The Dead Lands

The midwife threw down her bloodied towel and started toward her, one of her hands already raised.

 

“Ma—” The word was cut short by the fist that struck her. She fell to the floor and brought a hand to the hot swelling at her cheek. She looked up at Juliana with dribbling black eyes only to see her mother’s face twisted up in a snarl. The years had done something to her, distanced and polluted her. She had forgotten one family and become part of another.

 

“Stay away,” she said, “you freak.”

 

There was a sudden electrical hum. The air trembled, like a wind first finding its breath. The midwife raised her hand again to strike her. But the hand never fell.

 

A dark stream of wasps poured through the window. One moment the midwife was rearing back to strike Gawea and the next moment she was seething with wings and stingers. They covered her completely, a nettling mass. She crashed into a wall and then the floor. She tore at them, clawed at them, but, like smoke, they parted a moment and then filled the space her hands passed through. Their bodies pulsed, jabbing their stingers again and again into every available surface of skin, and then, when the midwife opened her mouth to scream, they scrabbled down her throat.

 

She was still thrashing on the floor when Juliana, over the storm of wasps, screamed, “Get away!” She wrapped the baby in a blanket now and clutched it two-handed. “Get away get away get away get away!”

 

Gawea’s expression hardened—as if all the anger and sadness and disappointment she might feel had mineralized—until it appeared someone had chipped her face from a piece of rock. She was about to ask the wasps something more. She was about to ask them to hurt the baby. If she concentrated hard enough, if she bent her desire into a question, she knew they would answer.

 

But they stopped her. First the midwives, then the doctors. They stormed into the room and held her down and knocked her out and she woke later in a barred cell with a swollen eye and a blackening headache. On the other side of the bars she found the thin man, studying her with his head cocked and his eyebrows arched. “You’re awake.”

 

She rolled upright and brought a finger to her temple and it came back tacky with blood.

 

“What are you going to do to me?”

 

“Me? Nothing.”

 

“What’s going to happen to me?”

 

“That’s not my decision. If it was my decision, I might slice you open and see what makes you tick. You make me very, very curious.”

 

“Whose decision is it, then?”

 

“Aran Burr’s.”

 

“Who’s Aran Burr?”

 

“Who’s Aran Burr?” The thin man laughed, a reedy clicking. “If you don’t know that, then I better tell you the color of the sky and the name of the planet and the smell of a rose.”

 

“Who is he?”

 

“You’ll know soon enough. He wants to meet you. He wants me to take you to him.”

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 21

 

 

 

ONCE ELLA LEARNS where Simon lives—in a lean-to in an alley—she insists he stay with her. “We’ll head back to the doctor in a few days for a proper cast. In the meantime, we need to keep that wound clean. Judging from your clothes and your habit of crawling through sewers and sleeping with rats and trash, you’re obviously incapable of taking care of yourself. You’ll die. Or they’ll have to cut your arm off and then you’ll die.” So he will stay with her at the museum. In the room they share, there are two beds, and Ella sleeps in one, Simon the other.

 

His forearm, now purplish with an angry red gash in the middle of it, has swollen to twice its size. His black sausagey fingers will not respond to his commands. Twice a day she helps clean the wound and doses him up with morphine, but she does not permit him as much rest as he would like. She puts him to work instead—sweeping one-handed, scrubbing the bathroom, boxing up a butterfly display and replacing it with reptiles and amphibians. He is especially taken by a specimen of frog—called the Hairy Frog or Horror Frog—skirted around the waist with fur and capable of breaking the bones in its fingers and toes in order to defend itself, forcing the shards through the skin, creating claws. He remembers the pain of the break and rubs his arm and imagines it as a newly carved weapon. He is a weapon. And if he could revenge his father—if he could hurt someone, slash his arm across a throat—it would be Slade.

 

About this he spends a lot of time daydreaming, and about other things, too. Hunting dinosaurs with a spear. Blasting off to space in a rocket. Lancing a knight in a duel. Whereas before, he spent all of his time trying to fill his stomach and filch valuables and escape detection, his every comfort is now attended to, and he can afford to indulge. The museum encourages his mind to play. For the first time in many years, he is allowed to be a child.

 

When he asks for his backpack, Ella says, “Maybe later,” and when he complains, she says, “You do what I tell you to do. I’ve got you by the balls, remember?”

 

So he does as he’s told. There seems to be no other way with her. Even when she uses the word please, it comes at a near shout, but so does she make him meals and mend his clothes and cut his hair, the clippings of which collect in a thick nest on the floor when she circles his chair and scissors her way to his scalp and finally stands back and nods approvingly and says, “You look much better now. Very presentable indeed. Except for your stuck-out ears.”

 

He runs a hand across his bristling scalp. Without all that hair he feels naked. She is good at making him feel that way. Stripped, revealed, as if there is no hiding anything from her.

 

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