth’s face. He did not like the unknowing stare they gave.

  Eventually, it took the coat. It had no trouble putting it on and buttoning it, which Lionel found peculiar. What sort of animal was this blue creature that it knew how to dress itself? Several years ago, there was a feral cat that birthed a litter of kittens behind the shed where Mr. Mannerd used to make furniture. One of the older ones had knit a sweater for one of the more docile kittens, and when she had tried to put the sweater on the kitten, it nearly tore the nose from her face.

  The creature turned the doorknob.

  “You’ll need shoes,” Lionel said. He was thinking of the gooseflesh on Marybeth’s skin that afternoon; she could not tolerate the cold weather as well as he could.

  The blue creature wriggled Marybeth’s feet into her boots and stepped out into the windy autumn air. Lionel followed several feet behind.

  He followed the blue creature across the front lawn, down the long dirt driveway that led to the road, and then down the road itself. For as long as he could remember, Marybeth had been the one who followed him at a distance, never wanting to disturb the animals he sought as company. He wondered how she could stand it. It was horribly lonely watching her from afar; the creature didn’t look over her shoulder at him.

  He wondered if Marybeth had any say in where they were going.

  After what Lionel guessed had been a mile, the creature in Marybeth’s skin turned off the road and down a grassy hill. Lionel followed.

  There was an old farmhouse in the distance. All its windows were dark. Marybeth would never trespass, and so it was strange to watch her stride so confidently past the house, through the yard, to the barn that didn’t sound as though it contained any animals.

  Lionel followed the blue creature into the barn, to where the moonlight no longer reached them. There were mice skittering behind the hay bales. Marybeth was a coward around mice and would have backed away, but the blue creature was undeterred. It made a bed for itself in the dirt and curled up there.