Nothing But Blackened Teeth(17)

But even that impression gave way.

Slowly, as more painted bodies—some no more than scrawled lines, others magnificently detailed—crowded the ceiling, it began to distend, almost as if it had turned gelatinous. Under a pustular overhang of grinning onlookers, our group turned to each other.

“Now what?” Lin demanded.

Faiz sat keening into his hands, a broken howl that wouldn’t stop or waver, no matter which of us came over to whisper platitudes into his ear. He convulsed with his misery, scratched at his cheeks until the skin tore into translucent ribbons, embedding itself under his nails. Blood ran in thick stripes, muddying his hands.

“I don’t know,” I said, chugging water. The taste of it made me think of the pond, of algae and silt and bodies, bellies curdle-pale and soft, curving out of the murk. Wide piscine eyes flashing beneath the surface, silvery with mucus. I gagged and spat petals of duckweed, slick tangles of black hair. “What the—”

“Looks like we hit critical mass for supernatural stuff.” Lin giggled, high and weird. I winced at his pitch, each burst of lunatic laughter like a nail pounded through my temple.

“Stop it,” I said.

No one listened to me. Faiz kept crying, Lin and Phillip argued about something, and the yokai continued to stare, whispering to themselves. I could hear them now, pieces of conversation that didn’t quite slot together, spoken in dialects older than the house itself and bursts of cutting-edge slang. Here and there, English as punctuation, barely intelligible. Almost none of it made any sense except for the words bride and hello and wet, repeated so many times they soon began to resemble a heartbeat.

hello hello hello

I drank more of the brackish water. This time, the house didn’t try to choke me with weeds.

The headache began to ebb, a hum now, like bees had taken residence in the fibrous, grey crenellations of my brain. At least half the lanterns had gone out, and I was thankful for the dimness. I stood and staggered towards Lin and Phillip, the former holding a pose like a demented Peter Pan, fists propped against slim hips.

“Clearly, we need to leave,” Lin said.

Phillip shook his head, his lion’s mane of blond hair sticky with sweat. “Talia.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t, but I do.” Phillip, for all of his easy swagger, knew the trick of standing smaller, being shorter. Most days, you couldn’t tell he was six feet three, an artist’s rendition of the American dream. Broad shoulders, muscled thighs, a ruggedly Neolithic jaw. But now he’d given that up, exchanged his approachability for something more contentious, a predatory stillness that drove a scream through the medulla oblongata.

I thought of domestic cats and their wilder cousins, shoulders low to the soil, every paw fitted into the footprint abandoned by the last. I tried not to look down as the smell of ammonia rose sharply, to see whose crotch bloomed with dark stains. It felt rude, somehow. Even indecent. Like I was crossing a line, unmaking one final propriety.

“Yeah, that’s you. Go ahead and stay, I guess. But this is when the murders start. You know this is when the murders start.” Lin’s voice cracked twice through the sentence. He removed his glasses, wiped them along the hem of his shirt. “We’re going to die here.”

He shuddered. Palmed his face and sang under his breath, giggling as he rocked along his heels.

“Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die. La, la, la. We’re all going to die. Because the dead are lonely in the dark, and they all miss the sun.”

“Shut. Up.” Phillip squeezed the bridge of his nose until the skin beneath blotched. “Shut the fuck up. Shut up, or I’m going to—”

“You’re not going to do anything. Lin isn’t wrong.” What I’d wanted to say was we shouldn’t have come here, that there was no reason to stay. I thought of Talia and her sighs, one for every season, the drop of a paisley summer dress along the back of her knees, the breeze in her dark hair, how the dead would suckle the memories from her marrow and be warm for a moment on that. I thought—

I strangled the idea in a fist, took a long breath. “And if you two start fighting, who the fuck is going to do the rescuing? Isn’t that your job? You’re the all-star quarterback, aren’t you? The hero? You’re supposed to—”

“Die,” Lin whispered.

But Phillip seemed mesmerized, and he gazed at me, mouth slack. I thought of new corpses lying quietly in shallow pools, still lukewarm to the touch, eyes and mouth open as though wedged open with wonder. But slowly, Phillip’s tepid stare came alive as I continued to murmur, Scheherazade-like, about everything and nothing, the yokai settling into odalisque poses, an eye-watering collage.

“I guess—no, you’re right. We have to—”

“There’s a library.” Faiz surprised us all with his voice, his proximity. His eyes burned, their heat an infection. And he kept licking at his upper lip, broad and inquisitive strokes of the tongue, the muscle inflamed, red and swollen with veins. “There’s got to be information there.”

“Faiz, no,” I began.

He sniffed. In the lantern light, his face was more pink than red, more muscle and clotting fluids than skin. Despite the crosshatching of injuries, Faiz seemed docile, almost. “There’s a book. There has to be a book. There’s always a book—”