Stab by Chris Adrian / Fiction / Untitled Books

"I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being"

Stab by Chris Adrian

Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there.Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime, and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth's doorstep.

Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By then I had known for a long time who was doing all the stabbing. I discovered the identity of the murderer on the first day of June, in the summer of 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother's death from cancer. I got up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington,D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. "Look at that," he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.

"Isn't that amazing?" my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. "See that? They're just six months old!" Colm and I were separated at one and a half years. I had no clear memories of either the operation or the attachment, though Colm always claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side, but my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other--that was something I did remember: looking in my mother's silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.

Early as it was, on our way out to the car we saw our new neighbor sitting on the front steps of her grandparents' house, reading a book in the morning sun.

"Hello, Molly," said my father.

"Good morning, Dr. Cole," she said. She was unfailingly polite with adults. At school she was already very popular, though she had only been there for two months, and she had a tendency to oppress the other children with her formidable vocabulary.

"Poor girl," said my father when we were in the car and on our way. He pitied her because both her parents had died in a car accident. She was in the car with them when they crashed, but she was thrown from the wreck through an open window--this was in Florida, where I supposed everyone always drove around with their windows down and never wore seat belts.

I turned in my seat so I was upside down. This had always been my habit; I did it so I could look out the window at the trees and telephone wires as we passed them. My mother would never stand for it, but she was flying a trip to San Francisco. She was a stewardess. Once my father and I flew with her while she was working and she brought me a glass of Coke with three cherries in it. She put down the drink and leaned over me to open up the window shade, which I had kept closed, from the beginning of the flight, out of fear. "Look," she said to me. "Look at all that!" I looked and saw sandy mountains that looked like crumpled brown paper bags. I imagined falling from that great height in to my brother's arms.

"Spider-Man!" said my father, after we had pulled onto route 50, and had passed a sign that said, washington, d.c., 29 miles.

"Aren't you excited?" He reached over and rubbed my head with his fist. If it had been just me and my mother, she would not have spoken at all, but my father spoke the whole way, talking about Spider-Man, talking about the mall, talking about the Farrah Fawcett look-alike who was also scheduled to appear, asking me every time if the prospect of seeing such things didn't make me excited, though he knew I would not answer him. I hadn't spoken a word or uttered a sound since my brother's funeral.

Spider-Man was a great disappointment. When my father brought me close to him for an autograph, I saw how his uniform was badly sewn, and glossy in a gross sort of way, and his voice, when he said, "Hey there, Spider-Fan," was pitched high like a little mouse's voice. I knew he was an utter fake, and I only wanted to get away from him. I ran away, across the mall, and my father did not catch me until I had made it all the way to the Smithsonian Castle. He didn't yell at me. It only made him sad when I acted so peculiarly. My mother sometimes lost her temper and would scream out that I was a twisted little fruitcake and why couldn't I ever make anything easy? She always apologized later, but never with the same ferocity, and so it seemed to me not to count, and I always hoped she would burst into my room later on in the night, to wake me by screaming how sorry she was, to slap herself, and maybe me, too, because she was so regretful.

"So much for Spider-Man," said my father. He took me to see the topiary buffalo, and for a while we sat in the grass, saying nothing, until he asked me if I wouldn't go back with him. I did, and though we had missed the Farrah Fawcett look-alike's rendition of "Feelings," he got to meet her, because he had connections with the Society. She said I was cute and gave me an autographed picture that I later gave to my father because I could tell he wanted it.

When we got home I went up to my room and tossed all my Spider-Man comic books and figurines into the deepest recesses of my closet. Then I took a book out onto the roof. I sat and read Stuart Little for the fifth time. Below me, in the yard next door, I could see Molly Pitcher playing, just as silent as I was. Every once in a while she would look up and catch me looking at her, and she would smile down at her plastic dolls. We had interacted like this before, me reading and her playing, but on this day, for some reason, she spoke to me. She held my gaze for a few moments, then laughed coyly and said, "Would you like to see my bodkin?" I shrugged, then climbed down and followed her when she went into the ravine behind our houses. I did not know what a bodkin was. I thought she was going to make me look inside her panties, like Judy Corcoran, who lived two doors down, had done about three weeks before, trying to make me swear not to tell about the boring thing I had seen.

But what Molly showed me, after we had gone down about thirty feet into the bushes and she had knelt near the arrowshaped gravestone of our English sheepdog, Gulliver, and after she dug briefly in the dry dirt, was a dagger. It was about a foot long, and ornate, encrusted with what looked like real emeralds and rubies, with a great blue stone set in the pommel, and a rose etched on the upper part of the blade.

"Do you like it?" she asked me. "My father gave it to me. It used to belong to a medieval princess." I did like it. I reached out for it, but she drew it back to her chest and said, "No! You may not touch it." She ran off down the ravine, toward the river, and I didn't follow. I sat on Gulliver's stone and thought about all the little dead animals, and I knew--even a little mind could make the connection--that Molly Pitcher had been murdering them. But I didn't give much thought to it, besides a brief reflection on how sharp the blade must be to make such clean wounds. I went back to my house and went down to the basement to watch The Bionic Woman, my new favorite.

After Colm's death I got into the habit of staring, sometimes for hours at a time, at my image in the mirror. My parents thought it was just another one of my new autistic tendencies, and they both discouraged it, even going so far as to remove the mirror in my bedroom. What they didn't know was that the image I was looking at was not really my own; it was Colm's. When I looked in the mirror I saw the face we had shared. We were mirror twins. People who knew our faces well enough could tell that together they made a perfectly symmetrical pair, the gold flecks in my left eye perfectly mirrored in Colm's right, a small flaw at the right edge of his lips mirrored by one at the left edge of mine. So when I looked into a mirror, even the small things that made my face my own made my face into his, and if I waited long enough he would begin to speak to me. He would tell me about heaven, about all sorts of little details, like that nobody ever had to go to the bathroom there.We had both considered that necessity to be a great inconvenience and a bore. He said he was watching me all the time.

There was a connection between us, he always said, even when he was alive, that the surgeons had not broken when we were separated. It was something unseen. We did not quite have two souls between us; it was more that we had one and a half. Sometimes he would hide from me, somewhere in our great big house, and insist that I find him using a special "twin sense." Usually I couldn't find him, but he always walked right to my hiding place when he was it. I could not hide from him anywhere in the house, or, I suspected, anywhere on earth.

After he died I found him, not just in mirrors, but in every reflecting surface. Ponds and puddles or the backs of spoons, anything would do. And always the last thing he said to me was, "When are you going to come and be with me again?"

Molly Pitcher appeared that night at my window. I was still awake when she came. At first I thought she was Colm. She stood in the open window, and it was not until a flash of heat lightning illuminated her that I saw who she was. When I saw the dagger flash in her hand I was certain she had come to kill me, but when she came over to my bed, she only said, "Do you want to come out with me?" Another flash of lightning lit up the room. The lightning was the reason I had been awake when she came. On hot summer nights Colm and I would stay up for hours, watching it flash over the river. Sometimes our parents would let us sleep on the porch, where the view was even better.

She sat down on my bed. "I like your room," she said, looking around. There was light from the hall, enough to make out the general lay of the room. Our father had built it up for Colm and me, making it look like a ship, complete with sea-blue carpeting and a raised wooden deck with railings and a ship's wheel. Above one bed was an authentic-looking sign that said captain's bunk, while the other belonged to the first mate. While he lived we had switched beds every night, in the interests of absolute equality, unless one of us was feeling afraid, in which case we shared the same bed. The last time he slept in the room he had been in the captain's bed, and because the cycle could not go on any longer I had been in the first mate's bed ever since.

Molly pulled my sheets back and while I dressed she looked around the room for my shoes. When she found them she brought them to me and said, "Come on."

I followed her, out the window, over the roof, and down the blue spruce that grew close to the house near my room. She went down our road, to the golf course around which part of our community was built. The place where we lived had once been a Baptist girl's camp, but had in the century since its founding turned into a place where well-to-do white people lived in rustic pseudo-isolation. It was called Severna Forest. You couldn't live there if you were Jewish or Italian, and in the summer they made you lock up your dog in a communal kennel. The golf course had only nine holes. It was a very hilly course, bordered by ravines in some places, and in others by the Severn River. The part of it that Molly took me to was a wide piece of rough on the fourth hole, only about half a mile from our houses. Though the moon was down, I could see under the starlight that rabbits had gathered in the tall grass and the dandelions. I bent at my knees and picked one of the flowers. I was about to puff on it and scatter the seeds when Molly held my arm and said, "Don't, you'll frighten them."

For a little while we stood there, she with one hand on my arm, the other on her knife, and we watched the rabbits sitting placidly in the grass, and we waited for them to get used to us. "Aren't they lovely?" she said, letting go of my arm. She began to move, very slowly, toward the rabbit closest to where we stood. She moved as slow as the moon does across the sky; I couldn't tell she was getting any closer to the rabbit unless I looked away for a few minutes. When I looked back she was closer, and the rabbit had not moved. When she was about five feet away she turned and looked at me. It was too dark for me to see her face. I couldn't tell if she smiled. Then she leapt, knife first, at the little creature, and I saw her pierce its body. It thrashed once and was suddenly dead. I realized I was holding my breath, and still holding the dandelion in front of my lips. I blew into it and watched the seeds float toward her where she was stabbing the body again and again and again.

In school the next Monday, Molly Pitcher studiously ignored me. The whole morning long I stared at her, thinking she must give some sign that a special thing had taken place between us, but she never did. I didn't really care, one way or the other, if she never spoke to me again. I was used to people experimenting with me as a friend. Children, inspired briefly to kindness, would befriend and forget me like a puppy. I let them come and go.

I had given up on her by the time she finally spoke to me. After lunch, when we were all settling down again into our desks, in the silence after Mrs.Wallaby, our teacher, had offered up a post-luncheon prayer for the pope, who had just that day gone on a ground-breaking trip to his native Poland, Molly passed me a note. I opened it up, thinking, for some reason, that it might say, "I love you," because once a popular girl named Iris had passed me such a note, and when I blushed she and her friends had laughed cruelly. But Molly's note said simply, "You'd better not tell." I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever read. I supposed she meant I had better not write a letter to the police. She did not really know me at all, I thought to myself. She couldn't know I wouldn't tell.

"What's that you've got there, Calvin?" Mrs. Wallaby asked. She strode over to me and squinted at me through her glasses. Before she arrived I slipped the piece of paper into my mouth and began to chew.

"What was that?" I swallowed. She brought her face so close to mine I could read the signature on her designer-frame glasses: Oscar de la Renta.

"What was that?" she asked again. Of course I said nothing. She heaved a great sigh and told me to go sit in "the Judas chair," which was actually just a desk set aside from the others, facing a corner. She was not a bad woman, but sometimes I brought out the worst in people. Once she saved me at recess from a crowd of girls who were pinching me, trying to make me cry out. She brought me inside and put cold cream from her purse on my welts, but then, after she spoke for a while about how I couldn't go on like this, I just couldn't, she gave me a long grave look and gave me a pinch herself. It was not so hard as what the girls were giving me, and it was under my shirt, where no one would see. She looked deep into my eyes as she did it, but I didn't cry out. I didn't even blink.

Molly came back a few nights later. At school, after the incident with the note, she continued to ignore me, except for flashing me an occasional cryptic smile. On the night of the first day of summer vacation, she came and got me again from my bed. She said nothing, aside from commands telling me to get dressed and follow her, until we passed the golf course and I started off to where the rabbits were. She grabbed my collar and pulled me back.

"No," she said. "It's time to move on." We spent the night hunting cats. It wasn't easy. We exhausted ourselves chasing them through the dark. Always they outran us or vanished up a tree.

"We need a plan," she said at last, and quickly came up with one. We went back closer to our houses and found a neighbor's cat by the name of Mr. Charlemagne who had run off before when we chased him, into a cat door that led into a garage. Molly positioned me in a bush by that door, then chased after Mr. Charlemagne, who up until that point had been eyeing us placidly. When she came at him he took off for his door, but I jumped in front of it. For some reason he jumped right up into my arms, looked up in my face, then turned to look at my companion. She had her knife out. He snuggled deeper into my arms, expecting, I think, that I would bring him inside to safety, but I threw him down hard on the ground. Molly fell on him and stabbed him through the throat.
*
Mr. Charlemagne's death did not go unnoticed. Not that the previous deaths had gone unnoticed, but the authorities of Severna Forest--the sheriff and the chairman of the Community Association and the president of the Country Club--dismissed the squirrel and rabbit deaths as the gruesome pranks of bored teenagers. When Mr. Charlemagne was discovered, draped along a straight-growing bough of a birch tree, a mildly urgent sense of alarm spread over the community. A crime had been committed. "Sick!" people muttered to each other while they bought vodka and Yoo-Hoo at the general store. Not one bit of suspicion fell on Molly or me. Everyone considered me strange and tragic, but utterly harmless. Molly Pitcher was equally tragic, but widely admired. With her blond hair and her big brown eyes, she was the picture of innocence, and she acted perfectly the part of an utterly good little girl. Sometimes I thought it was only because she stabbed that she could play the part of her sweet, decent self so well.

A few days passed before she came for me again, in the early evening after a lacrosse game. Every Saturday afternoon the Severna Forest pee-wee team had their practice. I was one of their best players, because I had absolutely no fear of the ball. I did not try to get away from it when it came flying toward me like a little cannon shot. Others still ducked, or knocked it away with their stick, instead of catching it. If it hit me, I didn't care. I scooped it up and ran with it, often all the way down the field because it rarely occurred to me to pass the ball. My cradling technique, made fine by hours of tutelage by the junior coach, a college boy named Sam Corkle, was the envy of every other player. I don't think I cared much for the game then (I didn't understand why it was so important for the ball to get from one side of the field to the other), though I kept playing, and many years later my father would be able to point me out in televised college games. But I liked to run, and to be exhausted, and I thought one day the ball might fly at me with such force it would burst my head like a rotten pumpkin.

That day I got hit in the eye with the ball. Sam Corkle hurled it at me with all his adult strength, thinking I was looking at him and paying attention. But I was daydreaming. When it struck my eye I saw a great white flash and saw a pale afterimage of Colm's face, which quickly faded. The blow knocked me down. I looked up at the sky and saw a passing plane, and wondered, like I always did when I saw a plane in flight, if my mother was on board, even though I knew she was at home today. Sam Corkle came up with the other coach and they asked me all sorts of questions, trying to see if I was disoriented and might have a concussion. Of course I didn't answer. Someone said I would throw up if I had a concussion, so they sat me on a bench and one of them watched me to see if that would happen. When it didn't, they let me back into the game. I went eagerly, though my eyeball was aching and starting to swell, hoping to get hit again and catch another glimpse of my brother.

"What happened to you?" my mother asked when Sam Corkle brought me home. She was sitting at the dining room table, where my father held a package of frozen hamburger to his own swollen black eye. He had gotten into a fight at a gas line when someone tried to cut in front of him. It was a bad week for gas. Stations were closing early all over town, having sold their daily allowance before noon. "You too, sport?" he said. He examined my eye and said I would be fine. My mother was relieved to hear I hadn't been beaten by bullies and when Sam Corkle praised my fortitude in returning so eagerly to the game, she even smiled at me. While she held hamburger against my eye there was a knock at the door. Sam answered it, and I heard Molly Pitcher's voice ask very sweetly, "Can Calvin come out and play?" I jumped off my mother's lap and ran toward the door. She ran after me, and caught me, and said, "Take your hamburger with you." I stood at the door while she walked back to the dining room with Sam and I heard her ask my father, "When did your son get a little girlfriend?"

Molly had an empty mayonnaise jar in her hands. "We're going to catch fireflies," she said, not asking about my eye. I followed her through the dusk to the golf course, dropping my hamburger in a holly bush along the way. I ran around with her, grabbing after bugs, delighted that she had come for me in the daylight, and thinking that must mean something. She slapped my hands a few times because I kept grabbing at her flying blond hair as much as I did the fireflies.

I thought she was waiting for us to fill the jar so she could stick her hand in and crush them mercilessly, or bring them home and stick them with pins to a piece of cardboard, or distill their glowing parts into some powerful, fluorescent poison with which she could coat her knife. But when it was dark, when we had caught about thirty of them and they were thick in the jar, she took off the lid and went running down the hill, spilling a trail of bright motes that circled around her, then rose up and flew away down the hill to the river.

Soon there weren't any cats left for us. Not because we had killed them all, but because after the fourth one, a tabby named Vittles that lived with the Nottingham family at the bottom of the hill, was found stabbed twelve times on the front steps of the general store, people started keeping their cats inside at night. Our hunts were widely spaced, only about once every two weeks, but in between those nights Molly Pitcher would come to the door for me and take me out to play in the daylight. We did the normal things that children our age were supposed to do, during the day. We swam in the river and played with her dolls and watched television. By the time we had killed Vittles it was late in July, and after two nights of fruitless hunting for cats, she decided another change of prey would be in order. She took me through the woods, on an hour-long nighttime hike out to the kennels. I could hear the dogs barking through the darkness long before we got there. I thought they knew we were coming for them.

The kennels were lit by a single streetlamp, stuck in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was a little service road that ran under the light, out to the main road that led to Generals Highway and Annapolis. I watched Molly Pitcher stalk back and forth in front of the runs. The dogs were all howling and barking at her. It was two a.m. There was nobody around, and nobody lived within a mile and a half of the place. The whole point of the kennel was that the dogs be separated from the houses between June and September, so their barking wouldn't disturb all the wealthy people who came to live in their cottages during the summer. It was a stupid rule.

Molly had stooped down in front of a poodle. I did not know it. It retreated to the back of its run and yipped at her.

"Nice puppy," she said to it, though it was full grown. She waved me over to her and, turning me around, took a piece of beef from the Holly Hobbie backpack she had strapped on me at the beginning of our excursion. Then she took out my lacrosse gloves and told me to put them on.

"Be ready to grab him," she said. She bent down and held the meat up in the meager light. "Come on," she said. "Come and get your treat, baby. It's okay."With one hand she held the meat and with the other tried to waft its aroma toward the dog, who continued to yip and snarl for a few moments, but then stepped up warily to sniff at the meat. She held on to one end while the poodle nibbled, and now with her free hand she scratched its head. She motioned for me to come up close beside her. It was the closest I had ever been to a poodle in my life. I tried to imagine the owner, probably a big fat rich lady with white hair, who wore diamonds around her throat while she slept in a giant canopy bed.

"Just about . . . now!" said Molly. I reached through the bars of the cage with my thick lacrosse hands and grabbed the dog by a foreleg. Immediately it started to pull away. "Don't let it get away!" she said, scrambling in the bag for her knife. When it tried to escape--at first just a gentle tug--and it gave me a "What are you doing?" look, I very nearly let it go. If she had not remonstrated me, I think I might have.

It was an awkward kill, because the bars were in the way, and it was a strong-willed little dog that wanted to live. It bit hard but ineffectively at my hands. It bit at the knife and cut its gums, and its teeth made a ringing sound against the metal. It snarled and yelped and squealed, and all around us the other dogs were all screaming. Molly was saying, "There! There! There!" in a low voice, almost a whisper. When she finally delivered a killing blow to the neck, a gob of hot blood flew out between the bars and hit me in the eye. It burned like the harsh shampoos my parents bought for me, but I didn't cry out.

On the way back I let her walk ahead of me. I watched the glint of her head under the moon as she ducked between bushes and hopped over rotting logs. I felt bad, not about the poodle, which I had hated instantly and absolutely as soon as I had laid eyes upon it, but about the owner, the fat lady who I thought must be named Mrs. Vanderbilt because that was the richest name I knew. I thought about her riding down to the kennels in her limousine with a china bowl full of steak tartare for her Precious, and the way her face would look when she saw the bloody cottonball on the floor of the cage and could not comprehend that this was the thing she loved. Molly got farther and farther ahead of me, calling back that I should stop being so slow and hurry up. As she got farther away all I could see was the moonlight on her head, and on the white bag, which she had taken, promising to clean my gloves.

When we had gone about a mile from the kennel I heard a train whistle sounding. It was still far away, but I knew the tracks were nearby. I went to them. In the far distance I could see the train light. I lay down in the middle of the tracks and waited. Molly Pitcher came looking for me--I could hear her calling out, calling me a stupid boy and saying it was late. She was tired. She wanted to go to bed. As the train got nearer, and I felt a deep, wonderful hum in the tracks that seemed to pass through my brain and stimulate whatever organ is responsible for generating happiness, I imagined my head flying from my body to land at her feet. Or maybe it would hit her and knock her down. She would, I imagined, give it a calm look, put it in the bag, and take it home, where she would keep it, along with my gloves, under her bed as a souvenir of our acquaintance. The train arrived and passed over me.

I suppose I was too small for it to take off my head. Or maybe it was a different sort of train that did that to Charlie Kelly, a fifteen-year-old who had died the previous summer after a reefer party in the woods when he lay down on the tracks to impress Sam Corkle's sister. The conductor never saw me. The train never slowed. It rushed over me with such a noise--it got louder and louder until I couldn't hear it anymore, until watching the flashes of moon between the boxcars, I heard my brother's voice say,
"Soon."

All Severna Forest was horrified by the death of the dog, whose name turned out to be Arthur. A guard was posted at the kennel. For the first few days it was Sheriff Travis himself, but after a week he deputized a teenager he deemed trustworthy, but that boy snuck off with his girlfriend to get stoned and listen to loud music in her car. While they were thus occupied we struck again, after two nights of watching and waiting for just such an opportunity. This time it was a Jack Russell terrier named Dreamboat.

The kennel was closed after that and the dogs sent home to owners who kept them inside, especially at night. Sheriff Travis claimed to be within a hairsbreadth of catching the "pervert," but in fact he never came near Molly or me. She never seemed nervous about getting caught. Neither did she gloat about her success. She was silent about it, just like she was silent about why she went around stabbing things in the first place.

But she talked about her parents all summer. When I was not playing lacrosse, I was with her, sailing on the river in the Sunfish her grandparents had bought her in June, or soft-shell crabbing in the muddy flats off Beach Road, or riding around on our banana-seated bicycles. I envied her hers because it had long, multicolored tassels that dangled from the handlebars, and a miniature license plate on the back that said, "Hot Stuff. "While we sat stuck on a calm day in the middle of the river I dangled my hand in the water and listened to her talk about her parents, about how her father was a professor of history at the same university where Sam Corkle would return to in a matter of weeks, and how he would tell her stories at night about ancient princesses, and tell her she herself was surely an ancient princess in a past life. Didn't she remember? Didn't she recognize this portrait of her antique prince? Didn't she recognize the dagger with which she had slain the beastly suitor who had tried to take her away to live in a black kingdom under the earth? Her mother, a cautious pediatrician, had protested when he gave her the bodkin, though her daughter was grave and responsible, and not likely to hurt herself or others by accident. "A girl needs to defend herself," her father said, but he was joking. The knife hung on her wall, along with an ancient tapestry and a number of museum prints of ancient princesses, and she was not supposed to touch it until she was older.

I listened and watched pale sea nettles drift by. Occasionally one would catch my hand with its tentacle and sting me. I wanted to tell her about my brother, about stories we had told each other, about our lighthouse game or our bridge game or our thunder-and-lightning game, or the fond wish we both had for a flying bed, of the sort featured in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, except that ours would be equipped with a matter transporter, à la Star Trek, so we could hover over our favorite restaurant and beam up many delicious pizzas. But I said nothing. Nothing could have made me talk, on that day, or any of the days that stretched back to Colm's funeral. Back then I didn't know why I would not speak. Different professionals had tried to get me to talk, with art therapy, play therapy, with pen and paper, and even, once, with anatomically correct puppets. I could not tell them what I did not know, and even if I had known, could not have said because the only communication I engaged in was my homework. I think now that the reason my throat closed up and my brain sealed up was because I knew, that day in the funeral parlor, that there was nothing I could ever say that would be equal to the occasion of my brother's death. I should have spoken a word that would bring him back, and yet I could not, and so I must say nothing forever.

Molly's birthday came in the first week of August. My mother took me shopping for a present. She spent much time in the Barbie section, agonizing over accessories, but I insisted silently on my own choice: a Bionic Woman combination beauty salon and diagnostic station, a deluxe playset where your Jaime Sommers doll (I had picked one of those out, also) could not just get her atomic battery recharged but her hair done, too. It was not the gift I really meant to give her, not the gift from my heart. I insisted on it because I knew Molly would show a complete lack of interest in it and I would be able to take it and play with it myself. Her real gift from me was a wide flat stone, taken from the Severn, with which she could sharpen her knife. I wrapped it in the Sunday funnies. When she opened it she smiled with genuine delight and said it was her favorite.

From her grandparents she got a Polaroid camera. Her grandfather, a man who had always believed in buying in bulk, bought her a whole carton of film and flashbulbs. In the evening after her birthday party, we sat on my roof and she sent flashes arcing over the ravine, tossing aside the pictures that popped out. They were of nothing, and she was not interested in them. I picked them up and pressed them to my nose because I liked the developing-film smell. After a while her grandfather shouted from their porch next door that we should stop wasting film, or else somebody might get her new camera taken away from her until she was a little more responsible. Of course she stopped immediately.

That night she came to my window, her pack on her shoulders. I had a feeling she would come and had gone to sleep fully dressed, right down to my shoes. To my surprise she took my shoes off, and my socks. While I sat with my feet hanging over the edge of the bed, she took a jar of Vaseline from her pack and, scooping out a plum-sized dollop, began to slather it over my foot and between my toes.

"We have a long walk tonight," she said matter-of-factly. I closed my eyes while she did my other foot, enjoying the feeling. When I put on my socks and shoes and walked on my anointed feet it was like walking on a pillow--or my father's fat belly when he would play with Colm and me and let us walk all over him in our bare feet, all the while yelling, "Oh, oh, the elephants are trampling me!"

We went far past the kennel, three miles from our homes.We walked right out of Severna Forest, past the squat, crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance to the forest road. We walked past the small black community, right at the edge of the gates, where families lived whose mothers worked as maids in the houses of our neighbors. She led me into the fields of a farm whose acreage ran along Generals Highway.

"I want a horse," she said, standing still and eyeing the vast expanse of grass in front of us. In the distance I could see a house and a barn. I had seen it countless times from my parents' car, when my mother was driving and I had to sit right side up. I had always imagined it to be inhabited by bonneted women and bare-lipped but bearded men, like the ones in a coffee-table book on the Amish that sat in our living room and was never looked at by anyone but me. Molly started toward the barn. I followed her, looking at the dark house and wondering if some restless person was looking out his bedroom window, watching us coming.

No one challenged us, not even a dog or a cat. I wondered what she would do if a snarling dog came out of the darkness to get us. I did not think she would stab it. I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being, and I knew that once she had visited a particular animal class she would not return to it. According to my theory, she was storing the life force of everything she stabbed in the great blue stone in her dagger's hilt, and when she had accumulated enough of it, it would glow like the earth glowed in the space pictures that hung on the wall in our fourth grade homeroom, above the caption "Nothing Is Impossible."
And when it glowed like that I knew her parents would step from the stone and be with her again.

If the horse had a name, I never knew it. In the dim light of the stable I might have missed it, if it was carved on the stall somewhere. It was a tall appaloosa mare. Molly had brought sugar and apples. She fed it and whispered to it. It was the only horse there. The other stalls were empty, but looked lived-in. Molly was saying to the horse, "It's okay. It's all right. There's nothing to be afraid of." She smiled at it a truly sweet smile, and it looked at her with its enormous brown eyes, and I could see that it trusted her absolutely, the way I had read in stories that unicorns instinctively trusted princesses. In her right hand she held the knife, and her left was on the horse's muzzle. "Touch it," she said to me. "It's like velvet." I put my hand on the space just between its eyes. She was right. I closed my eyes and imagined I was touching my mother while she wore her velvet Christmas dress.When I opened them the horse was looking at me with its great eyes, and in them I could see my brother touching the horse, and behind him Molly striking with her dagger. It did not even try to pull away until the blade was buried deep in its throat. Then it rose up, pulling the blade out of her hand, and trying to strike us with its hooves, but they only fell on the wood of the stall. When it shook its head the knife flew out and landed at my feet. It was trying to scream, but because of the wound in its throat it could only make spraying, huffing noises.

I watched it jump and then stagger around the stall. I was still and calm until Molly took the first picture--I jumped at the flash. At thirty-second intervals another flash would catch in the horse's eyes. At last it knelt in a wide pool of its blood, and then it fell on its side and was dead. All the time it seemed very quiet, despite the whirring of the Polaroid, and the whooshing and sucking noises made by the wound, and the thumping. When the noise stopped I could suddenly hear crickets chirping, and Molly's frantic breathing.

Molly took me home and made me get in the tub with my pants rolled up. She washed the Vaseline from my feet, and the horse blood from my hair, and then she put me back in my bed, not an hour before the sun came up. I slept and dreamed of horses who bled eternally from their throats, whose eyes held perfect images of Colm, who spoke from their wounds in the voices of old women and said they could take me to him if I would only ride.

A real live police investigation inspired Molly to decide we must lie low for a while. While Anne Arundel County police cars cruised the night streets of Severna Forest we lay low, and even after they were long gone, we still did not go out. The summer ran out and school started again. Molly Pitcher mostly ignored me while we were at school, but she still came by occasionally in the afternoons, or on weekends. We sailed in her boat and once went apple picking with her grandparents, in an orchard all the way down in Leonardtown. Outside my bedroom window the leaves dropped from the trees in the ravine, so I got my clear winter view of the river, all the way down to the bay. In the distance I could see the lights of the Naval Academy radio towers, blinking strong and red in the cold. I would watch them and wait for her, my window wide open, but she did not come again until the first snow.

That was in December, just before Christmas break. That evening, down by the general store, all the children of Severna Forest had gathered under an old spruce, where a false Santa sat on a gold-leafed wooden throne and handed out presents. I knew he was a false Santa, but most of the children there didn't. It was actually Sheriff Travis, dressed like he was every year in a Santa suit, handing out presents bought and delivered to him by the parents of all the greedy little children. He sat in his chair, surrounded by bags of wrapped toys, and made a big fuss over whether or not this or that child had been good throughout the year. When he called my name I went up and dutifully received my present from his rough hands. It was a Fembot doll, the arch nemesis of the Bionic Woman doll, which had taken up residence in my room, after Molly rejected it. I was playing with it in my bed when she made her sudden and unexpected appearance at my window. I had to get up and open it.

"Go down and get your coat," she said. "It's cold out there." I did as she told me. My father had left for the hospital shortly after we got home from seeing Santa, and my mother was asleep in her room, exhausted from an all-night flight from Lima. Almost all the other Severna Forest adults were down at the clubhouse, having their Christmas party. Several of them were famous for getting drunk on the occasion, Sheriff Travis especially. He kept his Santa suit on all night, and people talked about his antics for weeks afterward. They were harmless antics, nothing crass or embarrassing. He sang songs and said sharp, witty things, something he seemed incapable of doing at any other time of the year, drunk or not.

Already there was about an inch of snow on the ground when we left. The storm picked up while we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents' friends dancing, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door to the hall. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died. With our door open we could hear them laughing, and sometimes someone playing the piano, and I always fell into the most peaceful sleep listening to that noise.

I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly's shoulder. We were wedged close together, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, "Wake up, it's time to go." She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking snow from where it had accumulated on my back and shoulders, and I hurried after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards from us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat. Sheriff Travis was famous for refusing a ride home every year. He was very proud of the fact that, no matter how drunk he got, he always found his way home. He lived down by the river, in a modest cottage that I imagine must have been lonely, because his children were gone and his wife was dead. He was taking a short cut across the golf course. I knew he would cross through the woods beyond the green to Beach Road.

But we had caught up with him by then. He was singing "Adeste Fideles" in a loud voice and did not hear us come up behind him. Molly Pitcher, when we were about ten yards away, had taken out her dagger and handed me a short length of lead pipe. "Be ready," she said. When we were closer, she suddenly ran at him, looking slightly ridiculous trying to run through the deepening snow with her short legs. But there was nothing ridiculous about the blow she struck, just above his wide black belt, about where his left kidney must be. He fell to his knees, and she struck again, this time at his back, almost right in the middle, and then again at his neck as he fell forward. He screamed at the first blow, just like I thought he would, a great, raw scream like the one my father let go in the hospital room when Colm finally stopped breathing. She stabbed him one more time, in the right side of his back. In the dark, his blood was black on the snow. He lay on his face and was silent. I stood in the snow, clutching my pipe and wondering if I should hit him with it.

Molly grabbed my hand and dragged me after her. She ran as fast as she could, through the woods, then along Beach Road to a point just below our houses. "I got him," she was saying breathlessly, in a high voice. "I got Santa." Twice we had to crouch down behind tree trunks because of the approaching headlights of the last few stragglers headed home from the party. We tore up through the ravine, past Gulliver's headstone, and she gave me a push up the tree, saying only, "Put your coat back downstairs!" before running off to her own house. I did as she said. I would have, anyway. It grated that she thought I would be careless. I still had the pipe. I hid it deep in my closet, where the Spider-Man toys were still piled.

Back in bed, I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis's body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a light veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played "I am the mummy's bride," or "the plastic surgeon just gave me a new face." I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door and suffering the snow to blow through to where he was suffering it to collect on him, or in him, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.

Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn't answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him. He had not moved an inch, but he was alive. At the hospital my father took him to surgery to repair his lacerated kidney and fret over his hemi-sected spinal cord.

When he woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his two attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him "Honky Santa." Police visited the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested when Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.

Molly was furious that Travis hadn't died. I had never seen her so angry as when she stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the "First Mate" sign fell down with a clunk.

"Why?" she said in a loud voice. "Why couldn't he have died? I needed him to die." I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, "Everything okay in here?"

"Yes sir," she said. "We were just playing kick the bed."

"Well, please don't."

"Yes sir," she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to shut up and go away. Don't make her angry, I was thinking. I didn't want her to get him.

When he was gone, she said, "It's just not fair."

I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but she came back soon, after only two weeks had passed, at the beginning of the second week of January. She had been gone, down to Florida with her grandparents over break, but she came for me the first night she was back. While she was in Florida, bitter cold had descended over the Atlantic coast from New York to Richmond. The river and even parts of the Chesapeake were frozen over.

When we went down the ravine to Beach Road, I thought for sure we were going to Travis's house, to finish him off. But when she got to the road she crossed it and stepped over the riverbank, onto the ice. She turned back to me. "Come on," she said and went sliding over the ice in her rubber boots. She went past the pier and the boat slips, out into the open water. Her voice came drifting back to me. "Don't be such a slowpoke." I hurried after the place where I thought her voice was coming from, but I never caught up with her--perhaps she was hiding from me. It was a clear but moonless night, and she was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. I stopped after a while and wrapped my arms around myself. I was cold because my parents were both home and I did not dare go down for my coat. Instead I had worn two sweaters, but they weren't enough to keep me warm. I knelt on the ice and looked down at it, trying to catch Colm's image. I heard her boots sliding over the ice out in the dark, and I thought about a story people told about the ghost of a girl who drowned skating across the river to Westport, to see her boyfriend. On nights like this you were supposed to be able to see her, a gliding white figure. If you saw her face it meant you would die one day by water. I looked downriver, searching either for the ghost or Molly, but seeing only the lights of the bridges down past Annapolis. There was a flash, and for a moment I thought it was the winter equivalent of heat lightning until I heard the Polaroid whirring and realized she had just taken my picture.

She did it again, and again, from different sides. I suppose she was trying to upset me, or make me afraid. Maybe she thought I would run and slip on the ice. I just knelt there, and then I lay down on my back and looked up at the stars. My father had shown me the constellation of Gemini. It was the only one I ever looked for, but now I didn't see it. Molly came sliding up to me. She stood behind my head, and I could not see her, though I could see her panting breath.

I thought she would speak, then. In my mind I had heard her speak this speech--I had played it out many times: "I need you," she would say. "For my parents. They're stuck in here and I must let them out. You don't mind, do you?" Of course I didn't. I would have told her so, if I could have. I had been expecting her to say this ever since she had stabbed the horse, because I didn't know what animal she could turn to after that, besides me. That night Colm had said to me, "So very soon now!" But it was not so soon, and I waited.

She didn't say anything, though. She only knelt near me and put a hand on my belly. She wasn't smiling, just breathing hard. The camera hung around her neck and the dagger was in her hand. She raised my sweaters and my pajama top so I could feel the cold against my skin and the goose bumps it raised. She put the tip of the dagger against my belly and when she looked at me I was so tempted to speak a word.

"Goodbye," she said, and slipped it in with as much gentleness as I suppose could possibly have been managed. I heard my brother's voice ring in my head. He, too, spoke one word: "Now!" For just a moment, when I felt it enter me, I wanted it, and I was full of joy, but not for long. A cresting scream rose in me and broke out of my mouth. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard, louder than Travis's scream, louder than my father's scream, louder than any of the dogs or cats or rabbits. It flew over the ice in every direction and assaulted people in their homes. I saw windows lighting up in the hills above the river as I scrambled to my feet, still screaming. Molly had fallen back, her face caught in a perfect expression of astonishment. I turned and ran from her, not looking back to see if she was chasing me, though I knew she was. I ran for my life, sliding on the ice, expecting at any moment to feel her bodkin in my back. I cried out again when I climbed over the seawall and ran across the road, because of the pain as I lifted myself. As I clambered up the ravine, I could hear her behind me. At the spruce that led to my bedroom she caught up with me, stabbing my dangling calf, so I fell. I kicked at her when she came again, getting her knee, but she didn't cry out. I held my hands out before me and she stabbed them. With a bloody fist I caught her in the jaw and knocked her down, and I got up the tree and into my room, too afraid to take the time to close the window. I rushed through my door and down the stairs into my parents' bedroom, where I slammed the door behind me and woke them with my hysterical screaming. My mother turned on the light. Despite my long silence the words came smoothly, up from my leaking belly, sliding like mercury through my throat and bursting in the bright air of their room.

"I want to live!" I told them, though my heart broke as I said it, because as my mother turned on her light, Colm's image appeared in the floor-length mirror that stood on the opposite side of the bed. He was bloody, like me, wounded, I knew, by my cowardice and betrayal. I saw him looking at me while my parents jumped out of bed and rushed to me, with their arms out, their faces white with horror at the sight of their bloody child. I cried great heaving, house-shaking sobs, not because I was bleeding from painful wounds, or because my parents were crying, or because I knew Molly was on her way back to the river, where she would turn her knife on herself and at last sacrifice a human life to her soul-eating dagger, which somehow I knew would happen, as it did. I didn't cry like that because I felt guilty over the animals and people, now that I knew just how much a knife hurt, though I did feel guilty. And I wasn't crying at my impending betrayal of Molly Pitcher, though I knew I would say I had no part in any of it. I cried because I saw Colm shake his head, then turn his back on me and walk away, receding into an image that became more and more my own until it was mine completely. I knew it would speak to me only with my own voice, and look at me with my own eyes, and I knew that I would never see my brother again.

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Stab is from Chris Adrian's short story collection, A Better Angel. His new novel The Night Garden, is also published by Granta.
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Tuesday, 5 July, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being"