The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart Read online

  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 telli
ng 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.

  And his presence there on the floor had helped. Marybeth had not wandered off against her own accord in some time.

  This time, it was her own decision to go.

  Carefully, she stepped over Lionel’s sleeping body. He growled at something in his dream and scratched at his ear. Marybeth waited until he was totally still and quiet, and then she moved down the stairs.

  She did feel guilty for going without him. But when anyone was around her, the blue creature was on high alert. Only when Marybeth was alone with it did she have a chance at soothing it.

  Sometimes she was able to hum the blue creature to sleep, but for now she was merely trying to keep it calm. She wanted it to show her whatever was in that barn, but she did not want it to take over her body. It was a fragile dance she was slowly learning.

  She hummed in her head as she buttoned her coat, and as she pulled on her boots, and wriggled her fingers into her tattered gloves.

  It was November now, and Marybeth had vowed to be rid of the blue creature before the first snowfall. The little red house was at the end of a long dirt driveway, at the bottom of a hill. When it snowed, they were stranded there for days. Marybeth suspected the confinement would cause the blue creature to panic, and there wouldn’t be a thing she could do to console it, trapped in a house with seven other children.

  By the time the farmhouse appeared in the distance, the sun had begun to rise.

  “Stay down,” Marybeth said, as the blue creature fussed about inside her. It was itching to take over. Marybeth understood. After the blue creature sent her running from the graveyard, she knew what it was trying to tell her. It didn’t belong there. It belonged here. “If you go about panicking, I’ll walk us back home and we’ll never get you sorted out,” she warned. “So behave.”

  She was bluffing, but it worked. The blue creature could tell her what to think and where to go sometimes, but it could never read her mind.

  It was her own heart thudding in her chest as she stepped off the road and onto the large yard in front of the farmhouse.

  She took a step toward the barn, which always called to her when she was here, but a sound stopped her.

  It was coming from the trees, a loud whack. Followed by another, and another.

  Slowly, she moved toward the sound, clenching and unclenching her gloved fingers to keep them warm. The chilly air was biting at her nose and cheeks.

  Whack!

  Whack!

  Whack!

  Not far into the woods, just beyond the tree line, there was a man in a plaid flannel shirt, loading logs onto a stump and chopping them into firewood.

  Marybeth recognized him as the old woman’s son, Reginald.

  His back was to her, and he froze with the ax over his head as though he sensed her standing there.

  “What do you want?” he said. “Why do you keep coming back here?”

  “I don’t know,” Marybeth answered honestly.

  Reginald set down the ax and turned to face her.

  The blue creature ebbed inside her arms and coiled around her heart, trying to take over.

  Marybeth clenched her fists. Be still, she told it. Her temples ached from the strain of trying to maintain control. Her entire body ached at times, and she empathized now with the grunts and groans that came from Mrs. Mannerd when she stooped to pick up something she had dropped or struggled up the stairs with the final load of laundry. Marybeth felt that she also had the body of an old woman, more and more as the days went on. She was forgetting what it was like to be a young girl, and to run outside and play.

  Reginald’s breath was a cloud in the cold air. His cheeks were flush and red from the work of chopping so much firewood. He wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead and said, “You walked all this way?”

  “It wasn’t very far,” Marybeth said.

  “That orphanage? It’s two miles at least.” He folded his arms. “What do they do to you there? Beat you?”

  “No,” Marybeth said.

  “Starve you? Lock you in your bedroom?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  Reginald was tall and slender, with gray streaking some of his dark hair. He was not as old as Mrs. Mannerd, but maybe old enough to be someone’s father, Marybeth thought. And though he appeared perfectly normal, Marybeth was unsure whether she should trust him.

  “I just like it here.”

  The man canted his head as he looked at her, as though she were some sort of strange creature that had crawled up through the frost-covered dirt.

  The way he looked at her caused the blue creature to turn in her chest. It was trying to wriggle itself into her arms and legs—she could feel it. She balled her fists and clenched her jaw. Be still, she told it, or I am taking us back home.

  Marybeth worried that he would sense the blue creature that was at that very moment fighting with her. She swallowed a snarl in her throat and pushed her fists into her pockets.

  “Did you live on a farm with your parents?” Reginald asked. “Is that it?”

  Marybeth shrugged. She would have liked to say, “I don’t know,” which was the truth. She didn’t remember where she had lived before she came to Mrs. Mannerd. But her tongue was shaking inside her mouth, because the blue creature was trying to scream.

  She clenched her jaw. Quiet, you foolish thing. I’m trying to help you.

  “You’re not much,” Reginald said. “I don’t suppose you’re any good at chopping firewood.”

  Marybeth watched him pick up the ax. They had one at the
red house, kept jammed in a stump by the shed where Mr. Mannerd had kept his tools and things. The two oldest children did all the chopping. Lionel had tried once, and Mrs. Mannerd threatened that if he tried again, he could say good-bye to all his bird feeders and his bringing berries to the foxes because he wouldn’t be setting foot outside again until he was a very old man.

  “I’ve never tried,” Marybeth said, her voice emboldened by the force of overcoming the blue creature.

  “I knew a girl like you once,” he said. “Most girls are afraid of axes and sharp things, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t afraid of anything.” He looked at her, and Marybeth felt, for a moment, that she had known him all her life. Longer than that, even. She felt that she had confided her secrets in him long ago.

  She shook her head. “I’m not afraid of many things.”

  “Well, since you’re going to stand there gaping, might as well make yourself useful. Come on and take a shot.”

  Hesitantly, Marybeth stepped forward. Though the red house was nowhere in sight, she still felt that Mrs. Mannerd would somehow sense that one of her children was this close to a blade and would come running to stop her.

  But no one came. There was nothing but a cold breeze that bit at her skin through the holes in her gloves, and the ax being offered.

  She took it, and its unexpected heft caused her to stumble forward. Reginald laughed, though not unkindly. “Use both hands,” he said. “Here.” He set a piece of wood on the stump. “Aim right for the center of it. Carry the weight in your forearms.”

  Marybeth did her best to hide the effort it took to lift the ax. In the red house, she was not even allowed to use the hammer to hang nails for the Christmas garland.

  “What happened to her?” she said. “The girl who wasn’t afraid of anything.”

  Reginald narrowed his eyes at her, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “She’s still around,” he said.

  The blue creature was a buzzing in her blood. It was as though a beehive had been set loose inside her skin.

  He knows something, Marybeth thought. But how to ask him?

  She raised the ax, and then, as she was about to strike with it, hot blood rushed through her arms, and she was overtaken by the blue creature. The last thing she saw was the firewood splinter and break apart under the blade, and then everything blurred and she felt herself falling asleep.