New Decameron Ninety-Five: Kari Maaren (Patreon)

The Girl Who Had No Story

by Kari Maaren

“Not again,” said Sophie from the front passenger seat as the “Detour” sign came into view on the right.

Mary, back in the jump seat with Tom, could just see it by twisting around and craning to peer out the window past Darryl. She thought Sophie should have sounded less surprised. They’d been smelling smoke all day. Around noon, Darryl had spotted flames, barely visible in the distance but unmistakable. This was their third detour since morning. It felt, thought Mary, as if the fire were pushing them farther and farther off the path they had set out to follow.

“We’re…where are we now?” said Mum as they passed the sign, and the barriers nudged the car towards an exit.

The car didn’t have GPS. Mum’s cell did, but it was running low on data. Mary had the sense they were running low on everything.

She counted in her head. She was doing that a lot lately. Normally, on a trip like this, she would have buried her face in a book before Mum had turned the rental car’s engine on and only emerged when they hit a rest stop. And she did have books. There were two on the jump seat between her and Tom, and more strewn over the floor of the trunk. She hadn’t touched them once since they’d set out. She’d wanted to. One of the books on the jump seat had a cover featuring a girl holding a sword, a dragon behind her. Mary would like to have known whether the girl knew the dragon was there and, if so, what she was planning to do about it. But she couldn’t force herself to pick up the book. She wanted to know about the dragon, and at the same time, she didn’t care about the dragon at all. The dragon was irrelevant.

Mary thought:

Twenty-nine days since he got the first headache.

Twenty-seven days since he went to the doctor.

Twenty-three days since he was admitted.

Two days since Mum bought the car.

Two days until we arrive at Aunt Brenda’s.

Or maybe three if there are any more detours.

She felt, vaguely, as if she might be skipping something in there. But like the dragon, the numbers between twenty-three and two were irrelevant.

Sophie called the car “a relic from a bygone age,” and Mary thought that was just about right. It was a station wagon, and Mary didn’t even know anyone else who had one of those. But it also had no air conditioning, and it looked like a car from one of the old movies Mum and Dad sometimes showed them: movies Mum and Dad had watched when they were kids. Mum had bought the car from a grateful teenager who had been about to upgrade to something from slightly less close to the dawn of time, and she had found a crumbling, rusty trailer on Bunz, and after some trailer-hitch-installation drama that had involved both swearing and bleeding, off they had gone with all their worldly possessions crammed into the trailer and under the car’s seats and their landlord shouting something about a damage deposit as they peeled away from the curb in a cloud of probably illegal exhaust fumes.

Sophie had pulled out Mum’s phone and was burning up some of the precious data. She had a phone too, but it had died early in the afternoon. “We’re not really close to anything. I don’t think we’re going to make it to Kim’s tonight. We’ll have to camp.”

“We can’t—” started Mum, and stopped.

Mary knew the missing words were “afford it.” But no one was going to say the missing words.

“Give me a sec,” said Sophie, fiddling with the phone as the car bumped down a road that was luckily not on fire but had also not been maintained for quite some time.

A week ago, Mary hadn’t even known there were cars with backward-facing seats. She hadn’t been sure she would like sitting in the trunk, but as it turned out, she preferred it. Tom was the quiet twin, and he didn’t get carsick. Darryl, the loud twin, did. So the middle row of seats was abandoned to Darryl, and also to Alice, who was strapped into a car seat but still somehow couldn’t sit still. In the front row, Mum drove, and Sophie was tactful and considerate, which seemed to be her role lately.

“There are free campgrounds all over BC,” said Sophie. “I’m trying to find out if there are any near here. Can we do without a toilet?”

“No,” said Mum and Darryl simultaneously.

“I’m hungry,” said Alice in the tone that meant she was three seconds away from melting down.

Mum said, “Just hang on a little bit, baby. Sophie’s finding us somewhere to stay, and when we get there, we’ll cook hotdogs over a fire on sticks. Won’t that be fun?”

“I’m hungry now,” said Alice, her voice climbing higher up the scale with every word.

“Got it,” said Sophie. “We’re on the right road and everything. There are three places nearby. We just have to keep on the way we’re going. They could be full, though. They’ve only got two or three spots each.”

“We’ll risk it,” said Mum.

It sounded all right to Mary, inasmuch as anything could sound all right at the moment.

The sun was still up, but she knew it was well after dinnertime. She was probably hungry too. She’d lost track of her hunger a week or so ago. Eating when people told her to eat worked pretty well, so she’d been doing that. The food didn’t taste of much. Maybe hotdogs cooked over a fire would have more of a taste than other food.

She glanced at Tom, who was drawing quietly. Darryl had thrown a fit when his four-year-old Nintendo 3DS had run out of battery a few hours ago, but Tom had handed his own over and pulled out a sketch book. Tom freaked Mary out sometimes. He was like a boy from one of those old books where all the kids said things like “Gosh” and “I say” and politely solved mysteries with their brothers and sisters. Darryl, on the other hand, had taught Alice six swearwords yesterday afternoon and had once tried to set his classroom on fire.

Sophie’s theory was that Darryl only seemed to be the evil twin. “When they grow up,” she’d told Mary a month ago, before everything had gone wrong, “Darryl’s going to save the world from Tom, who’s going to turn out to be a supervillain. And everybody will say, ‘But he was such a nice little boy.’”

They drove along the road. Darryl killed aliens and Alice whined about being too hungry for hotdogs and Mary watched out the back window as the sinking sun, red and dim behind the smoke in the atmosphere, dipped in and out amongst the trees. They were driving up the side of a mountain, and then down the side of a mountain, and then level for a bit through the evergreens.

“Turn here,” said Sophie, who was still being the responsible one, and they took a right onto a dirt road that made the car creak and bounce.

The first campground was just a patch in the middle of the forest, and the three spots were all full. Mary saw faces glancing up, uninterested, as their car bumped its way through the site and back out onto the road. The people in the campground had already set up their tents or were sitting outside their campers on folding chairs.

“One down,” said Sophie. Miraculously, Alice wasn’t screaming yet.

The second campground also had three spots, and they were taken too. It looked to Mary as if the people had been there for a while, and they all seemed to be together. All of them were men.

“Way too hungry for hotdogs. I need cake,” said Alice, hugging her stuffed bunny.

The third campground was next to a lake.

There’d been a lot of lakes today, but they hadn’t stopped for long at any of them. This was, thought Mary, not a very big one, though big enough that the word “pond” didn’t fit. She had to kneel on the jump seat and peer out the front window past Mum and Sophie to see it properly, but her first glimpse of it was of not water but flame. Ahead of her, Darryl said, “Holy shit, the lake’s on fire!” That was what it looked like to Mary too: seething deep-red ripples lapping against the shore, licking hungrily at the land.

“Language,” said Mum, though not as if she meant it.

“It’s just a reflection of the sunset,” said Sophie. “Look at the sky.”

As Mum pulled up beside the water, Mary could see Sophie was right. The sun was a red ball above the trees, and the sky around it was red too, deep red shading to bright red and back.

“There’s someone already here,” said Tom, who was looking out the window on the other side of the car.

“Only one spot’s taken,” said Mum, turning off the engine. “Good enough.”

They piled out into the August evening stillness. It had been hot earlier, and Mary had thought it would be still, but she’d been fooled by the stuffy trunk. The air was pleasant in the way that meant that as soon as the sun went down, it would stop being pleasant and send everyone off in search of sweaters and long pants.

As Mary stretched the kinks out of her legs, she glanced over towards the occupied campsite.

The two spots were both up against the lake, separated from each other only by a bit of scrub grass. Mary could see an outhouse over near the trees, a pump beside it. Parked in the other spot was a white van, the type people rented when they were moving.

A bird called in the forest; Mary wasn’t sure what kind. Right afterwards, a crow cawed. And right after that, two people came around the van, arguing.

They were a woman and a boy. Mary thought the boy was somewhere between her age and Sophie’s. He was a bit easier to see because the van was between him and the water. The woman was silhouetted against the dazzling lake and looked mostly, at the moment, like a shadow.

“I don’t see why not,” the woman was saying.

“There are rules,” said the boy. “I tell you that every five minutes. You can’t just go—” and Mary saw him wave his hands around, his fingers twiddling in the air “—and fill the world with puppies. Even you can see that most of the time. So you also can’t just go—” the gesture again “—and skip to the end. We need to get there the long way around.”

“But it would be so easy,” said the woman longingly. “Just one little nudge. We’re close enough that I’m beginning to get more—”

“So am I,” said the boy, “and I say no. Go get the tent, will you? We need something to pretend to sleep in tonight.”

“Pretend to sleep in?” said Tom very quietly from just behind Mary. She flapped a hand at him, waving him down.

He hadn’t spoken loudly enough for the strangers to hear, but the woman had noticed them anyway. “Look, Josie,” she said, “neighbours! Practice for us.”

“You don’t have to practise being a neighbour, you lunatic. Get the tent already,” said the boy. He shot Mary and Tom a glare over his shoulder and stalked off around the van. Mary thought she could hear him muttering as he went.

“Try to ignore him,” said the woman. She moved a bit towards them, shifting around so the light was no longer at her back. As she came more into view, Mary could see that she looked ordinary enough: younger than Mum, but still firmly in the “grown-up” category. The only thing about her that seemed worth noticing was on her head.

Darryl, who had joined Mary and Tom, said, “What kind of hat is that?”

The woman pulled her hat off and looked at it as if she’d never seen it before. “I’m not sure. I don’t know how it got there. I seem to have a thing for hats lately, but this one doesn’t feel right.”

“It’s a deerstalker,” called Sophie from over by the trailer, where she was unloading the tents and sleeping bags. “Like Sherlock Holmes wears.”

“Thank you, tall one with glasses,” said the woman, and put the hat back on. “That information will come in useful the next time a desperate Londoner approaches me with a seemingly unsolvable mystery. It keeps happening.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said the boy from the other side of the van.

“Yes, it does. He hasn’t noticed,” said the woman. “He’s been too busy doing math for fun. I sometimes change the value of pi without telling him, and he can’t figure out why the equations don’t work any more. It’s always nice to have a hobby.”

She was beaming at them as she spoke, her hands twitching in a distracted sort of way. Mary couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her. It didn’t seem possible to continue the discussion without asking how the woman had changed the value of pi. Or why she had changed the value of pi. Mary couldn’t imagine herself having that conversation at all, especially not with someone so much older than she was.

Mum had gravitated over to them in what Mary thought of as her there’s-a-strange-adult-talking-to-my-children-and-I’m-sure-it’s-fine-but-if-it-isn’t-I-shall-rain-hellfire-down-upon-her way. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Carol. And you are…?”

“Josiah,” said the woman, turning back towards the van, “they want to know who I am.”

“Then tell them,” said the unseen Josiah.

The woman sighed and shook her head. “He can be so inconsistent sometimes. One minute, he’s all, ‘No, you can’t teleport us to Vancouver. That would be wrong,’ and the next, he’s fine with me giving away my name to just anybody. I’m going to have to sit him down and talk to him about the fundamental nature of reality.” She smiled and stuck out a hand. “I’m Cuerva Lachance. I’ve forgotten your name already. Could you repeat it six or seven times?”

#

Later, after they’d somehow got the tents up without more than two pinched fingers and one tantrum from Alice, and Tom and Sophie had built the fire, and Darryl, unexpectedly helpful after the battery in Tom’s 3DS had run out, had found six good sticks for the weenie roast, Sophie said, “There’s something weird about those people.”

They were all sitting around the fire, cooking their wieners. Mum had done Alice’s first because Alice had been rolling on the ground, alternating between laughing and sobbing, and that was never a good sign. Mary had two wieners on the same stick and was doing science on them. One was right in the middle of the flames; the other was just above them. She didn’t know which she was going to like better. With luck, at least one of them would taste good to her.

“Oh, probably,” said Mum, rotating her wiener slowly. “But it’s not bad weird. I had a university roommate who would start every day explaining what kind of tree she was.” She paused, then added, “She was high as a kite that entire term. But still.”

“What’s ‘high as a kite’?” said Alice with her usual unerring instinct for zeroing in on the bits of the conversation she wasn’t supposed to understand. Mum didn’t reply.

“They’re still weird. I like them,” said Darryl. “I invited them over to our fire.”

”Darryl,” said Sophie.

Mum said, “It’s all right. I told him he could.”

“The flittery one said they’d be over when the muffins were done,” said Darryl.

After a silence that went on for just a bit too long, Tom said, “The muffins?”

“I mean, it’s what she said,” said Darryl. “Can you make muffins in a moving van?”

“You must have misheard,” said Mum. “Alice, come here. You’ve got mustard in your hair.”

The sun was below the treetops now, so the dazzle off the lake was gone. The air was growing chilly, as Mary had thought it would. They were all as close to the fire as they could get, except Tom, who kept having to move because no matter where he sat, the smoke blew right into his face. The campsites had half-decent fire pits with logs ranged around them as seats, so no one had to sit on the ground. Sophie, Mary saw, was right next to Mum and was keeping an eye on Alice. Sophie was a little too good at being fifteen and responsible.

Mary thought:

Thirty-three days since Sylvia and I went out for ice cream.

Thirty-one days since Alice lost a tooth.

Twenty-nine days since he got the first headache.

Three days until I was supposed to start grade eight.

Mary was pulling her wieners off the stick, burning several fingers in the process, when Cuerva Lachance and Josiah came over to the fire.

The first thing Mary noticed was that Cuerva Lachance had changed her hat. The deerstalker was gone, replaced by a baseball cap Mary thought was blue, though it was hard to tell in the dim light.

The second thing Mary noticed was that there really were muffins after all.

They were in a muffin tray, and steam was coming off them. Cuerva Lachance was holding the tray carefully with oven mitts.

Instinctively, Mary glanced at Josiah.

“Don’t ask me. I don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

Cuerva Lachance, smiling, plunked herself down on a log beside Darryl, who took a muffin without asking. “That’s right,” she said. “There are enough for everyone. When you burn your tongue”—this was as Darryl, who had already bitten into the muffin, let out a muffled yelp—“I’ve got some ice cream in my pocket.”

“You changed your hat,” said Tom.

“Did I?” Cuerva Lachance set down the muffin tray and, still wearing the oven mitts, took off her hat. “I guess I must have done. This one’s not right either.”

“You’re all going to be happier if you pretend she’s not here,” said Josiah. But he sat down between Cuerva Lachance and Tom, then picked up the muffin tray and passed it on without taking a muffin.

When it reached her, Mary did take one. The tray was still slightly warm, but the muffins had stopped steaming. She wasn’t sure what kind they were. She could see red flecks in them, but she couldn’t smell them very accurately because the air was already thick with woodsmoke and the scent of burning wiener. She put the muffin on the paper plate beside her hotdogs.

“Where are you headed?” Mum asked politely as the muffin tray came around to her.

“Vancouver,” said Josiah. “We’re moving there. You?”

Mary swallowed. Vancouver was where they had come from. Thirty days ago, I was sad because the summer was half over, and it was time to start putting together my school supplies. Twenty-nine days ago—

“Saskatoon,” said Mum steadily. “We’ll be staying with my sister for a while. We’ve had a bit of an…upheaval.”

“Yes, that can happen,” said Cuerva Lachance, who had got her muffin tray back. “Sometimes, everything goes wrong, and you find yourself having to assume a new identity and sneak out of town in the middle of the night with only the clothes on your back and the mayor’s prize spaniel. Sometimes, after the high-speed chase and the traumatic loss at poker, you end up wandering the mountain ranges of Russia, bereft of everything but the lesson you have learned about the power of friendship.”

Mary had been in the process of squirting mustard on a hotdog bun when Cuerva Lachance had started speaking. Now she became aware that she was still holding the mustard bottle poised over the bun. What in the…?

“No?” said Cuerva Lachance, looking from face to baffled face. “Just me, then?”

“You sound like Mary,” said Mum. “She likes telling stories too. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Which one is Mary? Is it the tall one, the sad one, or the little soggy one?” said Cuerva Lachance.

Mary put the plate down and stood up.

She wasn’t hungry. She’d already known she wasn’t hungry, but there’d been food, and food was supposed to be eaten. But now just being near the food made her stomach twist. The muffin looked good, and even the wieners didn’t seem too bad, and she could no more eat them than she could dance on the surface of the lake.

Twenty-nine days since he got the first headache.

Mary likes telling stories too. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

As everyone turned to her, she gestured vaguely in the direction of the outhouse.

“Take the flashlight,” said Mum. “The sun’s going down, and it’ll be dark in there.”

Mary nodded and took the flashlight from Sophie, since Sophie was considerate and responsible and apparently in charge of flashlights. And she stepped out of the circle of warmth and light.

#

It was dark when she got back to the fire. She could never explain, afterwards, exactly what she’d done in the meantime. She’d peed, but that had only taken a few minutes. She thought she’d spent some time shining the flashlight into the corners and playing around with the shadows of the spiders. There were a lot of spiders in the outhouse, most of them small, a few half the size of her hand. She made a mental note to tell Darryl, who froze whenever he saw a spider. Or maybe she wouldn’t tell him. Sometimes, you just needed an excuse to make your little brother scream.

She’d been hoping Cuerva Lachance and Josiah would be gone when she returned. They were…all right…but they were also strangers, and she didn’t think she wanted to deal with strangers right now. Plus they kept making her wonder about them. Where did the muffins come from? What’s with the hats? Is she his mum? She doesn’t act like it. Why do I keep thinking of her as “Cuerva Lachance” and not just “Cuerva”? Why do they even talk like that? These were normally the kinds of questions she would have liked. She would have had twelve stories about them imagined out by the time she was done in the outhouse. But that had been before. Now the questions just dropped into a hole and disappeared, unanswered.

Cuerva Lachance and Josiah weren’t gone. Mary had, she saw as she approached the fire, missed the moment everybody went from polite and distant to the best of friends. Everyone had switched positions on the logs. Sophie was talking passionately to Josiah about something; as Mary drew nearer, she realised Sophie was giving him advice about grade nine. “The kids are assholes,” Sophie said, heedless of Alice listening in. “All of them are complete assholes. They’ll hate you for the first month no matter what because you’re new. You just have to keep being weird until they eventually lose interest.”

“Every time I’m in grade nine is worse than the time before,” said Josiah. Mary wasn’t sure why Sophie just nodded and accepted this.

Cuerva Lachance was next to Mum now. As Mary sat back down beside her cold hotdogs and neglected muffin, she heard Mum say, “I won’t lie; it’s been tough on the kids. It’s strange to think that only a month ago, we had no idea where we’d be today. If you’d told me, I’d have said you were lying.”

Cuerva Lachance nodded. “I would definitely have been lying, though.”

Mum seemed to have reached a place where she just accepted that everything Cuerva Lachance said would be slightly strange. She said, “We couldn’t stay where we were. Everything was too different. When Dan died…”

Mary, who had just picked the muffin up, put it down again.

She saw Mum throw her a flickering, nervy little look. Mary wished she hadn’t. She knew Dad was dead. She knew what was in between twenty-three and two. Other people could talk about it, and that was fine. She couldn’t because there was a hole in the world now, but if other people didn’t seem to know the hole was there, good for them.

And as for her telling stories—

“Ghost stories,” said Darryl. “We can totally tell ghost stories. This place is perfect for that.”

Even as she silently cursed Darryl for accidentally reading her mind, Mary had to admit he was right.

They were out in the middle of nowhere, and aside from the stars and the faint glow beyond the trees from the distant fire, it was completely dark. Mary was used to night in Vancouver, where there were always streetlights, and the city lights reflected off the clouds. Here, there were no city lights, and really no other lights either besides the flashlight and the fire. Here, there should have been stars, though there was enough smoke high up that only the brightest could get through. The sky was a velvety spark-dotted blanket above. And lower down were the black trees poking up into the sky, tossing uneasily in the breeze. It seemed wrong there was no loon calling out on the lake.

“Ooh. Good idea, noisy one. I love ghost stories,” said Cuerva Lachance, turning her full attention to Darryl. The firelight glinted on the metallic edge of her little brimmed hat. “There was once a man with a hook for a—”

“No,” said Josiah.

“But Josie,” she said, “I know a really good—”

“We’re not telling stories,” he retorted. “You remember what happened last time, right?”

“Yes,” said Cuerva Lachance. “That’s why I love—”

“Just stop. Oh my God,” said Josiah.

Cuerva Lachance subsided, though Mary was sure she saw a rebellious flash in her eyes as she gave way.

Mum was looking from one to the other of them. “Maybe we could tell some ghost stories, and you could listen,” she said mildly. “I think Darryl’s got one ready to go.”

“Ooh,” said Cuerva Lachance again, very, very quietly.

Everybody was looking at Josiah, who sighed. “Don’t you have any screens to stare at in a zombie-like manner? No? All out of brain-melting technology?”

“Everything needs to be charged,” said Sophie.

“Well,” said Josiah, “on your heads be it. But it should be safe enough.”

Darryl had started talking before anyone could ask Josiah what he meant by this. Mary wasn’t sure anyone was going to, anyway.

Darryl said, “Once there was a guy named Joe who married a woman named Maggie. She was really pretty: she had eyes like sapphires, lips like rubies, and teeth like pearls. And they were fine until one day they were in a car accident, and Maggie got hurt so bad that the doctors decided to cut off her leg.”

“Ew,” said Alice, who was sitting next to Darryl. Darryl smiled creepily. Unlike Alice, Mary had heard the story before, so she knew why.

“Maggie was really sad to lose her leg,” said Darryl. “So to cheer her up, Joe bought her an artificial leg made all of gold. He had to sell everything he owned to afford it, but it was worth it because Maggie perked right up.

“But then one day, Maggie died suddenly of something else. Nobody knew why; she just died. And Joe was so upset that he hardly noticed the funeral or the burial or any of that. He just sort of went around being sad all the time and not knowing—”

Darryl paused for a moment. Mary thought maybe Darryl hadn’t thought through the implications of telling this particular story at this particular moment.

“It’s okay,” said Sophie in an artificially bright voice, not looking at Mum as she did. “Keep going.”

“Anyway,” said Darryl, “Joe went back to his life. But he was poor now because he’d spent all his money on the golden leg. And…oh. I forgot to say he’d buried the leg with Maggie.

“And so one day, he was lying in bed, and he just started thinking, Why did I bury that leg?

“Like…Maggie didn’t need it. So what was the point of her keeping it? And Joe kept thinking about this, and thinking and thinking, until he couldn’t stand it any more, and he got out of bed and grabbed a shovel and headed off for the graveyard.”

Darryl was back in the swing of the story, and he was directing most of it straight at Alice. “And the wind went…Oooooooooooo. And Joe ran to the grave, and he dug it up. And the wind went…Oooooooooooooooooo. He dug and dug, and he got to the coffin, and he opened it. And the wind went…Oooooooooooooooooooooooooo. And he reached down into the coffin without looking, and he tore out the golden leg!”

Alice had her hands pressed against her mouth. “It’s okay, baby,” said Mum in her comforting voice. “You come over here and sit on my lap if you need to.”

Alice shook her head, her eyes fastened on Darryl.

“And then,” said Darryl, “Joe ran home as fast as he could. He ran to his house and up the stairs to the bedroom, and he threw the golden leg under the bed, and then he jumped into the bed himself and pulled the covers over his head.”

Everyone was watching Darryl. He was, reflected Mary, pretty good at telling stories, especially for someone who would, if he’d been allowed, have played video games for fourteen hours a day.

“And then,” said Darryl to the breathless, horrified Alice, “Joe heard a noise from downstairs.”

“No, he didn’t,” said Alice.

“Yes, he did,” said Darryl. “He heard…creeeeeeeeak…like the front door opening. And he heard…thud. Thud. Thud. Moving down the hall. And then…moving up the stairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. And along the hall to his room. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. And the bedroom door went click, and it creaked open.

“And Joe lay there under the covers, and he was so. Scared. And he didn’t want to look. But finally, he pulled down the blanket. And there…”

Darryl leaned in towards Alice, who shrank back. “There…was Maggie. But she was…different. No eyes. No lips. No teeth. And no golden leg.

“And Joe looked at her, and he said, ‘Maggie…Maggie…where are your eyes like sapphires?’”

Darryl said in a booming, hollow voice, “‘Baaaack in the graaaaaaave.’

“‘Maggie…Maggie…where are your lips like rubies?’

“‘Baaaack in the graaaaaaave.’

“‘Maggie…Maggie…where are your teeth like pearls?’

“‘Baaaack in the graaaaaaave.’

“‘Maggie…Maggie…where is your golden leg?’”

And Darryl grabbed Alice by the knee and shrieked directly into her face, “‘You’ve got it!’”

After Alice had stopped screaming out tears and been comforted with a lot of hugs and an extra muffin and an upside-down glass of water for the hiccups, Cuerva Lachance said, “I liked that one. I’ve got to say…you told it much better than the last person I heard it from. That must have been at least a hundred years ago.”

Josiah made a throat-clearing noise that was clearly not real, and she added without taking a breath, “Did I say years? I meant hours.”

“That wasn’t very kind, Darryl,” said Mum, who must not have heard the story before either.

“It’s not supposed to be kind. It’s supposed to be a ghost story,” said Darryl. “Can I tell another one? I know one about a boy who died in a boat—”

“Let someone else have a turn,” said Mum. “How about you, Mary? I bet you know more stories than the rest of us put together.”

She should have answered. She should have at least said “No.” But there were three things happening in her head, and not even a single word would come out past them. The first thing that was happening was that there was a big roaring hole of emptiness. It was the same hole, she thought, that was in between twenty-three and two. It was the same hole she was sure was in all the books now, so that she couldn’t even open them to see whether it was really there. She couldn’t get past the hole. Darryl could, and that was okay, but even as she’d listened to his story, she’d felt the hole trying to suck it up and consume it. She didn’t know how to explain that to the others. It didn’t seem to her that words would be able to help.

The second thing that was happening in her head was that she was noticing Cuerva Lachance’s hat.

What was going on there? The hat had flowers on it now. It looked like one of those straw hats old ladies wore in the summer. But a few minutes ago, it had been smaller, and the rim had glowed in the firelight. And before that, it had been a baseball cap. She had seen Cuerva Lachance take it off and look at it. Was Mary the only one who had noticed the hat changing? Mum was sitting right next to Cuerva Lachance. Why hadn’t anybody said anything?

The third thing that was happening in Mary’s head was creepier than either of the other two things.

She could see something glinting behind Darryl.

It had been there for a while. It wasn’t the car or the van. The only thing that should have been behind Darryl was the forest. This seemed closer than that, though far enough away that the firelight barely reached it. It was…shiny. It shimmered in a way that was somehow…buttery? She couldn’t find the right word for it. She couldn’t always see it; it would swim into view, then slip back into the darkness. But she knew it was there.

The three things together were too many to concentrate on all at once. So she just stared.

“I think that’s a no from the sad one,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Are you sure—”

“Once upon a time,” said Alice loudly from Mum’s lap, “there was a princess and a horse and a snake and a broomstick and a baby. And they said, ‘Let’s go see the wizard and get a magic wagon.’ So they walked along the road until they found the wagon but not the wizard because he’d gone off somewhere. Then the cat went poof in the middle of the road and said, ‘I have three riddles. What’s the difference between night and day? Who is a man? And where did the fox go?’ No one could answer the riddles. Then the horse said, ‘Blue!”, and everyone saw the princess breathing fire ‘cause she was actually the bad guy. The horse ran away with the baby, and the snake cried. Then another cat came and it pooed on the snake. It pooed on it! But the princess was already married to a man who had a lot of oranges, and she said, ‘You have to kill the horse. The horse is the chosen one.’ So the man with the oranges went and killed the horse. The snake cried again. It still had poo on it. They had a funeral for the cat. I mean the horse. They had a funeral for the horse cat. And they all lived together in a castle forever.”

This was a standard enough Alice story that almost everybody knew how to react to it. “Good job!” said Mum, kissing the top of Alice’s head, as Sophie, Tom, and Cuerva Lachance applauded.

“It wasn’t even a ghost story,” said Darryl. “I know a story about a boy—”

But by that point, everyone was looking at Josiah again.

Mary had started watching him about halfway through Alice’s story. The flinching had drawn her attention first. Almost everything Alice said made him flinch. By the end of the story, he had his head in his hands.

“Are you okay?” asked Sophie, who was on his right.

“No,” said Josiah in a choked voice, “I’m not. I cannot express the magnitude of my…that was absolutely not…no attention to structure or consistency…why was there a horse cat—”

“Just breathe, Josie,” said Cuerva Lachance.

He looked up and levelled a trembling finger at Alice, who was watching him with wide eyes. “That story is an affront to my very existence. It will haunt me forever. Until the end of my life, I will never be free of it. How dare you?”

Alice, who should have been in bed hours ago, buried her head in Mum’s shoulder and began to wail.

There was more hugging and more extra muffins, and Cuerva Lachance said, “Maybe this is a good time for you to take a nice walk in the pitch darkness,” and Josiah stalked away from the fire, muttering and scrubbing his hands through his hair. “Never mind him,” said Cuerva Lachance cheerfully. “He has the strangest ideas about things. Personally, little soggy one, I thought your story was magnificent. I never understand why all stories aren’t like that.”

“I’ll go next,” said Sophie, and launched into a story about a friendly ghost who liked little girls and helped them find lost things. Mary was pretty sure she was making it up on the spot. All the way through, Darryl kept whispering, “Not a real ghost story. Why isn’t anybody telling a real ghost story?”

Mary barely listened to him. She barely listened to Sophie. She couldn’t stop staring into the darkness behind Darryl.

There was a different feeling around the fire now that Josiah was away from it. She didn’t know how to describe it. Things seemed…looser…as if the nice little family campfire scene were only painted on a black canvas. Cuerva Lachance’s hat was different again. It looked like a sailor’s cap now. And behind Darryl, something was gleaming once more. And something else…

Fur, thought Mary. Maybe? Something fury and huge and silent. She knew it couldn’t be there, but she saw it anyway.

And as Sophie’s story drew to a close with the little girl and the ghost swearing eternal friendship, there was something else as well.

It slipped and shivered and tumbled through the night. It was behind Darryl, and then it was behind Mum, and then, Mary knew with certainty, it was behind Mary.

Mary thought:

Twenty-nine days since he got the first headache.

One day since Alice asked where Dad was now.

Maggie…Maggie…where is your golden leg?

Josiah came back just as Sophie’s story ended. “I have ruminated,” he said to no one as he sat back down beside Sophie, “and though I’m not ashamed of my behaviour, I promise not to do it again.”

“You’d better not,” said Sophie a little coldly.

The painted-on-a-canvas feeling was gone.

Mary nudged her log closer to the fire.

There was one thing that had always discontented her about the books she read: the way the characters in them reacted whenever anything strange happened.

There were, Mary had noticed, two ways those kinds of stories tended to go. The first way was that the characters would, for instance, wander through a portal into a magical world, and five seconds later, they’d be perfectly fine with it. They’d go from “Magic is real?” to “And now I shall shatter the unbreakable spell with this miraculous goblin sword!” 

The second way was that the characters would go into deep denial. Character A would see Character B fly, and Character A would convince herself it was a dream or a hallucination or a trick of the light. She would continue to be in denial until she had to admit to either the existence of magic or her own insanity, and even then, she might lean towards insanity. Eventually, she would reach the “And now I shall shatter the unbreakable spell with this miraculous goblin sword!” point.

When Mary asked herself which way would fit her if she came across magic, she couldn’t answer.

She thought it was because both ways were about the story, not the characters. Both ways were there for the reader. Real life wasn’t like that. It didn’t care what the reader thought. It didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t have a plot. People who tried to convince you it did needed to get out more.

As she sat beside the fire, watching Cuerva Lachance’s toque, feeling something move in the darkness behind her, Mary found out how she would have reacted if she had been a character in one of her books.

She would have bided her time.

She didn’t think she was the only one. Tom’s eyes kept flicking up past the circle of firelight. Sophie, done her story, was making a show of picking up some of the paper plates and feeding them to the fire, but as she did so, Mary could see her peering sharply under her own arm, back towards whatever had been gleaming in the darkness. Tom and Sophie had seen something. Mary tried to catch their eyes, but they weren’t looking at her. Their attention was barely on the circle at all.

“This is fun,” said Cuerva Lachance brightly. “Who’s next?”

“Oh, I’ll go,” said Mum. “I don’t know many ghost stories, but I know one that has ghosts in it. It’s about a boy who didn’t know how to shiver.”

Mary thought:

Twenty-nine days since—

But then she thought:

No. Don’t count. Watch. Watch what happens when Mum tells the story.

It was one she’d heard before. As Mum spoke, the story fell into the hole with all the other stories, but in a way, it was already there because Mary already knew it. The boy who didn’t know how to shiver set out into the world to learn how, and along the way, he ended up agreeing to stay the night in a haunted castle that killed everyone who tried to sleep there. He saw a lot of strange things, including a man who fell down the fireplace in pieces and a corpse who rose from a coffin and tried to strangle him, but he didn’t learn how to shiver until later, when his wife dumped minnows over him in bed. Sophie said the minnows were symbolic, but she never said of what.

Something about the story bothered Mary.

It wasn’t the way Mum told it. She did it well. She made the boy clueless and the ghosts scary and the minnows funny. Cuerva Lachance, sitting there in her yellow rainhat, was enchanted, leaning forward, her eyes sparkling in the firelight. Even Josiah was paying attention, and Tom’s gaze was only periodically sliding out into the darkness. As a story, the story was fine.

But.

Maggie…Maggie…where is your golden leg?

You’ve got it.

Something was wrong with all the stories.

Mary listened, but she also watched the darkness. And so she saw the moment something else appeared outside the ring of firelight. She couldn’t really tell what it was, but she knew it was there. She knew they were all there. There were four of them now.

When Mum was done, Josiah nodded. “Not my favourite, but it all comes together in the end.”

“I don’t know,” said Cuerva Lachance, her chin resting on her fist. “I think it only seems to come together.”

“I think—” started Darryl.

Sophie said, “Don’t.”

As Mum glanced at her, Sophie added, clipping the words short, “Don’t tell any more stories. It’s late. Alice is tired—”

“We’re clearly not finished, though,” said Cuerva Lachance.

The words clicked into place in Mary’s brain. She knows. Whatever’s happening, she knows it is.

And Mary looked at Josiah, who seemed entirely unsurprised at both Sophie’s words and Cuerva Lachance’s. And Mary thought, So does he.

Darryl said, “I know a story about a boy—”

“No,” said Tom, “it’s my turn.”

He was still staring out into the darkness. Mary could see the gleam again. It was closer now, and she could tell it was something long and quite straight, something that shone in the firelight like—

Maggie…Maggie…where is your golden leg?

What was wrong with all the stories? She didn’t know.

“I think—” started Mum hesitantly. But Tom had already begun.

“There was a guy driving home one night,” he said. “It was raining, and he was on this lonely deserted road. And he saw someone standing by the side of the road.”

“I know this one,” said Darryl. “She’s dead. I know a story—”

“So he pulled over,” said Tom much more forcefully than usual. “It was a girl, all shivering in the cold. She got into the car and told him where she lived, and he followed her directions to her house. Then she got out, and he drove away.”

“She’s dead,” said Darryl.

“Darryl,” said Mum automatically, though Mary could tell she was distracted by something.

Tom said, “The next day, the guy realized she’d left her scarf in his car, so he drove back to her house to give it back. He knocked on the door, and it was answered by an older woman, who said, ‘Can I help you?’

“The guy said, ‘I gave a girl a ride home yesterday, and she left this in my car. Could you give it to her?’”

“No,” said Darryl, “because she’s dead.”

Mary could see Tom trying very hard not to turn towards Darryl. He didn’t, though. He kept his eyes on the darkness, and Mary found herself following his gaze.

“The woman said, ‘Sure,’” said Tom. “‘But she’s here right now. Why don’t you give it to her yourself?’

“And then the girl came to the door and invited the guy in for a snack. And the next year, they got married.”

Mary saw the moment the girl stepped out of the night.

She didn’t know what she was. That was obvious right away. Mary thought she was so easy to see compared with the others because the others all fit into their stories…even the horse cat, which was lurking awkwardly over near Maggie and occasionally coming just barely into view. Mary was sure that at one point, she’d seen it sit down and scratch its ear with its hind hoof. But the horse cat was comfortable with itself. So were Sophie’s ghost and the corpse from Mum’s story. They were all dead. Even the horse cat was dead. They knew they were dead. They were fine with it.

The girl wasn’t sure whether she was dead or alive. She was spectral, and she was solid. A wedding ring winked into existence on her finger and just as quickly flashed away. She was cold and shivering and pale and sad, and she was wrapping the scarf around her throat and smiling.

“Which story is she from?” asked Mum, who was watching too. “The one Tom told? Or the one he was supposed to tell?”

Mum had noticed. Mary wondered how long ago she’d realized what was happening.

And then Mary found out how everyone in her family would have reacted if they had been characters in one of her books.

“Does it matter?” said Sophie. “She’s not supposed to be there.”

“I did her as an experiment,” said Tom, looking at Cuerva Lachance. “Did it work?”

She tilted her head at him. “A little. But I’ve got to say that this isn’t my fault.”

“Of course it’s your fault,” said Josiah. “Everything’s always your fault. How are you even managing this? They’re almost solid. And I’m absolutely tamping down on you.”

“I think it’s both your faults,” said Tom thoughtfully. “You balance each other out, don’t you?”

Mum said, “I think they do. But it’s not just them. It’s us too.”

Maggie with the golden leg had come up beside Darryl, who was regarding her uneasily. She had the leg, but not the eyes, lips, or teeth, which made looking at her at all profoundly uncomfortable. “Can we make them go away?” said Darryl. “This one’s freaking me out.”

“That one’s yours,” said Sophie.

Alice, who Mary would have expected to go into screaming fits at the sight of Maggie, didn’t seem interested in her. “Is mine here? Which one is mine? How did I make it? Can I do it again?”

“We don’t want to be surrounded by story ghosts, Alice,” said Sophie.

“There were people in all the stories who weren’t dead,” said Mum, pressing a finger against her chin. “We seem to have ended up with just the dead ones, though.”

“A theme,” said Cuerva Lachance happily from under her old-fashioned bonnet.

“Just pick a hat,” said Darryl. “Holy crap.”

“I want to see mine. I want to see it. Where’s mine? Where is it?” said Alice.

The dead horse cat stepped into the ring of firelight.

Alice said, “I want mine to go away now.”

“It would be fantastic if they all went away,” said Josiah. “This is not supposed to be happening. Cuerva La—”

“I told you,” said Cuerva Lachance, “it’s not my fault.”

Maggie was sitting down next to Darryl now. He kept scooching away from her, and she kept scooching towards him. Just above Sophie, her friendly ghost was hovering, churning in the air. The ghostly hitchhiker leaned down to show Tom her wedding ring as Mum’s dead man dragged his coffin closer to the fire.

“Are they…settling in?” said Mum.

“As long as they’re not trying to kill us,” said Sophie.

“They may yet,” said Josiah. “I think we’re all forgetting something.”

Everybody looked at him.

Josiah said, “Cuerva Lachance and I don’t tell stories. It’s safer that way. But there are six of you, and we’re heard only five stories tonight.”

And now everybody was looking at Mary.

Mary thought:

Thirty-five days since Sophie’s birthday.

Thirty-one days since Alice lost a tooth.

Twenty-nine days since he got the first headache.

Twenty-seven days—

“Mary,” said Sophie.

“I mean,” said Darryl, “what if she does, and then they eat us? They look like they might eat us.”

Twenty-seven days since he went to the doctor.

“Honey,” said Mum to Mary, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“I think she might, though,” said Tom. “Like…I think they’re waiting for the last story.”

“They are,” said Cuerva Lachance, “but I don’t know why. Isn’t it fun?”

“It is not,” said Josiah.

Twenty-three days—

“Mary,” said Alice, “could you tell a nice story? About not a ghost?”

“Didn’t Tom already try that?” said Sophie.

“We are so getting eaten in five minutes,” said Darryl.

Twenty-three days—

Maggie with the golden leg was looking at her expectantly, even though Maggie with the golden leg didn’t really have much of a face.

Where is your golden leg?

Twenty-three days.

I seem to have a thing for hats lately, but this one doesn’t feel right.

We’re clearly not finished, though.

The stories are wrong. They’re right, but they’re wrong at the same time. I don’t know why.

She knew why.

“I don’t have a story,” said Mary.

Everyone went still.

“None of the stories end,” she said as the fire crackled and leapt in front of her. “I mean…they do. But they also don’t. What happens after Maggie yells at Joe? Does she kill him? Does he give her the leg? What happens? No one ever says.”

Darryl, who couldn’t read the room or, apparently, the fire pit, said, “I know a story about—”

“I don’t care,” said Mary, marvelling internally at how cheerful she sounded. “Alice’s story goes from ‘They held a funeral’ to ‘They lived together in a castle.’ Sophie had a happy ending too, but…the girl and the ghost were living together? How did that even work? How long did it go on for? Did the girl grow up and leave the ghost behind? How did the ghost feel about that?”

She didn’t know where the words were coming from. They were just coming. “What happened after the princess threw the minnows over the boy? Was he happy because he knew how to shiver? Did he decide just to leave and go back home because he’d finally figured it out? Why did he care so much, anyway? And in Tom’s story—in the real version of Tom’s story—isn’t it that it’s the anniversary of the girl’s death? Does she just keep hanging around in the rain every year? Does her mum end up with a little collection of ghostly scarves?”

Josiah said, “That all happens after the stories end. None of it matters.”

“It does matter,” said Mary. “It’s supposed to matter. It’s supposed to be…stories should have real endings. They shouldn’t just stop. Things…shouldn’t just stop.”

“Just…could you tell a story, Mary?” said Sophie, looking nervously up at the ghost hovering over her head. “A short one. It doesn’t matter. We…maybe if you…end this…it’ll all go away.”

Endings. Endings were what had fallen into the hole. Endings were why she couldn’t open the books, couldn’t find the numbers between twenty-three and two.

“You want a story?” said Mary. “Fine. Once upon a time, twenty-nine days ago—”

“No!” said everybody in the family except Sophie, who said, “Stop!”

Josiah said, “What—”

“I think,” said Cuerva Lachance, “she may be about to tell the story of her father’s death.”

Maggie with the golden leg was sitting right there, right next to Darryl.

The ghosts from the stories were all sitting right there.

Their stories were over. And they were sitting right there.

Mary said, “He got the first headache. And then—”

“Jesus Christ, Mary, stop,” said Sophie. “That isn’t a story.”

Sophie was the responsible one. She had to say that.

Everyone seemed frozen in place. They should be running at me, thought Mary dreamily. Someone should punch me in the jaw. She didn’t want someone to punch her in the jaw. She wanted to fill the hole. She wanted the stories to mean something again. If she told just this one, in just this place, with the stories coming to life in the darkness around them, she would get the stories back again. She would get…more than the stories back.

“Twenty-three days ago,” said Mary. “Twenty-three.”

Maggie with the golden leg was closer now. She’d slid down off the log to sit in front of Mary. She should have stunk, Mary thought. But she couldn’t smell anything. Not from Maggie, and not from the dead man who had pulled his coffin around the fire towards her, and not from the horse cat, which was leaning over her shoulder and meowing. Mary didn’t think Mum was frozen any more, but she also didn’t think Mum could make it past the ghosts. They floated around Mary in a bubble. They’d been hers all along, really. Their shapes had come from Darryl and Tom and Mum and Alice and Sophie, and she thought probably their reality had come from Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, but they’d grown from the hole in the middle of the stories. And she was the only one who knew the hole was there.

“Twenty-three days ago,” said Mary, and stopped.

It would have been so easy.

Thirty days ago, telling a story would have been the easiest thing in the world.

She saw Cuerva Lachance sitting next to Maggie. She’d got into the bubble somehow.

“Now,” said Cuerva Lachance, who was wearing a top hat, “I don’t get sad very often. When I do, it’s by accident, and it doesn’t last long. I usually make it going away by creating mice. But I don’t think that’s going to help in your case. You may have to just ride it out.”

“I don’t have to, though,” said Mary politely. “I just have to say the words, and he’ll be here.”

“Maybe,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Who can say? But you’d be telling him as a story. As a ghost story, really. And as much as I hate to admit it, stories have rules.”

Maggie…Maggie…where are your teeth like pearls?

“Back in the grave,” said Mary.

Her head felt strange.

Outside the bubble, she could see all the faces. All the faces hurt. They could joke and laugh and play video games and still hurt, even though that didn’t make sense. Maybe they did know the hole was there. They just didn’t see it the same way she did.

She needed to fill the hole with the story of her father. She needed…but she looked at Maggie, and she saw Joe digging up Maggie’s grave to find something he thought he wanted, and outside the bubble, the wind went…Oooooooooooo.

The wind was in her head, and the wind was in the trees. The flames were crackling as the ghosts crowded around, waiting for the story to end, for real this time.

Mary lied: “And they all lived happily ever after.”

The ghosts looked at her.

“You wanted an ending,” she said. “That’s all I’ve got.”

Maggie was the first to fade. She looked disappointed, if a faceless ghost from a story could look disappointed. The friendly ghost followed, dispersing into the woodsmoke. The dead man and the hitchhiker blew away together. The horse cat hung around for a few seconds longer, but then it was gone too.

Darryl, not Alice, was the one to burst into tears.

“That concludes this terrifying reenactment of ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’” said Josiah as Mum hurried around the fire to comfort the howling Darryl. “Let us agree never to do that again.”

Mary sat there, her hands folded in her lap, as Mum hugged Darryl, and Sophie hugged Mum, and Alice started to sniffle because it was late and she was tired and other people were crying. No one, Mary noted with clinical detachment, was hugging her. It may have been too soon for that. She wasn’t sure she would have hugged her either. She felt all emptied out inside, her mind still a sucking, roaring blank.

Tom did pat her once on the knee. She thought that made her feel slightly better, though only time would tell.

“Hmm,” said Cuerva Lachance, tapping the brim of her fedora. “Maybe this one.”

Mary nodded.

#

In the morning, Mary crawled out of the tent she was sharing with Darryl and Tom and saw that the white van was gone.

Tom was just behind her. “Maybe they weren’t real,” he said as they jogged over to the other campsite to check. Their breath turned into fine white mist and dispersed. Mist was shimmering over the lake too, and the red sun was rising.

Mary pointed at the tire tracks on the ground.

Tom said, “Okay. Real. But…also a story?”

“Maybe,” said Mary, and they left it at that.

All their electronics were dead. The car was too old to allow them to plug anything in to charge. They washed at the pump and had leftover hotdog buns for breakfast. The muffins had vanished with Cuerva Lachance and Josiah. Mary never had eaten hers. She wondered if it would have tasted of anything, unlike all the other food.

As they were piling into the car after having folded the tents and cleaned up the site, Mum stopped Mary. “You okay?” she said.

Still no hugging, Mary noted. “Probably not,” said Mary.

“At least you know,” said Mum. “I’m not okay either, in case you were wondering. I doubt any of us is okay.”

“But,” said Mary, “we will be?”

Mum said, “I guess we’ll find out.”

And they drove away.

The mist had burned off the lake. Mary, in the jump seat, watched it until it was swallowed up by the trees.

Mary thought:

Thirty days since he got the first headache.

Twenty-eight days since he went to the doctor.

Twenty-four days since he was admitted.

One day since I didn’t tell a story.

One day.

Once upon a time.

There was a girl.

Who had no story.

“You’ve got it,” said Mary, her hand resting on the cover of the dragon book.

And she had.

It was small, and it was shaky, and it didn’t have an ending.

But maybe, eventually, she would be able to take it from there.

***********************************************************

"Oh wow wow wow," Maya says. "Cuerva LaChance! And the stories."

"Stories can be real," he says, quietly, as if he thinks she might not agree.

"That was so perfect," she says. "The way she was counting instead. That was amazing."

He hands her two muffins. They have red flecks, and are warm. "Impossible muffin?" he asks.

Maya takes one in each hand. "One for Josiah and one for Cuerva LaChange," she says. "And the story would work if you hadn't read the book, I think?"

"I think so too." His mouth is full of muffin. 

"What now?" she asks.

"Here." He hands her a book.

"Caroline M. Yoachim, Dreams as Fragile as Glass," she reads.

"It's a complete story," he says. "And we need to read it."

"All right," she says. And they read.